I undertook the project of writing The Trinitarian Mystery beginning in May 2022 as a means of grappling with the experience of the onset of my bipolar disorder. 

I had a profound experience at the beginning of my first manic episode. I felt in my body an almost indescribable feeling of truth. It felt like holding a single Truth from which all other truths of my reality followed. In fact, in the moment that I received this “Truth,” I felt an overwhelming sensation that I can only describe as feeling that my soul was leaving my body, that I was starting to float up above myself. But just as I felt the destabilizing moment when I could let go and merge into abyss, I thought with great fear that if I surrendered myself to this feeling, I may die and leave my wife Catherine; so I pulled back from that feeling and chose to “return to my body,” as it were.

After that, I found that I could effortlessly read signs from God, who I felt to be an extension of myself (in my writings at that time, I described God as “Self”). I felt utterly merged and in tune with the whole of existence. Yet at that time I could or would not have described it as such. It is the same way that describing qualia like the taste of an apple cannot be adequately captured in words. This was, as my friend Salash put it after his own transformative experience, “The Truth that is a place.”

My wife quickly noticed that my entire demeanor had changed. It was clear that I felt a great joy and peace, that I had a new vitality and energy. I was also speaking about God with great faith, when previously I was agnostic on the existence of God. I tried over several days to explain to her the Truth that I understood. Gradually it became clear to me that this new Truth was alienating me from my wife. She began to feel uneasy and confused about my transformation. It became clear that she was not in that place with me; she could not see what I had seen.

I became acutely terrified of losing her. I felt the powerful transformation and consolation of this new Truth, yet I could tell that it was distancing me from my wife. I resolved to leave behind the talk of God until she was ready to join me in my understanding. This introduced an element of resistance and doubt to the feeling Truth that would prove destabilizing.

I quickly found that I could not simply reject that Truth I felt. In fact, when I began critically probing my newfound state of consciousness, I found that I couldn’t be surprised by anything at all. Everything that happened felt like a foregone conclusion, since it followed directly from this one Truth that I held intuitively in my body.

Realizing this incapability of surprise, I became confused. What could this mean? I felt like I was God Himself, that my possession of this Truth made immediate sense of everything in my experience and therefore gave me dominion over it. With horror, I experienced that I was able to control others with my mind. It seemed to follow that if I were God, and if everyone else were an extension of my mind, then I was utterly alone in the universe.

This cannot be overstated: I felt myself, intuitively in my body, to be the only real being in the universe. Everyone I loved—my family, my friends, my wife—were only illusory extensions of my mind. This was utter agony.

At other times, I experienced a complete loss of free will, as if my body was moving without “my” say-so. The transitions between these modes of ego inflation and ego death were sporadic, as I was spiraling in confusion of the implications of this one Truth that I had come to feel with such certainty in my body and then come to doubt in order to reunite with my wife. Of course, the extreme distress and confusion I was feeling only increased the distance I felt from my wife.

In the midst of this excitement and confusion, I remained awake for 5 consecutive days.

I can say now that delusions and psychosis had profoundly altered my consciousness; but while it was occurring, these experiences felt as real as anything else I had ever experienced—more real, even.

My family eventually realized that my strange behaviors and pronouncements betrayed a medical problem, and they brought me to a hospital. Once I had received medication and rested, my mania and psychosis subsided. And here’s the kicker: once I left that manic state, I found that I couldn’t remember what that great Truth had been! I couldn’t speak it. I only remembered that my subjective experience of it had been real. This was indeed the Truth that is a place, and I had left that place.

I have produced this document in an attempt to make sense of the profound alterations of my consciousness that I experienced—to incorporate these experiences into a framework that accords with my previous understanding of the universe and incorporates new insights. The mystical framework and philosophical orientation that I have described in The Trinitarian Mystery has helped me (perhaps ironically) to demystify and incorporate my lived experience of bipolar disorder. My hope is that it may carry seeds of resonance to others seeking to make sense of their experience of reality, whether living with a mental health disorder or not.

It was only when I experienced psychosis and delusions, and knew that I had, that I was able to understand intuitively and viscerally that all of our knowledge, however fundamental it seems, is provisional and fallible. This knowledge was very unmooring to me. And yet, to accept this leaves one with a philosophical orientation that is extremely productive. It allows one to feel both tapped into a great source of wisdom and yet standing always at the unfolding frontier of a great mystery. It is to let the push and pull of conviction and doubt coexist and open you to new generativity and possibility. This is, in other words, to enable a dance between the inner voice that asserts and the inner voice that doubts to continually trace out the contours of reality in their back-and-forth.

This great, unfolding mystery I call The Trinitarian Mystery.