Creativity, Insanity, Mysticism, Bipolarity, Numinous Exploding Vehicles

[jodawi]

"latent inhibition"+creativity
"We are very excited by the results of these studies," says Peterson. "It appears that we have not only identified one of the biological bases of creativity but have moved towards cracking an age-old mystery: the relationship between genius, madness and the doors of perception."
— via indigopowder


Ditto mysticism, or at least part of it: sense of something profound, which may or may not be accompanied by being able to describe what the profundity is. Hmm... probably ditto some psychedelic experiences too, and peak experiences, and suchlike. Numinousness.

c.f., Jodawijournal - April 18th, 2003, +/- Jodawijournal - April 17th, 2003

Deja-goo doesn't have my post on a similar subject from 1995. Batards. I think I posted it to LJ, but I didn't find it, so:
In article <3nhc0e$dmt@louie.udel.edu>, from about April 1995, I wrote about something from about December 1992:

I'm looking for neologisms to fill a.u.e.n. For those who don't know, neologism = new word = coining. Such as "netizen", "email", etc.

Specifically, i'm curious about this: is there a overarching word for a certain ... duality that i see all over. And if not, let's create one to validate the existence of alt.usage.english.neologism.


For those who didn't follow that: I'm searching for a word, or wish to create a word, to describe a certain thing, which i will describe in a quite disjoint fashion below:


I had what i now refer to as a "peak experience" (a la Abraham Maslow) in which i had a very weird mental experience that partially involved things that could be semi-accurately described by the flaky and/or mystical terminologies "oneness, all things are connected," etc. It was a couple years ago. But it was sort of a common element to magick, buddhism, zen, things in Robert Pirsig's _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_, things Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were talking about (though i personally detest both of them), physics maybe, Taoism, etc. A thread running through physics, mysticism or Eastern philosophies, Western philosophies, and my brain. It only lasted until i went to sleep, and then the literally hundreds of connections and things that had been buzzing through my brain disappeared in my night of sleep, leaving me in the morning to wonder what the hell it had been that i had been experiencing the night before. Like memory loss or something.

Great emotional and physical feeling was involved... "beware, beware, his flashing eyes, his floating hair" (refers to some romantic-era poet i think, but also fit me that night. At least in the eyes). In the midst of years-long depression i was suddenly infused with powerful happiness and a return of my old humor, went from zero confidence in my ability to do things to much confidence, went from muddy clouded thinking to very clear thinking, etc.

All happened in the middle of a stressful period, wherein i was getting little sleep at school, applying to physics graduate schools, usually depressed, completely uncertain about what i was going to do with my life and scared as a result, etc. But it happened gradually over a specific day, a not particularly stressful day compared to others in that time period. I've never used drugs other than sugar, tv, and people (don't even drink coffee). Really have no idea what triggered it, and had no idea how to get it back when it left me. Except: during part of that evening, when i was getting tired and writing an essay and the feeling was leaving, i wanted to get it back somehow so i could finish my essay applying to graduate schools. I lay on the floor and suddenly remembered the breathing meditation mentioned in a history of buddhism class that i took, or maybe it was the "giving up" thing, and anyway i focussed on what was causing me the most distress: my future, the graduate entrance essay, etc. I mentally said 'all right, i give up on my need to go to school' and meant it. Immediately> my legs jerked and the feeling came flooding back, and i could then get up and finish my essay full of humor and not giving a shit what the readers might think about it. (I've since decided that jerking of my legs, which was quite dramatic and weird, was probably a muscle spasm from tension release, which one might get just before falling asleep or when doing the breathing/ letting go/relaxing meditation. It still happens, if i think about the experience maybe, or relax my muscles consciously. Still is kind of weird. Just happened now, for example.)


Scraps:

At one point during the experience, i was looking at (or i drew) the yin-yang symbol, and it hit me that the symbol made a _lot_ of sense, sort of metaphorically related to patterns i was thinking about.

Abraham Maslow (psychologist) studied psychology of health, and described "peak experiences", which is a term i've adopted for use for what happened to my brain. (I was earlier using, uncomfortably, 'epiphany', 'satori', and maybe other things.) One thing mentioned by Maslow is a sense of something very important happening, of knowledge gained, but that the validity or applicability of that knowledge might be questionable.

In _Green Mars_, Kim Stanley Robinson talks of the green world and the white world, both present simultaneously, one being sort of viriditas, life energy, and the other being mental, ice, coolness, something. (Haven't analyzed it very carefully.) But it's the same duality-yet-intermingled thing as the eyes of the yin-yang symbol.

Spiraling patterns, cyclic things. Learning physics in loops, where the same stuff is covered over and over but in increasing depth and sophistication. I related this to the writing of Virginia Woolfe, but i don't remember how.

Common mystical thread about the other world (or whatever) that you can experience, but can never put in words (thus sort of making this posting futile). I was certainly experiencing something very real and very powerful, and the phrase "expanded consciousness" seemed apt at the time (in that my head felt bigger internally, in some sense, such as being able to simultaneously have many more concepts and connections and realizations all at the same time, in parallel rather than serial perhaps). But i couldn't really capture it in words that night, and the next day it had mostly evaporated from me.


What else... Pirsig talks about a similar thing in _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_, and in a letter about the book he describes the symptoms of Phaedrus as typical schizophrenia symptoms, but that he thought there was something more there, a real element to the experience that people didn't understand.

Schopenhauer and Nietzsche... not sure i remember now how they were related, but i was really surprised in the months following the experience by how similar some of the things they were talking about were to things i knew about Buddhism/zen. (And maybe Taoism or Gnostic Christianity, though i really know very little about these). And then Pirsig's things...

Last thing... recently had a similar (though more bland) experience. Came to grad school in electrical engineering, had Ph.D. qualifiers. Found out i absolutely detest semiconductors, but since i took semiconductor classes that's what i would be tested over. For a month i tried to sit down and study, and could only manage an average of 2 hours a day. Finally, a couple days before the test, something broke and my mind just went crystal clear and cool, my old physics mind, and i started studying for 14-20 hours a day and managed to barely scrape by the test (despite never getting through most of the notes for one class before the test hit). And during that period, i actually liked or even loved semiconductors, and visualizing these electron waves slipping though crystals. Now i hate them again. But not as much. Wish i had known what i really enjoyed before i was neck-deep in other things, but that's another story.

So, to make a short story long, i had a weird experience and i want a term to talk about it. I sense a relation between all these dualities from fiction, philosophy, religion, mysticism, magick, whatever, but they all seem to be just sort of the same but not quite. Like there's some point on [Remainder of text lost]

Someone replied to my post with:

Dear John Chao,

I'm an Italian Bachelor of Psychology and I've the article about your "peak experience".

There are a lot of psychological schools you may refer to for an esplanations, and I think you shall find the Carl Gustav Jung doctrines very interesting because he liked very much dealing with Eastern Philosophies and some deeply hidden threads of thought in the Western world like Alchemy, Gnosticism, Future Telling - and the Jungian way of healing is to initate the patient to a series of experiences leading to a peak not very different from yours. The experience of what you call "oneness" can be found in the Indian book _Bhagavad-Gita_ (in sanskrit, _The Hallow's Song_ or _The Song of the Lord_), and the being thus experienced is called there _Atman_ - - which means simply _Self_.

You should beware the use the diverse psychological factions make of the latter word: Psychodinamic Psychiatrists (the late followers of Sigmund Freud and some other disciples like Heinz Kohout) refer to the _Self_ as one man's personality build up by his/her conscious efforts, while Jungian Analysts consider the _Self_ as the *whole* personality of a man/woman, whose boundaries may extend well beyond him/her mind or body.

I cannot make a precis of the Jungian Psychology by E-Mail, but I'm sure that you may find easily some books about Jung in the Medical Faculty Library of your University; should you like Jung, a very cute of his American disciples is the Texan James Hillmann. As you may wonder why I posted my words directly to you and not to the newsgroup you pointed to, I have to tell you that your experience sounds suspect.

You quoted the Pirsigs's words, which said that such an experience is a collection of schizophrenical symptoms, but I think that the truth is somewhat less daunting: you may have a *bipolar disorder* - which makes you alternate periods of _depression_ and _hypomania_ (great excitement), and the experience of "oneness" you had may have been accomplished through an hypomanic phase of your illness.

I too - I admit - have such illness, which has fostered my creativity along my life; perhaps even Jung was a bipolar man (although he may also have been schyzotypal) and his malady influenced very much the psychoterapic technique he developped.

Since I've never met you, I cannot be sure of my diagnosis; but I can advise you a book (and an URL) which may help you to rethink about your case; the book is:

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON
Touched with Fire
MACMILLAN 1993

Should I prove right, don't worry too much: bipolar disorder can be controlled very effectively with not-too-expensive drugs (schizophrenics aren't yet so lucky), and you may even think that, under appropriate treatment, the creativity the malady gives outruns its drawbacks.

Should I be wrong, I hope you found my hints about the _Analytical Psychology_ - the name Jung gave to his theoretical and therapeutical system - interesting.