Letters to the Editor
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The "God" Side of Our Brains?
Here is an incredible 18 minute video I would like to share with Salon readers. It is a brief talk given by a brain scientist who experienced a brain hemorrhage in her left brain. It is truly remarkable to hear her tell of her experience and it plays very well into this thread:
http://www.microclesia.com/?p=320
Happy Easter!
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Factoidus
1. You cannot say for certain, because you don't know.
2. You have no idea what I believe. If you do, please share.
3. I agree with you on religion.
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Oh...
4. No, I do not believe the creator of the universe to be male. I used the term for convenience, but I knew you were going to jump on it.
5. I said I would like to believe, not that I did believe. I also said, "I don't know."
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Just Once
In the grips of a bitter anxiety which threatened my ability to teach my college classes, even just to enter the classroom, I began reading a Psalm at about 9pm each night. After reading, I went out for a vigorous, usually one hour walk. I was, am a kind of social justice Catholic, a Catholic left winger, very skeptical of all reports of personal experiences of God found in so many born again stories. I usually hyperventilated or feared doing so and so always carried a small brown bag with me. But this one night, after the Psalm reading, I stopped mid-walk, and had an intense spiritual experience. I believed totally that there was, as the Scripture said, joy in heaven over my return to God. I was overcome, but only for a minute or so. I have never had the experience again, but I have never forgotten it, and I have never failed to draw sustenance from it.
All the best to Ms. Bauer and her son. Bob
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God talk
Thank you for the lovely bearing of your soul. More than thirty years ago my son, who is not autistic, and now holds two degrees and a substantial job, clarified the question of "God" to my satisfaction. He and I were in a pre-service gathering of adults in the small(no other children, no Sunday school) Presbyterian church we attended. A woman remarked that she had not performed the task that had been suggested the previous week. "I didn't pray to God for anything because I'm too small to ask great big God to do me a favor."
My son, whose feet stuck straight out from his chair, said, "When you're praying, you're talking to yourself, and if you're too busy to ask God for something I guess God's too busy, to listen to you, too.
The adults stared at me. I do not remember if I did anything but smile. My son had arrived at his own interpretation of God and had no fear of speaking it. He was allowed to "be himself"in the family.
Unfortunately,the brilliance of insights he showed during his childhood has been modified by the normal educational and social systems he and most have had to navigate to survive.
Given the ever unfolding evidence of brain study I think my son and your son knows this. "God" says, "I" say "No." Who listens?
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valuable, costly lessons not taught as school
Having been a manic depressive and a heroin addict, (self-medicating until I learned other tools to deal with it), I recognized your words and experiences as those of my own past. Having just read the "I love to watch" column on reality TV shows about NYC housewives who create their own worlds, living in an almost exclusively shallow emotional life, I cannot help but believe the painful and all heart and time consuming experiences you describe teach their own, extremely valuable lessons that cannot be taught, nor learned any other way. Although pain and frustration undoubtedly hurt, they are, never the less, a viaduct to deeper experience when compared to the day to day life many live. Because of the deeper experiences these things bring, I also believe they teach to recognize the happiness that even smaller gains might bring, often overlooked by many.
As painful as your experiences may be or have been, they led you to that one amazing experience that night, that is almost indescribable. (Despite your valiant attemptat doing so.) Had you not gone through all these tribulations, do you think you still would have found yourself there? If even for an instant.
By living with the "abnormal", you got the gift of "abnormal" (often deeper) experience. abnormal is, on occasion, just another term for "unique".
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It's the 'otherness' thing that struck me.
The author's described distinction (or lack thereof) of the difference between self and other.
How may of use reject the concept of God because God may not believe as we do? As a Christian, I believe God is the ultimate other; Creator to my creature, Knowing parent to my mistake-driven wisdom, He allows Himself to be perfect, as He (and I) allows me to be human.
My wife, who has struggled with self-esteem, had trouble knowing between compulsive thoughts and God speaking to her (Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card, in the Ender series, was interesting to me for this reason). Who is she and who is God?
The son in this letter may be identifying with God in some sense; his conscience or a voice from outside telling him what is wrong?
Anyway, I found depth in this letter. Thanks to the author.
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smoke and mirrors, denial and lies
I've read Ms. Bauer's essays on her son's mental illness - filled with omissions and equivocations, deceptions that can so easily mislead Salon's readership. I wonder if Ms. Bauer does not ask the right questions of her son's physicians, or, if asked, does she always deny their answers. For some of my patients, medications will not help - they're waiting for new ones. Some 'miraculously' get better, then sadly get worse. This seems to be the pattern for her son. And each Bauer essay is more dissatisfying and disconcerting than the one that preceded. In her last one, she never stated the medication that he son took that made him so 'well' after ECT did its damage.
I've actually written to Salon.com with my concerns that her essays are misleading to parents and those diagnosed with a mental illness. Her son's disease is hell and gone from autism at this point. This sounds like full blown paranoid schizophrenia. I wouldn't rush to diagnose, except for the fact that Ms. Bauer seems intent on calling it by another name.
Yes, call it macaroni. It is what it is.
But sometimes there is something liberating - liberating beyond becoming forcing a god connection and hallucinogenic experiences on oneself - in actually stating that this is the problem and I'm going to work with it.
Few things are hopeless. But cycling as Ms. Bauer does cannot be helpful to her son.
ESharenov