TRANSCRIPT
I’ve traveled all over the world, talked with lots and lots of people, of lots of lots of different cultures and lots of lots of different languages. And most of the deeper messages that I share, the kinds that I share here on YouTube, people don’t really agree with. But there’s one thing that I can say that I do say here on this channel that pretty much everybody in the world universally agrees with. Everyone who’s an adult, that is, and has any sort of experience with life, even if they’ve never gone anywhere. And that is when I say the world has gone crazy. Everybody knows it’s true. Nobody argues with me. People have different reasons why they think the world has gone crazy. People might have different ideas of what we need to do to change it—very different ideas somehow. But everybody knows it’s true. And I come to talk about this here because I find it interesting. I think if you went back a thousand years or five thousand years and said the world has gone crazy, I don’t think people would agree. I think people would still feel the world was more sane. And is it because there’s just so many people and there’s so much overcrowding and overuse of resources and pollution and obvious iniquities and corrupt governments everywhere and misuse of the environment and filth and inadequate medical care and very rich people and very poor people living right next to each other? I mean, this happens pretty much everywhere in the world, and everybody knows it. Everybody knows that there’s a lot of sick things going on. And all you have to do is turn on the news and watch a little bit of news or hear a little bit of news, even indirectly, to realize it’s like something very troubling is going on. And that’s even in light of the media’s distortions of the news—how the media likes to put out really negative stuff that hooks people in and does the sounds in the background, b b b Bo, to get people to watch their news show when they talk about murder and rape and other horrible things. But is there a solution for this insanity? I ask people. I ask people a lot what do they think, what do they think the solution would be for this. And most people really do not have an answer. They have fantasies. They say, “Oh, we’ll vote for a different person, vote for a different political party, a different politician.” You know, “Oh, we just have to live our lives. There’s nothing we can do about it.” A lot of people just throw up their hands and just say, “Keep on living, do your best.” But real solutions that people really have hope? No, because that’s another thing that I say: the world has gone crazy, and it’s just going to keep getting crazier. And everybody knows it’s true. Well, I’ve said it before, there is one answer. It’s a hard and painful answer, and that’s looking within at our own personal history. Each person has to do this—look within, critique the people who specifically harmed us, starting with the people who had the most power in our lives—our own parents. And when I say that, because that’s the only thing that I’ve ever seen that really changes an individual, and therefore on a m level could change all individuals. When I say that, I really understand why the world is still crazy and probably just going to get crazier and crazier, because it’s so hard to do. It’s so hard for people to look within. It’s so hard to really know it in their heart how their parents failed them, how their parents traumatized them, how their parents were limited, how painful that is, how terribly painful, and how it disrupts the very basic fabric of their lives. I speak from personal experience. Whoa! If I hadn’t been really strong and really clever and really had a very strong independent streak, I don’t think I could have broken from my family. I would have just been shunned and alienated so strongly that I might have just curled up and died inside. And I would have just had to go back into the denial and the dissociation that I lived in in my childhood. And that’s what I see with most people in the world. They know the world out there is crazy, but it’s very hard for them to see that they’re a part of this on a very personal level. And that’s a big part of the painful realization I had along the way, because I realized that the world outside of me was crazy and sick. Before that, I realized that I was—that my childhood family system was—I knew about craziness. I’d studied biology in high school. I knew that the world was polluted and disturbed and so many things were just off, and politics was crazy, and there were wars going on. I was born during the American Vietnam War. Talk about a disgusting, despicable, unfair, violent, genocidal war! That was the war of my early childhood. But it took me a while to figure out about the real war that was going on much closer to home—in my own home. The war of my parents against my true self and how devastating that was to figure out that the people who I really deeply believed loved me more than anyone actually really didn’t love me that much and were trying to kill whole parts of me and shave me down so I’d be some little lost creature who idealized them because they were so sick that they needed to be idealized to keep their false image of their selves alive. And when I got real, they had no use for me. It was actually even worse than they had no use for me. The use for me was to get rid of me, make me go away. I mean, I’ve said it before. I think they would have been a lot happier if I just died, had killed myself a long, long time ago, so they could just create a narrative about me—how I had lost my way and, you know, killed myself because I was mentally ill or some other lie that they came up with so that they could control the story of what happened to me. Me becoming stronger and true and more honest and functional in the world, and heaven forbid useful to other people, that wasn’t part of the narrative they told and still tell. And yet it’s strange. It’s like how hard it is for people really to grow and change, to really look within, to really look at these truths. It’s still very, very rare. I think about a lot of people in my life to whom I’ve given a huge amount of mirroring and support on the healing journey. And in fairness, I would have to say not a lot of them really used that mirroring all that well. Some did, but a lot of people, it was just like they didn’t want to be mirrored. They didn’t want to have someone shine, well, reflect back the truth of what they went through. Some, a rare few, do, but a lot of people, it’s just too terrifying, too overwhelming, too painful. The truth of our own history can drive people crazy. In fact, that is what drives people crazy—the truth coming up too fast. It’s too overwhelming, too many feelings. I mean, that’s my observation of what psychosis is. Psychosis is split-off, buried post-traumatic feelings bursting out into a consciousness that is not ready to hold it, into a social world that’s not ready to hold these truths. And for a person to stay connected with their parents, to stay connected with their troubled family system, their troubled society, their troubled religions, their troubled country, their troubled school systems, their troubled social networks, truth—the truth of their own history doesn’t fit. And so it’s easier to divert that truth, those emotions, those post-traumatic feelings into the psychological defense mechanism of psychosis—to put it all into metaphor, into voices that say things that are metaphorical for what one went through, delusions that are metaphorical for what one went through. I’ve seen this again and again. Parents who say, “Oh my God, the worst thing that ever happened in our family was our child went psychotic, became psychotic, became delusional and schizophrenic and hallucinating and whatever else happened. This is the worst thing that ever befell us.” Well, I will say this: it’s better for those families and their denial that their beloved child became psychotic than if their beloved child was able to tell the truth.
Directly and not through metaphor, that freaks out a family a lot worse. I’ve seen it again and again and again. My mother would have been so much happier if I’d gone psychotic than if I became who I am—someone who tells the truth about what really happened.
It took a long time for me and a lot of strength internally to build a structure not only within my life, within my mind, my body, but also within my social network to have people around me who could handle the truth that I was holding in my mind, holding in my journal, holding in my meditation. The truth of my history, the truth of my feelings, the knowledge of my traumas—my family could not handle it. They could not sit with it. My whole family system could not handle it. They had to get rid of me. They had to break away from me, throw me away.
They could have handled me if I was psychotic. They would have still loved me and said, “Daniel, he’s a wonderful guy. He had a wonderful self. He’s just now mentally ill.” But no, me being a truth teller? Absolutely unacceptable.
And so what I say now is my family is crazy. They’re really crazy. They’re on the side of denial and defense mechanisms, and so is the world. The world is crazy. And I have engaged in the healing process and have become a lot less crazy, and becoming still less crazy. I see people out there who are becoming less crazy, but we are a small few in a world that’s becoming more crazy.