The Atmosphere of Moments

William St, Kings Cross, Sydney, Australia

"We do not remember days; we remember moments." _Cesare Pavese.

‘I’ll have you fucking sectioned myself, this time!’ He said, stabbing his rigid forefinger close to my face.

"Jesus! This is tough," I thought, along with the memory of holding his hand when he was seven years old.



In one frozen moment I watched his top lip curl up in an involuntary snarl, as time seemed to encompass different dimensions in this one space. Photo like images cascaded through my mind, as flash bulb memories of me pointing up at a star field milky way, quick glances at his boyish face to check if he was following the line of my arm. I sensed my emotive intent back then too, like a soothing balm allowing me to bare the shock wave of this unexpected attack. Self soothing memories of impressing a sense of wonder upon my first born child, while here my boy was so forcefully impressing his cruel intent upon me. It wasn't the actual words that cut me to the bone though, that fueled a wave of numbing shock. It was the intonation in his voice, the forceful finger stabbing and the image of his flushed, snarling face.

Suddenly a wormhole in the fabric of time had opened up, bringing back to life the heritage of my red headed, Viking blooded, father. The generational divide of body and souls seemed to collapse, with the whiff of something else in that snarling lip, a brute force of nature bursting through an otherwise gentile guise. I closed my eyes involuntarily, overwhelmed by a sense of loss and down spiraling dissolution. A painful recognition of guilt too, in my culpability of inappropriate anger and rage when he was young. Ambushed by an unconscious emotional learning, returned to haunt me in the murderous expression of my own precious child. After years of therapist training and counseling others, my own child’s lack of empathic connection in this moment, was stunning beyond belief.

Mad Visions or Mental Illness? Part 2

Metaphor-Myth & Life's Deeper Meaning?
Parting a Red Sea? Or The Brains Twin Hemispheres?
From Gut Instinctual Reactions to Metaphysical Mind?

At the height of manic euphoria the Christian Bible and the Meaning of Life always consume my minds attention. Its been that way since 1980, on or off medications, regardless of the trigger and my more normal, rational desires.

A gushing sense of spiritual oneness overwhelms me every time, even though between episodes, a return to normality wishes it would just leave me the hell alone. I just want a normal life!

Objectively it makes no sense that Biblical references should flood my over emotional experience when I'm high. Euphoria is treason to any normal sense of reason?

I've been a democratic socialist for Christ's sake, with an Atheist disbelief in God during long periods of my everyday social sense of normality. Yet in times of manic flight, biblical stories mesmerize me with their sense of something deeper, something beyond their literal setting in external reality. In heightened states of euphoria I catch sensation glimpse's of deeper meaning, in these metaphor'd stories of human existence.

In the Belly of the Whale. William Blake.
Our Shadow Taller than our Cosmic Soul?

Sometimes it feels like I'm right back there under those star filled, dark desert sky's, filled with a sense of awe and wonder? A trick of the light perhaps? An illusion of form, and an earth bound sense of time? How could this current moment be an eternal now, for God's sake? Isn't everything separate, isn't this just my dream? You go and do your own video log, as Jake Sully advises in a very popular movie? Yet inside this belly of a cosmic whale, just what is dreaming within our collective perception of life?
Is the task of maturing self awareness best described in Joseph Campbell's defining of the hero's journey, upon which so much movie making is based. Jake's journey to a heart felt maturity begins in the belly of a spaceship. Is this an objective dramatization of a subliminal metaphor? In William Blake's painting of the belly of the whale, we see the cosmic serpent so universally described in primitive creation mythologies. (see Mad Visions part 1)

"And as we wind on down the road. Our shadows taller than our souls." _Led Zeppelin. Is it only the instinctual shadow of our evolution that prevents the transcendence of our Cosmic Soul?

Part 2 of an analysis of a month of manic euphoria; its metaphors & meaning?

2007: 1st of four full term PSYCHOSIS

‘Your all mind and no heart!’

I shouted at him before storming out the door of our pokey two bedroom apartment, here in the Sydney suburb of Mortdale.

Groaning in frustration I stomped down the stairs to the ground floor, slamming the entrance door to our three storey apartment building behind me, knowing the pain in the ass reverberation it would cause within this cheap brick, concrete and tile block.


“They don’t want to know, nobody wants to fucking know!” I told myself as I walked across the carpark at the rear of the building . Pity! I’d felt the manic energy subsiding before his brother told me about the paranormal séance.

‘Someone came up to him and put a card in his hand saying something about a message from Pa, and that someone in the family needed counseling.’

After weeks of mania and battling the dream like altered states of mind so common to the experience of bipolar disorder, more evidence of paranormal communication? Was this contact from my dead Father-in-law more proof of a paranormal connection, I’d been demanding for two weeks? It had been another one of those days, wondering around in a dream like state, finding associations to my special paranormal connection everywhere. It was Easter Monday, April 9th 2007, a month after another relationship loss had triggered a steady rise into full blown mania. This one was different of coarse. Well, I would say that wouldn’t I?

Sectioned- On The Road to Redemption

This old man and his four sons.

April 12th 2012: Today is an anniversary of sorts, five years on from April 12th 2007. By the fate of the calendar’s cycle it’s the same day of the week too, it’s Thursday.
The day I was sectioned for the first and only time, in my thirty two year experience with this profound dis-ease know as bipolar disorder.
Confined within an acute care ward and then released with profuse apologies a week later.


The experience speaks volumes about our subjective states of mind, and the reality of mental health diagnosis. On that Thursday afternoon I’d sat opposite a young psychiatrist, as guilty of projecting a subjective state of mind onto immediate reality, as I was. I’d seen his involuntary reaction the previous Thursday while watching him read a young psych grad’s evaluation notes. Watched a whole body shift as his posture suddenly stiffened, and a pronounced look of concern transformed his face. His mind seemed to become fixated from that moment on, “this man is unstable and needs medication.” Over two brief sessions he repeated the same mantra some half a dozen times, “your in a hypo-manic state and without medication you will become hyper-manic.“

‘I’m coming out of the hyper-phase now, I’ve been in the hyper state for a couple of weeks.’

My explanations of emotional context and relevant developmental issues, like childhood trauma did not register at all with him. My twenty seven year history of bipolar only confirmed a rigid mindset, “unstable - medication.” I might as well have been experiencing my first episode of psychosis, same procedural approach, same firm belief in a disease of the brain. Discussing emotional context was counterproductive in his view, “loss of insight is a standard feature of this illness,” was his most empathic response during our first meeting.

Long Night of the Soul, an Invitation to Depression

May 8th 2012:
A no thrills hotel room in Laos, 2am and the mechanical hum of an old pedestal fan accompanies a grinding ache in my stomach, thoughts of defeat and a fraudulent sense of self won‘t stop buzzing around my head.

Almost two and a half years into my self discovery sojourn here in South East Asia, I fear I’m running out of time with dwindling finances and visa restrictions, becoming pressing concerns.


“I’m just kidding myself that I understand anything about the processes involved in mental illness. The fantasy of writing a book just rationalizes a life’s unconscious default pattern of withdrawal and isolation. Follow my heart notions are a mania fueled romantic joke, leading me to ruination not salvation.” After five years with no return to a cyclic pattern of depression and no need for medications of any kind, I’m feeling the old familiar sensations of defeat and collapse here. There‘s a pressured sense of doom inside my head, as a continual loop of disaster thoughts hold my mind in a vice like grip of driven compulsion. “It’s a physiological state and my mind is amplifying it,” I tell myself. “Then face it and stop running away from it, the negative thoughts are stimulated by a core feeling, its innate fear-terror.”

Mythology & Metaphors of Our Species Evolution

The Cleft & Our Metaphors of Evolution?

Inspired by;
A CONVERSATION WITH DR. JOHN WEIR PERRY

From When The Dream Becomes Real:
the inner Apocalypse in mythology, madness and the future, By Michael O’Callaghan

A notion that, Attachment, Separation & Loss.
Is perhaps the ultimate challenge to deepening awareness, for a sentient species, in our current global challenge to deeper individual self-awareness, in our 21st century A.D.

2012: "The ascension is not a rising to “above” it’s a Fall, just as its always been, when you seek awareness of the Universe within, & truly feel the presence of this Eternal Now. In Eastern mysticism, such experience is known as a Kundalini awakening, or in the “stillness” of the great Prince, Buddha being?"


Perhaps not the most beautiful photo to represent a story about mythology, science, spirituality, and our species evolution. Yet this is the normally hidden reality of that most precious organ of species differentiation, our brain. Its neural evolution and its role in the life of the mind, particularly the mind's relationship to our body, which is I believe what so many of our mythological and metaphor stories, and tales are actually about. This particular blog post represents the culmination of a five year self-education journey, with four full term euphoric episodes of spiritual Ecstasy.

A journey that has led me to believe that Science & Spirituality are Converging Now? Not this minute, this week or this year, yet in this, our 21st, coming of age century. What follows is a timeline of unfolding euphoric vision, and my explanations of why science, spirituality, metaphor and new meaning are currently emerging, within our species journey of, Cosmic evolution.

PSYCHOSIS: A Journey, documents a five year unfolding of a natural process, of self-revelation. Being with the fist of four full term psychosis. In 2012, this year of great yearning for a spiritual ascension, this particular post will dovetail into Peter Joseph's Zeitgeist: movies, to show a misinterpretation of "the system" out there. Innate affect/emotions are the keys to our future and the realization of heaven, right in front of our eyes. When we honor and do not deny our instinctual evolution, and the millions of our ancestors who have suffered and sacrificed to bring us to this point in our sentient species journey.

Science, Spirituality & Psychosis

Are Science & Spirituality Converging Now? 

SCIENCE & SPIRITUALITY
IN THE 21st CENTURY A.D.

 “Andrew Newberg and his colleagues have, in their seminal book “Why God Won’t Go Away,” brought together a vast amount of research on the brain substrates underlying a variety of different spiritual experiences. The application of this type of brain research to trauma transformation is a rich area of further research and exploration. The autonomic nervous system (ANS) gets its name from being a relatively autonomous branch of the nervous system. Its basic, yet highly integrated function has to do with the regulation of energy states and the maintenance of homeostasis.


The ANS is composed of two distinctly different branches. (Although the parasympathetic branch is dived into a primitive (nonmyelinated) and an evolutionarily recent (myelinated) branch.)” _Peter Levine, “In an Unspoken Voice.”

It is this myelinated branch of parasympathetic stimulation of the heart & therefore metabolic rate, ventral vagal complex (VVC), which is metaphorically eluded to in the mythology of the Christian Bible. “The Ark of The Covenant.” Put very simply, it’s the secret of your Smile, and those two hundred muscles of your head & face.

And of coarse you don’t want to know about this, inside your Cartesian “mind-set” awareness of being, because life truly flows in “unconscious” spontaneous, physiological reactions, like when you feel the pure joy of being alive here in heaven.

The ascension is not a rising to “above” it’s a Fall, just as its always been, when you seek awareness of the Universe within, & truly feel the presence of this Eternal Now. In Eastern mysticism, such experience is known as a Kundalini awakening, or in the “stillness” of the great Prince, Buddha being?