Thursday, 4. May 2006, 07:34:49
art, madness, outsider
You don't have to be mad to be an artist, but it may well help. Outsider art - or "art brut" to use the term of Jean Dubuffet who was the pioneer collecter of the stuff, scouring lunatic asylums for artistic outpourings - has always intrigued me. Not surprising, being a semi-professional artist (i.e. I sometimes get paid) and an amateur loony (i.e. I do it in my spare time and at the state's expense). An exhibition at London's Whitechapel Gallery brings together a collection of such art and displays it alongside that of "real" artists such as Miró and Kandinsky (who happen to be two of my C20th favourites). Looks worth checking out.
Gallery here: and detailed review here
Image of painting by Henry J. Darger, displayed at the Whitechapel, here:
Saturday, 25. March 2006, 10:46:23
Lewis Wolpert is a professor of biology who, after suffering from severe depression over several years, wrote one of best books on the subject (Malignant Sadness: An Anatomy of DepressionMalignant Sadness: An Anatomy of Depression). Now he has turned his attention to religious belief with Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
I’ve not read it yet, but the reliable John Carey, reviewing the book in the Sunday Times, provokes me to fear the worst and to expect some unhealthy doses of reductionism.
Wolpert argues that our ancestors, having discovered how to make and use tools, soon cottoned on to the idea of cause and effect. And then they started to wonder what caused unpleasant and inexplicable events (illness, death, natural disasters etc) and – hey presto! – we got religion. Somewhere in the brain, it is argued, is a “belief engine” that encourages us to seize on causal explanations for events, whether or not these accounts have any basis in reality.
He’s not the first to argue that, whether true or absurd, religious belief seems to confer benefits on believers and surveys are cited showing that religious people are happier, more optimistic and less scared of death than non-believers. Next step in the argument is that this means religious belief confers an evolutionary advantage. Next step is that therefore the ability to have such beliefs must be partly determined by our genes.
Line of argument seems reasonable. Although there an awful lot of assumptions here and one does require an almost religious belief in Darwinism to buy the whole bundle. But then we come to the real reductionism. To quote Carey’s review:
Mystical raptures, similar to those reported by the devout, can be produced, he points out, by mental illness or hallucinogenic drugs and this, too, indicates that religion depends on neural circuits in our brain that accident or malfunction can activate. Some neuroscientists now link spiritual experiences with specific brain areas. Stimulating the brain of subjects with electromagnets causes tiny seizures in the temporal lobes that induce the subjects to believe they have spiritual experiences. The visions of St Teresa, it is suggested, may have been symptoms of temporal-lobe epilepsy.
Well, I’ve also read that St Teresa’s accounts of her visions match the DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia. And that she was fond of munching a herb that grew in her convent garden that had hallucinogenic properties. So what to make of this? Do we reduce all the wisdom and insight of Teresa’s writings, her depiction in detail of a seven-stage path towards perfection (in The Interior Castle), her reform of the Carmelite Order, merely to the effects of an illness (or maybe two at the same time?).
We are in “Flatland” territory here. The interiority of the person experiencing “spiritual experiences” is denied. So it matters not to the reductionist whether the vision of Christ is a genuine one – one that confers grace, wisdom, moral insight and spiritual growth – or a delusional one – one that generates mania, delusions of grandeur and illness. St Teresa of Ávila not only had some wild experiences that involved the stimulation of her neural circuits, she also took on the Inquisition and reformed one of the main religious orders of the church, founding convents across the breadth of Spain. A tough task for anyone, but for a woman of suspected Jewish ancestry to have achieved this in C16th Spain is almost beyond belief. Not bad for an epileptic, schizophrenic drug addict (if we may combine the three reductionist theories I’ve cited).
I can claim to have experienced all three of the separate states mentioned here. Mental illness, hallucinogenic drugs and “mystical raptures”. From the inside, I can tell you that there are indeed similarities between the experiences and from this it would not surprise me to learn that they all involved similar kinds of neural activity. But I can also say that they are totally different experiences. Each with its own “taste”. And each with its own very different content. I have enjoyed a classic “peak experience” that involved a sense of union with nature and with the divine. I have also suffered a psychotic episode laden with religious imagery and the voices of saints and angels. They are emphatically not the same thing at all.
Wolpert and Co. may be conflating the medium and the message. The genuine spiritual vision à la St Teresa might possibly be experienced through the same wiring system as a drug-induced hallucination or a psychosis. But that does not mean that it is the same thing. A scientific observer, measuring the binary code, the Mbits and the MPEGs, the pixels and the codecs, might conclude that there is no difference between my watching online a video of the Dalai Lama teaching in Dharamshala or the porn movie Debbie Does Dallas. Same bit rates, same codes, same resolution. But somehow, that seems to me rather missing the point.
We get back to the core issue of needing to avoid pathologising spirituality while, on the other hand, not falling into the trap of spiritualising pathology. What I call the “R or R trap” – Reductionism or Romanticism.
The important things in assessing “mystical raptures” and “spiritual experiences” are the content of the experience and the understanding of the event on the part of the experiencer. And these are both beyond the measuring machines of the flatland reductionists.
Some people have had visions of Christ and undergo profound “conversions” or inner transformations and then act in the world in a way that is clearly highly evolved spiritually – St Teresa, St Francis of Assisi, Thomas Merton among others. Some people have visions of Christ and then lead armies into battle and kill those who don’t believe as they do. Others have visions and end up thinking that they are Jesus Christ and finding themselves in psychiatric wards.
All three kinds of event may involve the same bits of the brain, may all stem from the same “belief engine”. But there do seem to be some not insignificant differences!
These comments are based only on a review of Wolpert’s book. So are very much provisional until I get round to reading the book itself.
Friday, 24. March 2006, 11:42:41
spiritual, spirituality, manic depression, Tibetan
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In one of life’s nice little ironies, I seem now to be spending a lot of time dishing out advice that not so long ago – OK, a decade or so ago – I grandly ignored, thereby pushing my frail vessel onto the rocks of madness.
It’s the New Agers. Although I guess that, as charlatans and their gulls are as old as the hills, there is nothing particularly new about them. In particular, the way that one can get so easily stuck with exciting secondary effects of the spiritual path – the dazzling lights, the psychic side show – that we happily accept Fool’s Gold as if it were the real thing. And then, charging around on a “spiritual high” telling everyone else about it in a very excited fashion.
What happens, it seems, is we break out of our little minds and all the psychic stuff comes flooding in and, because it seems bigger and better and is laden with “spiritual” content, we can mistake it for the real thing. But any insight that might be there is invariably mixed up with all kinds of far-from-enlightened material stemming from unresolved conflicts in the unevolved parts of our psyches, the Shadow, primal myths and so on. And, at the centre of all this is good old small-mind Ego, who can get quite a kick out of all these weird and wonderful experiences.
The problem is that there is no authentic guidance. If I go to my local Zen or Tibetan Buddhist centre, I will be able to check out the lineage. Who’s running this show, who the teacher is, who taught him, who taught the teacher’s teacher and so on and so back. Often back to great masters such as Dogen or Jigmé Lingpa. Authentic lineage, authentic transmission offers some security to a would-be student. At the very least, the security of being in good spiritual company. At best, the confidence of joining a network with authentic spiritual masters.
But with the New Agers, there is little of this. Such guidance as there is comes from “discarnate” entities that are “channelled”. I don’t deny that truth can come through these visions and voices and channels (A Course in Miracles, for example). The problem is not the message, but the medium. There is no safeguard against muddle or malice. Unlike a living, flesh-and-blood teacher, a “discarnate” or “ascended” Master is experienced only within our Imagination. This means that even if he (or she or it) is an authentic spiritual entity, he still has to penetrate the Ego and its multiple strategies to keep the truth out.
“Interference” in the transmission is inevitable. And, at worst, the whole thing may be no more than a glorious ego trip. Because it is taking place within the Imagination, it is subject to Ego tricks and control. There is no Zen master with his stick to hit you or give a sharp (or gentle) word to correct you when you go off the track. These ones – the flesh and blood ones – you just can’t control. And they can be, from Ego’s point of view, horribly unpredictable and discomforting.
It’s a double trap, the New Age channelled masters thing. First, it is a lot easier because you don’t have the living teacher with his unpredictable tongue or stick. Second, because it is not-of-this-world, it seems to be more “spiritual”, coming from a higher plane (or “vibration” in New Age speak).
To be specific here. I recall hearing an authentic teacher, Sogyal Rinpoche, talking about a student of his who was suffering from anorexia and was convinced that he was telling her, via visions and dreams, not to eat. He told her face-to-face that she should ignore this stuff and that he was not telling her to starve herself. But she chose to believe the visions rather than the real teacher.
The problem is that, if we are not awake to this, the energy charge of a vision is so much stronger than something merely of this world. A discarnate master seems so much more “real” than a real, living one. So we give priority to what is merely a grandiose delusion.
Been there. Done that. And that’s why I take lithium!
In fact, the anorexic example is a good one. Because much of the New Age is body-hating. They are the dualistic heirs to gnostic ideas of the soul’s being imprisoned in matter. Spirit good, matter bad. They want to raise their vibrations to get out of a nasty, dirty, smelly, weak and sinful body. So get vibrating away and you may go “up” to be with ET and, if you are very lucky, JC himself!!
Actually, you just end up with Big E. The whole desire to go somewhere else – to higher realms, to purer levels of higher vibrations – this is not really a spiritual journey at all. Just the old Ego Trip in fancy dress.
The spiritual masters, east and west, have established procedures to testing the authenticity of voices, visions, channels and the like. St John of the Cross writes extensively about the need for a spiritual director to understand the “discernment of spirits”. And the warnings against getting distracted by voices and visions are almost as legion as the voices and visions themselves.
I write with some experience. I’ve had the visions and I’ve heard the voices. And I’ve written reams of “channelled” verbiage purporting to come from saints and angels. Frequent visitors to my hyperactive brain during this period of my life included Sophia (the archetypal goddess of Wisdom), King Solomon, the Archangel St. Michael and St. Francis of Assisi. There were some nuggets of wisdom there and pages and pages of drivel. Much of it, like many of the channelled books you can buy today, apocalyptic in tone and imagery with lots of stuff about final battles and all that. I could have edited it and published it as a New Age book – The Message of Sophia and Solomon, maybe. Fortunately – both for me and the world – I chose the wiser course of burning and binning the lot of it.
Because all this was happening at a time when my manic-depressive illness was enjoying one of its “up” periods. The channelled stuff was almost entirely written in a hyperactive state at four o’clock in the morning after only a few hours sleep. I was “hypomanic” for months and at times right on the border with psychosis. And, much as I would like to say that I was in some kind of rapturous, ecstatic state where the Divine was speaking through me, I have to accept that I was basically bonkers. The nuggets of wisdom that seemed so important and world-changing at the time were at best commonplace observations that had been put better many times before by people whose sanity could not be questioned.
So, this stuff can be dangerous. But beyond the risk of mental ill health, there are two other dangers that I see in the New Age Nonsense.
First, even if you don’t go mad, you get completely lost yourself as far as any spiritual or psychological development is concerned.. Second, your new-found beliefs and experiences start to cause harm to others. In the last few days, I ran into an example of each danger.
Example Nº 1. An artist who, in no more than a 20-minute conversation, divulged his mystical experiences with hallucinogenic herbs in the Amazon – standard altered-consciousness visions of exploding, expanding galaxies, otherworldly colours and sounds, sense of the immensity and unity of the cosmos, etc – along with past lives, crystals, chakras, channellings and so on and so on. A bit of theosophy here, Rosicrucianism there, plus some self-styled “gnosticism” thrown in with chunks of the real stuff from the East and mixed together with ample doses of New Age Narcissism. Oh, he talks with ETs too.
He was just revelling in the lights and excited about there being world upon world above ours, and beings – with whom he has communicated – who have many more dimensions than we do.
So he is trying to raise his vibrations. As they all do in the New Age. I said that I preferred to work on trying to bring other people’s vibrations down to my level. Which he didn’t entirely appreciate, but my humour isn’t to everyone’s taste. Just as well that I didn’t mention my idea to patent a New Age Vibrator™ - “insert in area of base chakra, switch on and watch your vibrations rise...”
His art – which seems to express a conflict between Light and Matter – is not bad at all. But he struck me as being lost, lost, lost in all this. But harmless as far as others are concerned.
Unlike, Example Nº 2. A woman who, when not trying to wash away her physical impurities by drinking her own piss, seems to think that any ancient form of medicine is in itself and its antiquity and Eastern-ness more valid than western medicine.
She is an advocate of the dangerous idea that illnesses of the body are caused by the mind or are even “karmic illnesses”. She believes, for instance, that some of the people with MS that she looks after as a nursing auxiliary have their illnesses because of abusing body/sexuality in a previous life. She presents this as being about where their energy in blocked (“energy” is a scientific word that, like “vibration”, the New Age loves to abuse). Message is: You abused your body then, so you can’t use your body now.
Not sure that you can do much with this “knowledge”. Well, you could tell your patients that they are suffering a nasty, terminal body-wasting disease because they abused their bodies in a previous existence. Or you could go around telling people not to abuse their bodies or they will come back with MS. Either of which gives “spirituality” a bad name.
But who benefits? Ah, that would be Mr/Ms Ego yet again. Getting off on having superior spiritual knowledge. And in all this, why single out an illness supposedly caused by sexual misconduct? Where is that coming from?
I’ll gave her a good Ken Wilber article on the subject, about the need to treat illness at each level (body, emotions, mind, spirit) in a way appropriate to that level. Yes there is a mind-matter link, but No it is nothing like what the New Agers say (you have cancer because of repressed anger, your are poor because of your “poverty mentality”, etc.)
Not sure she will buy it. Like a lot of well-meaning, seeking souls who have stumbled into the New Age, she prefers to waste time reading Alice Bailey’s channellings of “The Tibetan” talking in incoherent “esoteric” prose about hierarchies and correspondences – when there are plenty of real Tibetan masters around who can talk extremely coherently about real things.
But somehow a “channelled” teaching from an “ascended” master – an “adept of the second ray of love-wisdom” and “initiate of the 5th degree” in the case of Djwhal Khul (Bailey’s Tibetan) – is more convincing than a real, incarnate flesh-and-blood lama.
Watching Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire again rather brought home a lot of this. I simply delighted in the sheer joy the angel (Bruno Ganz) finds when finally leaving his pure, eternal, painless monochrome existence for the messy, full-colour, passion-and-pain life of a human being, where coffee tastes good and it is wonderful to rub your hands together to keep out the cold.
Yeah. I’ll tell that the New Age crew – time to wake up and taste the coffee.
Thursday, 1. December 2005, 09:45:08
science, research, mental health, manic depression
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The old "artists are mad" chestnut has come up again with a supposedly scientific study of artists showing that they display a surprising similarity to schizophrenics, particularly in the bed department. Artists have twice as many sexual partners as mentally healthy non-artists (whatever they are).
The research involved an unbelievably large sample of 425 people selected through a poetry magazine a randomly distributed questionnaire and a less randomly selected number of diagnosed schizophrenics. (Only a cheap comedian would suggest that the responses from the schizophrenics counted twice.)
According to the head scientist (as it were), 'artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on "unusual cognition", a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one's own thoughts.'
Dr Daniel Nettle goes on to argue that his results suggest that the creativity of some artists is fuelled by the unique world view mental illness can provide, but without the completely debilitating aspects of the condition. Instead, the artists are able to direct their creativity into artistic projects.
It is a theory he has put across before in a book called
Strong Imagination: madness, creativity and human nature and I have to wonder whether the research has been designed specifically to prove his theory.
His thesis is essentially this.
(1) Given Darwinian natural selection, why would the genes for schizophrenia (and also manic depression) persist? Surely, given that they seem to confer no evolutionary advantage, then surely they would have disappeared from the gene pool Yet 1% of the polulation suffers from schizophrenia (it is claimed).
(2) So maybe these genes are carried in healthy people who do not develop a debilitating illness yet they enjoy the "creative" benefits that are somehow part of the condition. In other words, the schizophrenic and the manic depressive suffer and other members of their gene pool reap the genetic benefits.
There are more than a few problems with this line of argument. Here are five for starters.
(1) It's based on a very "hard" form of Darwinism and genetic predetermination.
(2) It assumes that schizophreniza and manic depression are entirely caused by genetic factors.
(3) Schizophrenics and artists are put in separate categories, as if to say that a person with schizophrenia cannot also be an artist.
(4) It ignores completely any social, environmental or cultural factors involved in the perception and categorisation of so-called "mental illness", which it assumes to be constant and universal.
(5) It ends up pathologising normal and health experience (creativity), which is also a trait of the psychiatric profession which is forever "discovering" new illnesses in perfectly normal behaviour patterns.
You can read about it here:[URL=
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1653761,00.html?gusrc=rss]research And, for a riposte from an artist, here:
artist hits backThe artist - Dinos Chapman - does not seem to have much time for Dr Nettle:
"What a pile of crap. Those responsible should be shot. Better still, they should be forced to have several thousand sexual partners. Preferably schizoid artists, bad, ugly, psychotic ones. Then shot."
Monday, 28. November 2005, 14:18:00
bipolar, madness, mental health, manic depression
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This blog, when I get round to taking it seriously, will post messages on the subject of madness and its relation to creativity and spirituality. Hence the title which is an appalling pun of the kind that manic depressives (like me) tend to come out with. A lot. So characters such as Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf and St Teresa of Ávila will crop up here, along with a bunch of complete nutters (like me). The hope is to provide a forum for discussion and a useful resource (through links).
WIDGETIZE