Mental Illness has for long ben swept under the carpet in societies like our’s where we just cannot handle being unwell in the mind. It hasn’t been easy for me as I have coped with mental health issues like being bipolar and Schizophrenia for several years of my life. The disease developed within me during my early thirties and went on for a good five to six years of my life . It’s a disorder which couples with huge mood swing’s . One is euphoric at times and feel’s completely down and out at other times .
I developed the archetypal “bad habits” and have more than experimented with drug’s all my life ever since my twenties onwards, all types of hard to harder chemical drug’s. I have had hallucination’s during my LSD trip’s and been down and out on cocaine. Drug’s just ruled my disorder. During my extreme phases i began to talk to myself and generally lost interest in most thing’s that i was doing. I was under treatment for four years in the care of Dr. Razdan in Jodhpur , who treated me for my mental illnesses . I had C.T Scan’s on my brain , medication to make me goto sleep and all sort’s of tranquillisers and stomach washes to get the drug’s out of my system .
The other most significant thing that happened during this phase of my life was in fact my sense of heightened creativity . I began to write poem’s both in hindi and english and felt that I had become more spiritual . Some times i wrote poem’s whose meaning i did not understand, I blamed it on the drugs but later I realise they just may have been a bit off anyway!! I once tried sentence construction with word’s that I did not know the meaning of. It’s as if this creativity was coming from an outer source, warbled garbled but something which was not a part of me , perhaps coming from a different dimension .
I once felt a spiritual experience which was profound. I woke up one night in my flat and wore my then customary OSHO Robes, a phase I was going through at that point and which i use to love wearing in those day’s a big fan of OSHO as I was. I walked out into the rain and started throwing my hand’s up and down and taking circles of the parking lot . I kept doing this for almost seven hour’s till it was morning again , with no stopping all the energy and power to do such an extensive laughing meditation was coming from another source . When i stopped in the morning people where looking at me in amazement , i went unto my room and it was full of energy .I took off my clothes and i could feel my hair standing up as if their was a ring of electricity around me . I dropped back on my bed and slept for three day’s after that. It was the sweetest sleep i have ever had . I explained this to my doctor and he doubled my dose of medication and it was then that I think i was getting convinced that i was really loosing it .
You see these experiences are personal and only the person going through it feels the intensity. Only the knower know’s . My doctor started taking me to my past to see if he could find signs of trauma there. He started regressing me and took me to an age when i was four years old. He later told my father that i was disturbed because of my mothers death . He used medication to wipe out those unpleasant memories . In doing so he wiped out my immediate memory . So when i use to get up from my sleep i use to ask .” What’s my name , where am i , who am i.” My medical attendant Tiwari would then say “ Do you know you have acted in which film’s?” and i would say “ No?!! am i an actor .” So my short term memory had been erased and i would be oblivious to my own identity .
My Dad grew more and more confused and desperate to see me in my situation, but i had no clue that i was subjecting him to so much pain as i was in my own world. As if an outer shell had developed around me and i was immune to the sights, sound’s and heart ache’s of the world. It was like i was Shiva who had renounced the world and was sitting on an icy mountain’s of Kailash , with no regard to what was going on. I would be in my room for upto four, five months just sitting doing nothing, watching the rain and contemplating heavens know what? It was a great feeling at times to be thus removed and aloof from the world .In this state one has worries , because their is nothing to achieve and nowhere to go. No goal’s no sorrow , no failures , no victory , just you and eternity.
It was a challenge for my dear Dr Razdan too, he tried all the tricks in the trade all the different medication’s , but i couldn’t get out of my state . My icy rejection of the world was permanent. People around me where howling out to me and I had nary a care. It was me and my icy cold room in my apartment, which rang only music from OSHO’s Nathbhram and Kundali Meditation from day’s on end . I was in a different zone . People knew i had lost it completely . But know i was just on a different highway or plane then they were on that’s all. As they say one man’s sanity is another man’s insanity . After my father’s gruesome murder i got the rude awakening into awareness. It’s was as if i had been slapped on the face and been forcibly woken up from my zone .
It’s been three year’s since i don’t talk to myself any more .I am more aware of my surrounding now , but the magic of poetry , heightened creativity or the icy plane of my room coupled with the spiritual experience has vanished from my life . It is the same old boring routine , nothing extraordinary happen’s any more .I have lost the zone i use to be in year’s back and at times still tern for it . Now i have to engage with the world and everything look’s so ordinary and so plebeian.
