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| Peak Experience or Psychosis? |
On this particular day I basked in a sense of openness within my heart, the ease with which I strolled along to Starbucks on this bright sunny morning. I was certain that three weeks of rising mania had peaked, I had the sense of a fundamental easing of constriction, deep down in my heart, lungs and skeletal musculature, of old habitual postures of defending myself dissolved in an inner warmth. There was also a notion of finally walking in my own footsteps, my destiny, my life, my time, free of some withholding shadow I‘d finally left behind. I was inordinately happy, “this time its done, this is the ease of experiencing sensations that seeks to greet life, not hide away from it,” I thought as I approached the Starbucks door.
As I waited for the latte and muffin, I thought about Buddha and book I’d recently read, all that experience and all that learning, leading up to the night he fell. The years with his back to that Bodhi tree, his mind revising all known wisdom, in the should and should not’s of how to be! Did he wake to find his instincts were all he’d ever needed, why all those animals came so close to heed the sense of his being? It felt like that for me this day, like a thousand and one shades of simulation on who and how I should be, were no longer required for rehearsed motor actions, no longer an actor, but a real alive, unguarded and spontaneous me.
As I read the Bangkok Post, I was surprised by the cartoon comment of the day, a circular montage of dinosaur, caveman, Stonehenge and high rise buildings, which seemed to encapsulate my imaginings in the past three weeks. “Some kind of fate or hot limbic association” I wondered as I spotted the American across the room, the deep brown tan and cheese cloth tee shirt, clues to a different lifestyle. In previous times my look would have been quick and cautious, yet now my open smile greeted his and unhesitatingly morphed into a grin. ’Good book,’ I asked, nodding to the yellowish paperback in his hand, and so our conversation began, me listening to his extraordinary life story, while he warmed to the spiritual nature of my recent experience.
For the past twenty years this delightful man had played the flute in thirty nine different countries, selling his recordings with a, ‘hand to hand, face to face contact is very important’ he explained. We talked about spiritual growth and I explained my notion of God as a projection of collective human potential, telling him how I thought the Bible stories were a projection of the neural activity inside the brain. ‘The river Jordan is the cleft between the right and left hemisphere, with the left being the land of milk and honey that will come from expanded knowledge and insight.’ I talked about the three weeks of mania and its religious-spiritual content, how it has always grabbed me this way and he confided his own spiritual journey in contrast to his brother who had taken a more conventional and material resources path.
‘My brother is angry with me, he thinks I’m a selfish waster, a loser’ he told me. We talked about convention and the dependency that can keep us acting out a life of should and shouldn’t expectations, compared to following one’s inner dream’s. I told him about the sleepless nights with thoughts of my father who had died exactly a decade earlier, how it coincided with a twenty year phenomenon of a super harvest moon, was it just coincidence and emotional associations within the limbic region of my crazy brain? ‘Have you seen the red oxide flood water in Hungary’ I asked him, after talking about the incredible atmospheric calm that pervades me when in this ‘state.’ We talked about the next day being John Lennon’s 70th birthday and the anniversary of Che Guevara's death, how I’d been thinking that ‘imagine’ was the real revelation and we were living through the age that book prophecies, ’the age of the Goddess falling’ had consumed my mind.
I told him how I thought the second world war was the Biblical Armageddon, a thought that had come to mind in my youth, without me really knowing why. ‘Perhaps you are a born intuitive, a wayseer of higher purpose,’ he told me, ‘perhaps your shifting into the life you were born to live.’ I explained how I’d been pleasantly exhausted that morning, happy to just be and trying not to think too much, yet still I’d seen a visual hallucination on TV, an elaborate number seven. It had come less than twenty four hours after I’d sent this, ‘A 7th day - a 7th Wave’ message to others on twitter.com, I even wondered if I was in contact with my father, now alive on Orion, part of a cosmic unfolding, an evolution, ancient beliefs and prophecy of times still to come.
Like my manic episode in 2007, I was getting all this down in digital black and white, with posts on theicarusproject,com and Stephen Fry’s site available for anyone to see, convinced that I could stand the ridicule and would go on to explain what this process is really about. For more than a decade I’d been like the kid with an elaborate clock, wanting to pull it apart, putting it back together and understand its works.
There is that feeling of higher power, when absorbed in these heightened emotional states, I had tried to test the feedback by posting links that were spontaneous and not contrived, perhaps guided by a Goddess hand?
Music stimulated my euphoric states as it had during all my previous manias, with the theme from the “Blade Runner” movie prominent this time.
Was it about emotional need and simple associations? The timing of a super harvest moon, a decade ago that month since my father’s death, John Lennon’s 70th birthday, red river blood in Hungary, prophecy and future age? Had I seen to many metaphors in the movie “Avatar” with a red dragon psychosis and resonant harmonic energies, with the power of digital music reaching out to the heavens, feeling that the real keys to heaven and hell are within us, that its all about a projected neural growth, as a microcosmic brain fractal’s patterns of an infinite cosmos. Or was it really about an unwanted, traumatized child’s need for attachment, for John Bowlby’s famous secure base?
Was mania the elative chaos of electrochemical activity that was stimulating Stephen Porges ‘social engagement’ system within my brain, with innate joy innervating my ventral vagal complex (VVC). Did I use music, warm spiritual thoughts and emotive associations to stimulate this third branch of my autonomic nervous system, shifting a lifelong pattern of immobilization with fear, to immobilization without fear, like the relaxed and unhurried conversation I was having with my American friend? Is the need for collective spiritual belief reflect the hard wired need each individual has for attachment, for our very sense of humanness reflected by the mirror neuron reactions of others towards us?
Six months on, after the predictable fall into depression did NOT occur I look back on the unguarded states of relaxed and happy postures during that manic period and know that I can access a more open approach towards people anytime I want too. Six months on, after more reading and research I’m putting the elaborate clock back together again, able to feel my life beyond the traumatized postures that proceeded my manic NEED. Six months on, I can look back on a decade of hard gained insights finally coming to fruition as I fully accept that I was never “Mentally ILL,” and that the commercial model of health care has more to do with the realities of a food chain economy, than my mental health.
The new awareness of reactive attachment disorder (RAD) speaks volumes about human nature in general, with reactive attachment order perhaps a more correct description of human nature than denial cares to admit? As one of the most individually vulnerable creatures on the planet with the longest childhood period of any creature, we are affected to denial in ways that must change if we are to secure our future. My autonomic (animal) nervous system is the mediator of my energies and movement, including my NEED for mania, and for as long as we continue to live in denial of our animal instincts, they will retain the power to both protect and defeat us. My own affective disorder now seen and felt as simply disordered animal instincts.
The famous night of Siddhartha’s fall when he awoke to become our Buddha, had he fallen back into William Blake’s bipolar art of “Paradise Lost,” back into the Garden of Eden and an acceptence of his animal instincts, throwing away all he’d learned of human should and shouldn’t, secure in a felt sense of all that is born within? - The Wise Man & The Whore:
As we parted that day my friend and I left each other with a gift, he with an apreciation of his neural, nervous system stimulation and me with a tip to practice catching the still point of mind at the bottom of each exhaled breath, ‘Its Zen thing, how the mind falls down the well, clinging on with fingernails, fearful that it will not rise again,’ he told me.
In all this chaos of innate affect stimulation, like the innate affect of pure joy that I was unconsciously using to reorganize my systemic brain/body motivation towards a more positive integration of my expectations.
I kept sensing the need for inclusion over an instinctive exclusion, an age old ‘us & them’ mentality, a falling age of Goddess creation like the primitive awareness of women having a connection with the great spirit of creation that men can never know, for a man is essentially evolved to kill and plays his part in an instinct driven food chain economy.
On the 10th I was prompted to tweet this message 10.10.2010: As The Age of The Goddess Falls a Question forms - What is it That We Really Want? At first glance it looks wacky to anyone caught up in the needs of an average working day, immersed in the affective interactions of people, place and expectation, yet as I try to point out throughout this blog are we miss-lead by a shallow object oriented conscious perception?
Is “The Polyvagal Theory
” and Stephen Porges concept of ‘neuroception’ a scientific explanation of our real motivations, our unconscious ‘id,’ our animal instinct for survival and the key to our constantly repeated folly of objective miss-perception. My peak experience or psychosis stimulated a deep need for acceptance, not from without but within, accepting not who I am, but what I am and the deeper reality of cosmic energies which the heightened states of hyper-vigilance can bring in what some call a spiritual breakthrough. Hyper-Vigilance born of birth trauma in my case, and the need of relief from this energy absorbing lifestyle that mania tries to chaotically bring, if only we can understand that its essentially about energy and movement and not objective thinking. Some say that all thought can only be a metaphor of internal states, projected onto the 3d moving picture screen we call life, words are poor descriptors for an electro-chemical reality within our 100 million neuron brain. Instinctively we fall into a comfort and ease need, innate distress stimulating us away from any deeper awareness of a chemically based self. Reality appears to be what we see through the needs of immediate and instinctive survival, yet down at the micro, millisecond speeds of our cellular self a deeper reality is the misperceived norm and its true connection with a wider reality is as yet unknown.
In my mad musing’s during this psychotic period I kept approaching a female need, the age of the Goddess falling and its spiritual twist. Are we entering a new age, with Aquarius rising on a tide of post world war two education with its rewarding insights into the human condition, or was I simply lamenting my own loss, my missing connection with my Mother? I kept thinking what impact a simple change in letter would have on the human population, changing Human to Wuman, perhaps stimulated by one of my favorite songs.
As a sentient creature do we turn matter into meta through a neurochemical activity of mind, as the song suggests are we Dr Wu-man?
Peak Experience or Psychosis?
Some of the crazy stuff I posted during my six week sojourn into ????
Blade Runner Sound http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnUCf_6bjd8
Tweeted on 6th, What happened on October 1st? http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/22sep_harvestmoon/ The Icarus myth and mania?
Has the world changed? As we begin the seventh sojourn? David
Welcome to my dream, Please end this 'us vs them madness,' does she guide my hand now? David
There is no THEM only Us and the System that Binds Us all Together Please read about Polyvagal Theory & Neuroception
We Can Start Again - Fall back into Paradise Lost - Emotional Torment is Hyper-Vigilance - Dissociation from Nature
So What Time is it Really? Dr Wu-Man? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57VHBFrl8_A&feature=related
The Mind is an evolved Dissociation from Nature caused by 'TERROR STATES,' mediated through the brain & nervous system
@amnestynl A 7th day - a 7th Wave - This Is The Moody Blues: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsoK2vA9jbQ
Tweeted on 10th 10.10.2010: Stop Breath & Feel the Universe Sing 2U - Fill the Mind with Her Love - She-We - Need another way Now! Trust Love?
10.10.2010: Age of Goddess Falling - As Chaos Threads Forward Balance & Harmony: A Trust of Love so NEEDED NOW
Happy 70th B/Day John: Our Book of Revelation Man & Che Guevara's Death too? Coincidence or Destiny Falling?