Exporter:
So manic depression is more likely in groups who are CREATIVE. One may take solice in the fact that mental illness may be a result of CREATIVENESS. How many painters were “screwballs”? This is just a brief sketch of the paper.
I was diagnosed severe BP disorder.
My healing came through many channels, mostly spritual direction, prayer, and self-study of philosophy, religion, and results from various other methods.
There might be a good explanation for this relationship. When I consider whether reasoning on a particular issues is sound, I routinely consider what would happened if we carried this thinking, along with everything else we abstract the underlying theme to mean, to the ultimate extreme. This, in connection with pain/pleasure memories that are triggered directly or indirectly by consideration of such logical extremes, can skew one’s view of things. On the other hand, it can open one’s mind a little beyond the focused attention blinders that society would have us all wear at any given time, to explore ideas that could provide for the best possible scenario and the worst possible scenario that the “known” facts support – therefore that helps avoid judgment, but keeps me thinking in extremes which ultimately lead to extreme reactions to current and past events.
This is all from personal experience, though. A better example might be the types of training Zen Buddhists use.
First, they see opposites as necessarily coexisting, and try to incorporate that into a type of “polar thinking.” In other words, you can’t have a magnet with only a north pole. It has a north and a south, and chopping off one end doesn’t help. Similarly, spiritual and intangible things also have two sides along many axes: good/evil, helpful/unhelpful, failure/hero, fear/confidence, genius/crazy, liberal/conservative, eternal/temporal.
To develop this polar thinking, there are several methods. For example, a zen master might answer a question about something sacred with something disgusting, or a question about something tangible with something intangible, and vice versa, question about something tangible, answer intangible. They do this in a very strict controlled setting, for one practical reason is so that they don’t go berserk during training.
Example:
Q: What is the meaning of life? A: Have you eaten your porridge?
Q: Please hand me a knife. A: (hands him the sharp end.)
Q: please hand me the handle end. A: what would you do with a handle end?
Western or eastern, I think the ying/yang thing is a valuable tool to accept that there is no good without evil counterpart. The world is made of pairs of things. There is no up unless there is a down. No top without bottom. No matter what our environment or a point of view we have, the opposite point of view can always be obtained by taking the negative.
One of the best books I’ve read was by Paul Tillich, “My Search for Absolutes.” I first heard of Tillich by a quote in a Catholic magazine (though Tillich wasn’t Catholic) “faith is not an absence of doubt, but a component of doubt.” Again, this polar thinking was very attractive to me so I went and pursued more writings by him.
For bipolar, I think a lot of times I had problems because I always fancied my ability to See Both Sides of an argument, and I found it frustrating to be on teams who wished to take one side of each argument and use their collective power to defeat the other side. This is kind of cute behavior, watching petty people fight each other over nothing important and don’t even realize there are two sides to a coin, but it can be a real problem for the people involved!
Alan
