Schizophrenia, Psychosis and Recovery

[spiritual_emergency]

Create a brand new thread in this forum. Tell us about yourself or just launch into your issues.

Trusted members of the forum will read what you have to say and if they feel you are for real and not some scammer, they will increase your reputation (by voting up your reputation after reading your new post). Once you pass a fairly low threshold, you will automatically become a trusted member and will be able to post in any forum here.

We look forward to talking with you and welcoming you into our community and hope that you can bear with us while we give you a once-over so as to deter spammers.

Source: Welcome Message

Rules and guidelines are good to have of course. Spammers and trolls can be an annoyance but sometimes, rules are not used for their stated or intended purpose. Sometimes they are used to silence people; sometimes they're used to keep people out because they are different, or perhaps don't share the same opinions as those who hold power in that particular situation.

Meantime, if the intent is to deter spammers, I wonder how many authentic members are also deterred?

[Symora]

Sorry, I guess your points went by unnoticed.... you should be good now.

[spiritual_emergency]

Thank you Symora.

~ Namaste

[Symora]

I finally took the time to read your posts SE and found them super insightful and interesting, it actually changed the way I see schizophrenia. Thank you for taking the time to post all of that. You sure have done your research! I also found you description of the 6 week event quite enlightening, and the archetypal description. I really fits in with the people I have known and their episodes as well.

I look forward to reading your posts elsewhere, and I appreciate your perseverance in staying with us

[spiritual_emergency]

I've been told Symora, that actually reading my posts is like doing homework. I can sympathize for it is. I know, because I did all that reading too and more so. Out of all the reading I did do and continue to do, I try to share what I found most helpful. That doesn't mean it will be helpful for everyone but some people seem to find some benefit in it.

~ Namaste

[spiritual_emergency]

Hello From The Moon,

Regretably, I know virtually nothing about fibromyalgia. I can only assume however, that just as I was once earnestly looking for answers, you are looking for your own. I could only encourage you to cast your net wide and be open to learning from everyone you encounter. That doesn't mean everyone will have an answer for you but I did find some of my own answers in the most surprising places. You can just never tell who is going to have something valuable to share that you can learn from.

Wishing you well with your own recovery, From The Moon.

~ Namaste

[spiritual_emergency]

As an adjunct to another topic, this was the cause of the dissociation. It also helps explain why the first substantial blow to my egoic identity was my mother's death. This is a bit of a sad story but it's also a bit of a beautiful story.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

This is a story . . .

According to my mother I was the product of my father's rape. In spite of this she says I smiled when I was born.

"It's just gas, dear," said the nurse.

But my mother had given birth to three children and she knew a smile when she saw one. She says she knew then I'd never give her much cause to worry. And I didn't. Not really.

I don't know where my father was when I was born. He might have been away at the base camp or perhaps he'd checked himself into the hospital again. He did that from time to time. My mother never knew when he'd leave or when he'd return. His presence in our lives, like his fits of violent behavior, was erratic and unpredictable. When he was home her life was hell. When he was gone, she happily busied herself mothering her children and caring for her home.

Like the third daughter in every fairy tale, I was the fortunate one. I don't remember that life at all. My eldest sister does though. She remembers crouching under the kitchen table as our father laid his boots and obscenities into our mother who lay, curled into a ball on the floor. And my sister Colleen must have remembered things too, but not me. I was only two months old when she left. Three dress ties fashioned into miniature hangman's nooses and placed carefully around each of her sleeping daughters' necks prompted her frantic, middle-of-the-night departure.

She ran first to the church, but the doors were locked tight. From that moment forward, she never again willingly entered a Catholic church. The comfort of the church denied her, she ran to her family. They'd surely known, but why they never did anything about it, I don't know. Why she never fought back, I don't know either. I guess she feared he'd kill us if she did.

She stayed with her family for a short time and then found a low-rental flat. We were poor then, desperately poor. At first, my sisters and I slept on pillow cases stuffed with newspapers, I don't know what my mother slept on. We lived on social assistance but it wasn't enough. In those first few months my mother lost 40 pounds, there simply wasn't enough food to go around.

She couldn't live in that kind of desperation so she found a job and thereafter left her three young daughters to the care of babysitters -- some of them good and some of them very, very, very bad. All three of us received our sexual introductions through those babysitters but for some reason, we never told our mother of those events. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was enough to know that she'd have protected us if she had known. Maybe we were trying to protect her.

Meanwhile, even though she left and then divorced our father, he still managed to inflict terror over her. She moved numerous times in those early days to avoid him but he would always find her. He'd never confront her. He'd just leave a sign that he'd been there: his shoes appearing on the front steps in the morning, his body vanished. She'd move again and he'd find her once more, oftentimes tipped off by her own family members who thought that a father should be able to see his children. (It's mind boggling, don't you think?)

And then, my father came along -- or rather, the man I consider my father.

He was sixteen years older than my mother. Over six feet tall with shoulders like a buffalo, he had once played professional football. He was a veritable mountain of a man. I think it was Colleen who fell in love with him first. By then she'd been diagnosed with some form of autism. If anyone other than our grandmother came to the house she'd quickly retire to a closet where she'd whimper to herself until they left. She didn't speak. She didn't laugh. She didn't cry. But the day that my father walked into our home for the first time, Colleen crawled into his lap. I suspect that was when my mother, not to mention my grandmother, fell in love with him.

Of the three of us, Colleen manifested the damage of her early childhood the most. My mother couldn't take her out of the house, she'd leap from a moving vehicle. At home, she kept to herself. She'd rock: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. She wouldn't play. But my dad thought that was nonsense. "Children have to play!" he declared. So he'd take Colleen to the park, place her tenderly on the swing and then lie on the ground beneath, her tiny feet on his chest. He'd swing her gently, gently, gently: back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. When we drove in the car, the expected ritual was that Colleen would sit on his lap. She never jumped out when he held her. Colleen began to heal. She began to play, to talk, to laugh. Within a span of a very short time she was just like every other child. It's amazing what love can do.

As for my biological father, he stopped coming around once my adoptive father was on the scene. Like most bullies, he was easily intimidated. A few years later he signed adoption papers and we three girls were legally adopted by my father.

It's a matter of odd coincidence that both my biological father and adoptive father were born sixteen years apart in the same hospital. It's a further matter of coincidence that they were placed for adoption through the same ward. But it's not coincidental at all that my father was an alcoholic, not the vicious kind though. He was the gentle, jovial kind. He played with us. He'd wake us at midnight just to look at the stars or present us with a gift of chocolate. He never struck his children. We adored him. Trailing his godlike presence we became quail children, our heads bobbing as we followed wherever he led.

In our early years he once became deathly ill with cirrhosis of the liver. The doctors gave him only a few months to live and amazingly, my father's liver regenerated. After 25 years of exceptionally heavy drinking, he quit cold. There's that power of love thing for you again.

We were still poor then, mostly because our father couldn't hold down a job for very long. Fortunately, he was an accomplished thief. He'd take us into the grocery store and pick up some day-old bread -- you could buy it by the box in those days. Then, as his brood of children charmed the people around him, he'd lift the top loaves, squish down the bottom ones, and sandwich our daily necessities in between. They never caught him and we always ate well. You can't buy day-old bread in boxes anymore. Ha! It's probably my father's fault.

Thus began the good years of my childhood.

My birth father's behavior was common family knowledge. It was something we talked about openly in my family. My siblings and I also talked about those babysitters although we never did share that detail with our mother.

Because those events were openly discussed and admitted, I thought I had dealt with them. I hadn't. In particular, what I hadn't dealt with was the emotion that was part of those experiences. This was part of what came flooding back during my "break with reality".

I did talk about those events with that man who showed up in my experience and I did learn how to cry about them and grieve the loss of innocence of the child that was.

Music of the Hour: Enigma ~ The Child in Us

See also:

- Trauma and Schizophrenia

- The Role of Metaphor

[spiritual_emergency]

Tucked away.

[spiritual_emergency]

I probably should have put a trigger warning on that. My apologies if some found it to be too intense.

At any rate, yes, that was my childhood -- or parts of it anyway. There were many other parts, many of them quite good and pleasant. But some parts, I must have put away. Because I did, I lived my life as if the first few years of my life had never happened. I eventually married a good man and became a mother myself. In hindsight, I understood my reluctance to ever leave them with babysitters.

Meantime, all that lay latent within me until my mother died. Within days of her death I would encounter an individual who terrified me and I didn't know why. I know now, he must have shared some characteristics in common with my birth father. Two weeks after that, I would lose my best friend. He was a male, a confidant, someone I could talk to about anything. Those were the blows that cracked my ego.

Ten months after my mother's death my ego would collapse and I would spend the next four months secretly wondering if I was dead. Then, I would spend six weeks in another world talking to a man named Gallagher who was a composite image of everything that was good about the many males I had encountered in my life -- my father, my husband, my brothers, my friends. Jungians will recognize him as my Animus.

It's amazing what love can do.

See also:

The Animus as an Archetype and Dream Symbol: Understanding the Jungian Archetypal Animus and Its Integration

[finding my way]

SE, that is a considerable amount of pain you have been through:(. You have done some amazing things with your perspective on it all. I notice your deletion... are you ok? If we can help, we are here for you!

[spiritual_emergency]

Thanks for asking finding my way. Yes, I'm okay. That experience is several years old now and I did invest a considerable amount of time in doing my grieving in the aftermath.

Meantime, I did delete one portion, in part because it's something that's very intimate to me and truthfully, a person has to have some insight into the Jungian psyche in order to understand what was going on there.

Nonetheless, for those who do, this might make sense to them now...

- I split into functions of the psyche ...

- I had an archetypal experience ...

- I had a confrontation with my shadow ...

- Jung and Perry both believed that schizophrenia was an attempt by the psyche to self-heal ...

I do believe that part of the reason I am well is because I had that experience and I had the opportunity to take it through to its completion. That involved peeling back the layers of the psyche until finally, there was nothing left to strip away.

Music of the Hour:

[finding my way]

This post gives me courage, SE:o thanks for your clarity!

[spiritual_emergency]

Darkness born of darkness, the beginning of all understanding.

I am still learning from that one.

See also:

- The Tao

- The Unmanifest Absolute

- In the Beginning

Music of the Hour:

[spiritual_emergency]

Because someone asked...

The Luminosity of the Dark Goddesses: Night Enfolds Her Cloak of Holes

Music of the Hour:

[Mjolnir07]

Spiritual E,

I have been reading your posts and find them quite inspiring. As I'm sure you know, the most difficult thing about psychosis is the overwhelming fear that you will be lost to it, and then perhaps the fear that you already have been and will never recover. There are many accounts of people who have had experiences like yours and have been driven irreversibly mad by them. I personally have in the past at one point in time or another (while I was still confirm-ably symptom free) seen, well witnessed, the absolute boundaries of my minds extreme capacity. Luckily, at those times, I was able to experience the relief of stepping away from them. As you are obviously aware, many religions seek absolute ego death as a means of finally becoming spiritually whole. Before reading your posts it had never occurred to me to think of these mental difficulties as an exercise of the mind and spirit, I am personally preparing myself for the inevitable point where my symptoms cease to be episodic and begin to become chronic and permanent. The first step to that, which I am still on, is accepting that I will likely cease to be who I like to think of myself as. It is very encouraging to read that through the trials and tribulations of these issues, someone has come through once more un-fragmented.

[spiritual_emergency]

Hello Mjolnir,

I don't know if you might have read this thread: Can a Mind Be Well?. It details three very successful treatment programs that produced a recovery rate in the range of 85% among individuals deemed to be schizophrenic. My own experience is closest to that described by John Weir Perry. The primary mode of therapeutic treatment in all three programs was talk-therapy in one's home or a home-like residence as coupled with minimal or no medication.

If you read through the second page of this thread you've also read those accounts from Courtenay Harding and the World Health Organization, all of which suggest that recovery is far more common than many have been lead to believe. I immersed myself in those kind of stats and studies and for that reason, don't see my own recovery as all that remarkable as much as it was inevitable. However, I also believe there were things I did (or that happened) that worked well for me that may work well for others. This included the availability of "talk-therapy" on a 24 hour basis for about six weeks, care in a home-like environment, no/minimal medication and the development of alternate perspectives.

Before reading your posts it had never occurred to me to think of these mental difficulties as an exercise of the mind and spirit

There is no doubt that psychosis/schizophrenia takes a very heavy toll on an individual's egoic identity/personality structure -- there may not be an ego death in every instance but there is always severe structural damage to the boundaries of the ego. It's the breach in these boundaries which allow unconscious content to leak through or pour forth. Insofar as the spiritual aspects go... this is a common component for many individuals who undergo these kind of experiences. What's perhaps more startling is to realize that these "schizophrenic" experiences also share some common ground among those who have followed a dedicated spiritual path, i.e., such as that that I referenced in that other discussion.

In this stage, nothing around us seems solid or trustworthy. On all levels, our consciousness becomes attuned to endings and death. We notice the end of conversations, of music, of encounters, of days, of sensations in the body on a powerful cellular level. We sense the dissolution of life moment to moment. ... As our outer and inner worlds dissolve, we lose our sense of reference. There arises a great sense of unease and fear ... leading into a realm of fear and terror. "Where is there any security?" "Wherever I look, things are dissolving." In these stages we can experience this dissolution and dying within our own body. We may look down and see pieces of our own body seeming to melt away and decay, as if we were a corpse. As the realm of terror deepens, periods of paranoia may arise. In this stage, wherever we look, we become fearful of danger...

Source: Forms of Spiritual Emergency

That's from the book A Path With A Heart by Buddhist teacher and psychologist, Jack Kornfield, cautioning long term meditators of some of the experiences they may encounter with intensive meditation... but it sure sounds like the account of a paranoid schizophrenic.

The first step to that, which I am still on, is accepting that I will likely cease to be who I like to think of myself as.

Something to keep in mind -- ten years from now, you are not going to be the person you are today and this will be true whether you ever experience a full blown case of psychosis, or not. Change is inevitable but it is natural to want things to stay the same. Or rather, it's natural to want them to stay the same if we experience things as being good. If we experience things as being bad, we want change very quickly. Then, it doesn't come fast enough.

~ Namaste

[spiritual_emergency]

I was recently given the opportunity to share my experience with a researcher who is gathering personal accounts from people who felt that spirituality played a role in their experience of psychosis. I thought I might as well share it here as well.

My experience of psychosis was several years ago. Part of the difficulty in writing about it these many years later is because I have changed since then. I have found a means of understanding, interpreting and integrating my experience although back then, I had no such means of doing so. When my experience occurred, I had not known of a single human being in the history of the world who had ever had such an experience. I didn’t know what to call it so I simply called it, “The Story”. In the course of my recovery I discovered other names: Dark Night of the Soul; The Night Sea Journey; Shamanic/Gnostic Initiation; Encounter with the Unconscious; Spiritual Emergency, Ego Collapse/Ego Death and more. I also discovered that in this culture, my experience was considered to be one of psychosis or schizophrenia.

To help provide the reader with a baseline it might be necessary to flesh out who I was before. Who I was then was a woman in midlife, mostly content, very much in love with my husband, my children, my family and friends, my life. I considered myself to be very fortunate. For the sake of this account I think it’s worth emphasizing I was not a religious person. I had never identified with a formal religion, never attended church outside of a brief period in my childhood and the occasional wedding, never read the Christian bible or any other piece of religious scripture. I did consider myself to be somewhat “spiritual” in an “earthy” sort of way. I was drawn to nature, had a pack of tarot cards and a pretty rock collection that I’d collected from a new-age book shop. Somewhere in the back of my mind I must have believed in some form of God too, because I recall the moment I no longer believed any kind of god could exist, along with my anguish and rage in those moments.

My experience began when my mother died. In the immediate aftermath of her death, two unusual things happened. The first was that I found I could not cry, even though I had been very close to my mother and loved her deeply. The second was that I became terribly frightened. This fear was not attached to mortality, rather the world suddenly became a place that no longer felt safe to me. I couldn’t understand that fear nor find a rational source for it, so I pushed it away and pretended it wasn’t there. A few short weeks after my mother’s death I lost my closest friend and confidante.

I describe those events now as three blows that came heavy and fast upon me. That was when I started to crack. Life began to get a bit odd from those points forward. The oddness persisted for several months and included a new fascination with specific pieces of music, prose and poetry that captured my attention for reasons I couldn’t explain. It also included terrible nightmares, a growing obsession with someone I considered to be “evil” and a slow estrangement between myself, my family and friends as they struggled to make sense of my new behaviors.

Ten months later another series of blows would come, harder and heavier than the first. There was a tragedy, a travesty. People were dead. I connected this with my earlier fears and obsessions of evil. I felt responsible in some way. During the same time frame, I lost my other most significant friend and confidante. I lost a role I had heavily invested myself in. I lost my larger community. I was horrified by those deaths. I was sworn to keep a secret I could not keep and shamed, cast out, exiled and abandoned as a result of my transgressions. My husband was angry and at the end of his rope. He refused to offer any form of comfort. That was the night I stopped believing there could be any form of a God. That was the night I felt as if I was drowning over and over and over again. I felt there was no one I could talk to save one casual friend known by the name of Kali.

The next day I got up and went through the motions of living. I did that for four months. During those months I also began to suspect I had died that night but somehow managed to go on living. These were the events that brought me to the doorstep of “The Story”. It started like this: In the Beginning…

The opening credits of that story took me back to my maternal grandmother – a woman I had barely known except through family history. The setting placed me somewhere out in the darkness of the universe. That’s where “The Story” took me -- or most of me, anyway. There was another part of me that was sitting in my home office with the door locked, but that part was a broken, physical shell of me. Somehow, these two parts were connected. One part of me lived the experience that took place in that other world, the other part of me wrote it down to the best of my ability as it happened. To this day, I would never deny the reality of that experience. I can’t call it a delusion. I call it a different plane of reality. Every moment, everything that happened in that space was entirely real to me...

[spiritual_emergency]

Cont'd from post above...

In that new world I had entered, there was a residence of sorts. On the upper level lived a man whom I called Gallagher. “I” lived in a separate apartment beneath Gallagher’s living quarters. My living quarters had seven rooms, including an outdoor garden. The entrance to my apartment was an opening in the floor, hidden under Gallagher’s bed. A ladder connected the two levels. Shortly after I settled in, a visitor arrived…

A tiny pair of polished Mary Janes appeared at the top of the ladder that joined Room 311 with the apartment below. Next, leotard covered legs could be seen. A lace-ruffled bottom appeared next, and finally, an upper torso complete with a head that bobbed Tess' way and sarcastically remarked, "Y'know... I could've put you up at the Plaza."

Tess' face broke into a wide grin. "Yo' god! Long time, no see.

Those were the first two “characters” who showed up – Gallagher and that little-girl god. There would be other characters too, all of them related in some way to the people I had lost or been with through the course of those climatic events. My job was to tell the story and Gallagher’s job was to listen. The other characters appeared in accordance with the telling: The Devil, Kali, Limh, Five-Star-Woman. Christ also made several cameo appearances. A number of those earlier pieces of prose and music also re-emerged, with greater significance.

Telling that story was akin to getting more naked than I’d ever been. It was very painful but with each painful retelling, another piece of me would be stripped away. It was during the process of this stripping down that Christ imagery began to surface, sometimes in a very subtle manner…

Tess lay down on the couch. She crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes. "Hey Gallagher, do I look dead? Woooooooo," she wailed. "I am the ghost of Elvis."

Crucifixion themes also crept in: She pressed her back to it and extended her arms out at the shoulders. "It fits me."

Subtle. But I know where those places are. I also knew it was crazy but it was all crazy.

There came a point, the most painful point, when there was nothing left to strip away. I call that point The Place Where Time Melts. I didn’t exist. There was no me left. This was the place of Dancing With God. There was a death, then a birth; two sides of the same coin. Life and Death. Black and White. Night and Day. Love and Hate. Good and Evil. “The Story” continued...

Slowly, I came to the realization that a new task had fallen upon me. I had to kill the Devil and I had to do it in a way that involved no violence, no weaponry, no hatred. I had to do this so I could save my soul. I had to do it so I could save the world. But I didn’t know how I was going to do that. This was when I discovered that under my bed was another entrance to a deeper place. I thought it was Hell. I thought I was going to Hell. I thought that the Devil was down there but I had to go. It wasn’t Hell. In that place God gave me a needle made of the purest love possible and this was how I killed the Devil -- by putting that needle into his heart.

Love is the only poison that can kill a heart of darkness.

By the time that point came, I’d had my throat cut, my chest sliced open, my heart pierced. I was covered in blood but I had also done what I had to do. Then, Gallagher had to undergo a similar process and I held his hand while he did, just like he’d held mine when I was in so much pain and so frightened. When it was all done, Tess and Gallagher made love and that’s where “The Story” ended.

Later that day I lay down and slept for the first time in many days. That was when I heard the only voice that took place outside of that world I had been in. It was a little girl’s voice and she spoke from underneath my real-life bed. She said only one word: Heart.

More than a year later I would come across the work of Jungian-trained psychiatrist, John Weir Perry, and realize that every “character” in my experience could be mapped upon Jung’s model of the psyche. A few months after that, I returned to work, initially in a part-time capacity only.

I was never hospitalized during or after that experience of mine. Nor have I been medicated or received any degree of formal therapy. I have managed to hang onto my marriage and some of the same friends. I’ve also been able to hold a job for several years, save an extended period when one of my children underwent an experience similar to my own. I quit working then so I could be a support to them. My birth father was also in and out of psychiatric hospitals but I didn’t consider this to be an important detail until my child’s experience.

In terms of spirituality: I began to study various texts because it was the only way I could try to understand what my experience was all about. I still do not follow a formal religious path, I still do not attend any sort of house of worship. I do find solace in moments of Silence.

A new God image has arisen out of my experience and this centers around the dark, ancient, matriarchal feminine: Kali, Isis, Sophia, Binah, Shekinah, the Black Madonna, the Tao, the Unmanifest Absolute. This same imagery has fuelled an intense interest in quantum matters: dark matter, black holes, the universe itself. I still listen to the music too.

In the beginning... all was the void and all was black.

God saw this and said: Let there be light.

And there was.

The Book of Genesis

Music of the Hour:

[spiritual_emergency]

A po-em.

I was sent forth from the power,

and I have come to those who reflect upon me,

and I have been found among those who seek after me.

Look upon me, you who reflect upon me,

and you hearers, hear me.

You who are waiting for me, take me to yourselves.

And do not banish me from your sight.

And do not make your voice hate me, nor your hearing.

Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard!

Do not be ignorant of me.

For I am the first and the last.

I am the honored one and the scorned one.

I am the whore and the holy one.

I am the wife and the virgin.

I am <the mother> and the daughter.

I am the members of my mother.

I am the barren one

and many are her sons.

I am she whose wedding is great,

and I have not taken a husband.

I am the midwife and she who does not bear.

I am the solace of my labor pains.

I am the bride and the bridegroom,

and it is my husband who begot me.

I am the mother of my father

and the sister of my husband

and he is my offspring.

I am the slave of him who prepared me.

I am the ruler of my offspring.

But he is the one who begot me before the time on a birthday.

And he is my offspring in (due) time,

and my power is from him.

I am the staff of his power in his youth,

and he is the rod of my old age.

And whatever he wills happens to me.

I am the silence that is incomprehensible

and the idea whose remembrance is frequent.

I am the voice whose sound is manifold

and the word whose appearance is multiple.

I am the utterance of my name.

Why, you who hate me, do you love me,

and hate those who love me?

You who deny me, confess me,

and you who confess me, deny me.

You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,

and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.

You who know me, be ignorant of me,

and those who have not known me, let them know me.

For I am knowledge and ignorance.

I am shame and boldness.

I am shameless; I am ashamed.

I am strength and I am fear.

I am war and peace.

Give heed to me.

I am the one who is disgraced and the great one.

Give heed to my poverty and my wealth.

Do not be arrogant to me when I am cast out upon the earth,

and you will find me in those that are to come.

And do not look upon me on the dung-heap

nor go and leave me cast out,

and you will find me in the kingdoms.

And do not look upon me when I am cast out among those who

are disgraced and in the least places,

nor laugh at me.

And do not cast me out among those who are slain in violence.

But I, I am compassionate and I am cruel.

Be on your guard!

Do not hate my obedience

and do not love my self-control.

In my weakness, do not forsake me,

and do not be afraid of my power.

For why do you despise my fear

and curse my pride?

But I am she who exists in all fears

and strength in trembling.

I am she who is weak,

and I am well in a pleasant place.

I am senseless and I am wise.

Why have you hated me in your counsels?

For I shall be silent among those who are silent,

and I shall appear and speak,

Why then have you hated me, you Greeks?

Because I am a barbarian among the barbarians?

For I am the wisdom of the Greeks

and the knowledge of the barbarians.

I am the judgement of the Greeks and of the barbarians.

I am the one whose image is great in Egypt

and the one who has no image among the barbarians.

I am the one who has been hated everywhere

and who has been loved everywhere.

I am the one whom they call Life,

and you have called Death.

I am the one whom they call Law,

and you have called Lawlessness.

I am the one whom you have pursued,

and I am the one whom you have seized.

I am the one whom you have scattered,

and you have gathered me together.

I am the one before whom you have been ashamed,

and you have been shameless to me.

I am she who does not keep festival,

and I am she whose festivals are many.

I, I am godless,

and I am the one whose God is great.

I am the one whom you have reflected upon,

and you have scorned me.

I am unlearned,

and they learn from me.

I am the one that you have despised,

and you reflect upon me.

I am the one whom you have hidden from,

and you appear to me.

But whenever you hide yourselves,

I myself will appear.

For whenever you appear,

I myself will hide from you.

Those who have [...] to it [...] senselessly [...].

Take me [... understanding] from grief.

and take me to yourselves from understanding and grief.

And take me to yourselves from places that are ugly and in ruin,

and rob from those which are good even though in ugliness.

Out of shame, take me to yourselves shamelessly;

and out of shamelessness and shame,

upbraid my members in yourselves.

And come forward to me, you who know me

and you who know my members,

and establish the great ones among the small first creatures.

Come forward to childhood,

and do not despise it because it is small and it is little.

And do not turn away greatnesses in some parts from the smallnesses,

for the smallnesses are known from the greatnesses.

Why do you curse me and honor me?

You have wounded and you have had mercy.

Do not separate me from the first ones whom you have known.

And do not cast anyone out nor turn anyone away

[...] turn you away and [... know] him not.

[...].

What is mine [...].

I know the first ones and those after them know me.

But I am the mind of [...] and the rest of [...].

I am the knowledge of my inquiry,

and the finding of those who seek after me,

and the command of those who ask of me,

and the power of the powers in my knowledge

of the angels, who have been sent at my word,

and of gods in their seasons by my counsel,

and of spirits of every man who exists with me,

and of women who dwell within me.

I am the one who is honored, and who is praised,

and who is despised scornfully.

I am peace,

and war has come because of me.

And I am an alien and a citizen.

I am the substance and the one who has no substance.

Those who are without association with me are ignorant of me,

and those who are in my substance are the ones who know me.

Those who are close to me have been ignorant of me,

and those who are far away from me are the ones who have known me.

On the day when I am close to you, you are far away from me,

and on the day when I am far away from you, I am close to you.

[i am ...] within.

[i am ...] of the natures.

I am [...] of the creation of the spirits.

[...] request of the souls.

I am control and the uncontrollable.

I am the union and the dissolution.

I am the abiding and I am the dissolution.

I am the one below,

and they come up to me.

I am the judgment and the acquittal.

I, I am sinless,

and the root of sin derives from me.

I am lust in (outward) appearance,

and interior self-control exists within me.

I am the hearing which is attainable to everyone

and the speech which cannot be grasped.

I am a mute who does not speak,

and great is my multitude of words.

Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness.

I am she who cries out,

and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth.

I prepare the bread and my mind within.

I am the knowledge of my name.

I am the one who cries out,

and I listen.

I appear and [...] walk in [...] seal of my [...].

I am [...] the defense [...].

I am the one who is called Truth

and iniquity [...].

You honor me [...] and you whisper against me.

You who are vanquished, judge them (who vanquish you)

before they give judgment against you,

because the judge and partiality exist in you.

If you are condemned by this one, who will acquit you?

Or, if you are acquitted by him, who will be able to detain you?

For what is inside of you is what is outside of you,

and the one who fashions you on the outside

is the one who shaped the inside of you.

And what you see outside of you, you see inside of you;

it is visible and it is your garment.

Hear me, you hearers

and learn of my words, you who know me.

I am the hearing that is attainable to everything;

I am the speech that cannot be grasped.

I am the name of the sound

and the sound of the name.

I am the sign of the letter

and the designation of the division.

And I [...].

(3 lines missing)

[...] light [...].

[...] hearers [...] to you

[...] the great power.

And [...] will not move the name.

[...] to the one who created me.

And I will speak his name.

Look then at his words

and all the writings which have been completed.

Give heed then, you hearers

and you also, the angels and those who have been sent,

and you spirits who have arisen from the dead.

For I am the one who alone exists,

and I have no one who will judge me.

For many are the pleasant forms which exist in numerous sins,

and incontinencies,

and disgraceful passions,

and fleeting pleasures,

which (men) embrace until they become sober

and go up to their resting place.

And they will find me there,

and they will live,

and they will not die again.

Source: The Nag Hammadi Library

I've been hanging out with that po-em for several years now and it's still teaching me how to understand everything it says and doesn't.

[Sissagwaad]

Indeed, to revel in realizing the beauty and perfection of the dynamic, that we are each and all 'alone,' yet apart of the whole.

We are alone, in our freedom, the freedom of our choice, of conscious recognition or denial, of the goodness, love, and support which surrounds us. Emotionally we experience the result of our choices, as our amazing Brain obeys and instructs our machinery to put out the hormones to correspond with our chosen vision.

Thank you Tess, for reminding me at least, that the flavor of our experience of life, is in fact the product of our choices. The challange being, to learn to operate ourselves more in tune with our deepest desires......and avoid the temptations and traps of being fearful instead. bw Larry