Psychosis or Spiritual Awakening: Phil Borges at TEDxUMKC (2)

And this rebirth - I don't know how to explain that.

It's like they ...

take on much more of an elevated consciousness.

They expand their consciousness.

Their awareness of who they are expands.

They expand their circle of compassion;

I guess that'd be the quickest way to say it.

As such, they learn to go into the spirit world,

where they believe the spirit world informs our world of reality here.

That's where things really happen.

They go there, get the information, come back to help people.

And then,

after they've learned their trade,

they begin their life of service, either a healer or a seer, a priest,

and they typically do this for no money.

This is something they just do, it's just something added to what they do.

In the beginning many of them resist it

because like Janduli Kahn, he's still a goat herder,

he still has to do that.

But on top of that, he is the healer for the community.

Sukulen has five kids that she has to take care of.

On top of that, she is the healer of her community.

So it is a lot of extra work.

So it happened - I put that whole project aside

because I didn't know what to do with it.

I didn't know what to say about it.

I felt I was getting in over my head,

into the world of consciousness, and spirits, and all this.

But a year and a half ago, I met a young kid

who had one of these psychological breaks.

I just want to introduce you to him, just a moment here.

(Video) Adam: "It was just this total shattering,

and my mind just opened,

and I started thinking of all these different things.

And in that sense, it was beautiful.

I found it was -

How I found my -

The first time I'd ever experienced a real connection to the universe,

where I really felt like a part of this.

That I was this, this was me. It was just like ... incredible!

And so simple - Yeah, I mean, absolutely amazing.

And then I kept going, and then I went way too far.

And then it got scary.

It was just kind of like a panic.

I don't know.

'Put some medication in this kid and just hope for the best,' but it -

I don't know if it hurt or helped.

It was at the point where I was being diagnosed,

I think, for side effects of medications.

Like, there was a point where I was taking 15 pills in a day.

And I felt like a lab rat, and the side effects were just awful.

Absolutely awful.

Vomiting all day,

I couldn't leave my house for so long, from just these awful anxiety attacks,

and the thought of interacting with people would make me sick to my stomach.

It was just so much.

I still don't know what was the side effect

and what was my mind."

Phil Borges: Adam was on drugs, on pharmaceuticals, for about four years.

He was having a such a hard time that he decided to go cold turkey,

cut them off, and did a Vipassana meditation retreat.

And those of you who don't know what that is:

They come in various forms,

but this one was 10 days silent meditation, 10 hours a day.

It's very rigorous.

I did one just to see what it was about.

And it was one of the hardest things I've done.

He was able to stabilize himself.

He got a job at Whole Foods Market, which he hadn't been able to do before.

He started having what he called "synchronicities,"

where he'd have a thought and the thing would happen.

And by the way, he is very psychic,

he has very strong healing potentials.

But he has no confidence in what's happening to him,

there's no one that's been able to conceptualize it for him.

Anyway, he had these,

and he decided he needed to go back and do another Vipassana.

Well, they learned that he had this history of mental illness,

and they sent him home.

So the one avenue that he could have gotten relief from

cut him off because of the stigma of his mental illness.

Adam isn't alone in this by the way.

In having bipolar [disorder], schizophrenia, depression,

any of these heavy psychological episodes.

Here's some statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health.

One in five of us will suffer a psychological crisis in our lifetime.

By the way, that's a rising figure right now.

The other thing is, one in 20 will become disabled because of it.

Another interesting fact about this phenomenon

is 50% happens before the age of 14.

By the way, most of the shamans, it happened either in their adolescence

or in their teenage years.

Seventy five percent before the age of 24.

So it's more or less a phenomenon of young people.

Here is the difference in cultures that I noticed.

The shaman's advantage.

One, they have a cultural context.

The physiological crisis, although it's difficult,

it's believed to be - they put it in a positive light.

It's something the person is going to come out of

and be stronger in the end.

Have more abilities in the end.

The other thing that's a big advantage is it's not stigmatized.

If you have the stamp of mental illness on your forehead,

or on your dossier, or whatever, you are not going to get a job.

It's not like having diabetes or even cancer.

It's one of the most stigmatized things

that can happen to the person in our culture.

And especially, if some kid is having these visions,

and he's not knowing what's happening to him,

and the doctor comes and says, "You're broken and you are this,"

you can imagine how that adds to the problem.

The other thing they have an advantage of,

they have a mentor, they have somebody that has been through this process,

that can take and hold their hand and say,

"Listen, I know what this is all about, and this is how you manage it."

And the third thing that's a huge advantage

is they have a community that buys into what they've gone through.

Not only that, they have an outlet for their talents.

Many of these people have specific talents that the normal person doesn't have.

So, that's what is an advantage

if you're in one of these indigenous communities.

I don't know if you heard the recent TED Talk

by a woman by the name of Eleanor Longden.

Has anybody heard that one?

It went viral. She did it a couple of months ago.

This is a young woman,

when she went to college she started hearing voices.

She said, "My nightmare began

when I told my roommate I was hearing voices."

Her roommate said, "You'd better see a doctor."

So she went [and] saw the doctor.

The doctor said, "You'd better see a psychiatrist."

She went to see the psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist gave her the label "schizophrenia,"

put her on medications.

By the way, these medications suppress the symptoms,

they don't get at the root [of the] problem.

She said, from that point on, she just spiraled down.

You ought to listen to her video on how she brought herself out of that.

She eventually got to the point where she said,

"I realized that those voices were helping me resolve

this old childhood trauma of sexual molestation."

But it took her and a couple of friends that believed in her,

to get her out of that hole that she had gone down in

because of that stigma.

So, if you do have one of these issues,

if one of us does have one of these issues,

we go to somebody.

The common method of treatment

is to suppress the symptoms with pharmaceuticals.

So, with Adam, we've been following among,

and so I've been posting this on our blog over the last year and a half,

how he's doing and what's going on.

By the way, he's homeless now, like so many end up.

And we've started interviewing professionals

that take a whole different approach to this problem.

And in fact, some of the psychiatrists, psychologists we've interviewed,

and we're posting them as well,

claim many of these instances,

not all of them, but many of them, as spiritual emergencies.

And they believe, just like I do now, if you hold these people,

if you don't stigmatize them,

if you don't scare them with the label, and tell them they're broken,

and if you give them a place of support,

that the psyche itself is self-healing.

It will take them, and it will eventually work out whatever is going on with them,

and they'll typically come out

at a higher level of awareness and consciousness

then when they went into the problem in the first place.

There are many people that believe -

we've interviewed cultural historians, cultural anthropologists,

they believe that our species right now is in crisis.

You look at the environment, you look at the economic system,

you look at what's happening with our continual wars,

and we're being asked to raise our consciousness

to a whole different level.

I just want to end with this statement from one of our most famous scientists,

and I love this statement, he says, I'll just quote:

"We human beings tend to experience ourselves

as something separate from the whole we call the Universe.

This is actually an optical delusion of our consciousness.

It's like a prison for us.

Our task is to free ourselves from this prison

by [widening] our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures

and the whole of Nature in its beauty.

This striving for such an achievement is a path to our liberation

and the only true foundation of our inner peace and security."

That was Albert Einstein.

Thank you very much.

(Applause)