6 Mar 2025
To clarify, I don’t have it, but I do know a bit about it. I have a family history of multiple psychotic disorders, but that’s about the extent of my own experience. I don’t go to the shrink, I’m only formally diagnosed with three conditions, and I’m not interested in collecting any more bc I aint no Ash Ketchum. It’s strange that I have so many shared experiences with people who have schizophrenia though, but I firmly believe I do not have it for a few good reasons.
Pathologies overlap. The reason I focus on schizophrenia as opposed to more specific pathologies like schizoaffective, bipolar, MDD, ADHD, or anything tangentially related to psychosis is bc to understand the more niche problems, you need to step back and shed light on the most complicated thread which seems to weave through multitudes of these smaller meridians.
It's all interconnected ofc, but if you want a linear heuristic for practical purposes: 1. get labs done and check up on your physical health 2. then look for psychiatric explanations
Anyways, before u fight me, it can be argued that schizophrenia is a disorder of excessive abstraction and systemization; look at all those 4chan schizo charts, people with right hemisphere damage looking @ the showerhead and seeing all those tiny drops and the geometric abstraction of a drain, but being unable to holistically grasp the showerness of a shower or the running water as a stream.
Schizophrenia is primarily a disturbance of ipseity, which stems from the Latin word “ipse” for “self.” This is the experience of the first-person perspective, of existing as a self-identical subject, inner time-consciousness. We experience this as our own, non-local, self-referential point of origin for phenomenological awareness, directed outwardly. This is the anchor. Now what happens when the boundaries between the unified one-point perspective break down? This is schizophrenia. And what keeps them together in the first place (this is the Binding Problem)? Part of this is hyper-reflexivity—exaggerated self-reflection and ruminative introspection, detachment from one’s own actions. Much of pop spirituality nowadays excessively encourages this exaggeratedness, and it just leads already-solipsistic people deeper into more solipsism. Klaus Conrad called it a “’constant reflexive attention,’ or ‘stepping-back’ from experience.” This description seems eerily similar to that of centerlessness, a somewhat obscure spiritual concept which I’ve talked about in my Gurdjieff post and A. G. Emilsson has written about at length. This dissociation I guess it could be called parallels what happens when you excessively meditate.
The brain is like an intermediary transmuter of consciousness into reality. In this way it is a tripartite process; matter and consciousness working together to Create, and vice versa. One of the many problems with solipsism is that consciousness itself doesn’t create everything else, it is the mediator, the corpus collosum as Ian McGilchrist describes it.
Here’s a summary of John Nash’s dilemma:
There’s a gap between communication; 2 prisoners; trying to reach the transcendent state by removing all barriers following all the synchronicities leads u back to the same place, we gotta traverse it with a smoothing operator, concrescence of suffering and striving upwards allows us to get closer to t=inf, where the help becomes the identity operator, theosis.
I think the way to ‘smooth out’ is to be less isolated, but more separate, if that makes sense. More connected to the people around you, more separated from the all-connectedness. The reason we were all so happy as kids was bc we were connected to each other as a proxy to all-connectedness, we lose it as adults, then ppl go schizophrenic trying to find that connectedness directly to the cosmos, bypassing interfacing with interpersonal relationships.
Too many boundaries dissolved leads to further isolation, paradoxically.
Nash’s method to curing his schizophrenia:
- Ask delusions to justify themselves
- Compartmentalize and allocate these to a register of the brain, unused (essentially creating a temp file system)
- Rationalizing the delusions as a “hopeless waste of intellectual effort (kind of what I am doing right now)
- Created his own exercises of linguistics and wordplay
And most importantly… ESCAPE THE ZERO-SUM GAME.
Essentially, he was trying to process Insight—the ability to “trick” and enter into a dialectic with his delusions. Depressives lack the ability to retrieve this. Schizos can’t sort through this. What happens is sometimes you’ll see a massive shift in polarity between the two extreme states. This is abaissement du niveu mental. As soon as I think I’ve derived something novel, turns out Fucking Jung has an answer for it (thankfully actually)!
There are several definitions for this, but in essence, every emotional state produces a relaxing of psychical constraints in two directions; a narrowing, then a corresponding strengthening of the unconscious (Synchronicity, An Acausal Connecting Principle). The French definition is literally reduction of mental level. But it’s more like a reduced state of attention, leading to loosening restraints, which allow archetypical unconscious symbols to emerge. It is spontaneous, even when supposedly intentionally directed towards active imagination.
Sometimes I stumble upon people giving advice on how to be a better writer/artist/musician/whatever ur artistic medium is. It’s all very systematic, but ultimately it won’t help. It should spring up from inside like a fountain; the creative urge cannot be controlled. It’s ejaculation onto a canvas, the partner is a mere assistant in the act, the ejaculation comes from within. U are beseiged by uncontrollable imagery that must be released. Everything is orgone. Well how do I allow this to happen? This is abaissement du niveu.
Other side of the coin:
“Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one’s self-assurance. The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole. It reduces one’s self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing egocentricity, narrows the mental horizon [“Concerning Rebirth,” CW 9i, pars. 213f.]”
And this is why it should stay relegated to a transitory state, rather than a constant mode of being. When it is the latter, u get the schizophrenic.
In schizophrenia, you also see abnormal tacit-focal structure (salience-pattern) and aberrant theta wave firings in the entorhinal cortex, which affects spacio-temporal processing. Everything is salient, nothing has meaning. Motion rendered non-existent with all-encompassing salience.
