World Congress 2023 – Caroline Mazel-Carlton
Have you ever felt like you just didn’t belong in this world? Felt like you had to hide who you truly were? Have you ever felt you needed to hide your truth because the world just didn’t have room for you? I know I’ve felt that way. I know I’ve spoken to literally hundreds of others, who felt this deep sense of not belonging. Maybe that’s why you’re here… because you’re searching for a place that you belong.
Yann asked me to speak here today for a couple reasons:
- Most importantly, I hear voices and do a lot organizing for Hearing Voices Network
- But also because I study in a Jewish Seminary, a rabbinic school, and provide spiritual support to psychiatric survivors of many traditions
Yann was interested in a spiritual perspective on our conference theme on challenging consensus realities. Now “rabbi” in Hebrew, just means “teacher,” so; I want to call in a very important Jewish teacher that I think a lot of us know:
THIS GUY:
Now, of course, Albert Einstein was a scientist. But for him, the pursuit of scientific knowledge was also a spiritual practice. He did not separate spirituality and science into separate, binary categories. Sometimes he even spoke of a “cosmic religion”. One of the main reasons why Einstein is considered one of the greatest physicists of all time, is his discovery that light is both a wave and a particle. Light behaves BOTH like energy AND like matter. In order to truly understand the phenomena of light, you cannot have a consensus reality. Researchers must move between different realities, different physical concepts, in order to conduct studies on Light. It has to be both.
So back to this question about why so many of us feel like we don’t belong. Sometimes I think it is because our belonging is dependent on us just being “one” thing. That acceptance requires showing only one face to the world. It feels like there is no room for contradiction in the consensus reality. We are like light… that is being forced to be either a wave or a particle… instead of allowing for both.
Since I was 5 years old, I have heard the voice of a man nearly every day. In order to make it this far in life with this often angry voice, I had to understand the voice in multiple ways. This voice is an aggressive protector connected to childhood abuse I experienced. This voice is also a masculine part of me, part of my gender expression. This voice is my nefesh in Hebrew, a part of my soul. A part of my soul from a past life where I died in the Vietnam War. AND this voice can also simply be a disturbing sound, keeping me from falling asleep. All of these things are true. AND I would be harmed if I tried to build consensus on just one of these realities. I would fail to understand it, just like a physicist who insisted on only seeing light as a particle.
In my life, I have needed to work with my childhood trauma. I have needed to take a medication called trazodone hydrochloride, to help me to sleep. It has also been critical for me to push back on traditional female gender roles AND to excavate my Jewish tradition to find spiritual healing tools. I can’t just do or be one thing.
This picture is of a recent Jewish holiday where we are dancing in the streets with Torah scrolls. These scrolls contain an ancient sacred text… and the scroll begins with the creation of the Earth…
But the Creation story is literally told TWICE: two different stories in a row. For example, in the first chapter: God creates humans LAST after all the plants and the animals and makes the humans in the image of God. But in chapter 2, God creates humans from dust, BEFORE plants and animals are created.
So there are literally two different stories, told one after the other. The sacred text is forcing us out of consensus reality. You cannot take it literally or interpret it only one way without losing the meaning. Humans are BOTH incredibly holy, AND they are also dust! Energy and particles.
Of course, there is a long, dark history of people abusing these spiritual and cultural texts for power, taking them literally, and saying there is only one CORRECT way to interpret them. In English, this is called “fundamentalism.” And fundamentalism can cause great harm. Fundamentalism enforces a consensus reality.
Fundamentalism does not just exist in the realm of religion, but the mental health system as well.
I remember as a teenager, being really scared by some visions I was having. I remember walking around my school and seeing some of the students appear to be bleeding. I remember the dark colored blood that seemed to flow from some of their heads like from a gunshot wound. I was deeply terrified by it. I went to a therapist, who had been hired to help me. I said to her “what does it mean, what happened to them that they are bleeding? Am I supposed to help them?” What does it mean?” She said “Caroline, what it means is: you have a neuro-degenerative disease, and if you don’t take your anti-psychotics as prescribed, your brain is going to further degrade. You are going to get sicker and sicker and sicker.”
Ultimately this woman was a fundamentalist. But instead of viewing my distress as a MORAL failing (as a religious fundamentalist might), she insisted it was a MEDICAL failing. As a medical fundamentalist, she believed that voices and visions were only due to internal brain pathology… a literal chemical imbalance… that could only be changed by neuroleptics. And, ultimately, this narrow view failed her and me, at both a scientific and a spiritual level. If she had been curious about the cultural context, she may have realized that the recent death of Kurt Cobain, by suicide, was affecting many people in my age group. She would not have missed that important variable. And in terms of meaning I believe these visions had a deep spiritual purpose. I believe these visions were one of several calls I have received by God to give empathy to people struggling with suicidal thoughts.
Suicide is a desire to die on one level, but on a spiritual level; it is a deep desire to be transformed. I am facilitating a workshop tomorrow where we are going to discuss a model that can help us to stay out of fundamentalism and fear whether the topic is suicide, religion, or one of many human experiences. I know some people have said the solution is to not talk about religion. But I think it is important to remember that they once said not to talk about hearing voices… and that is the reason we are all here today. I have found that talking about religion isn’t the problem. It’s how we talk about it. We need to make space for our individual complex stories. We need to challenge the notion of consensus. And we need to stop telling people that their unique personal experience is wrong. Perhaps you don’t consider yourself Catholic but are still deeply inspired by the stories of voice-hearing saints. Perhaps you are Jewish but you do not believe in God. Perhaps you do believe in God but don’t relate to any religion. Maybe Nature is your sacred space…or you are reviving the earth-based traditions of your pre-Christian ancestors. Perhaps you are Muslim but you do not pray five times a day. Maybe you aren’t Muslim but like me you inspired by the ghazals of mystical Muslim poets like Rumi and Kabir.
In fact, I would like to share a line of this Sufi poetry right now by Hafez: “Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living under better conditions.”
I love Hafez’s conception of fear being a room in a house. We all experience fear. Fear is a part of being alive. But we don’t want to spend the bulk of our lives in that room. Being silent can actually stoke fear. If we cannot talk openly, there is the danger of the media defining us. In my country, the media often only shares about voice-hearers who are violent… just as they often only share about Muslims in stories about violence. Our shared tradition of the Hearing Voices movement begins with a process in which Marius, Patsy, Sandra stopped acting out of fear and fundamentalism. And we are all a part of this lineage of courage and deep listening.
Sometimes when training in my country I will say: a Buddhist, a Muslim and a Jew walk into a room… To Americans, this sounds like a set-up for a joke, but I’ll say: this isn’t a joke. This is the beginning of a Hearing Voices Network meeting. A Mystic, a Government Target, a Trauma Survivor all walk into a room. Again, this isn’t a joke. This is an experience of a real Hearing Voices meeting. Of course, we also have to remember that a Mystic, a Trauma Survivor, and a Government Target can all walk into a room, and that room contains just ONE person. One person can be all these things. During the course of their lifetime, or even in one single moment. We are so many things. And the key to feeling like we belong here is making space for it. To remember that we are like light. And that the world could use a little more light right now.
EN 
ES