Oh, Those Poor Neurotypicals and Their Delusions

by Jay Paul

 [Note: A "neurotypical" is a person without a condition such as developmental issues (autism, etc.), cognitive issues, or what is typically called "mental health issues"—a so-called "normal" person.  Neurodiverse people—people with conditions such as autism or schizophrenia—add valuable insights and thinking to human culture that derive specifically from their conditions.]

Oh, those poor neurotypicals and their delusions!

Thing is about neurotypicals, they don't know they're deluded. We schizophrenics often realize we are, and guard against it. For instance, neurotypicals typically think the sky can't fall simply because their culture tells them so. But it can. Chicken Little was right. Maybe Chicken Little was schizophrenic. At any rate, I say the sky can fall because sometimes the sky is clouds. Clouds fall as rain. Hence, the sky falls. What's more, in the 70s Skylab fell out of the sky. Some may say that there is a difference between something falling from the sky and the sky itself actually falling, but would you be splitting those hairs if Skylab fell on your noggin? The same is true with meteorites. I wouldn't want one of those to hit my noggin! So, it is a delusion to think the sky doesn't fall. Yet, neurotypicals insist on it. Just because they have been so told.

Oh, those poor neurotypicals and their delusions! They think time is some sort of absolute, but we schizophrenics sometimes have temporal delusions of a psychiatric nature, where the passage of time feels different from the way it conventionally does. But the conventional passage of time, if it is taken to be an absolute, is a delusion, too. A photon travels at the speed of light. At such high speeds, according to Einstein, time slows completely: there is no time. What's more real, a photon's sense of time or the conventional human one? There is no reason to assume human conventions reflect any absolute reality. Time is made up, a construction, and those who think it is absolute are deluded. Most neurotypicals I know clearly believe it is an absolute. Therefore, they are deluded. They just don't know it, but we schizophrenics do.

Oh, those poor neurotypicals and their delusions. They often think they control their own selves and much of their fate. This is easily shown to be false. Google algorithms know all kinds of information about people and their motivations—of which the people are completely unaware. Neurotypicals are deluded about how much they control their own lives. We schizophrenics know psychiatric delusions or voices or hallucinations could, at any point, take over how we see the world. We don't fool ourselves into thinking our fate is even close to solely in our hands. We know, from experience, we have extremely limited control over our lives. Neurotypicals are more deluded than we are.

The difference between our delusions and those of neurotypicals is that neurotypical delusions are conventionally accepted and ours are not. That's the only difference. Neurotypicals believe a whole host of lies—but they are safe lies. And nobody challenges them, so they keep on lying to themselves.

New flash! Since neurotypicals are clearly deluded, often going about their lives and basing their behavior on clearly erroneous premises, perhaps we should give them a label. Hm. What would be a good one? Oh, I know. Let's call them ill.

Some neurotypicals are leery of us schizophrenics, thinking we're weird and have strange ideas and so on. I think neurotypicals have strange ideas about the sky not falling, time being absolute, how much control they exert over their own lives, and so on. And they're crazy to be so afraid of us as to not want to hang out. Who in their right mind wouldn't want to hang with such floridly imaginative people? We're a kick.

Oh, those poor neurotypicals, they're so deluded. They actually think there's a hard line between life and death, that after death you are absolutely gone from this realm, although you may "live" in another realm such as heaven or hell. This is so clearly untrue. Some schizophrenics have psychiatric delusions that they are dead—simply a walking corpse. Their "delusion" is more accurate than the neurotypical belief, with their assumption of a hard and fast distinction between life and death. We are walking and talking corpses on some levels. The outer layers of skin are formed of dead cells. It they weren't, touch would be too raw. We also need dead cells to see and hear. We perceive in and through death.

What's more, to survive, we ingest death, in the form of food. Life can only exist because of the constant interplay and interpenetration with death.

The line between death and life is delusory in another way, too. Life/death is constant energy transformations. We grow up, and as we do, our bodies transform, shedding cells and adding others, just as our consciousnesses constantly reshuffle, rearrange, and completely reform memories according to the needs of the present moment. Nothing is still, and nothing remains long.

The same happens as we grow old. The same happens as we grow toward and through death. I say this because physicists tell us matter is mostly empty space composed of various forces acting on point particles. These forces vibrate and pulse. They seem vibrant to me. Indeed, they seem like another form of life.

When I hear and see matter, I sometimes sense this vibrancy. Obviously, I don't sense it at the microscopic level, but something tells me matter is vibrantly alive in its own way. If this is true, the transformation from life to death is just another energy exchange, not different in kind from other exchanges, such as growing up and growing old. As stated earlier, we just keep growing, right through death and beyond. In this way, death, considered absolutely, is delusion. We merely pass from form to form, as we have our entire life, as we leave behind biological cells and forms of consciousness in favor of new ones. Death is just one step along the way on an endless and, often, wonderful journey.

If course, I mourn my loved ones when they die. I miss them terribly, and wish they could be with me. But this is based on my delusions about death. Yes, in spite of what I have said in this essay, I hold profound delusions about death. This is because the intellectual exposure of a delusion does not make it go away. It often remains on various emotional and existential levels. This is because intellection is extremely shallow, and people are very deep, with roots stretching way out into culture and the biosphere. I am emotionally and profoundly attached to my delusion about death, and this attachment is not going away any time soon.

But I take comfort to know that when I breathe, I take in vibrant particles that were once part of my loved ones, and that they, eventually, course through my blood. I take comfort in knowing that the soles of my feet, the soles, walk on floors and earth that contain matter once associated with them. I am, in this way, in contact with them. "Death" is a mere fragile line neurotypicals have drawn in the sand, and they pretend it conforms to some joint of nature. But over the sand, the wind blows.

"Death, thou shalt die."   —John Donne