Making Space For The Spiritual Man
Where did the spiritual man of the village go back then?
There was always a place for him, as healer, counsel, ascetic, or shaman.
Allowed for and, even while living in solitude, contained within the greater bounds of the society. In all of those most ancient social roles, solitude was a centermost defining characteristic, thought to facilitate their relationship with spirit. Even while the counselor or healer were to some extent social, the were sought and revered for that perspective gained through disciplined solitude.
Where does the spiritual man of the city go now?
A doctor? That's where Freud went. His isolation created the inward science of psychoanalysis, giving straggling psychology the academic exposure it needed in its struggle to be recognized as a science.
An artist? God knows I was given opportunity as an artist, and all I needed to do was apply myself, become successful socially while forming a career in media.
A madman? A schizophrenic? God knows I've heard the mystical things they'd say in the hospital. I would speak for hours with the paranoids, who were often able to stay clear, concise, and lucid in their expression, describing truly brilliant insights or intensely poetic emotions. This was due to their hypersensitivity, their lowered latent inhibition. The often overwhelming energetic intensity they feel both "resonates" and "radiates." The resonance can manifest as uncontrollable or fully-engaging empathy, which new research shows is not only evident in the schizophrenic, but also in those diagnosed with manic-depression and autism ( ).
"Mad Pride!" is the catch phrase of the Icarus Project, a group composed of psychiatric patients who claim mental illnesses like schizophrenia exist along a spectrum of varying states of consciousness. The baseline state of each individual has a differing degree of both sensitivity and complexity. The complexity, the thoughts and mental constructs which result from sensitivity balance the degree of that sensitivity inwardly as blooming branches of cognitive association. The degree of this sensitivity could be thought of as a flood of attention, the priming capacity of branching out across Anderson's ACT-3 semantic network (Anderson, 2000).
The semantic complex, this branch with greater or lesser degree of inward associative complexity, may develop in any direction subjectively; branch and bloom into any subject. Many subjects are spiritual, others are paranoid, some are mathematical, while others are delusional or pathological. Yet even these categories are not so clearly bound, but define a spectrum of incremental shades: vibrant brilliance to darkened malignancy. Many subjective categories develop together, spiritual peak experiences being followed by an often intense struggle to interpret the extra-ordinary or visionary perceptions of the experience. The resultant interpretive complex can be seen as either developing in the direction of spiritual insight or delusional religious preoccupation based on the relative degree and direction of subjective development in the person listening (or diagnosing). That is, the categorization of subjects has a subjective component, that of the listener in an interpersonal relationship, and the interpretive bias of culture which comes to aid his stereotypic categorizations. As much as the word has come to carry a negative connotation, to some degree or another stereotypes compose a very basic social function, one which allows for the immediate discernment of an individual into a category, a role, a group, a label. This function facilitates psychiatric diagnosis on one level of complexity as much as the basic ability to recognize a doctor on another, criminal profiling on one level as much as instinctual defenses and threat detection on another.
There was always a place for him, as healer, counsel, ascetic, or shaman.
Allowed for and, even while living in solitude, contained within the greater bounds of the society. In all of those most ancient social roles, solitude was a centermost defining characteristic, thought to facilitate their relationship with spirit. Even while the counselor or healer were to some extent social, the were sought and revered for that perspective gained through disciplined solitude.
Where does the spiritual man of the city go now?
A doctor? That's where Freud went. His isolation created the inward science of psychoanalysis, giving straggling psychology the academic exposure it needed in its struggle to be recognized as a science.
An artist? God knows I was given opportunity as an artist, and all I needed to do was apply myself, become successful socially while forming a career in media.
A madman? A schizophrenic? God knows I've heard the mystical things they'd say in the hospital. I would speak for hours with the paranoids, who were often able to stay clear, concise, and lucid in their expression, describing truly brilliant insights or intensely poetic emotions. This was due to their hypersensitivity, their lowered latent inhibition. The often overwhelming energetic intensity they feel both "resonates" and "radiates." The resonance can manifest as uncontrollable or fully-engaging empathy, which new research shows is not only evident in the schizophrenic, but also in those diagnosed with manic-depression and autism ( ).
"Mad Pride!" is the catch phrase of the Icarus Project, a group composed of psychiatric patients who claim mental illnesses like schizophrenia exist along a spectrum of varying states of consciousness. The baseline state of each individual has a differing degree of both sensitivity and complexity. The complexity, the thoughts and mental constructs which result from sensitivity balance the degree of that sensitivity inwardly as blooming branches of cognitive association. The degree of this sensitivity could be thought of as a flood of attention, the priming capacity of branching out across Anderson's ACT-3 semantic network (Anderson, 2000).
The semantic complex, this branch with greater or lesser degree of inward associative complexity, may develop in any direction subjectively; branch and bloom into any subject. Many subjects are spiritual, others are paranoid, some are mathematical, while others are delusional or pathological. Yet even these categories are not so clearly bound, but define a spectrum of incremental shades: vibrant brilliance to darkened malignancy. Many subjective categories develop together, spiritual peak experiences being followed by an often intense struggle to interpret the extra-ordinary or visionary perceptions of the experience. The resultant interpretive complex can be seen as either developing in the direction of spiritual insight or delusional religious preoccupation based on the relative degree and direction of subjective development in the person listening (or diagnosing). That is, the categorization of subjects has a subjective component, that of the listener in an interpersonal relationship, and the interpretive bias of culture which comes to aid his stereotypic categorizations. As much as the word has come to carry a negative connotation, to some degree or another stereotypes compose a very basic social function, one which allows for the immediate discernment of an individual into a category, a role, a group, a label. This function facilitates psychiatric diagnosis on one level of complexity as much as the basic ability to recognize a doctor on another, criminal profiling on one level as much as instinctual defenses and threat detection on another.