I’ve had a lot of time over the last eight years to contemplate the difference between a manic episode and a mystical experience.  Superficially, they bear a lot of similarity to one another, which is why someone like me who has a spiritually emergent experience gets labeled bipolar.  For the most part, the psychiatric establishment does not acknowledge the validity of spiritual experiences, and so does not do any research into the potential neurological differences between someone having a purely psychological experience and someone with a strong spiritual component to their experience.

Despite my medical diagnosis and continued need for medication, the spiritual aspect of my experience has never disappeared for a single moment, no matter what meds I was taking or how much of them, although the intensity of my experience varied.  Never once have I doubted the spiritual validity of my experience and have flatly rejected any suggestions to the contrary.  Out of wisdom, I have not abandoned the medical paradigm, but neither will I completely submit to it.  I know in the marrow of my bones, and have for eight years, that my experience was and is more than an aberration of my neurology.

One of the ways that I know that I am not suffering from a progressively degenerative condition as bipolar is classified is because each time I have a cycle, I don’t lose cognitive abilities, I gain them.  It feels like leveling up, and each time I do it, I shed more unnecessary conditioning that only hurts me, I become more whole, and I feel myself condensing and compressing into something stronger, something that other people in my life can see when they interact with me.  I’ve spent time in online forums for bipolar people, and those people are in mental agony.  I am not, not like they are anyway.  My commonality with genuinely bipolar people is only superficial in nature.

I also do not solely experience shifts in mood, which is what defines bipolar disorder.  The common perception of bipolar disorder is that people bounce between elevated moods and depressed moods.  While that is sometimes an aspect of my experience, it’s more akin to shifts in consciousness rather than mood, which makes sense given the mystical journeying I engage in during my cycles.  The so-called mania is really just me existing more in the Otherworld than in this one, and due to the nature of the Otherworld, my mental state, thought patterns, and behaviors are going to be different until the cycle is over.

The flip-side of mania is seen as depression from a psychiatric standpoint.  However, while there is a reduction in my overall energy level, I see it as more of a rest period after a period of sustained energy output, which definitely describes the average mystical cycle for me.  I see it as being akin to a kind of ‘psychospiritual breathing’, in which I take in new psychological and mystical information for a while, then process it in a cycle that typically takes ten days, which is then followed by a lull in energy, after which I experience several weeks or months of analysis and output, usually in writing.

These ten-day cycles largely take place in this Otherworld, the mystical land beyond the veil in many Celtic traditions, which goes by many names.  In this place, I can retrieve lost parts of myself, heal damaged parts of myself, and put them all back where they go in my soul, spirit, and mind.  It has only been by virtue of all of this apparently ‘insane’ activity that I have achieved any measure of real healing and a regaining of sanity.  Even my body has been healed as the somatically embedded trauma I was carrying was dealt with.  I had no idea how much pain I was in until it was gone.

Rather than experiencing my cycles as being damaging as bipolar research indicates, I experience them as being purging, healing, and connecting.  I release emotionally-laden baggage, which allows me to heal, and in doing so, I make both internal and external connections.  However, this process can only work if it isn’t interfered with, which usually happens from outside forces that don’t understand what they’re witnessing.  This is a state of cultural affairs borne of the West’s failure to recognize the validity of mystical experiences.

I do not doubt for one second that the more mystically inclined members of humanity have something neurologically special going on in their brains, but it isn’t a disorder.  It is a set of psychospiritual proclivities that can be trained under the right sociocultural circumstances and managed with traditional herbal medicine if necessary.  The mystical syndrome itself won’t be as severe because the person won’t exist in a fearful environment, which heightens or even causes paranoia.  In the absence of any kind of context to provide a person with a reference point for what they might be experiencing during a spiritual awakening, they will go off the rails and appear to have lost their mind to everyone around them.  Even if they do have context, like I did, it is an extremely intense experience to manage that can take years to fully unfold and understand.

I believe I have emerged from my experience relatively intact only because of my extensive knowledge in matters scientific, philosophical, and spiritual.  I drew upon all three areas of knowledge to maintain a tether to the ordinary world as I explored the Otherworld.  If I had lacked any of the three areas, I would not have been able to find and navigate the necessary intersection between them, the Three-Way Crossroads, in order to find my way Home.  I would indeed have simply bounced between one and another in eternal conflict, like many bipolar people.

Instead, my mind and spirit took all of that scientific, philosophical, and mystic spiritual information and put it together to yield a kaleidoscopic vision of the totality of Existence, one in which we are simultaneously One and yet completely unique.  Monotheistic religion too often envisions a uniform Supreme Creator, one that does not allow for all of the variation of its human creations, and in doing so, excludes a great many of them from Divine Grace.  As we are all born with the Divine Spark, this is the height of spiritual criminality.

In the absence of the mystical context our culture would require in order to understand what it’s seeing when someone has a mystical experience, it is understandable that such an experience would appear to be ‘insane’ to the outside observer.  However, I believe a great deal of suffering could be alleviated, for both those who genuinely suffer from bipolar disorder and those whose experience only resembles bipolar disorder due to the intense spiritual component, if more research was conducted into the differences and similarities between the two experiences.

In order for that to happen, though, the mental health paradigm in our culture will have to expand in order to accept the validity of those who experience spiritual awakenings.  We need non-pathological guidance through a sacred process that may or may not require medication.  I firmly believe that many of the negative symptoms of bipolar disorder as well as other severe mental health issues are actually caused by the attitudes and treatments we are subjected to, largely out of unfounded ignorant hubris.  If someone has had a profound spiritual experience, they should be encouraged to explore it rather than hide it for fear of pathologizing and medicating.