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| Hollywood Hype or Reality? |
Delusions are false beliefs that are firmly held.
Types of delusions include:
Delusions of grandeur; the false belief that one is famous or publicly important or is a god.
Delusional jealousy; believing a spouse or partner is unfaithful when it is not true
Persecutory or paranoid delusions, believing one is being followed, spied upon and secretly listened to, etc.
Delusions of reference; thinking that random events contain a special meaning for you alone.
Bipolar Delusions are clearly a sickness of the mind?
Sometimes, a person with severe episodes of mania or depression has psychotic symptoms too, such as hallucinations or delusions. The psychotic symptoms tend to reflect the person's extreme mood. For example, psychotic symptoms for a person having a manic episode may include believing he or she is famous, has a lot of money, or has special powers. In the same way, a person having a depressive episode may believe he or she is ruined and penniless, or has committed a crime. As a result, people with bipolar disorder who have psychotic symptoms are sometimes wrongly diagnosed as having schizophrenia, another severe mental illness that is linked with hallucinations and delusions. From: NIMH Bipolar Disorder
Could delusions have any purpose or meaning?
Over 30 years I have been through many manic, psychotic periods that have included all the above signs of what is considered a sickness of mind. In my case delusions have been about thoughts of grandeur in the classic spiritual tradition of "I think I'm Jesus." I have only had two sensory hallucinations, one auditory and one visual and both while taking high dose anti-psychotic medications.
In a busy civilized world of work a day survival, rational objectivity is highly valued with disruptive behaviors and unusual thinking considered a loss of insight into objective reality. How could delusional thinking and particularly sensory delusions have any purpose or meaning for any individual? Surely anyone trying to justify their experience of delusions or hallucinations is clearly sick and deluded? Such would be the common perception? Yet how hard does common perception try to understand these experiences beyond the norm, beyond a normal comfort-zone awareness?
Diary of a psychosis and its purpose?
Friday September 17th 2010: Three years after my last mania-psychosis a new one begins with delusions of grandeur, with thoughts of the Biblical King David expanding my sense of being. As with my psychotic experience in 2007 I want to experience these thoughts and feelings, believing they have an emotional purpose despite the confusing content. A history of shy withdrawn orientation to the external world has never matched my internal experience of wonder and creative joy, my private inner dance. After 30 years experience I am well aware of the dangers in letting myself get carried away with the powerful innate joy that seeks to break the bonds of constricting fear - terror, which has fueled my lifelong external persona.
In 2007, after much education and training in psychology I documented my psychosis in hand written diary entries and journal notes, in 2010 I did it online as well. I'd come to Thailand in January 2010 hoping to write a book about affective neuroscience and the meaning of affect in ordered and disordered life experience. I'd spent the previous night brainstorming ideas for a book title, sleeping for three hours and waking enthused by new hopes. I want to feedback test my understanding of new scientific concepts and make my first post of this unfolding psychosis on www.theicarusproject.net; profile Batey57.
Posted: 17 Sep 2010 07:13 Subject: God calling or the Universe of associated experience
I have been dealing with B.P since 1980 now and like so many brought up with a Christian background I fall into the Christ delusion when manically high, I do believe there is more to it than a chemical imbalance, although I'm sure if I had been brought up in South East Asia where I now live my associations when manic would be to Buddha or Krishna. My name being David I have often associated myself with King David in the Bible in what neurologists now call a hot limbic association, lacking the cooler insight of the frontal cortex. The hot limbic is about my need for emotional sustenance and the lack of it from others.
Knowledge expands the associations of synaptic connections within the brain and after reading much science and the modern mythology of Sci-Fi I do believe we are a sentient species reflecting the evolution of the universe and its desire to perceive and save itself.
If you watched the movie Avatar and the Joseph Campbell influenced Hero's journey of Jake Sully, who is challenged by the Goddess to become what he really is, to himself and the people. This is how groups have survived since time in memorial as the "sensitives" are asked to interpret the meaning of life and the groups future direction. Like the medicine man in "Dances with Wolves."
According to the latest neuroscience our condition is due to poor regulation of emotional energy, probably due to events in the first three years of life, like trauma and neglect which combines with an unusual capacity/sensitivity of the left hemisphere like the Autistic Savants whose condition is now thought to be one of extreme hyper-vigilance probably to do with unconscious terror from birth trauma.
Poor neural control of emotional signaling makes for poor group inclusion and the loss of vital inter-regulation of emotional energies, so people like us are thrown back onto intra-regulation, hence the ubiquitous use of self supporting fantasy to energize ourselves to action and support ourselves through our group exclusion, and these days when the need for rousing myself towards more engagement with the world begins to swing towards manic euphoria, I find myself singing Harry Chapins "Someone keeps calling my name" is just the rustling of the wind or is it just that I need a friend.
I hope you all don't mind the waffling its probably classic B.P but I would like to point out that the brain works by neural network connectivity, it serves the needs of now! by matching patterns from experience, hence the urge to be your own hero matched with your history of mythology, God, Alha or Buddha. The need is always projected onto the screen of life using the material of memory and all its associations.
They say we can change our brain these days using new learning and insight, I guess that means learning all we can about our condition and allowing the new neural networks of memorial association the time to re-shape our experience, perhaps as the world expends its horizons from group centered awareness to cosmic awareness old notions of God in his Kingly castle will fade from memory just as the depiction of Godhead was the pregnant female for millennia prior to the first Cities and their Kings. (God couldn't be the simple projection of the power of a King and the individuals need of a wise father, could he?)
So I guess what I'm trying to say is that being a chosen one is about your need for affirmation, not by the rest of the world or any creator, but by you, in words of the classic Whitney Houston song "learning to love yourself is the greatest gift of all" and perhaps it was never the heavenly father's love that I needed but very much my own earthly father who like so many was simply not ready to be one.
Anyhow time to continue my own hero's journey and expand my insight/awareness till the neuronal networks in my brain change the history of my associations and find insight into my momentary needs.
Hope the above makes some sense to others, it was written after a typical bipolar restless night when I could not summon my learned relaxation to let go of compulsive thinking, perhaps what I really needed was a good old fashioned hug, like a painting touch speaks volumes, but in a world of highly protective denial, refuge seeking 'norm's' I find little support being a so called 'ab-norm'
PS does anyone agree the red dragon in Avatar is a metaphor for psychosis? You'd have to be Psychotic to jump on the back of that thing, just like so many of us do.
The following three weeks:
Over the next three weeks posts on the icarus project and Stephen Fry's site show a rising manic excitement with posts on both sites plus tweets on www.twitter.com Posts like the one below made on 4th October 2010 here http://www.stephenfry.com/forum/topic/zombie-land-poems-to-be-buddha-awake/page/2
Posted Mon Oct 4th, 2010 4:35am Post subject: Zombie-Land Poems to be Buddha (awake)
I'm not sure if anyone is seeing this, I'm just making it public while I can, this Monday 4th of October in the land of wise Buddha man. I really need a hand now if we are to live out the plan, the decades since WWII, a revolution the 60's began.
So what are the seven seals of sin for this instinctual Wu-man?
STARTLE
DISTRESS
FEAR
SHAME
ANGER
INTEREST
JOY
Sorry if I mixed them up mr silver tomkins man, and of coarse he was right, contempt and disgust are drive drive auxiliaries, so we don't eat or drink poison Wu-man, funny Huh? They get used a lot in the bows and arrows game of shame - humiliation.
And something about four lampposts, could be four areas in the brain, all part of our unconscious game, out of Africa with this genisis
gene game, the bows and arrows and prophecy projection of a very special Wu-man. And something about three angel messengers, reptillian-mammalian-wu-man. It’s the evolved triune brain and nervous system man!
And where is this promised land that could be so close at hand.
unconscious motivation of a young tattooed nation, the yearning for return, into the body man!
I'm getting really tired now it's not easy to fire my dragon lion heart to fry my Icarus kite, most all day and night, strange I tried to type fly
three times and it came out fry, must be about you Stephen, being a very smart and understanding Wu-man.
Strange things happen in my life and I used try and understand why, now i realize I simply have to breath and be!
So WWII was this old Army-genion and we have to complete the book, how could we not, for we are the book.
Posted Mon Oct 4th, 2010 4:40am Post subject: Zombie-Land Poems to be Buddha (awake)
Time to build a new Jerusalem?:
If all Wu-man thought and words are an attempt to decipher the meaning of our existence, then how does the previous post relate to this one?
Is Jerusalem simply a metaphor for the protective dome of our mother earth?
What is the alchemist gold this lady sings of?
Ofra Haza Yerushalaim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)
Is Wu-man the real gold, that your heart metamorphoses into gold through the insight of a knowledgeable mind and the inspiration of
your spirit and those voices on the wind, only education and true knowledge will set us free from the tyranny of our own ignorance.
Innate affects, the product of our instinctual evolution are the gods and devils within, and the - keys to our individual heaven and hell.
I believe there is no supernatural evil in this world, only ignorance and suspicion and acted out blind instinct.
Educate yourself about you, please turn your eye inwards and shine the light inside as well as without.
NASA - Hubble's Eye into the Universe.
So what is the meaning of the eye and is my current psychosis, in-sanity? And what does the last scene in Avatar really mean?
Batesy
A sick deluded mind or a spiritual awakening?
Over my 31 year experience of bipolar shifts in energy and mood, the christian stories of the New Testament have always filled the content of my emotional grandeur, my expansive thinking. Music has always been a source of joyous energy as I sailed these weeks of musing beyond the objective norm of a work a day life. Always the same existential themes explored in those famous bible stories fill my delusions, the "whats it all about Alfie?" questions.
By the 4th and 5th of October I was really tired of the constant racing thoughts and emotive energies, I wanted it to leave me alone so I could let it go and reflect on it all later. That week beginning Monday October 4th was extraordinary though with a further shift that felt like the universe really was confirming my beliefs in a resurrection close at hand. Since childhood Jesus and the resurrection have haunted the back of my mind, with thoughts of the 1st and 2nd world wars as the biblical Armageddon a firm notion since adolescence.
There were experiences like those I describe in Peak Experience or Psychosis:
"It was the 8th October 2010, psychosis had peaked the day before, in a delusional state when I associated a passing Buddhist procession with Jesus entering Jerusalem. As always in my 30 year experience of these altered states of awareness, I was extremely euphoric, spiritually enthused with intense feelings of universal oneness. Heightened senses with feelings of unusual calm, brought sensations of harmonic attunement with nature, the trees, birds, every wisp of wind on my skin and a eerie feeling that I was ‘affecting’ a resonant harmonic balance in the atmosphere surrounding me, or visa versa. It felt like, whenever I stilled my mind, and matched heart and breath with rhythmic nature, I could touch a oneness with all the usual sense of separation dissolved away."
Experiences that convinced me I was right to let the psychosis unfold without intervention and left me wanting respite and a warm ear to discuss my sojourn into madness with. On Wednesday 13th October I flew back to Sydney Australia looking forward to the greeting of my oldest son, which I write about in Family & the Gen Affect:
"‘I’ll have you scheduled myself, this time!’ He said while stabbing his extended forefinger close to my face.
"Jesus! This is harsh," I thought, accompanied by a flashback memory of holding his hand when he was seven years old.
Watching his upper lip turn up in an involuntary snarl the memory played on in slow motion rewind, I was pointing up to a star filled milky way trying to impress a sense of wonder upon my first born child, and here twenty two years later he was forcefully impressing such harsh intent upon his father, for my own good of coarse?"
This confrontation happened within 30 minutes of me stepping of a plane from Bangkok, and into my 4th week of psychosis. Less than 5 hours later I'd walked away from two of my children, exhausted and not knowing where I would stay that night, yet remaining unmoved in my new inner dance. Ordinary common sense does not like being disturbed from its comfort-zone perceptions of an objective reality, and I would find no receptive ear back in the heart of my family or my wider Caucasian culture, a week later I flew back to Thailand.
"That first time in 1980? It was like the real you had come out, but then everybody wanted you to
go back in again." A comment from my best friend during my week back in Australia.
So! Whats the purpose?
The purpose is becoming what you are, what you were born to be, not who you are to your family and friends. Ordinary common sense has no clue about its own inner processes let alone what constitutes sanity or insanity. Ordinary common sense has no clue about the extent to which it is unconsciously motivated by its autonomic nervous system and the electrochemical activity of its brain. Ordinary common sense thinks in terms of objects, like the ones its mirror neurons constantly scan for signs of threat or resource. Ordinary common sense has no clue of the extent to which it is still unconscious, still asleep, yet to wake from this nightmare of "objective" reality. Ordinary common sense is deeply concerned with maintaining a comfort-zone of sensation experience, happy to belong to group support and protection at any price.
The purpose is to reshape unconscious expectations automatically stimulated by the autonomic nervous system. The purpose is to be in the moment with all the innate capacity we are born with, confident that whatever happens in the next instant you WILL cope. The purpose is to bring your body/brain/mind back into harmony away from the unconscious fear filled movements of the past. Just like the acorn which will grow into an oak tree unless impeded in some way, the emotionality of manic-psychosis seeks to correct an unconscious impediment.
Its a thermodynamic process not an object oriented linear cause and effect process. Until we recognize the electrochemical foundations of our mind perceptions we will remain lost to our own reality. stuck fast in a dissociated, subjective mind. Until we accept the reality of our animal evolution with its instinctual firing of our heart felt imagination, blind instinct will continue to divide us into us vs them. Education into what we are, not who we are is setting us free from an us vs them madness, and ushering in the golden age promised in the Book of Revelations.
In physics a property of resonance is sympathetic vibration, the tendency of one resonance system to
enlarge & augment through matching the resonance frequency pattern of another resonance system
"Affect Dysregulation & Disorders of the Self" _Allan N Schore.
The age of Aquarius is rising now with the mass education that continues to gather pace since the second world war. Only our lucid, wild creature imagination likes the idea of melodrama where it practices mastering its own nature in the rehearsal room of the mind. The last judgement referred to in that famous book is more than likely a metaphor for the last generations of human animals who will unconsciously react with blind judgement towards their fellow creatures. As science reveals our deeper nature in the electrochemical stimulation of our actions, a hidden dreamer is being reveled beneath the mask of consciousness? Is it really all a dream on a cosmic scale, and why does the dreamer need us to know itself? As this new millennium continues will she continue to grow into her own destiny, as her sentient species children confirm her sense of "I am."
Of coarse taken in the light of work a day objective reality these ramblings are superfluous, meaningless no-sense? Aren't they? Yet if all thoughts and words are only products of an electrochemical process in the brain, then what is metaphor and meaning? Only the fear of unconscious SHAME reactions keeps us from being honest and open with each other about unusual life experiences and there deeper meaning.
"Life shrinks or EXPANDS in proportion to one's Courage." _Anais Nin
Am I suffering from a mental illness, or a lapse of objective reason? What Do You Think?
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