For over a century in western society anyone who
displayed any level of consciousness or other worldly intelligence
that wasn't socially acceptable was carted off to a mad house where
they were locked up, drugged, experimented on and generally
treated like second class citizens and abnormalities of the human
race.
Yet, if you read world history and ancient myths
you soon discover that people who were gifted with extra-ordinary
mental abilities were generally hailed as seers, oracles, harbingers,
prophets, fortune tellers, soothsayers, mediums, channellers,
psychics, diviners, clairvoyants, augurs... The majority felt it
better to live as hermits or, at the very least, as loners. Seekers
would often have to go to remarkable lengths in order to find the
desired oracle at their hide-out either atop a mountain, down a
cavernous valley or in a distant wilderness. They were scary people;
they moved and spoke in strange ways, did bizarre things, lived in
unconventional fashions but they were as necessary to some
societies as their judiciary systems and water works.
If you rifle through the annals of
western history you will come across exceptional thinkers, painters,
musicians, writers, all of whom (excerpts from their letters and
diaries have told us) suffered heavily with mental strains -
depressions, elations.
Tchaikovsky
said "Life is beautiful in spite of everything! ... There are
many thorns, but there are roses too."
Rilke
has said so many beautiful things on the subject of melancholia
(which we so ineptly call clinical depression), two of my favourites:
1. "How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths
about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps
all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to
see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in
its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
2. "You mustn’t be frightened if a
sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if
an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and
over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening
to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its
hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your
life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you
don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?
Why do you want to persecute yourself with the
question of where all this is coming from and where it is going?
Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions
and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything
unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the
means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one
must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to
break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."
It is not hard then to come to a realisation that
most of us, or at least most of those who have left their biggest
mark - either on us or on history, have tumbled to the very depths of
their souls and thrashed there in wild torment. How else can they
have risen again, and with such words of wisdom and clarity?
Zen teaches us that until we have felt and
experienced something ourselves we cannot know it. We can
intellectualise, we can surmise and ruminate but we cannot truly
understand till our hearts have melded with our minds though that
most challenging of tasks; feeling. Feeling all the feels. Sitting
with them patiently. Watching how each feeling expresses itself in
each part of us, in our physical, astral and causal bodies. And how
those feelings loop back again and come to us in words and thoughts
that we can grasp and express. Not just to ourselves but in ways that
we can vocalise and teach others of our experience.
If you see a mental breakdown you immediately
attempt to file it in your brain in a way that you can make sense of
it and understand it. That is the nature of humans. If you experience
a mental breakdown yourself you do the same. Only it is much harder.
Reality has slipped through your fingers, you can't tell what is
truth and what is not. There are no signposts. There is no guide. You
are all alone in a world you do not understand and have never heard
of. There is no logical way to file what you are seeing and feeling,
not least because you cannot be sure what you are seeing and feeling
is real. And here's the kicker: it is real. All of it. Even the
fantasy. Even the not real. It is all real. It is your experience.
And all experiences are real. Let us say you have two heads, you know
you don't really have two heads, so you refuse to acknowledge the
existence of the other head. The other head grows bigger and more
demanding it shouts at you and demands you pay attention, you
steadfastly refuse to give in. You believe if you give in to the
madness of admitting you have a second head then there will be no end
to the insanities and non-realities you may start admitting to. So
the head grows bigger still, and more twisted and grotesque and
finally, you snap. You believe you have gone mad. You believe that is
the end of it and you give up. It is never so conscious as all that,
but that is the general gist of it. And then you are mad. But you
have been mad from the moment you refused to acknowledge that you had
a second head. Because it was there. Right in front of you. Talking
to you, trying to get your attention. It was there and real the whole
time. It was real because you saw it. You made yourself mad by
pretending it wasn't there and that it wasn't real. You did not
acknowledge it and it grew into a monster that you could no longer
control. And then it consumed you. This is the society we live in. We
are taught logic and reason and nothing else. If logic dictates that
we all have one head then in order to maintain your standing in the
society you live in you can't risk admitting even to yourself that
you have another head. But if, at the very beginning, you said "Hello
second head what do you want?" you might have ended up having
rather a nice conversation and learning something about yourself or
even the world and then perhaps the second head would have gone away
because all it wanted was a chat.
The more we struggle and push against things that
we don't like, the more stressful and overwhelming they become. Every
human has the capacity to completely and utterly lose all sense of
reality. Genetics plays a big part, as does environment. But even if
you have no genetic predisposition to insanity, anxiety, depression
it does not mean you are immune. Even if your environment is
conducive of peaceful, loving and caring thoughts and feelings,
again, you are not immune. I believe that the universe sends us
challenges and obstacles to overcome only when it feels you are ready
for them. Or, to put it another way, I believe that we ourselves do
not see the next challenge or obstacle till we know we are ready to
take it on. Sometimes we freak out, even if we are expecting the
challenge, we think we're not ready, we're not strong enough, not
prepared enough, whatever, but that negative cycle of thinking is
what disables us from succeeding. As soon as we've got to the point
where it is make or break most human beings will end up making. They
will put aside, temporarily, all the doubts and feelings of
inadequacy and take the challenge on, because there is no
alternative. They have to. And they give it their best shot and 9
times out of 10 they pass. Which gives you a feeling which is a
little like a power boost: I did it! I can do anything! Like a
character levelling up in a video game - their health bar increases,
their power bar increases, they have access to better and more
powerful and more interesting items and areas of the game. Game
makers take all that from life.
What then about mental health? Those of us who
have mental health challenges are at a disadvantage in our society.
Our society deems that there is something wrong with us. Something
that needs to be fixed or taken away or stopped. We need to be made 'whole'
again. And because this is the pervading thought process we ourselves
begin to think it too. We have an episode and it debilitates us, we
shout and curse and wish it would go away, we swallow their pills
because they say it will make us 'better'. We live in shadow states,
not quite mad, not quite sane. We feel like we are half a person. We
are not. And it is shameful for society to make us think along those
lines. We are whole people, we are just whole in a different way. We
need guidance and acceptance for who we are as we are. Not as society
thinks we should be. The more society teaches us to rail against our
conditions and aberrations of mind the harder it is to sit with and
converse with those episodes when they do occur. If we are told there
is something wrong with us we are naturally going to push against it
and wish it gone. If we are encouraged, on the other hand, to have a
conversation with ourselves and sit with and explore those episodes,
however hard it may be, we may see, as Rilke suggests and I know from
personal experience to be true, 'that sickness is the
means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one
must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to
break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.' It is very hard to be both patient and doctor but
that is what you must be in order to fully understand and learn from
what is going on in your mind. No one knows you better than you and
if you are feeling at a loss and like you don't know yourself at all
then perhaps that is why you are being sent these mental challenges:
so that you can get to know yourself and become all that you were
meant to become.
Imagine then my horror when a well known mental
health research group emailed me a short while ago to ask for
feedback on their proposed new advertising campaign to be launched
later this year:
"We swear to stop it, if you swear to help"
Mental health is not something that can be
stopped. It can be supported, accepted, nurtured, alleviated, but it
cannot be stopped. No amount of drugs or therapy or research can stop
mental health. Each individual needs to find their own best preferred
and effective method for them, but even then it does not mean they
are 'cured' - it does however mean that they have come to an
agreement within themselves that it is part of what makes them who
they are and they have accepted that within themselves. All society
needs to do is come to the same level of acceptance, and thus
facilitate and help those who are struggling to accept themselves.
The above type of marketing lies at the core
problem of society's attitude to mental health: that it is bad and
that it needs to be got rid of. If you take away all the nasty bits
of life then you cannot enjoy the roses. For without the endurance of
misery there is no real appreciation for the beautiful. If life were entirely a bed of roses the roses would lose
their beauty for lack of a contrast. It is the contrast that makes
life beautiful and ugly. Both are necessary. Both must be embraced.
