I came across an online documentary (included below) produced by BBC called “Dangerous Knowledge” and I couldn’t help feeling a deep connection to the first person presented in the documentary - Georg Cantor. Interestingly enough, the documentary began with a quote from one of my favorite poems by William Blake - Auguries of Innocence, which set the stage for what was to come. I of course didn’t relate to Cantor by his mathematical genius, but rather the isolation that he felt by living outside the realm of “the taken for granted” world. In the documentary, Dr Louis Sass describes Cantor’s situation in these words, “I think if you are a person that takes that step (outside the realm of “the taken for granted”) in a way you are already doomed to living outside in some way… so it’s not as if it’s only the intellectual project itself that takes you out there, there’s something about you as a person that this unnaturalness comes so naturally.”

The unnaturalness that is described is something that I often feel and that I’ve talked about briefly in some of my previous entries. It’s a deep connection to something that appears to be foreign to the rest of the world and in which the inevitable isolation forms from the grips it has on your relationship to everything. This deep connection communicates something that makes everything in the “taken for granted” world feel so artificial, plastic, fake and undesirable. It creates a longing in the core of your heart that forces you constantly seek deeper understanding for your existence, as the everyday world drifts far away from you. It’s a personal communication between you and something greater than everything, that only you and this greater phenomenon can share. I guess some might call this communication ‘religious experience’.

Later in the documentary, it was concluded that Cantor suffered from manic depression based on his psychiatrists notes that described his shifting moods and mental states, and which also landed him in a mental institution on multiple occasions. Most of the world I’m sure would believe that what Cantor saw was a delusion and product of his mental illness and emotionally maybe this would be correct. The people of his day saw him this way and refused to acknowledge his work. It wasn’t until after his death that his work was properly accepted and understood as pure genius.

This raises a major question for me in regards to the spectrum of mental illness. The current reality of the human species is that we are social organisms that delight in our ability to relate to each other and share common experiences. We want life to be predictable, controlled and understood. This is what forms the social and cultural fabric of our societies and institutions. Then there are those of us who don’t fit so neatly into this desired reality and depending on how extreme our disconnection is, the majority decides what to do with us. They begin by calling us eccentric, crazy or weird and as our disconnection grows, they suggest that we seek medical advice and get put on medication to prevent our minds from continuing to move away from the ‘norm’. What really is the problem though? Is it mental illness or how society interprets and deals with what it calls mental illness? Perhaps in some cases mental illness is simply caused by a mind that has evolved past its current generation’s way of thinking and has to live in a world that opposes its understanding of reality and the opposition it faces everyday causes it to breakdown and become mentally ill. I don’t have answers or solutions for bridging the gap between the majority and the mentally ill, but I do acknowledge that I do share a need with the majority as a social organism and this need is to relate in some way to others. It is refreshing to find someone who I can truly relate to even though he may be considered ‘crazy’ or mentally ill. Perhaps this relationship that I feel with Cantor is simply a way for me to not feel completely alone in certain aspects of my life. It’s a way for me to validate certain experiences. Cantor came to describe the infinite as an abyss between what he had seen and what he knew must be there, but could never reach; I describe my relationship with the infinite as an abyss between what I have seen and what I know must be there, but that I cannot seem to share with anyone.

Dangerous Knowledge: Part 1

Dangerous Knowledge: Part 2

A couple of weeks a ago I received an email from a visitor that basically said that they would never say “I am bipolar” because they are more than just a label and their identity is not bipolar disorder. I’ve also read about this opinion in a couple of other places on the web including in “The Ten Greatest Lies about Bipolar Disorder” by David Oliver at bipolarcentral.com. Below is the excerpt from the #2 lie - You can’t control bipolar disorder.

“One of the ways you can control the disorder is to use the term “have bipolar disorder” instead of “am bipolar.” When you say, “I am bipolar,” you give power to the disorder since you identify yourself it. When you say, “I have bipolar disorder,” however, you simply acknowledge that you have a medical/psychiatric condition. You realize that the bipolar disorder is NOT your identity. “

After receiving this email and reading this opinion elsewhere on the web, I asked myself a few questions. When a person says “I am bipolar” are they really saying that their identity is bipolar? Is a person giving more control to bipolar disorder by saying “I am bipolar” instead of “I have bipolar”? Does a person really identify less with bipolar disorder by using the words “I have” instead of “I am”?

My conclusion was that it really doesn’t make a difference whether you say “I am” or “I have”, either way the symptoms are still experienced the same regardless of how we reference them linguistically. I came to this conclusion by swapping the word “bipolar” with “hungry”. Out of social linguistic norms we often say things that are not completely grammatically correct, but we know what people are saying when they bend the rules of language. For example, when I say “I am hungry” I do not mean that my identity is only “hunger”. I am simply saying that “I” or the sensation of my body is experiencing the sensation of hunger. Whether I say “I am hungry” or “I have symptoms of hunger” the fact remains the same - the biological experience of hunger is still present. Using the words “I am” is simply linguistic convenience and a way of communicating with reference to your self. This linguistic process has nothing to do with transferring personal identity, but rather a way of stating that your experience of self includes the biological symptoms brought on by bipolar disorder, which is factually correct. In fact, an argument could easily be made to say that “I have bipolar” is just as grammatically inaccurate because we don’t ever possess or hold ownership over bipolar disorder. From what science currently understands, it is programmed into our biology and our biology is who we are.

So, is there really a benefit to saying “I have” instead of “I am”? Well, the only thing that I can think of is the possible gratification that stems from believing that there is a difference. If a person is convinced and believes that there is a difference then in their minds they will experience that difference whether it is real or not, but if your are like myself and you don’t see a difference, then saying “I am bipolar” is simply another way of saying “I have bipolar disorder” or my biological organism experiences sensations brought on by a biological disorder that the scientific community calls bipolar disorder.

My depression appears to have lifted and I’ve been feeling pretty stable for the past week or so. It has been great. I’m not sure if it’s just part of a cycle that I’m going through right now or whether a mild increase in my medication has helped bring about the change. It has also been the one month mark for an experimental custom multi-vitamin/amino acid/Pro EPA omega-3 treatment as well. Who knows, maybe it’s the combination of all three.

The timing has been perfect though because it has really allowed me to enjoy Christmas this year. I’ve felt so much more engaged in the conversations I had with family members and I’ve noticed that my feeling of connectedness to my environment has increased tremendously. That strange spacey empty feeling, that over the past few months had made me feel so detached from everything, has gone away. My sense of humor has returned and I truly feel my laughter and enjoyment when it occurs.

I don’t want to get too optimistic too early though, because I still don’t have very much ambition or motivation for socializing or going outside the house. I’ve been avoiding contact with friends during the holidays because I still dread the thought of being around social events outside of my immediate family.

I’m hoping this is the beginning of a change that brings about some sustained consistency in my mood and helps me return to a higher-functioning me. I’m going to continue paying close attention to my mood and hopefully this feeling will continue to grow, but hopefully not too much!

I was driving home late last night on the dark winter highway. The car’s headlights were cast out like fishing nets, capturing a large v-shaped portion of the road as it quickly passed under the front of the car. Random scattered thoughts sifting through my fatigued mind. Warm air trickling from the tilted vent on the left hand side of the steering wheel. Ice crystals forming in the bottom corner of the window where the condensation always forms. A heavy nostalgic feeling aching in the pit of my stomach. The feeling of time giving and pulling these moments away and emptying them of lasting substance. Everything feels so real and at the same time so unreal.

Over the past few months I’ve been looking up famous people touched with bipolar disorder and I’ve been amazed by the number of well known people that have been or who are afflicted by this disorder. Interestingly enough, it turns out that one of my favorite writers/poets/painters that I was deeply interested in while growing up and of course still am, is believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder. His name is William Blake.

From article by Peter J. Buckley, M.D
(The American Journal of Psychiatry)
“Alongside his ecstatic visions, Blake was prone to fits of severe depression. In 1800, he recounted a descent into “a Deep pit of Melancholy, Melancholy without any real reason for it.” These episodes were often followed by periods of “illumination” and intense creativity. This is highly suggestive of bipolar illness, albeit a mild form that did not disrupt his enormous creative achievement and may have been central to his transcendent artistic vision.”

I was amazed when I found his name on a list of famous people believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder. I never once thought about him in this way. However, it shines a whole new light on his works and the documented extraordinary experiences that ranged from angelic visions to his deep preoccupying insights that touched both extremes of human imagination. Perhaps there is even a subconscious hint of his bipolarity behind the title of his poem “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” or perhaps even within a few lines of his poem “Auguries of Innocence” below.

Small Excerpt from Auguries of Innocence - William Blake
Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie
When we see not thro’ the eye,
Which was born in a night to perish in a night,
When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,
To those poor souls who dwell in night;
But does a human form display
To those who dwell in realms of day.

One thing is for certain, William Blake was definitely in touch with something quite profound and amazing. The capacity of his abstract mind was immense. Perhaps encountering great shifts within his own realm of experience gave him the ability to see a world unknown to us and also gave him a hard driven impulse to try to communicate this world through his writings, poetry and art. If in fact he did suffer from bipolar disorder, I think it defends the stance that perhaps there is something extremely important for us to learn from the realms of mind that the mentally ill appear to know so well. Who knows, maybe it would open us up to a whole new way of understanding ourselves and the worlds we privately share.

Small Excerpt from Auguries of Innocence - William Blake
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

I stood in the falling snow last night and felt the cold air press up against my face. I love nights like these where the world comes to a stop and a deep natural silence fills the dark backdrop of the sky. Shadows bending over snow banked hills, warm breath evaporating into icy air. The smell of wood burning in hot bricked fireplaces. The hypnotizing patterns of spinning snow particles giving an unusual depth to empty space. A sensation of knowing your atmosphere intimately.

The world can become so mysteriously quiet when the weather has its way. No cars, no people, no noise. All the dividing features of the landscape hidden under a single thick white blanket of snow. Harsh angular lines replaced by soft gradual curves. A virgin pasture born from the sky.

The weather and time of day, what powerful effect they have on perception. What marvels they bring to the senses.

My last post “Poisonous Mind” received a few comments about identifying with thoughts and the influence this identification can have on our perception of things, and meditation was suggested as an excellent practice for loosening the influence thoughts have on our perception of who we are and our emotional reaction to the contents of thoughts. Both of which should potentially benefit a person dealing with bipolar disorder. This topic is of great interest to me, not only from a psychological perspective related to bipolar disorder, but from a philosophical perspective as well so I’ve decided to write a little about it.

From my experience of bipolar disorder, I’ve come to realize that my mood usually changes before my thoughts do. Mood being a state of being that isn’t thought about, but rather experienced. It’s a sensation deep within. Bipolar disorder affects this deep rooted sensation by shifting the sensation from sustained lows to sustained highs, which in turn affect my thoughts and behaviors.

I consider my thoughts to be more of a reflection of my mood, rather than the source of my mood. If my mood is depressed my thoughts are going to be negative, angry and/or melancholic and if my mood is hypomanic my thoughts are going to be goal oriented, excited and/or full of energy. Thoughts and mood are very closely related, but are definitely different occurrences.

I know philosophically that my identity cannot be the content of my thoughts because I’m separate from them and I can see them mentally. If I were my thoughts, then I wouldn’t be able to be separate from them and look at them from the outside. However, when I’m actively living life this clear division becomes much blurrier and I do frequently become emotionally involved in the contents of my thoughts. Merging the sensation of self and the emotional reaction to thoughts together. My thoughts then go from being a reflection of my original mood state, to being emotionally connected to my mood state and helping to further influence my sense of being.

Now where I think meditation may come in helpful with bipolar disorder, is by using it as a relaxation technique to release any emotional association with thoughts by silencing the chattering of the mind and breaking any emotional identification that may occur with thought patterns. Meditation may not be able to remove the biological origin of the mood disorder and the experience of shifts in mood, but it may be an extremely helpful exercise in helping to lessen the effects of symptomatic emotionally fueled thought patterns that occur because of the shifts in mood and prevent them from adding to the intensity or growth of the mood shift. The outcome hopefully being a more relaxed and in control state of mind. Instead of letting your mind run with your thoughts, fueled by your mood, to become emotionally charged. You instead try to relax and focus your mind on something else like breathing or bodily motion and let the thoughts drift away. I guess the objective is to bring your attention away from the constant distraction of your emotionally charged thoughts and try to stabilize your attention by focusing on one thing.

Up until this point in my life I’ve read many books that touch on meditation, but I haven’t formally practiced meditation in a consistent manner. I have had my moments where I’ve sat silently and watched the contents on my mind while focusing on my breathing, but I’m definitely not an expert in the practice. I do however fully support the practice because from what I’ve read and understood, it psychologically and philosophically makes sense and so do many of the insights derived from lifetime practitioners, but ultimately my support stems from supporting a practice that promotes inner peace and deeper understanding of our experience of being, which ultimately will then become our thoughts and the world we live in.

My ability to engage in passive conversation has left me. I can’t trust my mind right now, it has become poison. There is no contentment behind my words. My eyes have become hypercritical and ultra particular. I must refrain from participating. I lose control too easily. It’s the momentum of thoughts and how they begin to snowball. I get carried away by the compulsion of my ideas. The confrontation pulsating through my body. One taste and I spiral into disregard for everything. Committed to a path that I will soon regret. Forever tainting my appearance to the world that knows so little about what is happening inside my head. I must stop. My future depends on it.

Is it that life truly is this empty, forcing us to build elaborate mental constructs of enjoyment to fulfill our innate hedonistic brains, or has depression distorted my ability to see things as they truly are?

Since September, my mood has dropped and with it my whole way of thinking and experiencing life. I fluctuate now between moderately depressed, mildly depressed and occasionally a baseline mood that is sprinkled here and there with mild elevation. For the most part though, I’m feeling low, withdrawn, empty and detached. I feel like I’m going through the movements of life, just for the sake of going through the movements. There is no real drive, ambition or great appreciation for anything. I do things because I feel a social/family pressure that pushes me to do things that way and not because I truly want to.

This really affects my perception of my life because the emotional cause for everything is missing. I perceive things in an existential form detached from the meaning and emotional context that created the situations. It’s not that I don’t want to experience the emotional cause for behaviors and actions, it’s that it seems impossible to do so. I always feel like I’m faking it.

Occasionally it feels like I’m the only person in the world who has awoken from the dream and realizes that everyone else is still dreaming. I can’t connect to them because I can’t see or feel what they see or feel. Everyone around me seems so emotionally involved with each other and the meaning/value of their relationships. There reactions and involvement appear to be so authentic and real. They seem directly connected and fulfilled by their common experiences, whereas I’m left feeling empty, detached and unfulfilled by the same experiences or maybe I’m just depressed and having trouble feeling life as it truly is.

Every morning that I wake now I have a strange anxiety in the pit of my stomach. A deep sentimental yearning towards something I can’t put my finger on. I’m not sure what it is, but I can feel it from my midsection up into my throat. A feeling of my body knowing something without my mind understanding. Maybe an anticipatory subconscious emotion rooted in some deep cellular memory. It feels like a strange nostalgia directed towards my future.

During this early morning hour I lie with my head pressed against my pillow, gazing into the ceiling and letting my thoughts drift like soft white clouds. Everything is quiet and calm. I can feel my existence, every ounce of my life. The sound of my breath and heart beat deep in my ears. This is where I come to escape. I’m in my most comfortable place where I’m closest to my thoughts, but I can feel my imminent future staring at me from the foot of my bed. My body knows it’s there, even though my eyes can’t see it. How am I going to get up? I don’t want to leave.

The sunlight is starting shine through my bedroom window. It’s getting late. I have to get to work. I keep glancing at my alarm clock every couple of minutes hoping that maybe time will stop or move backwards. My thoughts begin to drift again, but it’s not the same. I can feel the pressure of time pulling my thoughts away. I glance at the clock again. Shit, I’m late. Stress adrenalin begins to circulate through my body. I’ve found my way to get up, a potential crisis has taken control of my movements. I sit up and go through my morning routine, once again lacking true motivation and intent. If only I looked forward to these days, getting up would be so much easier.