the crazies

Sun 12.10.17

      “The Mentally Ill”, I prefer to call them crazies to remove them from the “something is wrong with you” category and placing them in the “outlandish oddball” grouping.  These are people who are trapped in another dimension.  Some black hole sucked them up and they’re no longer with us; that is, unless they are taking psychotropic medication and then they are somewhere in between the dimension we call reality and some hellhole dimension that is making their lives difficult.  There are few happy schizophrenics.  The label itself is bizarre, it’s like saying a person suffering a myocardial infarction is an infarctionic.  The person is labeled with his “symptoms.”

      The field of psychology is not a science.  There is no physical id, ego or superego, rather it’s a classification for certain types of behavior and thought processes.  Psychology has many such types of categorization, the Adlerian, the Jungian, Maslowian, Skinnerian, depending on the person creating such an analysis.  There is no true scientific way of explaining human behavior and thought processes objectively, our needs, our desires cloud all we observe.  Psychology is merely ascertaining and stamping what society (depending on which society) is willing to endure as accepted behavior, i.e. normal. 

      It begs the question, what if crazies are not hallucinating?  Hallucination according to the Oxford American Dictionary is “an experience, a seemingly real perception of something not actually present, typically as a result of a mental disorder or of taking drugs.”  You see the problem; viewer is deciding that what is happening to other is not real.  He has no objective way of ascertaining that.  But . . . it’s not normal.

      Reality is decided by majority consensus.  No, little Johnny, there is no one hiding in the closet.  No sir, there are no threatening spaceships in the sky.  We’ve all agreed.  Late one afternoon, sitting in the car waiting for the light to change, a crazy woman materialized in the middle of the four corners, running back and forth, talking hysterically and blocking traffic from moving forward.  There were people on the street, similarly frozen.  No one approached the defenseless crazy woman wearing a thin cotton dress in late fall weather.  We’d probably still be at that intersection today if she hadn’t moved on.  It was like a parting of the sea once she stepped offstage.

      Everyone was afraid of her.  Why?  I encountered this type of behavior regularly when I worked in the field.  Crazy people are fearful.  They make us uncomfortable.  That’s because we don’t believe psychology’s explanation of hallucination.  Something is happening to crazy people that we have no rationale for.

      Reality is what we’ve decided on.  We have no objective way knowing what happens.  More and more through discoveries in the electronic field we start to grasp other ways of perceiving, other worlds, possibilities.  We have been merely looking at what is most obvious, most immediate.  We lack the ability to synthesize the spiritual overall connectedness of all of life.  What’s more, we dread it, afraid to lose our ephemeral reality.  That woman belongs in the psych ward.  Get her off the streets!

      Look out there.  Do you have an explanation for it, the solar system, the galaxies, the endless cosmos.  Is it infinity?  What does psychology’s “normal” mean vis a vis interstellar space and how do we connect to it?  Do we relegate it to our pretty blue sky with scudding clouds and the life giving sun? 

      How to open the door that allows for a more expanded interpretation of the absolute?