Spirituality and Madness

Spirituality and Madness

It begins, in me and in many other mentally ill people, with a heightening of the senses and a feeling of deeper insight and greater energy. Everything takes on a spiritual aura, depth and meaning, everything. I feel in touch with the very heartbeat of the universe and the voice of God speaks to me, converses with me constantly. I am able to predict the future. Everything I do has spiritual meaning and consequence. At first I have a sense of calm, peace and gentle euphoria. I begin to be the focus of reality. Every song on the radio (the good ones, that is) is about me, the weather revolves about me, I am in touch with all creatures and all people are my responsibility. I become the leading figure of my generation. In the last ten years I have twice become convinced I was female. My life as a man became the delusion. I am God’s emissary of creativity and good, the Holy Spirit within me castes out demons where e’er I go. The first few times I experienced this state, stressful circumstances pressed my reality into an evil cast. The universe turned dangerous and I along with it, though I did no harm. Every time I closed my eyes in sleep I awoke to find the world had had descended to a more decadent level, more evil. I cannot bear to be dangerous so anxiety mounts and I must find a way to cure the evil of myself and the universe to save the innocents. I consider suicide but God prevents me, guides me away from anything dangerous. I fail to save the universe, I lose control, I am incarcerated. There are many variations on this theme. If it comes on along with depression and stress there is no euphoria, only anxiety and despair. Beginning about ten years after my first psychotic break, or episode, I began to be able to manage the state to such a degree that I would remain in it for up to two years, avoiding the descent into evil but it always ended in some sort of crash. The voice, “the voice of God”, remained with me to a greater or lesser degree from about six months before my first episode (February 1986) until the present. It was only in mid 2006 that I finally decided this voice was definitely not the voice of God but I do maintain that God was with me, that I was in touch with spiritual realities along with the delusions.
Since I decided not to listen to the voice it has dissapated and now rarely intrudes into my thinking. I have been told it is not the typical schizophrenic voice as I do not hear it with my ears, it is a voice in my mind with a recognizable personality. I believe it has some connection with my first wife as much of the dysfunctional behavior it elicited were things she might do, tempered by my more compassionate nature. She was extremely abusive and controled me in every conceivable way for over a decade, the decade of my twenties, such a critical period. Toward the end of our time together this control took on a powerful spiritual dimension which quite simply drove me mad. When she finally released me I failed to deal with the years of abuse, I simply stuffed it all and built a new life as quickly as I could. After about eight years this new life began to unravel under the influence of this voice. I have since attempted to address those years in my writing and through counseling. I found there was an incredible reseviour of repressed anger which I have attempted to dissipate but her influence upon my life is immeasurable. There is something in me that loves her still.
Atypical voice aside, experiences such as mine are a very common phenomenon among the mentally ill, this spiritual cast to everything. It can be very confusing, overwhelming, resulting in all sorts of odd permutations of thought and behavior. It is so common because, I believe, there is indeed a spiritual dimension to everything. God inhabits the very fiber of the universe, sustains it and binds it together. In our “normal”, Post Modern Western existence we are shielded from this aspect of reality by the training of our culture and perhaps a chromosome or two. But when our brain chemistry becomes unbalanced this veil is either lifted or our senses are made attuned to this aspect of reality. In most cases we are eventually overwhelmed by it if it does not subside. Variations of the Messianic Complex are extremely common among the mentally ill. One feels as though one is somehow an extremely important and special person in the world, perhaps the most important, perhaps Christ himself. This is understandable in this state. You feel so close to God, he makes you feel like the most special, the most unique, the most important person there is. We forget that he feels that way about everybody else in the world, too. The spiritual experiences of the mentally ill are not entirely delusion, there is much that is real and true in them. But this gets lost in concerns about abnormal behavior and control issues.
There is within us all certain brain centers which have been found to be active during deep spiritual states. Research with yogi masters and others have revealed very specific types of brain activity in such states. I know of no such research on persons going through manic or psychotic episodes but since the religious experience engages specific brain centers in specific ways it seems possible these same brain centers and activities might be affected, the religious experience gone awry.
We here in the West are not far removed from times when the mad were thought to be possessed by demons. This view remains in some cultures and seems to still be in the back of the Western mind. I would say it is possible, it does happen, but this is not the root of mental illness. Mental illness is in general abnormal brain chemistry, derived from a combination of genetics and environmental factors. It is not, as seems the Western attitude, a defect in character. Most mentally ill people are gentle but tortured souls living lives of quiet desperation. Our world is aflame with conflicts arising largely from differing spiritual beliefs. Throughout history, as today, there has been much bloodshed in the name of religion. This is true madness.