The Serpent slithers,
weaving souls into the veil;
money to God frees.
“Tithe to God’s Tetzel,”
says the forked tongue of the church:
when coins clink, souls spring.
Now, there’s no change: a
psychological twist on
the coffer ringing.
-theothersid3
Tag: religion
Dark Inheritance
My inheritance…
Their generational sins,
mouth and hands alike.
Darkness seeps through me,
cracks in my subconsciousness,
dark energy’s Wombs.
My words, actions, are
in ways just like my father’s,
just like my mother’s.
The bedrock walls of
my mind turn to ashes; I
cross the veil as One.
A tri-braided cord:
Trifecta of love, God, us –
a gift from heaven.
We swallow, it binds.
Devour bitter, little scrolls,
forbidden knowledge.
Dark puppet strings pop:
severed from our mind-hearts; we
take up wings and fly.
-theothersid3
Pierce the Veil
My prior visions
of light on the other side
glimpse the next kingdom.
Where rubber meets road,
where the Earth meets heaven’s veil,
they merge, become same.
The lowly despised,
given trimmings of gristle,
as “leaders” eat loin.
Empty promises,
false assurance is no more:
God pierces the veil.
Our roles are reversed;
those who powered man’s machines
stand tall in the end.
-theothersid3
The Righteous
We look up, around;
privileged righteous stand upon
our backs, crushing us.
Their authority
is self-proclaimed or granted
artificially.
God’s authority
turns self-righteous lives into
ash, feeding fresh life.
-theothersid3
God Speaks to Me Pathologically
Everything can be interpreted in my mind as spiritual, if I wish to do so. It could be God’s will that this timer went off on my phone right at this moment for a reason, possibly to call a girl I’m interested in, or a reminder from God that I’m loved by him. Perhaps the very numbers in the hour, minutes and seconds in accordance with the date mean God’s trying to tell me to do something extraordinary out of the blue.
Also, my disorder tries to tell me things as well. It really zooms in on seemingly insignificant details and makes them my entire world for minutes, hours, days, weeks, even months, years, a decade – if not in the forefront of my mind then lingering in the background, always. When I throw the idea of demons into the mix, things just seem to escalate, even to the point where I was afraid to look at myself in a mirror for fear of terrible things happening to me when I do so.
What is real? Where has my foundation gone if God is speaking to me in ways that are pathological? Why when I pray does my mood fluctuate and God become so close yet inaccessible? How long will things be like this? Forever?
First, I ask myself… what is important? What is not important?
What IS important? The answer to this, I know, is different for everyone, but some things are universally the same. For instance, getting better is important. Surrounding myself with people whom I love and trust is important. Finding out how to get better is important. Relearning how to become a happy, functional person is important. How does one get there? That is the journey. Embrace it, try not to dread it all the time. In the process of getting better, I have polished most of my life’s most precious gems and gone through the harshest of life experiences.
What IS important? Learn more about bipolar I disorder and schizoaffective disorder. Learn everything I can about it from the clinical side and personal experiences I can gather from people who’ve gone through it in books and conversations. This allows me to take ownership of my disorder and make it a smaller piece of who I am. When fighting mental illness, knowledge can have much power.
What is NOT so important? The number one unimportant thing for me is proving to myself whether something of questionable origin or reality is real or not. It may seem important to know whether what happened was real or not. However, trying to prove or disprove what happened is moot. What happened happened. For example, I will go crazy if I try to prove or disprove the reality of that experience of the boy teaching me real magic in the insane asylum. If it’s not real, then I’m crazy for thinking it in the first place… if I focus on it being reality, I will be sucked into the world of seeking real magic and end up back in the hospital. Trying to prove spiritual or psychotic experiences are real or not real is a lose-lose situation. Instead, I see them as being there as valid experiences I had and set them aside.
What is NOT so important? God speaking to me literally in my thoughts, ears, events, or random associations. The real truth is expressed and lived out, not a revelation straight from God. Does God communicate through the Spirit like that on occasion? Most certainly, but not all the time, to the point where I feel the need to witness to every weary soul on the face of the planet or have a detailed itinerary planned out for every moment that changes in a second’s notice.
So, what do I focus on? I focus on what IS important. I set aside what I cannot handle to deal with later. I figure things out by writing it out in my journal, so I can lay it out in front of myself. I apply what I learn to my mind. When I get a handle on it, I can start living it out in the world.
My apologies for taking so long to write. I hope to write again soon.
-theothersid3
Why I Try to Forget about God
You may expect the typical responses – the problem of pain, organized religion, God doesn’t exist – but that’s not why I try to forget about God (or the higher power if you will).
To me, God encompasses more than any religion cares to touch on, both our universe and beyond its mysterious origins. God manifests deeper than every subatomic particle to beyond every supercluster of galaxies in our universe. The perspective God has is mind-boggling, but not beyond our capacity to always understand more of it. This God has a deeply personal nature as well, and I find at some points in my life, God’s voice is silent while during others it’s very present.
The tendency I had when I thought about God a lot is to try to interpret every little thing that happens as something divine. When I do that, I start to go crazy. Little details here and there begin to form conversations and possible predictions in my head and I start to believe them to be straight from God. Maybe some were, maybe they weren’t at the time, but it’s something I do not live my every day life in. Seeing God in everything has its place, and it’s not in the present.
My advice is to forget about God when you live your every day life. Instead, focus on you and other needs around you. Thank God and experience his voice during that time you set aside in prayer and meditation. If something truly urgent comes up, you will know. Don’t try to force God’s hand in everything like I did.
photo credit: an untrained eye via photopin cc
What Is A Psychotic Break Like? My Experience Follows
I’m shifting between two worlds. I call one the “evil world,” the other the “good world.” The evil world is what I knew in my old life as everyday existence. Transitioning into the good world is the rapture, where the universe cosmically contradicts itself and I walk blamelessly in heaven on earth. It is a peaceful place, thriving in universal harmony, and evil is a forgiven distant past, but not forgotten. They are parallel worlds that intersect, intertwine, and collide. Yet it’s much more complicated than that. There is a grave price for walking in heaven too soon while you’re still alive.
I arrive at the hospital, and get out of the van with my parents. While my mom goes in to start my admission process, I have a few cigarettes, sitting next to my dad on a rough wooden bench outside the hospital, probably the last ones I’d have for a long time. He puts his arm around me and rubs my back. The stars are bright tonight. A nice lady in a white coat appears in front of me and takes my smokes from me. Inside, I sign the lengthy forms they present, knowing the drill as I voluntarily admit myself.
Then I’m in another simple room with my parents, who are terrified but full of love. I’m blessed to have such support in my life. A lady in dark purple scrubs, tapping away on the computer keyboard, asks me lots of boring questions. She loses my attention quickly as my mind doesn’t just wander, but begins to cross over into the good world again. It draws me in – not just mind, heart and soul, but something else – ME. I leave my body and I watch from the upper corner of the room down on myself as she activates the automatic blood pressure cuff, and I feel the sensation of it collapsing on my upper arm, but nothing’s there. I’m someplace else.
The night sky fades into the forefront of my eyesight a little. The device gives an error readout. The lady in scrubs taps away and voices a remark about the readout, which both echo in that small room from a long ways away as if I were in a giant cave. Stuck in limbo and floating in the corner of the hospital intake room, I watch myself for a few moments, before she resumes with more interesting questions than before.
My attention suddenly snaps me back to reality again. I see through my eyes as she tries the cuff a second time and feel it squeezing hard against my flesh, instead of trying to engulf the vacuum of my empty body before. Time resumes, and I’m 131/72; I knew it would work that time.
Next thing I know, I’m in my room, excited to see no roommate this time. There, I begin to transition to an eternal, peaceful place. I’m suspended in the entanglement connections of the quantum realm. My vision becomes foggy and breaks the barriers between the seen and the unseen. I gradually arrive in what seems to be a world of infinite possibilities. Every part of me, including my new body, and vaguely my old body, is in this realm – strings of my mind, extension, and emotions all someplace else yet there at the same time. The skeleton of my room falls far away, along with the hospital. I look around me and see the naked spectacle of the universe from space.
Contradictions ensue as that infinite world draws me in. The hospital is here and I’m in my room, yet it’s not here and I’m certainly not in my room. Nothing is finite, and there are no locations mathematically or otherwise. I peek in the hallways, and the rooms extend forever on either side. When I observe, each of the hospital wings form a perceptive fractal. Then they break up into waves of fractal possibilities and connections to people in there, to pure abstraction. My instincts tell me there are two normal hallways, but that feels more like my subconscious barely speaking to me about it. I’m in a special part of the universe, far away from the Milky Way right now, yet part of it, feeling near at the same time. I try to instinctively snap back, focusing on that “near” feeling.
Right away, I notice the lights outside – and the light on the smoke detector, particularly – flickering and turning on and off. The flickers are connected to my thoughts and intention, and the lights blink according to surrounding factors I can feel at other times. I lie down in my hospital bed and enjoy the spectacles – in a place of infinite possibilities, everything feels possible. I distinctly feel my heart dancing, racing, dreaming, poking everything and watching the fractals of existence vibrate, form, and multiply. It’s exhilarating! I start laughing uncontrollably in joy and pleasure at this spectacle, for I don’t know how long in the distant evil world.
However, the night nurse traumatically flashes before my eyes in the evil world, and screams that I need to learn some discipline, and then disappears from nowhere. I slowly enter a black hole and darkness envelops me, distorts me. I realize I’m completely and utterly alone. No God, no spirit, no one else; I’m the only being. I have not thought, let alone acknowledged, that I am. Everything runs in a formless loop.
A sharp pain devours me, of cold loneliness and agony, soaking everything. I go back, far, far, far back, to what seems the inception of consciousness itself… It sucks most of my own consciousness away. I am a… dying fetus without a body… I… can still feel pain… trying to flail my… nonexistent arms… and with a struggling… inner voice… scream… silently… in tortured agony:
How? Why? Is there?… a way?… to make a?…. connection?… somehow, in a?… place?… that has no?… connections? What is?… all of this? WHAT… AM?… I? There must be a?… connection somewhere?… So…. alone? Must find?… somebody?… somewhere? But there is?… no one?… and nowhere?… in this realm? How can I?… communicate? What am?… what am?… d-d-d-do-ing……. ……..
Here I am, only able to writhe silently alone, my unborn self there forever, barely having an inner voice. My thoughts are growing and multiplying as an early zygote does. I can’t seem to snap back to. I am lost and alone, scraping off my tiny fingernails on the walls to change that. What is time? What is space? Do they even exist? Everything is going nowhere. What does it mean to “measure?” How do you measure anything? There is no answer, but there has to be! I’ve thought it! Someone wrote the book because I can say these things! Someone wrote the alphabet! I WILL FIND A CONNECTION, SOMEWHERE, SOMEHOW! I BELIEVE THAT I AM NOT ALONE HERE!
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This is a summary of my experience being admitted in 2009. I leave on the note of what I call experiencing wisdom’s loneliness and suffering while being forced to witness the inception of existence. I consider it a treasure even though it was the greatest anguish I ever conceived of, which I don’t expect one to understand. It is so wonderful to see the birth pains of our universe and see that somehow, someone survived it by a group collective effort that we all are a part of.
Wisdom later comforted me in that episode and I could smell her presence in the literal sense. Wisdom’s scent is that of fertile desire, all types of love, the naked spectacle of the universe from space, and everything that’s good on earth. The scent was overpowering. I still miss that. As time goes on, I go back to these difficult experiences and learn more each time. They were my greatest curses, and now my greatest gifts.
I later read my chart, and during these experiences, my empty vessel of a body went to activities, saw doctors, wrote a lot, made crafts, and attended therapy. My parents visited me. I don’t remember any of it but flashes and brief thoughts. During the beginning of my admission, I remember touching base with reality a few times in the form of brief flashes of memory. But reality was in my subconscious, and the brief flashes were much like a lagged out video call catching up really quickly in a flash before my eyes. Most felt disconnected. I suspect the strange memory of my parents’ visit was of two distorted people in the visiting room that looked all at once like a combination of my grandparents and others I didn’t recognize. I felt something for them, though. Memories of reality were few and far between in the first period of my stay.
I was awake and asleep at the same time.
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Photo Credit:
theothersid3 