schizoaffective disorder

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 16, 2013

What is Schizophrenia?

EXPLORINGtheLATERAL

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 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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EXPLORINGtheLATERAL

 

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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 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

cognitive-symptoms-of-schizophrenia-03

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

diaptych(right) :: mess-up N/N mess-age

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

Thousand Plateaus Drawing

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

diaptych(left) :: mess-up 1/1 mess-age

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

catatonia-schizophrenia-symptoms-01

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

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August 24, 2013

Medicinal

“Medication Time! Medication Time!”

Fig. 1My music is a kind of poetical literature in instrumental form. In each piece, I attempt to tell a story.

This experimental, ambient piece tells the story of before, during, and after taking medication. In the past (a long ago past), I was highly against taking any kind of medication as part of treatment, as I considered medication a form of mind-control and I did not want anyone mucking about with my mind, despite the fact that, at that time, my mind was quite unfriendly towards me and regarded as monstrous. I explain this, to further illuminate the influence behind this particular piece and why I created it.

The beginning of the music portrays what triggers the (almost daily) psychotic episode (the affected part of SchizoAffective Disorder) and a depiction of the resulting mood and state of mind/consciousness (which is why the music grows from dark to a kind of chasing feel, as if the mind were chased by the impending psychosis). The middle of the piece/story portrays taking the medications (I no longer hold the same beliefs I did when I was younger about medication, I can now see its use and I now comprehend much more about the beneficial chemical effects it can have on the brain, which has an effect on the body and state of mind) and how differently the mind is affected and the semblance of peace it brings afterward (which sort of explains the lyrics in the middle, “Little did I know. . .”). But the medication lasts only a while and is not impervious to further triggers (shown in the immediacy of the return to the psychosis). The end portrays the return to the psychosis. . . and time again for medication. Basically, this piece illustrates the endless daily loop of life for a mind schizo affected (the reason behind the ending looping back to the beginning, although not exactly, because not every episode is the same).

This is the second track off the new album I am currently working on titled, From The Mind Of A Schizo, Affected. First track, Melvin, is here.

Features: (all samples are used with permission through CC license or public domain)
“Ghostpocalypse – 7 Master” & “Digital Bark” by Kevin MacLeod, Incompetech.com
“Awair — Forever Yours” & “Spooky Hallowe’en Sound 02 FX” from BeatsRoyaltyFree
“Traffic” & “War” sound effects from SoundBible
Free samples from ACIDplanet

Untitled*Image Credits (all artwork used with permission through CC license)–
“biTteRNeSS bEfoRE bREakFASt” by Sippanont Samchai
“Fig.1” by Vacon Sartirani
“Untitled” by Andres Yeah

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.

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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