“When the Mind Turns Against Itself”

A Personal Cry from the Inner Chaos

There are moments when I feel as though I am walking through the ruins of my own mind. Not the moral ruins alone but the psychic ruins, the places where thought unravels, where the ground beneath the soul feels like shifting ash. I see the world in chaos and I name it desolation, but the truth is more unbearable: the chaos outside is only a pale reflection of the chaos within.

I watch people rushing about, building, destroying, consuming, raging. It looks like madness seen from the outside, but I know that same madness lives in me. I see it in the frantic pace of my own thoughts, the way I cling to illusions, the way I try to control everything because I am terrified that if I let go, I will fall into an abyss with no bottom.

There are nights when silence does not feel holy but hostile.

It presses in like a shadow that knows my name.

I enter it hoping to pray

and suddenly the mind becomes a cage of screaming voices.

A thousand thoughts competing

accusing

mocking

insisting on their own reality.

It is not simply distraction.

It is something darker, something more primal.

The Fathers would call it the passions.

Sigmund Freud would call it the death drive.

Scripture calls it Sheol.

Whatever name I give it, it feels like something in me wants to destroy itself.

This is the hell I carry.

Not fire.

Not demons in the abstract.

But the psychosis of a mind that can no longer bear the truth of itself.

St. Ephraim knew this terror.

His Psalter reads like the diary of a man who sees his inner world collapsing and fears that even God might recoil from such a sight.

“My thoughts have become a grave,” he says.

“A tomb in which I myself lie dead.”

Jeremiah knew it too.

“My soul remembers and sinks down within me…

I have forgotten what happiness is.”

He wrote as one who felt God slipping away, not because God moved, but because despair had darkened his vision.

And so I say it too, with trembling:

Lord, I am afraid of my own mind.

Afraid of the fractures.

Afraid of the voices.

Afraid of the specter of myself that wanders through the day like a ghost trying to remember who he used to be.

The Tower of Babel is not a myth to me.

It is the story of my interior life.

The ego climbs higher

and higher

and higher

past the limits of sanity

until the whole structure collapses under its own weight

leaving confusion not between nations

but within my own thoughts.

My inner speech breaks.

My desires contradict one another.

My fears devour my hopes.

My mind becomes a battlefield without sides

a war in which I am both aggressor and victim.

This is the death drive.

This is the self-annihilation that hides inside every attempt at control.

And here is the question that terrifies me:

How deep does Your love enter into this madness?

How far does Your hand reach when the one drowning is not only afraid

but actively pulling away?

How long do You stretch Your arm toward a soul

that curses You as You approach

because it cannot distinguish Your love from a threat?

There are moments when I feel the pull toward You

like a quiet breath in the darkness

and then immediately I feel something in me recoil

as if the light will expose too much

as if Your nearness will reveal the full extent

of my fragmentation.

And so I ask You

with fear, with shame, with desperation:

Will You still take hold of me when I am thrashing in the depths?

Is Your mercy strong enough to hold on

even when the part of me that wants to live

is smaller than the part of me that wants to collapse?

Lord, I want to breathe the air of the saints

but at times it feels like I am suffocating on the fumes of my own delusions.

I want Your Spirit to cry out from the depths of my heart

but sometimes the depths feel like a place even You cannot enter

because I have made them uninhabitable.

Yet something in me whispers

from the ruins

from the ashes

from the fractured darkness:

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases.”

And so I dare to hope

not because I see a path

not because I feel whole

not because I am sane

but because You have descended deeper into hell

than I have fallen into myself.

If You can break the gates of Sheol

then surely You can break through the walls of my mind.

If You can raise the dead

then You can raise me from the grave that I have become.

So here I am, Lord

broken

confused

terrified

and still I stretch out my hand

even as it trembles and withdraws.

And I beg You

with the last breath of my sanity

Take hold of me

and do not let go.

*************

Silence reveals so much and it is not sanitized piety. The eyes open and see the world as it is and what our Lord entered into and the most fearsome reality revealed is the chaos within, the contradictions, the battle between light and darkness, life and death.

What I seemed compelled to contemplate I don’t believe is simply my experience but that of all. What kind of mercy enters into this and is willing to go deeper and deeper until healing emerges and the Spirit finally breathes life into the soul? It must be like the raising of Lazarus. A voice that overcomes death. “Lazarus come out!”