Schizoaffective

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 ...

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...

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...

 Strange insights can come up when you meditate, and I meditate a fair amount: 50 minutes twice a day. Over the last four or five months, a series of insights has revealed to me that I, and probably all people, hold deep, subconscious beliefs that our conscious self would never agree with. For instance, I was recently sitting when I heard some people talking in the parking lot outside my apartment windows. These people talk out there a lot. It hit me quite suddenly that "this is my life, to sit in this apartment overhearing the same people talking in the parking lot." It washed over me that this here, now existence is all I have. Even if I moved from this apartment, my life would not be substantively different. I would just overhear different people outside my apartment. The insight continued. I realized in this flash that I harbored a fundamental belief/feeling/hope that was quite delusional. I believed that somehow, somewhere, my problems would be solved and I would live in...

by Jay Paul Last week on this blog, I gave a rundown of what has been ailing me for the past five weeks—namely, wooziness. We still don't know what was causing it. A celiacs test came up negative. But in the course of investigating it, we found that my prolactin levels were twice as high as they should be. Prolactin is the hormone that in women causes them to lactate when pregnant. Risperidone, which I was on a low dose of, can cause prolactin build up because of its effect on the pituitary gland. So I am now off risperidone and on a low dose of olanzapine. Olanzapine causes you to gain weight more so than other antipsychotics. I have had problems with that for the last 25 years. I have recently been losing weight. So far, I am two days into the olanzapine, and I have lost some weight. My strategy is to eat set amounts only at mealtimes and not eat according to hunger. This is not easy. We'll see if I succeed. Two things concern me: olanzapine can raise prolactin as well, altho...

by Jay Paul On about June 14, 2020 this schizoaffective man changed for the better. It was a long time coming. The story begins over a year earlier.             One night in February of 2019 I was having trouble sleeping. I decided to meditate. I hadn’t done it in a long time. Until 2011, I was active at a Soto Zen center and meditated regularly. But severe difficulties intervened (see the July 16, 2020 post) and I got away from it. That night, the meditation got me back to sleep, and when I awakened, I realized how much I missed doing it. I did it again. I have meditated almost every day since then. I started regularly attending the Zen center. By the fall, I was meditating twice a day for 40 minutes each time. I also attended a two-day sesshin at the Zen center, which is essentially a meditation retreat.             The type of meditation I do is quite simple. I sit ...