THE COLOUR OF MADNESS
A Blog About Living with Mental Illness
Psychosis or Spirituality?
The world has birthed us right inside the greatest work of fiction ever written, the one we write for ourselves. Life. It is a book only we can read and only in the capacity afforded to us. We share part of our stories with other people allowing our knowledge and our understanding to grow continuously and yet only as we allow it to. We are its author, its creator, our chapters can never be rewritten, however with our choosing, the storyline has the capacity to twist and turn or even change genres entirely at any point.
This realisation allows us to create our own experiences, forge our own destinies and take whatever lessons we feel we need to learn on a spiritual level away from it.
Some of us have been gifted with intense experiences that differ our interpretations of reality from that of the wider population, our books may be firmly placed in the fantasy sections of other people’s libraries and yet to us they are biographical. These experiences will tend go one of two ways depending on your existing knowledge or beliefs as well as emotional state.
For example, if your soul is clouded by doubt, fear and anger, your mind may begin to interpret that fear using known imagery, this is where people may hallucinate, hear and see things other people can’t that terrify them, for example, characters from scary movies or what they perceive to be the devil and you may react fearfully or even dangerously. They may believe that they have done something terrible or that others are planning to do something terrible to them, it’s an awful lonely & frightening experience.
Alternatively, people begin to suddenly understand the immense power of their mind in a positive way and spiritual way, but as a new experience, they are unable to quantify it and in order to make sense of things they will also associate their experiences with ‘known imagery’ for example, they may have a personal belief in Jesus, so suddenly when their heart and soul makes this intense connection with the universe and they are flooded with feelings love and peace, in an effort to understand this new sensation they interpret it through what they have read in the bible, possibly believing that they are either a messenger for, or Jesus himself.
Ancient societies nurture such experiences as spiritual awakenings, usually a grandparent or tribal elder would take the effected person under their wing and mentor them through the experience so that they could learn and grow from it, many going on to become highly respected spiritual healers within their communities.
Buddhists refer to what might be labelled as a part of my ‘psychotic mania’ by people in my own culture as ‘enlightenment’, it’s a good word for it – as from my own experiences it can be a truly beautiful feeling of safety, completion and lightness which is obtained in such a way that you feel that you are no longer separate from the whole of the universe, everything seems to make complete sense, all of the whys are answered, you are no longer affected by the constraints of gravity, you are within it, part of its very fabric.
When you achieve this state, similarly to a dream and your mind can wander unbridled by the manmade mental restrictions of society, hallucinations readily occur. You are limitless, you can do anything at all that you want to and suddenly you are intensely aware of that fact.
Perhaps the difference between the Buddhists that strive to achieve enlightenment and my own experiences are that Buddhists train their minds to be free from ill will and fear for years allowing them to gain a pure and positive experiences, mine, while for the most part overwhelmingly positive, are thrust upon me strongly and at random whether my mind has been in a prepared state of purity or not and non dependent of which ‘me’ is running the show, while I find great comfort in it, some of us find it overwhelming and frightening.
No matter what story you relate to the most and choose to interpret your experience with, once you have made a soul level connection to the universe, felt its pull, meshed with its energy, you can never, ever forget it, it has become part of you.
After having these experiences, I became aware that all of the daily goings on around me are utterly meaningless to my soul or this higher self, and in fact the heaviness of life belongs only to my body and ego. I admit that it’s hard to discern if you are spending too much time in the spiritual world where you feel complete and don’t feel the need to connect with other humans physically as you already connect with the entirety of everything spiritually or too much time in the physical one where everybody else lives.
Speaking as me, right now, I see the world as merely a beautiful and amazing play thing, a delusion created by my own imagination that folds around the delusions of others to create a virtual world in which we coexist.
Western society has a habit of referring to these experiences, both positive or negative, as psychosis which must be stopped immediately with drugs. If your experiences are terrifying and destructive, then if medicine can help that I am all for it, however, personally I feel these experiences are mostly ones of growth and that fears related to them are based on stigma and concern for the opinions of others which are worries that disappear completely when I am in this state of Nirvana.
I feel that when you pray to God, really you are communicating with your higher self, your higher self can only influence your own part of this delusional world we have all created, it can influence your emotions, your reactions and your perspectives but not directly affect that of those around you. Your higher self can give you the ability to influence, through writing, art or speech, but ultimately the choices made by other individuals belong to them, their perceptions based on their own experiences and beliefs.
You cannot pray to God for money and expect $100 bills to rain down from the sky, the material world is a human creation. You can however channel your higher self to improve your sense of self and increase your awareness, being more confident and aware opens doors in the physical realm, it increases your ability to influence others and may indeed lead you to monetary gain. But it is not a ‘God’ that has ‘blessed’ you with this financial wealth, you have either created it for yourself or it has been gifted to you by someone else.
I believe in the power of prayer as collective thought because I believe that energy attracts like energy which may influence the physical world. When we think about things more deeply we increase our awareness of what was already there to begin with, you know how you buy a green car and suddenly you notice all the other people around you that also drive green cars? They were always there, but as they were not relevant to your inner world you had subconsciously limited your awareness of them. Making yourself more aware has the flow on effect of increasing relevancy and thus making you even more aware, a self-perpetuating cycle.
Universal connections are everywhere, thought of as coincidences by part of me, messages by other parts of me but made relevant through the awareness they have brought. Whether these connections are seen or not is entirely up to the individual’s readiness to see them. We march forward through our own perspectives, a billion different view-points for the same thing, each of them correct.
We leap forth out of the faith built from what we have witnessed ourselves and from what others have led us to believe.
Learning, believing, interacting – everything is simply a construct of our own personal ideals. If you want something enough, it will come, spiritual wealth is utterly fulfilling and not to be confused with monetary wealth which is absolutely not, they are quite different things.
Spiritual wealth is attained by forming an emotional connection to God. No, not a God, not a man sitting in the sky judging you while claiming to love you, for God is not a singular physical being, God is everything. God is the air that you breathe the trees that shelter you, the thunderstorms and the soil beneath your feet. God doesn’t love you, you don’t need to earn God’s acceptance because God IS love, God IS energy, and emotion.
Judgement is entirely of your own making, based on the beliefs you have internally created through things you have witnessed or been taught. There is no right or wrong in God or nature, purely a state of perfect balance and when things become unbalanced through human interference or otherwise, it slowly works to correct itself again.
One Comment on “Psychosis or Spirituality?”
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THE COLOUR OF MADNESS 
This is so deeply profound and beautiful, and as much as I would to love to join you in this completely manic and blissful place, I cannot afford another hospitalization in my life right now, so I am physically FIGHTING this intense feeling of actual joy that has been beckoning me for a while. It is so INTENSELY sad for me that I have to turn my back on this amazing bliss that I can absolutely cry right now, truly. I am seriously in pain reading this post, because as much as my mind. body and soul wishes to go to this place SO MUCH, I KNOW it will lead to hospitalization. I might not be able to follow your posts anymore until you get out of this manic state, because it is damaging to me. I wish you well.
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