First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

Broken Chords

In this respect, at least, I suppose I am a straight-forward materialist: Everything that happens in the mind is chemical. There is not, I think, any ethereal realm of spirit where love and faith and joy and virtue have some objective reality apart from the neurological cellular exchanges that take place with incredible complexity and grace in the organic brain. The whole reality of being human – all that we know and think and feel and observe and reason – are functions of that chemical intricacy. Subtract certain delicate compounds, or add others – tip the balance ever so slightly – and being human as most of us understand it becomes subjectively impossible.

During the long years when Mark and I strove, with increasingly intrusive medical intervention, to get pregnant, we became intimately familiar with the detailed physiology of conception. The more we learned, the more we marveled that, given the precise hormonal conditions required for ovulation, cell replication, and placental formation, anyone, anywhere, ever succeeded in reproducing. Yet these processes are crude and mechanical compared to the delicate choreography that creates perception, intention, knowledge, mood, and the thousand other facets of the operation of the human mind. What was once upon a time a locked box in the skull, impervious to observation, has in the last two generations begun to yield us secrets of self-understanding potentially as revolutionary as Newton’s mechanics or Einstein’s physics. Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Positron Emission Tomography today allow clinicians to watch the brain functioning, alive and in real time, and to begin to trace the correlations between overt chemical and cellular processes and reports of subjective experience and feelings. It is not usually as simple as a one-to-one connection – chemical A equals feeling B – and yet the lives of millions of drug addicts are mute testimony to the reliable power of certain chemical compounds to shift mood and perception in sufficiently predictable ways. Mind is a function of brain, and brain is a chemical process. This is not, in my estimation, particularly bad news for the dignity of the human race. Our consciousness is an achieved complexity; one of the best dances that matter knows how to do.

Professor Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine and author of "Visual Intelligence" puts it this way:

To speak of mental health, then – or its opposite, mental illness – is to deal with the ways in which the chemical systems of our brains interface not only with the external world, but with one another. As inherently social creatures, we know that our limbic systems, part of the brain’s elegant chemistry, have evolved to be literally interdependent; we regulate one another’s emotional, mental and biological systems. The mutuality of this process makes it work both ways: when our interactions with other people are emotionally destructive, or limbically toxic, they can change our systemic chemistry, and make us very literally ill. By the same token, some anomaly in the individual’s brain chemistry can create perceptions and behaviors that make it difficult or impossible for that person to participate effectively in the familiar patterns of social interaction by which mutual limbic regulation occurs. For a person of ordinary consciousness to be in the presence of someone who cannot effectively take part in the completion of the limbic loop is disorienting and uncomfortable. Which, I would suggest, is why mental illness still carries a social stigma that our culture has to some extent managed to separate from many other types of disease that are more physical in their manifestations.

The world of human culture almost necessarily makes an assumption that mental health – the ability to interface effectively and predictably with both the physical world and the community – is our default state. Mental health is seen as "natural", taken for granted as what will be the case unless something goes wrong. But I am inclined to believe that mental health, rather like pregnancy, is an achievement, however common it may be. Getting all the proper neurons to fire in the proper sequences to create reason, self-awareness, conversation, learning, empathy, memory, humor, and all the other ingredients of sanity, is really a pretty amazing accomplishment, when you stop to think about it. We should not be surprised when it goes wrong; we should be impressed that it so often works so well.

At the same time, every human mind, however emotionally and mentally well-adapted, is subtly different from every other, and it is in these differences that genius as well as madness lies. The goal of collective culture is not, after all, to make us all the same, but rather to enable our individual originalities to enhance our shared lives; to benefit from the insight and creativity of minds that do not all approach the world and each other in exactly the same ways. Without these differences, we might as well be indistinguishable ants in a hill or bees in a hive. Understanding one another would be no trouble, but there would be precious little to talk about.

Moreover, this principle of diversity operates within our own minds as well as among individuals. It is the variety of feeling states and perceptions that are available to each of us that gives interest and novelty to our days. Most of us have known the leaden feet of a depressed mood; the exhilaration of a sudden creative insight, the heightened energy of an inspired flow when everything seems to click together; or the frustration of an irritable hour when nothing goes right. These perceptions have reality in the world, and yet they are also demonstrably differing chemical facts in the physical brain. One of the most interesting and in some respects hopeful truths of our human condition is that creativity is not confined to moments of comfort and pleasure. Indeed, over and over in the lives of great artists, powerful thinkers, original scientists, we see the impact of emotional pain and mental instability. The capacity for seeing differently that opens the door to intellectual and artistic genius all too frequently also makes us unhappy or a little crazy, or both. As Barb has mentioned, all the composers whose work we are hearing this morning suffered from what would appear to have been clinical depression, or other sorts of mental disorders. Out of the pain of their failed connections to the world, they produced the expressive beauty of their music.

Broken Chords, part II

Once upon a time, before science and medicine had given a structure of understanding to the operations of the human body and mind, people who suffered from mental illness were thought to be possessed. Depending on the traditions of the community, and their status, and the particular manifestations of their particular illness, the possession might have been either by demons and evil forces, or else by the gods themselves. While this interpretation made for a great deal of suffering, when treatment consisted primarily of trying to make the patient so miserable that the afflicting demons would leave, it also recognized the paradoxical nature of the experience. The person who was possessed by divine powers might at times have a level of awareness and insight that was not available to more conventionally-minded people, and the concept of possession gave them an established role in the community. Spiritual leaders often emerged from among those who had undergone periods of inexplicable darkness, when something happened that set them apart and made them more sensitive to story and meaning, to all that goes unexpressed, and to the arbitrary pain of life. The shaman, the oracle, the witch-doctor, the wandering ascetic, all are roles on the edge of community, typically taken on by those who cannot fit comfortably into the conventions of the culture. So, too, is the role of the artist, who sees through the lens of imagination, or hears with an inner ear, visions that are sometimes terrifying and sometimes enchanting, but always filled with power. The life of the community is made richer by their images and premonitions; they express what others may not be allowed to say, may be afraid to even think.

Our world, of course, would be a poorer place had Bedrich Smetana not poured out his despairing love for his country and the agony of his own journey into madness as a result of syphilis into his music. It would be diminished had Van Gogh not translated his hallucinatory visions onto canvasses like "Starry Night." Emily Dickinson, whom many thought slightly crazy because of her intensely protected privacy, put it this way:

Much Madness is divinest Sense --

To a discerning Eye --

Much Sense -- the starkest Madness --

'Tis the Majority

In this, as All, prevail --

Assent -- and you are sane --

Demur -- you're straightway dangerous --

And handled with a Chain --

She is right, of course; cultural convention is the ultimate democracy because it is created precisely by our collective participation – "tis the majority that prevails" in defining what constitutes sense, or madness. Sanity is defined by seeing as other see, doing as others do, thinking as others think. But fortunately and uncomfortably for all of us, the human spirit cannot long be confined by the boundaries of popular opinion. Our brains and our minds are unique; always, in some individual the shifting balances of chemistry produce sensations of grandeur and despair that do not fit into the ordinary molds, that disrupt lives, careers, relationships with the internal roller coaster ride of mental illness that must be experienced in order to be truly understood.

The potential for it is there within all of us; rare are you if you have never felt your foot slide beneath you on a particularly rocky patch of life’s journey, toward the edge of the precipice of madness. It takes so little to tip the balance; a genetic heritage or a toxic environment, a tragic experience or a bodily disease, any of these can start the chemical cascade that propels us outside society’s lines of sanity. And yet, there is also an alluring promise of the kind of intensity that Kay Jamison describes, and that the musicians and artists demonstrate; at the creative edges of the mind’s good order, something precious hovers, beauty and insight twined with suffering, and danger.

This is what I suspect we shall never be able entirely to separate, however skilled we become at unlocking the chemical prisons of the mind’s malfunction and giving people the option to live manageable lives. The greatest possibilities of the human spirit’s inventiveness will always lie at the boundaries of what the social world will call, in one vocabulary or another, madness. To possess divine creativity is to be possessed by its urgent energy; we can learn to mitigate and soothe that inflammation of spirit to some extent, to stand on the side of balance with the chemicals we know, to make our interface with the world of matter effective again when the system crashes. But we cannot orchestrate the gifts of genius, nor can we spare one another all tragedy, sorrow, or loss. What we can do is to affirm the value of that truth which is found outside conventional perspective, and let our own perceptions be expanded by the visions and creativity of those who have no choice but to walk that painful road. The more we know, the more that compassionate chemistry can relieve suffering and redeem lives. But let us still honor the creative fruit of that suffering, the gifts that have been and will be given out of the pain of madness to be added to the world’s store of beauty and to enrich every human spirit.

Our closing hymn speaks of the still center and creative power that lives within even the most troubled mind, and our endless quest for the peace of true harmony.

Opening words:

We gather today to celebrate the tenacity of the human spirit,

And the creative power that lies within us,

In spite of all our greatest sorrow and pain.

The human mind is a marvelous thing;

An instrument of knowledge and reason;

A connection between ourselves, other people, and an enormous world;

A repository of stories;

A source of creativity and discovery;

An eternal hunger for meaning.

As there are diseases of the body, so the mind has its vulnerabilities,

Being finite, organic, a complex and delicately balanced function of physical forces.

What could be more frightening than the fear that our mind itself cannot be trusted?

And yet, as we shall see this morning, time and time again,

The creative power of the human spirit

has struggled against the obliterating pain of madness and transcended it through beauty,

bequeathing to all of us a message of hope,

and a persistent faith in the gift of life.

Call it mental illness, call it by any of its myriad clinical definitions,

Give it the old, inclusive name of madness;

It is one of the tragic realities of human experience.

And yet, like all other tragedies,

It is never the last word of the meaning of our lives.

Love and song arise, even in the mind that is bruised and broken,

Making us more than our afflictions,

Testifying to the power that makes us human and connects us to one another

In our perennial quest for truth and meaning.

May the flame of this chalice be to us a symbol of that power and that quest,

Illuminating our shared struggles and our private pain,

Its light a witness to the triumphs of the human spirit

And the enduring possibilities of beauty, wholeness, and a better world.