Suppression of Self

The preaching religions have long espoused the suppression of the self. The book The World’s Religions by Huston Smith gives a wonderful overview of our religions. When I read the book it became clear that the common thread of the major religions is this suppression of self.

As for Hinduism, he says “Every act done without thought for myself diminishes my self-centeredness until finally no barrier remains to separate me from the Divine,” The World’s Religions, p. 38. To be self-centered is to be apart from God, according to Hinduism. But loving yourself glorifies the divinity God placed in you, and nothing could please God more. 

Smith repeats the dictum from Hinduism’s holy book, the Bhagavad-Gita: “To work you have the right, but not to the fruits thereof,” p. 40. This angle has you doing everything in this life for God, and not reaping any reward for self. In my view this is completely backwards, and cuts against what we are born thinking.

On to Buddhism: Smith explains that Buddhists revile ego as a “secret sore,” or a “strangulated hernia,”p. 102-3. Buddhism decries Tanha, or the “specific desire for private fulfillment,” p. 102. I just don’t see fulfillment of your gifts as something shameful. We exit the womb bent on self-preservation and aglow in self-love. Trying to reverse nature by decrying pride in yourself has put us in a straitjacket. We are perfect and exude divine potential, and when we see this, the world will be made anew.

The Confucian Book of Li states that “Pride should not be indulged. The will should not be gratified to the full. Pleasure should not be carried to excess,” p. 175. Again, this religion suppresses self and free will.

Smith states that the sacred text of Islam, the Koran, “proclaim[s] the unity, omnipotence, omniscience, and mercy of God—and correlatively the total dependence of human life upon Him,” p. 234. There is no life without God, teaches Islam. Never forget how small you are in his shadow.

Judaism, Smith contends, is based on a covenant with God, or as he describes it, a “pledging of total selves,” p. 306. He cites Exodus 19:4-6:

You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagle’s wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.”

So here, God owns the whole earth, and he expects complete obedience from us, as his possessions. The most we can ever hope to be is a prized possession, gathering dust in His trophy case. Where the Jews were once slaves to Egypt, they are now simply slaves to a new master: God.

And finally, Christianity: Smith talks of Jesus as “free of pride” … “a man in whom the human ego had disappeared,” p. 328-9. Jesus minimizes his own self when he says “Why do you call me good? Don’t you know that only God is good?” The man we are supposed to emulate always practiced being a servant to others and putting God first. “The meek, they shall inherit the earth.” Hide that light, temper your glow.

I recall a story my husband Nathan told me about a Christian summer camp he went to. He won the “Me Third” award, which meant he put God first and others second, and then himself last. This is the Christian way: your Self is an afterthought.

I believe we can all agree we live in a far from perfect world. With tragedies like Newtown, Massachusetts and Columbine and 9/11, it is easy to subscribe to the saying that “Life’s a bitch and then you die.” It seems hopeless, and the road to Heaven seems as far away as it was thousands of years ago. And thousands of years ago we didn’t have suicide bombers and baby killers. So if the religions have failed to deliver us to the promised land (and in fact seem to be carrying us farther away by day), why not find their common thread and see it as the common problem? Maybe they’ve all got this ego thing backwards. Maybe you are really better than the religions ever allow you to be, and denying that truth is why we live in hell on earth. Maybe love of self as the key to finding Heaven on Earth is the single most important thing you can take from this book.

I’m not the first one to the dance in terms of this concept. None other than Nelson Mandela assessed the importance of profound self-love:

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. All of us. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Who else will shine your light for you? If not you, then who? Why not you?

Why can’t you be the next great thing? Why can’t you light the world? Shouldn’t our religion empower and embolden us to be the best we can be? Not to hide our light under a bushel?

To be called

I was at bible study tonight (I know that doesn't sound like my thing but I am so interested in all religious perspectives and I think it hones my own post-religion message), and the topic was how to know when you're called to do something with your life.  Who's doing the calling?  When does it happen?  How do I know if I am being called?  What do I do when it happens?  Can I still be called if I don't believe in god (YES!)

I think we all have a path and a purpose. No, I don't think there's a god above us directing the show but I think there is something Important and worthy for each of us to do. I was at sea for years, both before and after my bipolar diagnosis, not knowing how I would make my mark. I was always in a rush to find the calling and worried I would miss the boat if I wasn't paying attention. I would look up at the sun or moon, much like many of you look to god, and say please help me see, open my eyes to my truth and light. And finally after a lot of rushing around in my 20's I learned to say:

"Slow down Hilary.  Don't rush it. It will come to you in due course.  It will come to you."  And some great peace came over me (about the same time I stopped believing in god).  And I could literally see the synchronicity of my future and see how my calling would arise from and complement beautifully my other pursuits: being a mom, a wife, an attorney, a mental illness survivor. But I HAD to tend to all those things and diligently plant seeds not knowing when the harvest would come. I had to "ride the pine" until the coach called my number.

And now I have been called. And it hits you like a lightning bolt, but it's warm, not white hot, and gradual, and awfully familiar.  It's like you've known it your whole life but never saw it coming.  It's empowering and sustaining and awesome in nature.

I'm going to be a mental health advocate and speaker. I've already given my motivational talk to one group and have plans to continue speaking to other groups.  I've been asked to write about it. I've fielded mental health crisis calls.  I am filling a void in a world desperate for truthful unabashed voices on mental illness.  And people are listening.  And asking for more.  Doing what I care most about for a living is a gift.  I truly believe this gift is out there for all of us but there is no rush. It may happen when you are 15 or 37 or 82.  But plant those seeds and keep letting light in and it will come.  It will all make sense. It will come.

Please contact me if you would like more information or have a group you would like me to speak to. My talk is titled "Through the Open Door: A Bipolar Attorney talks mania, recovery, and heaven on earth".

P.S. I am by no means giving up my career as an attorney. I love it and I'll keep trying to knock it out of the park at the Chaney Law Firm in Arkadelphia.

Tools and Tips for Mental Health

After 13 years, I have developed some tools or tricks to help battle my Bipolar Disorder.  Here ya go:

1)  The first thing is called a Mental Toolbox.  This is a collection of things I can do if I feel like I am spinning out of control or falling into a depression.  For me it's things like getting outside, getting exercise, seeing my therapist, talking to a friend, journaling, listening to music, etc.  I just flip through these tools mentally and find one that fits my situation and go with it.  If I get through three or four and nothing works over a few days, then it's definitely time to see my psychiatrist.  It helps me to always know a doctor or nurse at my clinic is available on the phone 24/7.  My mom knows all about my Mental Toolbox and if she is concerned about my mental state she will remind me to try the Toolbox.  It really helps to have some shared language between you and your family.  Bywords that you both are familiar with help to focus on the problem.

2)  It used to be that with the slightest sign of mania I would call my psychiatrist and see if I needed to change my medications.  We've both figured out this is not the best course all the time.  You don't always know the nature of the problem if you don't give it a few days to see what's really going on.  A knee jerk reaction to up the Risperdal or lower the Lamictal may not be what you need.  There can be a lot of external factors that cause a blip on your mental health radar.  I think about whether I've been eating too much or too little, whether I have had to stay up late or wake up in the middle of the night with the kids.  Whether I have been drinking too much.  What time of the menstrual cycle I am in (my excellent psychiatrist specializes in women's mental illness and is well-versed in the effects your cycle can have on your mental state).  Whether it's a full moon (seriously!).  Whether I am having a personal or financial problem.  There are usually things going on outside my brain that are causing a change in how I feel.  It's a good idea to evaluate those triggers before reaching for the pillbox.  I can now recognize what part of Bipolar I am feeling after a day or two.  If it gets better by using something in my Toolbox, then I don't need to adjust my meds.  I've grown comfortable with waiting it out for a few days because each time something scary starts to happen I grow more confident in how I deal with it.  I've become very in tune with my illness and it's symptoms. 

3) A quick coping test for me is this:  I say "Has anything changed in my life since last week when I didn't feel this agitated, phobic, paranoid, or manic?"  I think about whether there have been big changes in my finances, my work, my kids, my interpersonal relationships, my marriage, my in-laws or the like.  If none of those have really changed since last week, I know my anxiety is purely chemical, a pure distortion in my brain, a true chemical imbalance.  This forces me to calm down and think before I make a big (and potentially regrettable) decision in the aforementioned areas.  It also tells me I do need to make a change in my dosages, with my psychiatrist's help.  It's hard to tell sometimes what is normal mood change that anyone would feel and what's bipolar, and asking this question really helps.  Meds really do fix your brain.  And quick. 

4)  My illness is organic and it changes.  As I get stronger so does it, and it finds alternate disguises and new ways to chip away at me.  It helped me when I analogized it to a video game, like old school Zelda or Donkey Kong.  Through great effort and sometimes repeated failure, I would finally figure out how to "beat a level" or beat the enemy in one level of the game.  I would unlock the door to the next level and a new enemy or a new kind or test would await on the next screen.  It gives me a chance to feel proud of beating the first level of the Bipolar game, but guards me against getting complacent in the face of my illness as the next challenge is literally right around the corner.  Mental illness is the dragon that never sleeps.  It started out, when I was hospitalized for three weeks, that I could not make any headway in the game, and seemed to fall back to square one if I ever did.  Now I gain more ground that I lose, and that will be true for all life-long sufferers of this chronic disease. 

The bottom line is that there is lots you can do on your own to fight this thing, but you are never alone.  We can help each other get healthy every single day.  Be brave.  Share your story and you are bound to help someone else who is struggling. 

Happy Friday Bright Lights!

Hil

Ironic

I heard an oldie but goodie today.  Ironic by Alanis Morissette.  "It's like a black fly in your chardonnay, ten thousands spoons when all you need is a knife, meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his Beautiful wife..."  Isn't it ironic.  It's about the things that go wrong just when you most want them to go right.  Today was the opposite kind of day for me. 

A green light day.  When things run, for the most part, just like they should.  Most of the time those days mean I am trending toward mania.  I feel good, and I immediately have to think (I have been trained to think), do I feel TOO good?  Should I take more meds to un-good how I feel?  Isn't that a sad way to have to think about happiness.  Never mind, it's just how bipolars have to think. 

Anyway, I didn't sleep as well a few days last week.  I was over-saturated with holiday wine and food and year-end worries.  I was getting a cold.  I was getting paranoid about little things.  All of these things were warning signs.  Thanks to great poise and counsel from Nathan, and with the aid of a couple extra lorazepam, I came off the ledge and got back to normal.  What's left though is a nice feeling of synchronicity with the world.  When this usually happens I tend toward the hyperreligious and get all preachy about the end of religion.  I think a lot about heaven.  I get going too fast and high and have a car accident or lock myself out of the house or drop a kid on his head.  There was a hint of that a few days ago but I slowed down and willed myself to be within myself and it seems to have passed. 

So today:  I ran out of my risperdal and there was a delay with the doctor getting the new prescription but it came through just before the pharmacy closed, so I don't have to go without it this weekend.  I saw four dear friends with great big smiles on their faces and had really touching conversations with them.  I was just putting my four year old's dinner on the table as he came into the dining room and said "I'm hungry."  He has started the basics of reading and we played freeze tag and hopscotch in the sun.  His grandmother met us at the park and watch as he helped my one year old son slide down the slide for the first time.  The baby has started signing "all done" and saying "thank you."  My husband helped me clean up the kitchen.  I uploaded some work files to the social security website just before the close of business.  Both kids napped.  Etc etc etc. 

BUT, then also we had an explosive diaper.  I spilled water all over the newly varnished table.  And my one year old has not gone to bed yet at 10:08.  So not everything went as perfect as you please, which makes me know I am staying healthy and arresting mania.  There is a lot of love in this family today and the good things about being a wife and mom are all in place.  It's a 95 out of 100 day, and that's as good as I could ever want it to be. 

Best to all of you.  Hil

Tenets

So I've written 64 blog posts. I feel sorry for anyone who has tried to grasp my basic beliefs by wading through all those words. All the posts mean something to me but it's hard to extract the "root juices" from that much writing. So here are the 8 basic tenets boiled down: 1. There is no God above us. We are all Gods. There is no one greater than us and our human potential. 2. We are not born sinners. There was no fall from grace, no original sin. If you tell a child who can barely talk the bible story about us being born sinners, there is no choice but for him to become one. 3. You are born perfect down to every single hair on your head. You’re just taught the opposite so you see every flaw, and reveal them to others. You have been taught to be your worst critic. 4. There is no heaven or hell after death. Heaven is going to come in present day, here on earth. And soon. And WE ALL get to go, no exceptions. Heaven can only come when religion dies, and we rise above from the ashes. 5. Those who have died before us are all back here with us in spirit. A sunset, the way the wind smells, the way the sky looks, all parts of the one spirit of love and they are all trying to propel us to heaven on earth because when we finally find it all the departed get to go too. 6. "Then through the glass darkly, now face to face." The AHA moment is when you look in the mirror at God and it’s you looking back. You are the God. God, if you want to conjure him, cannot wait for us to make that realization. He cannot wait for the veil to be lifted and for us to come home to ourselves. 7. Self love is the first love. Loving others above self has it backwards. Pride and ego are not bad things. We are taught to be ashamed to love ourselves. 8. All of religion is about submitting and obeying. Even look at praying, it’s always head down, eyes closed. It wants to keep us blind and fearful and small. Submission is a chain. Why would we have all this suffering if religion was right? It’s had thousands of years to get it right, and it’s just getting wronger. Does anyone know the name for this philosophy? I've tried to identify anyone over the millenia who believes like I do, and in much research have found no match. A little Transcendentalism, a little Pantheism, a little Jah, a little Atheism, a little Dan Brownism... Thanks for reading and may you always know your exponential potential.

Dark gray matter

Just finished reading Newsweek's cover article on the Multiverse. Pretty exciting math and physics discussion to think we are just one in a billion or more universes. As Nathan explained it to me, it's the theory that there are so many universes out there that there is one exactly like ours in every aspect except our yellow lab retriever is black instead. And then another where she's brown etc.etc.etc. Anyway, I talk in this blog about us heading toward a time where math, or science, and religion become one. Used to be back in Aristotle's day that religion and science were twin pursuits with a lot more in common, and that characterization makes sense if we can step back a bit to consider it. Theology literally means "God-science" in the Latin. It's such a shame, a crying shame, that the two disciplines are at each others throats these days. Did this divergence start in the Age of Enlightenment, or perhaps as long ago as on the cross? What I really liked about the Newsweek article was it's description of dark matter, or dark energy. It's been very hard to define dark energy in scientific formulas, but it's out there for sure and it's what binds the infinite universes together (or more aptly keeps all matter in suspension so we don't collapse in on each other black hole style). The author describes it as "not clumps of matter but an invisible energy, sort of like an invisible mist that's uniformly spread through space." Right on....a scientific way to describe my own theory. I've always thought there is a network out there, a web of circuitry that links us all. Theologians would call it the Spirit I think. That's how I was raised to understand it. But that's not right, since I don't believe in the Monotheistic God. In early blog posts I have called it a love network, but it's more than that. It's your sixth sense, and deja vu, and fate and chance and the hairs on the back of your neck standing up and the phone ringing and you know who's calling before you pick up. It's magic and ghosts and prescient dreams and feeling a swell of communal pride when you stand for the National Anthem. It's the untapped love we all have in us that is waiting to vibrate like a tuning fork when it's name is called. It's not just love but also knowledge. It's all the knowledge we have ever had and ever will have, and we are heading for a time when we will all have infinite knowledge like a shared brain, not because we learn it but just because the wiring gets turned on. The light switch will get flipped. It's a singularity of thought and feeling and discourse that will end all wars and cure all disease and quell all hate and flood all the dark fissures with light. To break it down, it's like Clark Griswold turning the lights on in Christmas Vacation. The dark gray matter is already there, in our internal brains and in our external consciousness, without and within, just waiting for the wire to go hot. It will be radiant. Who flips the switch and electrifies this stellar goo? I do, when I can articulate the end of religion (as we know it) and what comes next. My struggle is simply articulating the vision.

A win-win!

I am a Social Security Disability attorney. I work to get deserving people their benefits. Some clients are deserving and some are not and my job is to weed through them and work for those who truly cannot work. Many of my patients are bipolar. I naturally empathize with them and have a soft spot for their myriad problems: psychotic breaks, involuntary commitment to psych hospitals, hallucinations, deep depression, cutting, panic attacks, running around naked through town....you name it. Today I won another bipolar case for the dearest and most deserving of clients. His mother sobbed in relief, knowing he would have some modicum of assistance when she passes on. For so many clients SSD benefits just mean they can get on Medicaid and get health insurance and medications. For others it means they can buy diapers for a child. Needless to say today was a glorious day when I feel proud of my profession and lucky that I have found somewhere to do good while living with a mental illness. Have a wonderful Mother's Day weekend and take care of each other. Hil