What is a nervous breakdown? It’s not a disease, as some
materialists would like people to think. It’s not a physical ailment like a
broken leg or something. A nervous breakdown happens when a person cannot
handle the burden, anxieties and pressure of his or her life.
A person breaks down when he realizes that the material
shelter where he has been trying to take refuge has all fallen through. The
person experiences, “I can’t find happiness in this anymore. I can’t find
meaning in any of these things. None of these things are satisfying though I’ve
tried to squeeze out pleasure from them. I just can’t find shelter in them
anymore”. He experiences such a heavy burden and pressure due to his futile
attempts to find satisfaction in either material things, relationships,
possessions, endeavors, ambitions or goals.
The typical person who has a nervous breakdown is the
businessman. He continuously strives to reach the top of the heap in the
material world. The pressure to be the number one guy is always on him. He
worries that he is not going to get what he wants or that the other guys are
going to get the main job instead of him. The burden is so great that he can’t
handle the pressure and finally cracks.
Almost every politician also comes to the verge of a nervous
breakdown whenever there is a major election, unless he rigged it beforehand.
The politician wants to be the guy – the winner! While the votes are coming in
and being tabulated, he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown along with his
followers, campaign workers and wives. They are all waiting for the election
results.
Finally, the announcement is made and it hits them. “Huh . .
. we lost, we lost”. Then they start crying and don’t know what to do. They are
sitting there in a stupor. “What is our future? What is our purpose? What are
we going to do now? Now what?”
Also on the verge of breakdown may be the housewife who is
overwhelmed with this purposeless existence of just taking care of the house.
She tries taking anti-anxiety drugs but they don’t really do anything for her.
They keep her spaced out and she keeps coming down. So, she comes to the point
of a nervous breakdown without even necessarily knowing why.
These different people get so tense and the cause of this
tension and agitation is their whole materialistic life. Due to anxieties based
upon material ambitions, goals and illusions, they get so uptight. Their nerves
come up to this bound, wound up condition due to lust. This lust or passion
puts people in a state where they just wind up so tight that they are ready to
spin out or break apart.
A nervous breakdown simply means that a person cannot cope
any longer with the burdens that arise from their materialistic existence.
“They come to the end of their rope”, as some people put it, and when they come
to that point, they see and feel that they have no shelter, no refuge.
The problem is that they have been trying to take shelter in
matter – material things, relationships, bodies, goals and ambitions. In other
words, they have been trying to take shelter in this world. And, when you come
to that point, where you can’t take shelter in this world anymore, then they
don’t know where else to take shelter. So they think this is bad.
But, I say it’s not bad. A nervous breakdown isn’t bad. But
the materialistic person gets wound up in this condition of misery without
experiencing any real relief. And coming to that point he freaks out. He tries
to forget his existence through alcohol or drugs or desires to cease existing.
He wants to end his existence because he feels he has no refuge.
But an intelligent person who knows that God exists and
remembers that God is the Best Friend of every single living entity
experiences, “I can and must actually take shelter in God. I do have a Friend
and my Friend loves me unconditionally”. Coming to this point, he falls on his
face and cries to God, “Please save me. I have no shelter; I have no refuge but
You. All the great spiritual masters say that I can take shelter of You. I have
no other shelter. Please give me protection”. So, calling upon the Names of God
and crying out to Him. “Please give me shelter”, you will then experience your
real identity, your real relationship with God.
Interestingly enough many cultures in the world relate to
God with different names, and all those names relate to different aspects of
God’s personality. The Hebrews call Him Abba (Father) or Eloi (Friend); the
Muslims call Him Allah (The All-Compassionate One); the Jehovah Witnesses call
Him, obviously, Jehovah (The All-Mighty One); the Hindus call Him Krishna (The
All-Attractive One). The Hindus feel that the name Krishna is the most potent
because if someone is all attractive then the name for that aspect of their
personality must contain all the others.
So what is often seen as a negative thing – the pain of a
nervous breakdown – is really an opening. It is a door. It will cause you to
enter another dimension – the spiritual world – where there is real refuge;
where there is real love; where there is real friendship, real security, real
purpose, real solace, and a real meaning to your existence.
After having surrendered to God in this way, even once, a
person will not have any more nervous breakdowns because his shelter is God. As far as this world is
concerned, they experience, “If I ain’t got nothing, I got nothing to lose”. In
other words, because they are not attached to anything in this world, then
nothing can go wrong for them. What can go wrong? They simply live their life
trying to serve and please God. So, if they are in anxiety, their only anxiety
is whether or not their life is pleasing to Him.
Since the
Supreme Person is the unconditional lover of all of us, there is no question of
His not giving shelter to those who sincerely turn to Him. But what if a person
falls down from the platform of serving God? Easy! He simply turns to his
Dear-Most Friend and from the core of his heart cries out to Him. “Please
forgive me. Please give me shelter. I have rejected You. I have been foolishly
trying to take shelter in this material world even though I know that there is
no real shelter there. I have tried to take shelter in the finite, which is not
You. And again, I am suffering because of it. And now I am turning to You.
Please give me shelter. Forgive me for my rejecting You, for my turning away
from You”. Then God will give you His
protection for He is always waiting for a person to surrender to Him in this
way.
A person
who is serving God does not mind “nervous breakdowns” at all. In fact, he likes
them because it’s a different sort of nervous breakdown. He might come to point
of being nervous or experiencing some pressures in his trying to do things in
the service of God. But he doesn’t try to carry the load, nor does he try to
escape in drugs, alcohol or whatever. As soon as there is too much pressure to
bear, he simply goes into the secret world of his relationship with God and
surrenders to Him. Then he experiences how he himself is nothing. Because he
feels he is nothing he then experiences that he has no burden at all. “If I’m
nothing, how can I have a burden? If my world is simply dovetailed with God, it
means that I don’t have any problems that seeing myself as my body and not the
spiritual spark residing in the body (false ego) will present.
If I’m
following my will, ambitions and desires, then I will have problems. Because I
am not God, part of my will may not be done. Because I am not God, my will is
not all-powerful. But, if I’m trying to do God’s will, then the problem is not
mine, but God’s. And since He is God. the Supreme Controller, then the
so-called problem is not really a problem at all.
I do not accept
the idea that God can have problems or troubles with the devil, for example.
God has no competitor. No one can compete with God. Some individuals may be in
the illusion that they can compete with God but no one can truly be of any
worry to God. He never worries about losing control or that His will won’t be
done somehow because he may be losing His power. God is always the Supreme
Controller. He simply gives us the choice
to turn to Him or not.
So a
nervous breakdown is for a person who is still trying to do his own will. What
is he nervous about? If you look at anyone who has a nervous breakdown,
everything he is nervous about has something to do with his having his own
will, his own desires, his own interests and his own ambitions.
But if a
person doesn’t have any interest, will or ambition of his own, then there is no
question of him having a nervous breakdown. He’s already broken down. How can
that which is broken, break? A nervous breakdown is for those people who have
not yet been broken. A lover of God is already broken. His self-will is broken.
His self-interest is broken. His ambitions and plans are broken. He has nothing
but God, Who is everything. Yet, in this broken condition, he is the strongest
of the strong.
When
people lose things they are extremely attached to, they experience semi-death.
For example, entertainers and movie stars worry about losing their looks, as
their bodies get older. Things start to fall apart and they start losing
control. They are in anxiety because they aren’t respected as they used to be. Basically, a nervous breakdown means my
source of security gets taken away.
In the
Bible, there is a good point about not building a house on the seashore at low
tide. Eventually the tide will come in, so only a fool will build a house on
the sand when the tide is low. Those who have built houses on the seashore,
those who have taken refuge in this temporary material world, get surprised
even though it was obvious to them that sooner or later they would be kicked
out of their bodies through death.
So,
people who are living materialistic lifestyles and who are taking shelter in
the temporary instead of the eternal should be warned, one day, you’re going to
have a nervous breakdown. Right now, you may be temporarily getting away from
your problems through different methods. You may be able to temporarily forget
the insecure position you are really in, but one day you will realize how
insecure you really are, that you have no shelter. And when that day comes,
remember this: that you have real shelter. It is not hopeless. When the walls
of your house come crumbling down, then remember that God loves you. His love
for you is unconditional and that actually He is the only shelter.
In short,
be in the world but not of the world.
Namaste!
Sources:
Sri
Isopanisad
Nectar of
Devotion
Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.
After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a “plastic” community would be an understatement.
Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.
I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, ” let’s become vegetarians”. I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, “okay”! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.
So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, “The Little Kitchen”.
Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.
I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I’ll elaborate on that in a minute.
But right now, back to “The Little Kitchen”. Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.
The owner said to me, “Let’s make a deal. You do our tax return and we’ll feed you as well”. So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.
But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, “Hawaii”. Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called,” Mr. Natural’s”. I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at “Mr. Natural’s.” To make a long story short, that’s exactly what happened.
So, I’m working at “Mr. Natural’s” and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle – it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka’anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.
Since I was the new guy, and didn’t really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that’s exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.
I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.
Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I’m asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn’t thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, “You expected anything less”? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, ‘enchilada’s at “Natural’s” tonight’. I never had to cook anything else.
A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That’s when they found out I was an accountant and “Down to Earth” was born. “Down to Earth” became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.
In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD’s that would call in asking for my credentials.
My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.
I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii’s premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. She said,” If you want to be with me you’ve got to stop working on naked women”. So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.
Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a “chicken” or “egg” or “fish” or “pig” or “cow” was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.
The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.
Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.
For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.
Namaste!
