A Choice of Reason or Reaction?

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

"Curse the mind that mounts the clouds in search of mythical kings and only mystical things, mystical things cry for the soul that will not face the body as an equal place, and I never learned to touch for real down, down where the iguanas feel." _Dory Previn.

God Dam! This dark pit of woe within this crushing depression;
“For myself, the pain is closely connected to drowning or suffocation-but even these images are of the mark. The pain persisted during my museum tour and reached a crescendo in the next few hours when, back at the hotel, I feel onto the bed and lay gazing at the ceiling, nearly immobilized and in a trance of supreme discomfort. Rational thought was usually absent from my mind at such times, hence trance.” (Styron, 1990).

Again, William Styron’s words ring notes of identification as he describes his experience of depression, and I’m awed by his ability to paint such poignant pictures of the human condition. Who can forget the amazing scene from the movie “Sophie’s Choice,” as Meryl Streep is forced to choose between her son and her daughter, as to which one will face the gas chamber outside those gates of hell at Auschwitz concentration camp. How does any woman make such a choice or any Fascist Intellectual so loose connection with humanities heart, its soul, and force it upon her? Dissociation, the Devil’s own device perhaps?

Could she ever really say how she felt in that awful moment, could she ever consciously acknowledge the instant of that action. That awful reality of, “Take my little girl - take my baby - take my little girl.” Perhaps nature has a way of saving us from such awful realization, removes the reality of searing pain by the minds conscious distance from the felt sense. By degrees of dissociation? The Devils own device, or the reality of our unconscious nature? Is our conscious awareness founded on a hidden mechanism of dissociation, of denial?

The Music of Trance State Mania

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

“When the white eagle of the North is flying overhead

The browns, reds and gold’s of autumn lie in the gutter, dead.

Remember then, that summer birds with wings of fire flaying

came to witness springs new hope, born of leaves decaying.

Just as new life will come from death, love will come at leisure.

Love of love, love of life and giving without measure

gives in return a wondrous yearn of a promise almost seen.

Live hand-in-hand and together we’ll stand on the threshold of a dream.”

(From the music album, This is The Moody Blues)

“Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the
notes and curl my back to loneliness.” _Maya Angelou.

Truth! Perception? What is Really Perceiving Itself. Inside You?

The Man in the Mirror

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

"I'm Starting With The Man In The Mirror.
I'm Asking Him To Change His Ways."
_Michael Jackson.

From my very first experience of psychosis, questions about belief have plagued me, “is psychosis a sickness similar to cancerous cells within the body or a need for emotional growth, for continuing development or perhaps a spiritual experience that seeks a higher sense of self?”

For three decades I questioned my belief system, “do I suffer from an organic illness during psychotic episodes, a complex disease, or am I trying to evoke a better sense of myself, a desperate need to shift into a predominately positive state of being?”



“Is the common feeling of increased wellness during the early days of a manic mood swing, the body/brain re-adjusting to the growth processes nature intended at the time of conception? - Like how an acorn contains all the oak tree will be unless its natural growth is thwarted somehow.” Some people ask whether the positive aspects of psychosis represent a spiritual crisis seeking deeper, intuitive insights? While others see its negative aspects, like nightmarish hallucinations and hearing voices as a clear and obvious sign of a biological illness.

Nature's Madness: A Mental Illness Memoir

Recovery: A journey tasked by the trials of loss, misconnection, despair & hope's resurrection.

I'm finding nature in my madness states?

OCTOBER 2011, BANGKOK, THAILAND.

"Sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared
to give up every preconceived notion. Follow humbly
wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads,
or you shall learn nothing." _Thomas Huxley

This new bed sitter room with its dressing table mirror encapsulate my life somehow, as if chance and circumstance provide a compartment for timely self reflection. The God dam mirror keeps implicitly prodding me in some indefinable way, its symbolic presence urging me to dig deeper, to go inside and feel the actuality of my past, not pass over it with the distancing metaphor’s of my objectifying mind. I’m trying to write a memoir of my mental illness experience and recovery here. Yet for weeks I‘ve struggled with words that seem only to effect a distance from the inner nature of my madness experience.