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 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...