WillSpirit!


∞ Where Mental Skills Heal Mental Ills ∞

A former physician writes about mental health and recovery using insights from life, science, and spiritual practice.








  • Red_Exclamation_DotDisclaimer
    • Dear Visitors:
      Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.

    • ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.


Balancing Mind with Heart

Readers of this blog have demonstrated their preference for intimate sharing over intellectual musing. Abstract, reasoned posts garner few comments and occasionally prompt people to unsubscribe from WillSpirit. Reader involvement has waned of late, and I suspect that’s because many of my recent essays have been more philosophical than emotional.

But I need to write about metaphysics, the nature of knowing (technically, epistemology), and consiousness. Although its primary motive is helping others, my blogging nurses the wounds inflicted by past traumas and setbacks. Grounded spirituality supports my health, and philosophical essays situate my mystical aspirations on solid footings.

Several years ago I switched from a private practice psychiatrist to Kaiser’s mental health clinic. My new doctor offered two observations early in our relationship. First, she remarked that I was taking a lot of ‘garbage,’ by which she meant my half-dozen psychiatric medications. Second, she opined that my only hope for lasting peace of mind was to find a spiritual solution to the problems caused by my traumatic upbringing and devastating career loss.

Her contempt for my medication regimen shocked and alarmed me. I had trusted my prior psychiatrist and obediently taken all the pills she prescribed. It had never occurred to me that a different doctor would view the cocktail of potent drugs as excessive and dangerous. My new psychiatrist’s perspective forced me to realize that the dreadful side effects I’d incurred might have been avoided had I started out with more competent care.

Even more perplexing was the advice about spirituality. I’d attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for twenty years and had been trying to find a ‘Higher Power’ the entire time. After my transcendent experiences in 2000 (which doctors diagnosed as manic psychosis), I’d managed to sustain religious fervor for a few years. But the mystical resonance had worn off (indeed, the earlier psychiatrist had discouraged my exploration of mystical states). How was I going to find spirituality with a materialist worldview predetermined by my atheist upbringing?

Around the same time, I became friends with someone who had been active in AA for a long time but struggled with the Twelve Steps’ emphasis on God. Despite some moderating language in its Big Book, AA usually makes God sound like an all-powerful parent (i.e., Yahweh). Both for my friend’s sake and my own, I began writing blog posts to ferret out a transcendent path free of mythic and irrational beliefs.

I dovetailed this work with attendance at local Buddhist sanghas and retreats for over a year, and then a like amount of time training at a nearby Hindu center. Prior to this, my meditation practice had been developed in either Quaker or secular contexts (i.e., mindfulness classes at my local medical center). The former provided little instruction, and the latter ignored mystical implications. In contrast, Buddhist programs offered specific guidance toward deep currents of consciousness, and the Hindu tradition connected meditative states to cosmic love. As I progressed along these paths, WillSpirit essays helped me reconcile my spiritual insights with my understanding of biology and physics. The search was on.

My Buddhist and Hindu explorations overlapped with my study of Chinese Medicine as I prepared to practice acupuncture. Readers already know the outcome of that professional venture, but the schooling exposed me to Taoism, Confucianism, and other Chinese philosophies. These studies complemented my growing understanding of Buddhist and Hindu metaphysics. For the first time, I began to feel comfortable with Eastern mysticism. Blogging organized my thinking as I incorporated an entirely new set of philosophies into my worldview.

As many experts have asserted, it is easy to find parallels between Eastern philosophy and the counterintuitive reality revealed by modern physics (especially quantum mechanics). Similarly, although divergent in emphasis, both holistic healing and conventional medicine restore vitality to weakened organisms. WillSpirit became the platform on which I integrated newfound holism with the reductionism I’d absorbed as an undergraduate, graduate, and medical student.

You can see how blogging about philosophy has helped me mature. Since gaining insight remains central to my mental health, metaphysical writing will remain a key feature of WillSpirit.

Even so, I respect the needs of my readers. When I visit other blogs, I’m most touched when the writers reveal inner conflicts or neuroses that resonate with my own difficulties. I want WillSpirit to serve as a locus for kindred souls to gather and heal as one. Besides, just as philosophizing helps me grow, sharing my life experience helps me heal.

With that in mind, let me end by revealing how devastated I’ve felt during the past two days. After weeks of slow improvement, the neck pain that had so worsened around the time of my hospitalization returned full-force. I may have overstretched doing yoga, or maybe the intense pain and spasm happened for no reason. But until I broke down and started taking muscle relaxants and narcotics, I could barely move because of intense, stabbing pain in my neck, shoulder, and upper back.

This was bad enough, but the awful discomfort also had its predictable effect on my mood. I spiraled quickly into an angry depression, complete with specific plans for suicide. My thinking bordered on the delusional, as evidenced by my suggesting that my wife prepare for my death. On what planet would that be the right thing to say? I didn’t announce a definite decision, but I told her that my reserves were running dry and it felt like I’d lived long enough. I wanted the suffering to end, once and for all. Naturally, this greatly alarmed her and left us both shell-shocked for the next 24 hours.

As an alternative to suicide, I gave in and took pills. Narcotic pain relievers alarm me because of my past addiction problems, but they seemed preferable to sliding further toward suicide.

Where was my vaunted spiritual perspective during all this uproar? I must admit it failed me. I felt only sucking despair and lost my ability to mentally detach from pain. The agony worsened as I looked at my professional failures and troubled friendships through the lens of discouragement and self-contempt. I felt unable or perhaps unwilling to step back and adopt ‘The Watcher’ stance that usually saves me.

Today I’m feeling better. After a day of lessened pain and tension, I can now discern a spiritual light shining dimly in my heart. I can see the bigger picture, though the narrow view still tugs at me.

Maybe the philosophical posts are my way of sidestepping true emotion. If they serve avoidance, it’s no surprise they don’t engage readers. But I still think such writings help me. They don’t vaccinate me against despair, but they elaborate a spiritual philosophy that is independent of specific beliefs and resistant to doubt. Such a foundation makes it easier for me to accept my hardships with an open heart. Obviously, it sometimes takes time and even medication to unlock the gate, but I know where to find relief.

Hopefully, my readership will understand and forgive my putting personal needs first. Although the philosophical posts are often boring, they serve my psyche. I also realize that successful blogs usually stick to a single subject area; I appreciate my readers for indulging the obvious variability of theme (e.g., mental health, metaphysics, neuroscience). Long ago I promised to write the Whole Story. For me, that includes dispassionate contemplation as well as heartfelt intimacy. But the ultimate goal is to help us all discover paths to Peace of Mind.

In my own clumsy way, I seek to reconcile rationality with intuition, mind with heart, Will with Spirit. As boring as it often sounds, this is my best formula for Grace.

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Balancing Mind with Heart was published on May 7th, 2012 . 10 comments






Finding Purpose

After nearly two weeks in the foothills near Yosemite, we returned to the Bay Area Sunday. Toward the end of the visit I was feeling discouraged, as my posts made clear.

My lack of purpose after the demise of the acupuncture business was hitting home. The book project softens that a little, but the right formula eludes me. So far the prose sounds like my least successful blogging: too wordy and intellectual. Lyrical description of the richness and lessons of my experiences may be beyond my ability.

Recent essays expressed remorse about my relationship with my father. Through writing here and after corresponding with my aunt, I eventually moved past that. But there remained a shadow of sadness.

The neck pain and the bad news from the recent MR scan weighed on me. I felt lonely, too.

In short, I was stuck in the familiar place of self-criticism, fear, and discouragement.

Then, on one of our last nights in the forest, something shifted inside. Peace returned.

Whenever I feel defeated the same phrase comes to mind: “God, help me.” This must be the most common human prayer, and although I don’t often believe the cosmos listens, I say it anyway. The words feel comforting, despite their futility. This time, to my relief, I heard a voice speak in a loving tone near my left shoulder: I’m right here!

Maybe I was half asleep and slipping into hypnogogic hallucination. Maybe my own thoughts rose to audibility. Regardless, I felt reassured. Why question the source? Whatever conscious presence exists in the universe, I’m convinced it arises from the depths of matter. It is not something separate from life; it is something integral to it. So if it shows up at all, it must come by way of ordinary neural pathways. Why distinguish between a dream, a thought, or the voice of God? If it feels divine, I choose to accept it as such and not worry about its provenance.

In the calm aftermath of that simple phrase uttered by something that cares, my sense of purpose became clear. I decided that since the material world no longer seems to cooperate with me, I might as well focus on the spiritual. I could even interpret the way the cosmos has frustrated my plans as God pushing me to commit to the mystical path. At times over the years I’ve glimpsed truth and entered resonant states of mind. Why not quit trying to achieve in the human sphere and instead seek awakening with all my heart and soul?

In truth, I’ve run out of options. I will either find relief through higher consciousness, or find no relief at all. And yes, I’ve been working toward realization for a long time, but not as my primary goal.

Writing still feels important, but I’m viewing it as a means to an end. It helps me make progress toward grounding in life, love, and meaning. It isn’t a project in the usual sense of the word, whether I’m working on the blog, the book, or my poetry. Writing is the road rather than the destination.

Deep down, I know with utter conviction that peace awaits, provided I get serious about taking the needed steps. This means abandoning striving for success. Instead, I will concentrate on taking care of my body, building my meditative skills, and healing my heart. It is time, at last, to journey inward toward the Light.

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Finding Purpose was published on April 24th, 2012 . 15 comments






Forgiving Self and Others

The last post bemoaned my failure to love my father properly despite his faults. In fairness to myself, I must emphasize that he did not make love easy. But although that’s a reasonable excuse, with increased spiritual grounding I can no longer fall back on it. At the same time, there’s no point in wallowing forever in remorse.

Soon after writing that piece, I prayed under the stars for an hour, begging forgiveness for everything I’ve done that’s hurt anyone, ever. I understand God as something that arises from within, not without. So with genuine remorse, praying may not be necessary. But it can’t hurt. Gazing at the stars shining out of the clear mountain night, I tried to recall as many missteps as I could. In addition to the times I hurt loved ones, I also feel terrible about the patients who were injured by my mistakes. Errors were especially common during medical training, but also cropped up occasionally in later practice. My list of sins was painful to behold, but the ritual helped me feel freer. With that release I hope to quit beating myself up about what happened with my dad or any past error. I did the best I could. It wasn’t that great a performance, but it was all I could muster at the time. I believe it’s OK to move on.

The next morning I received an email from a reader, Trabel, who offered an interesting take on the book my dad gave me at that last visit, a text about corruption within the medical establishment. Her analysis makes sense to me; I share an excerpt with her permission:

There could be another possible interpretation of this last encounter with your father. Taking into consideration the title of the book he offered to you, it may be implied that he wanted to give you a warning about the deadly abyss of the medical system to which you were heading right in …

He had an empirical, realistic way of thinking, I can imagine; he also witnessed how your mother lost herself in the “health care” system (he saw not only her, maybe) – and by giving this book to you, he may have wanted to tell you “Do not let yourself get lost in this system! Don’t rely on them – find your way all by yourself!”

My father was indeed worried about the psychiatric drugs and their negative effects on my weight and clarity of thought. He did not like the way I was taking on the illness role and shrinking from engagement. And he did feel anger toward the psychiatrists who contributed to my mother’s decline and death. So it makes sense the book may have been meant as a warning.

Since I would have been resistant to his opinion stated outright, giving a book might have felt like his best option. A few years later I donated his present to our local library thrift shop without having read it—the book caused me pain just sitting on the shelf. I regret that decision and plan to track down the text and read it now, to honor my father and his last gift to me.

My dad made mistakes that caused lifelong problems for his children. The root problem was alcoholism. He knew he was an alcoholic, but he refused to seek treatment. He openly acknowledged that he drank to escape life’s pain; he could not imagine facing his demons sober. His fatalism in the face of his addiction may have been the most tragic fact of his life.

As I forgive myself for my shortcomings, I continue to work on forgiving my father. My recent writings have forced me to realize the scars remain more tender than I knew. Healing the past is an ongoing process, as perhaps it will always be…

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Forgiving Self and Others was published on April 20th, 2012 . 6 comments






Our Innate Hunger for Certainty

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Today’s post is just a (kind of) short addendum to yesterday’s treatise on conflict in mental health discussions. Mandy, my wife, pointed out another reason that people tend to cling tightly to narrowly defined solutions: fear of uncertainty. I agree with her that the discomfort we all have with ‘not knowing’ plays a role in the common scenario of debates about policy turning into heated arguments between adversaries who each are certain they have the right answer. Because uncertainty raises anxiety.

When quantum mechanics began to be elucidated early in the twentieth century, physicists started to see a fundamental role of chance in the structure and behavior of matter. The inescapability of uncertainty and randomness made Einstein uncomfortable. Even though his groundbreaking work on Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect helped usher in the quantum age, he still wrote (in a letter to Max Born) that he was “convinced that [God] does not throw dice”.

The idea of a non-deterministic universe strikes many as unsettling, to say the least. One of the objections to the theory of natural selection has always been that ‘believers’ insist that ‘God’ has orchestrated the creation of the universe, the earth, and life. Natural selection postulates that random mutations and probabilistic sorting of genes form the raw material of changes in life forms. If the mutations or gene combinations are advantageous, they get passed on to subsequent generations in larger numbers than if they cause the organism problems. With thousands and millions of iterations, these changes add up to dramatic alterations in living forms and ecologies. But the underlying engine of change, by that view, depends on haphazard events. This assaults the worldview of those who believe in a ‘hands-on’ God who directs events and answers prayers.

Some day I will write about how I believe how the universe may accommodate both probabilistic development, universal consciousness, and a certain kind of facilitated (rather than completely random) progression of history. My point right now is just that since the dawn of human self-awareness, people have had a strong need for predictability, and for a sense that they are not just adrift in a sea of chance. We prefer certainty over doubt, black and white over gray.

I heard an interview with a scientist who has written about why people need to be right. Despite a lot of internet searching I can find neither the scientist’s name nor the book, if it was a book, or I would reference them here. But the basic idea seemed to be that if you see a lion approaching, you need to ‘know’ without taking time to think, that the proper response is to flee. She who doubts hesitates, and she who hesitates is lost. Once decisions start being processed through cognitive and analytical channels, reactivity slows down, so that if an instant choice must be made one had better have a predetermined action pattern in place. There seems to be an innate demand for strong conviction.

So opening our minds to the possibility that our survival mechanism (whether medication, a specific kind of therapy, or a spiritual philosophy) might be fallible becomes quite difficult. We would rather hold tightly to the belief that our ‘answer’ is comprehensive, our world predictable, and our emotional safety assured.

So if I wrote yesterday’s post again, I would include our inherent uneasiness with uncertainty as another of the reasons why people become so bound to constricted views. A tightly defined, closed off ideology feels safer than one that is wide open, and leaves us aware of our vulnerability. We’d rather sit in a watertight box than risk feeling adrift in the random currents of fate.

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Our Innate Hunger for Certainty was published on August 20th, 2009 . 2 comments






Do Medications Change Who We Are?

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Last night sleep came. Since stopping Cymbalta 13 days ago, most nights have provided only a few hours of true dozing. Once or twice in the past fortnight I took zolpidem to knock myself out. But that does not lead to refreshing slumber, just a kind of drugged unconsciousness. Even with the sleeping pill, no more than five hours were spent sleeping; the rest of the night passed with me either laying in bed trying to relax, or else reading and eating blueberries (there must be a bumper crop this year, the prices are so low). But yesterday I retired early, then slept almost ten hours without awakening. What’s more, after arising I sat in our hot tub like I often do, but afterward got out and dozed for another hour.



We have a two-person spa on our deck, with a fine view to the east. Most mornings as dawn brightens I sit in water heated to 104° F (40° C), while I take in my surroundings in a silence broken only by a few buzzing insects and the first active birds. I leave the nozzles turned off, since I dislike the mechanical noise. I overlook a line of forested ridges rolling toward Yosemite, where the horizon is jagged with granite peaks. With an early enough start I am rewarded by a view of the sun rising into a salmon-colored sky, usually cloudless and marred only by the contrails of passenger jets in the stratosphere. These aircraft cross over the Sierra Nevada mountains on the last leg of their flight to San Francisco. One time I looked out the window during such a flight, and saw Yosemite Valley below the wing, looking like a small broken slab of gray stone. As I soak in the morning, loosening the tension in my damaged neck, I look up at those specks gliding through the twilit sky, and wonder about the travellers drinking morning coffee while looking down at the expanse of conifer forests and rock mountains. I wonder if it occurs to them that someone lives among those trees, watching them as they soar in the upper reaches of the atmosphere. I think about how insignifcant my corner of the world must look from their perspective, my home invisible in the green carpet of sugar pines. It amazes me that we will never know each other, that we will each live our entire complicated stories, each entirely unaware of the other’s drama. Our only connection is my fifteen-second reverie about a stranger in a jumbo jet, drinking coffee as her plane travels hundreds of miles per hour, drawing a rose-colored line across the dome of morning sky. Today such warm water thinking put me back to sleep.

After all that, my point is that I feel better. Yesterday my mood stayed pretty solid, with only a slight dip toward depression in the afternoon, something I experienced my whole life up until starting SSRI antidepressants. This morning, after finally getting up for good, I have been productive and energetic. Could it be I am finally getting past the Cymbalta withdrawal syndrome? The past two weeks have been brutal. If I did not have a strong commitment to survive and be here for my wife, suicide would have been the likely result of how badly I felt. Life seemed so very pointless, and not at all worth the torment roiling in my heart and soul. Countless times each day I dreamt and prayed (to the extent that I pray, since the God of my belief is not the kind that keeps an ear to the mutterings of mammalian nervous systems) that I just drop dead on the spot. Now I feel ready to engage my corner of the earth once more. Not that I am thrilled to be alive, singing like Julie Andrews on a grass-blanketed mountainside. No, I am still the not-too-optimistic failed surgeon. I sit before a small computer screen connected by a wire to my even smaller laptop, typing with nine fingers and one elbow (actually a finger in a thick dressing). The hillside I gaze upon is covered by an expanse of dead weeds baking in the August afternoon sun. But today I am pleased enough with this little drama of mine to stay in the production until it finishes its natural run. Once more, I survived all-out assaults launched by the mood-demons who dwell in the darkest recesses of my mind. Thank you, big Pharma, for marketing a drug that required me to weather such torment in order to release myself from its grasp.

That altering my brain chemistry by withdrawing a drug had such an effect on my worldview brings to mind, once more, my curiosity about what it means to exist as a human consciousness. I wrote earlier about the origins of decisions and intention. This ordeal has made me wonder, too, about the locus of attitudes and feelings about life. When something as fundamental as whether I think my story is worth living can be affected by removing a synthetic chemical from my bloodstream, then who am I? Is there ‘nothing’ more to ‘me’ than proteins, and cell membranes, and DNA, and myriad organic molecules? That kind of musing resurrects my whole philosophy about the relationship between living things and (what I for convenience call) ‘God’.

Aside from feeling that the Cymbalta wash-out may be behind me, I also cheered up after looking a bit at my web statistics. OK, OK, I know doing that is pointless. Numbers are not my objective, and obsessing about how many computers connect with my site will drive me (even more) nuts. Still, I noticed that my post ‘Is Depression Sane?‘ has been viewed two-and-a-half times as often as any other. This strikes me as great news, because I enjoyed writing that essay, and it touched on a number of philosophical points. I like to include in my blog my homespun views about the mind, mental distress, and how one can lead a satisfying life. Knowing that one of the essays that most does that also attracted the most interest encourages me to continue.

I resolved to keep my posts short. What I’ve written so far is the introduction to my real topic: the relationship between the chemicals that traverse my brain and the ‘person’ that the organ produces. In particular, how does an organism acquire the gifts of pleasure and pain, instead of just having a drive to move toward or away from certain stimuli and experiences? Rather than launching into that now and even further exceeding my supposed daily word quota, I will put the topic out there as something to either look forward to or avoid, depending on your attitude.

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Do Medications Change Who We Are? was published on August 13th, 2009 . 1 comment






Will’s Spirit Project, Initial Thoughts

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Sadly, no one seems to have been intrigued by my last post. Of course, the number of people visiting my still-new blog remains small. (I have to keep reminding myself how recently I started this project, or else I get discouraged when I visit sites that get ten comments to a post.) Maybe it just happened that no one tuned in to look at the post. Probably a sign that I need to head back out to some of the other 200,000,000 blogs and start leaving comments, so people will find out about me.

Nevertheless, as I slept last night (actually, as laid awake thinking) this sense of being ‘called’ to write out my spiritual understanding grew stronger and stronger. I cannot let the power of my psychotic ‘visions’ just pass out of my life the way you gradually forget about a bad flu. I refuse to think what happened was just a symptom of ‘mental illness.’ At the time the experiences seemed to be true messages from something far larger and more mysterious than I had ever suspected to exist. Even though it remains clear to me that everything that happened might have just been hallucinatory and delusional, it still seems that I should not just brush it all off. It would be tragic if ‘God’ somehow communicated with me, and I just ignored the call. I have read quite a bit about spirituality and consciousness, and pondered quite a bit more, for the past nine years. Since for most of that time I have not been employed, those nine years translate into an enormous number of hours combining concentration and looking inward without thought (plus meditating) in order to work things out. It is a body of work I want to develop into a product for the world, knowing full well that chances are good no one will pay attention.

As spelled out in my ‘About’ section, I have a solid education for the task of pulling together basic principles of science (e.g., physics, mathematics, many areas of biology, etc). Given my spiritual readings, retreats, meditations, and a love of writing I feel comfortable and assured combining this science with even more basic spiritual principles. I think another advantage is that I began developing these ideas with few preconceived ideas about ‘God’. As I’ve mentioned in my ‘About’ section, my father worked hard to convince me that religion is no more valid than fantasy, and he mostly succeeded. However, my grandparents had deep-seated faith, and my older sister was exploring ‘New Age’ movements before they even got that name. So I always held my dad’s opinion lightly, remaining open to other possibilities. The end result was that I entered adulthood as something close to a ‘blank slate’ in spiritual matters.

I have great respect for Christianity. My ‘visions’ had many Christian elements, and for years afterward I practiced devoutly as a Roman Catholic. My ideas about Christ form part of my ‘philosophy’ (I need to come up with a better name; any ideas?), as will come out as I go along. I do believe Jesus had immense divine presence within him. As a caveat, however, I cannot say that I believe he was the only son of God. There have been others, with the Buddha coming instantly to mind. (Despite the fact that the Buddha did not propose any kind of personal deity, I don’t think my ideas stand in much opposition to the fundaments of Buddhist philosophy. Others can be the judge of that as this goes forward.)

I truly hope someone will follow along with me, but if not I will still plug away. I don’t intend for this to be the onlything I blog about. Not at all. I may even move this project to its own page (but not a different URL, it is too important for me to move away from WillSpirit). I welcome, and actually would not hesitate to beg for input from others. I am under no illusion that I have the whole truth, or that I can’t gain from outside perspectives.

The goal is to come up with something that is as ‘true’ as I can make it, but also useful. I’m not sure I would be going to this trouble if I did not think my view of the universe has implications for how to live a good, productive, and satisfying life. I humbly pray (in my own sense of the term) for assistance to make this happen.

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Will’s Spirit Project, Initial Thoughts was published on July 23rd, 2009 . 5 comments






Time, Space, God, and The Broken Mind

GodsEye

For once, I am going to try to keep this short. I’m thinking under 500 words (or so).

Spirituality seems to be a popular topic among blog readers. The first time I blogged about it, a couple of days ago, the number of visitors shot up by almost 100%. Nothing succeeds like success, so I’ll continue in that vein for a little while.

If I could get paid for hours spent thinking about metaphysics, I wouldn’t be worrying about my finances. I admit that armchair philosophers are a dime a dozen, but I do believe my past provided insights that help lend consistency and logic to my ‘theory’. The framework that I have constructed builds on my long study of science (especially biology–see ‘About‘), and also the spiritual ‘psychosis’ I mentioned before. Some day I’ll go into a longer description of my ‘visions’, which in addition to hallucinatory experiences, also connected with real-life events in a kind of spooky, serendipitous way. For the purposes of building a model of creation that works for me, the significant part of my ‘awakening’ was what I described before as “all time (from the first infinitesimal fraction of a second after big bang until the present moment) and all space (from an impossibly small subatomic scale out through the full span of the universe) [hovering] in my awareness at the exact same time, like an instantaneous glimpse of all creation.”

The effect brought home the unity of the universe, and the collapsability of time. I did not see into the future, naturally, but I sensed its presence. I realized that from the right perspective, it would be possible to observe the full sweep of the universe’s history, from beginning to end, as a single unit. And not just on one scale of size, but simultaneously sensing the smallest subatomic entities (possibly ‘strings’, if string theories are correct), and the entire macroscopic universe, including each galaxy, quasar, black hole and every other kind of celestial object. If there is a consciousness watching our experience unfold, it would ‘see’ creation as a single entity in all its dimensions (four macroscopic–including time–and possibly many more on subatomic scales). Of course, I am not talking here about such a putative ‘awareness’ observing creation from a physical vantage point, and certainly not a point in time. As I’ll go into another time, I suspect this consciousness (assuming its existence) is not just watching the universe as if it were a movie, but is also the reel of film, the movie screen, and the projector. That seems to me the only kind of omniscient mind that could actually exist. When I believe my psychosis connected me to something ‘real’ (rather than just showing me new circuit paths in my brain), I feel blessed with to have glimpsed the cosmos through (let’s go out on a limb here) God’s eyes. It was, I suspect, similar to the epiphany people have when facing imminent death, when their whole lifetime is seen in an instant. Only I didn’t die and the life wasn’t just mine, but that of the entire cosmos. And for that instant, I understood that I was the cosmos, too.

Yes, the experience had ‘psychotic and grandiose’ stamped all over it. But at the time I only knew that God had blessed me with a special sight. Now of course, I cannot be sure. In fact, it is perhaps likely that I simply experienced a kind of seizure that distorted my conscious mind (which doesn’t mean deeper principles weren’t at play). But it felt as real as daily life and left me convinced of its veracity. So I like to take it at face value and see where it leads in terms of generating a metaphysics. I do not claim originality; only the way I write about these ideas is mine alone, not the concepts themselves. So far, it probably sounds like pantheism. Yes, I believe something like that, but there is more. This (sort of) short post is the introduction to what I have come up with. Stay tuned.

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Time, Space, God, and The Broken Mind was published on July 22nd, 2009 . 1 comment






When Mental Illness Fuels Enlightenment

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My recent debate/discussion with Marian touched on the relationship between mental health and spirituality, which happens to be a topic that’s fascinated me since my hospitalization in 2000. Seems like a good time to blog about it.

My interest grew out of events leading up to and following that first hospitalization. The past few months had been rough: my career as a surgeon had ended; Mandy and I had sold our vintage San Francisco house and moved to a suburb (a decision I immediately regretted); a therapist of five years (who had led me through a lot of the childhood trauma and abuse, and who had given me a tentative sense of safety) moved to the East Coast; my one and only malpractice case settled against me; and my neck caused me constant excruciating pain. After a period in a psychiatric ward for suicidal depression, I found myself back in the ‘real’ world on new medications, but with no idea about what to do next.

After several days of escalating agitation, I spent a night without any sleep steeped in feelings of abject defeat. The next day, my consciousness was launched into a stunning series of spiritual experiences and epiphanies. They included visual hallucinations of something I understood to be God, auditory hallucinations of ineffably comforting celestial music, and ‘delusions’ of intimate connectedness with God. I felt in an intuitive way the intricate underpinnings of reality. For a brief period all time (from the first infinitesimal fraction of a second after big bang until the present moment) and all space (from an impossibly small subatomic scale out through the full span of the universe) seemed to hover in my awareness simultaneously, like an instantaneous glimpse of the full span of creation.

What may have affected me most, however, was the wordless sense that my mind, body and soul were suffused with peace. Without writing a multipage essay describing my ‘visions’ in detail, the best analogy would be that it was like standing in front of an open oven, feeling the glowing heat radiate and warm me. God’s love seemed to be washing over me in just that way.

I stayed in that place for several days, and it only gradually subsided over the next two years. Without the antipsychotics I was given in the second hospital, it likely would have lasted even longer. The experience changed my life. I converted to my wife’s childhood religion (Roman Catholicism), and was filled with the fervent belief that I had been touched by God, like Paul on the road to Damascus. (It’s important to note that my father raised me to believe that religion is mere fantasy, wishful thinking on the part of frightened and distressed masses.)

These deeply held religious convictions lasted about three years. In the ensuing six, I’ve explored a small galaxy of spiritual philosophies and beliefs. Sometimes I’m right back to the convinced atheism of my upbringing. More often, I have a vague sense that something mysterious and profound resonates through all matter and energy, a kind of mystical glue that connects and comprises everything in the universe, but is endowed with omniscient and seamless consciousness. This cosmic awareness percolates through all that surrounds us but flows like broad rivers in the matrices of our brains. Our minds hold deep lakes of this essence that both supports and subsumes the universe.

Pretty ‘New Age’, right? Like I say, I bounce around. Mostly, the popular concepts that purport to pin down spiritual reality (or its absence) strike me as both too specific and too unsubstantiated, so I just fall back on what is probably the only supportable philosophy: “I don’t know”. (I don’t refuse to engage the question in the fashion of modern agnosticism, which in my opinion leans too heavily toward presuming the absence of spiritual forces. Rather, it is my opinion that we simply cannot pin down reality at the present time. Maybe there is a mystical realm and maybe not. The humility required to remain in this stance (which is harder to achieve than it sounds) may be the truest form of spirituality.

What I can be sure of is that the experience of God exists, whether God does or not. I also know that when I act as if God is real (no matter what form I give it in my mind), I tend to feel better. So reaching a spiritual plane has definite advantages, even if the ‘supernatural’ realm is utter fantasy. Therefore, I try to buy as far into spiritual thought as I can at any given moment. Sometimes that is not very far at all. Other times, I find intimate places of serenity inside my mind and being, where my life makes sense, I feel I have purpose, and I know that love surrounds me.

What does this have to do with mental illness? More and more the mainstream mental health community is adopting mindfulness meditation. Such practice leads to a relaxed and open state of mind that stand in for the kinds of experiences religion provides at its best (without the xenophobia, intolerance, and dogmatism that religion brings at its worst). Often, therapists and other mental health workers go further and encourage practices based on supernaturalism, such as getting involved in one’s natal religion, or any spiritual community that feels right. The mental health world takes this approach because it can work.

I have found that meditation and spiritual pursuits help me to the extent I practice them. Mindfulness meditation (which means moving away from verbal thought and focusing attention on the body’s moment-to-moment experience) often feels quite calming and centering. It is right up there with vigorous exercise as a stress management tool, except it leads to a deep sense of unity with my body (and sometimes even with all creation) rather than the stimulating endorphin rush of a good workout.

If I allow myself to abandon critical thought (which is exactly what modern atheists consider an anathema), mystical forces sometimes feel both real and present. These influences, whatever they are, seem to care for me and promote my best interest (not always what I want, but generally what seems right later on). I could just be sensing hidden streams of neural activity that promote my well being. But whatever the ‘truth‘, abandoning my doubt and accepting this fount of support helps me enjoy life. It helps me maintain the commitment to keep living it.

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When Mental Illness Fuels Enlightenment was published on July 20th, 2009 . 6 comments






My Life as a Doctor on Disability

birdintree

Since I started this blog at the end of May (and ramped it up in July), most of my posts took on a rhetorical style. In college (UC Berkeley) I took a year of Rhetoric rather than Freshman English, for reasons I no longer remember. Ever since then, it has been hard for me to write without composing an argument. My guess is that readership will not be attracted to an endless column of that stuff, as much as I enjoy logical analysis of issues.

While I cannot change into someone new, as much as I sometimes wish it, it is important for me to also be ‘real’ in this project. So what follows gives a brief sketch of my current lifestyle, at least as I lead it when in the Bay Area.

After waking up early, I sit at my computer for an hour or more looking at any comments that might have come in, writing responses, and visiting blogs. Then my wife and I walk our two little dogs: Emily, a chihuahua-dachshund mix, and Ralphy, who is some version of a poodle. Both weigh 10-11 pounds, and are the cutest dogs in the world (but it’s possible I’m a little biased). Some days I also go to an AA meeting a few miles from home; it’s a daily meeting, and it is one of the few places I’ve made friends as an adult.

After the dog walk, Mandy and I usually go to the gym. This takes us to noon, or a little later. The afternoon I often spend running errands, though I prefer to have time to write. That is one of the reasons I prefer living in the foothills (where we spend 1/4 to 1/2 of our time); it presents fewer distractions to my writing.

Mandy usually cooks dinner, and I either do the clean up alone, or with Mandy’s help. I actually prefer to do it by myself because, truth be told, Mandy does 90% of the housework; I have never been one to assist much. I feel guilty about it, but evidently not enough to pitch in on a regular basis. That’s another reason I like being up at our mountain place: there is a great deal of work to do outside, around the land. That way I can contribute to the function of the household, since I am poorly motivated toward cleaning and doing the indoor work.

In the evening we typically watch a rented movie. Then I do one of two things. If I am feeling OK, I spend more time at the computer. Unfortunately, very often I get depressed as the day ends, and I retreat to a dark room, curl up in a ball, and try not to think. I focus on my body and its sensations in order to escape the torment of my thoughts. Not a pretty picture, and obviously not one I am proud of, but there it is.

When I am writing, my guilt about not helping around the house gets alleviated slightly. Since my surgical career ended in 2000, I have spent six months in graduate school, three months teaching high school, and eighteen months doing public speaking for the California Department of Public Health (about childhood lead poisoning). I’ve also done some volunteer computer programming and other unpaid work (including a little recent work as a mental health patient advocate). But you can see how I do not have any earning capacity. For now we are coasting along OK, but someday an income will be needed. Since I have crashed at every endeavor since my surgical career ended (due to neck problems), the only thing I have left is writing. Although it may never pay actual money, at least it feels like work rather than mere laziness.

Writing as a living is obviously a very, very uncertain thing. Especially for someone with so little background in the field. I have what I think is an interesting story to tell, but whether I can tell it in a compelling way is an open question.

Believe it or not, those eight (rather short) paragraphs sum up the better part of my current life. It is simple, uncluttered, and sometimes boring. The difference between what I do now and what things were like back when I had a clinical practice is impossible to overstate. Back then I worked fifty hours a week (half of those in the operating room), fixed up our vintage house in San Francisco on the weekends, and spent the rest of my free time either sculpting or reading about sculpture. I was busy as hell. I felt productive and proud of myself. I was probably a little arrogant.

In those days I had minimal spiritual sensibility. I tended to see things from a materialist perspective and gave almost no attention to the murmurings of my heart. Stress consumed me.

Which is better? For all the loss, grief, depression, and defeat, I am now a more enlightened, understanding, and humble person. Admittedly, I sometimes take the humility thing too far until it borders on humiliation. But most of the time I see myself as a better person than before. (I admit my wife might have a different take on things.)

So that’s my story. I don’t know if anyone will care, or even read this far into my post. But I want this site to include some of my real day-to-day experience, rather than just arguments. Besides, I see now that my opinions about mental health topics sound naive compared to what I read on other blogs, where similar topics have been kicked around for a long time.

Lately, I’ve been battling a low-grade conviction that life is s**t. My grip on living has been slipping, and I find myself dreaming of the long fall off the Golden Gate Bridge, just like the old days. (When I was in the hospital, the therapists grilled me about why I was fixated on the bridge, when as a doctor I could–they thought–easily get my hands on some pills to die painlessly. My answer came down to what I mentioned in another post: my mother loved the bridge before she died. It seemed to represent something to her, even as she faded into the mists of depression back in Michigan.) That’s why I gave in and boosted the Cymbalta again.

Since the dose increase, my mood is perking up. Of course, I pay the price of diminished sexual responsiveness and the discouragement of losing ground in my project of breaking free of pharmaceuticals. But at least the nagging feeling that life just isn’t worth the trouble has lifted–sort of.

I’d like to end on a better note, but that would not be true to my current condition. When I started this blog my hope had been to show everyone a path to freedom out of depression: I actually believed my progress exemplary enough that I could begin to teach others. Rather predictably, however, I’ve slipped back into the pit, though fortunately not too terribly far. I have every expectation that things will look bright again before too long. I even have hope of feeling connected, once more, with the cosmic resonance that I feel at my calmest times, especially when surrounded by arrow-straight pine trees and dozens of birds, whose clicking, chirping and trills remind me of God’s voice.

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My Life as a Doctor on Disability was published on July 15th, 2009 . 2 comments






Do Medications Limit Spiritual Growth?

Mandy has an eye for God in Nature.

This is another addition to the ongoing conversation between me and Marian at Different Thoughts.

Believe me when I say that it pleases me to the core to know that you have attained a place of peace and connection with the central currents of creation. I am very happy that you have found your suffering to be a path to such a healthy and profound axis. I do know of St. John of the Cross and believe wholeheartedly in the concept of suffering leading to wisdom. At my best, I have found myself in such a state of grace.

Unfortunately, I am not there right now. It has been an impossible condition to maintain, as you said. Right now, the suffering just feels tiresome. I experience the world as a place that doesn’t fit my psyche, like I should have been born on a different planet. I’ve been trying meditation, retreats, groups, reading spiritual books, attending mystical services, hanging around people with values I respect, finding those who believe in deeper realities. Yet that state of grace is outside my reach, for now. I don’t mind that, because I don’t expect life to always be bliss. But I do get very exhausted having no energy and no enjoyment. That is the feeling the pills reduce.

I don’t like the medications. I think they are my enemy. But one way or the other, my brain is now adapted to them, and the pain (withdrawal symptoms?) I feel when I cut back too quickly gets to be too much if it goes on for more than a month or so. That’s when I raise the dose again, in order to catch my breath before the next attempt at reduction.

But for my part the drugs do not feel deadening. The antipsychotics did, but not the antidepressants or the mood stabilizers. They just don’t have an effect on my sense of reality that I can detect, except that they take away the experience of my days as exercises in pointless pain. I am not talking here about existential suffering, awareness of the aching heart of human tragedy, or connection with the streams of sorrow that run like lifeblood through the history of humanity. I am talking about dull, meaningless pain that I get sick of and can reduce with a chemical. Am I happy about needing to do that? NO. Do I feel weak for resorting to the pills? Sometimes. But I do what seems like the right thing for me, for now.

At the same time, I don’t believe the medications block me from spiritual awakening, or connection with divine consciousness. Our brains are biological. I suspect there is a non-material spirit too, but the organic matrices of our brain play at least a large role in our experience. If you add a foreign chemical you alter the biology, but you do not change the brain into something entirely new. I don’t think every chemical has the effect of blocking spiritual growth, though some might. I have not found the drugs to be a barrier to spiritual connection. In fact, my peak spiritual experience in life, which far transcended anything else that’s ever happened to me, and was very similar to what the saints describe, actually occurred while I was on Effexor and Depakote. I don’t think those drugs did anything to cause my epiphany, of course, but they did not prevent it either.

It is also important to remember that some spiritual traditions actually employ chemicals to foster spiritual enlightenment. Even the Roman Catholic church incorporates wine in its services. I know, at present the little sip of wine at communion is purely symbolic. I strongly suspect, however, that the early church founders did some actual drinking as part of their rites.

My point is still the same: each person is unique, and every path is different. I am relying on chemicals right now because I am trying to make my transition off the drugs without killing myself or making my wife miserable. And yet, I have had many days (not very recently, but not all that long ago, either) when my spiritual state was such that everything made sense and suffering became irrelevant: I was on a higher plane. I know that condition exists, but I can’t be there all the time, and as long as I’m living an ordinary existence I want to try to enjoy it.

I am glad that you have found your way to union with the grand consciousness. I fully respect that for you that has meant clearing your brain of pharmaceuticals.

Not everyone can reach union, whether they take medications or stop them. And for those that do, not everyone will do so the same way. There are many paths to God. For some, drugs may slam the door. For others, they may open it. For me, they do neither. My path to the heart of creation is open sometimes, and closed others, without regard to how much medication I’m on. It may have to do with lunar cycles, or simply with some variable rhythms in my body. Or perhaps I just try harder sometimes than others. But I am absolutely convinced that it is possible to get there now, or at least sometime not too long from now, and I don’t need to wait until every last psychiatric medication is out of my system.

Please understand that my ultimate goal is to be drug-free. So I embrace your philosophy on its basic level. However, I am not sure if I will ever achieve total freedom from psychoactive agents. It would be very discouraging if I thought that I would never experience God as a result. Fortunately, I know that to be false. I have before and will again experience the divine touch; I will feel in my innermost self the purpose, beauty, and power of suffering. In the meantime, I choose to live my life with a little less of the dreary kind of pain that is about as enlightening as pounding my thumb with a hammer.

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Do Medications Limit Spiritual Growth? was published on July 14th, 2009 . 5 comments






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