Interlude: Taboos

   

  At this point I must apologize for dragging the reader into my personal matters; I realize I am discussing any manner of taboo subjects: divorce, epilepsy, psychedelic drugs, altered states of consciousness, spiritual ecstasy, Krishna consciousness, occult rituals of the Meso-America.  Some of my posts are not for the faint of heart. And yet, now that my blog has reached over 20,000 readers, I feel I can open up. Writing this blog is giving me the courage to discuss the chain of events that led me to where I am and sent me in a particular direction.

 I know others have taken similiar paths perhaps for different reasons. Now I am in my Sixty-first year, and perhaps sharing my experience may help others. I have kept silent for quite a long time. Some of the people involved in these stories have passed on, and there is no harm for me to describe these events that happened so long ago.

    Let me say that I am not interested in drugs. I haven't made experiments of the kind described in Teenage Wasteland for many years. I'm only trying to be honest and confront the demons of my past. My cardiologist has prescribed me some heart medicine for my blood pressure, but I take it reluctantly and always look for alternatives in diet and exercise.

   That said, I have always been fascinated with the relationship between brain, consciousness, and spirituality, on account of my own personal experience. Epilepsy at the crux of all three, and from an early age I suffered from this malady. After 500 years of modern medicine, little is understood about this condition. People still speak of it in whispers. The word "epilepsy" effectively describes nothing more than a tendency to experience seizures produced from electrical storms in the brain. This can be caused by any number of factors from trauma due to head injury, psychological trauma, nervous or glandular problems, or a serious malformation of the organic cerebral tissues themselves.

   I began experiencing gran mal seizures as a small child in Connecticut. I remember a warm stuffy classroom. Mrs Carter helped us off with our rubber snow boots and had us draw Christmas trees with crayons on brown paper. We could see the snow falling outside. I drew a black tree and she chastised me saying, "Trees aren't black, Michael. Try again." As she spoke, her words melted like chocolate in the sun. Her voice drifted into the ether. I had the feeling that this had happened to me before, but where? I felt someone next to me and turned to see, but there was no one. I felt a sublime happiness and saw a radiant light. When I focused my eyes I could see the whole room was white. I was in my bed at home. My mother was sitting in a rocking chair at my side. She looked worried. "I'm sorry I colored the tree black." I said. "Are you all right?" She said. "We had to go to the school for you."

     No one was really sure what happened. But it wasn't long before there was another episode. And so it went. Over the course of my school life between kindergarten at the catholic Corpus Christi  school in Los Angeles and primary school at Bedford Elementary School in Westport, Connecticut I had hundreds of seizures. When I was 5 or 6 years old, I can't remember exactly, I was taken in to New York City for some tests. Perhaps the epilepsy affected my memory. I have a selective memory. I can remember all the books I ever read, but only a few exceptional incidents from my early life. One of them was the trip to the hospital in New York.
     The elevator was military green as were the halls. I was taken up into the higher floors of the building. They took me in a wheelchair. I was wearing pajamas with little blue airplanes with propellers. A pair of orderlies attended me. They wheeled me into a green room with big grey doors. I think they x-rayed my brain. Later I was on a grey padded table. The orderlies shaved my head with a buzzer. They glued electrodes to my head with the glue I later used to glue plastic model airplanes. It had a nasty chemical smell. To this day, I hate that smell. The electrodes were connected to a big grey machine with needles that swayed with the electrical impulses of my brain. 

Enigma Machine

It printed a paper readout. It was called an electro-encephalograph or EEG. According to my EEG I had irregular electrical impulses in my brain. Another doctor prescribed me medicine for the seizures. I was to take Dilantin and Phenobarbitol. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/meds/a682007.html
    When I went back to school I began taking the medicine. After a while my teacher called my mother to the school. "What happened to Michael?" she asked. "He used to be such a bright boy, and now he seems like a zombie. He just sits quietly and stares out the window."
     After a while they changed my medicine to a new drug called Mesantoin. http://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-9316/mesantoin-oral/details/list-sideeffects Sometimes I would skip the medicine for a few days and I would feel better; but then the seizures would return. Days would go by and suddenly, unexpectedly there was another episode. My mother scolded me for not taking my medicine. My excuse: "I forgot," didn't work so well.Truth be told,  I preferred an occasional dip into the "dizzy spells" that took me into another world to the numbness and stupidity brought on  by a daily dose or phenobarbitol.

   It was tough dealing with the situation. And I didn't have any means for understanding the psychological trauma I was going through. My way of adapting was to absorb myself in reading. Reading took me into another world. I read the stories of King Arthur and his knights and could see myself on a grail quest. I read about ancient civilizations in Egypt and India.

 I had a nerdy friend who invented an analog computer and wrote short stories. I never saw a psychologist. In those days, we didn't have psychologists. Or if we did, my mother really didn't consider the idea. She didn't want anyone to know about our family problems. We had a perfect family with the perfect Martha Stewart Christmas in Connecticut. I suppose she was in denial.

 

The TV executives at CBS in New York spent a lot of time at cocktail parties, drinking. Someone recommended a popular TV series to me called "Madmen." It's about post-war ad executives in New York and their cynical lives in the 1960s. I couldn't watch one episode. It was too close to the bone. My parents really weren't interested in exploring the psychology of epilepsy. It was taboo. 

 There's a stigma attached to epilepsy; the stigma of madness. The word stigma is interesting. Jesus Christ displayed the "stigmata" of having been crucified: The marks on his hands and feet where he had been pierced with nails as well as the scar over the heart where the Romans pierced him with a spear. Great saints and religious mystics sometimes display the stigmata. 



  The stigma attached to any kind of brain disease is such that the subject is taboo; no one wants to be known as a "mental patient." Perhaps this is less true today, but back in the 1960s it was anathema. And yet, certain "altered states of consciousness" caused by unusual electrical activity in the neural receptors and networks of the brain are sought after by many who want to know a visionary reality. 



Drugs and Narcotics are a multi-billion dollar industry. In this painful and godless mechanistic world of technology and robots people are starved for transcendence, for a vision of higher reality, for a real experience of the numinous. Paradoxically, while the stigma still attaches to brain disorders,  truth-seekers and scientists want to know how great mystics achieved the stigmata. Were mystics like St. Francis of Assisi or St. Joan of Arc really only suffering from some dissociative disorder? 

In the 1960s Intellectuals from Aldous Huxley, who wrote on the doors of perception,  https://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPerception.pdf  to Alan Watts, who lectured on the relationship between Zen States and LSD were determined to understand if there was some relationship between a new class of psycho-active drugs and transcendental experience. 




If psycho-active drugs could produce transcendent experience, would the state achieved resemble something like the dissociative episodes of epilepsy?  Dostoyevsky's Prince Myshkin describes his visionary experience in The Idiot (Constance Garnett translation): 

He remembered that during his epileptic fits, or rather immediately
preceding them, he had always experienced a moment or two when his whole
heart, and mind, and body seemed to wake up to vigour and light; when
he became filled with joy and hope, and all his anxieties seemed to be
swept away for ever; these moments were but presentiments, as it were,
of the one final second (it was never more than a second) in which the
fit came upon him. That second, of course, was inexpressible. When his
attack was over, and the prince reflected on his symptoms, he used to
say to himself: "These moments, short as they are, when I feel such
extreme consciousness of myself, and consequently more of life than
at other times, are due only to the disease--to the sudden rupture of
normal conditions. Therefore they are not really a higher kind of life,
but a lower." This reasoning, however, seemed to end in a paradox,
and lead to the further consideration:--"What matter though it be only
disease, an abnormal tension of the brain, if when I recall and analyze
the moment, it seems to have been one of harmony and beauty in the
highest degree--an instant of deepest sensation, overflowing with
unbounded joy and rapture, ecstatic devotion, and completest life?"
Vague though this sounds, it was perfectly comprehensible to Muishkin,
though he knew that it was but a feeble expression of his sensations.

That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments,
that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not
doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt. He felt that they were
not analogous to the fantastic and unreal dreams due to intoxication
by hashish, opium or wine. Of that he could judge, when the attack was
over. These instants were characterized--to define it in a word--by
an intense quickening of the sense of personality. Since, in the last
conscious moment preceding the attack, he could say to himself, with
full understanding of his words: "I would give my whole life for this
one instant," then doubtless to him it really was worth a lifetime.
For the rest, he thought the dialectical part of his argument of little
worth; he saw only too clearly that the result of these ecstatic moments
was stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy. No argument was possible
on that point. His conclusion, his estimate of the "moment," doubtless
contained some error, yet the reality of the sensation troubled him.
What's more unanswerable than a fact? And this fact had occurred. The
prince had confessed unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense
beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment worth a lifetime. "I
feel then," he said one day to Rogojin in Moscow, "I feel then as if I
understood those amazing words--'There shall be no more time.'" And he
added with a smile: "No doubt the epileptic Mahomet refers to that same
moment when he says that he visited all the dwellings of Allah, in less
time than was needed to empty his pitcher of water." 

 Dostoyevsky describes his personal experiences with transcendental states before a seizure in his own words:  "For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception.  I feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life.  I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me.  I really attained god and was imbued with him.  All of you healthy people don't even suspect  what happiness is , that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an episode."

What exactly is the link between the brain, consciousness and spirituality? Could it be possible, that by artificially provoking a psychotic dissociative episode similar to the epileptic experience, but during the waking state, one's seizures might be controlled? I'm not sure how these questions are appropriately answered, but I'm not the first to ask. At the present moment there is a strong current of research suggesting that medical marijuana may be a beneficial form of treatment for use in the control of seizures especially among children and even teenagers. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/epidiolex_n_7055784.html

http://www.webmd.com/epilepsy/news/20150413/liquid-medical-marijuana-shows-promise-against-severe-epilepsy

http://www.epilepsy.com/learn/treating-seizures

-and-epilepsy/other-treatment-approaches/medical-marijuana-and-epilepsy

Of course, it is still very much taboo to discuss these matters seriously. The so-called "War on Drugs" has claimed somewhere in the neighborhood of 80,000 lives here in Mexico alone. And yet we may well ask, "what drives the consumption of drugs?" "why are people so determined to risk their lives to discover the visionary experience offered by these drugs?"

In his famous ground-breaking essay, Aldous Huxley quotes the visionary English poet William Blake: "I have always found," Blake wrote rather bitterly, "that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning." Systematic reasoning is something we could not, as a species or as individuals, possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experienced participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves. Meanwhile, however, there are gratuitous graces in the form of partial and fleeting realizations. Under a more realistic, a less exclusively verbal system of education than ours, every Angel (in Blake's sense of that word) would be permitted as a sabbatical treat, would be urged and even, if necessary, compelled to take an occasional trip through some chemical Door in the Wall into the world of transcendental experience.