Bipolar Inquiry

I thought of an insight related to buckminster fuller's idea of synergy indirectly at least and if it's about the quote that I mentioned about how something about how we need some spontaneous social behaviors in order to save the planet and I think mania is one of those spontaneous social behaviors or it's an energy that produces spontaneous social behavior and it does it in a way that's not contrived it's sort of a moment to moment thing and a person is walking around attempting to basically get people to play with them in a way and this play could be a spontaneous social behavior that we need but what happens is after a certain period of time that energy fizzles out either because it's too powerful or because a person runs into too many buzz kills and at first we're able to ignore the buzz kills and sort of just keep going or insert our positive projections of their experience of the other person's interpretation of it to sort of uplift it to the next level meaning if I'm in mania I might do something and somebody responds in a way that could be good and could be bad but since I'm in such a positive state I interpret their response in the positive way and that keeps me going even though inside their head they might have been kind of wondering what the heck that was all about and even that can be seen as a positive thing creating some cognitive dissonance or a pattern interrupt in people's daily monotonous life and I was thinking too that in mania a person is generally at least at some point very social and even if the person's not typically programmed to be very social they end up very social in mania and the socialness is trying to create more socialness or connections or bonding oxytocin experiences and then what happens is after that certain period of time where it fizzles out because it's not participated with a person really has to be participated with and uplifted I don't think they have to but it's trying to maybe create little sparks in all the people interacting with the manic person and then eventually those sparks are the dissipation of the energy it gets diffused out to the populace maybe that's what happens it's like all the energy is contained in that one person and they go around spreading and spreading and spreading it until they've drained their battery and then what happens is a person that's been relating in mania in all those mostly positive ways released for a good period of time ends up draining months battery and then going into mania or psycho I mean sorry psychosis or depression and then a person might have a team of say one between one and twenty people supporting them through the depression it's like well when I was in mania why didn't have 20 people around me uplifting me in and playing with me and having fun with me all the time like a solid good constant team and then it happens instead in the bad states the crisis the fallout the depression the the psychosis and then we have this big team of professionals and family and friends if they stay around to help us out why are there people helping us out when we're up here maybe they are and maybe people that we meet randomly as strangers are helping us out and it's almost like that energy is better dissipated in the strangers but then as soon as we go back to our family they have disbelief about how wonderful the world is it's not even disbelief it can be seen as disbelief about how wonderful the individual person is and the family doesn't see it that way because the family knows the person as a certain person and they're projecting their own crap on to this empty space of energy and sharing and that is a buzzkill for sure if a person was able to just go off and never come back maybe they would stay in that high energy state but it's almost like the the habit which is the family the habitat and the habits of the person are like a funnel that is eventually going to swallow the person up in terms of the family being well why aren't you doing what yo

I want to talk a little bit more about what I was talking about yesterday which had to do with talking openly about experiences that we've had in our different altered states of consciousness and in my case my altered states of consciousness resulted in a mental health diagnosis of bipolar one with psychotic features and the conversations that I'm talking about are not necessarily about disputing a diagnosis or trying to get rid of it or explain it away but rather to expand the conversation and expand the language and the vocabulary that we use to describe some of our inner subjective experiences relating to the diagnosis or you know the whole process before diagnosis in my case I was in an altered state for two months before I was hospitalized and then given a diagnosis and during those two months I would have never guessed that at the end of it all it was going to be explained in terms of a mental health diagnosis it felt like some sort of spiritual journey and spiritual experience a lot of it was really scary and a lot of it was really blissful but I never thought that I was mentally ill I was told that so if i could imagine that if I could imagine going back to how I felt about the situation on a daily basis as I was experiencing it before I was given a mental health diagnosis I could probably share a lot of different things if I if I could pretend that I was never given the diagnosis and then you know I just got through that crisis without and got back to some sort of normal functioning without being given a diagnosis and without being given medication I know that didn't happen what I'm saying is I would have a very large amount of things to share and talk about and different wonderings and curiosities and and I would be sort of in awe of the experience and I would think it was kind of mysterious and wonderful and magical even though there was a lot of really scary stuff to I'm not trying to glorify these states as something that I would want to exist in all the time I'm just saying that in retrospect if I was to talk about it without having a diagnosis I would share something a lot different than after I was diagnosed and after I was diagnosed I was told how to interpret everything that went on and just explain it away in terms of a mental illness and and basically that gave me the impression and it wasn't an impression was pretty obvious which was don't talk about what happened there's no point in talking about what happened and what you experience because it was just a mental illness and I think that is a mistake I feel that there's a lot of really interesting conversation that can come out of the experiences and that maybe it's conversation that we need to start having and again that doesn't mean that i say i completely disagree with my diagnosis I'm just saying that's a very small amount of the overall story that's part of the story but it's not the entire story and I think that you know it's troublesome to assume that just because I have that diagnosis that that's the end of the story in terms of everything that I experienced you know that would be like saying to someone who has cancer to just say I have cancer and not share any of the story your struggles or or anything about it just say I've cancer so if I'm supposed to just say well I have bipolar disorder and not say anything that I went through and I have shared stuff before but a lot of its in terms of like my recovery journey so it's like well these are the symptoms i had and this is how I've gone about my recovery journey and that um you know that's usually for like a hopeful story for people to get better but you know that's like the diagnosis assumes there's going to be some kind of recovery story and so a recovery story implies a diagnosis and a diagnosis implies they'll be some kind of recovery story well what about all the other stories yes there is a story of recovery but there's also stories from the experiences and what that meant and what it mean

I believe I read in the book interpersonal neurobiology that we have an inner sense of interoception and I think in the book it was talking about how we can sort of feel our internal organs and stuff if we if we really tune into sensing that but there's I believe he also talked about just an inner sense in terms of sensing our thoughts and our feelings and our emotions and if you think about the sense organs like the ears or the eyes those structures can actually be diseased like you can get an eye disease or an ear disease of some sort and it'll affect your sense of hearing and so with the interoception or the inner sense perhaps that can get a dis ease as well and it changes the way we sense our inner experiences actually feel that we have a certain aperture of the amount of information that we're aware of inwardly and I think that's controlled by the reticular activating system so perhaps it's the reticular activating system that gets messed up and allows way too much information to come through at the same time or for us to be aware of at the same time the subconscious mind processes you know millions of bits of information each second and I believe the reticular activating system allows us to process like 12 bits per second so it's very minute so if you can imagine that something causes that to allow way too much information through and I actually did read somewhere that if we're stressed that more bits of information are coming through so there's something to do with stress and having this happen as well so it could be that with too much stress for too long then we're having too much information and eventually you know we try to make meaning out of that information and we start to make errors in the meaning that we're trying to make and just as I say that I'm wondering because we go about our daily life and we have a certain meaning that we have in daily life and everybody is around a very similar level of meaning of just feeling I'm trying to be happy looking for happiness striving and so if mania and psychosis is almost an error in the meaning making system or the amount of information that processing and making meaning out of or noticing and all of a sudden we notice more things synchronistically because we're noticing more information to make those associations and then we start thinking wow life's magical I'm wondering if that's like a necessary evil of the brain and of the world because otherwise would we ever really adjust our level of meaning making that we make were you know even how a lot of people become really altruistic or concerned about certain causes if that person say for example was able to make a huge change in the way everybody saw a certain issue it could be an issue that we already know about but basically that would change the meaning a person seeing that maybe can change the meaning and if they're able to change the meaning and people see that whole issue differently then that changes the collective conscious and a change is sort of the level of consciousness of society because more people are consciously aware of that issue so because a person just pretend had an error in their meaning-making system and they all sudden solve all this meaning somewhere and decided to act and change the meaning for the whole or at least for part that changes the collective consciousness and if that never happened to the person they never saw that and they never saw that as meaningful then they wouldn't have gone about working to change that issue and if that never happened they never did that that never changed it just goes along in the same monotonous way for that person and it continues the stream of monotony as a whole so in a way mania and psychosis are actually very important to make different ripples to make different waves to cause a ripple effect and the ripple effect it often causes is those person mentally ill and now we have to take care of them but imagine we actually were able to help people harvest

I've made a few videos today and I was thinking a little bit about the modality of video and kind of liking it because it's a way to have conversation and I'm having conversation at this point just with myself and it could be several months before I put this on anything where another person can listen to what I'm saying or I might never do it i'm not sure but even in playing back some of the videos to myself and listening to what i was saying and I don't plan on exactly what I'm going to say I have a general idea of something that I want to elaborate on but by listening to myself speak I realized that it's almost a way to have a conversation with myself so I had that conversation with the video camera and it was sort of it came out of nowhere in a way and then I listened to it after and it's almost like hearing the conversation for the first time and so I'm actually in a way benefiting from listening to my own video because I'm listening to how I decided to speak what it was that I wanted to elaborate on and some of the things that I say are our new in my mind where some of them I already thought of before so I like that aspect it's almost like having having that as priming for myself because sometimes I feel rather blanked about everything and in this way I can almost reinforce my views I guess it's kind of strange to have my self reinforcing my own views and over the years I've done some research on the topic and I've done quite a bit of writing and I find writing difficult because it's very linear it's it's got to be polished and I just said it's got to be and I don't even think that's a real sentence yet I can get away of saying it because it's a conversation and I like that conversational aspect and and really I just want to I just want to talk about looking at mental health differently and I have a diagnosis of bipolar one and I really feel that I can still utilize my diagnosis and at the same time talk about increased and ever-expanding ways to talk about experiences that I've had based on having this diagnosis and as a result of it so I feel like what I want to talk about is just expanding and elaborating on my diagnosis and my a subjective experience and there's usually not much of an opportunity to do that by so by making videos I have that opportunity and another thing I want to do perhaps is translate some of the things that I've written into video because again a lot of my writing isn't polished and then sort of separate ideas and I don't know if I really have anything to write that's polished that's like a perfect message of some kind my main messages you know who wants to think and feel and see mental health differently and talk about it differently and share about it differently it's not oh this is how you should think about it well this is how you should share its where's the sharing beyond just this is my recovery story this is how I recovered and these were my symptoms and this is what I'm doing now to feel better what about the inner subjective experience of it and really inviting conversation about it and making it as normal as talking about the dream you had last night and you know maybe it's a long dream maybe it went on for 30 days but it's still an experience and a lot of it is very harrowing tales and so just inviting conversation and talking about it and and again I feel I can say yes I have a brain disease if that's what you want to say I have you can't prove it by any test and I can't prove it by my experience that it's actually true but some authority figure is telling me that it's true so I'll say okay sure but I still have some great stories to tell and I still have more to share about it than just that one little snippet of explanation sure that's a great explanation but that doesn't mean that I don't have anything else to share about it and um I feel like talking about it more we'll invite a different way of looking at it and that doesn't mean that it's to the exclusion of that brain diseas

something I did want to talk about I don't know if I touched on and I wanted to talk about when I was mentioning that that visionary aspect comes in and sort of displaces or kicks out some of the ego elements at least temporarily is that the ego being displaced kicks out some of a person's functioning and ability perhaps and scrambles it but what happens is that a person in the visionary state they can actually acquire new abilities so a person doesn't necessarily have a disability they perhaps have different abilities and so it will be interesting to find out what it is that these abilities are that people can all of a sudden manifest just like sometimes a person that has a stroke or some kind of brain thing happen all of a sudden when they recover they are a great poet or they can write music when they've never learned music and these things are pretty rare but i feel that a person after they've gone through a mental health crisis perhaps sometimes now has a new pool of abilities to tap into and people that when they're in the extreme part of their visionary state they might feel like they're psychic they might feel like they're a profit they might feel like they're magical and maybe they are for that little time being maybe it's just a delusion whatever but how can some of those extreme traits actually get tamed down into something that is tangible on a daily basis so maybe a person that was felt like they were a prophet and they were writing a new spiritual doctrine while they were in that state maybe that person actually did connect with kind of spirituality that they want to explore when perhaps before the crisis they were an atheist or maybe a person starts like writing incessantly and then after the fact they can still write pretty well and maybe they are not channeling the type of information they were before but maybe all of a sudden they do have access to being able to write or I feel there's a lot of heart centered qualities that come into play so for example when I was in mania I felt very connected to the issue and occurrence of homelessness and before that I didn't have any real interest or thoughts about that but when I was in that state I could feel it like I know where I can sense or have a felt sense or it's like it's in within me that I can feel the empathy that empathetic resonance with the person that's homeless and I could really feel it and it was extremely painful so even though the manic state is very beautiful and wonderful and happy I also experienced a lot of pain in that I was so open and I was so vulnerable and I was so as if there was no ego of my own self to block me from resonating with whoever it was that I was perceiving at the moment so if I was looking at a little child I would be in just like Glee and happiness and how wonderfully happy they are or if I saw a parent yelling at their child I would just kind of be mad like you know you don't need to do that and um and then if I saw like homeless person I would feel incredible pain and sadness and and freezing cold and just it's almost like since I was nothing as an ego I was just whatever I wherever I was I was what that situation was and I could feel it and now imagine if we were like that all the time if all of us could really sense what we were seeing so if I if somebody looked at a homeless person they felt what it was like to be homeless they didn't feel yadda yadda ya goin on about what's for dinner thinking about what happened at work and looking at it and walking by which means not actually seeing anything at all not seen so this ego and monologue and yet yammering on actually is a protection mechanism because it blocks whatever it is that's really there because whatever is going on in the Yammer is not what's really there it's just you hammering and it actually prevents action so going back to when I manic and there's no real yammering and I'm really there with what's happening in the moment I have to go help that homeless perso

so I was thinking about dreams and how dreams at night are the brains way of trying to bring order to the day's experience or past day's experiences and so at night a person may or may not dream and they might dream about something that happened during the day or they could dream about something from the past in this way the brain is sort of continuing to think while it's asleep it's not quiet and sometimes people don't dream at all or at least they don't remember their dreams and to me a person that dreams may be trying to work stuff out in their life and in the same way a person that has psychosis or mania which is like having dream elements projected into daily life maybe needing to work out some internal stuff unfinished business and things to a higher degree than the people that manage to do it through dreams and interestingly enough many times when somebody goes into a state of psychosis or mania they haven't been sleeping so perhaps they haven't been sleeping that haven't been dreaming or maybe it's that they are dreaming but they're awake dreaming so their sleep time that's usually sleep dreaming is now still dreaming time but it's while the person is awake so they're not getting sleep plus the dream elements are being projected and causing trouble in daily life like say what's called hallucinations or delusions which could just be like sleepwalking while actually awake and that's just something I'm thinking about I'm not saying this is true or it's just it's just a conversation and I feel it's important to talk about the stuff and think about it differently because it's it's so fascinating and I'm speaking about it from my own experience not from oh I read this in a textbook it could be in a textbook somewhere or in a book somewhere but from my own experience it does feel like I'm sort of awake in a dreamland and maybe we're all awake in a dreamland but the dream element shuts off for the most part in most people but perhaps if we're not sleeping the dream element comes in and messes up the daily reality but why do we dream at all it seems like it's the subconscious way of reorganizing stuff so basically this dreaming while awake could be a way to reorganize a person's reality because there's elements that need to be reorganized and this could in my case I experienced trauma and it was hard for my brain to deal with that trauma so a way for it to be dealt with was perhaps to create a a mental health crisis or challenge which definitely made my internal subjective reality not really congruent with the outer reality and this is just perhaps a way of the psyches healing process I believe in holotropic breathwork they they talk about how the psyche is always attempting to heal itself it's a self-healing mechanism so psychosis and mania could be some kind of self-healing process but it's met with opposition it's not with the interpretation of being a disease like a permanent thing when it's not a permanent state most times people don't stay in that kind of state forever and coming out of it is usually attributed to medication but how many people are allowed to possibly go through the process without medication and perhaps maybe it would resolve eventually on its own if it's a healing mechanism a healing process perhaps it eventually corrects itself just like if we're sleeping and we have a dream eventually the dream stops eventually we wake up if we were to thank everybody that was sleeping was like dead that and bury them before they woke up well then we would be really silly so just because that happens we never there's not much there's not many opportunities to go through it in a safe way and have it finish almost like a longer sleep dream period imagine it takes for example say it takes 30 days on average now a person needs a nice sanctuary for those 30 days to go through the process but instead it's stopped the process is stopped through chemical means and then it's assumed because a person had that happen that the

Mania is a type of monologue and so is psychosis

Relating to an internal reality less than the external

The Open Dialogue Approach developed in Finland

Nothing about us without us

Wondering if sometimes mania and psychosis have some good ideas

The best self is for the betterment of the world

A small conversation in the world that probably needs to get bigger

The spiritual gift of madness

Talking to each other as visionaries

The biggest resource on the planet is the human brain

We need a new source of ideas

Ideas from the manic mind are not from the same level of thinking as the worlds problems

Mad gifts to change the world

Buckminster Fuller said specialization is the enemy of synergy

Buckminster Fuller proposes a reframing of culture that could get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction

We need to create synergetic conversations between people who have had ideas visions and gifts in extreme states of consciousness

Perhaps that's one of the reasons why it's often so hard for people that have gone through these crises to you know reintegrate into society is that you know society is so meaningless

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Owning our own story and interpretation of what happened

Diagnosis is medically helpful but limits the core of who we are

Grieving the loss of my former self

A light hearted approach

Not taking the diagnosis to heart

I knew myself for 28 years before doctors said they knew more about me than me

From raw vegan to 50 lbs up in two months

I kind of like playing the role of crazy person

There's meaning in mental illness

A miracle in the psych ward - from desperation to inspiration - thanks to a visitor

Symptoms versus inner meaning and subjectivity

Stories in mania and psychosis not to be feared as pathological

Diagnosis is helpful to access meds, programs and resources

Scientifically valid versus feeling validated

Special messages

Being happy for no reason is infinite reasons and infinite possibilities

What matters is having open conversation about some of these experiences

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Mania and psychosis as human design to prevent coercive conditioning

Not believing the consensus reality that the leader is trying to create

Mania, psychosis and depression as manifestations of the human psyche to ensure ideas can't get too narrow

Sometimes ideas come out of nowhere

People will keep experiencing visionary states

Ego collapse and the opportunity to transform

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Practicing manic traits and neuroplasticity

Warning: Get with the manic program

Inviting out potential: Human capabilities and capacities

Playing the token crazy person

People can't see what I see

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