Spiritual experience is correct


(Bangkok)

I moved to Thailand to live with my Thai wife about three years ago in early 2011. The doctors in Thailand reduced my medication drastically. After about six months I became very irritable. Little things greatly irritated me. After time went on, the stress from my job started taking its toll on me. I was highly stressed and experiencing marital problems which only made things worse. Later I began to think about the world and the direction humanity is going. I felt a deep feeling of the need to inform the population about where we are heading to the future. To me it was a very scary, lonely, cold, desolate journey that we are on. I felt that we are becoming more and more alike with ultimately no differences at all. Everyone was a programmed, mindless being, doing only as directed. We were in fact being funneled into a channel not knowing fact from fiction and only able to do as trained. The training mechanism is of course the TV, music, news shows, etc. I made an attempt to warn people though not remembering exactly what it was that I did to warn the people because this was the height of my mania. I just remember trying to make anyone who would listen understand our future. I thought everyone was slightly aware that something is taking place and they could therefore understand my message and behavior. After I began to come down my wife followed through on our divorce. But I became aware of the group consciousness in Thailand. There is an unspoken word to conform to Thailand's ancient culture in order to be a part of society. Now about a year later this group consciousness is still very apparent to me as I am conforming to the culture here.

Ben's Response:

Thanks for your story. I hope your path is leading you to a balanced and conscious state of mind. I think your insights about the mindless mass media influence has a lot of merit (not really so delusional). However, what often happens in mania that causes confusion and poor judgment, is a sort of over-generalization of the world "out there" and a split between self and world in which the world needs to be saved and you are the savior.

By staying conscious, grounded and self-aware, you are contributing to a better future for all. I wish you peace and good health.

Ben Schwarcz

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Jan 05, 2014
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Atavistic Undercurrents & Cross Cultural relationships
by: Anonymous

I too have experience as a Bipolar I, and also a challenging cross cultural relationship with an Asian woman; But she is Filipina and there are similarities and differences on that basis. As opposed to the Philippines, Thailand has a more of a core and nuanced culture because it was not colonized repeatedly like the Philipppines. Issues with Westerners is that especially in the U.S. we have tons of micro-cultures even in California. All of us human beings normally are a part of nuanced socials systems for generations of which there are many minor or major cues even facial expressions of which some could express in genetic memory. Your wife at least has a solid context or an inner dialogue on a cultural level and you would not have been able to fully bridge without fully learning the language. Partly it is the hypomanias (in hunter gatherer contexts these states may /been of use for hyper alertness, but without cultural shared things such as pre-post hunt or activity dancing, we naturally feel disconnected). People in the United States have a tendency towards hyper religiosity not just because of mental illness, but because Atavistically they have sockets in their brain for connected social behavior; Can't really blame for example born again Christians for surrendering to what provides some primate structure and routine to their lives, or the gym, or Yoga. But it is really shallow and romper room compared to the ancient Thai civilization (only partially colonized via some Chinese influx). You were brave, but as Kay Redfield Jameson says in her book "Exuberance" it is the risk takers and those in a genius way seeing the beauty and steady elements of other cultures and the "let's bridge, let's rebuild" attitude of "many lives and many deaths" within one bipolar lifetime of which we too easily see others as cowardly, stuck, or robotic. Unfortunately even in Psychiatry they are still not bridging the Classically educated type medicine with indigenous and holistic attitudes towards bringing people in and out of trance... but Ben is certainly trying. In my Buddhist experience Thai Theravada Buddhists can be a bit bigoted and inverted, a teacher friend of mine said that young monk students in Bangkok did not think Americans had any possibility of becoming enlightened. These insular attitudes can kick in if the road gets tough in a marriage. Isolation is common too, for example an issue which snuck up on me is that I felt like I was not living in the U.S. anymore because my wife's cultural homesickness was so all pervasive she until recently was domineering and I was comforming.

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