ego

September 30, 2013

The Real World: Attending To The Here And Now

This is the typical human problem. The object of dread may not be an operation in the immediate future. It may be the problem of next month’s rent, of a threatened war or social disaster, of being able to save enough for old age, or of death at the last. This ‘spoiler of the present’ may not even be a future dread. It may be something out of the past, some memory of an injury, some crime or indiscretion, which haunts the present with a sense of resentment or guilt. The power of memories and expectations is such that for most human beings the past and the future are not as real, but more real than the present. The present cannot be lived happily unless the past has been ‘cleared up’ and the future is bright with promise.

There can be no doubt that the power to remember and predict, to make an ordered sequence out of a helter-skelter chaos of disconnected moments, is a wonderful development of sensitivity. In a way it is the achievement of the human brain, giving man the most extraordinary powers of survival and adaptation to life. But the way in which we generally use this power is apt to destroy all its advantages. For it is of little use to us to be able to remember and predict if it makes us unable to live fully in the present.

What is the use of planning to be able to eat next week unless I can really enjoy the meals when they come? If I am so busy planning how to eat next week that I cannot fully enjoy what I am eating now, I will be in the same predicament when next week’s meals become ‘now.’

If my happiness at this moment consists largely in reviewing happy memories and expectations, I am but dimly aware of this present. I shall still be dimly aware of the present when the good things that I have been expecting come to pass. For I shall have formed a habit of looking behind and ahead, making it difficult for me to attend to the here and now. If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.

~Alan Watts

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September 23, 2013

Psychotic Episode (I Have No Ego)

I have no ego. . . my psychotic episode.

The schizophrenic experiences a stunning barrage of continuous, horrifying symptoms: auditory hallucinations, delusions, ideas of reference, paranoia, etc. The “indescribable severe torture” is unrelenting and can go on except during sometimes restless sleep, at whichtime the symptoms are even active when one becomes conscious at all. This experience is so overwhelming it is beyond the imagination. It cannot be conceived of intellectually. By its very nature it in fact necessitates the concept of religion in order to relate to it at all. This continuous experience of psychotic symptoms can be viewed as “spiritual exercises in perfection”. The effect on the schizophrenic is similar to that of monks when practicing their rituals in monasteries. When these spirited exercises become a lifestyle for the schizophrenic (lasting 8-10 years) with no real evidence given to the schizophrenic that he will ever recover, a fascinating thing happens to the psyche of that schizophrenic—he loses the perspective of “ego”. Ego consists of all his identifying factors in the world: his age, sex, race, religious affiliation or lack thereof, education level, social class, political affiliations, nationality, etc. He begins to see his environment with the eyes of a newborn, without the bias or prejudices, preconditions of his particular circumstances. It can be seen as a sort of continuous baptism by fire, a kind of purification, enabling him to see reality for what it is in actuality, rather than being viewed through the preconceptions of his individual mental, emotional, and behavioural repertoire instilled in him from birth. The schizophrenic in this condition is able in his interior to walk around in someone else’s moccasins with perfection. This can be seen as loving your neighbour as you love yourself, perfectly. I do not believe it is a condition that can be acquired by a “normal” individual by any method, because the horror of the symptoms of schizophrenia are unduplicable by man. (Religious persons would call this condition repentance for all one’s sins, e.g. “perfect repentance”.) ~Source

Recommended readings on the absence of ego in the SchizoAffective (schizophrenic) mind:

Features:
“What You Want”, “Bent and Broken” and “The Complex” by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com
“Tech-No-Logic” by In[Perfektion] off album Perfekt Chaos, freemusicarchive.org/music/InPerfektion/
“In Suspense” by Psychadelik Pedestrian off album Nocturnia, freemusicarchive.org/music/Psychadelik_Pedestrian/
“Eerie Horror Scene”, “Strange Days”, “Hell”, “Spooky Water Drops” and “Pterodactyl Scream” sound FX recorded by Mike Koenig, SoundBible.com

*Image Credit (used with permission through CC license):
“walking on the razor’s edge in the underground train world : manhattan (2007)” by torbakhopper

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September 14, 2013 Video

Terence Mckenna – Schizophrenic or Shamanic?

“Schizophrenia is just a catch-all term for forms of mental behavior that we don’t understand. . . . The typical schizophrenic lives in a world of twilight imagining; marginal to his society, incapable of holding a regular job, these people live on the fringes content to drift in their own self-created value system.” ~Terence McKenna

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September 13, 2013

A Look At The Absence Of Ego In The SchizoAffective Mind

DaydreamerThere is a point at which one becomes aware of deeper truths present in what one perceives as reality, and although scientific-management and the other social experiments exacted upon the world by those who seek to create come kind of rational human being, a superman from the nascent gene pool of human nature, attempted to insert in SchizoAffectives (although at birth it could not have been known that these particular individuals—true individuals and not the rugged individuals of whom Watts speaks—would resist this insertion by becoming SchizoAffective [or Autistic or even Schizophrenic]) this rational thinking process, the mechanism of the system, the SchizoAffective resisted, with his very life.

When a human being is born, he has no inherent thinking process; he has only sensation and awareness of those childhood-schizophrenia-symptomssensations. He lives only in the Now, he has no extrinsic concept of time, he has no ability of mind to predict behavior. At infancy, the human being is at his most mindful: all mind and no thought. All awareness and the glimmers of consciousness from his first intake of oxygen (and perhaps before). Through systematized familial relationships (whether that familial relationship be biological or institutional or on the street is irrelevant, for the etymological origins of the term family stem from the word “familiar”. Family is that which one is most familiar. That which one encounters and engages every day) a process of thought begins to supplant or replace that natural mindfulness and awareness. In Western Culture, rather than raise the levels of consciousness begins to break them down, to disintegrate them. Not necessarily out of meanness or malice or even evil, but out of efficiency and necessity.

*aLiCe iN WoNdErLaNd-SynDroMe*To disintegrate the consciousness and narrow the awareness makes for easier rearing of a child in an already systematized culture and society. Thus begins the Social Game. Without knowing the effects of such play, the familial institutions begin to prepare the infant for a childhood of systemized living: schooling, social interactions (rather than friendships), social communication (the forming of consciousness and awareness and sensations into rational, logical, linear thought, and thought into rational, linear, logical language). A schizophrenic meanders in speech, seemingly illogical, lacking linear capacity, therefore difficult to follow or comprehend. One thing does not naturally lead to another. It takes a path untrodden through the wooded fabric of his still intact mindfulness, awareness, and consciousness. Like grasping Alice’s hand and wandering thought Wonderland for a spell, visiting bits and pieces of nonsense. Like looking at the first layer of a highly iterated fractal. The SchizoAffective mind works (not processes) like layers of fractal chaos. It tessellates. Only making any kind of sense when the full pattern of the fractal can be seen from a higher level of magnification. As such, systematized society and its rules are traumatic to the schizoid mind.

Samsara + NirvanaThe schizoid mind is not fragmented by years of systematic abuse (that is AB-use, used badly or wrongfully) despite his speech appearing so to systematized society. His depth of emotion remains wide along the spectrum, not divided into sad/happiness, anger/contentment, crying/laughter. It retains its seemingly inexplicable nonduality and laterality: Cry-laughing-anger-smiling-sorrow-contentment-pensivity-stillness, etc. In effect, a chaos of emotion and mental associations that is like a quantum code. Every iterant absorbs the previous and results in a new iteration, which then absorbs, and so forth. Iterations can be understood to mean manners of speech, sentence structure, sensation, awareness, of environment, empathy of others’ emotions, words and meanings of others in their environment, and so on. Although, not an algorithm naturally, the mind of a SchizoAffective (and schizophrenic) behaves like one, more like IBM’s Watson, or higher level AI. The schizoid mind learns in this manner as well. Thus, he is a difficult addition to the social consciousness. He does not fit. He becomes the discordant (and contrariwise, society appears discordant to the schizoid mind; the affect to the schizo of SchizoAffective). Quite plainly, the social game can and does drive the schizoid mind into madness; hence his defense mechanism of dissociation, or isolation, or hallucination, or paranoia, or delusions.

Schizophrenia bisThe schizoid mind experiences intrinsically the external world like a person on LSD. His experience is psychedelic always, his awareness is synesthetic, his empathy almost like telepathy. What then of the socially constructed ego? Why is the schizo without one? Even if he were born with an ego, he would discard it out of preservation for his consciousness. The ego does not fit into the schizoid mind’s psychedelic experience and perception of the world about him. He MUST rid his mind of the ego; else, he shall not survive the continual and constant onslaught of the social order. In other words, the riddance and absence of the ego is a self-defense mechanism in the schizo.

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC license)–
“*aLiCe iN WoNdErLaNd-SynDroMe*” by caroline barberis
“treatment-of-schizophrenia-01″ by Life Mental Health
“childhood-schizophrenia-symptoms” by Life Mental Health
“Schizophrenia bis” by Gwendal Uguen
“Daydreamer” by H.Kopp Delaney
“Samsara + Nirvana” by H.Kopp Delaney

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September 13, 2013 Quote

QOTD Alan Watts

“The ego is nothing more than the focus of conscious attention. It’s like the radar on a ship, a trouble-shooter, to see is there anything in the way, and conscious attention is a designed function in the brain to scan the environment, like a radar does, and note for any trouble-making changes. But, if you define yourself as your trouble-shooter, as your ego, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety. The moment we cease to identify with the ego, and become aware that we are the whole organism…then the ego becomes servant, not master.” ~Alan Watts

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August 19, 2013

When the Edge Is Near: An Outline of a Psychotic Episode

It is so easy it seems for my mind to be wrecked, thereby, wrecking perhaps an entire day, or an indeterminate number of hours of long, prolonged moments trying to piece my mind together. And people (the egos of Society) always say I am gaming or manipulating or faking or stupid or some other such nonsense to explain away the means in which my mind attempts to recover from its shattered state.

I would rather not have this happen; I would rather not be affected at any moment, like being stalked by a monster wearing your own face. Like being stalked by your best friend, whom only a second ago was still your best friend and not the lumbering, snarling, shrieking, screeching ogre stalking you. Knowing where all your favorite hiding spots are; using every secret shared; every years-discovered nuance; every shift, pitch and frequency of your voice; knowing with precision every line of your face and using that knowledge as weapons against you. Because it is your own mind that stalks, at any moment turning against you. Turning in on you, twisting and distorting an already upside down world, like an inverted stream of consciousness. A psychic whisperer so can use truth like lies.

A psychotic episode comes on like a holocaust, save there is no warning, no foreshadowing, no skepticism, no ‘wondering If’ before hand, nothing to have taken heed. Just at one second, friend, and the very next before the clock ticks completely over, monster. And it is worse when the break must be kept quiet else it may disturb others (egos in society) and cause further problems, which feeds back in on the break, pushing the mind farther towards the cliff. Suicidal ideations may be pondered and masticated in the mind, but the actual decision comes in an impulse, an instant. Because no one knows where the edge of the cliff is, so one does not know at which point one will fall, as such, suicide is an accidental decision. “It” just becomes too much and there is a knife nearby so you pick that up and rake it across your throat, without thought, without feeling other than desperation as if you are locked inside a 5 dimensional tessellated Schrödinger box. You just want. It. To. Stop. You want your mind to stop.

The misconception is that there are racing thoughts and voices forcing and compelling you. This is a bit of an oversimplification. There are no thoughts; thoughts at that point are not raw enough to embody such pain. Words cannot contain such concepts of horror. The abstraction of that kind of state of mind tessellates fractals, like a code you cannot crack, because it multiplies exponentially a new number to code with each attempt at cracking it. As if a hacker were trying to crack a password, but with each attack, the password randomly changed and used the hacker’s effort as its algorithm. Like tessellating a fractal into splitting dimensions. So, thought, the idea is like a joke. Thought could not possibly exist in this level of hell. Others assume there are only basic emotions, limbic system responses, fight or flight. This is another misconception. We are talking about a unique, personal, intimate, sensual, perfect, precise, tailored mental hell that is boundless and that changes and evolves faster than any “cure” or attempt to heal the gaping wound that SHINES its pain is so clean and perfect, like the most priceless of diamonds. We are talking about a spectrum of emotions. If you should see one registered on the face, then THAT is an external sign of an emergency, because that means that the internal hell is leaking out to the external, amalgamated reality, and that means the edge is near.

I wish I were at a place such that when these moments strike me I can immediately start making a song, like capturing its photography, like freezing light. Sometimes, that helps to get out the daemon. But when such avenues are ripped from you for reasons of social aptitude, it only pushes the edge closer. It only makes you wish for the edge. To need it, want it, love it. So much so that death becomes like a private joke within you. Only the laughter never ends.

No, not so much a spectrum of emotions, but a prism, so many occurring simultaneously that you cannot name them all. That you cannot possibly identify them, they are so subtle, so loud. To say that one is “sad” or “depressed” in this state is not only synonymous with sacrilege (in its wrongness) but also absurd to think that it was that easily named, that easily quantified. Madness has no hold here. Madness has come and fled before something far superior and far, far more terrifying. Satan has had his fill, Satan flees in terror, and this is Satan’s hell. His horror turned to reflect his un-ego.

That is what it is like to be in the throes of a psychotic episode.

August 16, 2013 Status

The Sensation of Awareness

I became vividly aware of the fact that what I call shapes, colors, and textures in the outside world are also states of my nervous system, that is, of me. In knowing them I also know myself. But the strange part of this apparent sensation of my own senses was that I did not appear to be inspecting them from outside or from a distance, as if they were objects. I can only say that the awareness of grain or structure in the senses seemed to be awareness of awareness, of myself from inside myself. Because of this, it followed that the distance or separation between myself and my senses, on the one hand, and the external world, on the other, seemed to disappear. I was no longer a detached observer, a little man inside my own head, having sensations. I was the sensations, so much so that there was nothing left of me, the observing ego, except the series of sensations which happened – not to me, but just happened – moment by moment, one after another.

To become the sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and release. For it implies that experience is not something in which one is trapped or by which one is pushed around, or against which one must fight. The conventional duality of subject and object, knower and known, feeler and feeling, is changed into a polarity: the knower and the known become the poles, terms, or phases of a single event which happens, not to me or from me, but to itself.*

A Little Pool of Rain*by Alan Watts

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August 10, 2013 Quote

QOTD Alan Watts

What do you mean by you? If you are the universe, in the greater context that question is irrelevant. You never were born and you never will die, because what there is, is you. That should be absolutely obvious, but from an egoistic perspective it is not obvious at all. It should be the simplest thing in the world to understand that you, the ‘I’, is what has always been going on and always will go on, coming and going forever and ever.

an anamorphic polymorphic ego feeding an anamorphic polymorphic ego in an anamorphic polymorphic worldWe have been bamboozled, however, by religionists, by politicians, by our fathers and mothers, by all sorts of people who tell us, ‘You’re not it.’ And we believed it.

So, to put it in a negative way, you can’t do anything to change yourselves, to become better, toThe Transcendence of the Ego become happier, to become more serene, to become more mystical. But if I say you can’t do a damn thing, you can understand this negative statement in a positive way. What I am really saying is that you don’t need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all. ~Alan Watts.

a story of lifes and thread (the life thread)*Image Credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“The Transcendence of the Ego” by Derrick Tyson
“man-eat-man meanwhile some egos watch the scene” by Tommaso Meli
“a story of lifes and lines (the life thread)” by Tommaso Meli
“an anamorphic polymorphic ego feeding an anamorphic polymorphic ego in an anamorphic polymorphic world” by Tommaso Meli

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August 10, 2013

What Is ‘You’?

The real you is not a puppet which life pushes around; the real, deep down you is the whole universe. ~Alan Watts

From The Mind Of A Schizo, Affected

I am always thinking about what people are doing, so does that mean, I always know what people are doing? But, it seems as if they are always thinking about what they are supposed to do (what someone else told them to do). I even think about what I am doing. Why do I do that? So, if people are only thinking about what they are supposed to do or what someone else tells them to do, does that mean people can never think for themselves? If you are always thinking about what you are supposed to do, that someone told you to do, how can you ever think of anything else? If you cannot think of anything else, then how can you think for yourself?

They are only ever thinking about what someone else told them to do. Someone outside of themselves. Therefore, not you. So, you never think about yourself, and so never think for yourself. If you never think about yourself, and for yourself, then you are only think about something other than yourself, and what it (the socially constructed ego) tells you to do. You listen to some Thing else. When you listen to some Thing else, you react all the time to sounds. The sound of the alarm bell, the sound of the phone ringing, the sound of the television, the “sound” of the internet, the sound of voices over radio; all the time synthesised, mechanized sounds. The sounds of the System in which you reside. The System, although illusory, that you listen to, and let tell you what to do. These sounds become normal, because you have always heard them. Ever since you were born, you were born into this world of sound. And then you were enrolled into a school,
which told you what those sounds are. And you listened. You did not question. You let it tell you what to do. You do not think for yourself. If you do not think for yourself, do you know what ‘You’ is, or even if ‘You’ are? If you do not know that, how do you know what to do, unless a sound or someone (an other human with imaginary authority) tells you? If you do not know what to do, you are listening to what someone else is telling you what to do. Because even after you are out of school and you are all grown up, you are still listening to the sounds. If you are listening to the sounds, ‘You’are being told what to do and ‘You’ (that ego) cannot be real.

Anamorphic Polymorphic Sticker ...well it doesn't even exist*Image Credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“Digital Ego: Social and Legal Aspects of Virtual Identity” by Kevin Lim
“Anamorphic Polymorphic Sticker …well it doesn’t even exist” by Tommaso Meli

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