Schizophrenia, Sin and the Self (Owen Barfield)

[Lou Gold]

How can you have a community if some members remain "fierce, untamable and wild"? Extreme diversity of values and memories leads to disintegration. Initiation/Integration is precisely the 'taming' operation. It is walking softly while carrying a big stick, becoming the blessed meek. Mental illness needs to be empathically cured, sin needs to be redeemed.

This is where citizenship becomes central. The rule is mutual respect. Yes, this requires empathy ... golden rule ... etc. The middle way is intended to moderate extremes. Balance of freedom and responsibility and general balance between extremes is a process. The Haudenosaunee required consensus among chiefs. If it was not obtainable, the Clan Mothers were asked, "What would be best for the seventh generation to come?" Very hard to do this in a system where time is defined as money. You know the drill.

In the case of the "fierce, untamable and wild" the challenge is to create safe space for it. It's a challenge but that's what the Dagara people do with mental breaks. The disruptive one then has a choice of existing within the limits of 'safe space' or returning to or being banned to outside the community. Healed and cured are not the same. Healed involves accepting what is by all involved. Cured means altering the condition. Sometimes communities can live with what can't be cured and sometimes not.

[AshvinP]

How can you have a community if some members remain "fierce, untamable and wild"?

Such people are not necessarily members of a community, but outsiders.

There are outsiders for sure, only increasing in number these days, but no one wants to or should remain on the outside for very long.

“These men are in prison: that is the Outsider’s verdict. They are quite contented in prison—caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is prison all the same. And the Outsider? He is in prison too: nearly every Outsider in this book has told us so in a different language; but he knows it. His desire is to escape. But a prison-break is not an easy matter; you must know all about your prison, otherwise you might spend years in tunnelling, like the Abbe in The Count of Monte Cristo, and only find yourself in the next cell.” ― The Outsider

Barfield concerns himself with the prison-break as well, and the nature of the prison we must escape from:

"Of course not many people actually think of themselves as in prison. They only feel it. They feel it because virtually everything that is thought and written today, from science to literature and criticism, from sociology to aesthetics, from theology to politics and in politics from extreme right to extreme left, is thought and written within the walls of that prison.

I suppose the most important question for a prisoner is, whether or not there is any way of escaping; and that is the question I am really most concerned with today. It sounds as it it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only of mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. I can philosophize myself free from philosophical materialism quite easily; and so, I dare say, can you.

But what we are talking about now is collective mental habit, which is a very different matter. For that means that, after we have done the philosophizing and gone back to ordinary life, the materialism is still there in our very instruments of thought, and indeed of perception: it signifies that it is there in the the meanings of the words we speak and think with, and notably so in the commonest words of all - words like "thing", "life", "man", "fact", "think", "perceive", and so on. It is not merely habit, but an ingrained habit. It is even what we call "common sense". -History, Guilt and Habit

[Soul_of_Shu]

There was a time in my late teens, then an art college drop-out, when I went through some psychotic break for about a year, extreme anxiety with panic attacks; bat-shit crazy/vividly 'real' hallucinations, including envisioning committing mass murder of ex-classmates; periods where I could be stepping off a bus one moment, and then suddenly find myself in some location a mile away with no recollection of how I ended up there or what happened in between. I truly believed I was going insane and/or dying., without getting much help from the family, who just thought I was a being a jerk. Eventually I was put on whatever medication was available at that time, don't recall what it was, which helped calm me down long enough that I made up my mind, with what little resources I had, to get on a train and make the 90 hour journey from Toronto to Vancouver with no sleeping berth, during which time I ran out of meds (the whole trip being another story in itself), arriving with just enough cash to get a $50/month room, and about a week's groceries. And that somehow was what was needed to turn things around. I now wonder how by happenstance things might have turned out quite differently had events just taken a less fortuitous turn. I might be writing this from within the Kingston Penitentiary.

[Lou Gold]

Dana,

Thank you for sharing your personal story. It's a gift. I've never had such a dramatic break as yours but I've come frighteningly close. Yet, by some Grace beyond my comprehension or seeming merit, the healing space arrived and I took the opportunity offered, sometimes via step-by-step, sometimes via a big leap. I'm still playing/working at it and all I can claim to have realized is an ever-growing faith in the process, which may be the greatest gift of all.

[AshvinP]

There was a time in my late teens, then an art college drop-out, when I went through some psychotic break for about a year, extreme anxiety with panic attacks; bat-shit crazy/vividly 'real' hallucinations, including envisioning committing mass murder of ex-classmates; periods where I could be stepping off a bus one moment, and then suddenly find myself in some location a mile away with no recollection of how I ended up there or what happened in between. I truly believed I was going insane and/or dying., without getting much help from the family, who just thought I was a being a jerk. Eventually I was put on whatever medication was available at that time, don't recall what it was, which helped calm me down long enough that I made up my mind, with what little resources I had, to get on a train and make the 90 hour journey from Toronto to Vancouver with no sleeping berth, during which time I ran out of meds (the whole trip being another story in itself), arriving with just enough cash to get a $50/month room, and about a week's groceries. And that somehow was what was needed to turn things around. I now wonder how by happenstance things might have turned out quite differently had events just taken a less fortuitous turn. I might be writing this from within the Kingston Penitentiary.

Dana, I don't know if you saw this interview with Paul Vanderklay, but if not you may want to check it out. It sounds like the interviewee Brett Anderson went through something very similar.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Ashvin ... as it turns out I did watch that episode, and found it very relatable. And strangely enough Brett bears a striking resemblance to a guy who lived in the same rooming house I ended up living in shortly after getting off that Vancouver bound train, who was a few year older than I at the time, and became a bit of a mentor. A bit of serendipity that makes one wonder if certain events are meant to be: knowing no-one whatsoever in Vancouver, after arriving with about 75 bucks in my pocket, I bought a newspaper and went to a local coffee shop. Opening the paper to the classified ads, and under Rooms For Rent, out of dozens, the first one I called had a room for $50/month, and was 10 minutes walk from English Bay. Condos there now sell for millions. The guys in this house were an odd mix of misfits and transients, right out of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer ~ a novel I had packed in my suitcase ~ some borderline mad enough to make me look quite sane. Yet they became more of a family to me than my actual family was. A couple of them played significant roles in turning my life around, and remained lifelong friends. Not too long after I met my future wife to be. Vancouver still remains a kind of special spiritual place to me. Has to make one ponder some daemons behind the scenes that guide our destiny.

[David_Sundaram]

Barfield explores the phenomenon of modern mental illness, such as Schizophrenia, and how it reveals a fundamental alienation of the 'self' from the surrounding world and from the true Self in all of human society, with the Schizophrenics being the ones who are most aware of the alienation. Moderns experience this alienation as varying forms and degrees of insanity, while our ancestors experienced it as "sin". The former feels it is something that is happening to them, while the latter felt it was something they were actively involved in and, therefore, needed to take responsibility for.

Riffing on the above:

Mental 'illness' is really emotional 'illness'. 'Ill'-ness is really 'ill'-health which in turn is really just 'un'-wholesomeness, 'non'-integration, etc.

In thinking about such matters as a psychologist, I often speculatively theorized that as people 'grow' in terms of degree of 'intelligence', they develop what might be called 'conscience' (science=knowledge; con=all-inclusive), or at least 'sense' of 'conscience' even though this may be unconscious, repressed (and so 'denied') - I am talking about a 'self-transcendant "super-superego" , not the internalized kind of socially 'conditioned' super-ego that Freud postulated, here, although such 'introject' (which itself may be a function of social/parental 'illness') may also be included as a 'feature' of said 'conscience'.

If and when a person thinks, feels and/or acts against the 'judgment' of said conscience he/she experiences a (self-generated!) feeling of 'guilt', a 'sense' of being unworthy and undeserving of the 'goodness' of Life-at-Large, depending of the degree of said 'ant-Life 'violation', even think and feel and so expect retribution (punishment, negative karma, etc.) therefore. The ramifications of such feelings and expectations 'show up' in a kazillion and one ways which relatively 'sane' (i.e. more 'integrated') folks 'see', 'diagnose' etc, as mental/spiritual 'illness'. The condition(s) labelled shizophrenia (hearing 'crazy' voices, paranoia, self-hate 'freak outs') are just a function of said guilt feelings and anxiety-induced expectations (whch may be quite unconscious, mind you!) reaching and exceeding a subject's ability to handle calmly and manage rationally.

Here are a couple of quotes from my book which touch on this much too large to be 'simply' described, but I tried to do so anyway, subject:

"If you aren’t aware of the attendant possibilities for negative ramification, you might simply expect our higher degree of Intelligence to be an unqualified blessing. However, the fact is, we each run the very real risk of sinking and drowning in a psychospiritual hell of our own making until we learn to float and swim in the boundless flow of conscious­ness that results from our developing to the point where we partake of ‘the fruit of the tree of knowledge’.

Unlike creatures with lesser capacity, we grow past the stage of simple innocence. Whether we personally want to or not, all but the most feeble-minded among us develop and savor a vast range of ideas about what is ‘better’ and what is ‘worse’, as well as ‘how much’ better or worse a specific other condition or circumstance would be, as a result of our capacity for logical comparison and imaginative projection. Not only are we therefore more intensely, and in many more ways, motivated to try to attain and hold on to what we decide is better and to try to avoid and secure ourselves from what we decide is worse, no matter how 'good' our present situation may be, we keep conceiving of and so desire to actualize and experience ever higher ideals. Concomitantly, because we ‘see’, again by way of projection and comparison, how far present actualization and expe­rience fall short of the higher ideals we desire, we suffer disappointment and dissatisfaction, in proportion to the intensity of our fancies. Such suffering disposes us to construe our current condition and circumstance negatively, as ‘not good’ or ‘not good enough’. This sets the stage for the sequence of sometimes quite tragic ‘acts’ in the drama most of us know as ‘the human predicament’."

and

"The demoralization and demise of those who don’t accede to and accord with the prescriptions of conscience is assured by their own apprehensiveness—they are simul­taneously afflicted from within. Particularly when others around them increasingly suffer, because they then cannot escape knowing that selfish excess is unjustified and denying others their due is a sin [i.e. anti-Life in function], personal misgivings and anticipation of retributive misfortune overshadow their thoughts and feelings. Their fantasies become more troubled. Horrible happenings haunt their dreams. They keep imagining not obtaining what they want and losing what they already have. More and more, what is strikes them as personally insulting. However much may actually be available to them, they experience what isn’t as a significant denial. A sense of incompleteness and insatiety dogs their heels. Feeling more and more alienated from others and less and less a part of Life’s flow, they find being alone and doing nothing ‘grand’ unpleasant and disquieting.

In conjunction with the effect of the psycho­spiritual reactions they evoke from others, such wretched thoughts and feelings psychospiritually operate to guarantee them consequences that are most unfortunate. In proportion to how callous and destructive they are, judgments and fore­bodings see to it that they become foci for what, to those who are naive, appear to be ‘chance’ accidents, ‘natural’ illnesses, ‘inadvertent’ errors in judg­ment and ‘unavoidable’ catastrophes. However hard they try, wherever they may be, those who are not aligned with Life’s greater expression suffer eventual ill fate as, in realms of Mind and Spirit, they accrue more and more negativity. One way or another, those who don’t lovingly do what they can to advance our common cause go awry; if they don’t change for the better along the way, irretrievably."

[AshvinP]

Ashvin ... as it turns out I did watch that episode, and found it very relatable. And strangely enough Brett bears a striking resemblance to a guy who lived in the same rooming house I ended up living in shortly after getting off that Vancouver bound train, who was a few year older than I at the time, and became a bit of a mentor. A bit of serendipity that makes one wonder if certain events are meant to be: knowing no-one whatsoever in Vancouver, after arriving with about 75 bucks in my pocket, I bought a newspaper and went to a local coffee shop. Opening the paper to the classified ads, and under Rooms For Rent, out of dozens, the first one I called had a room for $50/month, and was 10 minutes walk from English Bay. Condos there now sell for millions. The guys in this house were an odd mix of misfits and transients, right out of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer ~ a novel I had packed in my suitcase ~ some borderline mad enough to make me look quite sane. Yet they became more of a family to me than my actual family was. A couple of them played significant roles in turning my life around, and remained lifelong friends. Not too long after I met my future wife to be. Vancouver still remains a kind of special spiritual place to me. Has to make one ponder some daemons behind the scenes that guide our destiny.

I would say the daemon here may be the freezing cold weather... that adversity seems like its enough to produce mental breakdowns and correspondingly profound psychic recoveries into higher spiritual states. There is some luck involved but also a lot of discipline and persistence.

[AshvinP]

Barfield explores the phenomenon of modern mental illness, such as Schizophrenia, and how it reveals a fundamental alienation of the 'self' from the surrounding world and from the true Self in all of human society, with the Schizophrenics being the ones who are most aware of the alienation. Moderns experience this alienation as varying forms and degrees of insanity, while our ancestors experienced it as "sin". The former feels it is something that is happening to them, while the latter felt it was something they were actively involved in and, therefore, needed to take responsibility for.

Riffing on the above:

Mental 'illness' is really emotional 'illness'. 'Ill'-ness is really 'ill'-health which in turn is really just 'un'-wholesomeness, 'non'-integration, etc.

In thinking about such matters as a psychologist, I often speculatively theorized that as people 'grow' in terms of degree of 'intelligence', they develop what might be called 'conscience' (science=knowledge; con=all-inclusive), or at least 'sense' of 'conscience' even though this may be unconscious, repressed (and so 'denied') - I am talking about a 'self-transcendant "super-superego" , not the internalized kind of socially 'conditioned' super-ego that Freud postulated, here, although such 'introject' (which itself may be a function of social/parental 'illness') may also be included as a 'feature' of said 'conscience'.

I probably should have expanded more on what Barfield was getting at, since it may not have been obvious from the excerpts. He was identifying the most fundamental 'guilt' in modern society as that associated with our unconscious 'sin' of accepting rationalism/materialism, which separated mind from 'matter' and then attempted to reduce mind to matter, thereby causing an extreme alienation from the environment, society and ourselves. Since that philosophical worldview is unconscious, we cannot put our finger on why we are feeling guilty and it also feels like the alienation is being imposed on us externally rather than resulting from our own habits of mind. It's ultimately a hopeful message, because what we generally think of as an intractable epidemic in modern society can be reimagined as deep habits of mind which, with admittedly a lot of discipline and effort, can be reversed.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I would say the daemon here may be the freezing cold weather ...

Well, the ice daemon does hang about in Canuckistan for half the year, yet doesn't seem to have profound psyche-altering influence over the vast majority of folks I know. They just dress imperviously in lots of weather-resistant downy insulation.