The Beautiful Path is Seldom the Easy One

The eventful, beautiful path is so seldom the easy one... Nothing worthwhile comes from going about the easy way in life. I was blessed to be bipolar, not cursed. I was given the gift to see a world few others can see. Schizophrenic and dissociative individuals, amongst many others, can also say that they can see into a world no one or few others can. Many come to believe that their hallucinations, delusions, and various other symptoms are actually a way of getting in touch with a spiritual world or some other kind of alternate dimension. Since it's not really easy to prove them wrong, and I've personally had those thoughts before, too, I wouldn't necessarily discount these beliefs. I wouldn't even really want to refute their claims. As one individual said in the movie, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, about if he regretted being born with bipolar, "That's a very easy question; there's a very easy answer. No, not for a second. 'Cause if you've walked with angels, all the pain and suffering is well worthwhile."

Do you ever hear about how the great spiritual figures in history and religion glided smoothly through life and into transcendence? Nope. You hear about a long, hard journey filled with doubt, wonder, pain, and strife... You hear about a journey with tremendous ups and treacherous lows. They know both great joy and dire despair. They've experienced the full range of what life has to offer, both good and bad. Perhaps they didn't necessarily go on murderous rampages, or give into the darkness so much that they at least dipped their toes in evil, but they did have to deal with such individuals. They have emotional and spiritual conflict. They were not always so certain of their purpose, of their religion, their god(s) or goddess(es). If such an individual came to be in this modern world, they'd probably be thrown into a psychiatric ward and pumped full of pills until these extremes seemingly disappeared... until they became 'normal.' I've seen some of these historic, grand figures - these spiritual marvels and tremendous heroes - and seen so many qualities of bipolar, of depression, of schizophrenia...

So, what really distinguished these people from those with 'mental illness'? Was it just that the times have changed and we've gained a different understanding of the human body and psyche? Have we unlocked hidden problems that were invisible to those of the past? Did our society change in such a way that it was virtually inhabitable for individuals like these great historic figures? So many questions that just might be impossible to answer...

Moses. He saw a burning bush... and God's voice came from it and sent him a message... and then the fire went out, and the bush wasn't burned. Some people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and various other mental illnesses, see spiritual hallucinations - things no one else sees. No one was around Moses, thus no one could actually prove anyone else could see what he saw. Yes, perhaps it was a physical manifestation that everyone could've seen, and that there were no hallucinations. But reality is an artificial construct of our minds, interpreting sensory data to map out a perceptual conception of what we call reality. You obstruct, enable, or alter any of these senses in any given way and the individual's reality changes radically. So what truly defines reality? What is real and what is false? Certainly their are some solid things. If I touch a rock, and then you touch the rock, the rock is probably their. If I hear a voice, and you hear a voice, and the voice is exactly the same to both of us, then it's probably real. But reality is still only as true as we can perceive it. Our dreams are truly real until we wake up. How can anyone prove that our spirits, minds, or souls don't enter some other dimension - some other world - while sleeping? Do we have to physically be their, or is it enough for only our abstract, our consciousness, to be their independently? If a heaven and/or hell exist, and our spirits go their, but our bodies don't, do we no longer exist? Are we no longer 'real' because we lack our bodies?

So back to Moses. There were, in fact, many physical manifestations that direly affected a great deal of people. There were plagues, one after the other. I do believe that God had a hand in this, but I also think that God often works within the confines of our logical, physical universe. He used frogs, locusts, droughts, hailstorms... He used things physically possible in our world. He didn't summon some grand creature with such an indescribable appearance or presence that it could drive a man mad just trying to wrap his mind around it... He didn't conjure something that was never before seen to the universe. Rather, God used the scientific laws, the constraints and rules of the universe, and he made them happen. Some could argue that the chances of things happening exactly as the Bible said they did would be so unlikely that it certainly didn't happen... But who in this world hasn't seen something that was so anomalous that they simply couldn't explain it? They occur at least at some point in someone's life, and yet these events couldn't possibly have happened at such isolated points in time so long ago? Occasionally... God does utilise truly baffling things to make His will a reality. These can be visions, dreams, or things that only a few - especially spiritual individuals - could see or did see. These more abstract, bizarre instances seem to be so similar to so many bipolar experiences. Mass hallucinations and delusions have occurred, in that multiple individuals saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt the same thing, even if no one else could. We often attribute these to chemical imbalances in the brain.

In that quote from the bottom of the first paragraph in this rant, this journal, a man knew he had bipolar - a chemical imbalance. It's proven that the bipolar mind acts differently than the 'average' or 'normal' mind. An interesting fact is that it's essentially impossible to detect bipolar simply from a brain scan... So, this man, Rod Harvey, is fully aware of his condition. He knows at least the basic scientific explanations behind the disorder - bipolar. He's aware of the physical and logical manifestations of his disorder. And yet... he refused 'treatment.' He refuses meds because he walks with angels. His mania highs give him such euphoria, such love and joy, and such splendid experiences. His mania also gives him frightening, terrible images - such as how he, "actually hallucinated by seeing the devil... Burning black coals of the eyes of the devil." Rod uses words like 'hallucination' or 'mania' or 'anxiety.' These are very clinical words. He is not oblivious, not unknowledgeable, and yet he accepts his hallucinations, his bipolar, and embraces it, even. He's learned to live with it, to function in modern society. Many psychiatrists, I'm sure, would just love to get a piece of him, to throw him into a hospital and to flood him with meds. He did attempt suicide once, after all, by walking right into traffic and nearly succeeding in killing himself! And yet... I see absolutely no reason to admit him, to call him crazy, or to fill him up with drugs to 'normalise' him. He is a marvel, he has a beautiful, magnificent mind... He walks with angels.

Reality is simply a perspective... One view out of many. Typically, realities align, and this is considered truly reality. But perhaps there can be more than one reality. Perhaps a person can see one reality overlap another, yet the people around them are totally unable to see them. And if you got a crowd of people hallucinating at the same time, you might have dozens of different realities overlapping! And does this make any one reality more real than another? Even great scientists dwell on the possibilities of many dimensions, multiple universes and worlds overlapping on another... The 4th dimension is believed to be unseeable, incomprehensible, to us 3-dimensional creatures. A 1-dimension entity could not comprehend a 2-dimensional entity, but could perhaps comprehend a 0-dimensional entity; likewise, a 2-dimensional entity could not comprehend a 3-dimensional entity, and yet it could comprehend a 1-dimensional entity. A 3-dimensional entity could not comprehend a 4-dimensional entity, but it could comprehend a 2-, 1-, or 0-dimensional entity. Now, this assumes that, somehow, these entities have some sort of sentience - consciousness and intelligence. It's purely hypothetical, theoretical. But these concepts are still generally accepted.

Regardless of if we can, in some ways, comprehend dimensions less than our own, but are unable to comprehend dimensions beyond ours, we really can only see and best understand our very own dimension - the one we live in and truly experience. But if a 4th dimension does exist, or a 5th, 6th, and so on, and somehow... by some crazy, virtually impossible to understand, circumstance, we were able to get a peak into that dimension... would what we saw not be real? If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound? The answer... yes. Just because others didn't sense it, I don't believe it makes it less real. This realisation is both utterly terrifying and enormously rectifying. It both scares me and puts my mind at ease. We can't understand everything. We simply can't - that's a fact. No one will ever understand everything, at least so long as they exist in this universe. We may strive and strive to unlock all of the mysteries, but there will always be questions, theories, doubts... That's what makes this world we live in, our lives, so wonderful and so awful at the same time. We naturally fear the unknown, and yet we strive to unlock it, to understand it. We are curious by nature, and yet we fear what we don't know, and what is there to be curious about but the unknown?

Perhaps no one is truly 'mad' until they're minds, their very cores, have been so twisted and warped that they are hopelessly heading towards an unfortunate demise. Sane until prove insane, perhaps. And we typically rush to conclude an individual is insane simply if we don't understand him or her. If the individual doesn't follow the 'average' coarse, and deviates so much that it potentially counteracts the flow of the most common reality. I believe that 'unable to function in society' really means 'unable to conform adequately to common perceptions.' In an alternate universe where the clinically insane are the normal ones, perhaps the ones we consider sane would actually be considered insane, as well. Everything is a matter of perception. Some individuals can't handle these altered perceptions, and their beings start to be twisted and warped. I do honestly believe that these individuals should get treatment, should get meds, so that they can return to, or come to, a state in which their minds can handle. I was once at a point where my altered reality was so estranged from what my mind could truly comprehend that I went mad for a while. I was certainly insane and unable to tolerate this altered reality. But, after getting treatment, and having given my mind time to cool down, learn, and grow... I think I'm ready to handle these alterations. I think my mind can once again wrap around these alternative realities. Now, whether or not I actually have hallucinations is currently unknown. My past hallucinations could've been perpetual due to a constant lack of sleep. Anyone and everyone can experience hallucinations under the right conditions, and tiredness - lack of sleep - is one such condition. People who've never had a mental illness, have no family history of mental illness, can go for days without adequate sleep and suddenly start seeings things that aren't there. So, yes, if I have enough sleep, I might never hallucinate again. Or, perhaps, I might not have started hallucinating because it takes as long as months for my meds to truly empty out of my system, or because my meds permanently altered my brain chemistry, or because I haven't had extreme enough circumstances, other than just lack of sleep, to induce these hallucinations. Many schizophrenics, for instance, have very disorderly, incongruous and inconsistent, hallucinations, but mixed with lack of sleep, they can suddenly become extremely lucid and real to that individual.

So many factors... so many mysteries... If this were not so, life would be so much easier, right? But as I titled this, as I wrote, the beautiful path is seldom the easy one. The real challenge is in understanding, or even realising, that this is so.

Sickness, Depression, and... Spirituality?

I got sick a few days ago... It's actually kind of difficult to accurately say exactly when I got the virus, but based on my mood charts, it was about two or three days ago (my mood went from having at least some symptoms of being 'elevated' to being totally absent of such symptoms, and rather leaning toward and dipping into depression.) Looking at it from a simplistic view, utilising numbers and images, I could track more than just my mood. I saw my mood dipping and dipping, getting duller, sadder, more lethargic, and even quieter to an extent (though, when I got irritated, I wasn't so quiet...) Life was looking bland. It wasn't quite hopeless, no, but it wasn't really hopeful, either. It was just... there. Life was life. And then the virus germinated inside me, spread like wildfire, and beat the crap out of me. Now, for two days, I've been totally miserable, both emotionally and physically. I'm totally drained, my life feeling like it's seeping out of my body.

Now, you might think that my list of symptoms aren't really that terrible - especially if you currently aren't sick. Stuffy and runny nose, soar throat, pretty bad, painful, dry cough, body aches and headaches. It's all pretty classic symptoms of that little, but awful, thing known as the 'common cold.' There's nothing especially tragic or dire about this virus, and everyone gets it eventually (unless you're a bubble boy, in which case it'd probably kill you! and then it really is dire.) But when you have a mood disorder, or potentially just about any mental illness, things are intensified. Things are amplified to levels that the average, healthy individual likely couldn't fully understand. When I get a 'common cold,' I dip into depression. Now, what are the symptoms of mild depression? Body aches, headaches, lack of motivations and energy, lethargy, tiredness, sleep disturbance, feeling like the life has been drained out of you... and those are just the physical effects! The psychological effects? Things are perceived as duller, you have a lingering cloud of sadness (sometimes becoming tearfulness for seemingly no reason), you lack the interest in things you used to like, or even love, you typically find less meaning in life, your perceptions are distorted so that essentially everything looks negative, at least to some extent... Now, I'm just talking about mild depression - not full-blown major depression.

So when you combine the symptoms of depression, which can be almost flu-like on the physical side, and which can be draining from the mental side, with the symptoms of a cold, you get a pretty volatile mixture. It's similar to battling both the flu and the cold at the same time, but with a somewhat different set of obstacles and symptoms. Your body goes from just drained and sub-par with the cold to drained of your life, of your soul, and feeling so miserable you want to do anything just to end the misery. This is how I've felt for the past couple of days - totally miserable. And I have been trying just about everything to get rid of the misery - from utterly disgusting teas to a range of over-the-counter meds and even somewhat less common tactics, such as nasal irrigation and a therapeutic humidifier. Nothing's really worked so far. So... I seemed to run out of options... and what do I do? Well, I made a radical decision - perhaps one of the craziest decisions I ever made! (and I've made a lot of crazy decisions.)

I accepted it.

Yep, just like that... I accepted it. I accepted that I had a cold and it wasn't planning on going away, despite all my efforts. I accepted that I fell into a bout of depression and that I felt awful both emotionally and physically. 'So you gave up!' you might think. But I didn't. Sure, I accepted it, and sure, I know that - at least at the moment - I can't really do much about it. But if more options appear, I certainly will try them to alleviate the pain and the draining effects. But I can't right now. Not at this very moment. So why constantly struggle, so hopelessly, over something that I can't so easily control? Why battle and battle when I don't have the ability to tumble this terrible foe? Now, with the depression, it's a little easier to deal with it. The cold is physical - another entity within me just gunning to take me down. I will feel miserable until that thing is dead, and I somewhat have to wait it out until my body does it's thing and finally kills that horrid virus. I have to have faith that my body will deal with it, which I'm sure it will.

Depression, as I said before, is a little easier to deal with if you have the right tactics. Normally, depression is like this massive stone wall that no creature - man or beast, land, sea, or air-dwelling - could possibly get over. But humans have this wonderful gift - ingenuity. What is ingenuity, exactly? Well, let's look at an official definition from the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "a : skill or cleverness in devising or combining : inventiveness; b : cleverness or aptness of design or contrivance." So what does this essentially mean? Well, as humans, we have the gift of using our minds to adapt and conquer, to make the world be as we see fit. Mixing it with our natural willpower and free will, well... you get great - almost unimaginably great! - methods for adapting and conquering things we never thought we could adapt to or conquer. So why would depression be any different? As long as we utilise our gift of ingenuity, learn from others and the world around us, we can adapt to or conquer anything and everything. This can be good or bad, depending on how we deal with the situations in which we find ourselves.

So, with the depression, I accepted it. Easier said than done, certainly, but I got to this point of realisation - an epiphany of sorts - where I realised that I can just accept that I was depressed rather than toil and fight with it. Rather than see depression as an enemy or something to rid myself of, I realised that I can utilise it, learn from it, accept it... and, if necessary, stop believing what my mind was telling me. Not everything I think is truth. Just because I thought something about myself or my surroundings does not make it fact. And when you are depressed, your thoughts can be extremely distorted, and you start to become blind to the truth, and accept all of the lies you tell yourself as absolute fact. So, this acceptance, acknowledgement, and even ability to realise that not all of the things your mind tells you are true, or to at least question the integrity of what you think before accepting it, are all mindfulness. Mindfulness is being aware of what is going on, but taking a more passive stance, rather than struggling and resisting what is going on. With bipolar, in particular, sometimes... a person just has to accept that they are going to have down moods, up moods, and in-between moods, or even mixed moods. If it happened even just once, it'll most likely happen again... and again after that, and again after that. To deny this, to resist this, is just unnecessary and exhausting labor that could end up being the actual downfall of the individual with bipolar.

Now, you don't want to be so passive that you do absolutely nothing. That's a dire misconception. Rather, you want to be unbiased, rational, aware... You want to be able to identify everything that is going on within and without, to be understanding, and to not let your irrationality or natural defence mechanisms get the better of you. When we give in to the lies, the defence mechanisms, the coping mechanisms, and believe everything our minds tell us, we become slaves to our bipolar. Bipolar can be good or bad, but it all depends on how you deal with it. Often, it starts out terribly bad, primarily because we don't understand the bipolar, what's going on with us and in our minds, and we can't control it or appropriately deal with it. Bipolar appears as this looming monster trying to swallow us up. And, in some cases, this might be exactly what happens. If you don't learn to adapt and grow, to appropriately deal with the bipolar, it will likely swallow you up whole in one way or another.

In this bout of mild depression, I had several revelations. I also happened to be watching the History Channel show, The Bible, which shows strong spiritual struggles, conflicts, both within and without. But do you know what the difference between the 'protagonists' in these stories versus the 'average' person? Those protagonists know how to deal with those struggles. In the end, they are victorious. They adapted, conquered, and accepted. As I watched these biblical stories being enacted in a stunningly engaging visual re-enactment, I realised just how similar these great protagonists, these great historical figures, were to someone with bipolar who mastered mindfulness. They knew misery, they knew great joy, they had ups and downs, they had great inner conflicts, as well as outer conflicts. But what was so different with them? They accepted. They believed. They sorted out what was right from what was wrong. They denied the lies generated in their mind - however good their mind's intent was in creating these lies - and they accepted the truths. They were masters of the art of mindfulness. They were... aware.

So, even after finishing watching the show - the first episode, at least - I started looking at my own struggles, within and without. I started to become more mindful, but it was just plain rationality, logic, and science, even. It was something spiritual. And I experienced a spirituality which I hadn't felt in a long time. When did I last feel such spirituality? Before I got on meds. And what changed in my life, now? I got off meds. I let my bipolar free. I gave it back its potential. Sure, there may be some permanent changes, or even some rehabilitation needed - what do you think would happen after 5 years of being trapped in a cage? My bipolar was like some fierce, exotic animal trapped in a cage, restrained, for 5 years. Sure, this creature could be vicious and deadly, but it can also be beautiful - one of God's very own creations. You look at a wolf from a distance, and you think how beautiful, sleek, and powerful it looks. But, up close, you fear it. You fear the very presence, whether or not it is malicious.

Man once lived in the wild. We were hunter-gatherers. In terms of biology, history, and cosmology, this wasn't very long ago. But we adapted so quickly, we became such clever, ingenious creatures, that we outran our biology by miles and miles. We are still biologically similar to those hunter gatherers. We are still primal at heart and in our very DNA, but modern society and advances came so quickly and so rapidly that our biology couldn't possibly catch up. Being bipolar is much like being a hunter-gatherer. You can either succumb to nature and die, or you can thrive and survive. With bipolar, you can tame the wild (but at what cost?) or you can learn to live amongst it. While I won't be going out of my house to live in the woods anytime soon, the metaphor still stands. Psychologically, I'm a hunter-gatherer, and my bipolar is my wilderness. I tried to tame it, I tried to cut down the forests and kill all of the animals, but that truly does not work. As modern humans, we're starting to learn this. We're starting to realise the costs of advancing so quickly beyond our biology, our very own nature. So I let the wilderness be. I let it start growing back, start becoming what it once was in all of its glory. I may be frightened by it to some extent, but I'm learning how to survive. I'm learning how to adapt because I'm a human, and humans have the gift of ingenuity.

There are a couple of great blogs that I read (coincidentally right after all of the things I just wrote about) that describe various areas of what I talked about to varying degrees: Finding Value In Depression and Mania, Are You Missing a Piece of Your Happiness?, and Untreated Depression in Pregnant Women

That's in order of what I think is most relevant to least relevant to what I've talked about. They did also influence some of what I said, primarily in a syntactical way. I thought it was so bizarre and amazing that I'd stumble upon those blogs right after all of these revelations and epiphanies I had. If that isn't a sign of something greater, I don't know what is. The stars seemed to have aligned and dropped a little gift right in my lap. As the first blog says, I found 'value in depression' (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, mainly because I'm not currently manic) 'and mania.' I took what I always knew deep inside and fully realised it. I accepted my bipolar, and I found the value behind it. Perhaps I can truly begin to make progress... Perhaps I truly laid down the start of a great foundation to build from.