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How can one distinguish between genuine spiritual experiences and self-delusion or psychological phenomena?
Hard to say, but typically self-delusion or psychotic experiences come from suffering and lead to more suffering. In my experience, genuine spiritual experiences do things like relieve anxiety or fear as opposed to fuel it.
Generally, if experiences are moving us towards a place of unconditional love for ourselves and all things, then they are genuine spiritual experiences.
If someone has an awakening experience like, oh I am awakened and now I see how dumb and asleep everyone else is; they are so unaware. Then this is subtlety pointing away from love or promoting divisions, the “I” and “them” attitude.
Another take is that all experiences, whether every day, spiritual, or delusional are all of the mind. That is to say all experience no matter the class of experience is still within the dream. So even the most enlightening spiritual experience is still within the dream and contains some degree of falseness. This is a great obstacle on the spiritual path because spiritual novices will replace mundane worldly experiences with the cool, esoteric, sexy spiritual experiences. But really all that’s being done is trading one half-reality for another. This is to say that the spiritual experience to some degree is as real…
