This
essay is an effort to respond to comments on the previous essay, “The
Ascendancy of Psychotic Knowledge,” and to carry forward the
implications of the ideas expressed in that text.
The line that
separates sanity from madness has never been clear. In fact, it is not
clear that such a line ever existed. This is because what passes for
sanity today is in fact still a kind of madness. Even the
psychoanalysts admit that normality is neurosis, a form of mental
illness. They also admit that one of the most tenacious forms of
psychosis is what they call normotic disease, meaning the insane need
to appear normal. What if all normality is really normotic? This
underlying insanity of the normal is becoming more evident every day as
normal people and societies fail to adapt to reality, fail to respond
to the climatic and other changes in our natural and social world that
should put us all on red alert. Instead, we are being terrorized by
propaganda regarding conspiracies that are themselves delusional.
Reality-based discourse has become impossible.
What is clear is that the
concept of psychosis is a political category, not a medical one. Such
disparate visionary thinkers as Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, John Perry,
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have all accepted this. That does not
mean that there are not people who are suffering with what can
descriptively be called paranoid delusions or other symptoms of great
psychic suffering. But we need to enter more deeply into their inner
worlds in order to understand the true nature of their suffering, and
recognize that they are mirroring back to us our collective delusions
and sadistic impositions of pseudo-realities. We need to recognize our
interbeing, as Thich Nhat Hanh has phrased it. Otherwise, we are simply
punishing the Other for our own sin of hegemonic collective
egocentricity. In the old Soviet Union, political dissidents were
routinely diagnosed as psychotic and locked up in mental institutions.
Obviously, if one was not satisfied with Stalinism, clearly the best of
all possible social arrangements, one had to be mad. But we need to
explore the possibility that all psychotic symptoms are, among other
things, passive political acts of resistance to a world order that is
itself psychotically unbalanced.
Morton Kelsey, a Jungian
analyst, wrote in one of his books that the difference between a
genuine vision and a psychotic hallucination is that the latter is out
of touch with reality. His example of the latter was that of a man who
believed that the FBI had put him under surveillance. For Kelsey, that
belief was delusional, by definition. I doubt that too many informed
people would agree with him these days. The naïveté of the so-called
experts in psychology is astounding. Is this not itself a form of
repression approaching psychosis?
The late Harvard psychiatry
professor John Mack nearly lost his position because he took seriously
the reports of otherwise ordinary people that they had been abducted by
extraterrestrial beings. By definition, according to the gatekeepers of
the psychotherapy industry, alien abduction is a psychotic
hallucination. Psychologists can lose their licenses if they take such
reports at face value. Not even Lacanian analysts are willing to
entertain any other hypothesis. But is not such closed-mindedness more
psychotic than the abduction reports? Is not such diagnostic rigidity
the equivalent of the Church’s unwillingness to look through Galileo’s
telescope in the Middle Ages?
Lacan famously defined psychosis
as foreclosure of the Name of the Father. But has not society itself
foreclosed the Name of the Father — the reality of the Absolute — as a
matter of ideological necessity? Are we not all (to the extent we are
“well-adapted”) committed to remain cut off from the Self in order to
genuflect to the altar of ego-consciousness? And if some of those who
refuse to swear allegiance to the ego fall into hell realms, others
ascend to divine luminosity. The latter group, the successful mystics,
can offer the only real help to those who have dropped into the abyss
of psychosis. Rather than confine those who suffer in nightmarish
mental institutions, we should be creating joyous spiritual refuges
under the governance of mystics rather than psychiatrists. Our current
approach to treatment is bankrupt. With a few exceptions, such as the
clinic led by Willy Apollon and the Ecole Freudienne du Quebec,
treatments are primarily drug-based and lack sufficient depth of
understanding and willingness on the part of therapists to enter into
the world of the psychotic. There have been great pioneers in this
realm, of course, including Jung, Klein, and more recently Harold
Searles, Wilfred Bion, Donald Winnicott, and others. But the field of
depth psychology has been under attack and losing ground for years to
the minions of pharmacological repression.
The ruling approach
today is a rigid refusal to recognize the insanity of the ego itself.
Yet this rigidity is understandable. It comes from the same mindset
that, in biology, leads to the refusal to even consider the possibility
of intelligent design being a more rational hypothesis than Darwinism.
In that case, the scientistic establishment fears precisely a return to
the Middle Ages, and a faith-based approach to matters that we need to
deal with scientifically. But has not science in its battle against
religion merely become another dogmatic religion?
The religion
of science is a belief system without the possibility of transcendence
of the ego. Not only must a scientist be an atheist, but also a
materialist. Not even Cartesian dualism is allowable — even though there
is plenty of evidence that dualism is true, as a matter of subjective
experience. For example, in the so-called near-death experience (better
thought of as an aborted death experience), consciousness leaves the
body and yet continues to exist in non-corporeal form, both in this
dimension and in a higher dimension. This phenomenon has been verified
thousands of times. Therefore, consciousness is not simply an emergent
property of the brain. It is a separate substance. That is dualism. Of
course, there may be a resolution of the dualism of consciousness and
form at a higher level of understanding, in which even matter is
recognized as a manifestation of consciousness. That is the Advaita
position. But at the first level of cognition of subtle reality,
dualism is a fact.
Yet, science cannot accept such facts. For
science, the near death experience must by definition be a
hallucination produced by lack of oxygen to the brain. There is no
other possibility. This is because we “know” that there is no such
thing as a soul; there is only matter in motion. Even though physicists
have already discovered that matter is a myth; that the universe is
filled with other kinds of stuff, given such names as dark matter and
dark energy; and that at the quantum level, particles do not act like
material objects at all, but as waves and swarms, defying ordinary
logic; and most importantly, that consciousness is fundamental to the
nature of reality.
None of this has yet been digested by the
modern mind. Politically, the capitalist system requires a belief in
social Darwinism to justify its modes of action and methods of control.
The communist system did likewise. Social systems that operate on other
principles have been largely eliminated. That has included most
indigenous tribal societies and most monastic societies. Modern
thought, trapped in its material greed, is now psychotically destroying
the planet in order to amass delusional wealth in the form of money. To
call this collective psychosis is not exaggeration. This is even
understood by many secular rationalists, yet they cannot change course.
The
real problem for secular rationalists is that acceptance of these
non-material facts would put them on a slippery slope. Where do we
stop, once we accept teleology and higher dimensional beings? Must we
not then accept such phenomena as channeling, the downloading of
information from akashic records, and so on? What criteria can we use
to ascertain truth from charlatanry?
If a young woman declares,
for example, that she is possessed by a thirty-five-thousand-year-old
male warrior spirit from another planet — then on what basis can we say
she is deluded? But do we then believe everyone all the time? And when
we end up with conflicting narratives, how do we decide if the aliens
who are speaking through the people in front of us are from the
Pleiades or Sirius or Zeta Reticuli? Clearly, we are at an
epistemological impasse. How do we solve this problem, without holing
up in our fortress of materialist crypto-rationality and denying all of
that as impossibly mad — or giving up on discourse altogether?
Here
is where the ancient Indian spiritual traditions, such as Yoga,
Advaita, and Buddhism, can be of immense help. First, let us examine
the great syllogism of Shankara:
The world is illusion;
The only Real is Brahman (the Absolute);
The world is Brahman.
This
bit of Logos, the Advaita Principle (non-duality), forces us to accept
that any belief system regarding the world is delusional — because the
world itself is Maya, illusion, through and through. What is real is
the Absolute. But Brahman is also nirguna (without qualities). That
means that the Real cannot be described or explained by any means. This
leads to the Advaya Principle, which was the ground of the steadfast
silence of the Buddha. This principle states that there is no form of
discourse that can approach an accurate understanding of the nature of
reality. In Christianity, there is a congruent principle of apophatic
theology, which accepts that nothing true can be said of God. But the
Advaya Principle is far more radical, maintaining that no aspect of
reality can be captured by language.
Yet there is a further
principle, that of omnicentrism, which is implied by the doctrine of
Shunyata (Emptiness), that is found most clearly in Tien-Tai Buddhism,
but also in the model of the Net of Indra, which is similar to the
modern notion of the holographic paradigm. This principle states that
every moment of conscious experience is valid in its own right, and
that every individual consciousness mirrors the whole, and is part of
the whole. The Absolute appears as the many and the momentary. But if
we put these three principles together, then what is Real is every
arising of pure awareness, but stripped of its subsequent
interpretation. What we must sacrifice is the hermeneutic desire, if we
are to regroup into harmonious interbeing at a higher level of
consciousness than the one that we are now trapped in. The
epistemological impasse is itself an illusion created by the psychotic
delusion known as the ego. Only from egoless Brahman-consciousness can
the current lethal encounter with psychotic knowledge be surpassed.
Such
a shift in actually existing consciousness, once enlightenment has
become the new normal, will by itself bring the current epistemological
impasse to an end. Once we are operating from quantum consciousness,
with our siddhis (spiritual powers) fully deployed, with
telepathic intercommunion in place, with everyone sharing in cosmic
consciousness, and each Atman Self-realized as an equal point source of
the Absolute, then the problem of psychotic knowledge will have been
resolved. The current state of pseudo-normality — which is a thin veneer
of courtesy over a boiling pot of paranoid aggressivity — will have
become a psychic relic of the past dark age of kali yuga, which is now
blessedly coming to an end.
Now the final question: How do we
get there? Using plant medicine or meditation? Or can we arrive at
Illumination through the cognitive discipline of metaphysics? Or will
devotional chanting do the trick? In fact, any or all of these may
work, depending on the temperament of the consciousness that is seeking
Itself. So there is no conflict between the entheogenic quest via the
tryptamine palace, or the crystal castle of consciousness that can be
attained through meditative means. And gyana yoga (the path of
metaphysical knowledge) and bhakti yoga (prayer and devotion) have been
recognized since the Vedic age as excellent means to attain jivan mukti, the Supreme Liberation.
Meditation
is the best path for some, while ayahuasca works better for others.
There are also dangers in every path. The psychedelic path can
obviously involve bad trips and blown-out brain circuits. Meditation
can also bring up repressed traumas and anxieties and the whole dark
night of the soul. The devotional seeker can get caught up in a cult
that exploits rather than liberates. The philosopher can get bogged
down in books and never reach Nirvana. Ultimately, everyone must follow
their own way, and that way will probably include at least a little of
every means and method.
The approach of Sat Yoga, which focuses
on meditation practice, bringing about the naturally arising
endo-production of entheogens; plus sattvic self-discipline
to purify the karmic and dharmic fields; plus the processing of dreams,
symptoms, and other psychic manifestations to raise consciousness to
higher assemblage points and transform the ego; plus cognitive action
to gain understanding of the multidimensional structure of
consciousness that forms our reality; plus the determination to
sacrifice the ego into the Supreme Flame of the Absolute; plus
performing the charitable service of karma yoga, and receiving the
support of a spiritual community and the wisdom of well-trained and
adept transformational guides; all together create a path of great
power with minimal danger. Such a path is not for everyone, and it is
not intended to be. But those who seek such a path, and such a refuge,
including having the option of living in an ashram as a contemplative
renunciate of the destructive jouissance of ego-consciousness, should
know that this is available as a valid life choice.
The choice
to lead one’s life according to the highest Dharma (whether it be
Buddha-Dharma, Sat Yoga Dharma, or some other similarly sattvic set of disciplines, such as those of Christian monastic orders, Sufi or Shiite religious orders, or Jewish halakha)
must be made only with the highest degree of seriousness of purpose and
determination. To a certain point, the greater the renunciation, the
greater the rewards — but that is true only if one’s intention is pure
and wholehearted. If the decision lacks authenticity or maturity, then
it is likely to backfire. But clearly the more one’s actions are in
alignment with what is highest and most vital and virtuous within one,
the greater are the blessings of ascension on the stairway to heavenly
consciousness.
The conscious choice of one’s life purpose
should be considered carefully before stumbling into karmic
entanglements that can swallow one up for a lifetime. This is
especially true now, as we near the end of civilization, as we know it.
If we are not clear about where we are in the destiny vortex of our
planet, then that should be studied in depth as well. None of these
epistemological and ontological issues would be of such intense concern
if not for the urgency of our existential situation.
What should
be clear to all is that the end point of the trajectory of
consciousness lies beyond what is currently called knowledge, beyond
language, beyond the mirage of duality, beyond the world of Maya to the
realization that this entire cosmos is only the dreamlike manifestation
of the One Supreme Being. If we start with that recognition, even if it
is only conceptual to begin with, we will be able to open our hearts to
the higher reality of love. All paths are in agreement that love is the
gateway to the Infinite. May we recognize our oneness in the
indescribable Emptiness of ego that is the Fullness of the Absolute,
and which is manifest always in the form of unconditional divine love.
Love or psychosis: we must choose.
Namaste,
Shunyamurti
Image by Ian Muttoo, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
