I don’t have heroes; most of the people put up before us for admiration simply don’t impress me. They may be rich, beautiful, or exhibit a superb level of athletic prowess. But they cannot command my attention for possessing such superfluous traits.
And so it came as a surprise to me yesterday when I met a woman whom I now consider a hero. She has been living on a platform sixty meters (200 feet) up a tree since December 14, 2011. She’s got a wind turbine, solar panels, a camera and a computer. She’s got walls and a roof made out of plastic. And she’s got more passion, determination, and focus than most people will ever have.

Her name is Miranda Gibson, and she climbed a rope into the tree to help protect Tasmania’s dwindling wilderness. But to my mind she is protecting something far more valuable than a cut block; she is protecting the wilderness of the human psyche, something most people are not even aware exists let alone could care less about. She is protecting that place inside us all that draws a line in the sand that says: NO MORE! She is letting the world know that she has a boundary, and that the wholesale slaughter of old growth trees is inside that line. She is a living testimony to personal integrity: she has taken a stand for something she believes in, and she won’t back down. Instead of exchanging her birthright for instant gratification in a world of bubble comforts, she has chosen to brave what the natural world would deliver from the vantage point of a forest canopy. And she has been doing it for months…

When the chips are down and the gloves come off; when the brave and free become the clones and cowards; when the spectacle is revered and the truth reviled; in the words of the immortal William Blake:

WHO CAN STAND?

Like most great street sayings, this one originated in the African American neighborhoods in the late seventies and early eighties, in conjunction with the crack epidemic that swept their demographic. Nothing will ruin a neighborhood, or an individual life, faster than a cheap, hard drug. And nobody uses these drugs more than the marginalized segments of society.

During the Occupy movement I gave the marginalized segments of society an out, but not the entitled class. There they were, in the tens of thousands, gathering on Wall Street and elsewhere demanding that we build a new economy. But were they really worthy of this ideal? If we had a window into their actions over the past two decades, would they come out smelling clean?

This is a question we must all ask ourselves, because we cannot create a better economy until we ferret out the human character flaws inherent in this one. Allow me to illustrate what I mean with a few examples.

We have allowed genocide to happen in our name, all over the world, and have done nothing to stop it. We were happy to go along with the game as long as we were getting a piece of the pie. Now that the pie is shrinking and we are no longer getting our share, we are turning against the global economic system that we have supported and benefited from, at the expense of others, for decades.

We have a covenant of respecting each other’s individual rights, and yet we financed that covenant by not respecting the rights of billions of people around the world. We can say we respect everyone else’s human rights, but if we are debasing their money and stealing their natural resources at ten cents on the dollar, we are not doing that.

We have gone along with the Beat Down, and now it’s our turn. The game that hit the African American neighborhoods in the seventies is now coming to a neighborhood near you. The middle class, who thought they could never get hit, are now watching the Beat Down spread to their demographic. Most of them could never have fathomed that this could happen, but those who have lived with this force intimately as marginalized members of society know that in a world based on predatory capitalism it can happen to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

For more information on coming clean, click HERE.

“If you are dependent on something outside yourself to feel good, you are addicted.”

When I was offered the choice of trading in my cocaine habit for a lithium habit, I knew the only difference was a legal one. I knew in my bones that I needed to face the uncomfortable feelings I had been running from all my life, but I wasn’t ready. I continued with my drug of choice, until I discovered climbing.

An addiction is something we can’t stop doing despite its negative effect on our lives. It is a substance or an activity that alters us neurologically, biologically, and physiologically. The over-stimulation causes the production of brain chemicals that make us feel good. It is this feeling that we cannot resist, not the substance or the activity that precipitated this feeling. This is why addicts can trade in one addiction for another with shocking ease.

At its most basic level, addiction is about not being happy. But the catch is this: no external thing can make us happy: happiness is an inside job. The first step toward this end is sitting with our uncomfortable feelings and admitting the truth about ourselves to ourselves. We need to do this as individuals, and as a culture. Only then will we have the courage to creatively destroy what is not working in our lives and let the unknown take us for a ride…

People often ask me why I can have a glass of red wine with dinner if I am a recovered addict. I tell them that substances are not the problem; the psychological state underlying the abuse is. Once I dealt with the underlying issues, and healed from them, the substances became irrelevant.

Like most things in our society, we need a huge revamping of how we look at the addiction and recovery model currently in use. Here is an interesting article on that very topic, and it closely resembles the path I chose.

As for other models, I just downloaded a program about a man with a chronic health disease who cured himself with alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco. You can be sure I’ll be reporting back on that one!

A recent Harvard study dovetails nicely into what Dr Gabor Mate has been asserting for years. In the words of the researchers themselves, “childhood abuse leads to permanent changes in a seahorse-shaped area of the brain that can cause adult depression and drug abuse.”

It also dovetails nicely into a recent surge of anecdotal evidence, namely that exercise can “reverse the damage by prompting the formation of new neurons in this part of the brain.”

The reason adults who come from abusive homes have similar symptoms to veterans returning from war is because of the similar effect of prolonged stress on human biology. In other words, there are events that we are not hardwired to live through, at least not without paying a heavy toll.

If you look at the symptoms of most modern disorders, they are identical to the symptoms of stress. This study proves that far from having a “disorder”, people suffering from depression and anxiety are having a completely natural response to having lived through events that have taken a toll on their bodies.

You can read the full article at Bloomberg.

In one hundred years, will the treatment of mental illness with a vast array of psychotropic drugs be seen as a success story, or a vast human tragedy?

When I was diagnosed with Bi Polar Disorder in my early twenties, I spent less than thirty minutes in the psychiatrist’s office where I was given a predetermined list of questions to answer. By the time I left, I had a prescription for Lithium in hand that I was told I would be on for the rest of my life.

Psychotropic drugs are dangerous chemical compounds. I know; I used them for many years. That is why they are either illegal or tightly controlled. Nobody really knows how they work, or what the long-term effects are. Suicide is listed among the many “side-effects” they can cause.

In an effort to widen the scope of possible patients, the industry has seen fit to target children. Children as young as two years old are being diagnosed with disorders and given prescriptions for one or more of these drugs. Nobody knows what the use of these chemicals will do to their developing brains over time. But what we do know is this:

-Over 300 million psychiatric drug prescriptions are written every year.
-The pharmaceutical industry brings in $80 Billion each year from the sale of these drugs.
-The top ten psychotropic drugs gross $26.5 Billion, more than double the amount of new money put into circulation each year by the United States Mint.
-Psychiatry today is a $330 Billion dollar a year industry, and has yet to find a single cure.

After being caught up in the Mental Health industry for twenty years, I am a true believer in informed consent. Here is an excellent documentary about topics covered in this post.

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that insanity could be the antidote to culture. Perhaps people with a mental illness are tapping into something that the rest of us don’t and can’t see, not because we’re not capable of it, but because we are too programmed by the belief system of the dominant culture to perceive it. In other words, we are too distracted.
In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offered his own interpretation on the matter. He believed that people suffering from these states were having a profound spiritual experience whose ultimate goal was to strengthen them in a way that nothing else could.
If this is true, then what we are doing when we intervene with drug therapy is we are taking away the crucible of the soul’s learning and whitewashing the connection to the void; wiping away the anxiety and torment of the moment, but also erasing the possibility for spiritual transformation.
I can’t prove it, and it could be total bullshit. But it has occurred to me on several occasions over the years that it could also be true.

Pink is the colour most associated with womanhood, femininity, glitz, glamour, and fun. It’s also used as a symbol for one of the deadliest diseases that kills countless women and men. I wouldn’t have a problem with this, except that the foundation in question seems to be a lot better at finding funding sources than it is at finding a cure for the disease. I recently looked up some statistics and this is what I found: the National Cancer Institute had a $5.1 billion budget for fiscal year 2010. There are more people making a living from cancer research and treatment in the U.S. than there are people dying from the disease every year. The typical American patient spends at least $50,000 on their cancer therapy. With one million new cancer patients each year in the U.S. that translates into $50 billion annual spent to treat cancer. That’s big money. And if there’s one thing I like to do as much as climb ice and write books, it’s to follow the money. (Note: I used the most conservative figures I could find for this post.)

Cancer is real, and so are the efforts of people who have lived or died through the disease, or have loved ones who have. These people often want to help out by raising money for cancer research. I have no problem with that. I simply have a problem with a foundation that has received so much money to find a cure, and has so far come up empty-handed (global cancer rates have doubled in the last three decades.)

Maybe it’s time to invest in some of the alternatives that have been ridiculed and/ or suppressed over the past few decades.

More importantly, maybe it’s time to put research money into finding and removing the toxic substances that are causing a large majority of these malignancies.

Queen’s professor Samantha King’s book, Pink Ribbons, Inc, has just been turned into a documentary film. I look forward to seeing her take on the subject.

I like to describe the void as “the insubstantial netherworld where you are trapped in your own grief and pain”. The void is not fun; but it is infinitely compelling. There are things you will learn from it that you could not learn from any other experience. But like Hades, you don’t want to get stuck there, and especially not for two decades.
I had a dream one night, which the Narrator called “The Land of the Mirror and Me.” In it, there was a mirror ball at the centre of the universe, and I was freely moving around it. Each time I moved, the myriad of tiny mirror fragments reflected different angles of my motion back to me. My takeaway from the dream was this: we are all just walking around experiencing reflections of ourselves everywhere. All of us; all at once.
The main problem with the void is how it feels: purposeless, meaningless, and hopeless. After twenty years of trying unsuccessfully to navigate it, I found the key to my release was its inverse: purpose, meaning, and hope. The trick was, these things did not exist, I had to find them inside myself and reflect them onto the canvas of nothingness. Not an easy task, as it turned out.
I realized during my time there that the void is the fundamental reality underlying the universe. Learning to interact with the void, to communicate with the void, and to play with the void was perhaps what my twenty years of mental illness were really all about. Nothing will take you into the void faster or more furiously than losing your grip on consensus reality. And therein lies the scary part: you must go in alone.
The void is a teacher and a healer; it is the fountain of all creative endeavours. To use an analogy, it is the space between the notes without which music would not exist.