Tangible Minds™

I know a little something about the experience of intense emotion. Seen as a “moody” child, I grew up with deep resentments, hatred, and despair alternating with moments of great hope and grandiose ambition. My life had two phases: at school I was the brilliant golden boy voted “most likely to succeed.” At home I was a “jackass” who couldn’t do anything right. The daily alternation warped me, I suppose. I went off to college, burned bright for the first two years, but crashed after a junior year abroad that sent me over a precipice I never saw coming and never named until seven years later.

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.

And 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.