Sixteen years ago I dusted myself off from several years of entanglement with the mental health system and left it all behind to redefine my life and myself. I had become ensnared in the mid-1990ās when I exposed the beginnings of a consciousness awakening mixed with unprocessed feelings of discovering I was a potential father without partnership with the mother. She told me on the phone after I had moved 5000 miles away for college that actually she really could get pregnant.
School counselors were my entry point to mental health engagement. Prior to the news of the pregnancy I had been a light one or two drink drinker and had smoked cannabis and a nicotine cigarette once each with no further draw to try either again. I had never made more than a couple dollars over minimum wage and was still too early in college with loans hanging over my head to be close to a professional career. It was a pretty simple math equation of financial life game over for me. At least the options I was aware of. The mother offered that she could take care of the child on her own and didnāt need my help. I could participate as much as I chose so the child would get to know who I was. She had a career path ready to take off that more than doubled my wage. I attempted to continue on living in the unknown.
I began to try cannabis more when offered, then LSD and mushrooms out in Hawaii where I was at school. I had been studying biology, chemistry and physics and was left wondering how solid reality and we really were when looked at from atomic building blocks of matter. I changed majors and began to study psychology. Sensation and Perception class focused my contemplation on how much the actual construction of the world takes place in our perception.
The drugs combined with my desire to know how life worked and what made a human broke down all past social conditioning of my individual self. I realized I was God. So was everyone else and I shared with anyone who would listen, but found no one who could understand or navigate the territory. āLoopy Laren,ā one friend called me. As my experience was much clearer and more self-evident than the materialistic constructs I was raised with, I was convinced I was onto something. There was little internet to speak of then and no Google to find others who experienced life as I was beginning to, so I voyaged on my own as best I could. I transferred back to school in Maine to face life unfolding there with new eyes.
It took two years for a confirmation from paternity testing that I had a firstborn son. I began to roll cigarettes with a little cannabis at the tip before classes. I still got Aās and Bās, but couldnāt take the edge off the life stress. I hit up the school doctor for a Valium prescription, and then a psychiatrist for more Valium, which meant they insisted on Prozac to go with it at least. Valium felt nice for about two days until it was gone and Prozac left the edges of my mouth cracked from yawning, my body feeling amped up with additional stress, and my penis numbed from sensation so much that ejaculation was near impossible. In that time I went from trying one illicit substance to every one I could find, moving on from psychedelics to opioids and stimulants including heroin and crack cocaine.
Needless to say, rather than process my feelings and adjust my life course according to circumstance, I became too numb to feel and didnāt have a productive discussion of my life experience or emotions around it in mental health settings. I was not surprised. I was told in psychology classes that emotions were a laughed at not serious line of study and though behavior was in vogue for a while, it was now all about genetic predisposition and brain chemical imbalances.
Some people do a beach in Florida on school break, but that was just a little too vanilla for me. I combined psychedelic mushrooms, injectable Ativan, credit cards given so easily to college kids back then and a memorized phone number for United Airlines, which I dialed in the middle of the night. I desired to leave the frozen solid early Maine spring and see the hot oozing volcanic lava in Hawaii. This flowed into a 10-day, $10,000 crack cocaine and random spending spree. Forgetting the sage advice of a friend that what goes up must come down, I interrupted my spree to wander through the Kilauea lava fields in a drowsy drug withdrawal and eventually was met by U.S. Forest Rangers with guns at the ready. After a quick search of me and my belongings, the volcano growled a thunderous roar and low cracking that sounded as if the newly formed earth we were standing on was about to split open and swallow us whole. The rangers scurried back up to the plateau where their helicopter was idling as one yelled out ācome quick if you want, or weāre leaving without you.ā In a flash I abandoned the cave where I had been sleeping next to an active lava flow and joined them for a helicopter ride up to the station for interrogation. I passed with a small fine and continued on to receive traffic tickets at the airport after smoking crack while driving my rented Mustang pedal to the metal to catch a flight heading back home.
I was picked up in the Los Angeles LAX airport for my first hospitalization. I had kept my sister in the loop of my travel plans in case I went missing and she got concerned. After smoking more crack in the restroom, I was tapped on the shoulder by the police at the gate to board a changed-on-the-whim flight back to Hawaii before returning to Maine. I let the police know I was too busy to talk with them, as I needed to catch a flight. I turned back away from them. They tapped me on the shoulder again and let me know I was going with them. Friendly enough folk to a 6ā2ā white guy, and they apologetically kept suggesting they were treating me well. In a holding cell, awaiting my baggage, I swallowed a pill bottle full of random psychiatric meds I had traded with someone I met in Hawaii. After all, I didnāt want to pick up a drug charge if they searched me. On the way to the hospital for evaluation the officers didnāt appreciate me moving my cuffed hands from behind my back where it hurt to in front, but I repeatedly did it anyway as it was more comfortable and I could. I did it for the last time at the Harbor UCLA hospital intake area where I heard a staff member yell out āget the Haldol.ā
Next thing I remember was being sucked back into my body. The sounds of static and sight of dots formed into beeping electronics, voices, and ceiling tiles. I soon met a psychiatrist near my own young 20ās age. She asked how I managed to get a Valium script and insisted that surely Prozac was the wrong prescription as my diagnosis should now be Bipolar and required different meds. There were many more DSM labels to come. Something about being in a coma reset myself and let me remember my intuition that all along knew no meds or illicit drugs were the answer. I let her know I wasnāt into their psychiatric meds, however the system was not yet done with me. Easy in, not so easy out.
I couldnāt find out how many hospitals I went to over the years as some lost all records of me being there, including Harbor UCLA. I donāt know how many involuntary hospitalizations I endured either. I adjusted to my new role leaving all hope of ever working again or completing my last semester at the university, as I was withdrawn from classes after that hospitalization. I lived on Social Security, Medicare, HUD housing assistance, food stamps, and a payee at the General Assistance office to dole out $30 each week in spending money. I pulled cigarette butts from the ash cans outside the emergency rooms that I frequented to lodge my complaints, and rolled the remaining tobacco into the nastiest cigarettes I ever smoked. I fulfilled the miserable role of permanently and totally disabled and carried out the suicidal thoughts and attempts that went with it. I knew from the get-go that the DSM disorders were just temporary made-up constructs to organize behavior and symptom patterns and no one really knew what the meds did, so I ditched all meds soon after each hospital release.
When I found an exit window to turn away from illicit drugs, I also tried to refuse the psychiatric meds at the treatment center. I was informed a few days after, while in withdrawal from the five years of benzodiazepine use, that I had to choose to take antipsychotics or be transferred to indefinite commitment in a state hospital. I had been up against that kind of threat before and knew from past experience they would just force medicate me to silence ways of thinking they deemed unacceptable. I wish I had been allowed more time to detox my body and mind without threat of a legalized gang attacking me, pulling my pants down, jamming a long pointy object in my ass, and squirting unwanted fluid into me.
I also had gotten jammed up in the awakening process in a sort of metaphysical solipsism or Drishti-Srishti Vada state of experiencing everything and everyone in the world as just a construction of my own consciousness. It had gotten so painfully lonely I was willing to attempt to keep living for a year, but if things didnāt turn around I was done. I pretended the psychiatrist really existed to submit myself and take the antipsychotic Seroquel, and of course several other medications.
After I left the treatment center, I refused a court offer of probation contingent on taking antipsychotics and fortunately my case was dismissed. I did not want legal precedent forcing me to take meds outside a hospital. I had been arrested before going to treatment when I asked to use a phone at a jail to call for help to get a dog out of the mud nearby in the bay, and I thought it inhumane that they said no. Intuitively, I still knew that meds and drugs were not necessary. I let my outpatient psychiatrist know I was going to get off all the meds, but would let him manage the elimination process. He thankfully agreed though it was a much longer three-year timetable than I would have designed.
In the process, a translation of a text written over 1600 years ago, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, almost fell off the library shelf at me. I finally knew that someone else sometime else had awakened in a similar way to me. Everything aligned with my experience except line 16 in section four about objects existing independent from being cognized by any single consciousness (Iyengar, 19931). At least I was not alone in experience and awareness completely.
I utilized my charity membership at the YMCA to manage the lower back pain I had picked up when I became obese from the Seroquel. I had ballooned to 239 pounds from my usual 175 back then. I knew I couldnāt shed the weight until I shed the Seroquel, so I built my core muscles to carry the weight better.
I found my first yoga classes at that Y which evolved into a vinyasa yoga practice. Yoga allowed me to survive the withdrawal process from the psychiatric meds. Association with experienced teachers brought me in touch with the Nondual Indian Vedanta philosophy. That furthered my ability to normalize the part of me that had given rise to societyās perceived need to contain my enthusiasm distorted by unprocessed life events with tranquilizers. Volunteer work in the 12-step fellowship I attended allowed a way to feel of value to society.
As I took my last dose of the last medication in 2002, I started taking a psychopathology class. It was one of the last five to complete my undergraduate work. I was sickened to sit through the pharmaceutical company-funded videos for class. The whole class presented just a single narrow-minded view of broken brains producing mental illness leading naturally to medications being needed to correct the chemistry of the broken brains. I sat on my hands, committed not to speak up but to jump through the hoop. I had been in the same class with the same professor six years earlier and I had been very disruptive, insisting the theory was much less than ideal. A couple of girls followed me home from that class so I knew I had caused an unacceptable disruption.
Convinced the American mental health system was lost beyond repair, upon graduation I pursued the more seasoned philosophies of mind in Yoga and Vedanta with two trips to India. In between I wet my feet with part-time work as a research supervisor. I had ditched the meds successfully, but wanted to slowly build my work capacity along with my willingness to interface with ordinary society. I put off a yoga teaching career, convinced I needed the confidence that I could find healing back to a regular life first.
After the second time living in India, funded in part by my cashed-in IRA from the research job, my sold car, and Social Security monthly payments for living expenses, I dove on into full-time work leaving disability income behind, and sent money to my sonās mother to replace what Social Security had been sending to her. I entered full-time work first in manual labor and then went on to become a welfare worker, but told none of the employers or coworkers of my colorful past. It was enough to deal with internalized stigma without having to be treated different by them.
Eight years later, with a wife and daughter entering school age, a mortgage, and supporting my wifeās schooling, it was time for her to work and me to look beyond proving I could work and into a career where I could be of more benefit. I had begun to do yoga again at work on breaks to bring back my happy that was dimmed by being overworked in an office and sure I saw value in teaching it. Yoga also helped me manage the sometimes torturous disc injuries in my lower back that persisted long after the last dose of Seroquel that had caused them. More, though, after eight years as a welfare worker meeting with countless disabled folks in the office, I was compelled to find some way to enter the mental health counseling field to carry a different perspective and different options for healing. Maybe I could help someone else turn their permanent disability that they often would prefer death over into just a stage to go through in a developmental process. Perhaps I could combine the counseling and yoga disciplines together.
I was made aware of a psychiatric survivor movement last fall, of folks like me who have looked outside the flimsy box that holds the stigmatizing brain disorder model and found ways to live beyond meds, and beyond labels to embrace their full experience of life. At the same time I saw from my counseling coursework that the mental health treatment system has gone from bad to worse. I was so saddened to see on the FDA website that in November an ingestible electronic tracking device was approved to be used in an antipsychotic medication to prove when it is ingested. In the 16 years I have averted my eyes from it, forced medication treatment with antipsychotics even in outpatient settings has grown tremendously along with the expansion of their use on kids. The CATIE study reported that when given a choice, most folks refuse to continue taking antipsychotics within 18 months, which suggests that they do not work for the people who are subjected to taking them (Lieberman et al., 20052). Colton and Manderscheid (20063) indicate that those labeled and treated as having serious mental health conditions can expect to die from 13 to over 30 years earlier than the general population, of mostly natural causes. Are we forcing people to die decades earlier and live with intolerable side effects in the meantime? Itās time to listen to those who suffer and widen the available options for true choice.
Forced treatment is inhumane torture for sure, from my personal experience, but Iām a born and raised in the woods American and believe in freedom of choice to take meds even if it cuts my life short. Freedom requires choice, a mosaic of healing paths to meet the mosaic of cultural expression taking root in the west. Iād like to see what could be done to open up options for others to change their story and allow their life to become worth living for.
Thanks, Laren. I never traveled as much as you, but our stories are the same in the essential points. The fact that so-called “mental patients” die as much as 30+ years sooner than they should, is in fact an intended feature, seen from the perspective of the Mental-Illness-Industrial-Complex. Given the rate at which drug-naive young persons are recruited, the quack shrinks who are the whores of PhRMA, are glad to make extra room by folks dying young. I can’t stress strongly enough, – These people are EVIL. They are NOT like you and I. They have chosen the DARK SIDE. That’s a tough pill to swallow, -irony & sarcasm intended! If what I’m saying were NOT true, then the system wouldn’t be so much worse, as it has become.
Yoga is excellent as treatment/therapy, because it gently stimulates the body’s natural healing capabilities. Psych drugs do more harm than good. They only *SEEM* to work, sometimes, in the short term. Psychiatry is a pseudoscience, a drug racket, and a means of social control. It’s 21st Century Phrenology, with potent neuro-toxins. Psychiatry has done, and continues to do, far more harm than good. God help us all. Welcome to MiA, Laren!
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Thank you for your perspective, Bradford. Yoga has been an amazing tool for me. I learned I could use yoga to change my mental, physical, and emotional states without the negative effects of drugs. Then I learned I could be ok taking a few years off from yoga to experience life more direct and raw. I found a good number of people in the yoga community who healed and left behind DSM labels. Community unrelated to diagnosis and treatment that I found in yoga was extremely helpful as well as community at several jobs. My story missed the immeasurable help I received from countless people in the 12-step community, and some in particular who pushed me to find freedom from the untrue illness stories I held onto long after I had detoxed from the meds.
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Sorry, Laren, that I haven’t seen your reply since last Sept.! Yoga is very could, but it’s incomplete by itself. It works with Prana, and asanas, which is calmative, but it leaves something out. Tai Chi works with Chi, which is NOT exactly the same as prana. I’ve found that combining the prana work of Yoga, with the Chi work of Tai Chi, is much, *MUCH* better! And I use beaver sticks to combine the 2. (Yes, “beaver sticks”, as in sticks designed and chewed by beaver. They’re common where ever beaver live, but I don’t see anybody going out and learning to use beaver sticks on their own!… I just got lucky, I guess, in “inventing” “Tai Chi Beaver Yoga Dance Therapy”!….)….
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Thanks for your story. It’s curious the bit about realizing you (and others) were God and then trying to talk about it – this was easier for me as a young man when I started thinking the same way, because that perspective was more talked about at least in the “hippy” subculture. Writers who were popular at the time, Alan Watts and Baba Ram Dass, for example, had some good ways of talking about it.
In the hearing voices movement they say hearing voices is only a problem if you don’t know how to handle it. I would also say that thinking you are God is only a problem if you don’t know how to handle it and relate to others from that perspective. If mental health professionals understood this, they would be better at really helping people instead of just trying to squish perspectives they can’t understand.
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Youāre welcome, Ron. It would have been nice to come across the work of either Alan Watts or Ram Dass much earlier in my path. It seems the mental health system has a materialistic, atheistic bias that tends to ignore data that does not support that bias. Spirituality appears to be looked at like a decorative garnish on a plate of pharmaceuticals. There is so much rich experience and various perspectives of extreme states from different spiritual traditions. The exploration of this knowledge has been a great help.
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Wow, I really like your phrase, about how spirituality is looked at as a “decorative garnish on a plate of pharmaceuticals.” I may quote you on it. It really captures the way I’ve seen spirituality be approached by the mainstream, when it even approaches it at all! It’s like a frill people might be allowed to have as long as it doesn’t interfere with them properly attending to the main course, the drugs and suppression.
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Thank you. You are welcome to the quote.
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Shirley McClain made a movie of herself shouting, “I am God!”
I am NOT God. Nor would I wish to be.
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Thanks for checking out my story, Rachel777. In part, my initial willing pursuit of pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs was an attempt to block out what I had realized as I did not wish to live with that perspective. I found all the pharmaceuticals and illicit drugs seemed to work in a similar way and required increasing doses until they stopped working. There were not enough new drugs being invented to block out unwanted awareness.
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The idea of God as ‘lording it’ over an unworthy creation is a coercive and divisive idea. But the idea of God as Source Nature and Expression is a reintegrative idea.
The nature of true giving is the natural extending embodiment of truly receiving. The Gift of (awareness of) Existence is a pure or perfect Creation in which we (as giver and receiver in like kind) can be the extension, reflection and sharing or expansion of – for such a ‘cup runneth over’. Any moment of true joy reveals this.
The idea of ‘in myself alone’ is ‘backwards’ to life and has a backwards result or experience – from which of course we may wake to recognize it is backwards thinking that spells out such experience.
My sense is that true cause is first and that putting what is first first restores true relational being with.
If an ‘expression’ (or son) seeks to become its own cause (or source), then it usurps true nature for the belief-reinforcement in a false or conflicting intent, and seeks to hide this by seeking and seeing symptoms (external effects) as displacements or diversions from what it fears in itself because it brought a fearful result. That this ‘paints us into a corner’ is not vindictive but the logical outcome of a self-limiting thought.
Maybe this is too ‘abstract’ for this forum – but the story I rejoice in is of awakened responsibility from a progressive state of confusion. the forms can be different or find common threads because we share many cultural elements. The fear of awakening responsibility in the ‘collective’ sense of established order operates across a broad spectrum – but does it at some level that is does not itself know, serve the awakening it seeks to deny? perhaps only by bringing an individual to choose one and let the other go – rather than a house divided against itself?
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Whatever your views are of Larenās wild youth (drugs, debt, premarital sex, elaborate vacations, etc.), there is no disputing one obvious fact: It should NOT have ended with psychiatric assault and torture. Plenty of people have pushed their lives to the limit, and society has let them alone to learn and enjoy and atone for their choices. Laren deserved that freedom, as well. Especially since he didnāt go wild on his own. None of Larenās desires would have materialized, if not for the insane greed of his creditors. Had quacks not stuffed him full of poison, Larenās mind would have been sharp enough to notice his need to de-escalate his lifestyle. Itās also deeply traumatizing for ANYONE – let alone a young man – to suffer a de facto loss of parental rights. Larenās behavior was caused by all the vipers in his life, not by a so-called āchemical imbalanceā. He was the last person to mess up, but the ONLY one to ever pay for his decisions. On top of that, Larenās punishment FAR outweighed the scope of his humdrum blunders (Remember, weāre a nation of people whose appetites are big, in every way, for everything.) And, the long-term benefit from his ātreatmentā? Zilch. For these reasons, Larenās judgments of psychiatry have always been correct. Its sole purpose IS to cripple and disempower societyās āundesirablesā. Good on him for rejecting that #FAKESCIENCE and moving forward with his life.
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Thank you for your support, J. You seem to recognize the role of our culture in the circumstances I found myself in. In addition to hard patient work on my part, it took the nonjudgmental support of many people for me to heal.
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Wonderful story man. I’ve been in similar situations in psychiatric hospitals. I can certainly relate to the sentence about a legalized gang attacking you and jamming sedatives into your body. Keep up the good fight brother.
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Thank you for sharing your appreciation, michael_simonson. It really caught me off guard and amazed me to discover you can be attacked gang style like that without having any desire or attempts to harm yourself or others.
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Great personal story Laren and I can’t help thinking that if you had been born into a Hindu family in Northern India, the thoughts and voiced words ‘I am God,’ would have been greeted with:
“Of course you are, God is Creation and so are You!”
Ron mentioned the wonderful Alan Watts, who suggested that it is important for each of us to realize that we come ‘out’ of the Universe and ‘into’ it, in any supernatural way. Sadly in the Christian perspective of the West, the ‘personification’ bias in our perception of creation has distorted the axial-age wisdom of Christianity’s inspirational founder.
As a survivor of the mental health system, now in my eleventh year of drug free self-regulation, I wish you well on your journey.
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Thank you for your comments, BigPictureAwareness. I seriously considered staying on in India to meditate in caves and leave the brokenness of our culture behind. Though surely any culture has a few bugs to work out. Eleven years drug free is pretty amazing in our culture. There are a lot of marketing and social pressures to consider our unadulterated states to be broken.
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Ahh! The cave thing? “the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.” -Joseph Campbell I wonder if you may have contemplated Plato’s allegory of the cave & its influence on the New Testament story of resurrection? Psychological, not Physical?
R.D. Laing spent a month in an Indian cave, with a Guru who introduced him to the timeless question: where are you between two thoughts? And I’ve often wondered whether that experience played a role in his intuitive comment: we are all in post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy. As the adaptive survival skill of literacy, seduces us into feeling that we and the world are made of words?
Yet, is language really human nature or simply a function of memory? Socrates was suspicious of how words imprison self-knowledge by creating ‘static’ impressions of our own reality: my heart, my brain. Yet the word heart is not the reality of our heart anymore than the word brain is the reality of our brain.
Within the cave of my body (the heart of the earth) I have often pondered why Plato said: I feared to see myself at last altogether, nothing but words.
Be well.
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Yes to the the well of being – and yes to the recognition of the power of the word in spelling the mind of its experience.
The willingness to ‘scribe’ for the wordless and formless is not to be the thing in itself but to serve the recognition that dis-spells false thinking and all of its effects. As an alloy of love and fear, the intent to uncover true can fear it but covers over in shifted forms.
Have you a link or more context to Plato saying this.
I feel that seeing oneself as nothing but false thinking arrives at the inability to persist AS that – and therefore opens re-cognition of life as the undoing and reintegration of what that denied in oneself and others both as one.
So if my sense of such self was recognizing a self-evasion that effectively shouted NO! in very clever ways of seeming to become a someone-in-his-own-right. The seeing of that as lack of substance without any resort to further tricks was the ‘shift’ to a true foundation that is not of my making (by word or definition) nor from ANY sense of deserving in the old terms.
So this ‘quality’ abides as that which notices or recognizes the ‘habit-reaction of No!’ as a choice being made instead of the true of who I am, and is the pause in which to listen or stay open for another way of seeing and being that is then given through me as a ‘Yes!’ that I could not have manufactured or made up – nor take credit for.
Yes to the Light outside Plato’s camera obscura and its freedom to be itself.
This repurposes the self and world made of static images imposed upon the living – to serve Living purpose.
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Binra ā is the death of the personal will so something greater can come through to act anything close to what you may be writing about at the end here?
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BigPictureAwareness ā I have not contemplated a relationship between Plato the resurrection story. Though I did read the Bible once, my introduction to Plato was before I had grown enough to appreciate the material so I certainly have more to investigate. In the approach to experiencing the world from a nondual perspective there can be a great fear of the individual death or losing oneself by seeing through the separate self as a socialized construct mediated by words.
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Laren – no reply box on your question to me. So answer here.
It isn’t really a death (though it may be feared as such) but a recognition of our true will as a result of a willingness to pause the mind-reaction (of a mis-identification) and -yes- extend and recognize something not only greater but recognisably whole.
Only giving love holds it in awareness and love here as a true recognition and not a romantic, sentimental or manipulative substitute.
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Yes, I agree binra that death is not the best term. I had a nagging feeling typing it. Likely as long as we have human form the mind reaction will remain at least in potential form, even if the deeper will beyond the mind reactions has been established in the forefront.
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I couldn’t reply to your response i place so here I say it isn’t that the ‘separate-self’ fear does not evidence itself – but that the way we choose to define and focus our awareness can feed that or free us from struggling within it. In some sense the capacity to choose against our wholeness remains potential whenever we are phished, baited or triggered to react from a sense of a mistaken identity – which can be a partial sense of ourselves taken as if the whole. But these events ARE our re-educative opportunity to pause, notice and release or nip reaction in the bud. While we see ourselves in or as a form rather than being through form, we need be vigilant against deceit. I see this as being aware of positive and negative choices, but learning to align in the true because it is true – which is the pausing to feel for truth rather than running on the mind of the presumption we already know. The true will is a true gift! Known only by the sharing.
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It may be that the New Testament story of Jesus The Christ, is know as the greatest story ever told, because it’s a parable story of the Human Condition?
King of the Jews?
Or King of Perspective?
A story that, in Hellenistic Jewish world that Jesus was born into, where the Romans where the colonizing Politic Power, Greek influenced writers demonstrated the Power of Philosophy.
And did so by adopting the Apocalyptic tradition of Israel’s Wisdom Teacher’s. While researching the World history and origin of words, @ online ‘cites’ like dictionary.com, one finds that the word Apocalypse was meant to convey the meaning: to uncover, reveal.
Furthermore, such research finds that it’s more commonsense assumption of catastrophic end of days, is modern, not until the 1800’s, apparently.
While, given that your nervous system was obviously active pre-birth, and waking consciousness begins with our very first breath, was the dissolution of your wordy wise sense of reality, a symptom of your Second Coming?
An experience of the ‘Parousia,’ a Greek word associated with the second coming of the Christ, and a word which essentially means, Presence.
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BigPictureAwareness. To answer in short, second coming is something I do not have experience with or perspective on.
You mention what may be a modern bias suggesting waking consciousness begins with our first breath. I disagree. Consciousness is likely not a product of the nervous system or breath ā though they are certainly correlated for other reasons.
My dissolution cut through the popular culture of science I was socialized with and along the way I touched base with the awareness, the presence that was unchanged throughout the different parts of my life and it included a birthing and pre-birth womb-like experience. That left the revelation of only one consciousness out of space and time at the base of all, not billions of individual disconnected ones produced by neurons.
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Got to go through Hell before you get to Heaven? Sounds like your tour of the other side of the Styx wasn’t much fun Laren. Good to have you back brother. š
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It is good to be back, boans. To borrow from binra above, I lost the ability to persist as that, which in practical terms means I got into some experiences that could have been labeled catatonic.
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From “biology, chemistry and physics” to eastern mysticism. That’s quite a leap!
I don’t feel like you’ve entirely left the mental health system behind at this point, especially when you go into counseling as a career, and that’s a problem for me, although I imagine obligations (the child you talk about), simple survival issues, must have a lot to do with it.
Suppose you had written, “Iām a born and raised in the woods American and believe in freedom of choice to” smoke cigarettes “even if it cuts my life short.” Smoking is diminishing. The “mental health” system, serious pharmaceutical consumption, on the other hand, is expanding, and in absolutely no danger of losing business.
“Biology, chemistry, and physics” or snake oil salesman? Snake oil salesman it is.
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Frank, you are right. Though I turned away from the system and did other things for many years, I have certainly reengaged when I started my studies. Arguably if I felt pulled to reengage then it still had an internal hold on me somehow. I have discovered through this community that I had a lot of unprocessed traumatic experiences as a part of the treatment that I get to feel now.
To me it looks like the integration of biology, chemistry, and physics leads naturally to perspectives similar to both eastern and western mysticism. It has been great to see and hear more and more mainstream scientists and professors able to integrate the understanding of the disciplines these past few years and feel safe enough in their careers to speak about it.
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laren I am glad that you are happy…
do you have any suggestions for young kids
about taking different drugs/alcohol/street stuff..
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Thank you for commenting littleturtle. I experience happiness, sadness, jumping up and down anger, frozen in my tracks terror, and the tickling pleasure of enthusiasm when insight dawns. These days I prefer not to block out my experience of life with any drugs. I would not suggest taking any drugs. My wish for kids is that the adults around them can listen to them and stay in relationship with them regardless of their experience or how they express it. My wife and I were blown away by a mantra given to kids starting in preschool and continuing in elementary schools of āyou get what you get and you donāt get upset.ā Though the intention may have been related to the red versus the green pencil, I went several times to have lunch with the kids and heard them in line chanting this repeatedly at 3 and 4 years old ādonāt get upset,ā and it may have an unintended long term impact. I wrote a song for my daughter to try to replace the mantra ādonāt get upsetā with ādonāt throw a fitā, and the message with one that it is ok to have feelings about the experiences in our life. I posted it on YouTube if you are curious.
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thanks laren and good you-tube
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You may read ‘Re -visioning psychology’ by James Hillman. It will help you understand what psyche is, because yoga an the other systems of believes it is just spiritualism, not psychology. We should understand the differences between psyche and the spirit. It is high time for it.
Good luck, my friend.
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Hi danzig666. I noticed in your comments on other blogs your high praise of the depth of this work in exploring psyche and concern for the surface approach we see today. It seems to echo ideas I have heard in this community that there is much more to being a human than the excitement of neurons.
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One in 200 successfully get off disability. Congratulations! I am at that point myself, just waiting for the letter from Social Security telling me I no longer “qualify” as dis-abled. I plan to frame it!
And you even make enough to support your kid and her mom. Wow, so cool. I hear you on NOT telling coworkers about your “dark past.” After all, as soon as you tell them they will never treat you the same.
I was on it, including back pay, from age 25 on. Now I am 60 and finally back into the workplace.
Looking back on my greatest accomplishments, I’d say getting off disability is very close to, if not at the top of that list.
I earned my degrees while still in the System, only I really don’t know too many others who managed to pull that one off. In spite of the doc’s recommendation that I drop out. Oops.
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Hi Julie. Sounds like a super exciting time for you. I spent years being reserved, cautious, and tentative after payments ended, especially with only a small handful of non-diagnosing/judgmental supporters and no awareness of a survivor or ex-patient community to help show me the way. It took a lot to build trust in myself.
Hopefully as more of us share our stories, those who want to re-engage with the larger society will have many torches to light up the various paths.
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yes we need to set examples by living well and getting ourselves out of the system and off the payments. And we need to get our stories out, too. No, you don’t have to stay on the drugs to be happy and successful, in fact, getting away from MH “care” might be the key.
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A very raw and insightful post – aaaaah, so glad you made it out the other side and had the incredible insight and resilience to trust your psyche and embark on the physical wandering it so needed, Laren! Lots of very wise comments here too.
My younger brother, Eric, was depressed and then became addicted (to cannabis, then heroin) in his early teens. He had two rehabs, but frequently tried to take his life. When on methadone (as a registered addict) in the UK, he was able to function and had happy times living with our mother after our father – who’d always scapegoated him – died. He developed paranoid schizophrenia in his late 40s and sectioned himself. I – out of 4 siblings – was the only one to stay in regular contact, partly because they were afraid of his symptoms. He took his life 9 years ago. It was his birthday on Monday, so I remembered him with a visit to Coventry where we were last happy as a family in the 1960s.
Like Eric, I had visions and heard voices. All were incredibly meaningful to me, so I felt no need to seek medical help. (I suspected I would be labelled and given drugs if I’d opened up about my experiences!)
I rejected the western view of life very early, as we were fortunate enough to live in Ethiopia for a time. That taught me about love, compassion and humility, not the ego-centric, fearful drama that goes on here in much of the west – and other countries who follow our “winner takes all” delusion.
I’ve had “psychotic” episodes since, and dark prophetic dreams which although deeply upsetting at the time, have always prepared me for tough life events to come. Latterly, I had Open Dialogue therapy to help deal with deep trauma over the poor relationship that manifested between my husband and son for a time (a repeat of my father and younger brother.) A wonderful team and therapy who accept unusual episodes as real, and having value. I found that it’s our Darkness which heals us, not the light. Many can’t accept this – especially intensely religious and spiritual people. I welcome it…..
Today, I’m very grounded and use my experiences to help others – addicts and family members – simply by sitting and listening. A great Truth begins to emerge where there is no judging, just sitting and listening. Peace to you and your family, Laren. May you continue to value these experiences as evidence of your soul emerging.
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Thank you, Annette for the compliment and for sharing about your brother. How fortunate you were able to find meaning in your experiences and embrace even the dark ones. It is notable and timely to read about the therapy success related to a family pattern with Open Dialogue as I just began a class in family counseling yesterday. I had enjoyed watching Daniel Macklerās YouTube documentary on Open Dialogue in the spring. Your groundedness comes through in your writing.
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Thanks Laren. A group of us have recently formed (carers of institutionalised adults who are showing progress with OD and ex-patients like me) who’ll be taking the OD message and benefits to a broader audience.
It is a blessing and a mighty privilege to sit with what emerges…. <3
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Hi Laren and anyone here….Please feel free to submit to the anthology:
http://forcedpsychiatry.com
Submissions are open now and anyone can submit. Looking for stories.
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Thanks Laren. A group of us have recently formed (carers of institutionalised adults who are showing progress with OD and ex-patients like me) who’ll be taking the OD message and benefits to a broader audience.
It is a blessing and a mighty privilege to sit with what emerges…. <3
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