The Benefits of a Nervous Breakdown

Below is an excerpt from my book, “Eye-locks and Other Fearsome Things.”  In this section of my book I am describing to my therapist a theory I had researched in grad school before my psychotic break with reality at age 28, long before I was to start my life over from scratch as a conceptually-challenged yet more feeling person.  Breakdowns can destroy cognitive functioning. It did for me. While I was never ever good at conceptual thinking, the breakdown has made it virtually impossible to understand even the most basic concepts.  Despite being on medications for Bipolar Disorder, my mind simply does not work as it once did. This is often humiliating and frustrating though I am mostly okay with it.

Yet, in the past few months, I found Mooji and am following his path– something I thought I would never do because Buddhism was so “beyond” me.  And I find myself following many Buddhist blogs. Many times reading such posts and poetry sail way above my comprehension.  But this, too, is good.  It is humbling and it deprives the ego of its food supply, which according to Mooji, is good.  A “chop” at the ego-self is needed over and over again in order to be in the Presence.  But the mind still yearns to understand.

For what it is worth here is the excerpt from a therapy session in which I describe my “theory” to my therapist.  What is synchronicitous is that the theory sounds somewhat Buddhist in nature.  It opens with me talking to my therapist, or rather, reading from my notebook, because I found it difficult to talk at times.

“Alpha = life in utero.  Birth = the end of life in utero—  death of a sort, a seeming death.  Birth is entering the world of light— Reality.

“Reality is too much.  People need to escape— to regress.  Therefore, the mind goes into altered states of consciousness.” I look up and stop reading and explain.  “I studied this when I was in graduate school.  I hit upon the literature of altered states of consciousness while I was in a Psych class doing a research paper on creativity and I became obsessed with the topic.  I nearly had a breakdown then because I wasn’t eating or sleeping or going to classes.  All I was doing was this research and writing.  A friend in the dorm used to make sure I ate something.  But all that time I felt like I was banging my head against a brick wall.  The material was difficult and I was afraid I was really going off the deep end and writing far out stuff. But in the end the professor gave me an A+ on the paper…”

“Anyhow,” I say as I start to read from my notebook again, “many altered states of consciousness have been found to coincide with the production of alpha brain wave patterns.”  I stop reading again and say, “I know this first hand because I did biofeedback once and the feeling you get when you’re producing alpha waves is the same as the one you get in mystical experiences and meditation.  Altered states of consciousness typically occur under conditions of sensory deprivation or sensory overload because overloading the system shuts it down, so in effect it becomes a condition of sensory deprivation.  The first experience of sensory deprivation occurs in the womb.  The ultimate form of sensory deprivation is death.  Death is a return to the womb.  The womb of the earth.  Therefore, Alpha = Omega.”

So there it is in a nutshell.  The book is mainly an emotional chronicle of relationships, and finding love, despite being very handicapped by Bipolar Disorder and Asperger’s Syndrome and OCD.  If you would like to purchase it for $2.95 please click on the link below:

http://www.independentauthornetwork.com/ellen-stockdale-wolfe.html

March 6, 2015 | Categories: Asperger's & Autism, Bipolar Disorder, Depression and Mania, Mooji, Segments and references to my memoir, Spirituality, Uncategorized | Tags: Asperger's Syndrome, Bipolar Disorder, Buddhism, Ego, Loss of cognitive functioning, Mooji, Nervous Breakdown, Psychological Memoirs, Theories of existence | 8 Comments