Watch This Helpful Video to Learn About Me

You can learn a lot about me by watching this video:

https://youtu.be/CFtsHf1lVI4

(Watch it! The following commentary assumes you already have…) I was lucky enough when I was 19 to have discovered Joseph Campbell, who served as a quasi-mentor to my “shamanic” experiences – I say quasi because he died ten years before I discovered him. Thus, unlike the modern man featured in this video, I have had a kind of guiding “rock” upon which I have invested my entire self-identity. But *like* him, I have been unable to reconcile my mystical experiences with having a job. But again *unlike* him, I have successfully used the only good part of the mental health system – social security disability – to obtain a safety net for the time being.

A Comment about Depression and Doctors

I’m repeating a comment I made on one of my own videos, as it seems quite accurate:

If we consider illnesses to span the range from being causes to being symptoms, depression is squarely in the latter category. But it is treated as if it’s a cause, because it relieves the “it’s your fault” burden off of people, and because there is a social taboo on being different. If we assume that half the time the cause of the depression (the mere symptom) is in the environment, we have to start accusing people other than the patient, up to and including society itself.

But even if the cause does reside in the individual, in their inability to integrate their personality into their greater life, modern materialist medicine is no help. Like the story of the man who dropped his keys somewhere else and was asked why he was looking under a distant streetlamp for them, and whose answer was “This is where the light is!”, doctors pass out medications because they have no skill in helping people integrate their personalities. (Well, certainly not in my case, anyway.)

The real difficulty of helping people integrate their personalities is that it’s very difficult to distinguish where mental health symptoms originate – from within or outside of the patient. Moreover, if a symptom does come from outside the patient, doctors are loath to accuse the families and other social institutions of being in the wrong, as those are very often the source of their livelihood. And sometimes the symptoms originate within the doctor himself(!), via the projection of the doctor’s own unconscious complexes.