The hallucination of separateness

A message from Eric Allen Bell, founder, Global One TV – Online Spiritual Television for a New Age

A message to all members of Global One TV

I want to thank everyone who participated in the live chat with Deepak Chopra on Sunday. The topic was “Oneness” and he had quite a bit to say on the subject.

What I found particularly interesting was this notion that the internet has become the modern Akashic Records. And that if you wanted to know the state of humankind, look at what’s popular online. Of course this has been a fascination of mine for some time and is much of the reason for my decision to launch Global One TV in the first place.

I asked Dr. Chopra a couple of questions and I wanted to share with you the answers that he gave…

The first question I asked was a rather general one, but perhaps a classic when it comes to one of the obstacles so many people have in believing in a Divine intelligence. I asked Deepak, “Why is there suffering in the world” and he answered..”All suffering comes from the hallucination of separateness”.

There was a lot of talk about non-duality. Although I don’t personally have a religion, if I did it would be that of Advaita Vedanta – the Vedic mystic tradition of non-duality. Separateness is clearly an illusion. It causes us to perceive ourselves as being separate from God. That and the idea that we are separate from one another has been the source of most wars. The concept of us and them exists only in the mind, which leads me to the second question I asked Deepak:

I asked,”Does the mind exist in time or does time exist in the mind?” to which he answered…”Neither. Time and mind exist in non-local consciousness.”

Someone asked where we go when we die and he answered, “You do not go anywhere as there is no time and space.”

On the subject of oneness and non-duality Dr. Chopra went on to say that “You are the ocean and the drop of water” meaning that we are not one or the other. There is a beautiful saying I heard once at a Science of Mind conference that says, “God in me, as me, is me.” Chopra put it differently referring to a quote by Franz Kafka which says, “All of our problems are the result of an inability to sit quietly and do nothing.”

But of all the insight that Deepak Chopra had to share with us, what stuck with me the most was this quote: “I am that, you are that, all of this is that and that is all there is.”

Big NIMH

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge — even to ourselves — that we’ve been so credulous. – Carl Sagan

I swiped this quote from Beyond Meds because Robert Whitaker’s new book Anatomy of an Epidemic*, currently on my reading table, points to the “Big Bamboozle” in the pharmaceutical industry when it comes to the treatment of the mentally ill. As it was with Ida Tarbell and Standard Oil, Upton Sinclair and the meat packing industry, let’s hope that the Whitaker book will put an end to the encroachment of the big pharma/academia/American Medical Association alliance on your brain.

The meticulously documented book explains that it was the Medicare and Medicaid legislation enacted in 1965 that allowed the discharge of chronic schizophrenia patients from unsubsidized state mental hospitals into subsidized nursing homes, not the invention of Thorazine in 1955, as it is so often attributed. Patients treated with neuropleptics in a 1956 studied cited had a lower discharge rate for first psychotic episodes than those who had been treated with a neuroleptic. The general opinion of researchers back then was that patients treated with neuroleptics had lower discharge rates than patients for whom no neuroleptics were administered.

Unfortunately our societal belief that it was this medication that emptied the asylums, which is so central to the “psychopharmacology revolution” narrative, is belied by the hospital census data.

Numerous studies in the 1980s cited in the Whitaker book came to the conclusion that there was no evidence that the dopamine function of the brain is disturbed in schizophrenia. Still the public continued to be told that people diagnosed with schizophrenia had overactive dopamine systems, with the drugs likened to “insulin for diabetes,” and thus former NIMH director Steve Hyman, in his 2002 book, Molecular Neuropharmacology, was moved to once again remind readers of the truth. “There is no compelling evidence that a lesion in the dopamine system is a primary cause of schizophrenia,” he wrote.

The pharma bamboozle is particularly poignant because of the millions of lives wasted and lost. Parents have been told, by a medical profession that they trust, that their child has a brain disease, just like diabetes, and that in order to “protect the brain,” they must continue to take these medications, just like a diabetic must do with insulin. That guilt is overwhelming because it is personal and had we been less credulous, the outcome may have been different.

Having heard Dr. Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH), I have no great confidence that that organization, despite it being a supposed watchdog of public mental health, will suddenly “see the light”. He stated very clearly in that seminar that research has demonstrated again and again that current and past drugs are ineffective in treating mental disorders, but they were shining their flashlights looking for the key in the wrong areas! They just haven’t found the right drug targeted to the particular problem! There’s a term for that in business that eludes me. . . when you trash the old product in order to stimulate sales of the new one. Don’t worry, in the NIMH’s world, there are always exciting new drug possibilities. So, the Big Bamboozle will continue as long as the public is gullible. It will take a different pharmaceutical tactic, that’s all. The insulin for diabetics idea has been exposed, so we’re not buying that one, but what will it be? It’ll be clever, that’s for sure.

Here is where Dr. Insel’s flashlight is looking:
We must address mental illnesses, from autism to schizophrenia, as developmental brain disorders with genetic and environmental factors leading to altered circuits and altered behavior. Today’s state-of-the-art biology, neuroscience, imaging, and genomics are yielding new approaches to understanding mental illnesses, supplementing our psychological explanations. Understanding the causes and nature of malfunctioning brain circuits in mental disorders may make earlier diagnosis possible. Interventions could then be tailored to address the underlying causes directly and quickly, changing the trajectory of these illnesses, as we have done in ischemic heart disease and some forms of cancer. For serious mental illness, this is a new vision for prevention, based on understanding individual risk and developing innovative treatments to preempt disability.
____________
Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychatric Drugs, and the Atonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, author Robert Whitaker

Another perspective on the Garden and the Fall

Here is a lengthy messsage from The Last Domino to me re my post on the Garden. In the shared hope of advancing the dialog, and promoting discussion, I have bolded a few key concepts.

“I must confess: I know very little about schizophrenia, although I’ve lived what may be described as a “split existence” most of my life. That split is natural for me, and is my normal. Yet I still feel a sense of Oneness with God, and with All Things.

The title of this piece, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden” is true. The split, however, occurred, not at the creation of Eve (At bottom, we’re still male and female, yin and yang.), but because of the eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The split had more to do with the mind of humans (and their resulting expulsion from Eden), and little to do with the creative process.

On my blog, the Secret Place, I’m examining, anew, the Creation stories. There are two accounts.

I’ll try to keep this brief.

“One rabbinical commentary asserts that Adam ‘was a man on his right side, a woman on his left; but God split him into two halves.'”

It wasn’t really a split. It was more like an assignment, or an assigning, a defining of roles in a larger creative process.

What I’ve been told is this: Eve is internal; Adam is external. Eve’s role(the Mother of All Living) is to be “bone of [his] bones (Adam), and flesh of [his] flesh (Adam).”

They’re united in this process (wedded, husband and wife).

In forming the man, God instituted the first creative act. Ensuing creative acts by humans resulted as a collaboration between Adam and Eve (man and woman). The two creations reveal how God and humans create.

Because the woman was taken from man, “Therefore shall a man [MANifestation] leave his father and his mother [God], and shall cleave unto his wife [Eve, humans’ creative impetus and power]: and they shall be one flesh [seamless, an indispensable union in the creative process];” in short, manifestations would now be subject to Adam (red clay) and Eve (the Mother of All), and not directly to the creative process of “his father and his mother,” God (Spirit).

Eve (the Mother part of our being that gives birth to All) pushes out, and Adam is that which is pushed out (MANifested).

Knowing their role and their assignments, it’s not surprising that Eve ate of the fruit of The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil first, and then gave it to Adam.

What she tastes, he tastes. What she eats, he eats.

Another role assigned to Adam is that of “Name Giver.” Adam decides what things will be called, that is, their nature and attributes, “and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.”
Eve, too, is subject to Adam in this regard, and is not Self-Named.

The fruit is not two fruits, but one fruit. Humans get to eat the fruit (experience it), and call it whatever they choose (Good or Evil).

Every experience in our world, then, becomes the fruit–every human act, every environmental (worldly) act, or occurrence, that we bring to our intellect, and attention, to judge, becomes the fruit.

An act is not inherently good, or bad, but “thinking makes it so.” We label it either good or bad.

Adam and Eve in their pristine state, where God (in the first creation, not Lord God of the second) did the judging, and the creating, this knowledge of Good and Evil did not exist, hence judgment didn’t exist.

Neutrality prevailed. As the writer you cited observed, “The world after the Fall, outside the Garden, is essentially colorless, neutral, impersonal.” Actually, this description best describes the condition of Adam and Eve in the Garden before the Fall, not after.

Neutrality (a non-judgmental state) existed inside the Garden, and was mostly “impersonal”, in that Adam and Eve were “naked” and weren’t “ashamed”.

Once their eyes were opened (after eating the fruit), they could see their nakedness, and could now respond judgmentally to their nakedness, and, hence, concluded that they were “ashamed,” shame being a judgmental state.

This judgmental state constitutes a “splitting of the mind,” what some mystics have called an altering of the mind, a condition that creates an “altered mind”. Don’t confuse this with an “altered state of mind.” Now a thing could be seen as either sinful, or sinless.

To “regain Paradise,” once it’s lost–and most humans reside in a “split mind,” lost state–requires nothing more than living without judgment, without dividing the world into Good and Evil, Good and Bad, and seeing the world as God sees it.

The God of the First Creation made this observation of the All, after All was created: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”

Because “good” may be confused with “the good” identified in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, it might be better, indeed, edifying, if we move into a new understanding, one of “very good,” that is, perfection, and dwell there.

Rather than judge (and alter, and split our minds, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”), we should declare perfection all about (“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”).

Granted, this is not an easy thing to do. We humans are accustom to seeing a divided world, as a result of a divided mind, where a thing is rarely seen as neutral, but on a continuum between Good and Evil, with Good on one side and Evil on the other, with degrees of Good and Evil in between.

The best way to keep the mind “The Same” is to dwell in love. “He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.” The “secret place” is Love. Fear, or any emotion that has it’s foundation in Fear, divides the mind. We’re told: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”

Frustrated

I was planning to do a longer post on body and soul, but then had my own out-of-body experience in the early hours of this morning that captures my frustrations with the slow pace of the way things are going. I was drifting between sleeping and being awake, thinking about my conversation with Chris last night that left both him and me frustrated. From my perspective, nothing is happening with him, he is going absolutely nowhere, confining himself more and more to the apartment while eating everything in sight. A high school friend who is getting married this summer was in town and Chris didn’t feel up to meeting him. Perhaps even more frustratingly, if that is possible, Chris seems to look at paid employment or going back to university as an intellectual exercise, something best thought about but never actually achieved. He is stuck in his own mind.

Under scrutiny, he appears to think that Ian and I somehow need him to be with us, as if we would completely crumple up and die if he wasn’t there to support us in our declining years. The situation is becoming once more intolerable. What do we have a headshrinker and an occupational therapist for? The OT has been working with him for a year, and still he is shedding more and more activities.

So, I put it to Chris once again: Chris, maybe you are not so concerned about us as you profess, maybe you are angry with us and this is your best revenge. Do you think you are doing guard duty by hanging around the house to protect me from Ian or Ian from me? I posed the last question, because it is a time-honored tradition to be angry with one or both parents. People who mature beyond the anger move on, people who don’t are stuck. Chris mumbled something about maybe he was sticking around to make sure Ian and I don’t divorce. As if!

That line of reasoning was getting us nowhere, so we all went to bed. Eventually, after trying out several dreams, I saw my chance to end it all. Like some kind of manic cartoon character (a woodpecker or a buzzard with attitude), I was hovering in the air, getting a bead on a some acreage down below. I started to back up and take a run at it. At first I hesitated, because I thought I knew what was coming, then I thought “what the heck, go for it.” As the land came up and tilted towards me, I hit it full on — and immediately morphed into another dream.

There is never an end. There are only beginnings.

We’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden

God was the first schizophrenic. In India every god has a “terrible form” as well as a benevolent one. The Bulgarians say that Satan arose from God’s shadow and convinced God to divide the world between the two of them. The Finns say that God asked his reflection in the water how to make the world. Reflections and shadows are schizophrenic images; when they step out of their relation of dependence and seize their own autonomy, a split occurs (in Greek schizein means “to split”).

Prior to my reading very much about theories of schizophrenia, I had a crazy intuition that Chris and others like him had been there when our world was created. His sense of the dark forces of the universe while struggling with hallucinations was so profound that I found it incomprehensible that someone so young (19 or so) with so little life experience could be so aware of ancient forces. His struggle seemed Biblical, centering around the creation myth but also the quantum Big Bang. There is a Forrest Gump quality to Chris and others. They were there when it happened. I can’t explain it.

The key here is when they step out of their relation of dependence and seize their own autonomy, a split occurs. For most people this is the period of young adulthood.

If the action of “splitting” or the state of “being split” isn’t explicitly present in the concepts of God of most primitive peoples, it is virtually present in all their creation myths. Creation is always a “fall” from wholeness, a separation, a dividing. When divinity is pictured as an indivisible totality, the creation of the world becomes a breaking down of this totality……This kind of process, the movement from wholesness to splitting, is a universal one in the act of being human. Erich Neumann sees in it the birth of the ego and the origin of human consciousness

Modern science has labelled the sometimes violent and often frightening process of becoming human, a pathological illness. Is religious preocupation or seeing the world in shadows and light really an illness or is it a journey? Chris became extremely preocupied with the concept of sin, and that he had sinned. Later on, he began to make amends to his childhood friends, whom he felt he had sinned against. I have no idea how this idea entered his head. Childhood sins? When he had his first psychotic break, he was reading Karl Menninger’s book, Whatever Became of Sin? Religious preoccupations and androgeneity are just part of the territory of psychosis. Yet, people still persist in calling this a disease of the mind, where others might see it as the disease of the fall from Grace.

In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve live in a proximate, and fluid environment. There is an aspect of wholeness to this life, a naive and direct participation of all forms of life in each other, a synthetic function to all of experience…..The world after the Fall, outside the Garden, is essentially colorless, neutral, impersonal. It has been separated from the person. There is no longer a synthesis….The sense of the unity of the body in the Garden has found expression in the assertion that Adam is androgynous. One rabbinical commentary asserts that Adam “was a man on his right side, a woman on his left; but God split him into two halves.”

From The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in twentieth-century literature and culture, by John Vernon, University of Illinois Press, 1973

Celebrity molecules

From today’s New York Times

The drugs in his system also included the antidepressants fluoxetine and olanzapine; the tranquilizers diazepam and meprobamate, which are found in Valium and other medications; the cough-suppressant dextromethorphan; and the antihistamine diphenhydramine.

The actor Corey Haim died from pneumonia complicated by an enlarged heart and narrowed blood vessels, while drugs found in his system played no role in his death, the Los Angeles County coroner said Tuesday.

The coroner has made two calls: that he died of pneumonia unrelated to the drugs in his system and that olanzapine, otherwise known as Zyprexa, is an antidepressant.

Celebrity molecules are also making a name for themselves in the visual arts.

Lizzie Burns is a biochemist and artist affiliated with Oxford University who designs jewelry and men’s ties based on the chemical structure of celebrity molecules like testosterone or dopamine. “The designs of chemical structures can have an intrinsic natural beauty and balance,” she said. Not to mention a certain conceptual consistency: there’s caffeine with its three reactive “hands,” as she calls the little methyl groups, waving at you to wake up; the lightning-bolt zigzag of the capsaicin molecule that gives chili its fire; and the bicycle shape of Ritalin, inviting the aimless wanderer to hop aboard and ride.

The Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF)

I urge you to read one psychiatrist’s opinion of the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation. Preying on Human Misery points out that the organization has had to distance itself from its reliance on funding from pharmaceutical companies due to the growing public outcry over the use of off-label drugs for children. To me, this organization is right up there with NAMI, with parents willing to label their children as brain diseased rather than to look into their own family dysfunction as a possible recourse.

I met another psychiatrist in the audience who told me about the existence of a website, bpkids.org, which is the homepage of an organization called the Child and Adolescent Bipolar Foundation (CABF). He said the organization was primarily funded by the drug companies, and featured messageboards with advice from parents of allegedly bipolar children on what other parents should tell and not tell their doctors in order to get their child labeled with the disorder. The drug companies also used the website to recruit subjects for ongoing clinical trials of drugs for pediatric bipolar disorder, thereby assuring that the subjects in their clinical trials were only those whose parents were anxious to have their child so labeled.

Sound of mind

I sent Chris’s sound shaman the New York Times article on hallucinogens. It is very exciting to me that researchers are actively probing the ways in which consciousness can be heightened by chemical means (psilocybin). Though the results so far are encouraging they are also preliminary, and, according to the article researchers caution against reading too much into these small-scale studies. They do not want to repeat the mistakes of the 1960s, when some scientists-turned-evangelists exaggerated their understanding of the drugs’ risks and benefits. (Rossa’s comment: Now, if only they would use their findings for good and not evil!)

Chris’s sound shaman is mechanically inducing heightened consciousness through sound manipulation, which is a drugless way of going after the same results. Here is his reply to my e-mail.

Hello Rossa,

Thank you for the interesting link.

The key phrase here is experience in which the boundaries between the self and others disappear . This exceptional phenomenon is attributed to an ecstatic, spiritual, and out of body sensation, as it spans a vast realm of experience, method, and interpretation. These sensations can be brought upon by the use of external stimulants. In practically all cultures the practice of changing sensory state is achieved through a change in sensory perception functions via the energy exchange occurring between elements through chemical reaction, mechanical vibration, and motive force! Specific drugs, sound, and movement, are the primary interface methods for experiencing this phenomenon known as a changed state of perception.

Wishing you a good evening, and hope to speak with you soon.

Bless you, Doris Lessing

Thanks to Beyond Meds for bringing to our attention Doris Lessing’s thoughts on schizophrenia. “So, craziness is not as far away as we’d like to think,” and she goes on further in the article to give her thoughts about loneliness bringing on craziness and how what we call Alzheimers and dementia might be linked to the loneliness of old age.

My mother started to develop signs of dementia about the same time that Chris began developing signs of dementia praecox (schizophrenia). I don’t know what really caused this, we tend to think of it as something that just happens in old age, but I do know that it began to develop around the time that my parents decided it was time to move back to Canada from Florida to be closer to my sister. The timing of this has convinced me to avoid making any life-changing decisions involving moving great distances when I am that old. My mother was a very intelligent woman and she was panicked by dementia. But, it was noticeable that she would “rise to the occasion” as my father would say, when they had company. She otherwise would spend many lonely hours in a house and a town she didn’t know or care for, humming to herself. For a while, she could still win at bridge.

My sisters and I wanted my father to get a break from being a twenty-four hour caregiver, so we tried to persuade my mother to check out an activities program at the local hospital. She sensed something was wrong as we drove into the parking lot. She started to curse under her breath that there was no way in hell she was going to go to a “program.” Miraculously, she pulled herself together on the tour on the five pin bowling room and the art therapy class. You would never know she had problems by the way she asked appropriate questions and professed great admiration for the set-up. She thanked the staff very nicely and then went home and refused to go back.

We once left Chris by himself for a week when my husband and I were both on business travel. This was at a time when he seemed to be well enough for us to chance it. When I got home, he was acting really strange He had drawn all the blinds and was talking gibberish and acting “spooked.” This took a few weeks to work its way through. It was enough to convince me that being alone, being abandoned, is the almost worst thing that can happen to someone.