Leo mentioned he didn't study the topic of mental illness a lot. I would like to give insight to him and to you all how my mental illness that was masked as spirituality destroyed me. I lived a life without much value I didn't work as I should have and didn't use the potential I was capable of. If this text gives just a glimpse of meaning and value to anyone I will be grateful.
How a false sense of ''spirituality'' destroyed my life and gave me dementia in my 33 years
I am doing this for you because I love you and because I want you to live life as I wanted to live it.
Before I die, I have to try to leave something behind as a warning and advice for people in similar situations. This won’t be a text that is well written because my cognitive abilities are drastically reduced as well as my vocabulary after 3 months of rapid dementia.
But I want you to try to understand my point and the urgency of my insights that may save somebodies life.
I am not a doctor and I can only speak from my own experience about the severe trauma I was living with. It completely controlled my life without me even realizing it. I will share with you how I analyzed the behavior of my mental illness and how it manifested itself in my mind and body.
Insanity and trauma are the most cunning things in the world. It is not a joke and should never be underestimated. Apart from physical disability or illness that is honest and straightforward insanity is not as clear and it operates by deceiving the mind and leading it to destruction.
If you are lazy beyond the norm and refuse to work, if you refuse to educate yourself and think success is not for you, you might be traumatized. If you think you are spiritual and have spiritual ‘’symptoms’’ that are not aligned with life and living, by being constantly exhausted, depressed brain fogged, you might be experienced anything but spirituality, but a manifestation of trauma symptoms. As malicious and occult as it may sound trauma can present itself as a living entity that is sucking the life force from you, leading you ultimately to your demise.
Insanity as I was living with it, completely gripped the essence of my thought process and kept me in delusion for 15 years. I not only believed the thoughts I was having but was convinced beyond any doubt, with body, mind and soul that there has to be truth to them. My emotions, my intuition, even my heart was driven and aligned with the schizophrenic doctrine my mind created due to childhood trauma. As you can see unfortunately this means that when somebody is insane the whole psycho physical, mind and body can serve to deceive a person. Its more than the typical hallucinations, hearing voices, and having conspiracy theories that we see in movies that make somebody insane. A person can be partly insane and be completely convinced they are normal, just following a higher path that nobody understands, just like I thought I was. If the thoughts do not support life and living normally then a person should try to question if there is truth to them. There is nothing wrong with being normal and ordinary and earning an honest living. Loving life and being grateful for what it is and not searching for some fantastical worlds that don’t exist. I never realized what enlightenment is and I don’t care about it at all. All I wish for is a healthy brain but that won’t come now. I would have lived so much differently.
My ideology was belief that there is no such thing as work or human will, that those things are illusions and that they are ultimately not important for realizing the truth about the world. I was aspiring to be a homeless bum, living as a fool for Christ in divine truth and bliss. I believed in the force of undoing or unworking and that it is like a black whole that devours everything and extinguishes everything, and ultimately when we experience this black nothingness, we see truth. I had many instances where I did work and tried to persist in my endeavors but believing I was spiritual undervalued my efforts, and the very meaning of work and success. Voices told me that work and knowledge are not important and that I was beyond them. That I don’t need it to be happy and enlightened. So, I was willingly retarding myself and regressing unconsciously while thinking this is a good thing. After dementia arouse and started desecrating my brain, this illusion collapsed and I realized that such thoughts came because of an extreme sense of worthlessness. Which I was living with and considered normal. When a person is traumatized, they live with extreme and abnormal feelings of powerlessness and hopelessness, that they consider normal because they learned these things and didn’t feel anything else. A glimpse of power and true value feels almost like death to their sick sense of self. And they might even fear it because their whole identity is challenged and shaken to the core. This is why work; knowledge, creativity and education are transformative tools for somebody living with trauma. They were the only cure for me except I realized this too late. The human will and will to work, and create, and love, and enjoy the successes it brings is a divine force, not at all to be undervalued like most spiritual teachers suggest, by saying do nothing or let go of effort. When people have trauma work is the only salvation they have to live a normal life.
So, if you refuse to work and think its something spiritual moving you in this direction seriously consider you might be wrong.
Now I will share some of my childhood story and how dementia happened.
My story begins by me being born with a physical disability called artogriphosis. I had bent arms and legs which could not be stretched, kind of like a baby is positioned in the stomach curled up, that’s how I was when I got out. However devastating this situation seemed at first, there was hope, because by exercising diligently I could walk and eventually stretch my arms half way. I had all the function and potential of a normal child. The problem came while doing the very exercises because they were invasive, complicated and painful. I slept with plasters every night and all this lasted for the first 12 years of my life. My parents while doing a remarkable job of straightening my body didn’t consider that I could be emotionally damaged by the process. And thus, they convinced themselves and me that I was completely normal, which I wasn’t. Those painful exercises created severe trauma that was left untreated and considered normal. In my 19 year I developed ‘’out of nowhere’’ a severe debilitating anxiety towards life and work. I had constant feelings of subconscious terror, which were relentless and constant every day all day. I tried many things to help myself and gave full attention to my psychological problem, which was paradoxically, a huge mistake. In the 15 years of living with this anxiety I learned to live with it and considered it a normal part of me. The only problem was I wasn’t productive and didn’t work and live independently. So, I read psychological books and all sorts of stuff and came across spirituality and eventually developed the doctrine I mentioned before.
In my opinion symptoms of dementia can come at any age if a person lives with extreme psychological burden. It starts the cognitive decline gradually and very gently as years go by so the sufferer can forget the pain. It introduces a wide variety of symptoms that mimic so many of the ‘’spiritual symptoms’’ I read about over the years. Brain fog, constant tiredness, sleepiness, a sense of peace, beingness and bliss that comes in doing nothing and sleep and rest. So all these ‘’positive’’ symptoms were actually dementia in my case, mistaken and confused for spirituality. In my opinion anything that reduces one’s abilities and qualities of life should be discarded whether it be ‘’spiritual’’ or not. The pain never ended and I was just becoming dumber and dumber and more tired, and unable to concentrate for longer periods.
In my confusion I mistook these sensations as positive and even advisable which kept me in massive delusion. Even efforts to work and keep my passion alive were diminished by an unnatural exhaustion that came over me as time went by. And then I thought work truly must not exist as I am truly unable to sustain my will towards it, this otherworldly tiredness is keeping me from it. It must be a sign that the force of undoing(dementia) is the true reality. That tiredness came from dementia and it was just an illusion and breakable by sustaining the effort. It might be unlikely, but if anyone identifies with my experience, my advice is to keep going and resist the exhaustion for it is a lie trying to keep you asleep. There is nothing spiritual and worthwhile in death and dementia. Life is a force to be lived, not spent asleep and tired all the time.
The final straw happened 3 months ago, when I took ciprofloxacin ear drops for mild noise induced hearing loss. I overdosed by mistake using them for 14 days instead of 7 as prescribed. Even though it was a relatively low dose of 2 drops each day, the final day my system collapsed. Perhaps due to my already overloaded brain, and combined with this poisonous medication I finally enraged and triggered dementia. Now the decline that was very slow and would have kept going on for 30 years or more, has accelerated 10000 times. I presume I have about 5 years of very unfulfilling life left. I will never experience the success I could have had. The love and joy of life I could have had. It was overshadowed by constant feelings of ungratefulness and arrogance. Believing I was beyond this world and its preciousness I was watching it go by me, waiting for my spiritual revelation which never came. I was very arrogant and ungrateful thinking that things cannot possibly be worse due to my anxiety. Incredibly, things can be 10000 worse than they are. Now I have dementia. The only right way forward for me was to accept the anxiety and reconcile that I have to live with it like any other handicap. And do everything in my power to work and live independently. Work is the ultimate expression of value and love towards oneself which trauma cannot endure, that’s why it does everything in its power to resist it.
So, this is it. I talked about my life choices and some spiritual traps that people might fall into. I feel very vulnerable writing this and even a bit stupid, wondering who on earth will want to read this depressive story, but honestly id give anything if somebody told me in the right moment how wrong I was. For years nothing could sway me from my stubborn convictions. The world is getting increasingly more insane as we can witness. Spiritually can be the source of massive confusion as well, and by me interpreting it the wrong way, or actually falling for its lies I ended up like this. I wish I had never read anything about it. You might argue that its not my fault for getting these severe side effects from that drug. In a way you would be right but its the life choices and ideology that led to this. My unwillingness to educate myself and work left me underdeveloped. I didn’t know that antibiotic in topical form is still dangerous, I didn’t follow the prescription, I didn’t research the side effects properly, so all these mistakes led to this. The ideology of undoing and not knowing, that false spirituality that I had so much faith in and surrendered completely to, destroyed me in the end. It was insanity and trauma and dementia taking form of something incredibly valuable to me.
Farewell friends or enemies, I do hope this gives some value to anyone and people can at least learn from my mistakes.
Some key points:
Work, knowledge and creativity is more than means to an end. It can transform our life and destroy trauma and mental illness. Because they represent love and support life. They are life.
Perfectionism and working eternally on your issues, waiting to first solve them and then return to the world, is trauma keeping you enslaved in eternal rumination which leads to nowhere. The only way is to ignore it. Work, be creative, learn about history, geography, economy medicine, science... each day enrich your mind little by little. Keep dementia away, keep ignorance away.
Massive suffering can naturally create symptoms of dementia like brain fog, forgetfulness and a false sense of peace that comes from oblivion, as well as sleepiness. Don’t satisfy yourself by thinking this as a spiritual symptom. Enlightenment if it exists might require force and enormous willpower contrary to much of the gurus say. Not surrendering helplessly to the void and waiting for things to change. Wake up by force, resist the antilife forces of the world.
Insanity can take form of some of our most precious values and ideas like spirituality, love, religion, trust, hope, etc. It can trick and turn them against us. Sometimes you can’t trust your own mind, your emotions, your intuition, even your body that can create feelings of exhaustion. Especially if it tells you to be homeless and renounce the world like it told me. Its more than just a thought that keeps us in delusion.
Some chronic traumas only get worse over time, it won’t solve by itself no matter how long your ‘’spiritual process’’ lasts. And if you are destined to live with it, live the best and most fulfilling life you can. Live now. Don’t sleep and rely on dementia to take you.
If you don’t work or know anything, and you depend on somebody to work and provide for you, you still won’t survive. Because such a lifestyle attracts natural catastrophes and disasters in form of disease, dementia, insanity or disability. You are never safe by being stupid. It can cost you your life like it did me.
Love and Gratitude is most important. Learning from ‘’ordinary’’ people enjoying their company respecting and appreciating them. Just being normal is the best thing in the world, and not being narcissistic. I unconsciously thought I was better than everyone. Now I see ‘’enlightenment’’ in everyone. We are just great as we are, trying our best to go by and nothing more is ever needed.
I’m sorry. You can’t imagine how sorry I am. I wasted my life for an illusion.
I was insane, I was misled. May God forgive me, may You forgive me, may the world forgive me. I failed to live. I was confused and alone, marked by misfortune. If there is another life, I will never make the same mistake again.
Be well and farewell
Phillip
