I often sit out in my car at lunchtime and read. The book I’m reading here is (still) Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” Dr. Estés covers many psychological topics from the anthropological or mythological perspective. If she isn’t a Jungian, she’s missing a great opportunity.
At home I’m reading “Spritual Emergency” edited by Stanislav Grof and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I would rather be home, but not because the books are any better. I ran out of an asthma med because my GP got strange about refilling drugs from a Canadian pharmacy. I did so much albuterol last night that I am still shaking.
I am so devoid of dopamine that my concern over my breathing is little more than an intellectual exercise. Y’all know the feeling?
The quote is about creativity, spirit, the river beneath the river. Many topics in the book refer to cycles or to seasons. I wonder as I sit in the sunshine whether I take psych meds to suppress the seasons of my soul.
In archetypical lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical “go forth and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, “If you build it, they will come,” preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.
Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their right time, and over and over again.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés in “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”
Any day that starts with an email from someone named “Bad Alice” simply has to be a great day!
Bad Alice is the acoustic duo formed by Suzy Johnston (author of The Naked Bird Watcher - the positive account of developing and learning to manage a serious psychiatric disorder that included depression, psychosis and self-harm)
Leslie interjects: The other half of the duo is Lindsay Robertson. So far as I can tell, she is horribly normal except when she gets a hold of a box of crayons.
The CD by Bad Alice is now available.
Titled ‘Walk in my Shoes’ it is a further positive and reflective message on mental illness, self-harm and the issues that face the young of today.
The CD is available on the Bad Alice website where individual tracks can also be downloaded. http://www.badalicemusic.com
The hope is that the music will help people to feel less isolated and offer reassurance that they can get through this. It is also meant to raise further awareness, understanding and - hey - people might even like the songs!
Excellent CD. It’s only number two in my 6-disc changer, but Bad Alice would have to play tuned chain saws to get ahead of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters - classic Jazz Fusion c. 1972.
I hope to get to Scotland on my next trip to Liverpool. If luck is with me, Bad Alice will have a gig when I’m there.
Suzy’s mum Jean is a great mum, I’m told, and a very cool lady. She even wrote her own book, To Walk on Eggshells, about her experiences helping her daughter navigate the dire straits of the mental health system in the UK. Family involvement is a big positive in handling bipolar disorder effectively.
The CD costs £6.50 postpaid in the UK. Not sure about the rest of the world, but it’s also available as mp3s. Buy it with PayPal and download it on the spot.
Post-modernism is about creating a synthesis encompassing, integrating, and synergizing the existing, mutually exclusive domains of religion and science. A new spiritual paradigm, if you like buzz-words. Most of us have evolved far beyond the pre-industrial, that is, agrarian, monotheistic religions. Blind faith stopped being relevant before WWII, so you practically have to drop out of modern society to avoid moving to the next level. But don’t tell the poor devils unless you want a bloody Crusade right here in the US.
The atheists would claim that we have a god-shaped hole in our heads that we must fill with something, and this may be true. Now all the geeks don’t know what to do with this need for spirituality - or even exactly what it is that they’re needing!
KW has some great ideas, but he expressed an opinion in an interview that evolution is a sudden transformation rather than a process of gradual adaptation to the environment. I don’t agree that intermediate, incomplete forms are necessarily incompatible with survival. The universe doesn’t need miracles, *we* do.
To me, this idea that the Universe will bring you whatever you want if you are spiritual sounds a whole lot like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you work hard enough or if you believe hard enough, God will grant you grace. And all of your basest desires.
Look around you. There are a very few beacons shining above a sea of ignorance. Check out SoundsTrue. There are some excellent materials there - you just have to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In my opinion, we will achieve enlightenment only when humanity physically evolves enough to provide us with appropriate organs for it. I’m just burning karma until then.
Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…
It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.
Hugs…
Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?
Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)
Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries - and lifestyles. If they do it right - well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.
You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.
The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.
The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.
Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.
China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.
As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer - you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.
Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” - with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms - to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.
The video mentioned new books - how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?
I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”
I agree that public funds shouldn’t be used to create foot baths for the Muslims to use before their five-times-a-day prayers. I’m also against the use of public funds to install sexist urinals for males who are perfectly capable of peeing in the general vicinity of the toilet. :-/ We could kill two birds with one stone by installing troughs with running water like they have in some parts of the world. =:-o And where are the bidets?
That was humor, in case any stereotypically humor-challenged schizoaffectives or lesbians are reading this. (You dykes all know I’m bi, right?)
I’m also against the policy of the colleges and universities that I personally have attended of having a small chapel on campus for the Christians. If you have to pray every day, you know where it is. If you don’t, then a) you probably don’t worship with the other Christians who stop into the chapel every day, and b) you probably think you are somehow *entitled* to use publicly-funded college facilities for the purpose.
Have I failed to offend anyone yet? Ok, then, I’ll keep going.
The ACLU hasn’t gotten involved because the university, after public hearings on the topic, decided to use the student-funded college maintenance fund to include the foot baths in new construction, NOT public funding. We’re talking about new construction that includes urinals, baby-changing stations, and other accommodations in the unisex bathrooms, I might add. The Moslems were accidentally pulling the sinks away from the wall and splashing water on the floor, so the foot baths are about safety and saving money, NOT about encouraging heresy.
The students on campus are mostly ok with this, so why are a bunch of conservative think-tanks getting all huffy about it? I don’t feel that it is my business. You don’t like it, don’t wash your feet in the sink. The other Christians have to pee in there!
This was brought to my attention by a Catholic, of all people. A good Catholic education includes a lot of reading about other religions, unlike that of the Fundamentalists. Some of these people wouldn’t read at all if they weren’t pressured by their friends and family to read the bible. Simplistic.
I don’t see the Christians being prevented from praying. What I do see is the flat-earth Fundamentalists demanding that the rest of us learn their simplistic, literal interpretation of a text that was originally intended to simplify the facts of cosmology, geology and evolution for a Semitic tribe of uneducated wandering goat-herders. Simplistic.
There were great civilizations in nearby parts of the world at that time, civilizations whose religions quickly incorporated new discoveries in the temporal world, things like the ptolemiac model of the solar system - you know, that the earth rotates around the sun? Maybe you don’t…
You’d know more about it if the Christians didn’t burn down the library at Alexandria in the 4th century A.D., *pretending* it was a pagan temple. A millennium-long Dark Ages followed. Millenia later, in the 17th century A.D., Galileo was threatened with death if he didn’t recant similar heretic theories about the motion of the earth.
They’re up to their same old tricks in the U.S., apparently trying to create another thousand-year Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books.
Personally I think it’s time for every world religion to start policing its extremists. Extremists balance out their hate by cashing in on the good works of the majority of their fellow worshippers, using threats of damnation or worse. Now there’s a sin for you.
I have no problem if the student body at UMich wants to fund foot baths themselves. The alternative is to ban them from washing their feet before engaging in private prayer, and that’s xenophobic nonsense.
[The] defilements are like a cat. If you feed it, it will keep coming around. Stop feeding it, and eventually it will not bother to come around anymore.
-Ajahn Chah, “Still Forest Pool”
From “365 Buddha: Daily Meditations,” edited by Jeff Schmidt. Reprinted by arrangement with Tarcher/Putnam, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
The FBI said information typically found in almanacs that could be useful for terrorists includes profiles of cities and states and information about waterways, bridges, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, buildings and landmarks. It said this information is often accompanied by photographs and maps.
My sister sent me a bit of internet flotsam this morning saying, “Hey, SNoogie. This will crack you up.” Once I got over being called “SNoogie” I googled it and found that it is true - or at least all the news outlets picked it up off the API as if it were.
Good strategy, keeping geography out of the hands of ordinary citizens. I hear they’re going after math and science next. Oh wait, they already are.
I think it would be more to the point to look for [tag]home-grown terrorists[/tag] by being alert for bibles and other right-wing strategy manuals. The [tag]bible[/tag] does, after all, mandate that I be murdered.
All the faults of our mind – our selfishness, ignorance, anger, attachment, guilt, and other disturbing thoughts – are temporary, not permanent and everlasting. And since the cause of our suffering – our disturbing thoughts and obscurations – is temporary, our suffering is also temporary.
Positive Atheism - search for “Magic To Science” when you get to the site.
I did a little light reading at lunchtime today. I got a real giggle out of this quote.
We see in these perceptions the first appearance of a kind of science — the seeking of causal explanations for the phenomena of the world. In today’s physics classes, the first thing students learn about is motion. However, they are taught that motion at [tag]constant velocity[/tag] does not require the action of a force; a force is needed only for changes in velocity, acceleration.
This observation is expressed by Newton’s second law of motion: F = ma, where F is the force on a body, m is its inertial mass, and a is the resulting acceleration (the [tag]rate of change[/tag] of velocity). In other words, movement does not require a mover, only a change in movement does. And if no mover is seen, then one does not have to invent one that is unseen. The ultimate [tag]prime mover[/tag], which Aristotle and [tag]Aquinas[/tag] defined as [tag]God[/tag], is not required by the data. But perhaps we should allow God to be redefined as the prime accelerator [tag]Fermilab[/tag] in the sky. From Magic To Science by Victor J. Stenger,
quoted on Positive [tag]Atheism[/tag].
An excerpt from Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses.
As the years go by, I am less and less impressed with NAMI. I think their agenda is to improve the family’s comfort at the expense of the patient’s autonomy. They teach the rather disturbing idea that a large percentage of mentally ill people have no self-awareness, no insight into ourselves. Like the lower animals. Anosognosia, they call it.
The article I’ve linked to above has some glaring logical errors and has terrible ramifications for the mentally ill. I’ll list some of them.
The article lumps bipolars together with schizophrenics as if we are all one big, happy family. We aren’t. Bipolar disorderis cyclic, often with long periods of remission in between episodes. This is not the case with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is associated with unremitting cognitive deficits. In either case, there is no “awareness of illness” modifier to the DSM-IV codes. Frankly, it is my opinion that the majority of non-mentally ill folks are wandering around with the same lack of self-consciousness. Why are we pathologizing it?
The article doesn’t examine in detail the cognitive effects of certain medications. Most notably, the [tag]antipsychotics[/tag] have been shown to reduce the [tag]IQ[/tag] by an average of about 10 points. In basing the sweeping generalization that we aren’t self-aware upon those individuals whose short-term memory is ravaged by their [tag]medications[/tag], the article makes a case for putting more individuals on the same meds. This will skew future research in this direction as more and more psychiatric patients are required to take meds that may cause [tag]anosognosia[/tag].
The milder forms of bipolar disorder occur far more that the severe forms. That is, most bipolars never experience psychosis. I suspect that there is a missing qualifier throughout the article - a description of what population exactly they mean. That is, do the authors include the milder forms of bipolar in their 40% statistic, or is the article strictly based on their experience with the sickest of the sick, the ones who wound up in-patient? If this is so, then the authors are [tag]stigmatizing[/tag] most of the bipolar population based on a very biased sample. I suspect that the sample of bipolars in the article are folks who have never been educated as to the symptoms of their illness. Education alone makes a big difference in our ability to manage the illness.
The horrible possibility that we aren’t aware of our symptoms is devastating to the self-esteem of even the most intelligent and self-aware mentally ill person. Am I acting out? Should I speak up or will my words betray my condition? I feel good today - maybe that’s just a mania talking? I disagree what what X is saying - am I delusional?
This article opens the mentally ill to victimization by society and especially by the medical profession. The word “Anosognosia” gives society the pretense of a valid reason to marginalize the mentally ill, to victimize, to force-medicate, to control us. It enables our families, friends and employers to shrug off our ideas and opinions for no other reason than that we have been diagnosed and they haven’t. Why exactly is it that a heart patient is allowed to request that further treatment be withheld, yet a mentally ill person can be hospitalized against his will? Are we monsters?
For all its talk about stigma busters, NAMI has shown with this single document exactly what they are all about. I am not an animal. Mental illness is not a crime. And NAMI is not advocating for us.
UPDATE 4/15/2007:
[tag]Sylvia Caras[/tag] of [tag]People Who[/tag] accepted this post for inclusion on her own site. Stop over to People Who and check out the tremendous amount of excellent mental health advocacy information she offers.
- the positive account of developing and learning to manage a serious psychiatric disorder that included depression, psychosis and self-harm)
- classic Jazz Fusion c. 1972.
, about her experiences helping her daughter navigate the dire straits of the mental health system in the UK. Family involvement is a big positive in handling bipolar disorder effectively.
bad+alice
suzy+johnston
indie
depression
psychosis
self+harm
The+Naked+Bird+Watcher
mp3
post-modernism
protestant+work+ethic
blind+faith
atheist
transformation
law+of+attraction
burning+karma
sea+of+ignorance
spiritual
monotheism
pre-industrial
darwin
Information age
technology
magic
Arthur C. Clarke
Globalization
China
I, Robot
tools
witchcraft
global economy
evolution
politician
Asia
self-improvement
Isaac Asimov
Innovation
Delmarva peninsula
Zero Population Growth
ZPG
One-child Policy
greenhouse gases
Global Warming
creationists
public education
Harry Potter
Muslims
prayer in school
Christian
Dark Ages
publicly funded
book burning
conservative think-tanks
urinals
Fundamentalists
,” edited by Jeff Schmidt. Reprinted by arrangement with Tarcher/Putnam, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.
