Part 2: Integrated Madness- flag of the inverted thunderstorm of irrationality
It was the answer to "where does madness fit in to the scheme of things." the mind became illuminated to itself, instead of just being a big black box; "it's all in your mind" was never a helpful comment. Now the mind can be analyzed as a vision. the mind was a big castle, connected to the body though deep pipes that allow steam to rise up ‐ like the 18th century ideas of "humours" and "vapors" of the body that affect the mind. And a homunculus ‐ a tiny man in charge of orchestrating everything ‐ is in the central tower, looking out on the hills and lakes and villages of the soul.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />
A mind becomes objective to itself: the castle is like a grand central train station, trains going out in every direction, above ground, (and coming back, from every direction, below ground); Beneath the white castle, four black stakes penetrate deep into the earth, and a single red light like Rudolph’s red nose is placed at the top of a central tower, where a central figure – a homunculus that feels like the force of will itself – can look out on the surrounding hills, valleys, and towns, like a panopticon of the soul. The central figure pulls a book from the library in the tower, and as he reads, the pages are produced dynamically, from the steam rising up out of the black pipes below. The book he is reading is called “MADNESS RISING”;
“PRIVATE GIGGLES IN A POSTCARD TO YOU: OUT OF A GOLDEN LAKE, MOLTEN LAVA RISES UP LIKE A TADPOLE THAT CATCHES THE ECSTATIC DRUMBEAT OF TIME AND LEARNS TO RIDE THE AIR; HOPE AND PROMISE TWINKLE AS ICICLES AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX TADPOLE CAN NEVER QUITE MASTER, MYSTERY AND WONDER FLYING ABOVE THE SURFACE OF THE LAKE AGAIN AND AGAIN.”
And as turbulent wind affects the environment, the homunculus/will is in charge of orchestrating everything back to the best possible scenario.
There's a huge "heat gradient" across this landscape that this will looks out upon: the higher regions, corresponding to the height of the castle tower, are cold. Icicles hang. Hope and promise. I could add the material world, comfort, companionship, etc. this is available only in the upper, colder reaches.
Mankind at this point in its development has risen out of the lower, hot, molten, alchemical (molten gold lake), and has reached the frigid heights. Continuous landscape that it is, the upper reaches are constantly threatened to be overcome by the hot below (the lake of "madness"); so the cold upper reaches have tried to close the door, stop talking to unreason, confine it in the sanitarium, drug it with SSRI's, but keep it from melting our icicles of "hope and promise".
But the homunculus itself is the evolution of the tadpole‐from‐the‐depths, that's not only the source, where it came from, but it's what will sooner or later be needed to rise up again, when there's a crisis, when the red light on the top of the castle comes on. That’s when the homunculus will have to raise up more "mystery and wonder", when there's no more "hope and promise" to cling to.
I lead my own soul, in and out of madness. I flood the upper reaches with storms of molten gold. I let them drip off and dry and freeze, for a little while, see what kind of butterfly emerges from the cocoon, but I am a wildly experimental homunculus, and I get bored with my cold and frail little butterflies of "proper behavior in the physical moral human social world", and I choose to raise up continuous streams of phantasms, out of the molten gold lake of madness.
Did I find my way out? I gained and understanding of madness from the madness itself; I will continue to inhabit and guide my own soul‐landscape, and mine will be full of the molten tadpoles turning to fiery dragons, the dragons of "mystery and wonder".
Delusions of power are the hardest part to keep contained. In any conflict I fly into the rage of a god. It’s a mistake, but frequently made.
As I was watching “ Law&Order” last night, the district attorney made the comment to the defense attorney: 'so you turn the courtroom into Alice in wonderland?!?' because she wanted to discuss the possibility that her client believed a 'god' would 'strike down a soul', and this was psychotic, in the context of the story. The point is the attitude of humanity toward 'Alice in wonderland'. Hard to integrate these two mindsets, these two worlds.
I had been reading Carlos Castaneda. I remember reading several books in order from him, but as with many authors, it was the first that made the lasting impression. i have told people to start with that as apprentice to shamanism. Here is the critical scene: Carlos goes into the Mexican wilderness, and discovers don Juan, a Yaqui shaman, who shows Carlos his magic powers and gradually makes Carlos the shaman apprentice. Carlos had to beg to be taught the magic. the first thing don Juan said to Carlos when he agreed to teach him was ‐ Carlos, you will go to the top of this cliff, and stand there as long as you need to, before you jump off. if you have the slightest doubt, you will die at the bottom of the ravine. But if you figure it out, if you get it right, you will just bounce when you get to the bottom. With this bounce you will arrive back at the top, and THEN we can get started with your training.
It's like a Zen koan. Mentally digest THAT story. Get to the point where you're ready to become a shaman. The mental processing of that koan has to do with learning how to integrate two realities into each other. Our American culture doesn't understand, and calls this schizophrenia. But the Mexican pre‐Columbian culture mapped the hallucinogenic worlds. Aztec, Taoist, Russian irrationalism, etc. but not our culture. But they gave us the libraries!
Problem with me is I have so much energy inside. I find sanity is an energy management issue, and I try hard, with lots of exercise, reading, and hard work, but sometimes it gets away from me. In the stressful situations that threaten my survival, the energy to maintain the insulating firewall between the right and left brain degrades. At some point I give up the effort, and it's not like I 'can't stop, but it's more like I stopped trying. And I let out the 'demons'. That’s what people call 'acting out'. It’s battle mode. mind‐to‐mind combat. I have a powerful arsenal, and unfortunately, a whole section of the frontal lobes devoted to warfare. It activates in confrontational situations. Acting out doesn't always have to happen, but the ideation is almost inevitable. And usually I just scare people by presenting the ideation, and that's enough, though since I always pull all the punches, eventually I lose credibility.
I think I have something kind of unique here, not run‐of‐the‐mill schizophrenia. Actually, I never heard of a mental disease that i didn't intuitively feel I have, but always with a twist. I’m autistic, but I can talk. I’m schizophrenic, but I can hold it in.
And that's the trick. And how hard is it? It takes energy. A lot of energy. That’s what's behind the 50 dollars a day worth of 7000 calorie intake, this is one huge circus I run. And I’ve always said that I could be 'caught' at my insanity, if only society had the resources to follow me around twenty four hours a day ‐ because I can't maintain the wall of 'sane' around my 'insanity' up 24 hours a day. It’s unnatural. I've had the situation all my life.
I recently saw 1408 the movie, and room 1408 is my situation. Only I can leave and go back in anytime I want. But it's exactly that crazy in there. the guy has to deal with it. Michael Eslin the writer; and so he take s a bit of the tack that I have learned to take. I command the spirits before me, overcome them with my will. It’s the only way. I would describe how I learned this as 'shamanism training', and I think it's a shame that people in this situation without shamanism training are termed schizophrenics in this society, and drugged into submission. i would also venture a theory that this 'madness' in room 1408, the schizophrenia, the demon world, the hallucinations, the collective unconscious even maybe, this madness learns to groom itself into the human world through parental guidance in the early years. I see a mom take the 4 year old in the temper tantrum on the bus, hold the kids head steady, look straight into the kids eyes, and say firmly 'you will STOP that'. That’s how most people cut off the demon world from the human world, I think. Like when I see the parent of the 18 year old say 'you do your best to raise them, you try to teach them right from wrong, and then look what they go out and do', again I think this is the dialog between reason and madness, between human and demon world.
This culture leaves that stuff as 'just dreams', 'leave it in the night where it belongs.' other cultures grab the dreamer and make him explain it to the community, and if the dreamer is good enough he is the shaman. The magical assistance of the tribe, interacting with the unseen forces. Whether they be modern physics 'Higgs field', or sprites and goblins, we could always use some help with the more‐than‐meets‐the‐eye.
I grew up in this culture. Dreams from the outset. The demon world. Not till 18 years old was I set free in the libraries of America, in the college and universities, in the New York City 'stacks' beneath Bryant Park, in the book stores of America, and even a little bit on the 'internet', did I discover the hallucinogenic cultures of the world, and their alternate understandings of reality. And I developed 'apperception', the ability to believe in more than one valid way of looking at the world. I dropped right out and retreated to the library, apperceptive capacity intact.
And I looked to the mysteries of modern science to develop my own alternate and equally valid way of looking at the world, thereby becoming a world visionary leader, as I always assumed I was, having been born to a Roman Catholic priest and a Catholic nun who had run away from her home in Mexico, where she lived with her mystical Aztec sorceress grandmother. I tell people I walk around in a non‐ordinary universe model. I have articles that I have integrated together so that I can explain away gravity. In my 'world', the earth pushes up, not pulls down, and that's another whole essay I already have somewhere.
I have a theory; it's only a theory, of how this works. I have a right brain and left brain. Colin Wilson in the sixties wrote a book, 'the bicameral critic', about experiments using one brain or the other. Breathing in through one nostril to activate the opposite brain. I did an experiment later in life from a guy in an article who said to drop cold water in each ear, one by one, to notice the different mood, activating that particular hemisphere. what I discovered that afternoon walking back up the hill from the diner to the computer admin job I had (which I was later kicked out of, lead away by the FBI, thinking I was a terrorist. it usually ends that way. can't keep the craziness locked up forever. never actually hurt anybody though, just manipulate their minds about the risk of having me around), and here's what I learned about my bicameral mind:
I think the emotional right brain suffered severe trauma, and I came up, under intense stress, with the survival tactic sometimes taken, where the left brain is commandeered to grow a new imitation replacement right brain. I can't do math. I mean I took calc I in college, but now I can't do math, don't know how much money I have, just vaguely know how long I can go for till I need to work, I refuse to compare the values of two numbers. it makes me depressed. To calculate with my mathematical left brain is to leave the right brain, 2 year old stunted emotional personality in place. Dangerous, too, 'cause the left brain, when it's not doing math, is the wall of energy over the two year old emotional mind. And it's the artificial personality talking to you here and now. Got good at this around 21 years old, in college dorms. Started working on it in 1st grade. Miserable at it till atleast mid way through high school. At 45, I’m a star, at the top of my field, at managing my class and doing a dynamic presentation. I’m a Citrix politician, 'cause I’ve just learned all the right things to say to make the students love me. I have the top evals in the country. And I stopped getting the rave reviews the few months I was on Seroquel, so they are responding to the schizophrenia ‐ the high, manic energy level. The entertainment of madness. (Though I act like a sane computer manager or something, till after evals on the last day, maybe.) One time someone said he thought I was either gay or crazy, from the animated personality. This disturbed me a little, I wonder how many people assume I’m gay, 'cause I’m not, but I guess whatever. But that's why I think it shows no matter what. I used to think I could convince anyone that I am sane or insane, depending on what I choose. I can't really. Insane, sure. But for sanity, the best I get from the psychiatrist is 'schizotypal personality disorder' and a recommendation for antipsychotics or SSRI’s.
I know that I don't deal well with stress. when my survival is threatened, or, worse, when a conflict begins to brew over anything, I jump into 'mind‐to‐mind conflict' mode, which is very schizophrenic, and there is no beating me, I’ll gradually escalate to the point where everybody dies and all is destroyed, unless the opponent takes an opportunity offered to step back. So that's the worst side of the schizophrenia. No, I know, it's my delusions of power.
A few years ago, a writer for the New York Times took notice of something called the “genius awards”. There were about thirty given out that year, and when the situations were looked at more closely it wasn’t quite “genius” that was being identified and rewarded, but more clearly, creativity. Of the thirty, twenty eight had been won by New Yorkers, so this writer decided to interview as many of them locally as possible, looking into the subject that happens also to be the subject of this post: what is creativity, and what do the people who are better at it have in common? She was able to interview the majority of these interesting people, and there was indeed a common thread to these New Yorkers’ lives: they all stayed away from technology. One was a runner, but while the other runners had their iPods in their ears, the genius award winner left hers at home. Of course she enjoyed good music, she said, and had her favorite music at home, but her running time was for creative thinking. (I remember a guy who would walk dozens of hours, he said after 5 or 6 hours the mind kicks in.) Several genius award winners had no televisions in their home, and most watched little to none of it. Most were refreshingly out of touch with the internet fads of the day and the pop culture media obsessions. A girl at the front desk of a school I was once teaching at said “Charlie, you are so anti-technology, yet what you do back there is teach extreme technology”, and I smiled and said I was like a tiger who had escaped from the circus. I now get by teaching other tigers how to perform at the circus. I wouldn’t recommend it, but if you’re going to do it I can show you how, and get my fleeting share of survival resources in the process. And I have that creativity that, like a firefly, comes and goes. And after 45 years I’ve got the recipe down pretty well for how to grow massive fireflies, and I’d love to share it here. I just saw one of these fireflies last week, a rare appearance that teaches me vocabulary words I’ve never heard in recalcitrant echoes from nowhere. I overate last week, between health kick breakfasts and two heavy dinners out, and had dreams all night one night with a message I was able to carry out I’d never heard before: “prandalist”, and a little bit of “post-prandalist”. I spent the last few hours of my restless sleep thinking “the word is “pran”, like the prawns my wife had last night at the Chinese place, and “dial”, like the soap in the shower, and I got out and said “prandialist” and “post-prandialist” to my wife when I woke up, then, after a day of food poisoning nausea, worst in years, I googled “prandial” and it means “eating”, and that kind of thing happens to me from time to time, so that at this point such weirdness barely surprises me. I of course chalk it up to the subconscious, that I do read a lot and look stuff up in dictionaries, but I never consciously knew that one. Makes you wonder what the subconscious knows, how it works, who it really is, or if we can contact some collective unconscious /spirit world in moments of twilight clarity. A book I found once, buried in the back of a large American city’s main public library, was written by a psychiatrist who wrote of his 30 year career, since the 1950’s, where, outside the consensual psychiatry field, he would get to talk to and care for people in their initial stages of psychosis. He began the entire career with the thesis that these people in the emergency room where their relatives had brought them when they, around 21 years old, suddenly fell apart and began walking around dazed, talking to themselves, drawing weird pictures, acting out madness, did not need to be drugged back into their old world, and were not mal functioning. These people, he said, had reached into the human mind’s source of creativity, and he provided the recipe he had seen in these people. They all had just experienced an event that confused them, something they could not process based on their previous beliefs and teachings. If they believed God always acts justly, and someone good had something bad happen, for instance, or if they were suddenly told their parents were not their parents, then these contradictions they could not deal with would send their mind in to a different state, called psychosis, where it would reach back in to the myth making deep state, not under functioning but actually using more calories in the brain than it had previously, thinking furiously at the metaphysical level about how to integrate the new facts they’re faced with. And the doctor said that after up to 40 days, the mind would return to its old way, with no outside assistance, and the person would then have a sane, integrated way of understanding the world that now integrated everything they had been presented with. The point of the book was not to drug patients but to let them talk, and to listen to them, to think heuristically about what the patient was trying to think about with their word salad, and give them the trust and understanding to move to where they need to be. The book was called “Trials of the visionary Mind”. He just listens to people! He says they aren't schizophrenic, they are having "visionary experiences" that last 40 days and should be listened to. He says treat them his way with no meds and there is only an 8 percent relapse rate. Give them just meds and none of his therapy and you get a 75% relapse rate.
Actually his theory of the psychotic episode is remarkably similar to my theory of "what is evil", except I say energy gates go down and the demon world comes out; he says energy goes down and then the "psyche", the "collective unconscious" comes out. (Same thing I guess)
And how do you get the psyche to come "inside out" like that?
Span discrepant worlds. Like your family wants you to be "all nice" but there's nastier stuff just below the surface,
or you change from one dominant culture to another (or I create psychoses on purpose by reading different topics back to back and thinking about the relation between them, or riding the subway and picturing a deep jungle all around me, or reading astrophysics while riding the nyc subway);
The Aztec civilization says all existence (collective unconscious?) is born out of "duality", their highest god being ometeotl, or "Mr. and Mrs. two", who live in omeyoacan, or "place two".
So I like to try to hold opposites in my head for the purpose of causing psychosis, but controlling when I do my psychotic thinking – not while I’m at work (the dreamer must control the dream, not the dream the dreamer) – and that, I think, is a great source of creativity, it’s looking for contradictory ideas, and loving to pour out the mental energy it takes to rethink everything, like, for instance, contemplating that gravity, or time, don’t actually exist, that works for me lately. I tend to scan science for their “mysteries” – just heard today that there are twin inverted tornadoes at the south pole of Venus and science is mystified. Concentration on things like that can lead to creativity, then psychosis, so some psychiatric patients are told not to contemplate these kinds of things, to leave them to someone else. These patients that can’t handle it I think are just malnourished, which leads me to my personal recipe for creativity.
Just like when I saw the experiment, in first grade, where a marble and a bowling ball are dropped off a tower, and, quite counter-intuitively, hit the ground at the same time, and I knew there was something wrong with that, and eventually came to a satisfying understanding - a “vorstellung”, or pictorial representation of the physics around me - where there is no such thing as “gravity”, (but rather “ytivarg”, or gravity spelled backwards, as it is a push from above, not a pull from below), I also was disturbed, only a few years ago, with a description on TV - some PBS or Discovery Channel thing - where the human brain was forming, in an infant, and the neurons were depicted something like sperm cells, as they were flying, in empty “space” in the brain, and they actually used the word “migrating”, trying to explain how the different “structures” develop. I knew intuitively, having speculated on just this topic somewhat obsessively, on and off for decades, that this was wrong.
I’d been speculating on brain formation mainly because I’d found an analogy - and this isn’t just me, others in popular science magazines have made the same connection - between the structure of the human brain, and the structure of the universe. Einstein’s brain was saved and dissected, and it was indeed different from most human brains, and the difference was the complexity of the interconnections between the neurons. I knew that from a young age, read that somewhere. Then as I studied during this, the historical “golden age” of astrophysics we live in, peeing deeper and deeper into our surroundings with radio, X-ray, and gamma ray space-based telescopes, I realized early on that the structure was “developing”. You see, in astrophysics, with the way the speed of light works out and everything, when we look into red shift space - and we do this all over the place, we have all kinds of pictures of galaxy structures in red shift space - we are looking at the past. They say we are looking at what happened millions, then billions of years in the past, and they say the universe is something like 13 or 14 billion years old - it’s weird but there is actually pretty solid science to support this, and it has become just about universally accepted by modern day science these days - and that we can look, these days, almost all the way back. We’ve hit a brick wall at something like a billion or two years of age, due to something called a “polarization” effect, I think, and some ambitious astrophysicists are still trying to push this envelope all the time, they want to go ALL the way back, for no obvious reason, but anyway, we know about how the structure has changed over the lifetime of the universe, from 2 billion to 14 billion years of age, and the story is remarkably similar to the way a human brain develops from womb to adulthood - at first almost a misty net, and as it grows up, some connections fall away, while others become much stronger, and eventually - at our point in the universe history - there are huge empty blank spaces, and then galaxy clusters - like ours, the “Local Group”, comprised of merely our Milky Way galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy, and a bunch of way smaller satellite galaxies, and the nearby “Virgo Cluster” with a super massive core, biggest thing in the “local universe”, (M81 and the quasar at it’s core), and then all the “empty vacuum” besides. Basically the structure stretches on and on, cucurbitaceous, into the past, and becomes less dense and more “misty” as we look back on the past the way an old person may look back on what he used to care about as a young man, and then as a kid, all playfull and habit-free.
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So I had theories, as the astrophysicists do, on how and why this structure forms the way it does. As the leader of all matter and energy in the war against time, I struggle against the “development” of the structure, as it progresses in time, and try hard to understand my opponent, time, and what’s happening to me, all matter and energy. I know, crazy project, but I’ve been working on it for a couple of decades nonetheless.
I didn’t like what modern day astrophysicists were coming up with - all “gravity” oriented theories, and I had come up with the analogy of the “structure” of cracks in an egg under pressure from outside, and that was my alternative working theory for a while.
Now I have a new approach, and this one is satisfying to me, it’s my new “vorstellung”, a new psychosis for me to use as I read the next brain or galaxy structure article, as I contemplate my own life, and as I bike to work and pump the blood wildly through my brain, and this new vorstellung “feels” good, so I’m thinking I’ll be keeping this for a while, like my “ytivarg” thing, just makes me crazier in the surrounding population of my worldly-minded peers, but I’m having fun. Honestly I don’t really have a choice, and this theory of brain mind I have even explains that insight, come to think of it.
I’ve been expounding a version of this theory for a few years, drawing on the whiteboard my “theory of brain / mind” after all-day or all-week computer classes. I knew from experience that I needed fats and cholesterol to deal with complex problems. One day a long time ago in New York City, when I came in for my 4 to 12 evening shift, it was a problem day: three people started telling me about all the issues: this was broken, that was in some state that we had no idea what was going on, and there was really no plan for how the evening work would get done. It felt a little overwhelming and I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t really wrap my mind around it all. But after everyone left, I went out for my cheeseburger and fries at the diner downstairs. When I came back to the datacenter, all by myself, I had a different take on it. That stuff was broken and there was nothing I could do, someone was coming to fix the second thing, and I would do what I could with the evening’s work. And I think that day I related the change in attitude to the fat and cholesterol in my bacon cheeseburger.
Twenty years later, teaching computer certification classes, I was still eating my bacon cheeseburgers, but I’d also learned how to consume a lot more fats. I’d learned about omega three fatty acids - the coating around brain cells that allows us to multiply brain power by separating neurons from each other the way insulation separates electrical signals in speaker wire - the flax seed oil, borage oil, evening primrose oil, and black currant oil. Also I learned about the omega three fatty acids that the large coldwater fish can create: the salmon, the tuna, the swordfish - but you have to watch out for mercury poisoning in this world of dirty oceans. And I learned about the magic of walnuts and walnut oil, one other source of omega three fatty acids, and so on top of adding the above supplements to my daily diet, I cook regularly with walnut oil, and then lots of other oils just for the oil of it - I use four oils a day in my meals, rotating walnut oil, peanut oil, hazelnut oil, olive oil, safflower oil, grapeseed oil, and at four times the price of the rest of them, pumpkin seed oil. And I take coconut oil supplements as well. There is bad cholesterol and good cholesterol, and I eat it all. Just got my blood tested, and my bad cholesterol is high but not past the recommendations for man, and my good cholesterol is higher than the recommendations. I like to keep my self oily. It’s a mind experiment. I use it to think, and I’ve been expounding a simple theory on why it works. I was feeling vindicated a few years ago when the New York Times, in the Tuesday Science Times, ran a little couple of paragraphs to describe a recent study. They said they noticed that of all college students who’d had their blood tested, the ones with the highest cholesterol were also the ones with the highest grades. So after a difficult first day of class, when the students get up to go home, I’d tell them on the way out to eat protein, get 8 hours of sleep, and get as much oil and cholesterol as possible. When my boss would direct me to learn a new topic, the first thing I’d do is go get that bacon cheeseburger and some ice cream - French vanilla, from the cold stone creamery, was the most powerful way to get the “bad” but powerful cow cholesterol in - and get started. I do caution people that there’s more to this than eating ice cream: after a few weeks of cholesterol eating and computer certifying, I’d do some hiking on a mountain, and later some alcohol drinking, in an attempt to reset the whiteboard to blank.
I knew oil was involved in the project for about a decade, but until now I hadn’t figured out this last component.
Now I’ve got the theory. The blood flows. The power of the flow varies, and exercise gets it flowing harder, and the oolong tea I overdo pushes the flow farther, like a little stream that surges in the springtime. This stream doesn’t flow in a vacuum, it is what feeds the mind - we all realize this intuitively. Well, here’s the brain - mind connection. That stream flows into, I imagine, a dense mush of dots, the neurons that grow together, very close together, like a pile of eggs, not like the pictures of neurons in text books. This raw mush of potentiality is what the stream, then a pounding river, pushes into, and just like a stream, it makes indentations in the surrounding environment, into which the flow later on just falls. And as the food and oolong tea and exercise and crazy concentration increases, the stream makes more and more inroads into this mush of egg-like neurons.
This flow is, of course, not constant. The flow dies down hours after the sugar and the tea, and eventually slows to a trickle, and doesn’t penetrate as deeply. The absence of the flow in the environment becomes what we experience as tiredness, then sleep. A trickle keeps some of the path open, but some of the path closes up. As this flow withdraws, the neurons, soaked in oils that got past the blood-brain barrier, come back together, the way they were originally, and we are “sleeping like a baby”. While sleeping, as originally, these neurons get sticky with each other. But then what happens the next day? I eat more sugar, drink more tea, get that river raging again, and read enough to get it pushing even farther. The neurons become separated again, but “hold on” to some of the stickiness of sleep, and these connections become the “dendrites” of the neurons.
As the brain pulses in time, the initial mush crushes down, then expands, then crushes down and gets back together, then expands again, and there are patterns in the flow.
Without the fats and cholesterol, the neurons are ships passing in the night, but when you get the brain all gooey with oil, they stay sticky and remember their connections better even under the steady force of the daily flow. I use the oils to form eddies in the structure, and I use these eddies to represent the world around me - or the computer program I’m trying to master - and I find it easy enough to build structures that hold themselves together for days or weeks. I am talking about short term learning here, you can’t remember too much this way or you won’t be able to learn anything new. So every few weeks, I cut the oil, add alcohol to get the neurons back close together, and use intense hiking and biking exercise to clear the palimpsest.
The insight I have now after realizing I really do have hypoglycemia, is that after pushing the river way too far, way too deep, and way too rapid, on a regular basis, then, on a budget, letting it go to draught levels, the surrounding environment of neurons crushes down, the river banks fall in, and it is way harder to think, mental power is reduced dramatically. Then after abstaining for a few weeks, and all of a sudden letting the river pound heavily again in celebration, the neurons light up better than ever, as they have formed many more connections, being so close to each other, and are now experiencing the flowing river again, awakening as the separate neurons.
The philosophers from Plato to Kant to people on the schizophrenia website debate whether reality, as we imagine it in our consensual consciousness, really exists, or whether our human reality is more like shadows on the wall of the cave, distorted representations of something outside the cave beyond the fire, that’s actually going on. I watched the debate and always leaned toward the idea that reality doesn’t exist, we’re living in a dream, but of course there is some objective interaction going on here too, flowing blood and squishing sticky neurons powered by the rich pulsing blood making up our daily experience and burning it into our heads.
It seems we can push this squishy sponge best by pushing a powerful flow through, and making a rhythmic pattern with the ebb and flow. When doctors started putting stints in the veins in the back of the necks of stroke victims, the patients said forget about the strokes, we’re seeing the colors brighter, the meaning sweeter, and the world more beautiful than ever before. My pounding bike ride for a few minutes every morning on the way to work is when I plan my day and my intricate strategies best. And the seventy-vegetable-thirty-bean diet with some oolong tea is a very powerful form of fuel for that boiling river.
I get myself into such a state; high pressure job by day, drink a lot of oolong tea and a high calorie diet, talk fast and click fast on the computer, a computer consultant trying to keep track of it all, then at night a glass of wine and possibly antihistamine to get it all to calm down again, and then there's a heavy hung over feeling in the morning. I tell myself I'd rather be healthy, as I walkout my front door, diagonally across the street and down the neighbor of the best-city-in-america-to-walk-in, (which is even better to walk in), the blood starting to pump through my head in the clear summer morning sunshine under the trees by the little gardens. And in that fresh healthy morning air things seem a little clearer than usual, even than they seemed a few minutes ago in my bedroom while thinking about getting up this morning. It seems that what's really important in people's lives is that they breathe, and stretch, and all this in-depth thought about the nature of things, battling scientific theories against eachother, that we get to doing to one extent or another, is the tendency especially of the schizophrenic mind, to go off dreaming about stuff. I guess it was the article in the New York Science Times that we all drift off and daydream and also have internal communication, some we don't even realize. I always knew that as a technical instructor, I told them I knew I was the only one who knew everything I'd said, because they all had to drift off a little bit from time to time atleast. And what is the schizophrenic mind's tendency but to dream, to drift off into fantasy at the slightest opportunity? So all this dreaming, theorizing, is maybe less important than the business of life, as many will say, numinous jet focused on the working surfaces of health & strength, as it has to be atleast some of the time. But to different degrees we stray from that and start to wonder, and wander in our own dreams, whether alone or together, and to the degree that it is harmless entertainment, it is one thing, but in some crazy people like me it goes much farther, runaway train on oolong tea that hijacks the living being out of sleep into a passionate frenzy of dreamy ideation, kinda like this little letter, and I was just thinking walking down that gardened sidewalk this morning, that the thinking is beside the point. It's the breathing, the stretching, the squeezing, that's important, and the heavy hangover feeling just inhibits that, and I only got that way 'cause I was confused about what was important in the first place yesterday, but then in the clear morning air I figured It out again, so I can start to walk lighter and clearer, as it felt after I turned around and started back home, focused on what's important, but then that only gets to last until I power up the computer and get back online for work and go back to pretending to care about the dreams again.I asked at the beginning what was the world about, what was it made of, what was its significance, where was it supposed to be going, and the answers coming from those that called themselves authorities - parents, teachers, education - were just inadequate, not satisfying. "because I said so" was one of my parent's favorites, and so the interesting little personality disorder here is built on not trusting the authorities to bring me up, having the idea from really early on that they don't know what they're talking about, and spending alot of effort coming up with an alternative to mankind's concept of reality. There are two worlds for me, then, because I have asked mankind what's up with this phenomenon and they came back with nonsense, but they call themselves the authorities - these days I'm threatened with 5150 psychiatric hold or prison, and at next level down with lack of work or denied access to resources - and those authorities, and their insistence on "property rights" and "capitalism", have all the power over the resources I need access to, my food and shelter. So I maintain "consensual reality" for the sake of getting access to resources, then after my 8 to 16 hours a day of that, I see no other reason to keep it up, to believe in gravity, to believe I am an individual separate from the others, separate from anything, to believe that time is appropriate rather than an enemy trying to destroy me or squeeze something out of me, and so for that last part of the day, I'm floridly psychotic, as they say in your world, I've gone to my other world, there's no property rights, it’s all the permanent universal capital, there's no gravity, this is all taking place in a time garden but I've escaped like a tiger from the circus, out of time, at the center of the stars, and I come back to be in the world but not of it, playful in the time garden. It's a beautiful, fulfilling existence, this completely different conception of the phenomenon of my existence, not the explanation the world around me offered. I maintain two because it just makes sense to be like that. It’s irrationality when it comes down to it. Like I told the cop at the door last week who said he was a trained negotiator and wanted to know where he'd made a mistake in his negotiation to make the conversation go in a "direction" he "didn't want it to go", I like to practice what I call "irrationality", so, I told him, there's absolutely nothing you can do. At that point Mr. trained negotiator proceeded to freeze like a deer in the headlights, made only one other comment in my direction, that I may think something was funny but he is actually way more concerned about me, and then ignored me as he searched the kid's room anyway but just quickly, afraid for his partner at the bottom of the stairs assigned to "cover" me during the un-warranted search, as I began to yell "you got one of ours so I think we're gonna take one of yours", so anyway, I learned years ago not to let reason get in the way. One day the young species of humans will put aside their toys, "science" and "reason", and join us in the world of mystery and wonder. I once watched as two strangers had a conversation, one manic and presenting a sort of psychosis, (like me in my posts) and the other, playing your role, just looked on calmly and still, and after the psychotic manic amazing presentation was over, the guy just asked "why?" and the first guy stopped and dropped his head, and the binding spell was broken. So there and then I decided my psychoses were not going to be susceptible to any letter in the alphabet especially the letter "Y". Irrationalist like the movement in 19th century Russia, that's the movement that taught me that the concept of property rights is naive at best, evil at worst. Irrational like the Zen guys in the Zen koans, irrational like the megalomaniacal Germans, of which I am one, who want to rule the world, and go about it however they think they have the best shot. I watched my two year old niece, as she listened attentively to what we read to her and developed an imaginary world in her mind based loosely on what had been presented, and as she was still somewhat isolated from the family and the world by a lack of full language capability, it made sense that she would fill in the details in her own mind with her own invention. I see that each niece and nephew starts out spewing their own reality, and gradually learns which components of their reality get recognition, and which don't, and categorize quickly and easily into "private reality" and "consensual reality", and the socialization process is one of gradually imposing consensual reality down upon private reality, in something of a compromise or integration, and the resulting psychosis becomes what we call the personality. I watch a microcosm of the process over the course of each of my days, as I wake up in the morning spewing my own idealistic reality, and gradually having consensual reality imposed upon me, to whatever extent, and think it is somewhat the same thing, and somewhat common; dreams we all have of potency and prowess gradually come into contact with harsh reality, and we have to "recognize our limitations". Gravity. Time. These are the battles I've chosen, the biggest problems I encountered in the human condition. They are the brick walls I run up against. Then there's the refusal to integrate, on the grounds that we can do better, and this is "irrationalism", not to be mistaken, as may be happening often, with directionless "emotion". Not just emotion inside when you get lost, but a real guide, sometimes better than elsewhere available, especially for a frightened and isolated child, who screams into the night and wakens the demon world, the collective unconscious, which has so much to teach about strength and magic and being alive, that it is sometimes chosen as superior, and as a leader. This is irrationalism, often misunderstood as rudderless, a lost gang of wild colts up against calm cold rationalism. We choose to serve Reason as a master, or not, but it cannot be enforced by the police and military forces around us; it can be gently nudged, suggested with a wink by psychiatrists who say we don't have to suffer, we can be more safe, come back from our ‘Alice in wonderland’ syndrome, back with "the rest of us”. A pack stays together, and holds one eye each, at least, on hard and cold reality, as you'd like to believe in it, purely for the good of the group, including his own welfare, but the other eye, oh, it's looking out there, for the sake of power, and this power pushes up against the weight that bares down upon us all. It seems unfair to refuse a minority the right to stand alone; either just consider them left behind, or out there in front leading the pack; some cultures allocate the role to priests, other cultures allocated that role to shamans, often one percent of the population, and it seems now this culture has allocated the role to the delusions of schizophrenics, irrationalists, knowing as well as my two year old niece which is "real" for man's science, and which is "imaginary", but, I ask you, what of the power of that latter, for our own light to shine out against that which bares down upon us, the warmth, the meaning, the love, the fulfillment, that can come of this hallucination that some call masturbatory? If properly managed can't this be an important part of mankind's mental development? Is it somehow in the rationalists’ interest to halt the advancement of mankind's mind? Because what a crazy idea that is!
Lance Armstrong is the United States’ strongest bike rider, a great American shaman in the news retiring from cycling this week. I remember how I ‘d see his picture on the front page of the New York City Daily News almost every day for a few weeks right about now in the summer, and I’d get out on the bike and work hard, one man victory parade coming in over the 59th street bridge and rocketing downtown, ricocheting from Park to 5th to 7th in the undeclared races with the bike messengers, my former teammates, and back out over the Brooklyn Bridge, or other days it was two hours out on the Metro-North with the bike then shooting across the Hudson Valley to the foothills of the Appalachians where I’d say I was working my way up to the Alps slowly, with the rocky Mountains my next proposed phase of training, and never quite got there, lost in California now forever. Lance works hard, seems practically selfless in his efforts, and so carries on his form a psychosis of mine, “flag of the storm”, - the “storm” of irrationality, on the inside of everything and raining straight up, the storm or freedom thinking itself - like some actors in old movies, Fred Astaire, they also get this psychosis of mine going, it’s like they are not really there the way most of us are, it is like they have succeeded in overcoming themselves completely and plunging themselves into their own hands in order to develop some skill, whether it’s Jim Carrey overacting in the blockbusters or Lance Armstrong shooting up the Pyrenees, and where did they “go” then, after they were overcome? In my story they – the selves, the subjectivities, or consciousnesses, like us – they go inside, they implode, they leave the time garden via the core, like a collapsing star at the end of one phase, collapsing into a compact object and withdrawing from the physical sphere previously surrounding it. They leave the time garden, go back outside time where all matter and energy are one object, un touched by time, and from there the full united will of being can think and make decisions, and then take actions that are in the world but not of it, these unusual characters, not full inhabited subjectivities subject to the storm of winds around them, but escaped circus tigers, escaped through the center, and having left a stuffed tiger behind, the shaman’s empty scarecrow, the tiger gets away with having escaped because everyone thinks he’s still there, indeed giving him awards for his butter oil grace.
And to say my heroes have ‘escaped time’ is to say they escaped the world or “reality” into madness, that other way of being, so unreal, living at the center of a star, submerged fully within madness, outside of time.
Madness is the larger or smaller reserve of subjectivity outside the performing structure. What we celebrate in our heroes is the structure above – how high, how clean, how agile, how empty of madness. But to be that perfect, it has to be more deeply mad, to be able to fly a flag so high, the flag of the inverted thunderstorm or madness, the smashing thunderstorm of dissipation that celebrates the accumulation of time, of sacrifice.
With the people at the mall, there’s the controlled behavior but most also demonstrate some reserve, and speculating on the madness within that reserve, it’s the civilians in the guilded cage, contented more or less by the guilding on their cage, but barely contented, that reserve of madness born out of the frustration from being caged. The more the reserve of madness, and the more pronounced, the less “promising” in the Republic of Learning the candidate, the less-than-wholeheartedness a tatteredness on the flag of the storm, storm of madness, storm of perfection.
There is a TV show I watch every night, in the demon world.
I didn't write the episodes, they play out around me every night.
In the demon world, watching tv is like living a situation, you are there, in 3-d, maybe because you are dreaming at the time, and it is as if you are one of the participants in the show, feeling the pull of the group's anxiety, and trying along with them to work out a solution to whatever is going on. Every night is an adventure. There is a theme song and that's the thing - I jumped up in the middle of the show and woke up for a second and wrote down the theme song, since it was so familiar, and it worked, looking at it the next morning it all comes clear.
Each episode begins with a story of a normal citizen, living a normal life. Then, invariably, something, or a series of things, happens to the main character - a bunch of tragedies in their life. Then, about a quarter of the way into the show, we get the one-line them-song: "next day he dreamed up he saw a man named wea-sel". And then this mysterious character, or pair of characters, show up, and they are undercover demons, from inside the sun, that's the thing, they feel they are part of the sun and shining light in a different way, as stories that so-called "schizophrenic" people see and hear, and dream, and this is the remainder of the episode. We, the undercover demons, shouw up as these imaginary people in the life of the person who suffered tragedy. We tell him weird, enearthly knowledge. Prophesies. "I am a witch, and I dream the wildest dreams - wicked prophesies nobody could interpret..." (new megadeth cd - dave mustaine is an sz leader!) anyway, the person then either goes crazy and gets locked up, or goes on to be a religious leader who glows and seems crazy, and it's all because of the character named "weasel".
Sometimes this forum is like the show. Next day he dreamed up he saw a man named weasel!
I KNOW, it's not really THERE, but.....
it's controlling all the stuff that really IS there!"
"What's 'not there'?"
"the CAVES! I'm so schizophrenic I can read the writing on the surface of the dark matter! It's alive! It started talking to me! It was the pellets - after reading all those recipes, with arsenic and lead and mercury and gold, who knows WHAT was in there - I asked but all I got was "NO TELLIN' WHAT"'s in those pellets, with the glowing eyebrows of a convicted irrationalist. I found a corpse in a mausoleum on a hill, and I put one of the pellets in the corpse's mouth. He got up, twisted his head, bent both his arms, and started rocking them back and forth in sync together, like he was dancing. Seeing the corpse's reaction, I tried a pellet of my own. I was right, life is fusion, and consciousness is the light hitting a surface. Ignore everything, and yet shine the light, and you hit a wall like a cave that the sun shines within. A corky cave, as I found a hole, climbed up through the gooey layers, and tied a rope so I could leave and come back. (Otherwise this was the scene where I leave humanity behind forever in a big flash of light.)"
"And these caves are controlling "everything" somehow?"
"No, not the cave, the WRITING - the writing is ALIVE somehow. I can talk to it, and it's making people do all the crazy things they do, and it's hard to tell why but it doesn't look good... it watches closely as our collective blood rises and falls like a green tidal ocean, and pumps in all kinds of alternating patterns..."
"And you say you can "talk" to the pictures?"
"Well the thing is I realized I've been talking to them all my life, in my nightmares, since I was a kid. These are the monsters, the monsters that chase me, the ones lurking around the corner when all of a sudden the lights don't work, the ones with the hurricane-like wind in-sucking force, that rearrange the genome when they catch you, and that can sometimes be talked out of an attack, but will sometimes just kill and kill, and they give off their own multicolored light. And because of that light, they've always stood out from "reality", even when they sneak in and try to create a "situation". But now I see them on the cave and I know that's not THIS world, but because of where I see it and what I see it doing, I'm starting to react. To be still. Because of it. Isn't that crazy?"
psychotic stillness, or catatonic sz? don't just STAND there ?!?!?!
