Schizoaffective

by Jay Paul   What am I going to make of being schizoaffective? Certainly, I don't choose to wallow in self pity and self negation, mirroring the greater society's poor opinion of people in my category. I want to contribute what I can; specifically, I would like to contribute what I can from the openings provided me by my very schizoaffective. Yes, schizoaffective is horrible and horrifying in many ways. But it also reveals aspects of experience that would otherwise stay hidden. It is a view from terrific loss, when seen from the conventional notion of success, but it is a unique view that offers a lot to humanity. Schizoaffective has taken so much from me. I had a respectable middle-class career, and that is no longer. In fact, my career, prep school teacher, was not even the career I had trained for. I'm a Ph.D. in English, and when I went to grad school in the late 80's, professorship looked like a promising career. The G.I. Bill Ph.D.'s were going to be retiring...

by Jay Paul  While meditating, I, like most meditators, frequently find myself lost in thought, perhaps thinking about an old girlfriend or about all the chores I have to do later in the day or my fear that my mental health symptoms will reappear. As I catch myself thinking like this, I most often simultaneously notice my breath. I feel myself inhale and exhale, all the way in and all the way out. My profound sense when this happens is that breath is much more grounded and connected to experience than is thought. What follows are some observations on breath and thought based on this experience and sense. Breath is wiser than thought. Thought flits and flecks, comes and goes, rarely landing in a solid manner. Even the greatest of thoughts, such as Isaac Newton conceptualizing gravity when the apple hit him on the head, are superficial compared to a single breath. Respiration connects us humans to the rest of nature, to the way bats and rats and lions breathe. It connects us, in its ...

by Jay Paul Estrangement is neither good nor bad. It is a position I find myself in many times a day. It occurs when I need to step out of my most intimate involvements with people and things, to see as a stranger, one who is not so involved. I do this to understand conceptually what is going on. When I am clear, I go back into the involvements, having reoriented myself. This is the role of conceptualization: to solve estrangement and allow me back into my involvements, to help me be intimate in my world once again.                    When I am driving, I usually do not rely on concepts. Oh, I rely on training and experience, but these have become habituated into my very muscles, well below the level of conceptualization. I don’t  think   when I drive, unless I have to. When driving I make sense of little around me. Other cars are blurs of color, as are pedestrians. Sounds come from them, too. Not thought, but habituation marks...

Meditation is in vogue. Various people representing divergent interests frequently tout its health benefits. I have no doubt that there are benefits to meditation, but that is not why I do it. At this point, I feel I do it for the same reason I breathe: it is part of my make-up and the way I am in the world. I meditate frequently: twice a day, 50 minutes a session. That's 100 minutes a day on my chair. The type of meditation I do is called "shikantaza" and is based in Zen. I simply sit quietly, and when a thought or feeling comes up, I notice it, acknowledge it, and let it go. Sometimes, of course, I get caught in my thoughts and daydream for a while. When I notice I am doing this, again, I acknowledge it and get back to just sitting, noticing thoughts, and letting them go. I have meditated off and on my whole adult life, but I only got truly serious about it in early 2019. Soon, I was meditating twice a day for 40 minutes a sitting. I became quite devoted to meditation a...

As I get older, I dread winter more each year. I am now 55, and it all comes down to one big worry: slipping and falling on the ice. I have visions of myself cracking a hip or twisting an ankle. I sometimes even worry about hitting my head.  The strange thing is, it's been years since I slipped and fell on the ice. I remember once when I was in my early 30s, I was walking to the bus stop to go to work, and a thin layer of snow covered a slick spot on the sidewalk. My legs flew right out from under me, and I landed on my back, the wind knocked out of me. But in the subsequent years, I didn't worry about slipping and hurting myself as much as I do now. Getting older has made me feel my vulnerability more.  I have always been vulnerable. I could have cracked my head open when fell onto my back. But I didn't feel this vulnerability as I do now. When I was younger, I just assumed nothing bad would happen; I assumed away many of the dangers of this world. I imagine most of us do....

by Jay Paul   finding myself to also be a great raven soaring over a rolling field of long grass and wildflowers and a few isolated trees with great canopies a family walked on a trail mown through the grass the father a young bearded man pushed a baby buggy and the pretty young mother walked along   suddenly realizing that man was me 25 years ago with my now adult daughter and ex-wife in a scene that never happened but is representative nonetheless because we all did love each other in our limited and limiting ways and things did seem open to vast possibilities   then seeing myself as raven floating in the sky and realizing I am also a constellation of a great bear high in the sky behind the blue veil of sky I am a bear constellation watching a soaring raven who is also me watching a man who was me a quarter century ago   this could go on who is watching the great bear perhaps the moon there is no end to the multiplication of selves across space and time   and ...

 After last week's post on the nature of the interrelatedness of what we call self with other people and even things, I got to thinking about memory. What is it, and how does it work? In particular, I was interested in how memory interacts with the present moment. Before addressing memory, we need to establish what the present moment is. This is not easy. The present moment seems to be composed, for the most part, of anticipations, of ways of organizing toward a conceptualized and hoped-for near term future. For instance, if I am having a genial conversation with a friend, I focus on how to keep the geniality and friendliness flowing. I anticipate conversation topics that may amuse or entertain my friend. I anticipate topics that may comfort her. I pay attention to how what I am saying impacts her so that I can adjust, if needed, my tenor and emphasis. This is all toward keeping the conversation flowing into the future. I can sense her doing something similar in response to me. The...

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...