A Recovery Blog

This blog is about my continuing recovery from severe mental illness and addiction. I celebrate this recovery by continuing to write, by sharing my music and artwork and by exploring Buddhist and 12 Step ideas and concepts. I claim that the yin/yang symbol is representative of all of us because I have found that even in the midst of acute psychosis there is still sense, method and even a kind of balance. We are more resilient than we think. We can cross beyond the edge of the sane world and return to tell the tale. A deeper kind of balance takes hold when we get honest, when we reach out for help, when we tell our stories.

Friday, July 15, 2016

God And Intelligence

Perhaps you are in pain right now.  Perhaps you are lost.  I go in and out of that, too.  Depression, the pain of it, can serve a purpose.  We live in a world of contrasts, of duality.  Darkness helps to define the light.  Depression can help to give clarity to happiness, when happiness comes, and happiness does come back.  The key to clarity can be found in cultivating awareness.  The path to awareness is through receptivity to the present moment.  That means you have to come to a stop.  A lot of people seem to have trouble with this - stopping.  I learned about this from Jon Kabat-Zinn.  He wrote a book called Wherever You Go There You Are and I bought an audio recording of the book and listened to it many times the year before I became psychotic.  It was a meditation tape and it helped me in my own meditation practice to learn the art of mindfulness.

It's been a long time since I meditated by stopping and doing nothing, letting the world around me go on its way without any effort on my part.  I do meditate, but there are multiple ways to meditate.  I am meditating right now while I write this.  But sitting in my living room and doing nothing has in the past been a special form of meditation for me.  My voices are uncomfortable with me even considering doing this again.  I feel so different from myself back then when I only had voices now and then.  Now they are always there moving from foreground to background and back again.  I am never alone, nor do I want to be anymore now that these voices have become my friends.  I do stop and listen for some kind of guidance throughout the day and night.  That listening is subtle and intuitive.  I remain receptive and I wait.  And I have faith that not only my voices are listening and being receptive to me.  Some greater intelligence is always there, listening, ever aware of my small life.

I want to improve my conscious contact with this intelligence.  My understanding of God is still abstract.  I don't know what it is or where it came from.  I do not anthropomorphize my idea of God.  I do believe intelligence is God given.  Or in other words, no God, no intelligence.  From intelligence comes understanding and I yearn to understand.  There is so much harmony within understanding and that is really what I yearn for, harmony, which, to me, is the essence of God.  This is not a random universe.  We do not live in chaos.  There is a sense and a logic to even the smallest things.  The atom is the smallest miracle.  And then there is the beauty in discovering the logic behind all life and its actions.  There is a logic to all life.  Discover the logic to make the sense to gain the understanding to find the truth.  Seeking the truth is my motivation for engaging in my life.  There is grace in understanding the truth in anything or any living being.  All the interconnections express God, lead back to God as I understand God.

Nothing exists in isolation.  Even black holes exist in relation to all that is not a black hole.  I believe that there is intelligence in space.  Intelligence is not biological; it has no heart, no brain.  We are a materialistic species afraid of the unknown, of what lies after death.  We are experts at distraction.  And yet wherever we go, whatever we do we cannot escape our own intelligence.  Our spirits are intertwined with our intelligence.

I'm going to try writing in this blog more often, just explore some of my daily thoughts, work with my intelligence.  I took my nighttime anti-psychotic medication before I began writing this and I am feeling quite tired.  It's time to get some rest.  I just wanted to put some ideas out there, some food for thought for whoever reads this.

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