It's "religious" only to the extent that that's a convenient reference for description. To me, it has nothing to do with "religion", it's just me and my relationship to reality, existence, and the world; which is, not ironically, my definition of religion.
To me, my deteriorating mental health was never completely separate from my "religious leanings", just different perspectives. It's not even that one was negative and defeating and the other was positive and reinforcing. What fueled my mental health descent is the same thing that sustains my religious (my definition) inquiry and pursuit (religion is less about faith or worship). A manifestation of my mental health decline becomes tools for the inquiry.
Furthermore, these two aspects are not mutually exclusive; it's not a matter of I was that way and now I'm this way. They co-exist and feed each other and alternate dominance, requiring a broader definition and acceptance of both.
What it boils down to is that my tenuous mental health involves my inability to accept and deal with life and physical reality as it has been presented since I was born; this matrix, this web, this menagerie, this reality that I've never accepted as self-conclusive and real.
In turn, the religious pursuit is a proactive inquiry into the nature of that which I'm unable to just accept, informed by metaphysics, Buddhist cosmology and theory, psychology, astronomy, scientific cosmology, post-modernism, astrophysics and quantum mechanics (what little I can understand), and . . . metaphor.
Either way, really. Mental hospital or monastery is fine. But just living life, although still possible and even attractive, is empty and unappealing.
