Into the Void

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!

Cheers,

Bad Alice
http://www.badalicemusic.com/
http://www.thecairn.com/

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.

Rethinking personal evolution.

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.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: post-modernism protestant+work+ethic blind+faith atheist transformation law+of+attraction burning+karma sea+of+ignorance spiritual monotheism pre-industrial darwin

College’s foot bath plans spark backlash

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.

Why Does the Christian Right Hate Harry Potter? [with picture of book burning featuring harry potter books!] (reddit.com)

They’re Burning Books Again

Church group burns Potter books

Burning Sensations: How would-be censors promote free speech.

And the canonical (so to speak) list of Harry Potter information

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.

Harry Potter Muslims prayer in school Christian Dark Ages publicly funded book burning conservative think-tanks urinals Fundamentalists

By way of BeliefNet:

[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.

FOXNews.com – FBI Links Almanacs With Terror Planning – U.S. & World

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 home-grown terrorists by being alert for bibles and other right-wing strategy manuals. The bible 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.

-Lama Zopa Rinpoche, “Ultimate Healing”

From Daily Wisdom: 365 Buddhist Inspirations,” edited by Josh Bartok.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a few days, but life has been kind of hectic.

Memes are ideas that spread from mind to mind like a virus. Not sound bytes, not quite, but the ideas conveyed by sound bytes. A quantum thought, perhaps.

Would you like to play a meme game to celebrate 2007? Open the last book you read, go to the 7th chapter, and type in the 7th sentence. I’ll go first.

Bipolar II: Enhance Your Highs, Boost Your Creativity, and Escape the Cycles of Recurrent Depression–The Essential Guide to Recognize and Treat the Mood Swings of This Increasingly Common Disorder
by Ronald R. Fieve

“But the hypomania and depression intensified, as they usually do without mood-stabilizing treatment, and Christopher developed a tolerance for the alcohol.”

Wasn’t that fun? Next do it for the books you’re reading now!

Messies Manual, The: A Complete Guide to Bringing Order & Beauty to Your Home by Sandra Felton

“One of the problems with accomplishing a task is that ideas flit quickly in and out of focus in the brain.”

and

Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change
by Bruce Wexler
This book, unfortunately, has only 5 chapters. So I counted the Introduction as a chapter and the meme is from the Epilogue.

“All but 300 of the 7,000 Pennan people now live in government settlements with comfortable beds and zinc-roofed houses, but with little productive work, little food, and no connection to the activities and surroundings that shaped them as a people and as individuals.”

Food for thought.

I Go From Bad to Verse

Donna Sue Rubin, the author of the famous Christmas in 2 North has a new book of poetry out. I Go From Bad to Verse is available as a downloadable ebook from Chipmunka Publishing.

Ranging in tone from humorous to dark, Donna’s poetry expresses with great honesty the experience of bipolar disorder and all its moods.

The paperback will be out shortly, but don’t wait!

I’ve just finishing reading a fascinating book called “Shifting Ground.”

The author, Ruth McVeigh, documents the joy and the heartbreak of being married to an undiagnosed, unmedicated bipolar for 22 years.

The 22 years weren’t all bad. Ruth truly loved – and probably still loves – Derry despite the turmoil. Their life together was a whirlwind of adventure as they traveled to Guyana for Derry’s job as a forester, or to Ireland on vactions. They always managed to find wonderful places to live – Ruth describes the breathtaking views out the window so well, you’ll feel that you’ve been there.

But the beauty was often overshadowed by Derry’s bipolar episodes. Ruth tells of the irratic behavior and careless decisions that estranged first her children from a previous marriage and then Derry’s own children. Knock wood, none of their children have inherited the illness.

The book is fascinating to me for a number of reasons, including the fact that the author founded a popular Canadian folk festival. She even got to meet Phil Ochs, a famous folk musician who happened to be bipolar! The list of musicians she mentions meeting at various points in the book is a veritable who’s who in folk music.

All-in-all, “Shifting Ground” was an excellent look into the lives and relationships in a family affected by one member’s bipolar disorder. I recommend that every spouse of a bipolar read this book. You’ll see your family there, and hopefully avoid some of the mistakes Ruth and Derry made. I hope that any bipolar who reads the book “gets” the cautionary tale contained in it; namely, that bipolar disorder is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. If we misbehave, if we are abusive or irresponsible, the people who love us *will* be driven away.

I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.