Schizoaffective

When I go looking for my self, my own personal "I," all my own, I keep finding other people. For instance, I am right this instant sitting in front of a computer typing in this blog post. Why can I do this? Why, because I can type. Why can I type? I can type because about 40 years ago in a business class in high school Mr. Moran taught me to type.  So who is typing this? me or Mr. Moran? or both of us? I am not sure of the answer to this question. Certainly, my fingertips are making contact with the keys. So on the surface, I am typing. But this typing is wholly dependent on my having learned how to type, which is Mr. Moran's doing—in that strange windowless room with 35 other students banging away on manual typewriters. I went looking for my self and found Mr. Moran and my fellow typing students. And what am I typing? I'm typing words. And where do the words come from? I don't remember my first words, but I imagine I spoke them to my parents. I assume I learned l...

by Jay Paul water in human form fluid in the fingers in the toes in the toenails and hair water in the soles of the feet   water tends toward the lowest spot all effort merely a twitch on the way down   water in the form of a blade of grass reaching for the sun itself water too   the sun tends down as does the grass as do humans because all is water finding the lowest available place   water joins the two ponds that had been separated by a tended path human effort twitches and stagnates a road is flooded   the water table is up in this part of earth because of more precipitation because of climate change human effort twitches and spasms can only divert the inevitable  tendency of water   the sun keeps drenching us with its water   there is no beginning there is no ending there is no birth there is no death in water   warming ice drips into the pond beneath water in the form of a leaf twists and tumbles down in air   consciousness is the ...

by Jay Paul   The last two weeks on this blog I have discussed visions that I have when I lay down on my living room floor and follow the path of an initiatory image. Strange things happen in these visions, which are like waking dreams. Prepare yourself for what I'm about to say. In some of them, I have even been eaten by giants, traveled through their intestines, and come out alive on the other end. Interestingly, some biologists believe that fish came to populate isolated mountain lakes in a similar manner: eggs survived being eaten by waterfowl who then left the eggs in those lakes when defecating. Visions such as this one have caused me to reflect on death and immortality. I have also been helped by reading Thich Nhat Hanh on "interbeing," especially in his discussion of The Heart Sutra . I have come to believe in a kind of immortality that does not invoke a spiritual realm of any sort—no heaven, no hell, no reincarnation. I want to think through what death is by atte...

  by Jay Paul Last week on this blog I distinguished between psychiatric hallucinations and visions. The former entail a confusion between what the hallucinator sees or hears and what is commonly taken to be reality. For instance, I once hallucinated that I could converse with people who were reading my thoughts through the intermediary of a medical device I believed was put in my head during a diagnostic test. I believed I was really  communicating with people. I was not. I was making it all up. A vision, on the other hand, does recognize the bounds between what is considered conventionally real and the actions in the vision. A visionary can end the vision at any time by focusing elsewhere;  hallucinators cannot get away from their pictures or sounds because they believe them to be reality. To do so would, in the hallucinator's mind, be the same as trying to get away from gravity. On the other hand, visionaries know that their visions take place in an alternate reality f...

Can we include a number of central biblical figures, including Christ, among the severely mentally ill? Three psychiatrists in their article “ The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered ”   argue that Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and St. Paul all exhibited what we would now call psychosis. As just one example, Moses reported seeing and hearing God in the form of a burning bush. These psychiatrists have a point. If someone told a psychiatrist today that they saw and heard God in a burning bush, he or she would be on their way to a diagnosis. For a couple years, these psychiatrists had me convinced. I thought there was some sort of link between schizophrenia and religion. I still do, but I doubt these figures in the Bible had what we now call psychosis. Rather, I think they had visions, and there’s a difference. I know because I have had both psychosis and visions. Based on my personal experience, they are very different. Today, I believe that when Moses saw and h...