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.