Nityaprem shares his personal experience
I’ve noticed that there still seems to be a taboo around the discussion of mental health in sannyas circles. This is not strange, because in society at large people don’t freely discuss their mental health issues, however in recent years this has been changing, especially in the United States. There has been a new openness, driven by pop singers such as Billy Eilish and Lady Gaga discussing it in their songs and Hollywood celebrities like Dwayne Johnson going on the record with problems such as depression. So in the spirit of this neurodiversity movement, I wanted to discuss my own experiences, and what the last fifteen years have taught me.
Just as a very brief overview of my history with Osho, I took sannyas in 1978 at the age of six, and was in Poona in 1979 when I partook in the very last family darshan that Osho gave together with my father, Deva Subuddho, and mother, Sat Navyo. I spent time in various communes as a sannyasin kid and teenager, including De Stad Rajneesh in the Netherlands and the Ranch in Oregon. Later I visited Poona again in 1987 and 1997.
In 2011 I had a very stressful period, resulting in about two weeks of nearly sleepless nights, and as a consequence I started hearing voices. Even when I started sleeping better, these voices didn’t go away, and I distinguished about ten different ones, including some aliens and one professing to be god. It was an eventful time. After about three months of listening to various different plays between these voices I agreed to take some medication for it. My English doctor at the time said “it’s like a broken leg, except for the brain, in two years or so you will be fine.”
Now voice hearing is not that unusual, more than one in ten people (and perhaps as many as one in four, according to some sources) hear voices in their lifetime. It’s the most common form of auditory hallucination, and often isn’t problematic. There is a worldwide voice hearing network of organisations where people who have this experience find each other and share their experiences.
However in alternative circles there are still many non-scientific explanations for this phenomenon, some of which are very old. In a famous example, Dr. Malidoma Patrice Somé visited a fellow student in a mental health institute in the US, and said – I paraphrase – many of the people here in my country in Africa would be trained as shamans, they are gifted and struggling to be born as healers aligned with a spiritual power. In a way this different perspective gave me some peace, in that it showed me a route towards acknowledging the reality of voices. The scientific perspective sees them as shadows of the mind which have no reality, and that denial is in my experience harmful to healing, wholeness and the spiritual processes in the mind.
So I took several training courses from what is called a recovery college, where people who have much experience in the field of neurodiversity teach skills which are useful in coping, talking and being. These perspectives are best typified as experience-based, sticking to what works. Even with the medication, there are still occasional experiences, almost entirely when coming out of sleep, but over time it has become more visible what has been an expression of my own mind, and what has been an extraordinary impulse.
It all led me to turn my life upside down. I quit my job at Microsoft (which truth be told hadn’t suited me all that well anyway) and decided to live for a while on my savings. In the years that followed, I was inspired by Osho’s lectures on the Dhammapada to start looking more deeply into Buddhism, and returned to live in the Netherlands by the North Sea coast, where I went for many long beach walks, meditated, and had frequent coffees with my father, who was also my closest friend.
In this time I came across a Tibetan version of a teaching of Atisha’s, called the nine point contemplation on death, which emphasises the fragility of a human life and the fact that you can’t take anything with you when death comes, except only a measure of spiritual development. That was the beginning of a time of much letting go, of television, newspapers, novels, computer games… the need to engage with these things just dropped away. I felt it was a kind of purification, a paring down to just the essential.
This being on the boundary line between what a psychiatrist would call a mental illness and what indigenous people call a shamanic state hasn’t always been easy. It brought a sensitivity to stress and change… Sometimes the help of Western institutions is useful, and sometimes it is a hindrance, and in the end I decided to just work with my local doctor. I don’t feel I am ill, it is more a spiritual sensitivity, a door which has been opened which leads to occasional visions and voices on the edge of sleep.
Therefore nowadays I pay close attention to my sleep. I go to bed early, and am early to rise, and take a cold shower just after I get up in memory of the Indian baba’s who take a dip in the holy river before sunrise. I still take the medication, and sometimes make notes and write a little. I live together with my mother, and help her with the things she can no longer do for herself, like the food shopping, and in return she helps me with daily care. She was seriously ill last year. But it’s like a little commune, we share and celebrate life together.
This is the first time I’ve shared some of my neurodiversity journey with a wider public, and I hope it inspires people to discuss their own more unusual mental moments, you’ll find you are better for giving these things air to breathe. My own learning from these years is that a major mental health event is a new beginning as well as an ending.
If you wish to contact the author you can write to our desk at web@oshonews.com and we will forward the message, or you can contact him via facebook.com/jerome.grasdijk
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