They call it bipolar disorder, a permanent mental illness caused by a chemical imbalance. But that's not what it feels like when you're bipolar. No, for most it feels a lot more like, I can't be ME disorder. Everyone else seems to be happy going to school or work having fun, being popular and successful. Why not you? Why can't you find your happiness? Maybe you do have a problem with your brain. Or do you? Maybe you're not broken at all. Maybe the world is simply not ready for someone like you. Someone who feels life with an extra degree of intensity. Someone who's probably had more than their share of pain at a fairly young age. Someone who has a hard time dealing with how fake and phony the real world really is. But what is real? Well as it turns out, our reality is not nearly as real as we thought it was. In fact, according to quantum physics, life itself is a lot more like the matrix than most of us ever realized. However, unlike Neo, the prison that we're trapped in isn't run by evil machines. In our case, the walls of our prison are nothing but your own ego, and it's your ego which dictates your reality and your identity. In other words, the prison is in your mind. Now, what exactly IS an ego is a big issue of debate? As you see, back just a few decades ago, Western psychologists were in the general agreement that the ego was who you are, and that the task of the psychologists was to help you develop your healthy ego so that you could function in this real, and by real I mean material, world. However, starting in the 1960s, some radical thinkers like Harvard's psychologist Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert started looking at our ego in an older mystical spiritual way. Because these doctors were having mystical experiences themselves experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Says Timothy Leary, I learned more about my brain during the five hours I was on magic mushrooms than I had in the preceding fifteen years of studying and researching psychology. Dr. Richard Alpert was so overwhelmed by his LSD experiences that eventually he went on a spiritual quest to India. Once there, he was given the name Ram Das by an enlightened guru and upon returning from India became one of the great spiritual teachers of the 1970s. Now speaking personally, I've never had any experience with hallucinogenic drugs or any drugs for that matter, and I don't recommend them. However, it's also obvious that for Dr. Leary and Alpert taking the hallucinogenic's helped them to broaden their understanding of how our minds work. And the big insight that they had with regard to our minds was that the ego is not who we are because under the influence of these drugs we lose our ego. And yet somehow we're still there. So unlike Freud had suggested, our ego is not who we are. Our ego is who we think we are, but we're not. It's our false self. And it is this false self which defines and limits not only our reality, but also our identity. Indeed for all of us, our idea of what is real and what is possible is much more limited than any of us could have ever imagined because our ego prevents us from seeing ourselves and our reality in any other way. So in other words, our egos are literally illusions that we live in which limit our reality. And with that said, the question becomes, well, if the ego is an illusion, why do we need it? Why is an ego important for us? A good analogy is to look at the world. Okay, here's the real world. But this isn't how we see the world. We see the world more like this, the map, the map that has the countries on it. And all of these countries have boundaries. These boundaries are what separate me from you, Canada from the US, France from Germany, this sort of thing. And while the boundaries between these countries are illusions, in another way, they are absolutely necessary because if they came down today, our world would go into total chaos. And in the same way that the world would go into chaos without its borders, we go into a type of chaos without our egos. Without our ego there to limit us and protect us, we become like a kite without a string. Flying high but totally ungrounded and in danger. In psychiatry today, they refer to this state as an acute psychosis. And it is in being an acute psychosis that our true selves or our souls are set free on this material plane of reality. Now the soul is an incredible thing. I mean, so connected to God that once you're in an acute psychosis of a manic episode, you may feel that your God himself, or Jesus or Buddha or some other spiritual figure. In fact, without the ego there to protect it, the behavior of the soul is compelled towards being completely unrepressed. So looked at from this perspective, rather than being a mental illness, we can start to see bipolar disorder as being an epic battle happening within the psyche, a battle between the soul which wishes to be free, completely free to express itself in every way. And the ego which is attempting to suppress any soulful expression or emotions, which it deems to be dangerous to the survival of the body itself. And in this battle, when the soul overcomes the ego, we're in a state of mania or even acute psychosis. When the ego completely overcomes the soul, we go into a state of depression. And it's this unresolved conflict between the ego and the soul, which is at the root of the cycling of bipolar disorder. As long as the conflict is there, we will move back and forth between mania and depression. And this battle will continue until it comes to a proper end, an end which medications bring about too quickly. Because what psychiatric medications do is they basically dull the chemistry of your body so that the ego can again take control of the situation, keeping the soul in check. And once that happens, you're considered sane again and you can function in daily reality. But as we all know, without more drugs, people often slip from mania into depression because once the ego is in total control, the soul has little room to grow to expand, and as result, starts to feel dead. Once on anti-psychotic medication, those limiting walls of reality seem even bigger and more imposing than they did before. Now ironically, the so-called hallucinogenic drugs, like LSD-25, or the organic magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, or even occasionally marijuana, can have the opposite effect. But not as you might expect. I mean, these drugs were called hallucinogenics because it was assumed by doctors that it was the drugs themselves that were providing the hallucination experiences, the feelings of euphoria, etc. But that's really not what they do. What these drugs do is they cause a collapse, a temporary collapse of the ego functioning. And the hallucinations and delusions and the visions of angels and feelings of being God are all within you. They are experiences within yourself that are finally released now that the ego has collapsed. Now for anyone who is bipolar, schizophrenic, or even completely normal, this battle between the true self of the soul and the false self of the ego should seem obvious. I mean, every day in our normal lives, there are things that we want to do, say, or experience that we don't simply because we're afraid. And we do this because we learned at a young age that it's a lot easier to get along in life when you can form to other people's expectations of you than to be who you really are. You may all be well and good when you're a little kid and you've got to learn how to behave yourself. But if you continue to live a life of total conformity, what you'll find yourself living is a life that's completely dead. You won't feel alive in your own life. And in this way, we are all repressed, we're all divided, not only those people who are bipolar, but pretty much everybody else on the planet. My favorite guru Oshou spent his whole life trying to heal this division within completely normal people, and this is what he had to say regarding normal life as it is today. In the past, we were unable to create real human beings. Instead, we made humanoids. A humanoid is one who looks like a human being, but is utterly challenged. He's divided because he is half. He is always tense, and he cannot celebrate. Others have been running his life for him. The parents, the teachers, the leaders, the priests. They've all taken away his decisiveness. They decide, they order. He simply follows. The humanoid is a slave. Only a fulfilled tree will flower, and man is yet to flower. The new man will be earthy and divine, worldly and other worldly. He will live without any inner division, without getting split. He will transcend duality. He will not be schizophrenic. And with the new man will come a new world, because the new man will perceive in a qualitatively different way. Right now, the new man is bound to be a mutant minority, but he carries with him a new culture, a new seed. We now need a new humanity in which religion and science become two aspects of one human being. And art will be the bridge. That's why I say that the new man will be a mystic, a poet, and a scientist altogether. He will be a mystic because he will feel the presence of God. He will be a poet because he will celebrate that presence. And he will be a scientist because he will search into this presence through scientific methodology. And when man becomes all these three things together, man becomes whole. And to create the new man, you need to begin with yourself. So looking at the world through Oshoshais, I think it's pretty clear that the only disorder and bipolar disorder is the disorder of living the fake everyday normal life. So the next time you find yourself thinking, I can't be me. You might want to back up a bit and ask yourself, well, who are you? Because the reality that you're looking for is a lot closer than you think. And while the journey to get there may be difficult, it basically comes down to one thing, bringing the bipolar battle of the soul versus the ego to its proper end, where the soul is no longer repressed by the ego, but is served by the ego. And that's what I'm going to talk about next.