All Discussions Tagged 'happiness' - Temple Illuminatus2024-03-29T14:34:39Zhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/forum/topic/listForTag?tag=happiness&feed=yes&xn_auth=noHealing Madness – An Emerging Paradigm for Wellbeingtag:templeilluminatus.ning.com,2011-04-12:6363372:Topic:1397082011-04-12T06:32:02.154ZGrigori Rho Gharveynhttps://templeilluminatus.ning.com/profile/GrigoriRhoGharveyn
<p><i>Many people are terrified by mental illness; they are afraid to tell anyone they suspect they may be mentally ill. Most mental illnesses are derived from our societies and cultures. If we do not learn how to talk about our fears safely, we may never learn how to heal ourselves.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Healing Madness – An Emerging Paradigm for Wellbeing</b></p>
<p>We are on the track of an emerging cultural phenomenon that excites us a lot, an emerging paradigm that will be a major focus…</p>
<p><i>Many people are terrified by mental illness; they are afraid to tell anyone they suspect they may be mentally ill. Most mental illnesses are derived from our societies and cultures. If we do not learn how to talk about our fears safely, we may never learn how to heal ourselves.</i></p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Healing Madness – An Emerging Paradigm for Wellbeing</b></p>
<p>We are on the track of an emerging cultural phenomenon that excites us a lot, an emerging paradigm that will be a major focus for our work for the near future. We see that many people are writing about revising our mental health paradigms to demonstrate that many things that today may be regarded as mental illnesses are actually helpful healing processes.</p>
<p>Things like Depression, Schizophrenia, and Psychoses <i>evolved</i>. These things did not just appear willy-nilly out of nowhere. These things could never have evolved unless they performed some sort of valuable, useful functions. Evolution would have culled them from our range of abilities if they did not help us in some fundamental way.</p>
<p>Ancient civilizations may often have understood these things better than we do today. Sadly, we may have lost their ancient wisdom partly because Christianity and Islam have both stigmatized mental illnesses as spiritual illnesses caused by or created by demonic influences or demonic possession.</p>
<p>As an emerging scientific civilization in the Dark Ages, in our collective cultural efforts to develop a more rational approach to the world, we dismissed these quasi-religious approaches to mental health and instead tried to build a model of mental well-being in which we have tried to redefine our madnesses as organic brain dysfunctions.</p>
<p>Sometimes, some mental illnesses, particularly depression, can trigger serious biochemical responses that can eventually lead to organic brain dysfunctions. However, most of these so-called illnesses are really ways in which we may learn to heal ourselves naturally when we are sometimes confronted with impossible circumstances in our lives that may make it seem very difficult to make any successful, healthy choices to fix whatever is wrong in our lives.</p>
<p>Depression is a healing response to being overwhelmed.</p>
<p>Depression motivates us to isolate ourselves, to remove ourselves from sources of our chronic, environmental stresses.</p>
<p>In the old days, we might have just gone on a journey, leaving family and friends behind until we returned. However, in our modern worlds we may not be able to go anywhere unless we abandon our homes and become itinerant homeless wanderers.</p>
<p>We, ourselves, have chosen to do that several times in our life now, so we understand the value of being homeless. Alas, the journeys we may sometimes go on, whether as a traveling vacationer paying their way for comfort in strange places, or as a homeless wanderer existing on the charity of strangers, is a journey within our own minds, a journey upon which it is often very easy to get lost.</p>
<p>When we get lost on this sort of journey, our civilizations tend to call us schizophrenic. When we are lost on our journeys and become more stressed, we may learn to act out in anti-social manners that many people agree are unacceptable behavior; they may then label us as psychotics.</p>
<p>However, none of these terms actually means that we are insane.</p>
<p>Often, it is quite the opposite.</p>
<p>If our societies and cultures do not stigmatize or persecute us for being mentally ill according to their own beliefs, then often, our psychoses, schizophrenia, and depression can actually lead us to our sanity.</p>
<p>All societies and civilizations on Earth are already insane. Few people like to examine this truth, but it is still true.</p>
<p>When we learn to conform to our societies' expectations, we are adopting their existing mental, emotional, and social illnesses. We are saying we will agree to live in ways that may teach us to hurt ourselves in exchange for the benefits of living in a reasonably stable society, culture, or civilization.</p>
<p>However, many of the social, emotional, and mental illnesses that we must adopt in order to adapt to our native cultures may benefit other members of our societies more so than they benefit us. Many social mechanisms are already in place that benefit the members of our societies as a group at the expense of the welfare of individual members.</p>
<p>The new model for mental health that is now emerging recognizes that what we currently call mental illnesses may really be healing processes. Within the structures of these re-emerging paradigms we may learn to teach ourselves how to heal ourselves and how to help each other learn to heal. We may then remake our madnesses into the tools whereby we enable ourselves to heal our own lives.</p>
<p>It often requires a cultural and social background that understands and supports these new healing processes and paradigms in order to learn to heal ourselves, however, the good news is that such cultures are now emerging.</p>
<p>The kind of cultures that can help us to teach ourselves to heal ourselves are becoming more widely accessible and acceptable; people like Deepak Chopra are helping to pave the way into this braver new world.</p>
<p>We wish we had it all together to tell you all of the details, but we are still learning about this; we are still learning how to write about it. We have had to take ourselves far beyond the veil of acceptable behavior in order to learn this; we have had to become as crazy as the people whom we hope to help, people who must still learn to heal themselves by using their own madnesses as the tools that will finally help them to heal.</p>
<p>Our most recent journeys into darkness and madness have been deeply gratifying worthwhile experiences; we are much healthier now. We will continue to become healthier because our new paradigms for mental, emotional, and social wellbeing are far more successful than anything that our more traditional medical practices of today have been able to provide, thus far.</p>
<p>Always remember, any belief in rationalism is just another irrational belief…</p>
<p> </p>
<p><i>To your good health! May your madness drive you sane…</i></p>
<p><i>Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn</i></p>
<p><i>aka Greg Gourdian, Roger Holler, et al…</i></p>
<p><i> </i></p>
<p><i>Namaste</i></p>
<p><i> </i></p>