September 16, 2013

What is Schizophrenia?

“A good question, with no simple, short, or straightforward answer, since each sufferer is unique and schizophrenia is a complex phenomenon. In general, schizophrenia is an extremely introverted, psychospiritual mode of perception, or way of relating to the world; or state of consciousness involving (what I have called) ‘extreme empathy’. This simultaneous blessing and curse is due to a fragile, fragmented, dead, or lost ego, or conscious personality structure. The normal, ego-enforced boundaries between the self and the world have broken down, such that schizophrenia sufferers – for better and worse – find themselves identifying with everything within their scope of perception. It is because of this ego loss, or ‘dis-integration’ that psychosis, shamanic initiation and mystical experience are so inextricably bound. The schizophrenic person may appear to family, friends and doctors to be lacking in emotion, but in reality is in a state of intense…

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September 11, 2013

A Schizophrenic Way Of Saying Things

I’d like to go home

but I have to go to the bathroom

and they won’t let me see the stars

I’ll give you a doughnut

because I haven’t got anymore

toilet paper

I want to go to Disneyhome

but Mickey’s dead

God looks at me from the sky

I can see the eyes of

Atlantis

Shut up! she said

I told her somebody stole

my bananas

the walls are missing

where did my feet go

I can smell your armpits, Mister

The hallway’s flooded with blood

because somebody farted

now the toilet smells like

home

When I comb my hair pieces

of wood fall out

My brother eats maggots with

his bare feet

My feet went home

Can I go too

I hear dogs calling my name

They don’t know the TV’s on

Oprah’s interviewing Justin Bieber’s

image

My mom’s in the audience

with her pet home on a leash

Jim Morrison is singing in my

ear

But I can’t hear the water

running What?

Was that the doorbell

Someone let the table out

I want to go home

but the silverware left without me

Is it my fault the bed’s on fire

oh, it is

I don’t sleep in a cloud full

of roses

Want to go outside and play

in the weeds

the roaches won’t care

They’re too busy picking curtains

at the supermarket

Go away but I lost 10 pounds

of home

Help me.

*Image Credits (all work used with permission through CC lisence)–
“cognitive-symptoms-of-schizophrenia-03” by Life Mental Health
“catatonic-schizophrenia-symptoms-01” by Life Mental Health
“Thousand Plateaus Drawing” by Magda Wojtyra
“diaptych(left) :: mess-up 1/1 mess-age” by Joel, Evelyn, Francois
“diaptych(right) :: mess-up N/N mess-age” by Joel, Evelyn, Francois

Schizophrenia: Reality VS Illusion (forfreepsychology.wordpress.com)
On “Schizophrenia” (madinamerica.com)
Schizophrenic Breakdown (jharnisch.com)
What it feels like to be schizophrenic (boingboing.net)
Today’s schizophrenics hallucinate different things than those of your grandparents’ time (boingboing.net)
These rebellious psychiatrists helped me see beyond the myths and stigma of mental illness | David Shariatmadari (theguardian.com)

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 15, 2013

A SchizoAffective Existence

We are the stuff of stars . . . and of dreams.

We are not all the products of society’s speculated and manufactured dreams. Some of us with the (dis)ability [deemed so by society’s very small and finite standards] of deviant perception see the world (and by the world I do not mean society’s reality, the technological lexicon industrial civilization has so purposefully become) as something else. Nay, as something more. Where although nature’s colors be bold and vivid, those colors are more so for us, with rays of colorful brightness that extends well beyond the so-called boundary of the object. As if the color glowed in the sun rather than the dark, as if ultraviolet were infused (as it is) but we are able to perceive its inevitable quantum inversion. As if each molecule spoke loudly, and those colors created the most beautiful of symphonies.

With our schizoaffected eyes, we hear music in every hue contained within a flower, or leaf, or body. Color sounds like the twinkling, glimmering glow that physics says it can possibly be. The world is not the binary bullshite of black and white, but voluminous with hues otherwise unimaginable. For it is not our eyes, our finite and limited eyes, that see, but our unfiltered minds the tastes of blue, smells of green, and feels of purple. The sounds of Now shine in the golden amber rays of the sun filtering through a newly-morned room, tasting of dust particles and feeling like humility. Should we scream our unconvinced insignificance onto the air, galaxies appear and dance like the seasons change subtly from one to the other. In our conscious minds beats the fervor of Earth planet’s hum, thrumming our inductive bones like native drums. When we dance, society names it crazy and neurotypicals follow the cry. Yet, their cry seems sad, for they too resonate with the rhythm of the spirit of life, only deadened by the burdens of eco and social (illusion) problems, solved only because they are meant to be unsolvable, less the economic clock quit tocking to the young tick of laborious tedium. Are people so ashamed not to let go of this miserable righteousness? Must we forever bear the cross of sins we never committed? I wonder.

Within the constantly firing neurons of our schizoaffected brains screams the need to be free of social ego’s needs, so we laid it to waste at birth, discarded like a piece of garbage onto the classroom floor. We are not children of light, we are not enlightened, we are merely unaffected by the scientifically managed, now neuromarketed, compulsion of affluence, abundance, deception, manipulation, and greed. Money does not provide our currency, only simplicity sooths our affected brows. Unable to stand the noise of shopping malls, labor, bureaucracy, government, felonious, superfluous laws and the other sick dis-eased ilk of modern (outgoing) social culture, we spit it out, repulsed and disgusted by the constant conundrum of society’s lies that attempt to entrap us. For this “crime”, we are sentenced to institutions and called disorder.

Funny. Who would call today’s society order? Or is it known only by name, and not action? What acts of order are seen performed on Shakespeare’s protean stage? What calm is felt from the pulpit’s preachers (read as presidents, priests, speakers, politicians, coaches, judges, etc. and other costumes of authority)? These, too, have color and it is one listless and bleak. Look around: where else do you see the blues of the sky? The purples, pinks, reds, yellows of the flowers wild?

Within our schizoid bodies, host a rainbow upon rainbows upon rainbows, a tessellated, multi-dimensional, interconnected double helix harmonic sequence of all senses woven together within every one. A chaotic order of untapped stillness . . . just barely there binaural beat pulsing, beckoning . . . life.

A schizoaffected existence.

Interconnected Posts–

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.

*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

QOTD Alan Watts

August 9, 2013 Video

Melvin (music video)

Melvin has ShizoAffective Disorder. Melvin has no socially constructed ego.

This is Melvin’s daily lifestory. Melvin is fine one moment, and in complete madness the next, then after too much of society’s false conventions, platitudes, consumerisms, materialisms, pseudo-complexities, bureaucracies, frivolous and superfluous laws, governments, neuromarketed ego need for shopping and other illusions and imaginary things, for too long, Melvin becomes shell shocked and unable to function. . . like a thousand yard stare.

This experiemental, ambient piece depicts the ups and downs, the good days and bad days, the moments when Melvin is “okay” and those moments when Melvin is going through hell. It’s syncopation follows the daily “schizo” moments wherein madness seems to overwhelm the entirety of Melvin’s consciousness and awareness and also those moments of beauty and tranquility wherein the whole of being becomes filled with peace of mind. This Melvin’s dis-ease, this Melvin’s life. Hit PLAY.

Melvin is a term of endearment given to me by my Stephen. So, this one is personal.

Invisible Pain in an Imagined Small, Quiet Village

Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding. ~Khalil Gibran

From The Mind Of A Schizo, Affected:

The incessant noise: it burrows through my mind like some kind of advanced technological precision military weapon. And yet if one were to speak of such an occurrence, should it be vaporised simply because it lacks all the evidence of tangible reality? Yet, how does the similarity end? When the bombs are over and the rubble cleared and the dead found then buried (if they are found amongst the rubble) in pieces?

I imagine, in some cases at a quiet small village in (allways) a “foreign country” (how insane that phrase!! How belittling and dehumanizing to be labelled such a phrase. *Foreign*, i.e., ‘You do not belong here.’ Which means your death is not only justified but righteous, because you are not human, you are foreign. Your stink, your culture disgusts the pure mind of the True American. ‘How dare you dirty our precious soil with your unwanted and uncivilized feet.’ With a “simple” phrase, entire popuations can be annihilated and the annihilator celebrated as victor! This green color be apt for such a thought: the colour of vomit and scum and shit. That is the conditioned, stupefied humanamatons created through slyly placed neuromarketing and micromanagment).

What tangible reality is left them (in that imagined quiet, small village or that sly-built humanamton)? Is not the continuing pain (or equivalent) suffered silently? Wrapped up in the reticence of truth? Lingering long after the village has been re-built and daily routines returned to normal? Is not the memories weaved into stories? What of that? Does that mean that once the visible violence has been swept up that the invisible also ceases to be? That is not to imply that I compare myself to those who were murdered (on both sides) in war. I only attempt (and perhaps poorly) at an analogy.

That pain can be invisible as well as visible.

*Image credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“On Suffering” by Hani Amir
“~Painfuless~” by Stuart Williams
“The Thinker in the Dark — A5” by H. Koppdelaney
“All the troubles lie on his shoulder” by Rana Ossama

A gallery of the above thumbnails to be viewed (deservedly) larger and on black:

August 2, 2013

Schizo

To go out of your mind once a day is tremendously important, because by going out of your mind you come to your senses. And if you stay in your mind all of the time, you are over rational, in other words you are like a very rigid bridge which because it has no give; no craziness in it, is going to be blown down by the first hurricane. ~Alan Watts

There is a lot of unusual experiences (from an external perspective I would imagine, as the experiences are quite usual to me, in that I have experienced them in some form since I was a child), experiences that I cannot determine are part of SchizoAffective Disorder or are somehow related but not caused by having a SchizoAffective brain/mind/consciousness or are not some other aspect of consciousness/awareness/existence as that is known and understood. You see, I must know/feel/intuit that the time is right before I can do anything, but then suffer from missed opportunity after missed opportunity thus making it ever harder to begin. It is a ceaseless and terribly horrific ride of a mobius strip.

Am I a mindless fool? My life is a fragment, a disconnected dream that has no continuity. I am so tired of senselessness. I am tired of the music that my feelings sing, the dream music. ~Ross David Burke, When the Music’s Over: My Journey into Schizophrenia

You see, whenever I have a thought, my mind creates a tessellated reflection of whatever happening, occurrence, event, abstraction, etc. that I imagine which creates an entire series of new thoughts. I could draw what this looks in the third dimension, but it would only be a digital representation (of sorts, only not unlike a photograph, the impression of light; rather, an impression of thought, a psychograph so to speak or logograph, I guess). What I am describing (or attempting to describe) is not only how I think, but how I experience consciousness and the “structure” of awareness as I perceive and experience it at this moment. However, this, although evolving, has remained constant within my entire life. I (as I can be known) has changed, but has always been. The Fibonacci Sequence, to me, happens to be a favourite number, sequence, harmonic series, description of the form of consciousness/awareness/intuition/life. By this, I extrapolate future happenings, occurrences, events, memories and “past” happenings, occurrences, events, memories, etc. From the present (where this form sustains allways), contains, like a spiralling set theory [a set containing the Fibonacci sequence, per se] what now once was and what now will be. It is nearly impossible to demonstrate or to convey that presentfuturepast are one and the same and the same one, but whatever grasp of English I can muster does not suffice. At least not in any written form that I know.

I apply this same “model” onto the motion of an electron along a motherboard, or the machinations of what is known as the world wide web, or the function of the internet in the physical realm, or the motions of average business, or the fluctuations of populations, or a race of people, paradigm shifts, the “laws” of motion applied to technology and information systems, to systems of bureaucracy, governments, etc.; or the structure of the socially constructed self; by it I comprehend philosophy, maths, law, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, etc. By that, I see the form of ego, the form of consumption, the form of one plus one equals two, or two plus three equals eight. And this is how I am able to perceive/see/sense/feel/emote life, consciousness, awareness, and existence. And so the experience of the third dimensional world to it is quite full, as every sense behaves in this way, as such, I experience, sound, color, taste, sight, hearing, texture as intertwining and full substantial matter, so to speak. When I taste something (not only food, but also an happening, or a sound, etc) I perceive that taste with my entire being, throughout my consciousness and awareness and existence, I do not so much as become that taste, as to vibrate in parallel, to create music with it, as to resonate at its frequency as if I (in that entirety and wholeness) were a tuning fork, its symmetrical reciprocal. It is both maddening and beautiful, freedom and enslaving.

No one is more dangerously insane than one who is sane all the time: he is like a steel bridge without flexibility, and the order of his life is rigid and brittle. ~Alan Watts

To see and yet carry the weight of those who cannot see in this manner and to carry the weight of thoughts that do not belong to me, but exist only in the brains of others, the idea of the social personality, that manufactured intelligence known as American people, neurotypicals, or global population, or bureaucrat, or president, or lawyer, or schoolteacher, or sister, or brother, man, women, age, etc, etc. becomes unbearable. So, suicide becomes the only option to quit the forever bombardment of mental mines. Then, I cannot fill out a form, I cannot talk to routinized human beings, I cannot bear to think for another or to control another, I cannot lie, I cannot harm another, even at my most horrible bouts of lunacy, and so forth.

All this, you see, in attempt to explain how I am should someone contradict, or attempt to place my mind in a conundrum or paradox, or present to me a double bind. This is why social conventions, mores, and platitudes can wreak such havoc and terror upon my conscious being and mind at multiple dimensions (i.e., spiritual, psychological, emotional, etc.).

Maybe each human being lives in a unique world, a private world different from those inhabited and experienced by all other humans. . . If reality differs from person to person, can we speak of reality singular, or shouldn’t we really be talking about plural realities? And if there are plural realities, are some more true (more real) than others? What about the world of a schizophrenic? Maybe it’s as real as our world. Maybe we cannot say that we are in touch with reality and he is not, but should instead say, His reality is so different from ours that he can’t explain his to us, and we can’t explain ours to him. The problem, then, is that if subjective worlds are experienced too differently, there occurs a breakdown in communication … and there is the real illness. ~Philip K. Dick

*Image Credit (all artwork used with permission through CC license, see Gallery below for larger view of thumbnails)–
“Gift of Schizo” by Joe
“WaNt To gO oUT!!!!” by Stephane Lavoie
“Hope” by Luca Rossato
“Elettroshock – final solution” by Luca Rossato
“le baiser – the kiss” by Monch_18
“The Great Madness” by wili_hybrid
“Human Brain Evolution” by hawkexpress
“Photo projects – chandelier spiral 2013 DSC_0004” by PowderPhotography

August 2, 2013

Melvin

Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. ~Allen Ginsberg

This experiemental, ambient piece depicts the ups and downs, the good days and bad days, the moments when I am “okay” and those moments when I am going through hell. Melvin is a term of endearment given me by Stephen, so this song is a personal one. It’s syncopation follows the daily “schizo” moments wherein madness seems to overwhelm the entirety of my consciousness and awareness and also those moments of beauty and tranquility wherein the whole of being becomes filled with peace of mind. This is my dis-ease, this is my life. Hit PLAY.

Track 1 off work in progress and new album called, From The Mind Of A Schizo, Affected, [NOTE: Also, see new category Journal for writings taken from my journal while involuntarily commited in a State Mental Institution, like this one] which is a personal story of my days living with SchizoAffective Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

*Image Credit (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“juste avant le sourire – just before smiling” by Monch_18
“Root of all Madness” by Chris Lofqvist

July 31, 2013 Status

The Real World

From The Mind Of A Schizo, Affected:

Life to me is not the real world and everyone living within it in their own dichotomous real worlds. To me life is the emotionless, spineless, mixed media of human beings trying desperately to remember what the real real world is like.

We have the potential as a unified race to be more than paradise and we are too blinded and plugged in to the Machine to notice our cave . . . What is the meaning of life?

It hasn’t evolved yet.

A gallery of reality. Click on image for larger view.

$fractal stock 060413 dg$

[NOTE: These statuses come from a journal I kept some time ago while involuntarily commited in a state hospital. This will be a new series under new category, Journal.]

*Image Credit (used with permission through CC license)–
“Ruin stock city night” by Ecathe
“Sunset Over Western South America (NASA, International Space State, 04/12/11)” by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center
“There is and there is not” by H. Koppdelaney
“Why does he leave Reality” by H. Koppdelaney
“Changing Reality” by H. Koppdelaney

Carl Sagan on the Meaning of Life. (zedie.wordpress.com)

	Alex Jones on QOTD Jon Krakauer
	Alex Jones on The Lightning Storm
	rudyoldeschulte on QOTD Abraham Maslow
	The Shopping Experie… on Psychotic Episode (I Have No…
	NIKOtheOrb on QOTD Buckminster Fuller

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