Psychotic or Holy?

Dan’s maternal grandmother loved him with her whole heart and he knew it. After she passed away, Dan sort of “forgot” about all the good that he received from his grandmother and he eventually became a rather depressed person. Only recently has Dan started to speak to his grandmother every day and he’s no longer depressed.

No, Dan isn’t psychotic but he is prone to depression. By speaking with his grandmother, the greatest source of love in his life, he feels less sluggish, has more self-worth, has less negative self-talk and is enjoying a more positive outlook on life. Dan has achieved all of this simply by taking a daily stroll through the countryside and spending 30 minutes with his all-time favorite person.

By the way, not all therapists believe that seeing visions and hearing voices are automatic signs of being crazy. Some doctors are reluctant to prescribe psychiatric medication to creative people because they fear law suits – the medicine can actually diminish a person’s musical and artistic abilities. Once a non-religious psychiatrist admitted to me that he didn’t really understand what psychosis was because he saw patients who appeared psychotic but who he felt had enormous creative and spiritual aspects to them.

Interesting…

How do we know whether people who speak to other people who “aren’t there” need medicine or not? And how can speaking to a “memory” be more real than speaking to a physical person? The first question depends on how the conversations affect the person’s life. Do the conversations make the person feel frightened, sad, withdrawn and render them unable to function? Or, do they recharge and uplift the person as in Dan’s case? As for the question of what is real, please be patient with me, I’m coming to that soon…

Do you know that the more creative part of your mind is located in the right hemisphere of your brain while the left side of your brain deals with the more logical aspects of life? And do you know that your soul, the source of your spirituality, is also located in your right-brain, according to the Kabbalah? When I finally put these two facts together I thought that I had discovered something new, that is until I saw what Rabbi Nachman of Breslev wrote 200 years ago. He said: “Your emuna is in your imagination.” (Likutei Moharan, Part 2, Lesson 8) In other words, your spirituality is intertwined with your creativity – and everyone one of us has much more of both than we know that we have.

To Dan, his deceased grandmother is as real to him as other people in his life who have physical bodies. Granted from the vantage point of your left cerebral hemisphere, your logical and rational mind – it sounds crazy to speak to people who “aren’t” there like me and Dan do. But from the vantage point of your right-brain it makes perfect sense. Here’s why…

The reason that Dan experiences his deceased grandmother as more of a reality than some of his contemporary relationships is because G-d is the only reality there is; and since “grandma” was good and everything good comes from G-d, that makes “grandma” as real as anything else.

From the perspective of atheistic psychiatry a person who responds to visions and voices can be labeled as psychotic which they define as a state of unreality. But from an emuna perspective since an atheist has cut himself from the One true source of reality – namely G-d, by his own definition he’s the one who is psychotic.

Dan’s success in overcoming his depression and the success of prayer in general that focuses on speaking to loved ones, great sages from the past or Biblical personalities is that all of the above are aspects of G-dliness. Another way of thinking about this is that since G-d is the essence of everything that’s good, focusing on what is good in any form becomes a powerful conduit for feeling better fast.

Another reason that imagination can heal is that since positive kosher thoughts, images and sound bites come from your soul they are not physical entities. These thoughts and images are spiritual and therefore draw upon healing forces that are beyond time and space. This explains how Dan, for example, could at different times be a child speaking to his grandmother; or a man speaking to her as an adult; or a man speaking to his grandmother when she was a vivacious happy child; or how he could become a child himself who was speaking to his grandmother as a child or a caring teenager. As you can see, since the imagination is plugged into the eternal, it has no limits; and by trusting your soul’s creativity you can be well on your way to healing from all kinds of emotional and physical problems.