The Mad Man's Manifesto

Unusual Beliefs
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Been letting my thoughts settle on this discussion throughout the day.

The concept of enlightenment that I presented, was originally described to me a by a girl I met in my first hospitalization. She described it not as knowing the world, but being detached from the past in a way that allowed one to be fully in the moment, to just be human. Granted we are all human but when the weight of past traumas and tendencies of negative self talk are taken into account as part of the self, this “enlightened” state seemed pretty blissful.

The brain’s access to past memories will always be there. The ability to plan out future actions is also necessary. But to primarily occupy this free state of being I think is a good thing to strive for.

It has helped me break down and even forgot about the psychotic scenario from time to time which used to be so ingrained in my psyche it was more or less my worldview or my reality. I can look at it freely now without get lost and also put it away and not think about it. I had to force myself into the state before it became a primary place to return too. I’m still working on cementing it in and making it more resilient to the presence of triggers. It’s a long long road. After a couple years of ongoing psychosis, this approach is what is working for me. If your strategies are different that is fine. I don’t really call it enlightenment in my mind or anything like that, it is simply something I must do in order to pull myself out of the whimsy of the psychosis.

Before the psychosis, my mind was all over the place. It took the development of psychosis for me to realize most people don’t operate that way and that their are other options out there.

I let the past come up in conversation, beyond that I try to either not think, or make plans for my future.

It’s interesting how feeling unlike people will gradually make you unlike them, but when you start to look at the similarities that internal pressure can be reversed and bring you back into the heard.

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cc: @SoitGoes

I’ll jump on this particular interpretation because it opens to door to the old belief-vs.-reality issue you seem to be dealing with in your disquisition here better than the others.

I am coming from the fundamental p.o.v. of the mid-century cognitivists like Broadbent, Chomsky, Neisser, as well as – further back, the arguments of Berkeley, Locke and Kant; and even further back, the positions taken by Lao Tsu and Siddartha Gautama – that most people do not see reality or “what is.”

What they see is their appraisal / evaluation / interpretation / assessment / judgment / attribution of meaning according to their (mostly) unconscious – and introjected – beliefs, ideas, ideals, assumptions, presumptions, convictions, rules, regulations, principles, codes and requirements.

If one can acquire the means and methods to look, listen and tactily “sense” what is occurring in the continual stream of passing, momentarily present moments, one will observe one’s own cognitive conditioning (as described above) attempting to “explain” or “make sense” of the as yet uncontaminated reality… and contaminate / corrupt the pure sensory perceptions into “codified,” "belief- and requirement-fitting appraisals.

And depending upon the relative accuracy – or inaccuracy – of these more deeply embedded cognitive constructs of belief, idea, ideal, etc., the resulting appraisals, evaluations, interpretations, etc. will be closer to truly – but never actually – representative and accurate… or (at the other end of the spectrum) grossly mis-representative and relatively in-accurate. (Sz-ish “paranoid delusions,” aural hallucinations and visual projections appear to be extreme manifestations of these cognitive distortions.)

Even if visual, aural and tactile images are embedded in memory – as opposed to mere verbal/lingual, or mathematical, symbols – they are subject to environmental influence (e.g.: neurochemical, later input, stress) that distort the sensory memories and resulting appraisals, evaluations, interpretations, etc. thereof. The words are never the thing itself, and after some time – beginning immediately after the original perception actually – neither are the memories.

What the vipassana-style (see Vipassana Meditation) mindfulness meditations used by the the various MBCTs like MBSR, DBT, ACT, MBBT and 10 StEP do is attempt to jump the institution of cognitive conditioning and the construct of appraisal according to belief by allowing the practitioner to have repeated experiences of momentary direct perception that are uncontaminated by conditioned belief, idea, ideal, instruction, assumption, presumption, principle, code, etc.

Having such experiences, the practitioner begins to actually see, hear and interoceptively (see How do you feel? Interoception: the sense of the physiological condition of the body | Nature Reviews Neuroscience) sense how his cognitive mechanisms mislead him or her into mis-appraisal, mis-evaluation, mis-interpretation, etc. of reality. If one continues to practice the meditations, they will come to experience that so doing provides them with direct, “trans-verbal” experiences of what is that produce immediate grasp of what to do about the circumstances they have more directly perceived.

What I have described is the essence of Tibetan, as well as Japanese Zen Buddhist “action-taking.”

2 Likes
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I totally with Soitgoes (sorry if I got that wrong).

i think that the things that we experience in life good or bad have to be incorporated into our ‘self’ only then can we learn from those experiences which then builds on our self awareness.

Once you are fully aware of your self by default you are aware of your limitations. …from there the sky is the limit.

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Thanks for your exposition. I suppose that if one truly masters such an attitude towards one’s own cognition then hallucinations will be a walk in the park to deal with - taken to the extreme, they would blur in with the other meaningless noise I suppose.

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What I am saying in the post is that one can acquire (or more accurately, RE-acquire) one’s self-awareness using the methods in the MBCTs that are built on the Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist meditation practices.

Though decidedly NOT on many of the southern Asian point-of-focus / distractive meditations like those in TM. Those meditations will “relax” the ANS and bring it back into sympathetic vs. parasympathetic balance for a while. But they will not produce observant self- or environmental awareness or transcendence of unwanted stimulii.

If you are curious as to where I picked all this up, you can start with Daniel Goleman’s, Charles Tart’s and Arthur Deikman’s books in the 1980s. As well as Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Jiddu Krishnamurti, S. N. Goenka and Chogyam Trungpa further back. And Stephen Hayes, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Marsha Linehan, Tara Brach and Pema Chodron more recently.

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Thanks ill check that out…hey today’s a great day!

Any day you learn something new is a great day.

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Yeah that’s along the lines of what I was thinking. The sz hallucinations and all that put mountains of bad crap and fears and programmed cognitive responses and associations in my brain. Unravelling them and preventing new ones is an ongoing challenge.

It’s much easier though when the mind isn’t always looking for that next thought. There is a little down time to breath and further establish that state of perspective over the mind as my default go to condition.

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Which is the product of doing the Vipassana-style mindfulness meditations on a regular basis for a while. I don’t do them that regularly anymore. As Krishnamurti and his pupils Joel Kramer, Alan Watts and Charles Tart all reported – and as I have experienced for several years now – up-out-of-the-box mindfulness becomes conditioned, habituated and normalized over time.

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Yeah. I waver in and out of it. Finding comfort and control then easing off the brakes a little.