Saturday, October 31, 2020
To Know the Dark by Wendell Berry
To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
A Simple Habit That Can Change Everything by Steve Goodier
Do you remember the story of the sailor who over-imbibed and fell asleep at his table? His buddies smeared a bit of strong smelling cheese dip on his mustache, which caused him to wake up and look around. He sniffed and then walked outside, sniffed again and came back in, walked out and back in one more time and finally sat down in his seat. “It’s no use,” he said to his friend, “the whole world stinks.”
Ever felt that way? We have all experienced bad days and horrible situations. We’ve felt trapped, helpless and, at times, hopeless. And sometimes it seems that the whole world stinks.
But I heard of one woman who learned never to view things that way. She grew up in extreme poverty and had every reason to think that her world, at least, stinks. But as a girl, she was privileged to be in a Sunday School class taught by a young woman named Alice Freeman. Freeman was later to become president of Wellesley College at age 26. (As an aside, she would later marry and become known as Alice Freeman Palmer, a renown advocate for education for women.) But let me continue with the little girl’s story.
One Sunday, Freeman asked the children to find something beautiful in their homes, and then tell the other children about it the next week. The following Sunday, when the little girl was asked what she found that was beautiful at home, she thought of her impoverished condition and replied, “Nothing. There’s nothing beautiful where I live, except...except the sunshine on our baby’s curls.”
Years later, long after Alice Freeman Palmer’s untimely death, her husband George was lecturing at a university in the western United States. He was approached by a distinguished looking woman who fondly recalled that, as a child, she attended his wife’s Sunday School class. Then she related this story:
“I can remember that your wife once asked us to find something beautiful in our homes, and that I came back saying the only beautiful thing I could find was the sunshine on my sister’s curls. But that assignment your wife made was the turning point in my life. I began to look for something beautiful wherever I was, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
That one simple act, repeated every day, became a powerful means of lifelong transformation for that woman.
If you have been thinking your “whole world stinks,” the daily habit of looking for something beautiful can help you see the good that actually exists wherever you are. You’ll see beauty that others miss. And you’ll never view your life the same again.
It’s a simple habit that can change everything.
Thursday, October 29, 2020
5 Simple Ways to Clean up Your Digital Life by Vanessa Torre
How to bring more contentment and less contention to every day.
Times are strange. Having been sequestered away for months, we’ve been more connected to technology than ever. We also seem to have hit a limit. We’re burned out, disenfranchised, and disillusioned.
I’m seeing people taking drastic action to disconnect from technology. I totally get it. I deactivated my Facebook a couple of weeks ago and it felt glorious. It still does.
Others may not be ready to pull the plug or may not even care to. My best friend swears she has a perfectly healthy relationship with social media. She told me this at happy hour last week and I just looked at her saying, “Mmmmm hmmm,” while sipping my beer.
Doing a digital clean up doesn’t have to be hard, broad sweeping, or overly dramatic. But, it allows you to quiet down the noise around you so you’re not in sensory overload every 34 seconds.
These actions take very little time, have a lasting effect, and will help you in ways you may not even realize.
Cull your heard
After realizing a few weeks in a row that I was in a generally pissy mood most of the time, I started to look around me. I had over a thousand “friends” on Facebook. Seriously. No one has that many friends.
What we actually have are a lot of minor acquaintances, friends of friends, people we met six years ago after a concert, and other random people we’ve collected over the years that we couldn’t pick out of a lineup.
The issue with all of these superficial relationships is that they’re often not bringing value to our everyday life. How do we connect with over a thousand people in a meaningful way? We can’t.
What I found is that many of the people who were getting under my skin regularly were not the people I was close to in real life. Oddly, the people I was closest to hardly ever post on social media. This was a huge sign to me that changes were needed.
I went through and deleted a quarter of my social media relationships. If I hadn’t had a meaningful interaction with them in the last three years, we didn’t need to be connected.
What doing this does for you:
- Decreases the amount of influence you allow in your life
- Allows you to focus on fostering and building the relationships that do matter
- Controls the amount of info you see, which decreases scrolling time.
If you’re hesitant about cutting ties, trust me when I tell you that someone you’ve not interacted with for three years will not miss you.
Turn off your notifications
Since I started writing this article, my phone, which is on vibrate and across the room, has buzzed exactly once. Last month, it would have happened ten times as much. No, I didn’t become wildly unpopular since last month.
What I did was go through my settings and turned off nearly all of my notifications. It was too much. The average person gets 46 push notifications a day. Many times, it’s connected to a little bit of dopamine we’ve become addicted to. It’s low key psychological manipulation.
The difficulty of the app notification is that rarely do we just pick up the phone and check that one notification. And, it’s designed to draw you back into the app. Why? Because the more you pick up the phone from the app notification, the more ads the app can send you which is their income source.
What doing this does for you:
- Allows you to control when you receive information
- Reduces the outside influence of apps to determine when you use your phone
- Allows you to stay focused on what you are doing without interruption
The world will not burn down if you do this. I mean, a huge missile could come from North Korea but may you’re better off not knowing that, anyway.
Clean up your inbox
If you're anything like me, you have willfully given your email address to anyone who has offered you a coupon or discount. You need an oil change? I have a coupon.
Wading into my email was overwhelming and time-consuming for me. By the time I cleared out all the nonsense, I either forgot why I was in my email to begin with, had been distracted by something on sale, or just got too tired to complete the task I started. What the hell?
If you spend the first ten minutes you have your email open deleting unopened email, you have a problem on your hands. The unsubscribe button is your friend. Handle this like disconnecting from people. If you haven’t visited a website or made a purchase from a company in the last year or two, you don’t need the email subscription.
What this does for you:
- Decreases the likelihood of impulse spending and fear of missing out
- Shortens the amount of time you inherently spend in email
- Allows you to keep your inbox organized
Even if you’ve made a purchase from a company that shows up regularly in your inbox, give some thought as to whether that purchase was intentional or because you saw the email. Unsubscribe accordingly.
Establish non-digital routes for connection
Get addresses. Get phone numbers. Create space for connection before you start plugging plugs. It’s critical to your success in disconnecting.
Be honest with the amount of time you have. You have more than you think. You can’t tell me you don’t have time to text people, send a note, or meet someone for coffee.
Coffee takes an hour out of your day. The average person spends two and a half hours a day on social media alone. And, coffee is delicious. Wine, even more so.
We’ve become reliant on technology to connect us because it’s easy. Most times, it’s passive. We can alert people to what’s happening in our lives by posting a picture, tweet, or diatribe in relation to a life event.
What doing this does for you:
- Allows you to focus on the quality of relationships, not the quantity
- Increases our ability to express ourselves genuinely
- Decreases our dependency on digital communication for connection
Face to face communication is much better for us than digital. It improves our overall ability to communicate, understand, and feel heard. As a result of this, our relationships improve.
Set metric goals for usage
Depending on your device, you can track your habits and create goals for yourself based on what you want to work on most — overall screen time, app usage, etc.
One of the metrics I am focusing on is the number of “pickups” I have during the day. I was shocked how often I pick up the phone, especially immediately after notification. Shameful.
I factor out text message pickups as those conversations trickle in but I know that, because I’m tracking my usage, I try not to meaningless just grab my phone. I have a goal of less than three dozen pickups a day. That’s still every 30 minutes for 18 hours but 20 pickups less than the average user.
What it does for you:
- Challenges you to stick to the digital decisions for usage you’ve made and set goals that can pare down usage over time
- Allows you to monitor how effective your efforts are
- Lets you monitor whether you replace one screen time outlet for another
Accountability is huge to me. I need it. Knowing that I’m checking against my goals for the week keeps me from grabbing the damn phone for no reason.
We all need to monitor and adjust our lives from time to time by examining our routines and behaviors. We need to make decisions in our own best interest, including those that encourage human connection and the improvement of our mental health.
Just like our homes and our cars, we need to do an occasional deep cleaning. How much work we have to do is determined by how much of a mess we’ve made. Taking time to tidy up our digital lives shouldn’t be avoided or time-consuming.
You digital clean up should be done like anything else in your life. Keep it simple and keep it sustainable.
https://medium.com/curious/5-simple-ways-to-clean-up-your-digital-life-cd0f26e2530f
Deleting Social Media Should Be the New “Breaking Your TV” by Vanessa Torre
Reclaiming mental health is more important now than ever.
After college, I took a writing class with a local author who lived off the grid. I thought it was unusual behavior in 1998, even for an artist. I was working full time as a teacher, taking grad school classes in the summer, and struggling to figure out how my writing would get the time and attention that it needed with all this going on. I asked her advice on how to do it.
“Listen to me very closely,” she said, leaning in. “When you get home today, grab a brick and throw it into your television.” She was dead serious.
She firmly believed that we had a much greater supply of creativity, positivity, and time by destroying the main distraction that pulled us away from our creative pursuits and our happiness.
I didn’t break my TV when I got home. It took me 20 years after that conversation to launch a writing career. Now, the brick needs to hit something else.
There is a reason I hate reality television. Only one of two things happens when we watch it. Either we feel horrible about our own lives or we watch other people’s lives to come to the realization that the train wreck we think we’re living is just merely a train delay.
Whichever one happens, neither feels good. This is the exact same experience I have on social media. I would say that the vast majority of us feel this.
Last night, I watched The Social Dilemma, a Netflix documentary with countless interviews from people who have become conscientious defectors from the apps they spent much of their career building. It’s terrifying but for an hour and a half, the world made sense to me.
Right now, the world is falling apart at every seam and everyone seems to have a thought about it. They’re not necessarily interesting or intelligent thoughts but people shamelessly sign their name to them regardless.
Do I sound judgmental and angry? It’s because I’m judgmental and angry. I’m coming to realize that’s not necessarily my fault. and I’m not alone in it. I’m judgmental and angry and it’s by design. And now I’ve moved from angry to livid.
The premise of The Social Dilemma is to show us how we are being manipulated by social media as a result of its intrinsic design. People who have designed major functions of the app explain how they work and psychologists explain what happens to our brains as a result.
Our mental health has been monetized in a destructive manner in order to fill the pockets of advertisers and it’s dismantling humanity. And we signed up for it willingly.
It sounds dramatic. I know. But, it’s neverending and the longer we stay involved in it, the worse it gets. The decrease in the quality of my life over the last ten years, as a result of social media, is staggering.
Before social media, I generally had no idea what my friends’ political beliefs were. Now, I find myself resenting people I used to adore because they’re not on the same page I am. I am part of the divisiveness.
Bail et al. at Duke University found that our exposure to an onslaught of political statements and images, whether we agree with them or not, actually increases our foothold on our beliefs. We don’t become open-minded. We become more polarized.
I am more inclined to spend money on things I don't need because I am routinely bombarded with ads for stuff I glanced at for 5.3 seconds online. I am less able to separate a want from a need.
A few years ago, Cooper Smith at Business Insider explained why this happens. Facebook and Amazon interact with each other to allow cookies from one site to promote goods on another, all using metadata, to show me the same rug 2,483 times.
And it works. I can’t stop thinking about that damn rug and practically have to freeze my credit card in a large ice cube to not buy it. Of course, Google stores my card information, making it really easy to get the rug frozen card or not. This technology is wearing me down.
People who display perfectly curated lives online when I know their marriage/jobs/children are falling apart, in reality, give me trust issues and have made me a bitter skeptic. I believe nothing I see.
At the same time, I believe everything I see. I have been fed a distorted reality of what happens in the world based on the millions of pieces of data apps have collected on me over the last decade.
This is intentional and we’ve lost the ability to separate truth from fiction. A study by MIT found that a fake news story will spread six times faster than one with actual truth. How do we filter out misinformation?
Beyond FOMO, I have recognized anger and depression over actually missing out when I see pictures of outings I was not invited on. It has made me question the strength and value of relationships.
Nothing good comes from this. Sure, I have learned about far off places through pictures I normally wouldn’t see. I have been inspired by the work of others and been able to share my work with a larger audience. Because of the existence of Facebook, an article I wrote this summer reached 75k readers.
Still, we stand to be better people without the endless parade of stimuli that clutters our minds. It’s time to reclaim our own thoughts. The digital age has run its course and it’s run itself right off the track.
Immediately after the credits rolled on the documentary, I deactivated my Facebook account. Today was the first day I didn’t wake up and check it before I’d even had coffee. I turned every single notification off on my phone. There is no reason to look at my phone before bed or first thing when I wake up. Anything there can wait until I’m ready for it.
This is the first stage in a digital clean-up. Basically, reprogramming my brain has to happen. I need less contention and more contentment. I need less artificial intelligence and more actual intelligence.
I need more joy. I like the idea of choosing joy over anything else. I feel that deep in my being. I need a period or mental repair. I want my time back.
How My Life Immediately Changed Without Facebook by Vanessa Torre
My thoughts and emotional behavior look different.
About a month ago, after having the crap scared out of me watching The Social Dilemma, I deactivate my Facebook account. I didn’t delete it because I’m too lazy to download all of my pictures right now. That sounds exhausting.
I thought I would make it about three days before Facebook called me back and dragged me back in. Perhaps it’s the tail end of an election year or, you know, having better things to do, but there has been no desire to reactivate. At all.
There was no withdrawal. Just much more opportunity for positivity. Peace and quiet. It didn’t take me long to see changes in my attitude and behavior. The changes in my life were quick and unexpected.
My screen time has changed in strange ways.
My screen time has decreased by only 34%. I hover at about two and a half hours a day on my phone. I was at about four hours, which is pretty average.
The difference is the composition of the time I’m spending. The amount of time I spend texting has increased as I now connect with people actively instead of passively.
What hasn’t changed is my obsessive need to Google weird things like the name of the actor from Greatest American Hero. Now, though, I don’t get ads for box sets of retro TV shows being thrown at me from all sides.
I am a far nicer person.
Especially now, with people at each other’s throats all the damn time, I had a low-level anger that just hung about me like a fog. And it was thick.
I’m a sensitive thing. I get triggered easily. I feel like I am just the type of person that Facebook’s algorithms can manipulate.
Following this week’s debate, I was thrilled that I had no external influence adding to how I felt about the disaster. I dealt with my own thoughts and no one else’s. Their commentary was unheard by me.
I’m more patient with other people.
I was starting to harbor some contempt for people I love. My friend Paul likes to stir shit on social media for the sake of it. When he says something horribly off-color in real life, it’s hilarious. When I see it on my feed, it bothers me.
I realized that part of deleting Facebook was that I love my friend Paul and that if I want to keep loving Paul, I can’t see him on Facebook. I can now look forward to seeing my friends without being in a state of annoyance about their drama, constant meme posting, cries for validation, or political posts I don’t agree with. These things just don’t come out in face to face experiences.
I do not fear I am missing out, at all.
To the contrary, I hear of drama playing out publicly in people’s lives and have no idea what is going on. Their business is no longer my business and my business is not longer their business. It’s glorious.
If there is anything happening without me, I have no idea and I like it that way. I am sure that there may be invitations I have missed out on because contact is easy on Facebook, but I don’t feel like there is a hole in my life.
I am slightly out of touch with minor (any maybe major) news stories.
But, I really don’t care. Look, at this point in my life, I know how I feel about important issues. I know which lawmakers support my stance on those issues. I know how to vote and when my ballot is due. The rest is inconsequential.
I find out about huge events like the passing of a Supreme Court justice or the president getting COVID-19 by word of mouth. If I want to know more, that is my decision, not an algorithm.
I am no longer dependent on Facebook, but slightly inconvenienced.
I couldn’t log in to my Spotify account. I had to connect it to an email. All of my playlists now show they are created by 12856329573.
The number of websites and apps that encourage our dependency on Facebook as an easy means of logging in without having to create an account is staggering. Keep in mind, this interface is one more way for Facebook to collect data on you.
All in all, it’s been a remarkably positive experience. For the longest time, I told myself I just wasn’t ready to pull the plug. I was. I hear this from a lot of people. You are ready.
This is not one of those events in your life where a strange voice comes on while you’re deactivating your account that warns you of a bunch of possible negative side effects. Those don’t exist. Reclaim your time.
https://vanessatorre.medium.com/how-my-life-immediately-changed-without-facebook-9a7081ba1004
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
A spiritual emergency can be wild. This is how to ride the wave by Jules Evans
In 2017, I travelled to the Amazon jungle to take part in an ayahuasca retreat. I
hadn’t done psychedelics for 20 years, and that last time I’d had a bad trip
which had left me traumatised. Why would I ever want to try psychedelics again?
Although I’d healed a lot from that youthful bad experience, I still felt I had
healing to do at a deeper level. And I thought that psychedelic therapy, guided
by trained facilitators in a safe space, might help me. I chose the retreat
centre very carefully, and set off. The retreat was a positive, if sometimes
scary experience. By the final day I felt my heart was deeply open and
connected to the other participants.
It was when I was back in Iquitos, this noisy, dirty city in Peru, that
things started to go wrong. It felt as if my heart froze shut. I was suddenly
profoundly disconnected from my surroundings and from other people, to the
extent that they seemed unreal. Now all the trauma from my bad trip of 20 years
before was flooding back – not on the retreat, as I expected, but after it. I hadn’t
expected that at all. It was scary. How long would the disorientation last?
Days? Weeks? Years? Forever?
I set off the next day for the Galápagos Islands, where I’d planned to
stay for a week. During the two-day journey there, I started to doubt if I was
in normal reality. I began to suspect that I was either in a dream of my own
construction or trapped in some kind of fake reality constructed by someone
else. Could I be in a coma or some afterlife limbo state?
These eery feelings intensified over the next couple of days. On the
ferry to the Galápagos, I thought I was on Charon’s ferry, crossing the river
Styx to the land of the dead. I checked in to a hotel in the Galápagos, and sat
on the balcony. Below me, three seals lay on deckchairs, like overweight
tourists, and bellowed sickeningly, while little black iguanas waddled
grotesquely around them. This isn’t real, I thought. How do I wake up? When I
got texts from loved ones, I thought my subconscious was constructing them. I
felt profoundly alone in this fake reality.
How do you know if you’re dreaming? It’s an old philosophical conundrum
that goes back to René Descartes. He noted that we could be in a dream, or an
imaginary universe constructed by an evil demon, and we’d have no way of
proving otherwise. Like Descartes, all I knew for sure was that I was
conscious.
For Thomas Hobbes,
ecstasy was something delusional, to be feared, ridiculed and avoided
For two weeks, my friends took care of me. They made sure I ate properly (I’d
forgotten to eat for three days) and helped me cross the road (I still wasn’t
sure what was real). It was a scary but also a beautiful time, because my heart
was still incredibly open, although my rationality was not functioning very
well. After two weeks, I was back in this material reality and life carried on
more or less as before.
I was helped, during this temporary ego-meltdown, by the fact that I
had studied ecstatic
experiences as an academic. I was familiar with the idea of a ‘spiritual
emergency’, and it helped me to not freak out.
The term was coined by two psychologists, Stanislav and Christina Grof,
in the 1980s, to refer to
a messy spiritual experience that, while having some aspects of psychosis, is
not indicative of a long-term mental illness. In fact, according to the Grofs,
a spiritual emergency can be a transition to greater wholeness and growth.
The idea of a spiritual emergency goes to the heart of a centuries-old
argument in Western culture over the nature of ecstatic experiences. On the one
hand, Enlightenment philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and psychiatrists such
as Henry Maudsley and Jean-Martin Charcot defined ecstasy as something
delusional, and probably indicative of mental or neurological illness –
something to be feared, ridiculed and avoided. This is still the mainstream
opinion in Western culture.
On the other hand, various countercultures – ecstatic Christianity,
Romanticism, the psychedelic New Age – defensively insisted that ecstatic
experiences are wholly good, meaningful and wonderful. They’re the greatest
experience a human can have, and we should seek them out.
Both these positions are a bit simplistic. Ecstatic experiences can be
both beautiful and meaningful, and also terrifying and bewildering. Ecstasy is
a moment where you go beyond your ordinary ego and ordinary sense of reality,
and shift into a more subliminal or trance mode of thinking. That means you can
tap into subliminal potentialities of healing and inspiration, see the world
afresh, feel connected to all things. But it can also be profoundly
disorientating, especially in a culture that has lost touch with its words,
maps, rituals and guides for such experiences. You might encounter repressed
trauma, you might get stuck in unusual or frankly delusional beliefs, you might
feel such a surge of energy that you can’t sleep for days or weeks. Ecstasy can
be messy.
Hence the Grofs, and others in a field called ‘transpersonal
psychology’, tried to find a middle ground, introducing the term ‘spiritual
emergency’ for a messy shift to greater wholeness. Christian mysticism also
speaks of ‘dark nights of the soul’, and it’s noticeable that many mystics had
difficult experiences sometimes lasting for months or years.
Often these episodes
were triggered by psychedelics or intense spiritual practice, but they could
also be triggered by bereavement or political crises
Often these episode
I had some familiarity with the concept of spiritual emergencies through my
academic research into
ecstatic experiences, and it really helped me. It gave me faith that the
experience would pass, that I should trust my soul and my friends, and practise
the Stoic and Buddhist wisdom I’ve learned over the past two decades. And I was
OK. I came back from the underworld.
Following that experience, I started to meet others who’d had similar
meltdowns. I worked with the psychiatrist Tim Read to gather stories together
and look for patterns. What we discovered was that spiritual emergencies happen
quite often, and are very little discussed. People told us they’d never
publicly discussed their experiences, although they considered them deeply meaningful.
Often these episodes were triggered by psychedelics or intense spiritual
practice, but they could also happen spontaneously, or be triggered by
bereavement or political crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
There are similarities in the phenomenology of the experiences (ie, what
they’re like). There’s a shift into an intense altered state of consciousness,
in which time slows down, the inner world of dreams and outer world of ordinary
reality blur, and mythical and archetypal thinking start to spill out. Events
and objects feel charged with a numinous significance. People might decide they
are divine, or that they have an apocalyptic mission. They might feel
themselves dissolve, that they are at one with all things, and this loss of
separateness can be beautiful and utterly terrifying. Or they might feel – as I
did – that they have died, passed over into the spirit world. In a way, they
have – the usual ego has disappeared. But it’s a temporary ego-death, usually.
In this raw state, the person is acutely sensitive to the judgments of
others, and many report bruising encounters with experts – spiritual or
psychiatric – who often fail to understand or sympathise with what the person
is going through, and its simultaneous beauty and horror.
What helps? Set, setting and integration. First, the setting. People’s
minds settle down when they’re in a peaceful, supportive and nonjudgmental
setting. Human connection and love help return the mind from its flight into
transcendence, so that it settles back into ordinary reality.
Second, the mindset. As the Stoics insisted, our context for events
defines how we feel about them. It’s important to have a frame of meaning and
growth on messy experiences, rather than the customary psychiatric frame where
psychotic episodes are meaningless symptoms of neurological disease. Also
helpful is the idea, found in most wisdom traditions, that ‘this too shall
pass’. In addition, I found basic breathing exercises helpful for riding the
waves of anxiety. The occasional diazepam also helped. I tried to practise
kindness to myself, accepting what was arising without attachment or aversion.
And I tried to practise humility – keeping grounded, not taking myself too
seriously, laughing at the weirdness with my friends.
‘The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which
the mystic swims with delight’
Finally, integration. My own experience wasn’t very traumatic – I think
it was more the resolution of old trauma – but, for many people, spiritual
emergencies are traumatic, and take a good few months or years to integrate. It
can be helpful to find a therapist, or a supportive community such as the
Spiritual Crisis Network or the International Spiritual Emergence Network.
As weird as it sounds, I look back on my own experience fondly. I am none the
worse for it, and it gave me an insight into unusual states of consciousness
and the artificiality of the everyday self. I still sometimes feel our ordinary
reality is a dream, but it’s a collective dream, not a solitary one. My
experience also gave me confidence that wisdom practices still ‘work’ in these
unusual states – perhaps Tibetan Buddhists are right, and these practices also
work in the afterlife.
The Grofs wanted to distinguish ‘spiritual emergency’ from ordinary
psychosis. I don’t think there’s necessarily a hard border between mysticism
and psychosis, more of a continuum. As the comparative religion scholar Joseph
Campbell said, ‘the psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic
swims with delight’.
The term ‘spiritual emergency’ is not perfect – the Grofs insisted that
such experiences always lead to better outcomes, to greater wholeness. But life
is ambiguous, and mystical or unusual experiences are particularly ambiguous.
We don’t have to rush to stamp them as ‘totally good’ or ‘totally bad’.
Either way, this sort of experience is happening more and more, as
people try psychedelics or pursue intense spiritual practices. Psychedelic
practitioners, in their rush to legalise psychedelic therapy, need to be honest
about people’s sometimes-messy experiences. So do spiritual or
‘transformational’ communities. We need to upgrade our cultural understanding
and support for these experiences.
I hope Western culture can stop defining psychosis as something totally
Other to rational civilisation, something frightening, shameful and bad, and
instead see that altered states of consciousness are just something that
happens to lots of people. They’re neither totally bad nor totally good – it
depends on how we process them. The good news is that we can sometimes learn to
swim in them, and we can share our experiences with each other.
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