Thank you so much for sharing this perspective. It does appear to be a major materialist assumption in mental health that consciousness is a product of the brain or neurons. I see this assumption at least starting with Freud’s investigation of neurons in the late 1800’s. As late as October 1844 Amariah Brigham a founder of the American Psychiatric Association and editor in 1844 of the American Journal of Insanity of which discussed on p. 99 how the immaterial and immortal mind is, of itself, incapable of disease and decay. To say otherwise, is to advocate the doctrine of the materialists….the truth appears to be, that the brain is the instrument which the mind uses in this life…
Another older 1809 book by John Haslam discussed enlarged ventricles in people with madness on p. 158, and later on p. 238 showed clear understanding that appears to have been lost by modern mental health researchers when he wrote It may be a matter, affording much diversity of opinion, whether these morbid appearances of the brain be the cause or the effect of madness.
I appreciate you sharing a Christian perspective on madness of which I know very little and some resources to find more information. I would like to read more on the topic.
I also would like to hear more on the topic from the perspectives of other traditions as well. I am working on one from a Yoga and Vedanta perspective. Maybe someday A good book will come out with different sections written by different authors to touch on some common alternative explanations to madness such as you give here, from yoga, from a shamanistic perspective, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, and clear scientific explanation from someone outside of the materialistic perspective and viewing consciousness as primary to leave some breadcrumbs out of the forest.
Again, thank you for sharing your perspective. To have informed consent we really need to have information about the different choices one can use understand and navigate their extreme states.
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 – 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.
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 Mackler’s YouTube documentary on Open Dialogue in the spring. Your groundedness comes through in your writing.
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.
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.
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.
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 “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” 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 “don’t get upset,” and it may have an unintended long term impact. I wrote a song for my daughter to try to replace the mantra “don’t get upset” with “don’t throw a fit”, 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.
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.
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.
Binra – 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?
BigPictureAwareness – 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re 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.
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.
Thank you so much for sharing this perspective. It does appear to be a major materialist assumption in mental health that consciousness is a product of the brain or neurons. I see this assumption at least starting with Freud’s investigation of neurons in the late 1800’s. As late as October 1844 Amariah Brigham a founder of the American Psychiatric Association and editor in 1844 of the American Journal of Insanity of which discussed on p. 99 how the immaterial and immortal mind is, of itself, incapable of disease and decay. To say otherwise, is to advocate the doctrine of the materialists….the truth appears to be, that the brain is the instrument which the mind uses in this life…
Another older 1809 book by John Haslam discussed enlarged ventricles in people with madness on p. 158, and later on p. 238 showed clear understanding that appears to have been lost by modern mental health researchers when he wrote It may be a matter, affording much diversity of opinion, whether these morbid appearances of the brain be the cause or the effect of madness.
I appreciate you sharing a Christian perspective on madness of which I know very little and some resources to find more information. I would like to read more on the topic.
I also would like to hear more on the topic from the perspectives of other traditions as well. I am working on one from a Yoga and Vedanta perspective. Maybe someday A good book will come out with different sections written by different authors to touch on some common alternative explanations to madness such as you give here, from yoga, from a shamanistic perspective, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, and clear scientific explanation from someone outside of the materialistic perspective and viewing consciousness as primary to leave some breadcrumbs out of the forest.
Again, thank you for sharing your perspective. To have informed consent we really need to have information about the different choices one can use understand and navigate their extreme states.
Report comment
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 – 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.
Report comment
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 Mackler’s YouTube documentary on Open Dialogue in the spring. Your groundedness comes through in your writing.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
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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Thank you. You are welcome to the quote.
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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.
Report comment
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 “you get what you get and you don’t get upset.” 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 “don’t get upset,” and it may have an unintended long term impact. I wrote a song for my daughter to try to replace the mantra “don’t get upset” with “don’t throw a fit”, 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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
Binra – 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?
Report comment
BigPictureAwareness – 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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment
You’re 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.
Report comment
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.
Report comment