The Opioid Condition

THE OPIOID CONDITION…..which is currently referred to as a crisis is the process whereby people are “checking out” of “reality”. Most homo sapiens desire to feel good, all the way up to joy. Our brains are hard wired with opioid and many other chemical receptors and neurotransmitters that stimulate our “feel good ” hormones, as well as many other varied states of emotional reality, that don’t always feel so good. This distress is being countered with substances that deny our deepest emotions.

What gets in the way of this “feel good” potential pattern staying activated?

It is our inhumanity. Our continued difficulty with maintaining empathy…all of the time. Yes, all of the time. Everyone thinks they are empathetic to some degree, but it gets very confused with sympathetic…so much so that when the emotional weight of empathy outweighs a person’s ability to self regulate(stay in control)…an egoic sympathetic response takes over…creating the sense of being in control to thwart the feeling of being overwhelmed.

True empathy is very selfless, a mindfulness of the mindlessness of “ego”, or the self. Because it is so hard to maintain empathy, we see our systems (which are our reflections) becoming unable to nurture ourselves. It is this growing pattern of insufficient care that is allowing the “perceived security” of power to find expression.

It is only the community of empathy that has the power to join us all and usher in the coming new paradigm of life…..

For your consideration, from my second book The Quantum Correlations Of Imagery, Introduction…

Since time immemorial, we humans have wondered about who we are and why we are here. The possibility that there are connections between creativity, health, and our existence have intrigued the brightest minds for a very long time. From ancient days when artisans and artists were revered for their talents in metallurgy, paint- ing, and other skills, there has always been a special place in history for those souls who could express beauty and bring it into our world.

For thousands of years, just why these talents were so special and given a reverent position in societies around the globe has remained a mystery. Today, in seeking to provide scientific answers, the burgeoning fields of neuroscience and genomics are validating much of what ancient intuitive wisdom has taught us.

Recent (scientific) research informs us that the brain is not the fixed matter it was once commonly thought to be. We now understand that the brain continues to grow and regenerate itself during a person’s life. This is called neuroplasticity. Specifically, our brains continue to evolve throughout our lifetimes, and we now understand that even previously compromised neurons and their dendrites (connective tissues) can regrow themselves, at times even wiring themselves around a damaged area to forge new healthy connections. The implications are potentially enormous.

This reality holds great promise for the treatment of diseases and conditions that were previously believed to be incurable and could at best only be managed throughout a lifetime. Mental health issues such as chronic anxiety and depression, along with developmental issues such as autism, intellectual disabilities, and TBI (traumatic brain injury) may now be able to be addressed with a brighter, more optimistic future. It is important to acknowledge that how this works is more than just a mechanical process.

The question that immediately arises is exactly how do we deal with these phenomena and make them an effective tool to work with?

Current research is demonstrating that when the brain is at rest, enjoying peaceful recuperative time as opposed to solving problems, it is able to experience a regenerative process that has the potential to not only mitigate, but also completely resolve, a diseased state. This is the main dynamic that is engaged when a person is creating art and communicating with their body, mind, and spirit through what we call imagery.

Imagination, or the process of image generation, is NOT the fanciful, dreamlike state that belongs to children alone. Rather, it is an extremely important capability that all humans have, but which is not usually cultivated beyond childhood unless the person is an “artist.” This is because our mainstream institutions, such as schools and businesses, do not fully recognize the power of creativity as expressed through art.

When a mental health professional uses art in conjunction with verbal expression to facilitate the artistic process in the course of providing psychological treatment, he or she is called an art psychotherapist. When the creative energy of the cosmos becomes accessible to the artist during the creative act, it delivers functional outcomes that heal and regenerate the brain. This invisible energy is not only harnessed but becomes intensely focused as it feeds functional skill building, nurtures the spirit, and brings balance and heightened awareness to our emotional and spiritual composition. It also leads to big questions.

What we call art, which is the visual representation of this process, is a side effect of this transformation, which brings beauty into our world—one image at a time.

There are many people who believe the brain is actually the mediator between our body and our spirit, which in some ways puts a more mechanical limit on our brain and its functioning, but at the same time opens a very wide door to the existential questions of …who are we, how did we come to be, and why are we here, along with what do the stars and cosmos have to do with it. These are complex questions that we seek to understand more fully. In the search for God, numerous references to possible answers are given by authors such as Zecharia Sitchin, helping us understand a possible way to talk about God—and to separate a major God from minor gods. This concept refers to ancient knowledge captured through imagery and stories and retold throughout many spiritual and religious artistic creations and texts in existence around the world. Virtually all such texts tell the same story of creation and our ancient origins, although there are many variations on the main theme. With the work currently being done in neuroscience, we have reached the point of beginning to identify and use the knowledge of genomics and the information contained within our DNA. Yet the mystery of our origins still remains…and is obscured from view.

Could it be that imagery, or this thing we call art, is a portal to an existential pathway that allows us to access long-forgotten knowledge and capabilities hidden in our DNA?

Why not? We are so visual; in fact, we are able to understand our world, planet, and existence from a visual viewpoint. Notwithstanding people who are blind, which is its own phenomena on the spectrum of visual understanding, we appear to be equipped to use our human capability for vision to perceive a world that is easily identifiable. Our eyes also receive much more information from the invisible realms of vibrational energy. Vibrational energy can be understood as the forces that exist everywhere throughout our universe, inside all of us, and beyond, that are not always visible to the human eye but are perceptible, such as infrared, magnetic, gamma, and x-rays to name a few. This certainly creates a multitude of questions about who we are and how and if we are designed or a product of natural evolution. No matter what your belief, we certainly relate to each other using our visual perceptions to describe our experiences of life, as well as the seemingly infinite questions that arise.

Author’s note: Perhaps the greatest question is : “How do we maintain an empathic response in the face of such challenging times, along with the alternative of checking out?”

Ed Regensburg, LCAT
Clinical Art Psychotherapist, Creative Sanctuary with Ed Regensburg, LCAT

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