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Author Topic:   Enlightenment, or Bi-Polar "Disorder" ???
Heart--Shaped Cross
Knowflake

Posts: 8453
From: 11/6/78 11:38am Boston, MA
Registered: Aug 2004

posted July 30, 2008 04:49 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Heart--Shaped Cross     Edit/Delete Message
Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou art fled away.

How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismayed;
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dressed,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good
Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love--though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee --
Thou art love and life! Oh, come,
Make once more my heart thy home.


~ Percy Bysshe Shelley



Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.

~ Sarah Williams

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sesame
Moderator

Posts: 1614
From: Oz
Registered: Nov 2003

posted July 30, 2008 08:21 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for sesame     Edit/Delete Message
praecipua, you say you have bipolar, did you relate at all to the videos? He seems to say you just "get over it" which I think must be simplistic. I find it a very interesting concept that a known mental condition could result in spiritual awakenning as where else would enlightnemnt arrive other than the mind? Makes you wonder about other conditions such as schizophrenia or manic depression or multiple personality disorder. Are there spiritual truths underlying these things? More to the point, how would it be possible to deal with these things without drugs? Could it be possible? Maybe there needs to be more spiritual teachers that have these experiences to teach everyone else about what they mean and how to deal with it. Maybe there is lots we could learn that we are just completely closed to at present?

Very interesting! Thanks again for posting HSC!

Cheers,
Dean.

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Heart--Shaped Cross
Knowflake

Posts: 8453
From: 11/6/78 11:38am Boston, MA
Registered: Aug 2004

posted July 31, 2008 01:25 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Heart--Shaped Cross     Edit/Delete Message
Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life; define yourself.

~ Harvey Fierstein

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Heart--Shaped Cross
Knowflake

Posts: 8453
From: 11/6/78 11:38am Boston, MA
Registered: Aug 2004

posted July 31, 2008 02:36 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Heart--Shaped Cross     Edit/Delete Message
redirected from R.D. Laing

Ronald David Laing (7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989), was a Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness and particularly the experience of psychosis. He is noted for his views, influenced by existential philosophy, on the causes and treatment of mental illness, which went against the psychiatric orthodoxy of the time by taking the expressions or communications of the individual patient or client as representing valid descriptions of lived experience or reality rather than as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. He is often associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although, like many of his contemporaries also critical of psychiatry, he himself rejected this label. He made a significant contribution to the ethics of psychology.

Laing argued that the strange behavior and seemingly confused speech of people undergoing a psychotic episode were ultimately understandable as an attempt to communicate worries and concerns, often in situations where this was not possible or not permitted. Laing stressed the role of society, and particularly the family, in the development of "madness" (his term). He argued that individuals can often be put in impossible situations, where they are unable to conform to the conflicting expectations of their peers, leading to a 'lose-lose situation' and immense mental distress for the individuals concerned. (In 1956, in Palo Alto, Gregory Bateson and his colleagues Paul Watzlawick, Donald Jackson, and Jay Haley[4] articulated a related theory of schizophrenia as stemming from double bind situations where a person receives different or contradictory messages.) The perceived symptoms of schizophrenia were therefore an expression of this distress, and should be valued as a cathartic and trans-formative experience.

Laing saw psychopathology as being seated not in biological or psychic organs -- whereby environment is relegated to playing at most only an accidental role as immediate trigger of disease (the 'stress diathasis model' of the nature and causes of psychopathology) -- but rather in the social cradle, the urban home, which cultivates it, the very crucible in which selves are forged. This re-evaluation of the locus of the disease process-- and consequent shift in forms of treatment-- was, indeed still is, perhaps now more than ever, in stark contrast to psychiatric orthodoxy (in the broadest sense we have of ourselves as psychological subjects and pathological selves). Psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers had previously pronounced, in his seminal work General Psychopathology, that many of the symptoms of mental illness (and particularly of delusions) were 'un-understandable', and therefore were worthy of little consideration except as a sign of some other underlying primary disorder. Laing was revolutionary in valuing the content of psychotic behavior and speech as a valid expression of distress, albeit wrapped in an enigmatic language of personal symbolism which is meaningful only from within their situation. According to Laing, if a therapist can better understand his or her patient, the therapist can begin to make sense of the symbolism of the patient's psychosis, and therefore start addressing the concerns which are the root cause of the distress.

Laing never denied the existence of mental illness, but simply viewed it in a radically different light from his contemporaries. For Laing, mental illness could be a trans-formative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights, and may even have become a wiser and more grounded person as a result.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._D._Laing

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Heart--Shaped Cross
Knowflake

Posts: 8453
From: 11/6/78 11:38am Boston, MA
Registered: Aug 2004

posted July 31, 2008 03:58 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for Heart--Shaped Cross     Edit/Delete Message
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRkA6zugNMQ

God, I love this man.

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Heart--Shaped Cross
Knowflake

Posts: 8453
From: 11/6/78 11:38am Boston, MA
Registered: Aug 2004

posted July 31, 2008 07:31 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Heart--Shaped Cross     Edit/Delete Message
[oops]

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Heart--Shaped Cross
Knowflake

Posts: 8453
From: 11/6/78 11:38am Boston, MA
Registered: Aug 2004

posted July 31, 2008 07:31 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Heart--Shaped Cross     Edit/Delete Message

In lazy apathy let Stoics boast
Their virtue fix’d: ’tis fix’d as in a frost;
Contracted all, retiring to the breast;
But strength of mind is exercise, not rest.

~ Alexander Pope

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praecipua
Knowflake

Posts: 643
From: england
Registered: Aug 2007

posted August 02, 2008 05:52 AM     Click Here to See the Profile for praecipua     Edit/Delete Message
sesame, i didn't watch the videos before today. i did it today, but stopped after a few minutes cause the voice, and what the guy said made me want to puke. may be i'm angry today i don't know but just listening to a guy telling me what is enlightenment is not for me. who's this guy? even if what he says is true, why does he feel the need to inform the rest of us? ego? a need to please himself? fair enough, i respect his need for applause and recognition as a great thinker, but my guru wouldn't be this kind of people... i'd rather listen to someone who ask me questions than give me answers.

boring!!

having said that, i realise that my anger is probably a reaction to my own attitude of know-it-all...
so i can't be bothered whith someone else inflated ego.

anyway, to be paradoxical, now i'm gonna do exactly what annoyed me with this video, i.e. give my views while believing what i say is true...

something made me react, it's when i heard him compare twenty years of meditation by buddist monk with sudden enlightenment while waking in a shopping mall. the two are different. but not because the monk is buddhist, or the monk is a monk, or he lives in india rather than the US. we are all human, all equals. but for me, there is a lack of respect for the spiritual path when we believe we can attain enlightenmnt just by living a normal life. here, i don't mean that to be spiritual u have to give up wife, kids, house and so on... what i mean is that there are many levels, many steps before attaining enlightenment, and to get there, it's a full time job. we live in spiritual age, and that's beautiful, but it doesn't mean that traditions like buddhism, with its techniques of meditation become irrelevant. if they are useful, it could just be to precisely avoid falling into mntal illness. obviously some can be strong and reach enlightenment without support or structures, but why not using them when they are available and have been tested over thousand of years? ego making us believe we are somewhat better than those "stupid" buddhist monks who didn't understand anything and wasted their time in a monastry?

here i'm not saying what IS, but what is, FOR ME. i might be wrong all along and it would be because of my need to appear knowledgeable.

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