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.

Ever feel like you’re not getting a point across?

Blog writing, at least as I practice it, is done on the fly. The essays are written quickly and revised only slightly beyond first draft. Sometimes the immediacy of the process obscures the intended message.

Many of this year’s posts have described my struggles, disappointments, sorrows, pains, and illnesses. Given that my goal is to write about life and growth using my own experience as illustration, it is only natural that setbacks prompt essays about difficulty. But the comments and emails I receive show that my larger perspective is not getting the attention it deserves.

It’s comforting to receive notes of sympathy and support. They help me feel that others listen and care. And yet, if my message was truly coming through, there would be more congratulation than commiseration.

Because the most striking fact of the past few months has been how little all these hardships get to me. Sure, I have moments of doubt and sorrow. In mentioning these, however, my hope has been to highlight the difference between how I’m responding now and how my tribulations would have affected me before. These days, I feel grief and pain flow through me at times, but my spirits stay fairly stable despite superficial complaints. In earlier years, my mind would have plunged into intractable depression and anxiety. With great relief, I’ve learned to watch life from the perspective of a deeper, broader, and more detached consciousness that doesn’t get pulled in.

I feel a clear separation between my transient emotions and my more enduring self. I can allow the feelings freedom to respond to life, but I watch them from a distance. I don’t, and can’t, take my suffering very seriously. Years of fostering meditative skills, spiritual grounding, and wise insight have led to this profound benefit. My quest has brought me to a state peacefulness I never could have imagined upon starting out.

As I work in the background on the book project mentioned earlier, I am feeling a sense of protectiveness toward that writing that seldom comes up in blogging. This larger work will demand careful editing before release. Online journaling has taught me how my unpolished language lets transient events obscure enduring truths. My book about mysticism and science needs to say its piece clearly and calmly, as if spoken from my most evolved mind; keeping that perspective in the foreground will require lots of rewriting. I hope to describe my position honestly, but with emphasis on realization rather than process.

Each approach has its advantages. I think the rawness of journaling appeals to certain readers, or else no blog would ever become popular. But the time is coming for me to clearly articulate a perspective on life that I’ve developed over decades. This can’t be done if it’s unduly influenced by the ups and downs of daily life. It needs to be written from that same perspective that is currently keeping me sane: broad, deep, accepting, and wise. I’ve gotten to the point where this viewpoint is always within reach, but it’s not always within my grasp, as recent posts have shown.

My last several posts talked about depression. Actually, they mainly discussed anti depression, but that prompted the rationale for today’s installment: you can’t consider how to cure an illness (if it is one, vide infra) without knowing a little about it. So, what is depression, anyway?

The word gets tossed about more often than it gets defined. Here is the MedLinePlus medical dictionary definition:

(1) : a state of feeling sad (2) : a psychoneurotic or psychotic disorder marked especially by sadness, inactivity, difficulty with thinking and concentration, a significant increase or decrease in appetite and time spent sleeping, feelings of dejection and hopelessness, and sometimes suicidal thoughts or an attempt to commit suicide

Definition (1) is straightforward: feeling sad. Number (2) starts with feelings: sadness, plus dejection and hopelessness. It then captures both thought dysfunction (impaired thinking and concentration) and the ‘vegetative signs’ of depression (inactivity, appetite changes, and disordered sleep). The final component is suicidality, either in thought or action.

So to simplify we have: sad feelings, impaired thinking, changes in bodily functions, and suicide. Does that sound like depression to you?

Everything listed can be true for me to varying degrees at different times. What this source fails to mention, though other dictionaries probably would, is ‘anhedonia’ or loss of ability to experience pleasure. Inability to enjoy anything often constitutes the crux of depression for me. If I could experience pleasure, life would not look so hopeless. Maybe I would then be motivated to eat, sleep, and think properly. Life is meant to be enjoyed, after all.

Or is it? In my opinion, our culture has fed us a huge depressing lie: that the purpose of life is enjoyment. More likely, the purpose (if there is one) is to experience what life brings, whether good or bad. Enjoyment is nice but not central to a meaningful life.

I grew up in a well-to-do household with many financial advantages. I attended good schools, went to a fancy summer camp, and lived in a house with a panoramic ocean view. The neighborhood had lovely landscaping, access to mountain trails, and a kid could bicycle to the beach in twenty minutes.

However, it was not a happy childhood. For those interested, here is an incomplete list of the traumas I experienced:

• Intense parental discord starting with my earliest memories.
• Prolonged and isolated hospitalization at age three.
• Parental divorce at age four.
• Annual moves for the next six years.
• My mother suffered from clinical depression, with numerous hospitalizations and shock treatments.
• She killed herself when I was six.
• My father’s second wife (his former mistress during the marriage) abused me with breathtaking sadism.
• My father was narcissistic, suffered from alcoholism, and disliked children.
• My sister a psychotic break (precipitated by heavy LSD use) when I was ten.
• My stepmother inflicted sexual humiliation on me between the ages of eleven and fourteen.
• I became involved in drugs and alcohol at age twelve (daily use by age fourteen).

So I suffered a traumatic, unhappy childhood in pleasant and prosperous surroundings. My high school had its share of celebrity children, and the prevalent attitude was that life should be happy and fun. Money worries should not exist. Everyone should be gorgeous and sexy. The neighborhood was not far from Hollywood, and many of the kids I went to school with grew up to continue the tradition of exporting these standards to the entire world.

How realistic are these expectations? Not long ago I attended a support group where one African-American attender came from a different environment: crack sales on the corner; imprisoned or dead fathers; drive-by shootings; endemic destitution; pervasive squalor. He had trouble understanding the concept of depression. When he first received the diagnosis, apparently, he told his psychiatrist that his feelings of despondency and hopelessness were normal. That would be the natural conclusion for someone growing up in such a habitat, wouldn’t it? How many of his classmates expected to some day meet a gorgeous spouse from a well-to-do and intact family, spawn a couple of genius kids, develop a fascinating and lucrative career, and live to an advanced age surrounded by loving children and grandchildren? White middle to upper-middle class people do not think such dreams to be wildly unrealistic. Improbable, perhaps, but not out of the question. In the American ghettoes, however, to fantasize like that would appear psychotic to your companions.

Maybe we ought to look again at what modern life typically brings. A huge proportion of marriages end in divorce. Financial security is a fading dream. Death is inevitable and illness almost so. The chemical byproducts of industrialization degrade the planet, posing a very real threat of ecological collapse. People move all the time, making stable communities a historical memory. War never ends. We’re no longer surprised by genocide and terrorism. And meeting people who grew up in truly loving and healthy families happens almost as rarely as finding four-leafed clovers.

Does this sound like a world where we might expect to be happy? You could even ask, of course, if human existence has ever been conducive to widespread joy and contentment. So maybe sad feelings, dejection, and hopelessness are not pathological. I realize this is a ‘depressing’ viewpoint. But before we start drugging ourselves because we feel ‘sad’, we might ask if it is really a sickness or just a normal human reaction (especially for sensitive people with concern for others, like most of us who get diagnosed with depression).

I am not suggesting we just live in misery. I will continue to work against depression until my last breath, if necessary. But it helps to know the true enemy. Is it really my brain, the way the mental health system teaches? Do I need to conclude I am a ‘sick’ person because the combination of a horrible upbringing and living in a discouraging world has left me susceptible to sad feelings? Maybe those of us who feel the pain of this life are actually the sane ones. Could it be that happy people are just in denial?

OK, that last statement probably takes the point too far. Still, I do believe that sadness must be considered a natural reaction. Any discussion of depression treatment would do well to start from that realization. Then we can proceed to identify endless despair and lack of pleasure as on over-reaction, but perhaps not an entirely pathological one. So when we look at what we should do, we will know that what we are fighting is, in part, the state of the world. Then the problem becomes, how can we find tranquility in the face of all the problems?

Starting from that position, using a psychiatric medication is nothing but a band-aid that covers rather than heals. After all, we could suck cocaine into our noses and feel better. But is that the best way to deal with life on this planet? Psychiatrists and drug companies, if they bothered to read this, would go bananas at the comparison. They would insist that psychiatric pharmaceuticals have long half lives, produce sustained benefit, and don’t lead to life-destroying behavior. And in truth there is a quantitative difference in side effects and social problems. But there is no qualitative difference in philosophy. Whether you buy the drug in a pharmacy or on the sidewalk out front, you are still treating life’s pain with chemicals.

Personally, I think that is not the best approach. Better to learn tools to cope with the tragedy and hardship than to drug yourself until you no longer care about it. And it is possible to retrain yourself to find peace and satisfaction in life in the face of its heartache and struggle. However, you will probably still feel sad. Part of the reason I became so miserable was my belief that things should be better. As a child, I saw relatives with happy families, and I envied them. As an adult, I resented that my colleagues continued in their careers, while mine ended because of a badly damaged neck. My resistance to making peace with my fate, not the misfortune itself, made me miserable. Now that I can accept my hardships as not being all that unusual, and certainly not ‘unfair,’ I can just be sad, without abandoning all hope for joy. It is OK to be sad. It is natural, maybe even healthy. My goal is to learn to experience the sadness but also allow myself to bask in contentment from time to time.

I believe that sadness is not the problem, despite how the definition of depression emphasizes it. Anhedonia is the real enemy. The inability to enjoy anything because of sorrow is a confusion about how feelings work. You can be sad a lot, but still find things to enjoy. But to get to this point I have had to abandon the unrealistic expectations fed to me by our modern culture. What a lie to believe one should get through life without being seared to the bone by tragedy and suffering! The fact is, every human frame will sometimes feel the flames of hell. But in our hearts we can look around, see the autumn trees outside the hospice window, and smile despite the pain.

Not long ago I posted a ‘Tweet’: The surest path to satisfaction is to lower your standards. What surprises me is that I now actually accept that to be true.

In closing, I would like to point people toward Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. It is not a therapy so much as a philosophy of recognizing the truth, and even the beauty, of pain. You don’t need a therapist to ‘get it’ (try this book–and I’m not getting a kickback from Amazon). ACT is not all that different from Buddhism, actually. But it is a good path for westerners who need to escape our society’s crazy message that life is supposed to look like a TV commercial, while grief, defeat, illness, and pain are for losers.

In the end, every one of us loses everything we love. What could be sadder? The trick has been to allow sorrow to rain on my parade, and just keep marching and pounding that drum.

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Note: the author of Health and Life directs me to this article which expands on the topic of antidepressant (in)efficacy. It also cites the STAR*D study, which made a mammoth attempt to assess and compare treatments. The short form of their result is that drugs, and even accepted therapies, don’t work all that well. But such a short wrap-up does the project a disservice, since it studied issues that always get ignored by drug companies. Some day I may devote an essay to it.

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(I modified this post in several places on 2009 August 4, c. 13:45 PDT. I did not introduce any substantive changes in the message or opinion.)

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