The Ostrich and the Elephant

A blog on spirituality, science, philosophy, ETs, and mental health

Tag: Beliefs

  • What it’s like to be Labelled with Schizophrenia

    Or, everyone is a little bit psychotic

    First, let me get something out of the way: I don’t necessarily believe I have schizophrenia. I had a psychotic episode with schizophrenic features, but as any psychiatrist will tell you, one psychotic episode does not a schizophrenic make. In fact, according to the US National Institute of Mental Health, three out of every 100 people will experience psychosis at some point in their lives.

    Now, one of my doctors said they believed I showed psychotic symptoms at an earlier point in my life, but I disagree with that diagnosis. That was in relation to my belief in extraterrestrial life, which I supported with evidence (see my previous article, “Evidence for the Existence of Extraterrestrial Life” for more on that). Another doctor was less convinced I have schizophrenia — he was more open to the possibility of this being a one-off or a “brief psychotic episode”, the type three out of every 100 people will experience.

    Nevertheless, it’s my opinion that I had a one-off at this point. The future of my life will be more revealing as to what exactly may be going on with my mind, but I await further evidence before labelling myself as schizophrenic.

    Secondly, I have been on a spiritual path for the last 7 years where the express goal of that path is to attain “enlightenment” by transcending the limits of the human mind. This is not an easy thing. It requires you to deeply examine all your belief systems, and ultimately let go of all your belief systems so you view the world directly as it is in awareness rather than through the filtered, and often erroneous, prism of the human mind.

    I believe this second thing is the main cause of what I went through, given my psychosis happened after an intense experience during a meditation weekend. I believe I am on the path of awakening, and the path of awakening is not always easy, and can sometimes lead you down a very rocky road.

    This isn’t to downplay the severity of what I went through or the consequences of it, which you can read in my first article, “My disastrous spiritual awakening”. What I went through that evening and the weeks leading up to it was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I believed — more out of uncertainty than anything else — that I may have become a target of “negative beings” in the universe, and in my ambulance trip to the hospital I thought I had finally been captured by them and was being taken to be tortured and possibly killed. I can’t really explain the terror of believing something like that was happening. The fear was paralyzing.

    But that is why I don’t necessarily believe I’m schizophrenic. I believe that what happened was directly a result of my spiritual path in which I was attempting to transcend the mind. The consequence of this is that the mind begins to break down — it has to in order to see beyond it. And I believe it just so happened that in my case my mind breaking down — while becoming more and more open minded (I am probably the most open-minded person I know! Some might say too open-minded!) led, because of some deep-seated fears of mine, to experiencing a very scary scenario.

    This leads into my next point, and the subtitle of my article, that: everyone is a little bit psychotic.

    At some point in our evolutionary history, humans started to develop language. We started to make sounds and point at things to communicate to each other what we were seeing. This was an immeasurable benefit to the development of our species. It allowed us to let others know what was happening, even if they weren’t experiencing it themselves.

    This started to become more and more detailed, to the point that we were making up *stories* about what was happening.

    This is when the trouble began, however. Stories are useful so long as they accurately reflect the details of a situation, but often they don’t. Often they are inaccurate stories based on inaccurate conclusions, and stories that can become so detached from reality that they could themselves be labelled as psychotic. This is why I think intrinsic to human language is the propensity to be somewhat “psychotic” — that is, to break from reality and become “just a story” in someone’s head.

    We humans have a lot of these stories. Stories like “I’m a good person because of A”, or “I’m a bad person because of B”. Stories like “the world is a scary place”, or stories like “the world is a good place”. These are all just stories, but they’re stories that the majority of the human population has at least some of, and usually a lot of.

    Language is an invaluable tool so long as it sticks with our actual experience, but often human stories are so detached from actual experience that there’s no real basis for them at all. Yet we believe them anyway.

    Why? Because stories are what we use to try and keep us safe. We think if we just *understand* things enough, then we can know how to navigate this life we find ourselves in.

    My contention is that no stories are ultimately true, they are simply relating a perspective of one individual to another. Some stories are at least somewhat accurate — they convey useful information that is grounded in experience. But a lot are not. A lot are so abstracted and detached from reality that there’s no basis for them at all. This is what happens when someone becomes “psychotic”. Their minds have become the sole ruler of their internal world, and has created stories within stories to the point of not being based on anything legitimately occurring in their experience.

    Most human beliefs are like this. In fact all are. In my opinion there should be no such thing as a belief. A belief is what happens when you say “I have all the relevant data and I have made this conclusion” and you stop looking at any evidence which might contradict that viewpoint. But why would you ever want to stop being open to evidence potentially countering your viewpoint? This is why the subtitle of this article is “everyone is a little bit psychotic” — because everyone has some of these beliefs rolling around their heads. It may be “I’m not good enough”, or “I’m not attractive enough”, or “I’m not likable enough”, or conversely “I’m great”, “I’m the best at this”, or “I’m the most popular person around.”

    When has nature ever looked at a flower and come to one of these conclusions about it? When has a tree ever looked at its withering leaves and thought, “I don’t deserve to be here”? So why do humans do it? Why are humans the only ones who come up with these crazy stories about themselves and about the world?

    The truth is, you are fantastic just as you are. With all your faults, all your blemishes, all your past embarrassments and failures, you are fantastic just as you are. Why? Because you are living in this incredibly complex and mystifying world and you are doing your best to navigate it, while trying to manage all the crazy stories going around about who you are and what you’re worth.

    So, how does it feel to be labelled as schizophrenic? Well, it feels pretty normal. I went through a period of my stories taking over completely and losing touch with what was real and what wasn’t, but now I’m back. I don’t believe any of the stories my mind comes up with about myself or about the world, I just think to myself, “hmm, that’s an interesting perspective you have there”, and that’s about it.

    The truth is, we actually don’t need stories as much as we think we do. Some of them can be very useful to navigate the world, so long as they’re based on our direct experience, but so many of them are simply just stories. A byproduct of our species developing very sophisticated language. And along with that, a whole lot of suffering that no other animal on the planet experiences to the same degree.

    So why not just get rid of all your stories that you can’t be certain about. I’ll bet you there’s really not much left once you do that. Just the practical everyday things the mind can be useful for. e.g. I drove to the store today to pick up some food. Great. Awesome story based on direct experience. But how about all the other ones we come up with along the way? Are those really necessary? Are they based in certifiable direct evidence, or are they just a crazy story you picked up somewhere along the way?

    As always, in love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, or follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

  • I’ve Been Accused of Being in a Cult

    Cults are an interesting phenomenon, and they definitely do exist. From Charles Manson to Jim Jones, there’s no shortage of examples of these charismatic yet deluded figures leading their followers, desperate to believe in something, off the proverbial cliff.

    But the word cult gets bandied around a lot, and often in a very casual manner.

    So what really defines a cult? Well, for me, the defining aspect is when the teacher becomes more important than the teaching, and the teachings are defended blindly against the weight of evidence against them.

    Now, just to get my side of the story out of the way first – I’m definitely not in a cult (said every cult member ever). As a former science student, the idea of any type of belief, scientific or otherwise, is anathema to me. Beliefs, I believe (hehe), are the opposite of the scientific and true spiritual method of making observations based on direct experience. And direct experience is ALL we ever have access to in determining truth, so using something other than direct experience to guide our lives seems pretty silly to me.

    Which is why it is so strange to me that I, of all people I think the least cultish person I know, have been accused of being in a cult.

    The cult I’ve been accused of being a part of is the one surrounding my spiritual teacher, Isira, and the organization supporting her teaching, Living Awareness.

    It seems that any time two or more people gather around a common spiritual cause, it’s automatically labelled a cult. But what did Jesus say? (another person who was accused of running a spiritual cult) – “Wherever there are two or three gathered in my name, I am there.” This is also probably why Buddhists hold sangha (spiritual community) to be the most important aspect of spirituality – because we learn more from our interactions with others than we ever could just going it alone.

    The irony is, I’m only ever accused of being in a cult by people who have never heard my spiritual teacher give a talk. Their knee-jerk reaction is: “Someone’s teaching you something that is not (yet) the norm in society?” – CULT! Anything that is the norm in society – science, politics, medicine, etc – they’re all fine to have teachers for, but nothing esoteric, nothing that isn’t easy to understand. This really is ironic because there is so much more cultish behaviour in these fields than in any spiritual field I have personally encountered. Although I do consider myself lucky in that sense – I had a good, skeptical, scientific training before ever becoming interested in spirituality, so I was always quite cognizant to never believe stuff just for the sake of believing in something.

    Which is what I think all cults, spiritual or otherwise, really boil down to: belief. In my opinion beliefs should not exist. From a scientific perspective, a belief is something you form when you say, “Okay, we’ve had this result, we’ve seen the evidence, we can make a conclusion now and stop any further investigation into the matter.” Why would anyone ever want to do that? In that sense I think beliefs have no place not only in science but in society as a whole. They are just psychological crutches people use because the world is so complex and the psychological need for humans to have some guiding principles is so great that we’re quick to latch onto anything that we feel gives us security.

    People think we NEED beliefs of some kind in order to function, but we really don’t. Casual beliefs, like the belief in time and space (they don’t really exist the way we think they do, so yes, these too, are beliefs), are fine to have and to use in everyday situations. So long as we acknowledge that they are indeed beliefs, and don’t actually represent the true nature of reality.

    I realise I’m asking a lot. Letting go of beliefs is a TOUGH road. The reason being is that our thoughts are so tied in with our emotions. They are inextricably linked to them. So to let go of a belief is not just to let go of a belief, it’s to let go of the feeling attached to that belief. And to do that, we need to experience that feeling in its raw state. Hence the resistance. We often think, “If we could just make sense of the world… if we could just finally get that last puzzle piece that fits everything into place then we’d have a full picture of how the world worked and we’d be *secure*.” We could finally relax.

    Well, I don’t think it’s ever going to work like that. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, I don’t think our minds really evolved to understand the true nature of reality. They evolved for relatively mundane tasks like picking berries, having sex, spotting predators, etc etc. We’ve done pretty tremendous things with this very limited brain of ours, don’t get me wrong, but in terms of understanding absolute reality – not a chance. As I mentioned in one of my previous blogs, it’s a logical impossibility for a system that operates within a system to fully understand the system it operates within. This is what Einstein’s theories of relativity were all about – it is all relative to the particular observer, at their particular reference point in space-time.

    But this principle applies just as much to our regular lives as it does to what we could call “Einsteinian post-modernism”. I’m not arguing that we completely throw out tradition and culture – a lot of things are here because they do, more or less, work, and serve a function.

    Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking you’ve discovered the ultimate answer to something, because, you know, around the corner there’s always something waiting to say, “nah, that doesn’t describe me.” It’s a little bit like women – if you try to figure them out you’ll come up against a LOT of problems, and they will certainly let you know about them.

    So what to do in a world we can never understand fully? Well, the same thing we do with women I think. To borrow a quote from the legendary Oscar Wilde: “Women are meant to be loved, not understood.”

    Love in the face of not understanding is the key that unlocks all the doors in my estimation. Because when you think about it, love is really the end goal of everything we are aiming for anyway. Everything we do, ultimately, is to find and experience more love. So why not just skip the whole process and start with love itself, the place we’re all really aiming for anyway?

    In conclusion, keep using your ideas so long as they are useful, just be careful about turning them into beliefs of “that’s just the way things are”, because sooner or later in this incredibly complex world of ours, you’re going to run into a situation where it doesn’t fit.

    And as for my “teacher”? Well, if she suddenly started to not make sense or act a bit cuckoo, I’d be out of there in a jiffy. So far, that hasn’t even been close to happening, so I’m quite happy with hearing her wisdom for the time being.

    As always, in love and light,

    Will.

    For more stories like this, including mental health, extraterrestrials, and spirituality, please subscribe to my blog, follow my Facebook page “The Ostrich and the Elephant”, or find me on Twitter @willkenway, Medium @willkenway, or Instagram @will.kenway. Thanks!

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