jackshoegazer | You don't know how big your head is.

Some of you expressed interest in reading this paper when it was finished, so I'm going to post it, locked of course. It's not as good as I imagined, but then, I had to keep it around five pages, so I couldn't be as grand and all-encompassing as I had wanted. Enjoy a peek into my brain.

Being Crazy Doesn’t Mean I’m Wrong

Schizophrenia and the Religious Impulse

An Autobiographical Essay

Jeremy Parker

Abnormal Psychology

Fall 2008

One of the most universal symptoms of schizophrenia is the religious impulse, an obsession with the spiritual, the metaphysical, the divine. Often, this symptom is found in conjunction with others such as the delusions of persecution, reference, and grandeur. In the attempt to dissect this issue, we are thwarted by a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Is religiosity a symptom of schizophrenia or does schizophrenia give one a view into a spiritual reality?

Carl Jung seemed to think the later. In fact it was his work with schizophrenics that led to the theory he is most widely known for – the collective unconscious, the archetypal ground of a universal mind that is accessible to all humans. It was his view that under the onslaught of the contents of this Unconscious, that the ego of schizophrenics was overrun. Jung wished to know why symbols and archetypes of the world’s religions were popping up in schizophrenic patient’s minds without any prior exposure to such ideas or images, and why religious iconography was so similar in civilizations thousands of miles or years apart.

One can trace contact with a spiritual world back to the very beginnings of human culture. We have always had religions; ancient pre-history shamans put themselves into trances, whether through drugs, meditation, fasting, ecstatic dancing, severe pain, or a hundred other methods, and subsequently interacted with gods, demons, and spirits. More recent religions are always based on a human’s collision with some divine experience – from Moses, to Buddha, to Mohammed, to Jesus. The question we must ask is thus: were these people schizophrenics or were they in contact with a legitimate spiritual reality?

Beginning in 1997, around my 20^th birthday, I had several experiences which I can best describe as encounters with a spiritual reality. These experiences left me psychologically shaken. I wondered continuously if I was going crazy. It was as if a switch had been flipped, as if I’d lived the previous twenty years in a dark room and suddenly a light turned on.

Over the course of that year, I had many revelations. I saw that God is the entirety of the Universe. I saw that the entire Universe is energy, matter being the lowest vibration of said energy. I saw that all of creation is a graduated scale from pure potential with no form or attributes all the way down to the most solid of manifestations. I saw that human souls are fragments of this divinity, tiny bits of God, animating and illuminating human existence, shining light into the darkest parts of the Universe. I saw that the human soul inhabits bodies in order to learn something, in order to experience something. Like a human getting into a car, souls have to have bodies to get anywhere. I saw that souls do this because God, being the center of all creation, the source of all light, had no light shining upon Itself, and thus remained always in darkness, always unconscious, not knowing Itself. Thus, God was fragmented, split, so that It may know Itself.

However, the experience that moved me the most, the one that had the greatest impact on my life was the day I lived my life in reverse. Over the course of about six hours, I experienced my life backwards. The most accurate description would be to imagine you are watching a slideshow of the events of your life in reverse chronological order. Not every single minute, but the important parts – not the important of the “I graduated!” or “the birth of my child” variety, but important as in the most defining moments in the formation of your personality. Naturally, this centered heavily during my childhood years.

I sat and watched the entire trauma of my past pass by. Not a moment was skipped. Moments I didn’t even remember until that moment leapt to the forefront of my consciousness. I saw the beatings, the lies, the betrayals. I saw every time my parents lied to me, every time an authority figure failed me. I saw the desperation of my southern white-trash upbringing, the cruelty of my step-mother, the indifference of my father, the abuse of my siblings at the hand of a family friend. I went all the way back to near-birth, witnessing the ambivalence of my mother and her eventual abandonment of our family when I was two.

It was not a passive viewing either. Imagine that during each and every scene, there was an entity that was running the slide show, stopping the motion in order to ask you questions, grill you, interrogate you as to why you reacted in such a way, what you did, why you thought what you thought and to point out exactly how that experience shaped your psyche, your thoughts, your actions, and all of your subsequent decisions.

At the time, I was of the opinion that I must be going insane. No one that I knew was having these weird thoughts. I knew that my biological mother, who I had not seen since I was three, had some mental health issues. I also knew that schizophrenia tended to show up in males in the late teens and early twenties. Was I inheriting my mother’s craziness?

In my quest to understand what was happening to me, I read a book by the American philosopher and integral psychologist Ken Wilber. In it, he discusses how when the human mind encounters something strange, especially religious experiences, without a framework, the mind does not know how to interpret to experience and much confusion results. This explains why people who were raised Christian have visions of Christ, why Buddhists have visions of Buddha, et cetera. That is the framework they had learned in which to interpret their mystic experiences. From then on, I set myself to learning as much as possible about what I had experienced, to build myself a framework through which I could interpret my experiences. I believe it was William Blake who said, “I must construct my own systems, else be slave to other men’s.”

Using Jung’s definition of ego as the focus of consciousness, mine, like most people’s, had been very small, centering on personal experience and survival needs. In this way, the life I lived previously was a puppet-life. All of my movements were directed by strings and the puppet master was a collection of imprinted responses, rote replies from issues and neurosis. After my experiences, I became aware of a greater “I”. My ego had expanded and my awareness of the world expanded beyond the small confines of my immediate phenomenal experience.

I later learned that much of what I experienced, much of what was revealed to me during that year, could not have come from my mind alone. These revelations were tenets of physics, ancient Gnosticism, Jewish mysticism, hermeticism, alchemy, mystery religions, and more. As I was raised without religion of any sort, one wonders how those things got into my brain. Was it Jung’s Collective Unconscious? Why was my consciousness running rampant unearthing the long-buried dregs of my personal unconscious? How did the cosmologies of early Christian Gnostics get into my brain? I was quite the atheist or at least agnostic until these experiences. My parents never took me to church; I had never stuck my nose in a religious text in my life. I never pondered the meaning of anything.

Now, full disclosure. The earliest of these experiences happened under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide or psilocybin. Later on, some of them happened without the ingestion of these substances. Early LSD researchers labeled it a psychomimetic – a drug that mimics psychosis. When these substances were studied later in the late 50’s & 60’s it was revealed that they also produced mystic states and religious visions.

For instance, Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Walter Pahnke ran a medically supervised, double-blind pre- and post-tested, scientifically controlled experiment on the production of religious ecstasy as described by Christian visionaries. They took five small groups of four divinity students and fed half of them psilocybin and half placebos at a Good Friday sermon at a local church. The statistical results were quite clear. The students who took psilocybin had mystic religious experiences and the control group didn’t. Their experiment was praised in an article in Time magazine. So, do these substances open up the doors of the Collective Unconscious or are they merely psychomimetic and cause temporary schizophrenia?

Now the question remains, could my experiences be diagnosed as schizophrenia? It would be easy to dismiss my symptoms as drug-induced, but they continued to happen long after the drugs have metabolized out of the body. Flashbacks can not explain this, as flashbacks are a myth – hallucinogens are not stored in fat cells or spinal fluid. One explanation is that what LSD does in the brain. The structure of LSD is almost chemically identical with serotonin, so much so that the serotonin receptors can not tell the difference. LSD fools the receptors and acts as a neurotransmitter. Rather than sending the brain’s messages where they are supposed to go, LSD send those impulses into lesser-used pathways of the brain, which can result in synesthesia, neologisms, the recovery of old memories, and the loose associations and rapidly-shifting thoughts commonly found in schizophrenics.

To answer this final dilemma, I will return to the first lesson of abnormal psychology, the four D rubric of diagnosis.

One, deviance: Are my experiences unusual or different than those of my sociocultural background? Yes, quite. However, in other cultures, and for thousands upon thousands of years, humans have been having these kinds of experiences, encounters with the divine, be they from deep meditation or drug ingestion. The fact that my culture does not value these experiences or regard them as real means very little.

Two, distress: Do these experiences distress myself or others? No. When they first happened, I was confused and worried, but constructing a framework and studying the history and methods of altered states has completely removed any distress. I do not feel the need to explain my experiences to others. When and if I do discuss them, I do not need to even explain my experiences, but can frame everything in academic and philosophic scholarship. I do not accost strangers on the street with rants about splintered divinity.

Three, dysfunction: Have these experiences interfered with my life, my relationships, or my routines? No, not in a negative way. In fact, these experiences have made my life better. I am more aware, more intelligent, and more knowledgeable than ever before. There is a beauty and meaning to my life that I was simply not aware of before. I am in a healthy and successful relationship, am raising an intelligent and creative child, attending college and working a job full-time. No, I say there is no dysfunction.

And finally, four, danger: Am I a danger to myself or others? No. Not in the slightest. If anything, these experiences have given me a greater reverence for life and antipathy toward violence.

While I may not be diagnosable and I choose to believe that the experiences I had are true and real, I have always been open and cynical. I am at all times aware that there are many who do not believe in such altered states, believe that the only states of consciousness is waking and sleeping, that believe the phenomenal world is the only reality. I am aware that my experiences could be the product of a genetic schizophrenia or drug-induced psychosis. I am aware that maybe the reason schizophrenics latch onto the divine is because the structure of their reality is crumbling and they are trying best as they can to make sense of it. I am aware that hallucinogenic drugs could merely be psychomimetic and nothing else. I am aware that Jung’s theories could be drastically flawed because his research was primarily based on case studies of schizophrenics.

This awareness keeps me humble, it keeps me rational, and it keeps me sane. After all, only sane people think they’re going crazy – crazy people just are. These experiences, real or not, are sacred to me. They are a burning ember, a tiny flame glowing in the night. All the rational skepticism in the world does nothing to lessen their brightness. I would not be who I am today without them. In the ever wise words of Robert Anton Wilson, “It’s all in your head – you just don’t know how big your head is.” He also said, “Of course I’m crazy, but it doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Touché.