A Psycho-Spiritual Journey

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A number of mental health approaches like Soteria, Diabasis, Open Dialogue and various others operate on what has become known as the Wellness principle. While often dismissed or derided by conservative vested interests, there is substantial evidence that this approach offers a proven and credible alternative to the predominant biomedical model.

Two important elements found in all the Wellness approaches include a supportive environment and a practice known as Active Listening. Both can also be found in one form or another in many ancient spiritual practices but are invariably lacking or not present at all in the biomedical approach to mental health. An examination of how these methods work, interwoven with my own personal journey, may be helpful in seeking a better understanding of mental health and future possibilities.

A Bad Start

One early sign of a troubled life to come occurred at kindergarten when I was about four years old. The teacher was reading the story of Hansel and Gretel. While most kids would have been happily engaged in the story, I was terrified. I responded accordingly, much to the annoyance and probably the distress of others.

Growing up with this sort of “sensitivity” soon got me labelled as a weird and troubled kid. These days I would probably be diagnosed and medicated but that didn’t happen back then in the early 1950’s.

When I was about 22 years of age I started hearing “god” voices. What was at first a curiosity became a problem. Soon after mentioning these experiences to my local doctor and the minister of the church I attended, I was certified insane and involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. According to some who knew me at the time, I went to hospital a somewhat troubled but functional person and emerged several months later seriously disturbed and quite dysfunctional.

In Australia, it was easy enough in those days to obtain a disability pension with subsistence-level government accommodation and an ongoing supply of medication. After looking around at others in similar situations, I decided that was not the way I wanted to spend the rest of my life. I walked away from the mental health system and tried to get on with my life as best I could. I was also acutely embarrassed and ashamed about what had happened to me so I tried to hide my experiences from everyone, even to the point of self-denial. Despite my best efforts, however, I was in and out of psychiatric hospitals for short stays on many occasions over the next fourteen years.

Then came a significant turnaround.

A Mad Priest

I joined a peer self-help organisation called Grow. It had been started by a Catholic priest named Con Keogh who had himself been hospitalised and diagnosed with schizophrenia. Before being hospitalised he had studied and taught philosophy at the Vatican. With the help of his training he put together a psycho-spiritual 12-step program for mental health, loosely based on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).

I found the spiritual aspects of Grow confronting at first but in time came to realise that spirituality could exist outside a religious structure or context. At its essence I now see spirituality as being predominantly about the development of conscious awareness; a somewhat contested and disputed subject for many.

Grow described itself as a caring and sharing community which was an important part of their system. Being accepted without demands or judgement helped keep people connected and coming back each week, long enough for other elements in the program to start having an effect.

Good support appears to play an important part in mental health. Support groups are often considered to be a cheap therapeutic alternative but the evidence shows that well-run support groups can be just as effective if not more so than individual therapy. Of course they are also significantly cheaper to run. Unfortunately, many therapists find group work difficult. This is particularly so if those running or leading the group lack the appropriate skills, particularly active listening skills, or have an agenda for group members to achieve specific outcomes.

For a support group to work, one or more members of the group must be able to “hold the space” for the group. This is essentially the same as active listening which raises the level of conscious awareness in the group. This in turn enables people in the group to feel listened to and valued.

It is possible to draw “energy” from a good support group indefinitely. While this can certainly help, it is essential that group participants use the group’s supportive energy to develop self-awareness by becoming mindfully aware of their own mental activity, emotions and bodily feelings. This allows us to deal better with life’s inevitable challenges without having to rely so much on others for support.

Keogh’s program challenged many of the unquestioned ideas and beliefs of contemporary society including the way we deal with thoughts, emotions and feelings. This in turn has a significant effect on the way we respond to life’s events. Learning about and following some of these new practices together with the support and encouragement of the group started to turn my life around.

Unfortunately Grow had also come to the attention of the psychiatric fraternity who were less than impressed with the idea that groups of people with serious mental health problems could help each other achieve results that they couldn’t. Over time, with the aid of government funding, Grow was taken over by so-called professionals. The organisation still exists today but my understanding is that it has become institutionalised and moribund.

Grow also triggered an interest for me in philosophy. If Con Keogh’s knowledge of this subject had led to the Grow program, maybe more could be gleaned by studying it.

Philosophy

I came across an advertisement in the daily newspaper for a course in “Practical Philosophy.”

It turned out to be a private worldwide organisation established many years ago in the UK by a man named Leon MacLaren. The school taught a metaphysical system based on Eastern and Western philosophy that included mindfulness and meditation practices together with the study of classical music, art, literature and poetry.

There was occasionally talk about how the school’s metaphysical “work” was not suitable for anyone who had any form of mental illness so I kept my own problems very private. There had apparently been a couple of psychiatric hospital admissions and at least one suicide within the organisation in the past.

On a couple of occasions, some of the practices triggered some quite bad psychotic episodes but fortunately by this time I was becoming reasonably skilled at dealing with them.

I learned a lot at the School of Philosophy but I believe there were some important elements missing in regard to emotions and physical senses (feelings).

After five years, my inner voice told me it was time to move on. I had acquired some knowledge of both Zen Buddhism and Sufism from the school so I started looking around.

Sufism

Sufism is the esoteric teachings and practices of the Islamic religion. It can be difficult to determine where the religion ends and metaphysics begins so Sufis have often had an uneasy relationship with religious traditionalists.

I joined the Melbourne Mevlevi Sufi order, better known as the Whirling Dervishes. The Mevlevi are one of the best-known Sufi orders because of their whirling or dancing meditation known as Sema, which means listening. This order, based in Turkey, was started by the son of the well-known mystic poet Jalalauddin Rumi, shortly after his death in 1273.

An important Sufi practice is known as Sohbet. The literal meaning of this word is conversation.

I was intrigued to discover how the practice of Active Listening used in the Wellness model was in many ways similar to Sohbet. Essentially it promotes a connection at an emotional level beyond the limits of the rational mind. This skill, like active listening is developed through mindfulness. It is amazing that such a simple practice can be so powerful but to be effective it must be carried out with conscious awareness, not mechanically. While it sounds simple, it can take quite a bit of practice to master.

Again I never mentioned my mental health problems to anyone in the Sufi community but when the group leader died, the person who tried to take over wasn’t able to “hold the space” and the group eventually disintegrated. I started having difficult psychotic experiences again. I had also just come to the end of a three-year “marriage from hell” and was rather fragile.

For the first time in more than 10 years I reached out for psychiatric help. A senior psychiatrist at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne prescribed a new atypical antipsychotic medication for me to use on an “as needed” basis. I used it this way up until early 2022, monitoring my own prodromal symptoms and taking the medication whenever I felt a period of instability building up and then tapering off as soon as possible after the episode had passed.

Meanwhile my mental health seemed to slowly decline. My main “practice” seemed to be trying to avoid places and situations that were likely to be triggering. I now recognise that this is not a very good way to deal with the problem. This approach is likely to allow things to get worse over time.

Transpersonal Psychology

Around the time I left the Mevlevi I became involved in a relationship with a woman who was a transpersonal psychologist. I got to attend monthly meetings of the Australian Psychological Society’s transpersonal interest group where I met a number of interesting people involved in the transpersonal psychology movement.

This woman had undergone training with Stanislav “Stan” Grof, a Czechoslovakian-American psychiatrist who was deeply involved with psychedelics. When LSD was banned in the US in the 1960’s, Grof developed a breathing technique for inducing Altered States of Consciousness (ASC’s) that he called Holotropic Breathwork. I tried this technique a couple of times and it did induce an ASC but for me it also induced a “bad trip” or psychosis soon afterwards.

Grof coined the term Spiritual Emergency” and promoted the idea that spirituality and mental health can be intricately related. In my view he left open a mostly unanswered question as to the difference between a spiritual emergency and ordinary psychosis. The difference, as far as I can see, is one of orientation, meaning a person’s willingness to confront emotional pain and move into it or to try and avoid it by moving further away into an even lesser state of conscious awareness. Antipsychotic medication works in much the same way. It reduces conscious awareness in the hope that it will also reduce emotional pain.

Trouble with Authorities

Several years ago I was hospitalised for a short time with a medical condition that required me to reveal my use of antipsychotic medication. This led to a number of confrontations with the state mental health authorities who were unhappy about the way I was self-managing my mental health and medication even though what I was doing had been prescribed by a senior psychiatrist from a major public hospital. Practices had changed quite significantly since that time and not for the better. Eventually I got fed up with the very unwelcome and at times intrusive interference in my life and decided to set up the Pink Panther Movement.

The Panthers were initially an angry response towards the oligarchs of the Australian mental health system. That anger has significantly subsided into an acceptance of “what is” along with a quiet determination to do whatever I can to try and improve the situation.

Setting up and managing the Panthers has exposed me to the rough and tumble of the mental health world presenting more than its fair share of challenges and surprises. I soon learned that my own experiences were fairly typical. Tens of thousands of Australians are being routinely subjected to abusive and sometimes horrific practices. Many have had to endure far worse than me. Another big surprise was that many mental health professionals claim to be strongly opposed to the existing biomedical approach but most are reluctant to take any sort of public stand against it.

New Frontiers

Many blame the immense global mental health crisis on pharmaceutical companies, the psychiatric profession, social media, the government and so on. While each of these things undoubtedly play a part in the problem, I believe there is a much bigger underlying issue that could be described as a culture-wide dulling of awareness and empathy together with deep-seated existential fear. When coupled with greed and a lust for power and control that drives the people I call “conservative vested interests,” you have an almost perfect recipe for what has happened.

Addressing this problem requires a much greater public understanding of consciousness and conscious awareness than what exists at the moment. We can find at least some of this knowledge in ancient spiritual teachings and practices.

The Wellness approach, despite years of deliberate suppression, has survived and proven itself to be highly effective. Together with its intrinsic core practice of Active Listening, it seems like as good a place as any from which to try and build a new and better system.

***

Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

25 COMMENTS

  1. The only problem is in interpreting the spiritual phenomena in a way conditioned by religious teachings or in terms of any of the more progressive psychiatric and therapeutic approaches, e.g. transpersonal psychology, open dialogue and so forth – because truth does not need to be interpreted at all – it needs to be seen and understood, and imagining that accumulating socially conditioned knowledge about religion and spiritual matters actually prevents such seeing and understanding if you ask me. I really mean this. You can’t flower spiritually by following any authority or believing uncritically what other religions, spiritual movements or progressive mental health treatments might say. You may be one of the most clued up people in Australia on the problem of mental health as far as I know – and I sincerely mean that – but this has nothing to do with the spiritual flowering which demands freedom, a freedom made impossible with following, interpreting or practicing anything. Seeing and understanding what is as it is is the only thing universally connecting all meditative religions and all truly therapeutic approaches in psychology too for that matter. I know you are likely to dismiss what I say because I can’t quote an authority to try and justify it. But it’s the truth bruv.

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  2. Active listening is a vital component of analytical psychology and can be seen in other psychological relationships. https://positivepsychology.com/active-listening-techniques/

    For some reason analytical psychology hasn’t the big following in Australia seen in other countries such as Europe, UK, Canada and the US. Dismissing Freud and the unconscious is fashionable but that’s about all. Ignore both at your peril. Generally speaking analytical psychology is a long term relationship of many years which explores the meanings an individual gives to his or her life experience. An article entitled ‘On Analytic Listening’ by W. W. Meissner in Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXIX, 2000 has many good points on the process.

    “Multiple dimensions of the listening process as implemented in the analytic process are discussed. Listening is not the same as hearing; it is done with the mind rather than just the ears. Listening seeks meaning, specifically the meaning in the mind of the patient. The meaning of words is often obscure, ambiguous and uncertain, and their deeper implications can only be approached over time through uncovering associative linkages.

    Listening takes place in multiple perspectives—subjective/objective, active/passive, dynamic/genetic, etc.

    Listening is also contextually related to dimensions of the analytic relation, including transference, alliance, and real relation.

    Modalities of listening related to each are explored for both analyst and analysand, and aspects of listening empathically and listening to silence are discussed.

    Listening and speaking are primary activities in analysis, and along with cognitive and affective attunement to the patient, are essential to the effectiveness of the process as well as the major basis for developing interpretations. As Adler and Bachant (1996) recently observed: “Analytic listening is a highly sophisticated and disciplined skill that prepares the analyst to be attuned to and to monitor multiple levels of discourse simultaneously (e.g., what the patient intends to be saying,what the patient might be saying if less inhibited, and what the patient is unconsciously saying, etc.) without ignoring his own affectively charged stream of consciousness” (p. 1030).1

    And on the part of the patient, listening both to him or herself, as well as to the analyst, is essential to the patient’s participation in the process. Thus not only is the fact that both analyst and patient listen important, but how they listen and to what is equally if not more so.2

    With respect to listening in the analytic process, the first question is what does it mean to listen, then what is involved in analytic listening—analyst listening to patient, and patient listening to analyst. I will discuss complex dimensions of the listening process, particularly problems connected with hearing the meaning in the patient’s or analyst’s use of words. Specific to the analytic process is listening within the frame of the analytic relation, including its constituent components: transference, alliance, and real relation (Meissner 1996c).

    Related issues concern the role of empathy in listening, listening when there is nothing to hear, i.e., to silence, and listening to oneself. Finally, I will consider some aspects of the listening process in the analysand.
    [text]

    CONCLUSIONS
    In the light of these considerations, I draw the following conclusions:
    1. The analyst hears sounds, primarily the patient’s speech but listens to meanings—the analyst hears with the ears but listens with the mind.

    2. The complete meaning of words is always to a degree uncertain and ambiguous. The full scope of meaning and implication may never be achieved, but can be approximated over time by open-ended inquiry and associative elaboration.

    3. Listening for both analyst and patient involves a balance of subjective and objective components. The analyst listens to the patient but that listening is filtered through his or her own subjectivity; the same is true of the patient listening to the analyst.

    4. Objective and subjective listening are reciprocal—the greater the focus of attention on the other, the less on the self, and vice versa—but the balance between them can differ among analysts as well as among patients. There is no optimal or preferred mode, but overbalance in one direction can increase the risk of mishearing or misunderstanding in the other.

    5. Analytic listening is as overdetermined as speaking forboth analyst and patient. Listening takes place on multiple levels of implication and within multiple frames of reference simultaneously and concurrently.

    6. Analytic listening takes place within the analytic relation specifically in relation to transference-countertransference, therapeutic alliance, and the real relation. Communication between analyst and patient can take place in any and all of these perspectives in the course of analytic interaction, and the listening perspective differs accordingly. Listening with therapeutic intent and purpose
    takes place within the alliance sector, by virtue of which the analyst, and hopefully the patient, are able to turn extra-alliance transactions to therapeutic purposes.”
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2000.tb00565.x?needAccess=true

    I’ve also experienced the bizarreness and rigidity of much of the Australian mental health system. With degrees in philosophy, law and mediation, and a lot of life experience, it’s been a long and interesting journey from there to here. It wasn’t until I found an analytic practitioner, a Buddhist Jungian practitioner, that the complexity of my life experiences were appropriately explored through the basis of active listening.

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    • Hi Lyn,
      While the “Madness” of the mental health system is undoubtedly a major global problem, Australia does seem to have its own unique idiosyncrasies. While I think these create some substantial challenges, at the same time I would suggest that they offer unique opportunities that I do not believe are available in most other parts of the developed world.

      Many Australian mental health practitioners have spoken to me about their concerns but only privately and “off the record”. I believe that if and when more practitioners find the courage to speak out openly, things could start to change very quickly.

      I have a vision of the day when Australia has the best mental health system in the world and becomes a showcase of best practices for the rest of the world.

      You may be interested in what I am trying to do with the Lived Experience Worker (LEW) community. Here is a link to a Facebook group “You and LEW Mental Health” https://www.facebook.com/groups/556736800344723/. Some more input to this conversation would be most welcome.

      Regards
      Tim

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    • lyn, thanks for wonderful comments.

      But, of all these folks who speak of “active listening,” none, it seems to me, recognizes the full “magic” or “miracle” of what happens, or can happen, when it occurs.

      Therefore, I ask again, anyone, Is there a difference between being listened to and thinking we are being listened to when we are not?

      I believe there is, and that I could spend lifetimes in trying to prove this, if only to myself, and that they would not be wasted lifetimes.

      When I feel myself listened to, I feel empowered and raised up in consciousness; thoughts flow easily; new ideas arrive freely, joyfully, liberatingly.

      I don’t believe Socrates or Jung or Carl Rogers or Science has offered any (recorded) explanation of this yet. And, if Jesus had any inkling of it (as how could he not?), it was not reported in any of the Synoptic/Canonical or Gnostic gospels that I know of, either, even if he was reported as listening, a while, on the road to Emmaus, post-resurrection.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15pjQRA80bs :

      Minute 0:55:

      “If the doctor wants to guide another, or even accompany him a step of the way, he must feel with that person’s psyche. He never feels it when he passes judgment. Whether he puts his judgments into words or keeps them to himself makes not the slightest difference.To take the opposite position, and to agree with the patient offhand is also of no use. Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity. This sounds almost like a scientific precept, and it could be confused with a purely intellectual, abstract attitude of mind, but what I mean is something quite different. It is a human quality, a kind of deep respect for the facts, for the man who suffers from them, and for the riddle of such a man’s life……..We cannot change anything unless we accept it: Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow sufferer. I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgement when we wish to help and improve…”

      Thich Nhat Hanh speaks similarly:

      “We know that many people suffer, feeling that no one is able to understand them or their situation. Everyone is too busy and no one seems to have the capacity to listen. But all of us need someone who can listen to us.

      Today there are people who practice psychotherapy and they are supposed to be there for you, to sit and listen to you so that you can open your heart. They have to listen deeply in order to be real therapists. Real therapists have the capacity to listen with all their being, without prejudices, without judgment.

      I don’t know how therapists train themselves to acquire this kind of capacity to listen. A therapist also may be full of suffering. While sitting and listening to the client, the seeds of suffering in him or her may be watered. If the therapist is overwhelmed by his own suffering, how can he listen properly to the other person? When you are trained to be a therapist, you have to learn the art of deep listening.

      Listening with empathy means you listen in such a way that the other piece of person feels you are really listening, really understanding, hearing with your whole being – with your heart. But how many of us can listen like that? We agree in principle that we should listen with our heart, so that we can really hear what the other is saying. We agree that we should
      give the speaker the feeling that he is being listened to and being understood. Only that can give him the feeling of relief. But, in fact, how many of us can listen like that?

      Deep listening, compassionate listening is not listening with the purpose of analyzing or even uncovering what has happened in the past. You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes. During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less. This is your only purpose. Other things like analyzing, understanding the past, can be a by-product of this work. But first of all listen with compassion.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh, from “Anger,” Page 93.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDJBKEOe7Pg

      “If this applies to you, observe the resistance within yourself. Observe the attachment to your pain. Be very alert. Observe the peculiar pleasure you derive from being unhappy. Observe the compulsion to talk or think about it. The resistance will cease if you make it conscious. You can then take your attention into the pain-body, stay present as the witness, and so initiate its transmutation.

      Only you can do this. Nobody can do it for you. But if you’re fortunate enough to find someone who is intensely conscious, if you can be with them and join them in the state of presence, that can be helpful and will accelerate things. In this way, your own light will quickly grow stronger. When a log that has only just started to burn is placed next to one that is burning fiercely, and after a while they are separated again, the first log will be burning with much greater intensity. After all, it is the same fire. To be such a fire is one of the functions of a spiritual teacher. Some therapists may also be able to fulfill that function, provided that they have gone beyond the level of mind and can create and sustain a state of intense conscious presence while they are working with you.” ― Eckhart Tolle, from Page 42 of “The Power of Now.”

      “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.” ― Robert M. Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values.”

      “The only devils in the world are those running in our own hearts. That is where the battle should be fought.” – Gandhi.

      So funny that LISTEN should be SILENT, all quietly untangled – almost as though even the English universes are not as hostile or indifferent as we supposed.

      Thank you for a most wonderful essay and discussion.

      Wishing you comfort and joy, and mirth,

      Tom.

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      • Apologies: One sentence of my quotation from Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Anger,” read:

        “Listening with empathy means you listen in such a way that the other piece of person feels you are really listening, really understanding, hearing with your whole being – with your heart.”

        It ought to have read:

        “Listening with empathy means you listen in such a way that the other person feels you are really listening, really understanding, hearing with your whole being – with your heart.”

        I believe that, whether listening very attentively and nonjudgmentally to another in person or by phone, we can merge our fields of consciousness in some way, and that a similar effect may be accomplished (again, simultaneously) while praying for or attempting “distant healing” for another person, faraway, much as though we behave like two “entangled particles.”

        I believe Albert Einstein must have enjoyed this phenomenon frequently when his great friend Michele Besso was with him, as also when he was in the company of Niels Bohr.

        I believe that, having struggled with the problem of (special?) relativity for (six?) long years, the very same evening in ?mid-May, 1905, that he had gone to visit Besso, he finally solved it – thanks to Besso’s….listening skills.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michele_Besso

        ‘”Not often in life has a human being caused me such joy by his mere presence as you did.”

        Albert Einstein in a letter to Bohr (1920).’

        – from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr

        Albert Einstein may have balked at “spooky action at a distance,” and, like the rest of us, also failed to recognize it as the same phenomenon when it happened up close and personal, too, but I believe we can figure out ways to prove it, with or without hypothetical or real cats who come to us and who purr just as soon as we relax, for instance.

        Sorry for the error.

        Peace and joy, and happy listening!

        Tom.

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  3. Naked women and chicken eggs would be the great basis for an almost infinite array of erotic art photographs, and perhaps also would naked man with chicken eggs, I don’t know, but definitely women are known to like men holding babies or animals with affection. Why is this? Think about it – I don’t need to tell you because it’s so obvious. Anything suggestive of fertility adds something to sex appeal and this is largely unconscious to all fashionistas and beauty seekers. And I think this explains ALL those things that make women or men seem attractive. If you go through the list you can see this, and men being violent or assertive can be attractive because it is protecting the young, you see? And once you nab them you don’t mind if they grow old with you so long as you make the most of their fertility while it’s there. This may seem like a trivial insight but if we don’t know it our whole world comes crashing down, as is evident everywhere. And you can only grow old with grace if you can disentangle beauty from sex and keep the former for yourself and leave the latter to the fertile and non-senile. I am trying to tell myself this every day. Then I’ll be able to find my future dates at the less competitive senior citizens clubs, although I may have to move a few colostomy bags out the way, and have a defibrillator at the ready.

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    • I have come to similar conclusions that this is how life operates at a mundane level. But I also know from personal experience that there is more to life than this.

      “Clean your ears. Do not listen for something you have heard before.
      Invisible camel bells, slight footfalls in sand. Almost in sight. The first word they call out
      will be the last word of our last poem.”

      ~ Rumi- Coleman Barks translation

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  4. “Many blame the immense global mental health crisis on pharmaceutical companies, the psychiatric profession, social media, the government and so on. While each of these things undoubtedly play a part in the problem, I believe there is a much bigger underlying issue that could be described as a culture-wide dulling of awareness and empathy together with deep-seated existential fear. When coupled with greed and a lust for power and control that drives the people I call “conservative vested interests”, you have an almost perfect recipe for what has happened.”

    Thank you for connecting the dots so expertly.

    My journey through life, my search in various places for intelligent, meaningful answers is somewhat similar to yours.

    Like you, my observations and experience have led me to conclude that a usually unrecognized existential fear more often than not is the source of people’s misery, a fear imperceptibly exploited by the powers that be.

    Out beyond ideas…there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

    When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. ~ Rumi

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    • Mevlan Jalāl al-DÄŤn MuḼammad RĹŤmÄŤ (or just Rumi as some prefer) has always been a big comfort, guidance and inspiration for me as he continues to be for millions of others today.

      Here is one is one of his poems that has nurtured me through some dark spaces.

      These spiritual window-shoppers,
      who idly ask, ‘How much is that?’ Oh, I’m just looking.
      They handle a hundred items and put them down,
      shadows with no capital.

      What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
      But these walk into a shop,
      and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
      in that shop.

      Where did you go? “Nowhere.”
      What did you have to eat? “Nothing much.”

      Even if you don’t know what you want,
      buy something, to be part of the exchanging flow.

      Start a huge, foolish project,
      like Noah.

      It makes absolutely no difference
      what people think of you

      ~ Rumi- Coleman Barks translation

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    • I largely agree, birdsong, but somedays the complete corruption of it all, leaves me sad. But today is my dead brother’s birthday, and a family friend died today, too … so I have legitimate reasons for having a sad day.

      I had a “spiritual” journey, similar to yours, Tim, except I was misdiagnosed for asking a psychologist what the meaning of a dream that I was moved by the Holy Spirit meant, and that Holy Spirit blaspheming psychologist thought all dreams are “psychosis.” Thank you for sharing your experience and research, Tim.

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  5. Thank you very much, indeed, Tim and MIA.

    In several years of reading MIA, I don’t think I have seen anything finer than this essay.

    Is there any difference between being “actively” listened to and merely believing that one is being listened to when, in fact, one is actually not being listened to, at all – say down a phone line, for instance, please?

    If there is, what might that be, please?

    Thanks, again.

    Tom.

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  6. Tim thank you so much for this wonderful piece. Rumi has got me through some dark nights of the soul too. I’m in Australia and you are right there is potential but tiny beacons of light. In ten years one human listening psychiatrist. Genuinely beautiful human being. Just one person, no cruelty or malice in her soul. Just one against a tide of cruel incompetent evil. Thanks again sending you love and thanks

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  7. My personal favourite is the quote that begins “Dance when you’re broken open.. And ends with “Dance when you’re perfectly free”.
    Good advice that has served me well over the years of bearing witness to the unspeakable cruelties of the Australian MH system and the destruction of my beautiful boy and my family.

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