I liken a bipolar episode to the tide coming in on a sandcastle -- you can see each succeeding wave getting closer and closer, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, and then the tide slowly eats away at the sandcastle bit by bit until there is nothing left but swirling water and blank sand. The tide always goes out again -- always-- but the sandcastle doesn’t just magically pop up again as soon as the coast is clear -- you are left with this expanse of blank sand that you then have to rebuild on from zero.
In this analogy, the destructive tide is an aspect of the self, of the same person who built the sandcastle in the first place. Rather than an external destructive force, it's a case of the manic-self or the depressed-self undoing what the normie-self has accomplished.
I realized that, while bipolar is an extreme case, all of us have experienced this to some degree: A particular aspect of the personality takes over and undoes the work of the aspect that was previously in control. In my childhood journals, there's a very funny sequence of two entries. The first lays out my future career plan in considerable detail -- I was going to do biological research in South America -- and insists with great earnestness that I am absolutely committed to this and that "it can and will be accomplished." The very next entry says simply, "Don't pay any attention to what I wrote yesterday. I don't know what got into me."
I was reminded of a quote from Ouspensky, which I looked up last night and pasted into a draft email, thinking I would perhaps reference it in my reply to the sandcastle email. This is the passage I copied:
Unless he attains inner unity man can have no ‘I,’ can have no will. The concept of “will” in relation to a man who has not attained inner unity is entirely artificial. The whole of life is composed of small things which we continually obey and serve. Our ‘I’ continually changes as in a kaleidoscope. Every external event which strikes us, every suddenly aroused emotion, becomes caliph for an hour, begins to build and govern, and is, in its turn, as unexpectedly deposed and replaced by something else. And the inner consciousness, without attempting to disperse the illusory designs created by the shaking of the kaleidoscope and without understanding that in reality the power that decides and acts is not itself, endorses everything and says about these moments of life in which different external forces are at work, “This is I, this is I.”
Also last night, I finished my latest rereading of the First Book of Nephi. Thus today I started the Second Book, where I read this, from Lehi's dying words to his wayward sons Laman and Lemuel:
And now that my soul might have joy in you, and that my heart might leave this world with gladness because of you, that I might not be brought down with grief and sorrow to the grave, arise from the dust, my sons, and be men, and be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things, that ye may not come down into captivity (2 Ne. 1:21).
"Arise from the dust, my sons, and be men." I'd always thought this basically meant to cowboy up, but a few months ago I read D. John Butler's In the Language of Adam, which proposes that Lehi's language is alluding to an ancient ceremony in which, as in the modern Mormon temple ritual, the initiate assumes the role of Adam or Eve. The ritual command "Arise from the dust and be a man!" would be a synthesis of the Genesis 1 creation account (where God creates by commanding things to come into being) and the Genesis 2 account (where God forms man out of dust).
Not until today did I connect this command with what immediately follows it in Lehi's speech -- "be determined in one mind and in one heart, united in all things." Back in July 2024, in "The brown emmets, the Ace of Hearts, and drinking absinthe with yaks," I discussed "one heart and one mind" language elsewhere in Mormon scripture and proposed an alternative interpretation:
"They were of one heart and one mind" -- that could be read to mean that all the people shared a single mind, a group or "hive" mind (like that of a colony of emmets), which does not sound desirable. Another reading, though, is that each of them had one heart and one mind -- that is, an integrated self, not one torn apart by conflicting motives. "Purify your hearts, ye double minded," says James (James 4:8).
If we take this latter reading of "one mind and one heart," then it is clear how it ties in with the imagery of Adam being commanded to create himself out of the dust. Dust is in essence a collection of unconnected particles which do not cohere in any way to form a single thing -- ""the dust of the earth moveth hither and thither, to the dividing asunder" (Hel. 12:8), like the particles of glass in Ouspensky's kaleidoscope. Kaleidoscopic man "has not attained inner unity" -- has not yet become "of dust a living soul" (Moses 6:59). To do that, he who was dust must cohere "in one mind and in one heart, united" -- an integrated man, with a single will rather than Ouspensky's succession of caliphs-for-an-hour. Laman and Lemuel -- trying to murder Nephi one minute, ready to worship him the next; always repenting but never getting any better -- certainly seem to be the playthings of such a revolving-door caliphate.
The "one heart and one mind" language is usually understood to mean being one with others, not being one within ourselves, but according to James the one type of unity depends on the other: "From whence come wars and fightings among you? come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members?" (James 4:1). Interpersonal conflict stems from intrapersonal conflict.
2 comments:
FYI and Just a comment on "Bipolar Disorder" to the effect that - as actually used - it isn't really A Thing.
There was a well defined disease called Manic Depressive disorder or psychosis. Typically, to be diagnosed, a person would have had significant psychiatric hospital *admissions" for both mania and depression. Because these are prolonged admissions, it would usually take several years before a person received a manic-depressive diagnosis.
Through the 1990s, mostly, the term manic-depressive got replaced with bipolar; and after a few years fifty-time (50X!) more people were diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder than had been diagnosed with MD.
What had been found in about 0.1 percept (1/1000) was now diagnosed in about 5% of the population in many studies - very few of those diagnosed had ever been admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Much of the "diagnosis" was done on the basis of retrospective reports by the person or a relative, concerning some past period of apparently increased or reduced activity, excited or reduced mood.
My conclusion was that Bipolar Disorder is a very mixed bag of causes and symptoms, of which only a very few would have been regarded as manic-depressive, and only a few psychotic (as opposed to personality of stress related).
Why did this happen? For money, as so often.
In surveys, a typical "Bipolar" diagnosed patient in the US, might be taking five, six, seven psychiatric drugs "permanently" - and from every class of the drug armamentarium (perhaps one or two "mood stabilizers", an antidepressant, a neuroleptic antipsychotic, maybe lithium, a tranquillizer/ sleeping pill, and a psychostimulant (amphetamine type).
What is really going on (if anything) underneath this extraordinary cocktail of dependence-producing agents is anybody's guess.
If such an unfortunate individual was not chronically psychiatrically ill before beginning some such cocktail; he certainly will be chronically psychiatrically ill once he has been taking (and dependent on) one.
Ha! I saw there was a new comment on this post and thought, "That'll be Bruce objecting to the 'bipolar' reference."
I don't mean to legitimize the current psychiatric lingo; I was just using the term my correspondent had used. Feel free to mentally replace "bipolar" with "extreme mood swings of unknown aetiology."
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