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Some observers have speculated on whether there is connection
between mysticism and schizophrenia. In fact, R. D. Laing, a Scottish
psychiatrist, built his entire career on the notion that schizophrenics are
like mystics.
I have worked with psychotics for over twenty
years hence understood them; I would like to believe that I also know a thing
or two about mysticism.
In this essay, I will try to see whether there is any connection
between psychosis and mysticism.
What is mysticism? There are many definitions of mysticism.
Evelyn
Underhill, in her book, Mysticism,
offered what we might call the best academic definition of mysticism. William
James’ “Varieties of Religious Experience” is also helpful in understanding
mysticism, and so is Maurice Buck’s “Cosmic Consciousness”.
I like to speak from personal experience. Therefore, let me share
with you some personal experiences that might help you understand what
mysticism is.
After eighteen years of marriage the relationship ended. I was
forty two years old. I moved out of our house and moved into an
apartment. I had a lot of time on my hands and read a lot about religion.
I attended a
Hindu
Vedanta
Center (in
Seattle)
and the Swami became my friend. I took up meditating and asked the Swami
for guidance. He said something like this (he is a British trained Chemical
Engineer and is, as such, very formal hence calls me doctor): “Dr Osuji, before
you meditate make sure that you love every person and have forgiven all those
who offended you; no one comes to God with anger in his mind”. I tried to love
all people and to forgive those I believed wronged me.
One fine Sunday afternoon, after returning from the Center’s
service, I sat on my couch and tried meditating. What is meditation?
Meditation, as Hinduism and Buddhism see it, entails telling
yourself that all the thoughts that you can think of are ego based. It means
convincing yourself that the ego is a false self. If the ego is a false self it
follows that all thoughts based on the ego are false. If all ego thoughts
are false then you reject them. Having rejected all ego based thoughts
you try to remain quiet. You tell yourself: I do not know what the truth is. I
do not know who I am; I do not know who other people are; I do not know what
any thing is or means. I do not know what the things I see mean (whatever I say
about them is ego based perception, which is false). If I do not know
what any thing is or means then I better keep silent and let a higher power
tell me what they mean. Thus, you empty your mind of all ego based thinking and
all concepts you have of who you are, who other people are and what things in
general are. You reject every idea that comes to your mind and strive to attain
mental silence.
It is difficult to attain inner silence. The ego does not like to
keep quiet. In fact, as you try to keep quiet the ego feels threatened and
redoubles its efforts for you to be identified with it, attached to it;
your mind begin chattering on all sorts of silly subjects. Ignore your
mind’s jabbering by telling you that all ego based thinking is not capable of
producing the truth.
If you succeed in attaining inner silence (the chances are one in
billions that you would succeed) you suddenly feel peaceful. You feel the type
of peace that
St Paul said
passes human understanding. If you have ever felt peaceful multiply it by
thousand times.
You probably already know that to be peaceful is to be happy.
Peace and happiness are synonymous; where peace is happiness is, and where
happiness is peace is. Men seek peace of mind because it is the condition for
happiness.
I succeeded in attaining inner peace. I had expected to be
happy when I attain peace but something interesting happened. I felt like I was
falling into a bottomless hole, being sucked into an empty vacuum, as if I was
losing my self concept and self image and no longer knew who I was.
Losing ones self concept is the scariest experience you
could ever have. You suddenly feel like you do not know who you are. Your
familiar self concept and self image is gone. (This is akin to what happens in
psychotic decompensation where the psychotic feels de-compensated,
depersonalized and de-realized and no longer knows who he is or what any thing
means.)
The self concept and self image are concepts, ideas of who we
think that we are and defend; but, in fact, are not who we are; they are
fictions, make belief constructs. The self concept and self image are not real
but made to seem real to its owner, us.
If you give up the idea of who you think that you are you would
find that you have no self concept and no self image; you would know that the
self concept and self image are made up ideas of who you think that you are.
Who you are, in fact, you do not know. (The real self is the maker
of the self concept and self image, the dreamer.)
As noted, I attained inner silence and felt sucked out of my
familiar sense of me. I felt terrified but decided that I ought to get to the
bottom of this experience rather than abort it with fear. I hung in there
despite the terror I felt.
After a while, I heard an inner voice, a quiet, authoritative
voice that said: “open your eyes”.
I opened my eyes and standing right in front of me was another me.
That is correct, another me, this time a me in light form.
I felt like I was hallucinating. First, I heard a voice asking me
to open my eyes (auditory hallucination) and second I saw a picture of me
(visual hallucination).
Alternatively, I thought that may be I was sleeping and dreaming.
To convince me that I was not sleeping and dreaming I got up from the couch and
tried touching the image of me. The image was pure light and could not be
touched. I walked towards it and walked right through it, for it did not have
solidity. From the other side I turned and was looking at it. It turned and was
looking at me. Scary, eh?
I was confused and decided to call my Swami and tell him what is happening
to me. He had told me that I was close to having spiritual experience. He said
that he knew this the very first time I walked into his temple. He asked me
whether I see light spots before I went to sleep and I said yes. He asked me
whether I hear what sounds like a bell (Omm) whenever I did the right thing (I
heard that sound this morning when a guy at the bus stop had no morning to pay
for the bus ride and I gave him all the dollars in my wallet) and I asked him
how he knew for I have had that experience since I was a child. He said, and I
quote, “Dr Osuji, you are close to enlightenment; all you have to do is
overcome your last obstacle to it, pride, and you experience it”. I am a very
proud man. My God, try doing something that offends my sense of justice and
fair play and I let you have it. The man said that I must give up my pride if I
am to come near to God, for pride is of the ego and no egotist comes to God. I
have been working on overcoming my pride but have not entirely succeeded.
(At age eight our folks decided that I was the “Onye Ishe Muo of
Amadioha,” the high priest of Amadioha. I was sent to our village to understudy
Igbo religion. Members of my family, Umuamadi, children of Amadioha,
traditionally produce the high priest of Amadioha. My uncle, Akakporo, was then
the high priest, and I studied under him for two years before returning to
Lagos
to complete my elementary schooling. Why did the old folk consider an eight
year old boy their spiritual leader? Perhaps, it was due to my precocity on
religious matters? I do not know the answer to my question. Igbos believe in
reincarnation and believed that I was a reincarnated high priest and dibia.
They must have seen what the Hindu swami, priest, saw in me.)
Any way, here I am having what seemed a weird experience and I
reached for the phone and tried to dial my swami’s number and a voice, this
time from outside me, above my head, began laughing hilariously, as if it was
having fun at my expense. I dropped the phone and sat back on the couch. The
episode ended.
I felt totally at peace and began thinking about the implication
of this experience. Was it a psychotic episode? Have I been
drinking something that could induce such visual and auditory hallucinations?
The only brain altering agent I take is coffee. I drank coffee that morning, so
could the episode have been induced by caffeine?
Here are some other supernormal experiences I had during this
period. I had read a book called “A course in miracles”, which, though written
by Professor Helen Schucman was allegedly dictated by Jesus Christ. I was angry
at Jesus for writing the book in a convoluted language that requires
interpretation. Already a cottage industry has sprung up with folk claiming
that their particular interpretations of the book are the best ones. Many of
these folk are already at war with each other; they fight through court suits;
in the past they probably would have shot it out, as religious zealots always
do. I asked why the old boy, Jesus, did not write his book in everyday prose
that all of us can understand and not need popes, cardinals, archbishops,
bishops and priests to tell us what it says. I told myself that if I ever get
my hands on that Jesus boy that I would like to whoop his ass. What is this all
about always speaking in parables that need interpretation; he came before and
spoke in parables and few understood what he said and he came again and made
the same mistake and I was furious at him. There matters stood between me and
Jesus.
I have never seen Jesus as my lord and savior; I see him as an
elder brother who has returned to our father and is showing us how he did it.
One evening, around 6:00 PM I went to my computer to check my mail
and or type something. I sat by the computer and the room suddenly went black
It was only 6:00 PM Seattle time and the sun stays up to about 10:00 PM during
the summer months, so there was no reason why the room should be pitch black. I
got up to go examine what was going on. While standing in the middle of the
room my awareness shifted and I found myself at
Venice,
California beach, gamboling with my three year
old son. Some one sitting by a beach table caught my attention. He was
clothed as Catholic priests do, in white robe. The man looked as white as
snow. He was bent over a book placed on a beach table, with an umbrella
over his head. His light color caught my attention and I went to investigate
what manner of man is this. As I got close to him I immediately knew that he was
Jesus Christ. My repressed anger at him came tumbling out. But I tried to
control my anger and talk to him in a civil manner. I noticed that he was
reading a course in miracles and said: interesting book, eh? He ignored me. I
continued by saying: I have read that book but found it difficult to understand
what the heck it was saying. He still ignored me. I am not used to been
ignored, and being ignored makes me angry, so I got angry and was about to ask
him who the hell he thought he was ignoring me when he momentarily looked up
and said, I have forgotten the exact words: “this book is for some persons who
would understand the perennial wisdom of mankind through its language, there
are other such books; you are going to write such a book, do not waste your
time bothering about this particular book”. At that moment my attention shifted
back to my room and the room was as bright as it was supposed to be.
I was raised as a Catholic and, no doubt, had internalized the
idea that Jesus would look like a Catholic priest. Thus, Jesus appeared to me
as I have an image of him. If I had a different image of him he probably would
have thus appeared to me. Jesus reaches each of us in a manner one is able to
accept him. Historically, Jesus was a Jew and, as such, would have been
brown in color. We are, of course, not talking historical reality here but
metaphoric representation of reality.
Another way of looking at the vision, for vision it obviously was,
is to say that my higher mind, my right mind, produced it; that my higher self
produced a message from Jesus. The message of the vision is that I am here to
write a book on spirituality (Unified Spirit Self is that book). You might say
that I want to write that book and manage to make it seem that Jesus told me to
write it, hence giving me permission to do what I want to do, what I know I
came to the world to do; you might also say that I used Jesus to give
legitimacy to my book, to give it credibility for now I could say that God’s
most enlightened son acknowledged the necessity of my book.
Our higher minds are joined into one unified mind, Christ mind; it
contains the Holy Spirit; Jesus is in that part of our unified mind; my
mind is in that unified mind; as it were, Jesus’ mind and my mind worked
together to produce the vision of him appearing to me. I projected Jesus out in
the vision; this also means that since our minds are joined he projected me
out.
Here is another experience. My mother had just died. I was very
much attached to her and was depressed (dysthymia). I wished to be with her. I
lay on my bed wishing that I were with her. Suddenly, I was out of my
body. That is correct; I could see me up looking down at my body on the bed. I
looked up and saw darkness. In that darkness was a point of light, not larger
than a pin’s head. I was fascinated by it and began moving to it (flying is
more like it). As I approached the light, it became larger and larger and I
became aware that my mother was holding my left hand. She asked me whether I
really want to enter that light. She reminded me that my children are young and
ought not to be left alone to fend for themselves. I felt guilty at the
prospect of abandoning my children. At the very moment that I felt guilty and
wished to be with my kids I was back into my body. My wish to be with my
children returned me to my body. (Wish/thought preceded my return to my body;
this means that wish/thought produced our stay on earth; the earth is nothing
but our thoughts projected out.)
I had so many extrasensory experiences that recounting them all
would fill books. I would be thinking of somebody and he or she calls on the
phone or I receive a letter from him Weird, it seemed to me. (I will not
narrate some of the more absolutely unbelievable experiences for unless you
have had them you would consider them impossible and there is no use trying to
persuade an ignorant person about the things of God.)
Additionally, I had incredibly vivid
dreams. Here is one such dream. As noted, I was in the process of divorcing
my wife; I am now a bachelor and free to fool around with women. I was teaching
at a local college (as well as working in the mental health field). A
literally pink colored lady was in one of my classes. After class she came to
talk to me. I learned that she is a professional who was taking the class for
self enrichment. Somehow we became friends and before you know it she invited
me to her house. Generally, I do not fraternize or socialize with my students
but because she was an older student, about five years older than me, I did not
consider it inappropriate to visit her house. Over the course of the semester,
however, it became clear to me that I was interested in her. At that point I
decided to terminate the relationship before some one got into trouble. It is
against school policy to have intimate relationships with students, older or
not. Thus, I stopped responding to her phone calls.
In the meantime, I attended a course in miracles group. This group
met one evening a week (7-9PM). Members got to know each other well. One
evening I could not attend the group because my car was in the workshop for
repairs. I did not consider it a big deal to miss a meeting. Around 8: 00 PM a
lady from the group called me and asked why I was not at the meeting, and I
told her. She asked for my address and said that she was on her way to come
pick me up. She did but by the time she was at my apartment it was almost 9:00
PM so we could not return to the meeting. We decided to stay at my place and
talk about the course. The lady volunteered to come and pick me up in the
mornings and drive me to work until my car was repaired. I told her that I
could take the bus. To cut a long story short we became friends. However, I was
not interested in having sex with her though it was obvious that she was.
Some where along the line a woman that used to be the
medical records supervisor of my clinic called and said that she heard through
the grapevine that I was divorced. I said yes. She told me that she, too, just got
divorced from her abusive husband and that she moved back to living with her
father. We talked and arranged to meet. In time, she invited me to meet with
her father. Her father has PhD in nuclear engineering and is recently retired
and had nothing to do with his life. He enjoyed talking to me. We got along
famously. I visited his palatial house on an island several times; in
fact, I slept over at his house on a number of occasions. Apparently, the
man’s daughter was interested in me (this time she is younger than me, she was
in her mid thirties whereas I was forty two).
As all these were going on I had the following dream. I was in a
house by a bridge and was standing behind my ex- wife and our young son. I
looked at the bridge and saw a pink horse running across it. I had never seen a
pink horse before and was fascinated and went to investigate where it ran to. I
walked along a street and came to a spot where an alley entered the street and
stopped to look and see if a car was coming from the alley. I looked into the
alley and saw two horses, one old, the other young, running towards me. As they
got to where the alley crossed the street, the old horse stopped and was
looking at me while the younger one was running towards me. I felt that it would
run over me and panicked and began running and the horse kept running towards
me. Just as the horse was about to run over me a pair of hands pulled me out of
its way, and the owner of the hands began laughing rather hilariously. At that
point I woke up.
What does this dream mean? The pink horse was the pink lady in my
class. The older horse was the older lady that offered me her car. The younger
horse was the younger lady that invited me to her father’s house. Clearly, I
was fascinated by the pink horse, the older horse was fascinated by me and the
younger horse wanted to become a romantic friend. The man who pulled me out of
the younger horse’s way was….make a guess….some of the friends in the course
group said that he was Jesus, that he saved me from the horse, from the young
woman’s wish to snare a husband.
Let us return to the original extrasensory experience of seeing me
in light body. I wondered whether the crises in my life, such as going through
divorce and my mother dying, could bring about such radical experience. Stress
can bring about weird behaviors but does it also generate psychotic behavior? I
doubt it. What is psychosis, any way?
Psychosis is characterized by the presence of delusion (believing
what is not true as true) and hallucinations in one or more of the five senses
(auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory etc). Psychosis generally occurs during
adolescence (from adolescence to twenties). I was forty two years old, so all
indicators is that I was too old to experience my first psychotic
decompensation, unless it was organic brain damage induced…psychosis induced by
injury to the brain, such as accident, medications, drugs etc.
Schizophrenia typically occurs as follows. An eighteen year old
boy or girl suddenly begins to hear voices. The voices may tell him that he is
this or that person (say, the most important person in his world, such as
Jesus, Bill Gates etc). The voices may be negative and tell him that he
is not good, that he is a son of a bitch and that he ought to go kill himself;
if a girl the voices may tell her that she is a whore, a sinner and does not
deserve to live. The voices are insistent and disturb the person’s mind.
In schizophrenia, paranoid type, the voices may tell the person
that a particular person wants to kill him or her and ask him to defend himself
by hiding from him, and the person hides. Here is how an Igbo-Nigerian woman
experienced her psychotic decompensation. She was young, mid twenties and a
graduate of
Nsuka
University.
Her parents arranged for her to marry a considerably older man, a medical
doctor in his late fifties. One evening she heard a voice telling her that a
particular professor (their friend) had killed her husband and their two little
children and was searching for her to kill her, too. She ran to my house and
ran into the closet in my bedroom and was hiding there. My wife asked her what
was going on and she told her that the said professor had killed her husband
and children. My wife, having no reason to suspect that it was delusion, called
the police and the police was there in less than eight minutes. Of
course, nobody killed her husband and children; it was all delusion and
hallucination. The police took her to a psychiatric hospital where she was
hospitalized and given a diagnosis: schizophrenia, paranoid type. She was given
neuroleptic medications. These medications suppressed her voices but she still
showed signs of delusional beliefs. Psychoanalytically, the woman was a young
woman, about twenty six, married to an older man, a rich medical doctor; this
was not a love marriage but a marriage of convenience. The professor in
question was in his thirties, closer to her age. She obviously wished that she
was his wife and converted her wish to the notion that he killed her husband
and children hence she was free to marry him.
(There is strong evidence that psychosis is rooted in abnormal
biochemical functioning; in schizophrenia there are issues with the
neurotransmitter dopamine, in bipolar there are issues with the
neurotransmitter norepinephrine, in depression there are issues with the
neurotransmitter serotonin etc. I do not propose to discuss the biochemical
issues in psychosis other than to acknowledge that such issues exist. On the
other hand, there does not seem to be biological issues in mysticism… or, may
be there are but no one has yet studied them?)
In functional schizophrenia the individual hears voices; in
organic injury to the brain the individual may see things.
Psychotic voices are generally irrational but understandable
within the individual’s life context. Consider a girl raised by strict Catholic
parents and told that sex is sinful. Let us say that she went to a party, drank
a little wine and wound up having sex with a young man she liked. If she had
psychotic decompensation she could hear a voice telling her that she is a
whore. That is to say that the voice represents her superego, her internalized
parents calling her a bad girl for disappointing them. What is going on
here is that the girl was brought up to believe that having sex is sinful and
she had sex and now feels like she is a whore and somehow converts it to a
voice calling her a whore.
It is not difficult to understand the meaning of schizophrenic
voices but it is difficult to make them go away. Here is another example. A
nineteen year old black-American college student heard voices telling him that
he is the Greek God, Zeus. He believed the voice and told his peers that he is
Zeus and they laughed at him. How could he be the Greek God they asked him and
told him to get out of here! He resented it that his friends did not accept
that he is Zeus and quarreled with them, for not accepting his hallucination
and delusion. This boy’s issue was eventually brought to his father’s attention
and he subsequently brought him to me. It is easy to see that he is
schizophrenic, paranoid type. He had delusion of importance (claiming to be
Zeus, a god, made him feel as important as god); he had hallucination.
Psychoanalytically, as a black American he felt inadequate and inferior and
thought that seeing himself as the chief God of the Greeks would make him
important in racist white American society. His wish was translated into
a voice hence hearing voice telling him that he is Zeus. After a few
weeks on psychotropic medications he seemed calm enough that I tried to talk to
him; I tried to explain to him the psychodynamics of his claim of being Zeus.
He argued with me and, instead, tried to convince me that he is Zeus. Well,
what can I say, he is not Zeus and the sense of importance that claim gives him
is delusional.
Here is another case, this time of bipolar affective disorder. A
black woman of homely attributes heard a voice telling her that she is
Cleopatra. Cleopatra is said to be the most beautiful woman in ancient
Egypt.
If this woman is Cleopatra it means that she is the most beautiful woman in her
world and that she is desired by all men. In effect, she was trying to seem
beautiful and desirable to men. An ugly woman played a trick on her mind and
now believes that she is the most beautiful woman on earth. This is how
delusion and hallucination works in psychosis. There is wish fulfillment
involved. Her case is manic-depressive psychosis for, in addition to the
delusion and hallucination, she exhibited the symptoms of mania: she was
excited, euphoric, talked a mile a minute, did not make sense, lacked good
judgment, was hypersexual etc. She could also be diagnosed as having
schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and mania. When she is
not manic she is often depressed hence swings from one affective polar to the
other. She was treated with both neuroleptics, anti manic and anti depression
medications.
In psychotic decompensation, the individual’s habitual pattern of
defending his or her ego breaks down. The individual’s ego structure is
temporarily disoriented (deconstructed and reconstructed with more bizarre
aspects). The individual no longer knows who he or she is and feels panic, pure
terror. He tries to recompensate by constructing a more grandiose self concept
and self image. A woman who, in ordinary circumstances, had wished that she
were beautiful and attractive to men now thinks that she is the most beautiful woman
on earth and that all men want to get under her pants; a man who felt inferior
now feels that he is the most powerful man on earth, Zeus.
In mystical experience the individual’s ego compensations, as in
psychosis, decompensate and he feels terror.
Note the terror I felt when my habitual sense of I, my self
concept, disappeared and I no longer knew who I was. I felt afraid of dying
out, disappearing into oblivion. But I produced this state by my act of meditation.
I had learned how to meditate and had been doing it for three years; I was
doing it under the guidance of a Hindu priest.
In mysticism the individual consciously decide to go through the
process of decompensating his ego, to experience egolessness (so as to experience
his real self).
In schizophrenia, a young person’s ego decompensates without his
consciously wishing for it to do so. In schizophrenia the person tries to
recompensate with a more grandiose ego (reconstruct with a grandiose ego).
Psychotics are
seeking to affirm their individual egos and make them important. Psychotics are
seeking separate egos from God and other people. Psychotics experience intense
fear and anxiety because they desire separated selves. Psychotics are agitated and
unhappy.
Mystics
want to destroy their individuated egos; they want to unify with God and all
being in egoless state. Mystics experience peace and calmness; mystics do not
feel fear and excitement; mystics are peaceful, happy and contented with simple
things; mystics have no attachment to anything external to them; they have no
attachment to society and social positions.
In mysticism the individual consciously works on
destroying his ego hence decompensates willingly; in mysticism the individual
does not wish to recompensate with a grander ego; instead, he wants to
experience egolessness.
Egolessness gives mystics peace and joy; egofulness gives
psychotics psychic conflict, psychological anxiety and somatic agitation.
There are apparent similarities between mystics and
schizophrenics. Schizophrenics tend to be hyper sensitive people. In childhood
they conclude that they are not good enough, that other people are not good
enough, that social institutions are not good enough and that the world is not
good enough. They then use their minds, thinking, to construct what seems to
them ideal self, a self that is good enough. At first the ideal self is of
neurotic quality, that is, a mere wish but during psychotic decompensation the
individual identifies with his imaginary ideal self. Thus, an ordinary woman
who had wished to be smashingly beautiful now believes that she is a smashingly
beautiful woman etc. The schizophrenic and manic-depressive flip into the
world of fantasy and live there and are no longer adaptive to our ordinary
world. When they are given medications and their minds clear up a bit they
re-confront the world that they had rejected.
Mental health professionals try making psychotics to accept a
world they had rejected but they do not want to accept that world, so
they stop taking their medications and return to their world of fantasy
where things are as they want them to be.
The mystic, like the psychotic, in childhood also concludes that
his body and ego self is worthless, valueless, meaningless and purposeless; he
concludes that the empirical world is meaningless and seeks a better world.
In childhood I noted that my body is a mass of particles
(protons, neutrons and electrons) and elements (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen,
sodium, magnesium, potassium etc) and that the elements that make up my body
are the elements that make up the bodies of animals and trees. Therefore, I
concluded that my body is not better than the body of my pet, dog, or the trees
I see around me. To me the human body was literally shit, nothing and I did not
value it. I saw my self concept, ego, as make belief, as something I made up
and pretend to be.
How the individual sees himself he sees other people. I see other
people as I see me, as unimportant. As a teenager, I amused myself by
looking at well dressed women and telling me that they are dressed up shit,
that they are white sepulcher, body that would die and rot and smell to high
heaven. When I saw a man who takes himself too seriously, sees himself as a
very important person, I imagined him dead and his body rotting.
I have witnessed cremation of the human body. A human body is
burned to ashes that fit into a cup. What was a man now fits into a cup! So,
how important is man?
During my university days and young adulthood I tried to make me
and man in general seem worthwhile via ego idealism (ala Karen Horney and
Alfred Adler) but by my thirties I recognized that no matter how much you wash
the human anus with soap that it would still smell of feces. Man’s body is
nothing and there is no getting around that fact.
If the human body is nothing it follows that the ego (self
concept, self image) it contains is nothing! Thus, I gave up on man.
Unlike would be psychotics I did not believe that man could be
made ideal. I did not see how the human body could be anything other than shit.
Pamper your body all you want the fact is that eventually it would die and rot
so what is the use? Prolong your life to 120 years but, sooner or later, you
would die. So what is the point?
The point is that I saw through tinsel-town and concluded that I
and all human beings are not important and left it at that; I had no illusion
that we could be improved.
Later, I decided to seek alternatives to the body, its ego and
this world. I threw myself into the study of Hinduism, Buddhism, Gnosticism,
Christian mysticism etc. I was not trying to improve my body and ego and
the ego based world for I knew that they could not be improved; I was
interested in finding out if another world, a spiritual world existed.
DISCUSSION
Let me say this and I say it with absolute certainty: the physical
world is a dream world. That is correct. The world you see with your eyes is a
dream world. You are the dreamer of the world you see. I am the dreamer of the
world I see. We collectively dream our collective world.
The day world is like the world we see at night when we sleep and
dream. The difference is that at night we dream individually whereas the day
world is a collective dream. Because the day world is a collective
dream, a shared dream, it seems solid and lasts billions of years. But it is a
dream nevertheless.
You can tune the day world out and awaken to a different world.
You could awaken to a world of light forms (bodies made of light forms, as in
the body I saw me in), or you could awaken to a non-physical world, world of
pure thought where all are part of one unified mind (as in the world of voice I
head above my head without seeing the speaker in bodily form).
There is a world that religious folk call heaven. I call it
unified spirit state, or the world of God. There is really no name for it for
God is nameless but whatever name makes sense to you would do. In it
there is one self, what folk call God. God is one (himself) and simultaneously
all of us. One God manifests in all of us. One God extends himself to all of
us. God is in us and we are in him and in each other. Where God ends and each
of us begins is nowhere and where each of us ends and another begins is
nowhere. In God, aka, heaven is absolute peace and joy, in a word, bliss.
The world that the individual experience is his personal
dream. You are the one who projected out the world you see. The real you,
spirit, as it were, went to sleep and dream the world you see.
The world you experience is the out-picturing of ideas in your
mind. This is literally true. The external world is your individual and our
collective thinking put into a picture; the world is a visual representation of
the ideas in our minds.
The world reflects your/our thinking. As you think you see a world
that pictures it for you to see. It is your thinking that produced your
body, self concept and self image, and produced the people and things you see
in your world.
It is your thinking that you would die that makes you and people
around you die. If you do as Jesus did and withdraw your belief in death and
did not defend your body and ego you would literally disappear from this world
and not physically die and disintegrate; you would simply awaken in spirit
self.
After you have experienced unified spirit self you could
return to this world to help other folk understand what you now know to be a
fact. I am doing exactly that here. An enlightened man can choose to stay in
this world and live in body so as to teach those who believe that they are
bodies and egos how to live peacefully and happily on earth. They live
peacefully by becoming detached to the things of this world and loving and
forgiving all people.
My intention is not to go into in-dept exploration of mysticism,
for it is a subject that most people would not understand. I merely wanted to
compare and contrast psychosis and mysticism and leave it at that.
Each human being is at a certain stage in his evolution. The
majority of the people are at a stage that is slightly above animals but is not
yet ready for spiritual experience. Only a handful of people are ready for the
journey back to their real self, unified spirit self.
I do not propose to make you begin the journey to your real self,
when you are not yet ready for it. If that journey is for you, you would do
what it takes to undertake it; you would have been doing so right from
childhood; you would have rejected flesh and ego and the things of this world
and turned your gaze to spirit.
If your gaze is on the things of this world that is where you are
at. You are fast asleep and are dreaming and take your dream self and other
dream selves as real. Have a happy dream by loving and forgiving your fellow
dreamers.
For the few who have had enough sleep and dreaming and are
awakening, they know what to do to awaken and do not need me to do it for them.
Those who have had the ultimate mystical experience know that it is beyond
words and cannot be explained in our human language. You suddenly enter a realm
where you are part of all people and all people are part of you and all of you
are part of God. People are not in forms. Just pure spirit, unified spirit
self. There is no you and I, no subject and object, no seer and seen; all are
one self and one mind. In it you feel eternal, immortal and all knowing.
You feel peaceful. When you come out of this unspeakable experience and
try to explain what it is like in words, words fail you. God and his
heaven cannot be cast in words, for speech was invented to adapt to the world
of separation and do not apply to the world of union.
We shall leave the unspeakable alone and instead concentrate on
the speakable, the conceptual, the egos world; this essay is in the realm of
the ego, though seeking purified ego, that is, loving and forgiving ego.
DEATH AND THE WORLD
OF LIGHT BODIES
When folk believe that they are dead all that happens is that they
see themselves in light bodies. They see their so-called dead relatives in
light bodies. They interact with their so-called dead folk for a while and if
they still have the wish for separation, to be egos and live in bodies, they
would re-enter bodies and be on earth (remember my wish to be with my children
and my immediate return to my body; that is how it works).
The light world and the dark world, the light body and dark body,
are illusions, dreams, make belief states.
THE GATE OF HEAVEN
AND TEACHERS OF GOD
If an individual has understood that our world is an illusion and
does not want to separate from God and his real self, upon so-called physical
death he does not return to our empirical world. He remains at the gate of
heaven (world of light forms) from where he teaches those still on earth how to
do what brings them to the gate of heaven. There are many such teachers; they
are teaching each of us. They teach us by directing us to where we shall
receive information on spiritual matters. If you are reading this paper
invisible teachers of God led you to it.
CONCLUSION
Our world is a dream, an illusion and does not, in fact, exist. It
exists only as in a dream. Each of us dreams the world he wants to dream.
Ultimately, the dream is pointless, meaningless and purposeless.
However, the dreamers themselves are the children of God who are
always as their father created them, spirit. While in spirit they dream that
they are separated from spirit and live in body, space and time.
Our world is, as existentialist philosophers, such as Jean Paul
Sartre see it, a meaningless, purposeless place. However, we can make it an
enjoyable nothing. There is no use moralizing about any aspect of the world,
for a dream and dream activities are neither good nor bad; moreover, each
person is dreaming whatever he wants to dream.
One can look at the world as nonsense and still have fun with it.
I call this approach to living on earth existentialist religion or
existentialist psychotherapy.
Mentally ill people did not like the ego and world they see; they
rejected their egos and the world and tried replacing them with their fantasy
big self. They do not want to be part of what folk call the real world.
They see their egos as nothing and tried replacing them with grandiose self
concepts and ego ideals, all illusions. When they fail in realizing their
illusions they want to die and do everything in their powers to kill their
selves (via unhygienic living, smoking and other bad habits that kill people).
Normal folk who are attached to the egos
dream of separation, to this world and want to live in it want to prevent those
who want to destroy themselves from self destruction and bring them back to a
world that they do not want to be a part of.
Clearly, mentally
ill persons want to die and are doing every thing possible to die, including
living unhygienic life styles, smoking etc. Those who work for them, too, want
to die hence exposing themselves to the filth and germs these people live in.
Both are world weary and want to leave the world. Initially, the mentally ill
wanted to live on their term but could not do so and now opt to die. They saw a
meaningless self and world and invented an idealistic self and world to replace
it and when those proved illusory they decided to die.
If the caretaker
did not want to die he would not have gone to the person who wants to kill
himself via germs. These people want to die and you try to keep them alive and
they feel angry at you for doing so hence drag you to their death.
My philosophy is very simple. I am not world weary. I am not
interested in escaping from this world; I am not interested in negating this
world. I know that this world would be around in the next billions of years. I
want to make it a better world by understanding it scientifically and mastering
it technologically. I want to build beautiful structures (houses) on earth, for
I love beauty. But I also appreciate that this world is a dream, a dream
to be enjoyed. Understanding that the world is a dream helps me put the world
in proper perspective and not take it too seriously.
Like Gautama Buddha I want to be in the world but be detached to
its transitory and ephemeral things, so that when I do not get them I am not
disappointed and frustrated. I enjoy the inner peace that non-attachment to
external things gives me.
What I enjoy I wish that you have hence I share this essay with
you; leaving it to you to make of it what you want.
By way of conclusion, whereas there seem some similarities between
mysticism and psychosis they are different; they are as different as night and
day.
Ozodi Thomas Osuji
January 7, 2008
ozodiosuji@gmail.com
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Posted by Robot| 07.01.2008 23:31