Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths*

Chris’s notes on his second out-of-body experience induced by sound

“It’s almost impossible not to see as though nothing’s changed since the last sound therapy. I could pretend that I’ve reached Nirvana but I’m seeing everything the way I always have, no psychedelic colors or even levitation or lightness. I believed I could leave my worldly attachments behind, but the difference has been in what I don’t see and especially don’t hear anymore. I can hear myself and see myself, and this has made me wiser. I will try to explain. It will be difficult.

During the color therapy, I saw vivid images of various scenes with various people, and I was in them too, but with a difference. I saw scenes in which I have pictured or even wanted myself to be in; they were anything from choosing what to wear in the morning to having sex with someone I’ve felt attracted to, to participating in a Nazi party rally! As it was explained to me later which I only perceived at the time, my insecurity with these images, often grotesque and violent, was rooted in the fact that I was really an observer. I placed expectations on the outcomes of each of the dramas, and with the sound therapy I was transported to each of these dramas, which were rooted in some subconscious fantasy from God knows what. As I heard the colors and shapes, I could see that my “mind” had been tricking me; or rather my body which was wanting to make my mind believe that my feelings were my body, were somehow inferior to the form of a beast which I had allowed my body to become. Indeed, having sex I could see that it was not sex but rape to my mind, and at the Nazi rally I felt a tingle in my arm as I raised it in a salute! I say only this for myself and no-one else, but what my intellect knows is “true” and horrible only exists because of the corrupt nature of my own body, and my belief in human failings.

Afterwards, the sound shaman sat me down to chat about the experience, which I needed because of wanting to understand my experience and what went on. I don’t remember everything he said to me, but I believe that it was said that in those “fantasies” was my true self, i.e. my physical manifestation that I’ve built up in the mirror is partly false and a deception. I believe that when I’ve chosen to follow an abstract goal, committing intellectually, emotionally and physically but without a true purpose then a split was caused in my being which is why I haven’t been able to find a true calling yet.”
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*Joseph Campbell

Heightened consciousness

Note from the sound shaman

“Unfortunately, modern psychotherapy continues to view the human mind as if it were simply a result of chemical processes in the brain. This viewpoint, in my opinion, could not be further from the actual truth. While our thoughts are made manifest by the “mechanical” action of our brain, our “mind” and our “emotions” are quite something else. We can measure the electrical changes in the body – the torso, the arms, the legs – when we think and emote. Thus, the action of thought and emotion affects our entire body system. Our thoughts and emotions are interpreted by our mind, and are generally reactions to some form of external stimuli such as sounds, images, scents, etc. It is our perception of these signals that forms the images, feelings and connections to short and long term memories.

Our western perspective on perception has forgotten, or simply ignores, a very important “reality” which is that there are other equally valid, if not somewhat uncommon, or misunderstood experiences and “perceptions” of the world around us. In ancient cultures, and with most indigenous peoples, the understanding of the world is augmented through “heightened consciousness” or “expanded perceptive abilities”. To reach these levels of “super consciousness”, cultures have applied various rituals and practices: meditation, chant, dance, sensory deprivation, the ingestion of plant and animal substances, etc. Through many years of training, practice, patience, and experience, the monks, sages, shamans, masters, are able to reach a level of awareness and perceptual experience, that under the microscope of modern psychoanalysis many experts would consider abnormally psychotic. In so doing, our modern society is losing (or has already lost), an opportunity, as well as a willingness to understand the true essence of who we, as human beings, really are.”

Holistic explanation of an out-of-body experience produced by sounds

I am publishing an e-mail (below) that I received from the sound shaman about Chris’s out-of-body experience while undergoing sound therapy. It is interesting how postively this is viewed by practitioners and adherents of “mysticism” (for lack of a better word) in comparison to traditional psychiatry, for which out-of-body experiences are thought to be destabilizing, particularly for someone with a mental illness diagnosis. I broached the subject last night at dinner with my dream analyst friend Val. She was very enthusiastic about Chris’s OBE and felt that it was absolutely healing.

Long ago I identified the body/mind integration as essential for Chris’s healing, but have been frustrated by not being able to find enough therapies that address this so directly. The assemblage point shift was important in this respect. Tomatis also is directed to integrating the person with the environment. I have been looking for something that potentially works faster than psychotherapy, which can take years. The goal is to feel emotionally integrated with the environment. In this respect, the Family Constellation Therapy that we undertook with Dr. Stern also fills the bill emotionally.

Note from the sound shaman
“Chris had a very interesting experience. I am very pleased as this is exactly the purpose and effect of the sounds – to expand our perception of the body and who we really are. The mind (thoughts) and the body (movement and emotions) produce changes in our electric field. The sounds – which have no specific reference in our mind (sounds that we have never heard before and so have no link to specific memories) – are perceived in the moment. Each sound is the actual vibration of light (i.e. specific colours). Our emotional system is not disturbed as the information contained in these sounds, and thus the processing work load required by the brain, is based on the natural vibration of light – slowed down by many octaves.”

Some sing low and some sing higher

I continue to mull over the events of the last few days. Chris and I both underwent sound therapy last Thursday, but my experience wasn’t nearly so dramatic. I could tell from the new way the sound was mixed, that I was being coaxed towards a deep meditative state. I almost got there, I could see how close I was to leaving my earthly baggage behind, but I got scared and refused to go any further. Maybe next time. Probably next time. I see the logic of release.

Recalling Dr. Stern’s clear alarm about Chris’s out-of-body experience and lucid dreaming, I have to smile. While I fumbled around to try to convince her that this was an all round good experience, I brought up the fact that Chris was also in the church choir, which so far nobody has questioned as being detrimental to his mental health. I told Dr. Stern that high church music whips people into a passion of ecstasy and abandonment to the Holy Spirit. This seems to me to be the opposite of grounding. “You know, Dr. Stern, I always say that the closer to the altar you get, the higher strung the people are. Who’s closest to the altar? The priest, the rabbi or the minister and the choir. In my experience, there is a higher proportion of “not regular folk” in this population compared to the population at large. I sometimes think it would be a good idea if Chris had more opportunities to split rocks and less time to spend hanging around the choir. ”

Dr. Stern looked rather stunned at my layman’s view of things. But think of it. In many ways it might be a good idea if Chris didn’t spend so much time hanging around the church, reading his Bible, and wearing choir robes. It mimics the psychotic behavior that we are trying to eliminate. Going to church may exacerbate mental illness!

I am not about to suggest to Chris that he drop choir, as it’s the first activity that he chose to resume after he got out of hospital. Playing the ball as it lies I assume that choir must be good for Chris, despite all of the reservations I have expressed. He is who he is, and he’s all about music. The church choir is a counter-intuitive activity to engage in, just as having an out-of-body experience is counter-intuitive to becoming grounded as most of us understand the concept – More African drums – less Mozart! Maybe, there is another way to look at it. Maybe we have been looking in all the wrong places, telling people to do certain things for good mental health, when we should have been telling them the opposite. I recently heard about a study on sugar’s effect on children, and guess what – the study concluded that sugar does not increase hyperactivity in children. I give up. How does anyone know what to do for good health when faced with contradictory evidence?

You go with your intuition and ignore all the noise.

Man and Superman

For the many people who cling to the notion that schizophrenia is a brain disease, I wonder how come writers spend so much time on the subject of schizophrenia as an archetypal struggle for survival and growth? Cancer and diabetes don’t get the same literary star treatment.

Today’s thought has been brought to me by my office colleague, Bruce, who handed me an article about the book The Denial of Death, from where else? – Wikipedia. The book was written in 1973 by Ernest Becker, who died a year following its publication. Even he could only deny death for so long!

The Denial of Death postulates that civilization is engaged in an elaborate symbolic defense mechanism against our own mortality which is linked to our survival mechanism. Man has a dualistic nature, on the one hand, the physical which death releases, and on the other, the symbolic world of meaning. The tension between these two natures can be overcome by becoming “heroic” as a way of circumventing death.

“From this premise,” Ernest Becker argues, “mental illness is most insightfully extrapolated as a bogging down in one’s hero system(s).”

What part of the so-called diseased brain deals with a “bogging down in one’s hero system(s)”, I ask? Try as many scientists do to find an elusive gene or a pill that controls the impulse to be heroic and to act in one’s own elaborate mythology, it hasn’t happened. Yet, writers persist in linking schizophrenia and depression to this heroic survival instinct.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Denial_of_Death

Going where nobody else is headed has its drawbacks

Yesterday evening, Ian and I had our quarterly meeting with Dr. Stern, Chris’s psychiatrist. We hadn’t had a chance to meet since Chris was released from the hospital in May. We spoke about his overall good progress, how Ian and I were pleased to have him home with us and how we are content to let things unfold at the pace Chris was setting. Then Dr. Stern dropped the bombshell. She leaned forward, and in a clearly worried voice, said “what’s this about Chris having an out-of-body experience? Chris’s occupational therapist told me about this and she also told me about a lucid dream.”

It has been my policy all along not to tell Chris’s psychiatrists about what outwardly kooky looking things he is undertaking in the world of holistic healing. I have learned, as this experience shows, that it only worries them and they want to put a stop to it.

Most, if not all, psychiatrists would not want their schizophrenia patients having an OBE, because to them, it is exactly what you don’t want them to have. Dr. Stern said she wanted Chris “in” his body and grounded, not out-of-his body and floating in space looking down at himself. It is exactly the sensible sort of thing a cautious psychiatrist should say, except that what has changed is that energy medicine has opened up a whole other realm of healing possibilities. I tried to handle this as best I could, knowing that Chris and I were headed to the sound shaman the next day for another go at it.

I tried to reassure Dr. Stern that actually, the meditative state that he achieved was a grounding state, not an excitatory state. I told her that an OBE for someone with a history of psychosis was actually a good thing, but it was counter-intuitive, because most people would think an out-of-body experience can lead to the person becoming destabilized and this was not in fact what was happening. Please note that this way of thinking is not only not widely shared, but not widely known. There’s me, and there’s the sound shaman, and beyond the two of us, who else knows about this counter-intuitive way of looking at schizophrenia? There must be a secret society somewhere, or maybe this is well-known in Eastern mysticism, but with Chris’s Western diagnosis of schizophrenia I was treading on very thin ice with Dr. Stern. Come to think of it, Western medical diagnoses are not included in Eastern mysticism texts.

Do you do yoga, Dr. Stern? I enquired brightly. “Keep in mind that yoga is used in many programs for schizophrenia patients.” Dr. Stern was more inclined to feel that yoga was more of a physical workout than a mental one, and that deep meditation is not something recommended for someone like Chris. Dr. Stern is a good psychiatrist and an excellent Family Constellation psychiatrist, but she is not a yoga person, nor all that familiar with energy medicine. Dr. Stern doesn’t “do” energy medicine, and this is where it gets tricky with a psychiatrist. What I am doing with Chris is clearly out of most traditional psychiatrists’ comfort zones. I only later thought about Chris’s former holistic psychiatrist, who taught us about energy medicine and got Chris to practice visualizations. Where is the line drawn between lucid dreaming and say, visualizing you are a shining ball of light in space with giant meteorites bouncing off you?

The out-of-body experience and the lucid dreaming were all news to Ian, who thankfully didn’t jump in and punch the air with “let’s put a stop to all this nonsense now!” I told Dr. Stern that lucid dreaming was something Chris does and it didn’t start recently. I was praying hard that the session would soon be over. I needed more information from the shaman to bolster my weak case in Dr. Stern’s eyes. “I understand your concerns, Dr. Stern, and if I were you I would feel the same way. I will look into this some more and share further information with you.” Inside me, I am really just hoping that all this will not be raised again.

When it was time to leave, I excused myself to make a phone call from Dr. Stern’s inner office. As I entered, I noticed a large jagged quartz crystal on top of the table near the door. Now, what was that there for if she is not a proponent of energy medicine and the healing power of gemstones and vibrations? Is this just a decoration that psychiatrists put in their offices now to show solidarity with the holistic crowd in the same way all companies claim they are eco-friendly? Or, is it just a nice decoration with no other meaning? All of this I ponder.

How do you feel about this?

According to yesterday’s New York Times,* Aspergers syndrome is proposed to be struck from the next edition of the DSM, due out in 2012, in favor of the term “autism spectrum disorder.” I suggest that the DSM editorial board hit the delete button and do the same thing for schizophrenia, in favor of a more nuanced perspective, as appears to be the case with the jettisoning of the Aspergers’ label. The DSM proposed change recognizes that there are different levels of functioning within autism, and that there are often other accompanying health problems that need to be treated.

This is a step forward, at least. Why not extend the same courtesy to schizophrenia, which seems to be on the bipolar, depression, mania, OCD spectrum? Although I am most definitely not in favor of saddling anyone with a psychiatric diagnosis, taking on the likes of the American Psychiatric Association, publisher of the DSM, will have to be chipped away at over time. What exactly is the difference between Aspergers, which can be terribly taxing on the individual and the family, especially when the child is young, and schizophrenia, which often allows a trouble free childhood and academic success, often brilliance, but provokes a major crisis in the adolescent years and early twenties? Well, for one, Aspergers is a recent addition to the DSM (1994) and it is easy to give up something you haven’t become entrenched in. (I had actually never even heard of it until my son was diagnosed with schizophrenia.) Schizophrenia, in contrast, functions as both the the holy grail and cash cow of the mental health industry. Wait, no, I take that back about the holy grail part. The APA and pharmacology aren’t interested in curing schizophrenia. It’s too much of a cash cow. They just pretend they are interested.

“Asperger’s means a lot of different things to different people,” Dr. Catherine Lord is quoted as saying. “It’s confusing and not terribly useful.” (I say the same goes for schizophrenia.)

The New York Times article quotes the efforts of the Aspergers’ lobby to widen the understanding of Aspergers to include health issues that accompany this diagnosis. The autism lobby has done an excellent job of bringing the message to the psychiatric community that there are underlying health issues that can be addressed, very often successfully. Many people say exactly the same thing about schizophrenia. I won’t quibble about deleting one more meaningless diagnosis in the DSM, but while they are at it, they should treat schizophrenia in the same way.

Unfortunately, the diagnosis of schizophrenia is too big a diagnosis for the APA to relinquish. That they will hit the delete button for schizophrenia is unlikely, given that the latest APA news to be posted on its site is “Brain MRI May Pinpoint High Psychosis Risk.” Nonetheless, let’s keep in mind that the gay rights lobby forced it to delete homosexuality from the DSM in the early 1970s. It can be done.

It can be done, were it not for the fact that the public seems to have bought the APA’s and NAMI’s negative view of schizophrenia. There is no powerful lobby for schizophrenia taking the same position that the autism lobby has succeeded in doing. This means that the battle to normalize schizophrenia on the spectrum of human conditions and delete it from the 2012 DSM is lost before it has begun due to a lack of organized opposition to the prevailing viewpoint.

“All interested parties will have an opportunity to weigh in on the proposed changes. The American Psychiatric Association is expected to post the working group’s final proposal on autism diagnostic criteria on the diagnostic manual’s Web site in January and invite comment from the public.”

Mark your calendar for January 2010 and let them know that Aspergers isn’t the only meaningless label. Here’s the APA’s website address. http://www.psych.org/

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/health/03asperger.html?hpw

Chris’s second visit to the sound shaman

“I was in a good mood that day and was happy to head out into the country. I was well rested and alert, but was slightly irritable, perhaps at the memory of our first trip out where we were delayed and nearly had to turn back. Having already undergone the therapy once before, I knew how it mattered that I be attentive but relaxed, to keep my body open, because this time around I had the tendency to become somewhat passive, which spoils the therapy as it works on the mind especially, and I think partly through the mind then the body.

The therapy lasted less than one hour, but I felt many changes. I tried to dissociate better my feelings about a color, red or green say, and allow the color to dominate my perception with as little judgment as possible. There were flies in the room, which at first I found irritating but later I found this a silly reaction to have, after I became more present in the room. The “sound/colors” themselves aren’t like anything else you’re likely to hear, because they’re pure sounds, they’re as natural as breathing. Once you hear them they take up the room. Listening to a color is much different from listening to Mozart; it’s the difference that having an author makes to the sound, as you follow music in Mozart but hearing the color red for example is like a mosquito bite and not “interesting” per se.

However, I began to fall into a sort of trance, which wasn’t quite sleep, or it was rather an aware sort of sleep that instead of relaxing into my body and dreaming I left my body and begun to experience the room while my body “powered down.” First I began to say to myself, this is just a sound, a basic unrefined sound but just a noise really and then my head refused to make any noise, any comment or utter any “thoughts” as I was released into the space or “aura” around me. I could see my body lying down from four feet away in any direction, and it was the best impression or image of myself that I’ve found in a long time, better than any mirror image can give. Those flies which I found irritating I realized were in harmony with my feelings of irritability which I had carried in with me, and I could fly around the room as if the flies were part of me. The only pain I felt was at the head level, when I could see that a big dark block at my head masked or obstructed this free flow of energy I experienced. To stand up in that state would have been impossible. Just as I was about to fall asleep the music stopped and it was time to go.

The sound technician explained that adepts at yoga, monks or shaman masters train for years to enter such a state, and that I was very lucky to enjoy it so early. That night I slept soundly and experienced a lucid dream in the morning, but this one was much clearer and longer than any I had previously experienced. The dream was pure fantasy or very close; actually it took the form of an episode of The Simpsons! I had been thinking about skiing the night before, and in this dream the Simpson family went skiing high up in the mountains, and Bart and Lisa got involved in the dangers and thrills of racing and jumping. When I felt scared at the outcome, and the dangers posed to the characters was too great, the story changed, based on my emotions. I suddenly had the power to create a dream and change it based on my emotions. The next day as I was reading on my bed in the afternoon I saw a woman wearing white enter the room and tap me on the shoulder, I could feel the touch but the woman I didn’t know, it was still a dream. My head was telling me to get off the bed and do something else, and here was this woman who appeared also compelling me to get up.

However, I don’t believe that this “awareness” the therapy opens within me should be relied on as a permanent change. There are many habits built into me that must be recognized first if I want to avoid becoming a “ghost” that just reacts to every little breeze or stimulus. From a personal point of view, emotion is more important or as important for a person, but mind can increase awareness and therefore enrich the emotional experience. The therapy has made me more aware of the physical manifestations of mental blocks: My head was quite unwilling to leave this form and it stayed there, while my body which has been through countless ordeals was more flexible. It’s interesting to know just how much my body has priority over my head, the sounds reaching all my cells without interference from my mind. The next step would be to train my mind to listen to my body first before the noise of the outside world, and to calm the tensions existing in the body which cause the mind to have fear and to shut down.”

Phonons

“Phonons are the tiniest particles of sound. Phonons are to sound as photons are to light. It takes billions of phonons to make up a sound. Phonons oscillate, echo, reverberate etc. at the sub atomic level in the quantum soup.” -Pauline Oliveros*

It takes Pauline Oliveros, a musician, to explain a complex subject (phonons) in a simple, straightforward manner. I am not allowing my complete ignorance of physics and phonons to deter me from feeling that the sub-atomic level of sound is where schizophrenia can be healed. Browsing the web has turned up an article from the European Society for Pigment Cell Research, of all places, linking schizophrenia to phonon activity. http://www.espcr.org/espcr/b_iss/Dis-8a.htm

According to our shaman of sound, phonons are a relatively recent discovery and the Big Bang actually lasted, best scientific guess at the moment, 300,000 years. That’s pretty darn close to a hundred thousand times pi. (Martin A. Armstrong take note!)

I don’t plan to wait for the phonon-related blockbuster drug that might emerge in twenty years or so. (A new drug “Fanapt” that works on a “more relevant set of neurotransmitter receptors” as the company describes it, will be on the market in 2010.**) Chris and I are getting to work now in the relaxed offices of shamanic healers and therapists who understand that to be of “sound mind and body” means paying attention to the vibrations of sound and emotions.

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*Pauline Oliveros is a musician who has developed a theory called “sonic” awareness, which is a focused musical and environmental consciousness.
**http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/01/AR2009110101846.html?hpid=moreheadlines
***See also http://www.answers.com/topic/phonon