Bipolar Inquiry

Does stress lead to making different meaning outside the spectrum of regular consensus perception in bipolar disorder


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I can see the value of stress in a way stress as allostatic load when it accumulates for me for example I have low tolerance to stress and when it accumulates I can get to a place where I'm in so called delusion or hallucination and these delusions and hallucinations are actually ascribing different meanings to reality and in a way if the reality is created in such a way that it's just stressful in a way when that adds up to a certain point it should accumulate in a way that creates it so the organism starts to make different meaning because if it's so stressful that the meaning is stress and suffering and pain because whatever it is that one has been programmed to see and experience and believed to be real and meaningful is now a source of pain it's giving stress and so that's stress once it gets to a certain point actually initiates a response in the organism such that they hallucinate or have delusions which is basically making different meaning outside the spectrum of regular consensus perception because perception has to perceive something else in order to move toward and create that and that that other perception could be just as true as consensus reality but since it's not consensus reality at seen as hallucination and delusion when really it's reality testing it's actually trying to push the spectrum of consciousness of what is acceptable reality to be something of different meaning maybe not necessarily better per se but the organism naturally moves towards wanting to create other meaning because this stressful meaning is painful and no longer meaningful it's actually leading towards destruction of the organism so the organism tries desperately to find other perceptions it finds meaningful and some of them actually can be even more destructive to the organism and cause more suffering and it seems like when a person goes outside that norm of consensus and to say mania and it's like ecstatic and and supposedly positive now to come back to consensus one goes into those negative things and one actually that could be part of it to not go too far out of consensus reality because then one is in isolation and so the negative scary stuff starts to happen so then one goes back to find safety with people because otherwise one which is go off into personal ecstasy and we would all just go our separate ways from each other we wouldn't even need each other anymore so the the coming back is sort of scary and it is a requirement so we then again need each other the trouble is upon return we're often pathologized and so one gets stuck in being pathologizing is never able to really harvest those new perceptions and those new meanings and there's the scary meanings to which can still be learned from as well I can just really see these stresses their perceptual stresses they're perceiving the same reality and being stressed about it and more and more because one is repeating the same stressful daily routine and then if somebody has more stressful events then it can lead to that point where consciousness wants to perceive something else that's meaningful in order to pretty much save the organism from continuing with that path that's not leading to anything meaningful because we might need meaning more than we need pleasure pleasure doesn't really sustain us for that long I was also thinking about the importance of the incongruence of moods and experiences so in the last week I wasn't feeling as good as usual if you want to call it that and I actually feel it's important that sometimes my mood be lower than what it is that I'm supposedly experiencing because if it was always the same in terms of if I'm doing something good then I feel good if I'm doing something not as good I feel bad then that would actually delude me into thinking I actually know what's happening and I know the meaning of things so in a way having incongruent mood is a way just to remind me like I have no idea what's going on and that's good because if I think I actually know what's going on then that can lead me into being too consistent and boring I also feel like there's there's ego math and there's heart math and the heart math has to do with synchronicity in the ego math has to do with habit we need to hallucinate and more meaningful reality and this increase in stress actually helps to facilitate that I've been reading a little bit more of Timothy Leary's book your brain is God and there's a few really good parts in it but I just came across this one on page 103 at the bottom he's basically talking about the number of people who have gone through this other conscious experience mainly in terms of using illicit drugs like marijuana and LSD the whole book is related to LSD but I think it's really congruent with just going into altered states of consciousness without using drugs some people go into that it that way and some people have it happen without doing anything like that which just shows it's a natural process that can either be facilitated by using some kind of drug or it can happen without that but at the bottom he says if we add those millions of institutionalised mystics who have had involuntary psychedelic experiences this group swells to astounding proportions so he's talking about people going into other states of consciousness through drugs or not but he says millions of institutionalised Americans which are the people that have been institutionalized through supposin men's mental illness because he talks about having involuntary psychedelic experiences and that's sort of what map consciousness is it's an involuntary psychedelic experience it gets our inner pharmacy going and creates in inner psychedelics so it was just really interesting to see him write that at the end of this book about how there are people who he calls institutionalized mystics this book was published in nineteen eighty-two so luckily since then less people are institutionalized but people are still put on pharmaceuticals which is like a chemical ego band-aid and he says on page 95 after you turn on don't spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty that's very much part of our religion the glorification the acting out the expression of what you have learned so I feel like manic consciousness is sort of like acting it out then one goes through psychosis and back to regular consciousness usually medicated consciousness but I feel like what he's talking about there is what I was mentioning earlier about embodying mania so here I'm sitting unfolding context from myself in self dialogue but at some point it's also about self embodied mania and he talks about getting one's place in order and he even talks about moving if place isn't really in harmony with with consciousness and I think with all the noise here that really resonates with me to move and on page 66 he says he's talking about being in an altered state of consciousness and then it's he says that a person can realize ultimate truth if there's enough preparation beforehand he says otherwise he cannot benefit now and must wander into lower and lower conditions of hallucinations until she drops back into routine reality so again that's talking about how when one goes up into higher states of consciousness one then when they're coming back down goes through sort of scary hallucinations before one reattaches to reality so the fact that one through manian psychosis has that happen it's the same if somebody takes an illicit drug it's usually happy stuff followed by some scary stuff and on the bottom of page 65 he says liberation is the nervous system devoid of mental conceptual redundancy and so I feel like he's talking about the ego loop voice that just keeps talking on and on that's redundant it's old it's boring its programming and so when we're liberated we are free of that and he says on page 48 modern quantum physics is currently producing scenarios involving multiple realities indeed infinite universes determined by the attitudes and mental structures and measurements of the observer so the attitudes and mental structures of myself in manic consciousness is very different from in regular consciousness now I want to embody my mania I can do that to some extent but I also need to reorganize my reality so that it's easier to maintain those attitudes and mental structures because what I've talked about too is how it's actually not safe to be super ecstatic all the time it's may be safe to be ecstatic and silly and playful when being with children or something like that but otherwise it's safer just to be sort of our robotic self and on page 46 he uses some language that i was using similar language she says now 20 years later we are harvesting the fruits of this disorganized mass brain scrambling so he was talking about the use of LSD and other psychedelics and how it was like a brain scrambling well I feel like map consciousness is another type of brain scrambling it's the universe scrambling our brains and it scrambles the ego for sure it suspends the ego temporarily and scrambles it but I find it interesting that he uses the word harvesting and brain scrambling and he talks about brain casts in the book he talks about how gaya has a division of labor of consciousness so certain brains are better at certain tasks in humanity I almost feel like the different symptoms of mental illness are some of those tasks in a way like receiving special messages or or hallucinations or things seeing things that aren't really there but are there for some people to see and it could be even that over time for example there are the voice hearers and then there are the vision Sears there are people that have different perceptual diversity and those could be just other intelligences and brain casts and those ones are the ones that are not being allowed to flower he has another book called psychopharmacology the politics of and I just flipped to a page it's page 64 and it says does LSD cause psychosis and he says psychosis is a sudden unprepared for confrontation with levels of energy that bewilder and terrorize you a psychotic person or person having a prolonged LSD state is suffering from a level of consciousness first reported by Buddha over two thousand years ago if you treat a psychotic as though he were looking at you with 2 billion years of neurological perspective I think you would find yourself able to understand and be understood by him that's a pretty good explanation and I think that a lot of the extrapolate of learning after the fact comes from that experience of being given all those different perspectives and on another page he says we need a language of inner space and that's sort of what I'm creating his context of inner space of map consciousness in retrospect in retrospect but also to be able to provide context for when those states of consciousness happen again and he is another vet on the politics of ecstasy and he says the first problem is to know something about the different levels of consciousness unless you have some model or language for describing different states of brain function you're operating in a state of confusion so I I feel like when I talk to myself about this stuff I'm talking about different levels of consciousness and different experiences I've had in order to have that context to speak about it and understand it and I'm not just doing it in order to investigate my experiences but also to talk about it in terms that I would like to understand it moving forward and maybe not exactly understand it but at least have a web of understanding and meaning and language to have a framework that if I have an experience it fits somewhere in there if there's all these different lines of understanding if something else happens that's new and it'll be likely knew because it's not old and I'd rather allow it to be new rather than interpreting it as something that's already happened while it's happening I think I'd rather fit it in somewhere after the fact but while it's happening let it unfold but what I'm saying is if I have such a diverse context there's less chance that something will happen that's so far out that it will scare me whereas if I've never created this context if I just have my linear ego understanding and anything that happens that's even a slight deviation from regular consciousness it's going to freak me out but by having this fast web so many different possibilities can unfold and I'm not necessarily going to be afraid of them I'll be more curious about them allow them to unfold and then put them in some kind of context after the fact and I think this has already happened because I have had a few experiences I don't even remember what they were now because they didn't get so out there that I was describing strange meaning to them they were perhaps uncomfortable and then there was probably something that I was having a sense of that was uncomfortable but it wasn't this big leap that was this huge meaning outside the web of context besides just discomfort and maybe some kind of uncomfortable story trying to assert itself but since I wasn't becoming afraid of it there was no fuel to make that story create more levels of the story that were more and more fearful because I was becoming more and more fear so in that way it was cut off from the source of energy but what allowed me to contain it was the context so for example if I was from a culture that had a bunch of context for other worldly experiences like the shamanic stuff if I started experiencing something like that that I had heard of I would probably go for help knowing that I would be supported through that and I would be less fearful knowing that but in society as it is right now we don't have that context so then anything outside of that becomes terrifying after after a certain amount of time and that fear fuels it makes it worse and worse until a person has to go for emergency help versus having a context in the community where people are supported through it because the community has the context so what I'm saying is I've sort of created that context for myself in a way and I did have some uncomfortable experiences and a pile up of stress that could almost put me in a state and I talked about I think in the last video how it seems like the accumulated stress puts people with that propensity and consciousness into a state where they might have supposed delusions and hallucinations which great different meaning which is creating meaning away from the path one was on which in a way it keeps a person on the path towards supposed mental illness but these delusions are trying to move us outside of regular ego consciousness but they get entrapped again by the medical system most often because we don't have that context to understand it so I'm at least trying to create that context with myself and I would invite anyone else to do the same provided one has the right safety measures in place I feel less fearful knowing I have safety measures in place which will which will mean it's less likely for me to become more fearful which is more stress which would accentuate fearful experiences in altered states of consciousness and i would like to embody my mania and move towards that but i do understand that if i go so far into that i might have to come back through scary stuff in order to reconnect with consensus reality and I guess that's sort of the next part that would be cool to do it seems right now that I might want to look at a few books in order to I don't know if it's convinced myself or what but maybe convince myself to leave my job and and focus more on what it is I'm drawn towards which is not pathologizing these altered states and maybe creating context and save space and safety for people to pathologize themselves less and then of course move towards one's highest vision of oneself for the good of all and I don't think that can be done through peer support and I've talked about that a lot lately and I didn't want to turn myself dialogue into that sort of thing but if I do leave soon I will be leaving in a good place which sometimes it's harder to do than leaving in a bad place like if I was to go into crisis again and it's strange to feel like we'll never know what it was like to walk out that path to the end because I left when I was still could take in a few more steps but it just doesn't feel right I was also looking in this book the spiritual gift of madness and I talked about it in one of my first videos when I was just getting going I was reading from it a bit to see what I wanted to talk about and I feel like I've talked a lot about this to myself which I'll still do but the next bit is how do I start to talk about other people with this about this and so for the next little while I might be looking at books a little bit just to help with my resolve in the direction that I want to go and this book the spiritual gift of madness i have like a lot of tabs and then a lot of highlighting and i came when i open the page i basically open to this page and it says on page 265 one does not have to repudiate the doctrine of mental illness as i do to see on an objective level that the medical model has been extraordinarily destructive even to those who embrace it so this page is sort of trying to taunt me to the side of the medical model is totally bad and in most of my videos even though I'm critical of the medical model I say well that's whatever is helpful and I still am in the medical model both in my work and I do take medication I have a psychiatrist and one of my theories is if I stop working in the field it's perhaps possible that i won't need the medication because it's sort of stressful working in a paradigm that i would like to transcend and see other people begin to transcend and so this chapter is sort of this whole book is very critical of the medical paradigm and part of me doesn't want to let it go because i have this sense that if I need help I'll likely be taken back into the paradigm so if I'm completely against it i might go kicking and screaming which would get worse treatment then if I was like yeah you need help come and help me but another statement it says on page 265 is it is now absolutely clear that diagnosing people with schizophrenia or bipolar illness giving them high doses of medications over long periods and not talking to them about their experiences produces a chronically disabled population and there's a reference there and then it says the psychiatric model produces the data that seems to validate it a chronically disabled population and I experience that when i went to the psych ward in April and I was put on a medication that wasn't helping me and I had to switch doctors in order to be switched off that medication and had I not been able to switch doctors to switch off that medication I don't know how I would have been able to resolve that so now I'm really afraid of going back because of that kind of treatment possibility but I created an advanced directive and representation agreement but basically the medication they gave me made me worse which just made it look like it was worsening of my mental illness which I knew in my heart wasn't true I knew it was the medication and when I was off the medication after month and a half I was back to being fine so often the treatment can make things worse and then a person that doesn't know the difference would never know that it wasn't their mental illness making them worse that it was actually the treatment and on the next page 266 it says the psychiatric model has no value even for those who claim it works for them the only honest indeed the only compassionate way to talk to patients who think they are mentally ill is to tell them that they have been misinformed and deceived they are not mentally ill they do not have a chemical imbalance but they had undergone a crisis they have dealt with a difficult problem in living and they do possess the inner resources to overcome their personal problems and contribute to saving the planet and they do not need toxic psychiatric drugs and it goes on to say that we shouldn't even tolerate the psychiatric paradigm so those are some pretty strong words and this whole book is filled with some pretty strong words it's the spiritual gift of madness by Seth Farber those words were from his book just little blurbs but I recommend buying the book if you want to learn more about this and I feel like I'll be studying a little bit of this plus some other books that I have that I read a couple years ago and I haven't really read them since yeah this book has this book has so many amazing ways of saying things on page two it says at the bottom people who have been defined as mentally ill reframe their conditions and celebrate unusual some call them spectacular ways of processing information and emotion so there's just so many good points in here and I feel like a lot of us have this context already it's not like we really need to read it in a book reading it in a book is more validating than anything else so reading some of this can be validating to what it is we've already experienced and i'm not sure what happens in order to actually create this context and this is something i've talked about on numerous occasions on page 123 it says psychiatry does not solve this problem of how to help the awakened person live in this society the goal is to adjust the person troubled by the insanity of the world to the normal world at all costs better to drug him back to sleep so it's all written in books and staff I've talked about from my own experience is sort of unfolding my own context that it's not really my own it would be similar to a lot of people who have gone through this and I just wanted to do a lot of self dialogue in order to vocalize it because I think that's a lot more powerful than reading it in a book on one's own because I already read these books a couple of years ago which I forget I forget what I said a couple weeks ago and I just remember reading the books and thinking wow this is all in these books and I always felt that that was how it was for me from the beginning but I didn't actually start to investigate any kind of books on alternates for a number years I just was having fun and I would actually like to go back to having fun but it'd be nice to be able to go back to having fun and be off medication and be out of this not fun paradigm oh one thing I came up with today that I forgot to talk about and it's totally unrelated but I realized that I realized that in terms of air pollution from vehicles and things like that all that oil as carbon is like in the ground and we're harvesting it and turning it into different products which is sort of distributing it so cars burn it up and it goes into the air and I was thinking to myself well if all that oils date in the ground all that carbon would just stay in the ground maybe eventually turn of diamonds or something but then it wouldn't really be able to be used again so it feels to me like our air pollution is actually a good thing in a way because it's distributing the carbon all over the earth again and it'll eventually be utilized by something it'll probably kill us before it really kills everything but in a way if it kills us then all the carbon will be everywhere because it's an air and it's falling everywhere sort of like carbon rain in a way and it's generally bad but in a way from carbons perspective it's kind of good and maybe from organisms that use carbon and it's going to create a selective pressure for something around that kind of carbon there's another blurb in the book that talks about being able to remain calm while in a very scary psychosis and i feel like i may need to develop the courage to offer a potato chip to an alien standing right in front of me

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Bipolar InquiryBy Alethia