Spiritual but not Religious Psychosis?

There is a story in the Daily Telegraph about a study conducted at University College London that proports to claim that people who are traditionally religious, agnostics, and atheists are perfectly sane, but people who claim to be spiritual but not religious are nuts.



According to the study "[spiritual people] were 77 per cent more likely than the others to be
dependent on drugs, 72 per cent more likely to suffer from a phobia, and 50
per cent more likely to have a generalised anxiety disorder." The researchers concluded "'there is increasing evidence that
people who profess spiritual beliefs in the absence of a religious framework
are more vulnerable to mental disorder.

"The nature of this association needs greater examination in qualitative and
in prospective quantitative research.'" 

Why am I not surprised?



A person named Meg969 commented on the article "No panic folks, take it easy. :DTranslating into common English it means that 'spiritual' people know more, hear more, see more and feel more than others and so it is obvious they will feel agitated (after all they are people as well) more often than the 'rest'. Besides, spiritual people may indeed experience aspects of life to a bigger extent than others but at the same time they may find more strenght to control or abandon their addictives. Nothing new was found really. London team just trying to put it all into a negative context for spiritual people and the society in overall? I have a funny feeling this article aims to simply conclude that spiritual people are basically mentally unstable."



I tend to agree, and so does Ken Wilber.





The more perspectives you can take on the larger the field of your awareness and the less attached to this little identity you have constructed in this life. At the same time you are more tacitly aware of suffering in the world and feel more deeply. If you have not made the monumental leap to second tier you are stuck in the existential halfway house and life pretty much sucks for you.





At the same time, we can look at these findings in another way. People with higher intelligence and psychological trauma may look to spirituality as a means of finding relief from their problems because neither traditional religion or atheism have the tools necessary to meet their needs. In other words, spiritual people are not necessarily more likely to develop psychological problems, people with psychological problems are more likely to develop spirituality.



Now here's what's really gonna' bake your noodle. What is the point of this story? I could have told you all this without having to do some expensive study that "requires much more research dollars". I'm not sure, but somewhere among the 400 previous posts on The Urban Mystic, I probably did talk about this before.



My old teacher always admonished us to look at who was saying what and to understand their biases to understand what they were saying better. Understanding the Telegraph's political leanings makes the spin they put on this story very clear. What is the only thing that organised religion fears more than atheism? People who are not atheists who do not need organised religion. A center right publication like the Telegraph is sticking with the Church of England, and if people can find God without the Church then they are a bigger threat than Dawkins and his laughable rehashes of Fifth Century arguments against God's existence that are packaged in a cheap tuxedo of scientistic materialism. The Church can use the atheists as a foil to strenghten its grip on its members, but as soon as a rival appears on the God scene they start to lose it. The simple Church-atheist dichotomy breaks apart just like the left-right dichotomy was shattered in my brilliant video Integral Politics. It's all just a dog and pony show to distract you from the truth and maintain a ridged grip on power.

Scrying

For those few who may remember, the title and topic of my first ever post on The Urban Mystic, in February 2006, was on scrying, a term used to describe a variety of divination methods involving staring at reflective surfaces. Today, I experimented again, gazing into a mirror which reflected a featureless white surface in a dimly lit room. I gazed until no more light remained (about thirty minutes), at which time an image did begin to appear, but it vanished very quickly, and with it all visible light, ending the experiment. I liked the results, and will, in the future, continue this practice. As always, I will keep you updated.

Richard Rose, American Zen Master

Richard Rose is often described as being a Zen master, although his inquiry is a lot more similar to Ramana Maharshi's method. The Zen part comes from his insistence on direct transmission. Rose lived in a Catholic seminary before becoming a scientist and working in various fields including physics and biology. In 1947 while meditating, he died and experienced at first everything and then nothing, and spent the rest of his life trying to get people to have the very same revelation. Richard Rose died in 2005 after struggling with Alzheimer's for several years.

Here are clips from what appears to be two lectures, totalling 24 minutes on the soul, the Absolute, and the ego, as well as becoming the Truth instead of just speculating on it.

Mary, Did You Know?

Cee Lo Green performing "Mary, Did You Know?", the official video for the television series "The Bible". Just beautiful.

States, Stages, and Meditation

Ken Wilber describes vertical and horizontal enlightenment. Vertical here deals with structure stages, going from first-tier to second-tier to third-tier (magenta/purple up through turquoise and beyond) culminating in what Aurobindo called Supermind. Each stage transcends and includes all previous stages and as you go up you identify with a wider and wider groups (egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, Kosmocentric).



Horizontal enlightenment is what is typically thought of when people speak of enlightnement, going through the state stages, (gross, subtle, causal, etc.) ending at what Genpo Roshi calls Big Mind. What is important to remember is that one can take state training at almost any level, so someone can be able to enter high states of absorption and be what people would typically consider "enlightened" and once they get out of their meditation and back into the world they are still operating from whatever stage they are at. Big Mind is the nondual ground of being, Supermind is the integration of the small mind with Big Mind.




Next, Ken describes why meditating is helpful toward ending world hunger.




As a person gradually disidentifies with a wider and wider array of states of consciousness, broadening their identity, it makes it a lot easier to climb the ladder to higher and higher stages. If you want to have a positive impact on the world you should work toward climbing toward an orange altitude or higher (why not shoot for second-tier?), and one way that is very good at moving people up stages is meditation.

The End of the World

In the great film Alexander, Hephaestion, Alexander's life long companion, asks Alexander "What would you do if you ever reached the end of the world?" At the other end of the world, near the International Date Line it is already 2 PM on Friday. Friday, 21 December 2012, the end of the world. According to some people, tomorrow (or today in some places that are already tomorrow) will be the last day ever, or something. To be fair, I had my own story "The L", which I began writing in 2006, have the end of the world begin tomorrow, when The Pinnacle Research Group initiated a global disaster from Bouvet Island. In my story the 21st is only the beginning of the end of the world, with the world not ending completely until fifteen years later after great tribulations have claimed five billion lives and ravaged the surface of the Earth.



It has been six years since I began my mystical career in January 2006, and started writing The Urban Mystic in February that same year (on AOL, which no longer exits, so you cannot access past archives which I have saved). It has been five years since I had my first taste of radical Freedom, One Taste, in January 2007, when the world was on the inside and my eyes were on the outside and my self was blasted across the face of the Kosmos. It has been four years since Christmas 2008 when I had a dream about the end of the world, 21 December 2012, where balls of light came to Earth and began erasing everything they touched. It has been nearly two years since I discovered My Little Pony, something that has really touched me and helped affect my life for the better. I have made predictions: the "Arab Spring", genetically modified viruses that mimic psychotropic drugs, the "Great Winter of 2010", among others. These past six years have been full of ups and downs, but I wouldn't trade them for the life I lived before.



Now, it seems like it is the end of the world. This year I was told that I need to make sacrifices to enter the next phase of my mystical career. The choice is mine, but it is a choice between being a mystic and living a normal life, and it is the greatest choice of my life, and the most difficult. A mirror reflects everything that falls on it, without altering the thing it is reflecting or becoming attached to it. A mirror mind, the mind of enlightenment, is the same. Cutting the fetters of attachment is necessary for enlightenment, and there are a few that seem too well entrenched in my psyche to be cut loose. If I go down this path farther I must deal with the death of the small self and all the little things it has accumulated over the years. What's really interesting is, I was told this would happen in the beginning! I was told in 2006 I would have these choices to make in 2012. I was told what to expect and when to expect it, and I failed to notice until most of the signs already passed and it was too late to prepare, just yesterday. Regardless of what happens in the external world tomorrow, it may well be the end of the world for my little self.



Come what may, it will be for the best. It has been a wonderful time, dear couple of readers (actually about 20 a day). I love you all.



Always Love.

Precious Human Birth

The body
is the chariot (ratha) of the individual
(jeevi), who is the Master. Human birth is the
glorious and precious opportunity amongst all living
beings. The human body is the castle from which one can
fight successfully against the foes of attachment and
egoism. It is the boat by which one can cross the sea of
change and chance. The realization of the reality within
oneself, through relentless spiritual discipline is an
arduous challenge – as fraught with dangers and
calamity, like playing with fire or duelling with wild
animals. Scriptures (Upanishads) have compared the
spiritual aspirant’s path to that of a razor’s
edge. One has to be alert, vigilant and fully trained to
meet all emergencies. Use the precious opportunity of this
human birth and leverage your intelligence, discrimination
and detachment you are gifted with, to rise above all, and
realize the Ultimate Reality.

-
Divine Discourse, Oct 15, 1966.