This incongruity between my intuition and the evidence around me has driven me throughout my adult life. I didn't realize until 30 years later that this core mismatch dates back to my infancy. I was born to toxically dysfunctional parents who were together only because of my existence. The suffering surrounding me was hell, and I knew somehow I was responsible for its existence. Without me, they wouldn't be together, she wouldn't be enslaved, he wouldn't be abusing, I wouldn't be burdened by a melancholy so heavy it poisoned every waking moment.

With this as my beginning, and with the blessing of a sharp mind, I was driven to find a reconciliation between my intutive grasp of a benevolent universe and the stark shock of obsession and oppression in the human world. If life as a human was this bad, I did not want to be here. Period. But as long as I felt on the track of a solution, a way to reveal the absurd mistake at the heart of all suffering, I was motivated to live. In retrospect, I can see this was an impossibly grandiose project for any single human being to take on.

The drama of my life-or-death quest was amplified when I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder at age 27. From a conventional medical perspective, my fraught existence was considered a consequence of bad brain chemistry. But I had studied enough science, and particularly enough brain science, to know how rudimentary the diagnosis was, and on what frail evidence the prescription for medication relied. And I had tracked my own inner cycles with enough awareness to know there was order to this chaos, beauty to this pain.

I vowed to make sense of it, and to undo the chains which bound me. Suddenly I had hacked my grand quest down to size: What mistake was I making? What perceptual mistake perpetuated my alternating experiences of abyssmal depression and unbalanced (and unproductive) mania? How was I sabotaging my access to the peace and elegance which I knew to be truth?

22 years later, I believe I have some answers. My bipolar disorder is long gone. And the mainspring driving my all-or-nothing quest has been unsprung. Today I am just a guy with a few insights I'd like to share with you.

By that time, 1987, the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was almost a relief. Perhaps the mess of my life had a cause. Maybe it wasn’t my fault.

But something nagged me about the prognosis: a lifetime of “managing” the disorder with a strict medication regime, without which my chances of eventual suicide were high (said to be 1 in 4) and further degradation of my quality of life was almost certain. Psychotherapy was considered useful only for the purpose of helping me adapt to the condition and stay on the meds.

Although I had no solid logical, medical, or scientific reason to doubt the expertise of the psychiatric establishment on this issue, I didn’t believe they knew the whole story. I had studied neuro- and other sciences before dropping out of college. I had trained in an iconoclastic therapy practice called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). And I had held since my year in Scotland the deep intuition that western culture was missing something important in its understanding of human nature in general and the mind in particular. In addition, I was by nature extremely introspective, and I had tracked the progression of my mood cycle on more than one occasion, noticing a repeating pattern of inner mental events that seemed driven by a psychological cause rather than a biological one.

After taking lithium for only 10 days, not long enough to reach therapeutic blood levels, I decided to trust my intuition and pursue an independent inquiry into my own mind with the intention of finding the mechanism responsible for the mood cycles and dismantling it. The problem was, I really had no idea how to move forward on this project except through further introspection. I had no particular discipline by which to pursue my campaign for success – in fact, as much as my nature was introspective, it was also undisciplined. It could even be said I was anti-discipline.

In addition, I had the opinion that no conventional knowledge could be useful. If my premise was that the prevailing view on my condition was wrong, that wrongness could be embedded in any or all of the body of existing expertise. I rejected it all, stopped reading books of any kind except the occasional novel, and committed myself to returning to the raw data of personal experience. My assumption was that everything I needed to know existed inside my own mind, and that with diligent effort I would find the key to unlock my prison door.

Of course, there was also a certain undeniable grandiosity to this project. I actually believed that I could discover something that had eluded research efforts spanning decades, if not centuries, and enrolling hundreds or even thousands of people probing the mysteries of the mind, scientists and therapists, corporations and universities.

It was crazy, perhaps, but this grandiosity was a central ingredient of my particular condition. Ironically, in this way I was uniquely prepared to undertake this mission. No one without unreasonable hubris would ever have persisted to the point of yielding results.

Someday perhaps, if time permits and people are interested, I will write an autobiography and fill in the details of this period. For now, to give you a sense of the tumult of my life during the period from 1979 to 1994, let me give you a few estimated numbers:

For this book, however, I wish to skip the drama and fast forward to 1994. I had been striving on and off again to wrestle this thing to the ground for seven years with limited success. I had employed techniques of NLP, deep introspection and journaling, self hypnosis, 12-step programs, sessions with three different psychotherapists, geographical relocation, family reconciliation, regression, expressive arts, performing arts, and other methods in search of answers. Some of these things led to personal insight and helped a little. But in the spring of 1994, I conducted a seemingly trivial experiment that was to lead in less than a year to the full and complete cessation of my bipolar disorder.

(Excerpt from a book draft written in 2007.)

March 1980, Arthur’s Seat overlooking the city at 2 am.

I come here often, striding the massive hill at all hours of the night. These days I am sleeping only every other day because I crave the fugue state that overtakes me on my nights awake. This night, I have been reading Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man and am captivated by his idea of the noosphere, a kind of global consciousness transcendent and integrative of ordinary, unitary consciousness. I feel I am on to something big, sensing insights just across the divide waiting for me to reach out and bring them home.

I stand with my chin out, gaze upward at the sky, stretch my arms out and back, my feet planted firmly at the crest of the hill, the wind whispering through my wild hair and beard. As I stand there, sending my mind out into the universe, I am carried aloft, a rushing torrent of energy surging upward through my body from the earth out into infinite sky. And I see, I hear, I know things that can never be contained by words. I sense the ever-growing tide of consciousness, the universe seeking to know itself, a kind of coagulation of awareness that drives the coalescence of order out of chaos, the evolution and ascendance of life and the mind.

I know in this moment that our understanding of life, of ourselves, of consciousness is a trivial shard of the grand whole. I have been given a glimpse of the whole, and I feel it is up to me to deliver this vision to the world.

Later, I encounter a friend and struggle to communicate what I have seen. I give up without much of an effort – it seems pointless, and I feel a deep, aching pain.

Philadelphia

October 1980, a West Philly row home

Back at Penn, I find myself isolated, unable to accept the pre-professional, materialistic culture that surrounds me. The coming year is difficult, painful, and challenging. I take a class in neuropsychology, and others in creative writing. I’m living in a co-op with some granola-chomping activists with whom I don’t feel much in common. My old friends seem distant and unable to understand me. I feel desperate and unsure of my future. It feels like a cruel joke, to have been given this grand vision of reality with no way to squeeze it into the common dross of everyday life and everyday people.

My sister comes to visit, and is freaked out by my rejection of Catholicism and my talk of saving the world. Later, my parents come for a visit, and want to take me to visit a psychiatrist. I agree with a wry, self-confident smile. I am clever enough to talk about my experiences with a droll sense of humor, wink-winking at my shared membership with the doctor in the elite-intellectual club, and do not show the deep pain I feel. He gives me a clean bill of mental health. I feel a strange separation from myself, watching my parents drive away.

High, low, and again

Vignettes like the one above were repeated countless times throughout my twenties and early thirties. I chose the first moment because it seems more than any other to have been the initiation into the deep cycling of the pattern. The extreme nature of that transcendent, noetic state intensified my already-existing belief that no one would ever be able to understand me, setting up a deep and abiding loneliness. The second moment could have been selected from any of dozens of abject low points, and I could just as easily have selected from dozens of other highs as well.

(Excerpt from a book draft written in 2007.)