Lost in a Crowd

Depression makes you fundamentally unaware of the people around you.

Even your closest most intimate companions are mysteries to you, because you don’t relate to them as people. They are simply “part of the world” and “the world” oppresses and hates you.

The only thing that matters to a depressed person is the internal dialog. The only relationships you have are with the demons inside of your mind.

Other people are just distractions. You don’t relate to them. You deal with them. You don’t interact with them. You get rid of them.

When you are living within this frame of mind, you do not know that this is how you are interacting with the real world. You couldn’t form the ideas above. You would be immersed in dialog with your demons while physically struggling through your oppression in “the world” that won’t just leave you alone.

Every now and then I would look up from this stupor and see the horizon. I would realize for a moment that this way of being was not something I had to accept. I would imagine what a healthy mindset might be like. And I would plot ways to change my consciousness so it would work correctly.

I’m proud of the fact that I managed to make these moments of clarity accumulate. Over years, some of my plots worked out.

But they were bursts of clarity that might last for a week or a month. They were melodies hovering weakly above the base line of the demon’s discourse.

I would be awake in the world for periods of time, and would try to gather my wits and find a way forward. But then I would move back into an entirely spiritual mode, where only consciousness itself mattered, and material reality in general was a secondary consideration.

Inertia would carry my life forward in society, but as of this moment that inertia has run out and I will be left with nothing but the demons.

It was the classic “fake it till you make it” method. I imagined being mentally healthy, and it primed me for making real transitions. My path has always been three steps forward, two steps back, but there have been steps forward.

I have made permanent changes in my consciousness. But I do not yet perform

Filed under: Uncategorized, asea, consciousness, depression, law of attraction, obsessive compulsive disorder, redox signaling

Stories without the adrenaline

When I first started working on this blog I kept it private because a lot of it is really embarrassing.

Probably the most embarrassing thing to tell you is that there are these horrible stories in my head that I can’t stop and that I am addicted to.

Literally, it is an addiction. When these stories play through, I have intense experiences. My mind produces all the hormones and chemicals associated with wild lust, savage violence, and demented cruelty.

I’m addicted to these hormones and chemicals and experiences, and so a part of me actively cooperates with my depression. And since I have OCD, I can go through the same thing over and over again, each time reaching another high.

The stories produce the drugs (like adrenaline) that I’m addicted to. So when a story begin a part of me latches onto it because that part wants the drug fix.

This is an unnatural connection between the mind and the endocrine system. There is a natural version of this connection, but my connection has crossed the line to mental illness.

I’m main-lining drugs that I create in my head and I am messing up my relationship to other people and to the universe because I am wasting my consciousness by running puerile crap through it all the time.

Obviously, this is not healthy, especially since these things are going on in my head even while you think I’m acting normal. You can tell there’s something a little “off” about me, but you let it go because I’m so good at masking what I’m going through.

But something is shifting in this phenomenon.

Now, somehow, there is less of a connection between the story and the drug. The connection is breaking down.

This is fundamental and radical for me. Because if there are no drugs, then the addiction does not profit from the story.

Without the addict focusing on the story to get the drug, the whole process that has been destroying my life for decades is undermined.

Fundamentally weakend.

This is fantastic. This is exactly what I need. If the whole chemical process that keeps these awful stories in play all the time breaks apart, then probably the stories will stop.

If the stories stop, then all of the mental discipline I’ve been working on will really work.

I’ll be able to actually act upon the advice that Buddha and James Allan and Napoleon Hill and all the others give us.

I’ll be able to control my thoughts. I’ll be able to fix my consciousness on the thoughts that will build the life that I want. I’ll be able to get that positive feedback loop working, rather than suffering under a negative feedback loop that I can’t control.

Could this really be happening? Could a flood of redox signaling molecules actually be having this effect on my mind?

I think it is. More to follow…

 

 

 

Filed under: 1g. Breakdown of the Negative Feedback Loop?, as a man thinketh, asea, consciousness, cure, depression, james allan, OCD, redox signaling, thearpy, think and grow rich

Being thrown down and worked over

The last twenty-four hours have really blown my mind.

The body will always try to heal. Simple. The cells in your body are programmed to heal; your immune system is programmed to heal. Whatever happens to you — injury or infection — your body tries to heal back to a state of balance and health.

This is easy to understand if you look at an injury, for example. You cut your hand while making dinner. Where there used to be smooth skin, now there’s a bleeding gash. You can look at it and know exactly what your body is going to do — it’s going to heal the gash and re-establish the smooth skin.

It is not so easy to understand when you think about mental health. If you’ve been afflicted with mental illness as long as I have, mental health is itself a construct of your imagination. You don’t know what it is like, so you try to imagine what it is like. You try to “fake it till you make it”.

But what if your brain is programmed at the cellular level with a mental version of smooth skin? What if your brain at the cellular level already knows what a healthy mind looks like?

What if your mind can heal the same way your skin does? What if it could just build healthy brain tissue the same way it builds healthy skin tissue, healing over depression the same way it heals over an accidental injury to your hand?

I believe that your mind does, in fact, have an innate blueprint for how to create healthy brain tissue — brain tissue that will enable you to have healthy thoughts and to build a healthy mental experience.

And I think that people like me just have some problem with our brain metabolism that prevents it from healing completely.

We can direct the healing of the brain — that’s what we do when we discipline our thoughts. When we discipline our thoughts, we direct the healing process and create as much positive mental tissue as we can.

But ultimately, we are working with defective tissue, and so we can not fully recover. Drugs can mask our condition. Good nutrition and exercise can maximize our natural ability to heal. Yet, we’re still stuck somewhere short of a healthy consciousness because of our disease.

Until now. Flooding the mind with redox signaling molecules changes all of that.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the mind has additional energy to use. It can metabolize more effectively. It can clear away damage, turn off negative signals, build positive ones, and make more progress towards creating the healthy mental landscape — the smooth skin — that it is programmed to create in the first place.

Twenty four hours ago, in the middle of the afternoon, I crawled into bed utterly exhausted. I wasn’t sick, I just needed to sleep. The brain does a great deal of cleaning while it is asleep, and depressed people often sleep a lot because the brain is trying to heal itself.

I woke up in the middle of the night for a couple hours, mostly because I was hungry and thirsty. Then I collapsed into a deep sleep again. I just woke up a little while ago.

I can feel that something major has changed.

I haven’t had a feeling like this since I caught chicken pox as an adult. It is the most miserably sick I have ever been. Adult chicken pox can render you impotent and make you blind, so my doctor pulled out the big guns and gave me some super-powerful antibiotic. The first pill eliminated my symptoms. I’d never been cured like that before, and it blew me away.

This is similar. Something that big happened during that twenty-four hours of sleep. My symptoms of depression are gone. So gone, so cleared away, that it is disorienting.

The first thing I did was pour more redox signaling molecules into my body. Whatever this is, I want more of it. I want all of it. This is beyond good.

This is miraculous.

I think my brain is healing back to a “smooth skin” state. I think that the redox signaling molecules are enabling my brain to heal itself back to the blueprint for mental health programmed into it at the cellular level.

Filed under: 1h. When the Mind Heals On Its Own, asea, awaken, awakening, consciousness, depression, depression cure, healing experience, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, treatment

Thinking Good Thoughts

One of the most frustrating things about having depression and OCD is that you can’t follow most of the advice that is given to other people.

For example, there is a preponderance of evidence showing that thinking optimistic, happy thoughts will have a positive impact on your life. This is especially true if you are having troubles — optimistic people are always more likely to get the job or to make the sale or to solve the problem. Studies actually prove this.

Optimistic people are luckier, too. This has also been proven. They did an ingenious study about this, where they invited test subjects to meet the person who was going to interview them at a specific table in a lobby of one of the buildings on campus. Half of the test subjects were depressed, and the other half were naturally optimistic, light-hearted people.

All of the subjects walked right over a $10 bill on their way to the table where they were supposed to meet the interviewer.

Every single happy person found the $10 bill. Almost none of the depressed people found it.

It was right there in the same spot for each subject — in a spot where it was hard to miss — but each individual’s attitude or their expectation about how their life was going to turn out determined if they found the money or not.

People like me don’t find the money because we expect to have misfortune. We have always had misfortune, we are currently experiencing misfortune, and so it stands to reason that we will experience misfortune in the future. That’s what we expect, and that’s what happens.

When the study was published, the conclusion was simple: Think optimistic thoughts, and good things are more likely to happen.

I imagine that this advice was welcomed by every healthy person who found it. It makes sense, and besides, isn’t it more fun to be optimistic than it is to be pessimistic? Isn’t life sweeter if you focus on the positive and not the negative?

But for people like me, this advice is a slap in the face. If I could control my thoughts in the first place, then I wouldn’t be depressed. I cannot think optimistically — that’s the whole problem.

For years I have actively tried to change this about myself.

I have tried a dozen different methods. In my wallet I would carry a list of good things about my life. The challenge was remembering to read it. So I became a Franklin Covey addict, and I kept the list of good things in my “hub” or notebook where I would be able to review it often. I used to carry a laptop everywhere and I would create an image of the list and use it as my desktop background. When I got a smart phone I put the list on the phone and tried to remember to read it.

Sometimes I couldn’t remember. Or worse, I would remember, but I would refuse to read it. I would decide that the exercise was pointless and idiotic. A lot of times I would destroy the list or delete it.

So you can imagine that it came as a real shock to me when a positive thought arose on its own today. I didn’t have to manufacture it. It just came up on its own. And it wasn’t an abstract positive thought about nature or something I’d read. It was a legitimate positive thought about my life situation.

I truly believe that the mind wants to heal and that it will heal if it can. My mind, it seems, can not produce enough redox signaling molecules to counter-act the negative processes that cause my depression and misfortune.

Pouring more of them into my mind gives it strength. I’m not messing with it by adding drugs that mask the problem. I’m giving it more of what is there naturally, and this is where the strength comes from.

It could be — and you have no idea how much I hope this is true — it could be that pretty soon I’ll be able to follow advice like other people can.

Filed under: 1f. The First Natural Positive Thought

Therapy Through Medicine

First of all, yes, I do think that marijuana can be profoundly beneficial for a depressed person.

I believe that there’s nothing wrong with using it. Cannabis has been grown and traded and consumed all around the world for thousands of years. George Washington smoked it; George Washington Carver smoked it.

And in our time, in the 1950s and 1960s, therapies using marijuana were under development by the psychiatric community — and they were showing promise. But when the drugs were outlawed, so were the studies.

Now that medical marijuana has become something of an established right, the psychiatric community is again experimenting with hallucinogens, and again, they are finding encouraging results.

My own use of cannabis has been sporadic. I go through phases where I crave it, and phases where I don’t even think about it.

I know that this back-and-forth has taught me a great deal. As a depressed person, you are aware of being aware of the different streams of your consciousness. So when you become aware of the state of mind imparted by cannabis, you can remember how to mimic some of it’s effects on your own. You are given a visceral experience of what it is like to have a different consciousness. You toy with changing consciousness. These experiences have helped me a great deal in my efforts to heal.

I should also tell you that I rarely drink alcohol, and that I have never used any drug other than marijuana — except this one time:

Now, given the state of healthcare in our country, I am very grateful that I had access to a psychiatrist at Kaiser. I certainly do not want to sound like I’m complaining about having health care when so many people go without it. But Kaiser’s entire line of treatment was geared to drugs. The doctor told me as much. She wanted to hear my story so she could name disorders and prescribe medications for them, which is exactly what she did.

I agreed to take Citalopram, the generic version of Celexa. And I refused to take the OCD drug along with it. I thought I should take one drug at a time so I could study it. She thought this was pointless, but she was very polite about it.

But if you are depressed, you know exactly what I mean. You can study it. You will know if you can use it.

And I know that a lot of people truly benefit from Citalopram (Celexa), Sertraline (Zoloft), Escitalopram (Lexapro) and Fluoxetine (Prozac). I am certain that people use these drugs in ways similar to the way I’ve used cannabis.  I certainly hope that some of what I’m writing here is useful to people using these drugs, even though they weren’t the right path for me.

There is a natural desire to play with this drug phenomenon, and most people do. I strongly believe it is possible to use these drugs to progress towards mental health.

But obviously, a cure is better than a therapy. For those of us who have used drugs as therapy, can we now embark on a cure?

I’m beginning to think that might be possible. One thing is for certain: enhancing the level of redox signaling molecules in your brain has a wonderfully supportive effect on all of your positive efforts, and it somehow weakens and dissipates the negative parts of your consciousness you are trying to control.

It simply enhances healing, and your brain heals to a more functional version of itself, same as any other tissue.

But this tissue takes your consciousness along with it.

Amazing.

Filed under: 4b. Citalopram and Marijuana

A Book by Sharon Begley with a Foreward by the Dali Lama

Begley writes about science for the Wall Street Journal, and this book came out in 2007.

Basically, it proves that thinking thoughts can change your physical brain.

Common sense dictates that this must be true, because there must be a physical basis for learning and memory. As we learn, we create new pathways in the brain. Now they’ve gotten to the point that they can actually map some of this, but when this book came out it was a big deal.

For a depressed person, the biggest deal of all is the concept that you can change your brain to the point that it is no longer depressed. Imagine if you had a handicap and suddenly there was a scientific basis to believe that you might be able to cure yourself of your handicap.

That you might be able to heal yourself in a way that everyone assumed was impossible.

This hope propelled me through the book in record time. It was enormously beneficial for me to read, because it gave me a physical concept for what I felt going on in my mind all the time.

I think that redox signaling molecules are the key to this — I have tried all sorts of drugs, but nothing, absolutely nothing has had the same impact that enhanced redox signaling has had.

And the reason seems ridiculously simple: The mind wants to heal, just like any other part of your body would want to heal. And it will heal, as much as it can, with what it has to work with.

The things I write about in this blog — my methods, and the degree to which they work — took me almost twenty years of really hard work, day after day, with no rest, to accomplish. So I personally have a great deal of experience working-out my brain.

But you know how you see some guys at the gym day after day, and no matter what they do, they have a gut? Or the woman whose diet simply can not be improved upon, but who is still chubby?

I had the same problem with my mind. There was just something fundamentally amiss, and I could not fix it completely.

Until I added to my body the thing that was lacking — redox signaling molecules. They help the cells heal, and they help the cells communicate. So now I have the extra energy I need to really profit from the exercise I have been doing all these years.

It is a perfect match, and it fits the thesis of this book exactly.

 

 

 

Filed under: 1e. Change Your Mind, Change Your Brain

The Ultimate: Bad Thoughts Don't Even Arise

This is really weird.

If you have depression, you learn how to live with it. It’s a handicap, and you find a way to work around it as best you can. But you’re handicapped, and you can’t escape that fact.

So one method I learned was to “park” the part of my brain that would tell horrible stories over and over again. I learned how to get that part of my mind to run in the background, while I was able to operate other parts of my mind and function in the world. The demon fires would be simmering while I would be working, or talking to you, or in every way appearing normal.

I called it “parking”. If I could, I would “park” my depression in the background, and present to the world a moderately well-functioning human being. Sometimes, of course, I could not do this and I had to hide from the world.

But absolutely NEVER did the demon fires stop. They either took over my consciousness, or they were parked. The only time they would sort of go away was when I was deeply engaged in writing one of my novels.

However, today I’ve had the weirdest experience.

The whole parking method, which has been a moment-to-moment reality for me most of my life, just sort of dissolved. I no longer needed it.

There was nothing to park.

No demon fires to begin with. Depression was not arising in my mind. There was no evil to fight.

This was so unusual I didn’t notice it until I observed my “normal” mind  panicking that something horrible was going to happen to us when the demon fires lit up again.

I flexed the usual “parking” muscle in my consciousness — and it clicked empty. There was nothing there to park. Nothing there to fight. Nothing there to suppress.

As soon as I realized this, I began searching for depressed thoughts the way a long-term hostage will show a demented loyalty to his captors.

Or the way a drug addict will shoot heroin into himself yet again. Because these demon fires are an addiction — I experience intense emotions and adrenaline rushes within them. So the addict in me wanted to go back for more.

But there wasn’t a story running that I could plug into. I had to use my normal memory to pull up a story. And I tried to “get into it” the way my depressed mind habitually would.

Normally, I would just get sucked up into this like a leaf in a tornado. But this wasn’t even a dust devil. It wasn’t even a breeze.

The story died, and I was left wondering why I had even bothered to remember it.

Then I became incredibly tired. I had to finish my work day, but when I got home I laid down and my mind shut off completely. I fell into a dreamless, motionless sleep for thirty minutes.

And now that I’m awake, all I can do is marvel at this. Just marvel at it.

Filed under: 1d. Nothing to Park?

My Experience with a True Healer

I have a wonderful old friend who was born with a crooked back. She has been going to chiropractors and masseuses and healers her whole life.

Knowing that I was going through a lot with these conditions, she suggested that I try Intuition Medicine. She turned me on to this book called Body of Health by Francesca McCartney, PhD. McCartney was born with the ability to see people’s auras, and she didn’t know this was unusual until after it had caused her a world of pain. Since our society was not organized to train people like her in the healing arts, she had to travel a very hard path to essentially establish her own practice and connect with others who were establishing similar practices.

Laura Genoway also had to go through a difficult path to get to her practice in Fairfax. I know less about her because she didn’t really go into detail when I asked her.

What she does is Intuition Healing, which means she deals only with your energy. This whole practice is based on the seven chakras and the aura they generate.

I went to Laura and I explained to her what I was going through. I described my meditations, and I asked her for help to make my efforts at healing myself through meditation more effective.

She knew exactly what to do. An intuition healer doesn’t touch you. I lay on a table and she moved all around me, working on my aura. I could feel her presence very powerfully in my physical body. She was clearly doing something, and she had complete control over what she was doing.

It was amazing. If I had not experienced it myself, I would have brushed it off as impossible. But she is the real deal — she did something.

And it worked. For weeks after seeing her, my depression was dramatically reduced. More importantly, my meditations improved dramatically.

Besides the Definite Chief Aim meditation, I also do energy meditations. You do your best to become aware of your chakras, starting at your sex and moving up to the crown of your head. And you imagine a flow of energy pouring into your head, flowing through you, and then flowing down to the center of the earth. This energy cleans you of negativity, and fills you with vitality. You can almost always capture bits and pieces of this meditation and use it to your benefit.

After Laura’s treatment, my meditation went off the charts. It was awesome how clean I became.

Of course, the effect only lasted a short while, and I couldn’t justify the cost of continuing treatment.

But what she was doing was real, and I hope that someday it will be a regular part of my life.

Filed under: 4c. Laura Genoway and Intuition Healing, cure, depression, energy healing, healer, intuition medicine

Driving Your Life into a Hole

Here are just a few of the things I repeat to myself over and over again:

• I hate this life.
• I hate who I am.
• I hate who I have become.
• God hates me and I don’t know why.
• God sneers at me.
• I don’t want this life.

These thoughts arise from my sub-conscious mind, and I say them out loud. Sometimes I hear myself say them. Sometimes I don’t.

If The Dhammapada, As A Man Thinketh and Think and Grow Rich are true, which they clearly are, then you can see how screwed I am.

If “our lives are a creation of our minds,” and if we attract into our lives the things we think about in our sub-conscious, then you can imagine how thoughts like these would destroy my life.

Perhaps you’re in the same situation.

While higher-functioning people are able to learn how to modify their sub-conscious mind so they can attract good things to themselves, I am stuck in the same project I’ve been stuck in for twenty years. I’m just trying to put out the fire in my soul. If I could just get the negative to stop, I would be happy.

Being able to create positive thoughts to see how they might affect my life is just a dream.

It will probably never come true for me. And I know that is a negative thing to say. But if you have the same conditions I do, you know exactly what I mean.

One thing I do have that some people may not is the will to keep trying until I’m dead. I’m not going to just lie there and let this condition exist in my consciousness.

I am going to fight back. It has taken years for me to make very small gains. But I will keep at it.

Filed under: 3b. The Horror of Repitition, about, cure, like, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, therapy

Napoleon Hill, James Allan, and the Modern Self-Help Industry

Self-help literature and elaborate descriptions of how to work the Law of Attraction surround us on all sides, but let be briefly describe it anyway.

The fundamental concept behind the Law of Attraction is that your thoughts create your life. This idea is ancient. Probably the earliest example of it is from the Isa Upanishad, which is a text so old  parts of it may come from before the last Ice Age. It’s called a Buddhist text now, but it pre-dates Buddhism by centuries. The opening passage goes like this:

What we are today comes from out thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: our life is the creation of our mind.

That translation is from the Penguin Edition of The Dhammapada by a guy named Juan Mascaro, who I consider to be the greatest translator of all time.

You now know everything you need to know about the Law of Attraction, but there are two other classics you might want to read as well. This basic idea was re-expressed by an Englishman named James Allen at the end of the 1800s, and his book, As A Man Thinketh is widely considered the classic on the Law of Attraction. It’s about 25 pages long and you can get a digital copy for free.

The other classic, and by far the most widely read and most influential, is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Hill interviewed hundreds of highly successful people in the early 1900s — guys like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and Dale Carnegie — and described the way they think.

All of these guys went through periods of extreme poverty and hardship on their way to success. Henry Ford, for example, went bankrupt three or four times before he invented the assembly line for manufacturing automobiles. Napoleon Hill teaches you how they survived these misfortunes.

But by far more importantly, Hill teaches you how to modify your consciousness so you, too, can become successful. He was writing his book for publication during the depression decade. He was writing for people who had lost everything — their homes, their money, their family, their sense of pride, their optimism and their hope. And he explains exactly what you can do to rescue yourself from a situation that dire.

I hope you read the book. I’ll give you one part of it here: he explains that the whole project of becoming who you really ought to be arises from faith. You must have faith that you will become what you want to become. But of course you don’t have that faith when you are penniless and eating charity food. So he tells you to create your Definite Chief Aim, which is a long description of what you want to have happen in your life and who you will become. He has you commit it to memory. And every day, at least in twice a day, you concentrate on your Definite Chief Aim and you recite it out loud to yourself, really focusing on it.

Faith, he explains, arises from the sub-conscious mind, where our deepest beliefs are held. The whole point behind creating and reciting your Definite Chief Aim is to train your sub-conscious mind and to create faith.

The simple fact is that this method works. That’s why his book is still studied — intently studied — world wide.

But it only works if your sub-conscious mind and your conscious mind function properly. Which mine doesn’t, and which yours probably doesn’t either.

My experience of consciousness, for decades, has been helplessly watching while my demented sub-conscious mind goes off on some horrific story. My whole project has been trying to prevent my mind from producing negative thoughts.

Which is really, really unfortunate, especially since The Dhammapada, As A Man Thinketh, and Think and Grow Rich are all true statements about reality.

Because what you think about is what comes to pass in your life.

And if you are thinking horrible thoughts, then your life will be driven in a horrible direction. Even if you can’t help thinking these thoughts, even if you are suffering from a disease, even if your wholeproblem is a lack of dopamine or steronintin or redox signalling molecules in your brain, it doesn’t matter.

The thoughts going on in your head ARE your life.

And if you can’t change them, you’re screwed. That is my situation.

I’ve written my Definite Chief Aim. I’ve memorized it. And I repeat it to myself twice a day. And I think it is helping. But my mind is defective — very few people are like us — and because my mind is defective, I don’t know if or when Hill’s method might work for me.

Filed under: 3a. Think and Grow Poor, as a man thinketh, cure, depression, help, james allan, law of attraction, napoleon hill, obsessive compulsive disorder, secret, therapy, think and grow rich