Hello Lord Hilarion,

I do believe in mental illness and I do believe in prescription drugs. I wouldn’t be corresponding with you now without the latter. I would be dead. I take an awful lot of prescription medication for my various ailments. And I take anti-rejection drugs. So for me, prescription drugs are absolutely vital. Oddly, codeine isn’t a drug I can get on prescription because my doctor won’t give it to me. So I cadge it from my neighbours instead. I will never give it up, because at times my life is so painful that codeine is the only thing that helps. I have osteoporosis, and codeine is the only thing that can touch it at times. It is also good for the mental anxiety I regularly suffer from. It is a great comfort at those times.  Feeling the warmth of it spreading through the body and easing tension is something I will never tire from. It makes my feel happy and content. That’s all I want from life. I have it under control at the moment, so it isn’t an issue. I am not popping 20 pills a day. It is more like 2, maybe 4. I don’t think that is a problem. I posit that for codeine to work effectively its use must be restricted or you lose the ‘hit’, as it were. It’s about finding a balance, like everything in life.

You’ve been told you are Lord Hilarion. If that’s what you believe I have no problem with it. We can be who we want. We can believe what we want. At one time I believed I was Apollo, because at one point this year the Greek goddess Artemis was constantly sending signs to me. There was too much coincidence, and to be honest, I still don’t fully understand it all. About a year or two ago, I suddenly out of the blue and for no real reason started playing the harp. I picked it up very quickly. Like Apollo, I also only have one functioning eye. These things made me sincerely believe I was Apollo reincarnated. But now, in the cold light of day and with sober reasoning, I can see how utterly absurd such thoughts were, because they can easily be explained away as mental illness. I also had a strange dream a few years ago in which I was encouraged to read the Torah and leave all other books on their shelves. Was this also mental derangement? Or was it the Almighty? I have learned to adopt a sense of detachment to it all for the sake of my sanity.

Best wishes,

Tannhauser

Dear Nirvair:

I thought this morning that my reply to you yesterday was not adequate, not in my mind. So I re-read all that you posted on this thread. First, I will rewrite some of what you shared (not in order), with quotes. Second, I will add my input to it, this very morning.

You wrote that you had the Buddha figurine for eleven years, that you prefer to have it in the window. “I prefer to have it facing outward seeing as that’s the view I’d prefer if I was a figurine”. But as you look outward yourself, “No matter where I turn my eyes, there’s vandalism, destruction, hate, racism and people hurting each other.. It’s quite overwhelming… It’s heartbreaking to see life this way”

It is important to you to not pretend “like everything is fine”, to not turn “a blind eye to the real problem”. It is important to you, for one, to point out the truth, that you “suffer from heavy depression, not because of an illness, but rather because I was abused as a child, my father would take out his aggressions on me”.

You are in a “very stressful relationship… a broken relationship for sure” with a person who “can’t seem to be honest with me. It’s like I have to constantly force the truth out.. she doesn’t want to see her own flaws, and as such she can’t begin to work on them”. She accuses you of being controlling. This relationship causes you “a lot of anxiety, stress, heartache”.

You wrote that every time you moved to a new place, the first morning you would hear “a huge rumble, followed by a blinding light. I walk up to the window and look out and there’s a huuuuge explosion in the distance that’s quickly coming closer“. In your recent post you wrote the problems you see (homelessness, immigration politics, greedy property owners charging extremely high rents, students in debt lifetime, etc.) “is only getting worse by the day“.

You wrote: “With all the negativity and evil that seems to overwhelm the world right now, I had given up. I’ve not left my home for 2 years”.

“I am very anxious, about my future in this world. I like certainty, and life only offers you one certainty”.

You asked about the figurine: “Is it possible that the figurine sensed a negative presence in the room and calmed it?”

My input: you highly value Truth. In my understanding of the Buddha, at least in its image in the Western World, its place in modern psychotherapy and literature, it is about Truth, about stripping all make-believe, all pretense, all convenient thinking from what we see, so that we can see the bare Truth underneath.

For a person who holds Truth in such a high regard, your relationship is damaging to you, it is you compromising with what you value the most, the Truth. I am not referring to the truth of the spiritual -kind. I am referring to the practical truth of every day  life, specifically of the very relationship you are engaged in.

I don’t think you are able to compromise with the truth, and the “negative presence” you referred to when asking if the Buddha figurine sensed it, is any compromise you are currently making with the truth, any pretense you are engaged in, in the context of your relationship, singular or plural.

This is my main point to you today. A lesser important one is regarding the troubles in the world that you listed, and concluding that “life is getting worse by the day”. It is not true. Life was bad throughout history, injustice, cruelty.. it was always bad. It is not getting more bad. Life always offered just one certainty, never more.

anita

Dear Nirvair:

You wrote: “I won’t give up (hope). It keeps me alive”- what particular hope are you referring to; is it hope for your relationship becoming unbroken?

Regarding technology, yes, I agree, of course, the ability of an individual or group of individual to practically destroy the world. Yes, that didn’t exist before nuclear capability. Technology makes it possible to cause many millions of people to die in a very short time. Without technology and with technology, each one of us will die, that doesn’t change.

Interesting, for me, my situation this very morning: the air outside (and inside to a lesser extent) is thick with smoke, alarmingly so, I feel fear from time to time, a feeling of being trapped in smoke. It is not because of technology but because of fires north of me, the heat and lack of rain. Yes, destruction is always a possibility, the destruction of one’s life, whether it is a whole lot of people destroyed at once, or not.

anita

Dear Nirvair:

Robbed at gun point in your own home? I hope you install serious security measures so that it doesn’t happen again?!

I am not able to read the rest of your post at this time. I will read and reply to you when I am back to the computer in about sixteen hours. Please take good care of yourself and be as safe as you can be.

anita

This f*cking world stinks. I am sorry that such a horrible thing happened to you.

Nirvair, you keep mentioning God. I personally no longer believe God exists. I think it is just a concept we invented to make us feel better. My own situation has become so unbearable that I have started to make plans to end my life. Not even the love I have for my family will mitigate this desire to end my suffering any longer. I am ready to take the steps necessary.

This world is finished, and if people can’t see that, they are unconscious, trapped inside a half-life of materialism and social media.

Best wishes to you.