Nona's World
My thoughts on various issuesWednesday, August 29, 2007
Some great free books
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
More from Larry Rosenberg
The Supreme Meditation
By Larry Rosenberg
Larry Rosenberg on how contemplating death can transform our lives.
Aging, illness and death are treasures for those who understand them. They’re Noble Truths, Noble Treasures. If they were people, I’d bow down to their feet every day.
—Ajaan Lee
In my early thirties, I met a teacher who was to have a profound influence on my study of aging and death awareness, primarily because of one central experience. I have never identified this teacher, referring to him in talks as Badarayana, because he specifically requested that I not reveal his identity. He had no wish to be known or to teach a great many people. He had just four students when I knew him, but he felt that they were all potential teachers and that he would reach a larger audience through them.
I was still a university professor in those days, but I was trying to bring some of what I had learned from the Eastern tradition to my work. Badarayana attended a public talk I gave and came up afterward and offered himself as a teacher, saying he’d had a great deal of experience in both Hindu and Buddhist disciplines. I was suspicious at first, but he never asked for any payment, and his teaching seemed quite authentic.
We worked together for a number of years. At one point he suggested we go to a small Mexican coastal town where I had spent some time, Zihuatenejo, to do intensive work. We spent four months there, practicing yoga and studying.
One evening I was sitting in our cottage reading and Badarayana came in extremely excited, telling me that a major opportunity had come our way. Ten days earlier a Mexican laborer had gotten drunk and fallen into the bay. His body had not been recovered in all that time, but it had washed up on shore that afternoon. His priest was coming from Mexico City for the body the next day, but for some religious reason that I never understood, the locals didn’t want to sit with the corpse in the meantime. But they wanted someone to stay with it, and they thought of the two outsiders who were staying in town. They approached Badarayana, who was quite excited at the prospect.
I didn’t understand his enthusiasm, and understood it even less when we got to the room. The corpse was in a large box packed with ice. The man seemed to have been big in the first place, but his corpse was also bloated, making him even bigger and distorting his features, and he was turning blue. There was a strong unpleasant odor. It was difficult even to enter the room. And we had agreed to be there all night.
Badarayana sat on one side of the box and I on the other. Soon he began teaching. “Not long ago this man was full of life. Now let’s look at him.” I, of course, felt a great deal of aversion, but Badarayana kept after me, insisting that I face this phenomenon and see what it brought up. There was fear. Nausea. Loathing. A strong wish to get out of the room. There was anger at Badarayana for putting me through all this.
We would be silent for periods of time, then he would check in with me, ask what I was really experiencing. That was the most valuable part of what we did. He also taught more directly. “This man was once alive. Now he is dead flesh. We too are subject to that lawfulness. What happens when you see that fact?”
I said that it was extremely painful. I didn’t want to dwell on it.
“No, no,” he said. “This man has a teaching for us. It’s extremely valuable.”
I wouldn’t say that I entirely understood what Badarayana was getting at, but I gradually grew more comfortable sitting there and gained some sense of composure. I would still have been delighted to leave the room at any time.
Finally Badarayana said, “Why was I so enthusiastic about coming here?” I said that it was to show us how precious life is. “That’s true,” he said, “but you can also go deeper. This is a great incentive to practice. It shows us that we don’t have much time. That we have no idea how much time we do have. This man didn’t know he would die when he did. Life is precious not just because it is life but because it is an opportunity to practice. That is the ultimate gift this man gives us. He offers us a strong motivation for spiritual practice.”
Buddhism goes deeply into the practice of death awareness. Cemetery contemplations, for instance, are included in the Satipatthana Sutra, which I think of as the declaration of independence for vipassana meditators. It boldly declares that deeply establishing awareness of the mind-body process can liberate us from suffering.
Later, as I got involved in Buddhist practice, I began doing some meditations on my own death, with Thai, Sri Lankan, and Burmese monks. Maranasati—or death awareness—is a standard, highly respected, and highly valued practice in these countries, and meditators commonly practice it. It hasn’t caught on much in this country because American teachers haven’t emphasized it, but it clearly has real value.
Sooner or later we all have to face the fact of death. We think of life and death as opposites, life as happening now and death as something that will happen at the end of the road, preferably an extremely long road. There is a certain unconscious arrogance that goes along with this attitude. Other people may be old; others may be ill, dying or dead; but we are alive and well and (comparatively) young, and we’ll deal with those problems when the time comes.
Our culture is particularly culpable in this regard. We put young people on pedestals, sick people in hospitals, elderly people in nursing homes; we sanitize the dead in funeral homes, trying to make them look attractive and alive, and do everything we can to keep death out of our consciousness. We put all of our energy into acquisition—of material possessions, knowledge, titles, land, friends, and lovers. We think we want these things for themselves, but we are using them to create and enhance our sense of self. This life of acquisition seems to shield us from the bedrock realities of aging and death. Our things become who we think we are.
The truth is that we are aging from the moment we are born, that we have no idea when we may grow ill and when we will die. No one is guaranteed even one more breath. Death will take all our acquisitions away, including our sense of who we are, of everything we identify as self. Death is not waiting for us at the end of the road. It is walking with us the whole time. We are fascinated by disaster epics, like the story of the Titanic, but the truth is that we are all on the Titanic, right now. We just imagine it’s a pleasure cruise, just as the people on the Titanic did.
At the same time, we harbor a huge amount of unfelt fear about sickness, aging and death, and that fear robs us of vitality, partly because we expend so much energy avoiding and repressing it. Bringing up this fear and facing it—as I did with Badarayana and other teachers—is a great enhancement to our lives. Really facing death enables us to appreciate and make the best use of our life in a whole new way.
Finally, of course, Buddhist practice is about liberation, awakening, nirvana. It is about coming to the deathless. The attachments we form when we live, and that we will have to let go of when we die, are actually what make us suffer while we are here. The Buddha was quite clear on this subject: clinging to things, especially to a sense of self, is what creates suffering. The knowledge that we have to let go of our attachments in death might enable us to let go of them now and save us a great deal of suffering. If we die to our attachments now, we won’t need to later and won’t feel so much fear of death when it comes. The shining light of death can liberate our life.
In addressing the practice of death awareness, the Buddha left us five contemplations, which he advised us to reflect on frequently.
1. I am subject to aging. Aging is unavoidable.
2. I am subject to illness. Illness is unavoidable.
3. I am subject to death. Death is unavoidable.
4. I will grow different, separate from all that is dear and appealing to me.
5. I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and live dependent on my actions. Whatever I do, for good or for ill, to that will I fall heir.
This isn’t the cheeriest set of reflections in the world, and most people, when they first hear them, feel some resistance. They don’t mind contemplating the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence in the world around them, but this is getting a little close to home. What is being asked of us as meditators is to come face-to-face with the law of impermanence in an intimate way.
These reflections have not been a major part of Buddhist practice in this country. In the sixties, when Buddhism first got popular here, people were coming to it out of the drug culture, looking for another way to get high. They weren’t looking for anything as heavy as death awareness. They just wanted to feel better.
But in the Asian countries where Buddhism has been established for centuries, the practice of death awareness is an ancient and venerable tradition, and many meditators work with it. In fact, there are some who regard death awareness as the ultimate practice. The Buddha himself left behind such a statement. “Of all the footprints,” he said, “that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”
Though these contemplations may sound morbid and depressing, working with them can have quite the opposite effect. Students often report—and I have experienced myself—a certain lightheartedness that comes from practicing them, a feeling of calm and ease. Many of us are carrying around a great deal of unacknowledged fear on the subject of death, and like any other fear, it weighs us down. Practicing death awareness helps flush out this fear, enabling us to face it and showing us that it too is an impermanent formation that is empty of self. The fear lingers in our consciousness when we don’t acknowledge it and let it live out its life.
Death is a fact of existence, one that we all must face sometime. And death awareness is a real aid to practice. A deep understanding of mortality can often lead to awakening. Seeing that we don’t have forever becomes a real motivating factor.
In Pali this phenomenon is known as samvega: the urgent need to practice that can grow out of a heightened sense of the perishable nature of life. It can include a real feeling of shock and a sense not only that life doesn’t last forever but also that the way we have been living is wrong. It might turn our world upside down, sending us off to a whole new way of life. Even if it doesn’t have so dramatic an effect, it can light a fire under our practice. We get much less caught up in power, prestige, money, lust, the acquisition of goods. Dharma teachings start to make real sense to us, and we begin to live them instead of just assenting intellectually. Samvega leads to a conversion of the heart, from an egocentric existence to a search for that which is timeless, vast and sacred.
Resources on Death and Dying that Larry Rosenberg recommends:
Our Real Home, by Ajaan Chah (Buddhist Publication Society)
What Happens at Death? by S.N. Goenka (Vipassana Research Institute)
The Zen of Living and Dying, by Philip Kapleau (Shambhala Publications)
On Living and Dying, by J. Krishnamurti (HarperSanFrancisco)
The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche (HarperSanFrancisco)
Facing Death and Finding Hope, by Christine Longaker (Doubleday) ©
Larry Rosenberg is founder and resident teacher of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Insight Meditation Center. He is the author of Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation. This article is adapted from his new book, Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive, from Shambhala Publications. ©2000 by Larry Rosenberg.
By Larry Rosenberg
Larry Rosenberg on how contemplating death can transform our lives.
Aging, illness and death are treasures for those who understand them. They’re Noble Truths, Noble Treasures. If they were people, I’d bow down to their feet every day.
—Ajaan Lee
In my early thirties, I met a teacher who was to have a profound influence on my study of aging and death awareness, primarily because of one central experience. I have never identified this teacher, referring to him in talks as Badarayana, because he specifically requested that I not reveal his identity. He had no wish to be known or to teach a great many people. He had just four students when I knew him, but he felt that they were all potential teachers and that he would reach a larger audience through them.
I was still a university professor in those days, but I was trying to bring some of what I had learned from the Eastern tradition to my work. Badarayana attended a public talk I gave and came up afterward and offered himself as a teacher, saying he’d had a great deal of experience in both Hindu and Buddhist disciplines. I was suspicious at first, but he never asked for any payment, and his teaching seemed quite authentic.
We worked together for a number of years. At one point he suggested we go to a small Mexican coastal town where I had spent some time, Zihuatenejo, to do intensive work. We spent four months there, practicing yoga and studying.
One evening I was sitting in our cottage reading and Badarayana came in extremely excited, telling me that a major opportunity had come our way. Ten days earlier a Mexican laborer had gotten drunk and fallen into the bay. His body had not been recovered in all that time, but it had washed up on shore that afternoon. His priest was coming from Mexico City for the body the next day, but for some religious reason that I never understood, the locals didn’t want to sit with the corpse in the meantime. But they wanted someone to stay with it, and they thought of the two outsiders who were staying in town. They approached Badarayana, who was quite excited at the prospect.
I didn’t understand his enthusiasm, and understood it even less when we got to the room. The corpse was in a large box packed with ice. The man seemed to have been big in the first place, but his corpse was also bloated, making him even bigger and distorting his features, and he was turning blue. There was a strong unpleasant odor. It was difficult even to enter the room. And we had agreed to be there all night.
Badarayana sat on one side of the box and I on the other. Soon he began teaching. “Not long ago this man was full of life. Now let’s look at him.” I, of course, felt a great deal of aversion, but Badarayana kept after me, insisting that I face this phenomenon and see what it brought up. There was fear. Nausea. Loathing. A strong wish to get out of the room. There was anger at Badarayana for putting me through all this.
We would be silent for periods of time, then he would check in with me, ask what I was really experiencing. That was the most valuable part of what we did. He also taught more directly. “This man was once alive. Now he is dead flesh. We too are subject to that lawfulness. What happens when you see that fact?”
I said that it was extremely painful. I didn’t want to dwell on it.
“No, no,” he said. “This man has a teaching for us. It’s extremely valuable.”
I wouldn’t say that I entirely understood what Badarayana was getting at, but I gradually grew more comfortable sitting there and gained some sense of composure. I would still have been delighted to leave the room at any time.
Finally Badarayana said, “Why was I so enthusiastic about coming here?” I said that it was to show us how precious life is. “That’s true,” he said, “but you can also go deeper. This is a great incentive to practice. It shows us that we don’t have much time. That we have no idea how much time we do have. This man didn’t know he would die when he did. Life is precious not just because it is life but because it is an opportunity to practice. That is the ultimate gift this man gives us. He offers us a strong motivation for spiritual practice.”
Buddhism goes deeply into the practice of death awareness. Cemetery contemplations, for instance, are included in the Satipatthana Sutra, which I think of as the declaration of independence for vipassana meditators. It boldly declares that deeply establishing awareness of the mind-body process can liberate us from suffering.
Later, as I got involved in Buddhist practice, I began doing some meditations on my own death, with Thai, Sri Lankan, and Burmese monks. Maranasati—or death awareness—is a standard, highly respected, and highly valued practice in these countries, and meditators commonly practice it. It hasn’t caught on much in this country because American teachers haven’t emphasized it, but it clearly has real value.
Sooner or later we all have to face the fact of death. We think of life and death as opposites, life as happening now and death as something that will happen at the end of the road, preferably an extremely long road. There is a certain unconscious arrogance that goes along with this attitude. Other people may be old; others may be ill, dying or dead; but we are alive and well and (comparatively) young, and we’ll deal with those problems when the time comes.
Our culture is particularly culpable in this regard. We put young people on pedestals, sick people in hospitals, elderly people in nursing homes; we sanitize the dead in funeral homes, trying to make them look attractive and alive, and do everything we can to keep death out of our consciousness. We put all of our energy into acquisition—of material possessions, knowledge, titles, land, friends, and lovers. We think we want these things for themselves, but we are using them to create and enhance our sense of self. This life of acquisition seems to shield us from the bedrock realities of aging and death. Our things become who we think we are.
The truth is that we are aging from the moment we are born, that we have no idea when we may grow ill and when we will die. No one is guaranteed even one more breath. Death will take all our acquisitions away, including our sense of who we are, of everything we identify as self. Death is not waiting for us at the end of the road. It is walking with us the whole time. We are fascinated by disaster epics, like the story of the Titanic, but the truth is that we are all on the Titanic, right now. We just imagine it’s a pleasure cruise, just as the people on the Titanic did.
At the same time, we harbor a huge amount of unfelt fear about sickness, aging and death, and that fear robs us of vitality, partly because we expend so much energy avoiding and repressing it. Bringing up this fear and facing it—as I did with Badarayana and other teachers—is a great enhancement to our lives. Really facing death enables us to appreciate and make the best use of our life in a whole new way.
Finally, of course, Buddhist practice is about liberation, awakening, nirvana. It is about coming to the deathless. The attachments we form when we live, and that we will have to let go of when we die, are actually what make us suffer while we are here. The Buddha was quite clear on this subject: clinging to things, especially to a sense of self, is what creates suffering. The knowledge that we have to let go of our attachments in death might enable us to let go of them now and save us a great deal of suffering. If we die to our attachments now, we won’t need to later and won’t feel so much fear of death when it comes. The shining light of death can liberate our life.
In addressing the practice of death awareness, the Buddha left us five contemplations, which he advised us to reflect on frequently.
1. I am subject to aging. Aging is unavoidable.
2. I am subject to illness. Illness is unavoidable.
3. I am subject to death. Death is unavoidable.
4. I will grow different, separate from all that is dear and appealing to me.
5. I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and live dependent on my actions. Whatever I do, for good or for ill, to that will I fall heir.
This isn’t the cheeriest set of reflections in the world, and most people, when they first hear them, feel some resistance. They don’t mind contemplating the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence in the world around them, but this is getting a little close to home. What is being asked of us as meditators is to come face-to-face with the law of impermanence in an intimate way.
These reflections have not been a major part of Buddhist practice in this country. In the sixties, when Buddhism first got popular here, people were coming to it out of the drug culture, looking for another way to get high. They weren’t looking for anything as heavy as death awareness. They just wanted to feel better.
But in the Asian countries where Buddhism has been established for centuries, the practice of death awareness is an ancient and venerable tradition, and many meditators work with it. In fact, there are some who regard death awareness as the ultimate practice. The Buddha himself left behind such a statement. “Of all the footprints,” he said, “that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditation, that on death is supreme.”
Though these contemplations may sound morbid and depressing, working with them can have quite the opposite effect. Students often report—and I have experienced myself—a certain lightheartedness that comes from practicing them, a feeling of calm and ease. Many of us are carrying around a great deal of unacknowledged fear on the subject of death, and like any other fear, it weighs us down. Practicing death awareness helps flush out this fear, enabling us to face it and showing us that it too is an impermanent formation that is empty of self. The fear lingers in our consciousness when we don’t acknowledge it and let it live out its life.
Death is a fact of existence, one that we all must face sometime. And death awareness is a real aid to practice. A deep understanding of mortality can often lead to awakening. Seeing that we don’t have forever becomes a real motivating factor.
In Pali this phenomenon is known as samvega: the urgent need to practice that can grow out of a heightened sense of the perishable nature of life. It can include a real feeling of shock and a sense not only that life doesn’t last forever but also that the way we have been living is wrong. It might turn our world upside down, sending us off to a whole new way of life. Even if it doesn’t have so dramatic an effect, it can light a fire under our practice. We get much less caught up in power, prestige, money, lust, the acquisition of goods. Dharma teachings start to make real sense to us, and we begin to live them instead of just assenting intellectually. Samvega leads to a conversion of the heart, from an egocentric existence to a search for that which is timeless, vast and sacred.
Resources on Death and Dying that Larry Rosenberg recommends:
Our Real Home, by Ajaan Chah (Buddhist Publication Society)
What Happens at Death? by S.N. Goenka (Vipassana Research Institute)
The Zen of Living and Dying, by Philip Kapleau (Shambhala Publications)
On Living and Dying, by J. Krishnamurti (HarperSanFrancisco)
The Tibetan Book of Living & Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche (HarperSanFrancisco)
Facing Death and Finding Hope, by Christine Longaker (Doubleday) ©
Larry Rosenberg is founder and resident teacher of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Insight Meditation Center. He is the author of Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation. This article is adapted from his new book, Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive, from Shambhala Publications. ©2000 by Larry Rosenberg.
On facing death
Life's biggest challenge is facing death. Death is an inevitability, a constant, what varies is how we react to it. My mother, for example, favors ignoring death. She says that since it is going to happen, no point in thinking or worrying about it. One should just enjoy life while one can. The Western world in general leans towards this approach, not just towards death but any "obstacle" - whether it be disease, ageing or dying. The other approach is to face it, to accept this inevitability and to prepare every day for it, so that our last days are not filled with terror and anguish. This is more of an Eastern attitude, and is evident in many Eastern religions. In Buddhism, for example, some of the practices that help you prepare for death involve spending nights in the cemetery, meditating on death (Satipatthana Sutra). Hinduism encourages a different kind of life, depending on the phase of your life cycle. They are the life of a student, the householder, and the "hermit".
Larry Rosenberg, one of my favourite writers of Buddhism puts it the best:
"Our culture is particularly culpable in this regard. We put young people on pedestals, sick people in hospitals, elderly people in nursing homes; we sanitize the dead in funeral homes, trying to make them look attractive and alive, and do everything we can to keep death out of our consciousness. We put all of our energy into acquisition—of material possessions, knowledge, titles, land, friends, and lovers. We think we want these things for themselves, but we are using them to create and enhance our sense of self. This life of acquisition seems to shield us from the bedrock realities of aging and death. Our things become who we think we are.
The truth is that we are aging from the moment we are born, that we have no idea when we may grow ill and when we will die. No one is guaranteed even one more breath. Death will take all our acquisitions away, including our sense of who we are, of everything we identify as self. Death is not waiting for us at the end of the road. It is walking with us the whole time. We are fascinated by disaster epics, like the story of the Titanic, but the truth is that we are all on the Titanic, right now. We just imagine it’s a pleasure cruise, just as the people on the Titanic did.
At the same time, we harbor a huge amount of unfelt fear about sickness, aging and death, and that fear robs us of vitality, partly because we expend so much energy avoiding and repressing it. Bringing up this fear and facing it—as I did with Badarayana and other teachers—is a great enhancement to our lives. Really facing death enables us to appreciate and make the best use of our life in a whole new way."
Larry Rosenberg, one of my favourite writers of Buddhism puts it the best:
"Our culture is particularly culpable in this regard. We put young people on pedestals, sick people in hospitals, elderly people in nursing homes; we sanitize the dead in funeral homes, trying to make them look attractive and alive, and do everything we can to keep death out of our consciousness. We put all of our energy into acquisition—of material possessions, knowledge, titles, land, friends, and lovers. We think we want these things for themselves, but we are using them to create and enhance our sense of self. This life of acquisition seems to shield us from the bedrock realities of aging and death. Our things become who we think we are.
The truth is that we are aging from the moment we are born, that we have no idea when we may grow ill and when we will die. No one is guaranteed even one more breath. Death will take all our acquisitions away, including our sense of who we are, of everything we identify as self. Death is not waiting for us at the end of the road. It is walking with us the whole time. We are fascinated by disaster epics, like the story of the Titanic, but the truth is that we are all on the Titanic, right now. We just imagine it’s a pleasure cruise, just as the people on the Titanic did.
At the same time, we harbor a huge amount of unfelt fear about sickness, aging and death, and that fear robs us of vitality, partly because we expend so much energy avoiding and repressing it. Bringing up this fear and facing it—as I did with Badarayana and other teachers—is a great enhancement to our lives. Really facing death enables us to appreciate and make the best use of our life in a whole new way."
Labels: buddhism, death, hinduism
Monday, July 09, 2007
Schizophrenia and the Mystical Experience
Many psychological traumas, once conquered, result in experiencing a new consciousness and interconnectedness. In many societies, the psychological breakdown in accepted and the person experiencing the trauma is taken to the local shaman. The shaman teaches the apprentice how to manage his or her experience and to use it for the betterment of the individual and the society.
Around 40 years ago, an acquaintance of Joseph Campbell, Dr. Silverman, had written an article on what he called shamanism and schizophrenia. Dr. Silverman had distinguished two very different types of schizophrenia: "essential schizophrenia" (also referred to as non-paranoid schizophrenia in modern psychiatric literature); and "paranoid schizophrenia". He drew a comparison between essential schizophrenia and shamanism. In essential schizophrenia the affected person withdraws from the everyday world and the contents of the unconscious are released into the conscious. In "paranoid schizophrenia," the person remains alert and projects his internal fantasies, and fears to the external world. In reality his internal world is falling apart, and, unable to handle this, he projects this to the real world and imagines cracks in the external world, for example the assaults from within are imagined to be actual assaults from strangers or friends.
On the other hand, in essential schizophrenia the person is grappling with unmastered
psychological energies. This is something that the shaman does as well. The difference between the shaman and this person is that the shaman has the support of the local social order and its forms; and these are the very things that help bring the shaman back to rational consciousness. On "recovery" it is found that his inward personal experiences reinforce the local traditions; for his personal dream-symbology is at one with the symbology of his culture. Whereas, in contrast, in the case of a modern psychotic patient, there is a radical break off and no effective association at all with the symbol system of his culture. The established symbol system here provides no help at all to the poor lost schizophrenic, terrified by the figments of his own imagination, to which he is a total stranger; whereas, in the case of the primitive shaman, there is between his outward life and his inward a fundamental accord.
What is then the mystical sea into which the essential schizophrenic falls into ? Joseph Campbell puts it best. He says that the plunges are all into the same deep inward sea. They are the waters of the universal archetypes of mythology.There may be a feeling of danger and being overwhelmed but also helpful personas that may guide and help one through. These are "the gods, the guardian, daemons or angels: innate powers of the psyche", that help face the shattering negative forces. The symbolic figures encountered by the mystic and the schizophrenic are in many instances identical But the difference-and he puts this very visually and beautifully - the difference is similar to that of a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic has been trained to deal with this experience and he is a master of this sea, whereas the schizophrenic has fallen in and may be drowning.
Campbell says "the inward journeys of the mythological hero, the shaman, the
mystic, and the schizophrenic are in principle the same; and when the return or remission occurs, it is experienced as a rebirth: the birth, that is to say, of a "twice-born" ego, no longer bound in by its daylight-world horizon. It is now known to be but the reflex of a larger self, its proper function being to carry the energies of an archetypal instinct system into fruitful play in a contemporary space-time daylight situation. One is now no longer afraid of nature; nor of nature's child, society-which is monstrous too, and in fact cannot be otherwise; it would otherwise not survive. The new ego is in accord with all this, in harmony, at peace; and, as those who have returned from the, journey tell, life is then richer, stronger, and more joyous".
The challenge is to go through the experience with getting lost, not to avoid the experience or become lost in the experience but to be equipped with tools that would help the person to recognize, tame and incorporate the energies of the demons that are encountered. This experience is similar to mysticism because in both cases the boundary between the individual and the rest of the world has fallen away. Mystics can be immersed in this experience with identifying with the images that they see, while schizophrenics identify with everything within its scope of consciousness. In western society, when someone is able to return to an ordinary state of consciousness, there is a chance that society may view their experience and insights as mystical, but when they are lost it will be defined as a psychosis.
There are a couple of possibilities with regard to the schizophrenic experience. If the self identifies with objects that are a source of joy then extreme joy will result. This joy is intense because of the lack of a barrier between the self and the universe. If the self identifies with objects that are a source of trauma or pain then the sadness will be equally intense. Moreover this feeling will be combined with a sense of responsibility and guilt.
Methods of gaining control used by apprentice shamans are many. Drumming a repetitive beat on hand drums, long adventurous walks, rubbing stones together, painting or sculpting things seen in dreams, removal from society, immersion in the new consciousness, allow the schizophrenic to gain control of a chaotic consciousness, yet schizophrenia in modern society is almost always addressed by medicine. Medication in our society may raise the issue of two contradictions: on one hand they are being chemically pulled away to a normal life, on the other hand they cannot ignore or immerse themselves in understanding their mysterious experience. This is worsened by going through this experience in a society where mystical experiences are mistrusted and the support system for shamanism is completely missing.
websites:
http://website.lineone.net/~crowseed/sands/skzlike.html
http://www.mindspring.com/~berks-healing/campbell-schiz.pdf
http://www.spiritualcompetency.com/sic.pdf
Around 40 years ago, an acquaintance of Joseph Campbell, Dr. Silverman, had written an article on what he called shamanism and schizophrenia. Dr. Silverman had distinguished two very different types of schizophrenia: "essential schizophrenia" (also referred to as non-paranoid schizophrenia in modern psychiatric literature); and "paranoid schizophrenia". He drew a comparison between essential schizophrenia and shamanism. In essential schizophrenia the affected person withdraws from the everyday world and the contents of the unconscious are released into the conscious. In "paranoid schizophrenia," the person remains alert and projects his internal fantasies, and fears to the external world. In reality his internal world is falling apart, and, unable to handle this, he projects this to the real world and imagines cracks in the external world, for example the assaults from within are imagined to be actual assaults from strangers or friends.
On the other hand, in essential schizophrenia the person is grappling with unmastered
psychological energies. This is something that the shaman does as well. The difference between the shaman and this person is that the shaman has the support of the local social order and its forms; and these are the very things that help bring the shaman back to rational consciousness. On "recovery" it is found that his inward personal experiences reinforce the local traditions; for his personal dream-symbology is at one with the symbology of his culture. Whereas, in contrast, in the case of a modern psychotic patient, there is a radical break off and no effective association at all with the symbol system of his culture. The established symbol system here provides no help at all to the poor lost schizophrenic, terrified by the figments of his own imagination, to which he is a total stranger; whereas, in the case of the primitive shaman, there is between his outward life and his inward a fundamental accord.
What is then the mystical sea into which the essential schizophrenic falls into ? Joseph Campbell puts it best. He says that the plunges are all into the same deep inward sea. They are the waters of the universal archetypes of mythology.There may be a feeling of danger and being overwhelmed but also helpful personas that may guide and help one through. These are "the gods, the guardian, daemons or angels: innate powers of the psyche", that help face the shattering negative forces. The symbolic figures encountered by the mystic and the schizophrenic are in many instances identical But the difference-and he puts this very visually and beautifully - the difference is similar to that of a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic has been trained to deal with this experience and he is a master of this sea, whereas the schizophrenic has fallen in and may be drowning.
Campbell says "the inward journeys of the mythological hero, the shaman, the
mystic, and the schizophrenic are in principle the same; and when the return or remission occurs, it is experienced as a rebirth: the birth, that is to say, of a "twice-born" ego, no longer bound in by its daylight-world horizon. It is now known to be but the reflex of a larger self, its proper function being to carry the energies of an archetypal instinct system into fruitful play in a contemporary space-time daylight situation. One is now no longer afraid of nature; nor of nature's child, society-which is monstrous too, and in fact cannot be otherwise; it would otherwise not survive. The new ego is in accord with all this, in harmony, at peace; and, as those who have returned from the, journey tell, life is then richer, stronger, and more joyous".
The challenge is to go through the experience with getting lost, not to avoid the experience or become lost in the experience but to be equipped with tools that would help the person to recognize, tame and incorporate the energies of the demons that are encountered. This experience is similar to mysticism because in both cases the boundary between the individual and the rest of the world has fallen away. Mystics can be immersed in this experience with identifying with the images that they see, while schizophrenics identify with everything within its scope of consciousness. In western society, when someone is able to return to an ordinary state of consciousness, there is a chance that society may view their experience and insights as mystical, but when they are lost it will be defined as a psychosis.
There are a couple of possibilities with regard to the schizophrenic experience. If the self identifies with objects that are a source of joy then extreme joy will result. This joy is intense because of the lack of a barrier between the self and the universe. If the self identifies with objects that are a source of trauma or pain then the sadness will be equally intense. Moreover this feeling will be combined with a sense of responsibility and guilt.
Methods of gaining control used by apprentice shamans are many. Drumming a repetitive beat on hand drums, long adventurous walks, rubbing stones together, painting or sculpting things seen in dreams, removal from society, immersion in the new consciousness, allow the schizophrenic to gain control of a chaotic consciousness, yet schizophrenia in modern society is almost always addressed by medicine. Medication in our society may raise the issue of two contradictions: on one hand they are being chemically pulled away to a normal life, on the other hand they cannot ignore or immerse themselves in understanding their mysterious experience. This is worsened by going through this experience in a society where mystical experiences are mistrusted and the support system for shamanism is completely missing.
websites:
http://website.lineone.net/~crowseed/sands/skzlike.html
http://www.mindspring.com/~berks-healing/campbell-schiz.pdf
http://www.spiritualcompetency.com/sic.pdf
Labels: abnormal, barrier, break, breakdown, Campbell, Carl, down, ego, Joseph, Jung, medication, mysticism, normal, oceanic feeling, psychiatry, psychology, schizophrenia, shaman. shamanism, visions
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