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

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

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

Glimpsing a Positive Feedback Loop from Afar

Since Napoleon Hill put so much emphasis on teaching the subconscious mind how to think, I worked on this as best I could.

He gives you a method: write your Definite Chief Aim, memorize it, and recite it to yourself.

This method might work for someone whose mind was at least partially receptive. But I was bifurcated, utterly. The part of me that wanted this health had to pry open the part of me that was depressed and repetitive.

So Hill’s project was out of scale. I needed something simpler.  I started with the worst and briefest muttering I suffered from:

“I hate my life. I hate who I am.”

As soon as I said it — if I heard it, which was probably about half the time — I immediately replied:

“I want this life. I want to be who I am.”

This was a double-edged sword and I knew it. My subconscious would seize on the truth in it — it would relish the thought of being who I truly am. A crazy artist running around the world. And the rest of me knew that “to be who I am” meant accepting that. Embracing a return to the idealistic and adventuresome ways of my heroes.

Perhaps you find yourself in a similar conundrum.

I decided to go for the radical break, and then a complete recalibration of how I lived my life. The initial break was the hardest part.

And the rest of it is sure to stretch over years.

From my spirit’s point of view, being free, outside, was non-negotiable. And my subconscious changed it’s schtick.

Now it says, “I want to be who I am.”

And since I want that too, I become one person. This is part of the “cusp” that I’m on. I’m on the verge of becoming one person.

I can feel how powerful a position that is.

Filed under: 1c. First Successful Modification of Subconscious Thought, cure, depression, experience, hope, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, therapy, treatment

The Balance of Power Shifts

The first day of the second week things changed abruptly.

For all these years I have struggled to have the strength to redirect my thoughts. But more painfully, I have always wished that my thoughts did not require constant redirecting in the first place.

As of today, my strength has increased without a doubt. But more magnificently, the thoughts that require redirecting are much weaker. When they arise I can dissolve them more easily.

Normally, there is a constant vacillation between states of mind that are warring with each other. Now, when my healthy mind scores a victory it gathers strength. The fight is no longer even, one for one. A melody has overwhelmed the vacillation, and I am playing it. Soon these destructive thoughts will arise so seldom they will no longer be a part of my life.

What is happening is clear to me. I know my consciousness so well, I can describe this to you. For years and years I have exercised my mind to work towards a healthy consciousness, so I use exercises I invented myself, and I really work them. And I was getting stronger, I was healing.

Now, though, these same exercises are having a much more dramatic effect, and the effect is lasting much longer. Incredibly, I think I am about to begin learning how to sustain a sort of mental positivity for more than an instant. I think I will learn to sustain much longer periods of mental health.

My neurons knew which connections I wanted to use, but it lacked the chemical power to fully sustain the pathways that create the positive state of mind I wish to occupy. Asea has flooded my mind with the energy it needs to sustain the pathways I will to exist. Asea literally is energy — minute bits of energy in a molecular form that is completely native to every living cell of every living on Earth. These molecules are everywhere in you already, and when you drink more of them they are absorbed into your system and across the blood-brain barrier with complete freedom.

And neurons that were struggling to communicate now have the energy to form and sustain pathways. The connections get stronger, and your consciousness comes under your control.

Something like that is at the physical root of the cure to these disorders.

I am discovering Asea after twenty years of training. I can only imagine how it would impact a younger person who is just beginning to understand the magnitude of his disorder.

However old you are, you owe it to yourself to try this. There’s no risk to get a month’s supply — send back the bottles for a full refund. And please don’t try to make it last — take two ounces twice a day for a month.

That’s what I’m doing. And on Day 8, it is amazing.

Filed under: 1b. Day 8 -- The First Breakthrough, asea, cure, depression, description, expereince, help, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, thearpy

Starting at the Foundation

This could be a placebo effect, because this is only the second day.

But it could be real…

If you read this whole blog you’ll know that one of my main challenges is learning how to stop my brain from telling a story I didn’t want to hear. My ability to do this progressed slowly and painfully over many years of hard work.

Now I’m at the point where I am fully aware of the moment a story arises, and usually I can deny it entry, and dissolve it.

That’s the most fundamental skill for me, the one upon which all others are built. So it makes sense that I would notice an effect there first.

Flooding my mind with native, naturally occurring, tiny and ubiquitous redox signaling molecules is strengthening the foundation of the healing I’ve done on my own.

Awesome.

Filed under: 1a. The First Gift from Asea, asea, cure, depression, description, expereince, help, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, thearpy

No Escape Possible

I strongly believe that there is such a thing as mental health, and I know that I’ve met people who are healthier than I am, and I know that I have met people who were so healthy they were on the verge of maxing out what the mind can do.

We can aspire to a higher state of mind. Others have it. We can have it too.

For a long time I felt certain that attempting to embark on a path to a higher state of mind was futile, because I could never cover such a distance.

I hope that I can help short-circuit that argument in your mind by telling you how bad it was at its worst. It probably won’t be exactly the same as yours, but I hope you’ll see some reflections that will inspire you to try some of the things I tried.

The worst periods I’ve been through have lasted months, where my self-generated consciousness was limited to five or six terrible stories, told over and over again. In every instance, I was locked in viscous combat. The violence and evil in some of these stories crossed the line to torture porn.

I had no choice but to indulge them, watch them, experience them, refine them. I experienced full body adrenaline rushes, hallucinations of utterly overwhelming intensity, and the depth and height of heroic emotions.

Paying attention to reality, such as other people, tangentially interrupted these stories, which ramped up again from the midst of an interaction with someone else. My ability to communicate nearly disappeared.

Sometimes a story would begin and I would be sad and defeated and exhausted because I had no choice but to experience the story again. I would look about at the world as though to say goodbye, and the story would take over.

Other times, which was much worse, I would throw a leg over the story’s black back and grabb her jet dark mane and look into her red eye before bolting into the underworld with her.

This never stopped. I was always, every moment of every day, at some point in a story. My mind was trapped.

That is the essence of my condition. Thinking like this has had a profoundly negative effect on the reality I experience in the material world. I am awful, things get worse.

But those moments when I could stand outside and try to address the problem were the beginning of my healing path. Those moments are all you need to get started, and you know you already have them.

A few times every day, through great effort, I would pull my mind out of the trap for a moment, and try to devise a means of healing. That’s what worked first.

Filed under: 2b. Living with a Defective Consciousness, asea, cure, depression, description, expereince, help, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, thearpy

An Experience of the Possible

I honestly believe that one of the main reasons I have made the progress on my disorders that I have is that I once had a completely out-of-the-blue experience of perfect mental health. That experience showed me what was possible and proved to me that I could hold it within my own consciousness.

In those days, my commute home from work was through some of the most beautiful woodlands and vineyards of western Sonoma County. In any state of mind, it was stunning and awe inspiring. So one late one sunny afternoon I was driving home along this very familiar road.

And suddenly mental clarity blossomed within my mind. “Blossomed” is the right word, because it literally originated at my sixth chakra and radiated out into the rest of my mind. It cleared all of my obsessive thoughts repeating depressing stories. Washed them out of existence with light. All that was left was a perfect clarity of perception, which settled upon the stunning beauty of my surroundings. A perfect state of Zen mind captivated me. No thoughts, only thought itself, singular, without words or errors. This state of mind lasted for over thirty seconds.

And it changed everything. I do not believe I had an enlightenment experience or satori. I think that I experienced a moment of simple mental health. Nothing spectacular, just the high-end of what an average person can have.

Which made it ever clearer that I was at the bottom end. I could live with it, though, because I knew that there was a path up. If I could experience it for a moment, then I could experience it again.

I set about attaining this in earnest.

Filed under: 4a. My First Glimpse of Mental Health, asea, cure, depression, description, expereince, help, mental health, obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, redox signaling, thearpy