There is a direct line to God. It is what I call the “God string.” Give it a pull and you see the world from your own eyes the way God intended us to see the world, in that particular moment or bigger time periods. How did I pull the string? I asked God to do his will, not my own. Then, after my eyes were open, I was dead and born again.
-theothersid3
Where Mad Hatter dreams,
the sharpest minds become blunt;
here, I cross over.
Between light and dark
lies lucid experience:
demons, Diety.
Both ravage my flesh,
state of living death; lost here,
in the asylum?
-theothersid3
I met the faces of wisdom and folly during my first psychotic break at age 17 on 12-25-03 in Orlando, FL. I experienced the faces of good and evil with my entire being during this vision.
At first, I was with wisdom’s embodied spirit. She gently pointed me to my then unknown wife, by name on that Christmas morning, 2003 in Orlando, FL.
Folly, wisdom’s shadow, appeared after wisdom left, the one who helped make my life a standstill for 6 years. She tied my soul to another woman, my obsession, via black magic. She snuck her spirit in to guide me to darkness every step of the way and shut out God’s light.
I experienced a couple of spectacular organic, drug-free trips down rabbit holes which ripped my mind-heart-spirit from my body. It reached the point where I physically looked down on my body, an empty vessel on autopilot.
The first trip was immediately after my vision on 12-25-03. The second trip was 6 years later at age 23 starting on 6-16-09 the first day of my second hospital stay.
The next step both times was to climb back out. I was lucky they ran their courses safely back to reality both times instead of being stuck in a state of perpetual psychosis afterwards.
The next step is to recover from this profoundly intriguing, devastating trauma. 17 years later, I am starting to wrap this up. For me, this involves developing the lens of my worldview after having such intense spiritual experiences, making peace with them, and gleaning the good from them to take ownership of.
I did everything I could do short of physically dying in the face of evil after folly put a spell on me. Mentally, my spirit was broken in 2003 and began to heal in 2009. I held onto the experience I had with wisdom to keep myself together during those 6 years.
6-16-09 marked the first day of my second hospital stay and the second trip down the psychotic rabbit hole, which was book 2 after book 1 being the first trip. When God laid his hands on my spiritual heart and brought me back, he shattered the twisted black magic from my own folly and folly’s.
7 years later on 6-16-16 marks the first day of my third hospital stay. I did not go down the rabbit hole, but I learned what the darkness and the light and everything in between sounded like in my head. I learned discernment during that stay.
The face of evil leaves behind the darkest shadows that none can pluck. They haunt me and I learned to shut them out. It is so personal and potentially destructive, I cannot acknowledge these shadows in the wake of wisdom. They come from the darkest cesspool of Gehenna, where the filth and bodies are burned.
With the light of wisdom in the world comes the shadow of folly in the world. Both go hand in hand. I choose to pursue wisdom as best I can. The light brightens the more I pursue wisdom and love.
Decades later, I have a deeper connection with God as a result. I also have a connection with darkness I have learned to manage. The darkness is my shadow, not me. The brighter I shine, the smaller and darker the shadows become.
I am still building myself up at age 34 in 2020, 17 years after age 17 in 2003. My wife embodies that spirit of wisdom I encountered at age 17. My wife is a person of God and formed from my rib, the one wisdom indicated by name. I experience God through her.
The shadows stay in my little black box I made for them in my mind.
-theothersid3
She was a burden.
As my empty vessel writes,
I undo the spell.
Its vines choke my heart.
They whither, releasing me,
both body and mind.
Yahweh lights my heart,
freeing me of obsessions,
from past black magic.
Last week, six years past,
I was beyond manic and
Completely sober.
God’s shadow showed me
unwittingly, black magic:
tied her soul to mine.
Violent lightning and
earthshaking cracks, followed by
God’s hands on my heart.
I am in Shalom,
and strongly linked to the past;
live all moments now.
After time lapses,
I observe all, everything
within my mind’s scope.
So I float along.
Outside my vessel I scout,
everything Shalom.
Seventeen years now,
since the black magic sentence,
since my first visions.
Eleven years now,
since I watched my body write,
release her; free me.
My visions tunnel,
they pick up where they leave off
Mind dipped in Shalom.
-theothersid3
I look back inside my psychotic death;
mind, none fathomed my plane exists, being
in the moment. All seemed natural, loving.
Left my body in these moments’ deep breaths:
A fully conscious veil of living death,
touched and healed by the Light’s power teeming.
I fly through the ward, without much speaking.
Peers react to thoughts/intentions, confess:
Faces, actions all spiritually declothed:
their thoughts, emotions, intentions, I see.
She briefly comes to mind while I fly high.
In my asylum room, we’re befuddled,
We see our empty vessels, flesh and be,
Our flesh journals on her, our being thrives.
-theothersid3
photo credit: marfis75 Im Schacht. via photopin (license)
Looking back, I now realize that God has been silent in my mind for a very long time… years, in fact. I have heard God’s voice before in spirit, and I know my Lord’s voice. However, it is apparent I don’t know them well. I’ve been deceived by a number of different spiritual presences since, and I suspect the most pervasive one is my own inner voice.
In June 2016, when I drove myself to the mental health facility to be admitted as an inpatient, I was following something destructive. I ended up writing a few hundred pages in my journal while I stayed there, which I am still not ready to review as of today. That spiritual voice led me down some very strange rabbit holes. This included taking on the identity of the Angel of Death, drinking from cups signifying various things including the tears of the saints, and encouraged the notion of soul mates.
However, in the process of all this madness, I had a profound moment of deja-vu. I cannot tell whether I was sleeping or awake, but I remembered with utmost clarity a religious experience I had in 2003 after I blacked out then. A few months later, this recollection precipitated a chain reaction in my psyche. Under the guidance of my therapist, I revisited many angles of these experiences in my journal and have begun the process of unraveling the twisted rifts in my mind.
Why, I ask myself, is God silent now of all times? I can only speculate. I trust God will make it clear when He speaks to me again and reveal himself when I am ready. He must have a lot of confidence in me to be silent while I sort out a magnitude of burdens with the help of my friends, family, and therapist. While these are burdens, they are also some of my richest blessings and provide me with much wisdom and understanding.
Whether you are spiritual or not, what are some tools you have for sorting out your mind?
-theothersid3
If it’s worth anything, after going through those vivid psychotic experiences I went through, I found the other side is a wonderful place and it’s intricately connected to everything here, now.
It’s not a matter of who ends up there or who doesn’t… it just is. We’re all part of it, whether we know it or not.
One way I can describe such a perspective is waking up in a dream and having that become reality, being awake and asleep at the same time… becoming the living dead. The dream itself is nearly incomprehensible.
The living dead’s eyes are open and see what God allows them to see, never more than what we can handle.
-theothersid3
photo credit: Eyes Color via photopin (license)
At my very core
Past the event horizon
That is what comes next
-theothersid3
photo credit: event horizon via photopin (license)
When I am truly hurt, everything is hopeless, and nothing seems to work, I will lie down and put on some music. When I’ve completely lost myself and I’m utterly afraid, I do my best to let everything go and I find that there is love and hope, always. This is one song I cherish:
Forget the peace inside
You’ve given way to the gods of destruction
Full of desire
You feel afraid that there’s nothing left
Oh oh, oh no
Oh oh, oh no
The ocean is dry
Do you feel hollow?
Nowhere to hide
And nothing to swallow
And when you can’t recognize
Anything solid
Where do you turn?
When you can’t buy it?
What can you believe in now
With no love to follow?
Now that you have lost yourself
Oh, can anything help you now?
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
What did you learn?
What was it worth?
What did you yearn for?
Everything’s lost now
And not alone and not alone
And not alone and not alone
And not alone and not alone
And not alone and not alone
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
photo credit: Dragon Tree via photopin (license)
So, how does someone with severe bipolar appear to become psychotic out of the blue? Does one typically snap into a psychotic state or out of one?
The answer my therapist gave me is true to my experience: No. Psychosis is a long, slippery slope towards falling over the edge, and recovery is a long, gradual, up and down slope out of the pit for acute psychosis. The trick I found is to learn how to catch it earlier and earlier to the point where I can maintain and not have to worry about it happening anymore. A significant part of staying away from psychosis as someone with schizoaffective/bipolar I disorder is staying on my medication, no matter how unpleasant the side effects can be. I’ve had two psychotic breaks: first was when I was diagnosed twelve years ago and the second one five years later when I stopped my medications.
What are some general things that go through my head when I’m psychotic?
Fortunately, I do not experience anger or aggression for the most part towards anyone. The only way I can briefly describe it is that I feel like everything I can possibly conceive of is going through my head at the same time. It feels like I’m transported to a different reality, which is a wondrous new place, or hell depending on what episode I’m talking about. With all this information overload, little details begin to form more delusions: religion, personal, ideas, world events, and reality itself all become torn open and full of mysterious riddles.
While all this is going on in my head, what do other people see?
I remember leaving my physical body and conversing with other people around the ward, conversing with patients and staff, and visualizing unimaginable things. However, my hospital records document me sitting in my room those days scribbling away on papers about a girl I was obsessed with years ago at the time. I remember having glimpses of writing about her in what seems like my subconscious. True reality was a dream to me and I was living in a dream (the kind I have when I’m typically sleeping). I likened myself to the living dead at the time, awake and asleep at the same time. My friend also visited me in the ward and he later told me that he could see it in my eyes that sometimes I left and came back right in front of him. When I came back, he pleasantly said to me, “Welcome back!” Then we’d converse for a few more seconds before I returned to my psychosis trip. The same would happen with staff as well – I faded in and out and the staff were very excited to see me back when I came back, before fading again seconds or minutes later.
Another interesting note: as I fade in and out of reality, so to speak, what happens when I call someone on a cell phone? Well, I did… I called my friend, and I heard his voice loud and clear, then felt myself go to the other reality and all I heard was static coming through on my phone – with a full signal. I’d come back and hear his voice again, then fade away again. I wrote a post about this earlier.
I remember trying to tell myself and hearing other people tell me that all those experiences are in my head, and they may be. However, whether real or not, they are what they are. I’m not concluding that I merely sat in a room as an empty shell of a body working out my obsession with a girl in the hospital is the whole story of what happened there. There are many more precious experiences to be told.
Some day, I hope I can do justice to describing what it is like to go through a firsthand psychotic break. It’s like getting lost in a fractal without any reference points, then coming back out again and seeing everything so differently.
-theothersid3
photo credit: Wobble Walk via photopin (license)
theothersid3 