Schizoaffective

  A friend of mine recently asked me what a post on this blog had to do with schizoaffective. The honest answer was, "Not much." What I am trying to present here on this blog is the full panoply of my thinking and feeling so that I am not reduced merely to being a man with a diagnosis, and to show some of the rich possibilities of a schizoaffective life. In two weeks, I will again address mental health directly. On April 22 I will post on "Mental Illness and the Myth of Violence" and in early May I will post on how happy I have been lately, to counter the stereotype that we with diagnoses are all miserable. This post today has little to do with schizoaffective, at least on the surface, and a lot to do with esoteric matters concerning Soto Zen. However, it addresses interesting issues about the relation of language to conception, perception, truth, and so on. So I assume it will be of interest to some of you. I recently wrote it for a Zen group I am a part of. It is ...

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...

 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...