Can philosophy be dangerous?

[Freefrommainstream]

Hello.I am back from the mental hospital and I was diagnosed with a heavy psychosis (because at some point I identified my ego with god) and spoke with a wall (etc.)because I thought a wall has conciousness. It is very interesting that philosophy actually brought me into the deepest and most terrible phase in my life. So what is your opinion, can philosophy become dangerous? In my opinion yes, definetly how you can see.

[Federica]

Hello.I am back from the mental hospital and I was diagnosed with a heavy psychosis (because at some point I identified my ego with god) and spoke with a wall (etc.)because I thought a wall has conciousness. It is very interesting that philosophy actually brought me into the deepest and most terrible phase in my life. So what is your opinion, can philosophy become dangerous? In my opinion yes, definetly how you can see.

Hello Freefrommainstream,
Sure, when we think philosophically, we challenge ourselves. We aim to understand and to relate to many things in one grasp: the world around us, the spiritual world, ourselves… It’s like we go from playing (everyday life routines, oriented towards mainstreamed goals) to working with the real thing. So yes, I believe ‘work accidents’ can happen. When you reflect in hindsight about the interesting side of all that, is there anything that sticks out as most interesting?

[AshvinP]

Hello.I am back from the mental hospital and I was diagnosed with a heavy psychosis (because at some point I identified my ego with god) and spoke with a wall (etc.)because I thought a wall has conciousness. It is very interesting that philosophy actually brought me into the deepest and most terrible phase in my life. So what is your opinion, can philosophy become dangerous? In my opinion yes, definetly how you can see.

Hello,

I'm sorry to hear of your struggles. Unfortunately, this seems to be an extreme case of what can happen when we pursue idealist metaphysics instead of phenomenology and therefore we end up with a discontinuity between the insight of all being One Consciousness and our first-person intuitive becoming within this One Consciousness. Not that this is the sole factor at work, but it seems likely to be an important one. You may want to look at some of the discussion on the other threads here, perhaps the Phenomenology of Cognition.

I will quote my first comment on 'ego inflation' from the Demiurge thread, which is a phenomenon you mentioned above. We need to discern how our lawful becoming on the physical plane is situated within the lawful becoming of the archetypal realms we tend to lump into the 'One Consciousness' which is responsible for the outer world and our subconscious inner life. We can't do this abstracly through conceptual theories and models, which can only help to orient us as we inwardly steer through the flow of our own thinking, which is conditioned by our underlying opinions, interests, passions, character, temperament, etc. We won't escape our inner demons by ignoring them, so instead we can engage a very discplined and living practice of Self-knowledge to gradually purify them with the Light of consciousness. To do this requires an inner disposition of sacrificing our current fragmented being for the sake of our higher potential Being who also encompasses humanity as a whole.

It seems to me that the trap here is what Jung called 'ego inflation', which we can concretely sense in the narrator of the videos. It is the state in which the intellect feels its own mind-container perspective to have perfect information on the Wisdom of Earthly happenings and to have perfect moral fiber to evaluate those happenings. Ironically, it feels its Earthly condition - the condition which it supposedly seeks to permanently escape - to be the yardstick against which all other higher states and encounters should be measured, and then builds up an entire worldview from there. Once we are trapped in this inflated ego, we can seek out any 'evidence' we want to support our own desired conclusions, while ignoring everything which suggests otherwise. Most of all, we can ignore the need to gradually grow out of our Earthly identifications and transform ourselves through inner work, instead settling for a 'quick fix' which gives us the illusion that our intellectual ego can leap beyond the entire archetypal structure of the Cosmos, whenever it so pleases. It's very similar to the bubble solipsistic perspective, which is also a symptom of this inflated ego condition. Such a condition did not really exist in the spiritual traditions of antiquity, since the individuated intellectual ego is a more recent development.

The Job drama is personally applicable to all. It speaks immediately to the almost universal question, “Why must this happen to me?” We all have an underlying resentment against fate and reality which is a residue of inflation. Such resentment takes many forms: “If only I had had a better childhood;” “If only I were married;” “If only I were not married;” “If only I had a better husband or wife,” etc., etc. All of these “if onlys” are the means by which one excuses himself from relating productively to reality as it is. They are symptoms of inflation which will not grant the existence of a greater reality than one’s personal desires. Job asked why his misery should happen to him. The answer that emerges from the Book of Job is so that he may see God.

Blake has captured the essential feature of the individuated ego in his picture of the repentant and rejuvenated Job. What is pictured is the sacrificial attitude. Having experienced the transpersonal center of the psyche, the ego recognizes its subordinate position and is prepared to serve the totality and its ends rather than make personal demands. Job has become an individuated ego... Individuation is a process, not a realized goal. Each new level of integration must submit to further transformation if development is to proceed.

Edinger, Edward F.. Ego and Archetype (C. G. Jung Foundation Books Series) (p. 112). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

[Freefrommainstream]

Hello.I am back from the mental hospital and I was diagnosed with a heavy psychosis (because at some point I identified my ego with god) and spoke with a wall (etc.)because I thought a wall has conciousness. It is very interesting that philosophy actually brought me into the deepest and most terrible phase in my life. So what is your opinion, can philosophy become dangerous? In my opinion yes, definetly how you can see.

Hello,

I'm sorry to hear of your struggles. Unfortunately, this seems to be an extreme case of what can happen when we pursue idealist metaphysics instead of phenomenology and therefore we end up with a discontinuity between the insight of all being One Consciousness and our first-person intuitive becoming within this One Consciousness. Not that this is the sole factor at work, but it seems likely to be an important one. You may want to look at some of the discussion on the other threads here, perhaps the Phenomenology of Cognition.

I will quote my first comment on 'ego inflation' from the Demiurge thread, which is a phenomenon you mentioned above. We need to discern how our lawful becoming on the physical plane is situated within the lawful becoming of the archetypal realms we tend to lump into the 'One Consciousness' which is responsible for the outer world and our subconscious inner life. We can't do this abstracly through conceptual theories and models, which can only help to orient us as we inwardly steer through the flow of our own thinking, which is conditioned by our underlying opinions, interests, passions, character, temperament, etc. We won't escape our inner demons by ignoring them, so instead we can engage a very discplined and living practice of Self-knowledge to gradually purify them with the Light of consciousness. To do this requires an inner disposition of sacrificing our current fragmented being for the sake of our higher potential Being who also encompasses humanity as a whole.

It seems to me that the trap here is what Jung called 'ego inflation', which we can concretely sense in the narrator of the videos. It is the state in which the intellect feels its own mind-container perspective to have perfect information on the Wisdom of Earthly happenings and to have perfect moral fiber to evaluate those happenings. Ironically, it feels its Earthly condition - the condition which it supposedly seeks to permanently escape - to be the yardstick against which all other higher states and encounters should be measured, and then builds up an entire worldview from there. Once we are trapped in this inflated ego, we can seek out any 'evidence' we want to support our own desired conclusions, while ignoring everything which suggests otherwise. Most of all, we can ignore the need to gradually grow out of our Earthly identifications and transform ourselves through inner work, instead settling for a 'quick fix' which gives us the illusion that our intellectual ego can leap beyond the entire archetypal structure of the Cosmos, whenever it so pleases. It's very similar to the bubble solipsistic perspective, which is also a symptom of this inflated ego condition. Such a condition did not really exist in the spiritual traditions of antiquity, since the individuated intellectual ego is a more recent development.

The Job drama is personally applicable to all. It speaks immediately to the almost universal question, “Why must this happen to me?” We all have an underlying resentment against fate and reality which is a residue of inflation. Such resentment takes many forms: “If only I had had a better childhood;” “If only I were married;” “If only I were not married;” “If only I had a better husband or wife,” etc., etc. All of these “if onlys” are the means by which one excuses himself from relating productively to reality as it is. They are symptoms of inflation which will not grant the existence of a greater reality than one’s personal desires. Job asked why his misery should happen to him. The answer that emerges from the Book of Job is so that he may see God.

Blake has captured the essential feature of the individuated ego in his picture of the repentant and rejuvenated Job. What is pictured is the sacrificial attitude. Having experienced the transpersonal center of the psyche, the ego recognizes its subordinate position and is prepared to serve the totality and its ends rather than make personal demands. Job has become an individuated ego... Individuation is a process, not a realized goal. Each new level of integration must submit to further transformation if development is to proceed.

Edinger, Edward F.. Ego and Archetype (C. G. Jung Foundation Books Series) (p. 112). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.

Thanks for your answer. I am going to explain why I thought I am god.

Actually everything started with logic and the omnipotence paradox. Bernardo Kastrup once answered the question "Is reality fundamentaly absurd" with some kind of a yes and this inspired me to investigate into logic. Soon after looking at some positions I concluded that logic is just some kind of cognitive construct in order for us to survive but it is not ontologically embedded into reality. After this conclusion I asked myself the question "Is omnipotence even a paradox?" And my answer to that question was, no. Then I started do drift into things like absurdism and started my own philosophical position. I thought that for example god can exist while he is not existing and I can know everything but know nothing at the same time etc. So I started hallucinating and hearing voices of aliens that told me a wall has an iq of 800 and stuff like that. So I thought yes, a wall can philosophically seen have an iq of 800 and have conciousness whilst having no conciousness. Psi phenomena also came into this, so I thought in a parallel universe a dog is smarter than a human and dogs are great philosophers and I thought that in the afterlife we realise that we are omnipotent and stones can reincarnate as Schopenhauer in some other universe and so on. So in a nutshell I basically thought that nothing has limits and literally everything happens and everything is possible.

Some other examples of my thoughts from my psychotic journal:
"An atom will reincarnate as Fichte and if this atom that reincarnated as Fichte dies again it will see again that it is completely omnipotent and will start to destroy universes and will shift itself into unlimited dimensions in order to become more infinite as it is because everything is possible and it will become infinity×infinity so everything is possible and nothing has limits" Excerpt from my journal

[Freefrommainstream]

Hello.I am back from the mental hospital and I was diagnosed with a heavy psychosis (because at some point I identified my ego with god) and spoke with a wall (etc.)because I thought a wall has conciousness. It is very interesting that philosophy actually brought me into the deepest and most terrible phase in my life. So what is your opinion, can philosophy become dangerous? In my opinion yes, definetly how you can see.

Hello Freefrommainstream,
Sure, when we think philosophically, we challenge ourselves. We aim to understand and to relate to many things in one grasp: the world around us, the spiritual world, ourselves… It’s like we go from playing (everyday life routines, oriented towards mainstreamed goals) to working with the real thing. So yes, I believe ‘work accidents’ can happen. When you reflect in hindsight about the interesting side of all that, is there anything that sticks out as most interesting?

Thank you for your answer.
I think I explored the deepest corners of my mind in this psychosis. It was the most terrible thing I could experience, I am so happy that I still live and see how much my lifie is worth because I nearly killed myself because I thought I will completely realise my omnipotence and I will play chess with a parallel universe Kasparov that has a 1000000000000 chess score and I will win because everyone is omnipotent.

[Federica]

Thank you for your answer.
I think I explored the deepest corners of my mind in this psychosis. It was the most terrible thing I could experience, I am so happy that I still live and see how much my lifie is worth because I nearly killed myself because I thought I will completely realise my omnipotence and I will play chess with a parallel universe Kasparov that has a 1000000000000 chess score and I will win because everyone is omnipotent.

Great feeling, I can imagine, to look back at your journey and see how you managed to stay alive, and to start a new phase in which the rules of reality are integrated. I'm glad you did it!