The Root Cause of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

The Root Cause of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

[00:00] The Search for Order

Thanks for coming and listening to and viewing my podcast, The Vedic Worldview. I’m Thom Knoles.

Today, I’d like to address a few questions that have come up about obsessive compulsive disorder, its causes, and its direction. We could even look at it and say its purpose, and then what is it that our technique of Vedic Meditation can bring to the suffering that comes about, not just from the person who is suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, OCD, but who is causing suffering of others due to it.

So, first of all, let’s say this: that there is such a thing in Nature as entropy and order. This is all a very interesting subject.

If we look at a beaker of, a glass beaker of water that is almost frozen, not quite, where the liquid water in the beaker is on the cusp of crystallizing into the solid state of water. In centigrade or Celsius temperature grading, we would call this 0.001 temperature Celsius, at sea level, because water freezes and liquefies at different temperatures at different elevations on the earth. So let’s make this sea level, and we’re just going hypothetical here, we’re not going to get too technical about it.

Then, what we’re looking at is water that is beginning to get slushy. It has thickened, the water has higher viscosity. Viscosity comes from the word viscose, which means thick. So think of the resistance to stirring in water that is room temperature, is relatively minimal. The resistance to stirring in a cup full of air is, we’re not going to say zero, because at a high enough speed you would get resistance, but relative to water, less viscosity. And greater viscosity means greater resistance to stirring.

If you stick your spoon into a jar of honey and start stirring it, you’re going to notice resistance to the stirring. And so then water, as it’s approaching its freezing point, starts to become more viscous, harder to stir.

[03:47] Heat Reveals Perceived Disorder

All right now, put the flame to it, put it under the Bunsen burner, and allow it to begin a process of warming, and keep watching those molecules. Now bring it up to 99, sea level, degrees Celsius, and what you’re going to see, by comparison, is a tremendous amount of what we call entropy.

The molecules, which previously had been lined up into very neat rows and staying put, have now begun to excite, and they’re moving around with a tremendous amount of, relative to the previous state that we examined, disorder or entropy. And so the water’s become entropic. And then, one more degree Celsius of heating, it’s no longer liquid, it escapes into its vaporous state as steam.

So water has those three states. It can either be a gas, steam, or it can be a liquid, which is a fairly narrow bandwidth of temperature range, or it can be solid. One of the miraculous things of being on Earth is that we live on a planet where most of the water, most of the time, sits right inside that range, which is neither gas nor solid. And there are many scientists who say it’s just a remarkable Goldilocks thing. Not too hot, not too cold, just the perfect temperature that water needs to be in order for life and life forms to use it to survive.

So, order, disorder, order, disorder.

Now, when we look at the so-called order of the molecules that are sitting perfectly in neat rows, and we compare that to our view of the molecules when the water is very hot, in the very hot, we see a tremendous amount of what we call entropy, but then this is a very human way of describing things.

Is it in fact entropic? That is to say, does Nature itself have a standard that Nature uses? Below that standard, there is order. Below that, below that temperature, there’s order. Above that temperature, there is entropy or disorder. What is disorder?

Well, as it turns out, it’s a human invention. I can’t see the order. My perceptual capability prevents me from being able to see the order that’s in the highly excited state. Beyond a certain level of excitation, I can no longer see order, and so there’s a sense in which all of us participate in this peculiar form of obsessive compulsive disorder.

We have a very restricted sense of what it is that’s orderly, and some of this is caused by Nature. That is to say, the natural ordering of things in a room, for example, as against what appears to be disorder, chaos in a room. You want, functionally, to be able to find a thing in a room. In order to be able to find it, you have to have a certain amount of order.

So, if I am looking for my iPhone, but it’s buried under knee-high piles of dirty clothes from the last week that are lying all over my floor, sounds like one of my teenager’s rooms, then it may be difficult to be functional in that room and to be able to find the phone, because according to me, it’s not orderly.

[08:39] Nature Orders the Forest

So then, in fact, what is order and what is disorder? So, having a very specific sense about what is order and what is not could be caused by nature, that is, the nature of the brain of the person. They’re born into a state in which, if they can’t find things easily, if they don’t know how to put their hand on a thing easily, they feel grave discomfort.

But another part of it is caused by nurture. Nurture means due to environmental pressures, due to parenting, due to social pressures and whatnot, and responses to that, due to the hypnosis of social conditioning, we have a certain very restrictive sense about what it is that is in fact orderly, and so then, you know, we want to order everything.

I took a Swiss man once through the forests of the local mountain here in the Coconino National Forest, and as we were walking on the trail, he was looking around at all the giant trees that had fallen in a variety of windstorms over the last 100 years, and there are a lot of downed trees and downed branches. And he said to me, “Why don’t they come in here and clean all that up? A forest like this would never be allowed in Switzerland.”

He said, “Our forests, the foresters go through, and they pick up all the dead wood, and they pick up all the dead trees, and they remove all of that, and some of it is pulped and some of it’s cut to be firewood. You know, it’s so disorderly.”

And what he was looking at was a forest the way a forest works. Some of that timber that has fallen has now become the home of squirrels and other forest animals, and some of it’s decomposing, and it’s creating a thick and rich, fertile floor of the forest, and forests don’t necessarily respond to a process of human ordering. “I’m going to go in there and order the forest.”

This is, in fact, what causes massive, multi-thousand-acre forest fires, is little fires are not allowed at all. They don’t suit the humans, and so with a century or two of preventing every single fire, lots of little trees grow up in between the old growth trees and create ladders.

If there’s a fire, it creates a fire ladder that goes up into the crown of the old growth trees. The old growth trees have smooth trunks and are relatively fire resistant if they’re left to their own devices, because little fires come through and clear up all of the little lodge pole trees.

But because we’ve become obsessed with no fires at all under any circumstances, what’s happened is we create a situation where there’s tremendous amount of ladders up into the crowns and old growth trees, because of human intervention, end up burning and dying out.

And so that’s what happens when you try to apply human elements of order to a forest. You end up killing the forest, you end up removing habitat, you end up overdoing it. That’s obsessive compulsive behavior, right?

Not being able to leave it alone, not being able to trust that Nature has organizing power, Nature has the capacity to order things.

So when we lose that trust, whether that loss of trust is due to an acquired brain function or dysfunction, that’s due to what we call nurture, we’ve been hypnotized into it, or by Nature, that is to say, there’s something going on in our brain that is congenital that causes us to have extreme concepts about order, we end up with obsessive compulsive disorder.

[12:05] When Order Turns Dysfunctional

Strangely enough, it’s the ordering that’s referred to as disorder. It ends up being non-functional.

So, a thing is a disorder when it is no longer functional, and when you wash your hands once, and then, you know, that’s not enough, so you wash your hands twice, and that’s not enough, so you wash them three times, and before you know it, there’s no more natural oil in your skin, and your hands are beginning to crack and peel.

And not only that, you’re using up bottles and bottles of hand-wash material, and bars and bars of soap, and the water bill is excessive, and skin’s coming off your hands, and all that, but you just can’t get those hands clean enough. And there’s some kind of a concept that if sufficient bacteria is to get into your body via your hands, that your certain death is going to come, and it’s worth losing your hands over just to get clean enough.

I mean, I’m using an extreme example to prove a point, but many of the obsessive compulsive disorders have to do with things like hand washing or the ordering of a room.

Somebody who has OCD, if they’ve set up their desktop in a particular way, and you go and move one thing, it completely drives them bananas. They absolutely have to move that thing back. It’s got to be in that spot. There are very many ways in which it manifests itself, but basically, what is manifesting is no trust, zero trust, in the natural order of things.

So then the truth of it is that if we are called upon by Nature to bring about order, then Nature will call upon us, and we’ll find ourselves innocently choiceless about setting things back into order again, making our bed or whatever it is that is functional, and so a certain degree of diligence about ordering the environment is not dysfunctional.

When it becomes dysfunctional, and, “I have to constantly order the environment, including my own body, in order to make things right, and I don’t trust what Nature is doing… Nature is the thing, the force that’s going to make everything go out of order. So, I feel myself constantly being attacked by Nature, rather than Nature in any way supporting me. Nature is the cause of disorder, and I am the ordering force,” and this is the mentality of the person who has obsessive compulsive disorder.

Now, there are many ways of dealing with it, and I think all those ways, which have been tried in the last, say 100 years, since this syndrome has been identified and isolated, they work. There are lots of different modalities that work, including talk therapy, including some psychopharmacological treatments, some drugs that can help. Where people are putting their lives and the lives of others at danger from being obsessive and compulsive, then we may need to look at the possibilities from the use of psychopharmacological drugs.

[15:37] Meditation Restores Inner Order

But Vedic Meditation brings something to the equation which is fabulous, it brings the individual mind, first of all, into a highly ordered state. The brain itself becomes highly ordered. The brain waves of a meditator are highly orderly and optimized compared with the inefficiency of the way the human brain operates outside of meditation, without the aid of the least excited state.

As we decrease excitation, always perceptible, and we’re going to use that word here, perceptible order increases anytime we decrease excitation, it’s a law of Nature. And so during meditation, the mind and the brain attached to the mind begin to default to more and more ordered states.

One starts to feel a satisfaction of orderliness internally. “My internal order is just fine. When internal order is my internal status, I begin to perceive order in the world around me. I can see the orderliness even in highly excited states.”

So, someone who has a failure to get satisfying pattern recognition above a certain threshold of entropy, they can’t get pattern recognition anymore, they have a disability. Someone whose consciousness and brain is itself intrinsically highly ordered can get pattern recognition even in a relatively complex environment.

To be able to have satisfaction that I will be able to perceive and get pattern recognition, pattern recognition is essential in order to live life in a way that you don’t create problems for yourself, I will be able to attain to pattern recognition, even in a highly complex state.

This comes from having an internalized experience of order. “I am orderly in here. My brain is orderly, my perceptual capability is orderly, and I can detect order in the world around me.” This is the capacity of a meditator.

“In addition to this, my individual consciousness is unifying with Nature’s intelligence. When I meditate, I go beyond individual thinking trends, and I experience the beautiful, blissful, supreme inner contentedness of Unified Field consciousness, and my nervous system becomes imbued with the chemistry of supreme inner contentedness.”

Imbued with this chemistry, and combined with the capacity to see order in even so-called entropic environments, one starts to feel reassured everything’s all right, everything’s going to be all right.

And so the regular daily practice of Vedic Meditation is highly recommended. It could be supplemental to existing treatments. I certainly don’t recommend it as a replacement. I recommend it as an addition to… it’s complementary, but it could be even pivotal. It could make all the difference in whatever regime is being explored for bringing about relief from the agony of obsessive compulsive disorder behavior.

[19:36] Q – What quiets obsessive compulsive thoughts?

When we have obsessive compulsive thoughts, is there anything that we can tell ourselves to help quiet that down?

[19:51] A – Nature Knows Best How to Organize

Yes. Nature knows best how to organize.

“Nature knows best how to organize. If it’s required of me to be diligent, focused, and even obsessive, because obsessiveness can be functional, it’s when it’s dysfunctional that it’s a disorder, then I’ll respond to the call. In the interim, I’m going to relax and enjoy, because Nature knows best how to organize.”

There’s organizing power in Nature, and one of those ways in which Nature will bring about order may well be causing you to experience a call to action. Now, what Nature doesn’t do is present a call to action where you scrub your hands to the point of bleeding. That’s not Nature, that’s human intelligence.

[22:05] Do Less, Accomplish More

Or you end up, I see this all the time, in marginal form, it’s not obsessive compulsive disorder, but it’s moving in that direction, standing at pedestrian crossings. We know that when you press the pedestrian button one time, it has registered, but because you might be in a hurry, you press it twice, three times, 20 times, 25 times, or just stand there like a woodpecker, just pressing away at it.

Each of the times you press that button after the first is a complete waste of energy. And not only that, you’re exposing your hand to a greater number of pathogens, because there have been many other people who’ve been sucking on their fingers and picking their noses and scratching their butts who’ve been pressing that same button as you.

So if you really are interested in minimizing, you having do less and accomplish more. So we have a declension of thought, and it goes like this: do less and accomplish more, do least and accomplish most, do nothing and accomplish everything.

“If there is a call to action, I will respond, and I’ll respond in a measured fashion. Meanwhile, let me enjoy the world around me.” One of the great things that brings us relief as Vedic meditators, or even if you haven’t yet made arrangements to learn this magnificent technique, even if my listener is not yet a Vedic meditator, you can do what we call coming to your senses.

Come to your senses means take five minutes, we’ve got five senses, devote one minute to each one of the five senses. A minute’s a long time. Take 60 seconds and see what is the taste profile in your palate right now?

I had a beautiful little drink called lassi, which is made from yogurt, Greek yogurt to be very specific, and unflavored with a tiny amount of honey added to it, and about 50% water compared with the yogurt. And I shook that up and drank it before giving this recording, so I can still taste a very tiny amount of that yogurt drink in my mouth, and it’s really quite delightful. It’s on my palate. See what I’m doing? I’m examining the taste spectrum.

Let’s do smell. All right, what do I smell? It’s a cedar-lined room. I can smell the cedar. There’s air coming in from the pine trees outside on a windy day up here on the mountain top. I can smell a little bit of the earth dust blowing around. I can smell the bodies in the room. They’re both quite good, by the way. My audience bodies, nobody in here is a stinker, and I can smell my own ambiance, the silk, and all the rest that goes with being me.

[25:08] Come to Your Senses

Okay, let’s say that that was 60 seconds, it wasn’t, but we could do 60 seconds. Then we move to sight. What is it that I can see? I can see that, that, that.

What is it that I can see that lies between that object I’m looking at and my eye? Oh, what does that mean? There’s something in the air, as it appears in the space that lies between the object and my eye, that I can also see. What is that? Let’s examine… let’s not answer the question, let’s just examine it and see it. 60 seconds on sight.

Now sound. We’ve done taste, we’ve done smell, we’ve done sight. Let’s do sound. What can I hear? In the faint backdrop, I can hear a fan that’s drawing in cool air from the outside, and it’s an exhaust fan.

Oh, I just heard a car in the faint distance. I can hear the backdrop of the cosmic hum, the shruti ringing in the backdrop. Like that, you examine sound for about 60 seconds.

Now, examine tactile. I can feel where my hands are on the seat. I can feel the clothes against my skin. I can feel a very, very faint little breeze coming on my exposed skin, my hands and my feet on my face. I’m doing the tactile thing. Oh, my nose, it’s just a little bit. I’ll just scratch that. How lovely to have tactile sensation.

This is coming to your senses. You spend one minute on each of the five senses, it takes five minutes, and what happens, you begin really quietening down, you begin aligning yourself with where you actually are.

See, most of us don’t actually even know where we are at any given time, we’re so caught up in our thoughts about what was, our thoughts about what is likely to be, so this is the past, and speculation about the future, which is all incorrect anyway. We never get it right, and we lose present-moment awareness.

When we lose present-moment awareness, we start getting fidgety, we start getting finicky, we start thinking about there’s a call to action every moment, every little thing needs to be adjusted. “I have to adjust this and to adjust that. Oh, there’s a piece of dust there that doesn’t belong there. How dare a piece of dust get anywhere near my picture of Guru Deva.” We’re talking about a man who lived in a forest and slept on the forest floor. Oh, he can’t have a speck of dust in front of him. What?

Okay, so coming to our senses has the effect of fascinating us with the bounty of Nature that’s around us and inside of us, and it has an immediate quietening and calming effect. So come to your senses is a very good technique, even if you don’t know how to practice Vedic Meditation. Come to your senses.

We hear people saying that: “Hey, come to your senses.” Okay, well, I’m saying it, but I have just given meaning to it. Come to your five senses. Spend five minutes on the five senses.

[27:46] Q – Is OCD similar to addiction?

I’m not sure if it’s considered similar, but OCD and addiction, I’m wondering if there is similarities there.

[27:57] A – Addiction and External Control

Obsessive compulsion is in fact an addictive behavior, and any therapist will treat it that way. An addiction is defined as, “I’m going to get my satisfaction from outside myself, and so if I have to get order from outside myself, but what’s myself? My inner consciousness in here is not orderly. I have to import orderliness into myself through an exogenous source, something outside me.”

“So I have to get everything orderly here, and body is also outside me. I can see my hands, I can see my feet, and I can see myself in the mirror…” and the infinite amount of adjustment, it’s an attempt to get internalized order.

So, in psychology, we have a way of looking at things. There’s the internal locus of control and the external locus of control. Someone whose locus, L-O-C-U-S, meaning the dominant point from which they view things, is the locus.

If their locus of control is internal, then they know and they feel that whatever they’re experiencing in the world is based upon what their consciousness state is.

“It’s not that it’s a bad day, it’s that, for a variety of reasons, I’m having a bad time in my consciousness.” The day may be just fine.

Now, there’s externalized locus of control. “I individually am not in charge of what I’m experiencing. It’s the environment that’s in charge of what I’m experiencing. So, there are people in charge of what I’m experiencing. There are events, meteorological events, weather circumstances, stock markets, whatever it may be. I’m just me. I am a creation of my environment, so my environment dictates and defines what I am.”

This is an externalized locus of control. Now we’re going to add some more language to it. When there’s an externalized locus of control, I am field dependent. That means, “I’m dependent on the field around me to bring me what I want, and I have to arrange the field around me to cause it to make me feel good.”

Then there’s the field independent. Internalized locus of control is field independence. “I am experiencing self-sufficiently, and I can cause myself to be having good experience independently of the field around me, so I’m field independent.”

So then in obsessive compulsive behavior, and in addiction, there’s a conviction that, “There’s a thing out there that’s going to, and it’s in the field, I’m field dependent, the field is going to bring about a state of satiety inside here, and so I have to get that thing.”

Getting the thing may be rearranging stuff obsessively, repeating things over and over again, you know, “I’m somebody who really believes in three, but then I’m obsessive about the auxiliary fourth, and so I have to do the three, and then I have to do the fourth one.” This is all classic obsessive compulsive behavior. “Because the environment, the world around me, is responsible for my internal satiety, my satisfaction level.”

And so a meditator starts to behave in ways which are less and less addictive, because, “I can, just with a mere impulse of intention, experience okayness inside me. Satiety is well within my reach, whether or not I adjust the environment. So the environment is secondary. I’m more and more field independent, I’m less and less field dependent. I more and more have an internal locus of control, less and less an external locus of control.”

[32:26] Growing Field Independence

All of these things in psychology weigh into addictive tendencies or not. Meditators over a period of time of practice regularly, twice a day, people who practice Vedic Meditation begin to evince ever increasing field independence, ever increasing internalized locus of control, ever decreasing field dependency, ever decreasing external locus of control, until a point is reached where they feel completely self-sufficient.

“I’m in charge of what I’m experiencing. The world’s not in charge of what I’m experiencing,” and this shows up as a psycho-mind, neuro-brain physiological functioning of the integrated functioning of the anatomy as physiology. Psycho-neurophysiological well-being.

“I’m in stay and play mode, let the environment go into disorder. Disorder may not actually be a disorder, it might be disguised order, and I have all the time in the world to be able to wait and see and play it out. If there’s a call to action and I need to act, I’ll know, and I don’t have to anticipate it or try to fix it all up in advance.”

And so one becomes less and less controlling. Controlling behaviors are variations of obsessive compulsive thinking. Less and less of a controller, particularly a controller of others.

“If I say this particular thing at a particular time in a particular way, I’ll evince this kind of behavior from that person, and when they behave that way, I’ll get internalized satiety.” And so I become a controller, and if exposed on the subject, I might say, “Yes, but I’m doing it out of love.”

So now I say, “You’re a loving controller, but controllers are a sociological hazard, a hazard to community.”

People who, for whatever variety of reasons, have a vested interest in controlling the behavior, the thoughts, the experiences of others, even if they’re doing so lovingly, in hopes that the other person’s going to have an improved experience, this is externalized locus of control. This is field dependence, so we want the opposite of that to dominate our lives.

Jai Guru Deva.