| On Paranoia |
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| Written by Ozodi Thomas Osuji | |||||||||||||
| Tuesday, 07 November 2006 | |||||||||||||
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ON PARANOIA Ozodi Thomas Osuji This paper points out that as long as human beings live on planet earth, paranoia/delusion disorder cannot be completely eliminated but can be reduced to a level where people function adequately with it. If delusion disorder is completely eliminated in the individual, he would exit from this world. If delusion is eliminated from the human race, we would cease existing on earth. In as much as human beings want to exist on planet earth, they must have some delusions. The most that can be done is make their delusions flexible and manageable. As long as human beings live on earth, as separated special selves, they must be prone to fear and paranoia. In union there is only love but in separation there must be fear and paranoia. Under the best of earthly circumstances, people would live with functional paranoia, but not without paranoia. Delusion is belief in that which is not true as true and behaving as if what is believed in is true. The human individual generally believes that he has a self that is apart from other people’s selves. He defends what he calls his self. He defends it with food, medications, clothes, shelter and with most of the things he does on earth. These defenses make the apparent self survive for, may be, a hundred years. Thereafter, the individual dies and his body disintegrates and returns to being part of nature (atoms: neutrons, protons, electrons, quarks etc). Since the self concept is predicated upon the human body, it would seem to die with the death of the body; what seems to survive our physical death is the thinker in us, the force that uses our bodies and social experiences to conceptualize selves for us. The self concept is at best a temporary phenomenon. It is an idea of the separated self that seems to exist for as long as the individual defends it. Generally, each human being imagines that his self is important to him and to other people. Each person fancies himself as special. But this is an idea in his mind, an idea not shared by nature. Natural forces like tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, assorted diseases spread by bacteria, virus and fungi destroy human beings as they destroy animals and trees. There is no empirical evidence that nature treats human beings as if they are special; in fact, the converse seems the case. Pure thinking, as existentialists like Sartre, Camus, Jasper and Heidegger pointed out, shows the individual that his existence on planet earth seems pointless, meaningless and purposeless. Life on earth seems like nothingness. People are born, grow up and die and decompose like manure. Their bodies are like other animal bodies: meat--- food for other animals. Pure observation shows people that they are not special. But human beings do not live on the assumption that they are nothing important. To live on earth each of them assumes that his life matters. Apparently, the individual must believe that his life has value and worth to be able to do the work it requires to earn a living for it. Animals do the same thing. A rat devotes most of its day seeking food. It must believe that its life is worth living to do all the things it does to acquire food and protection. There seems an inbuilt desire to live in animal organisms that drive them to live, to survive for as long as they could and for them to do whatever they could to survive. However, if human beings stepped back and asked: why are we surviving, why are we doing all the things we have to do to survive, no rational explanation comes to mind. Oh, people make up pseudo explanations, such as the various explanations provided by the religions of the world. Religions attempt to give people reasons for living and make them see their lives as valuable and worthwhile. A little thinking about the propositions of the various religions, however, finds them make belief and not true. What it boils down to is that human beings give themselves make belief value and worth; they give themselves make belief purpose for living; they give themselves make belief meanings. The various make belief reasons they give themselves for being, apparently, makes their lives tolerable, even enjoyable, sort of like a happy dream. But if those excuses for living are examined they tend to fall flat on their faces. It is self evident that human beings are nothing special and that they live seeming meaningless and pointless lives. They seem to have no worth. Consider that if a human being chooses, he could kill other human beings, until their desire to live make them to stop him. Adolf Hitler decided that he needed to kill human beings. He killed over fifty million of them before those who wanted to live banded together and stopped him from further killing. Joseph Stalin decided that he needed to kill people (under the guise of socialist ideology and his own paranoid grandiosity and persecution…he saw enemies under his bed and set out to kill them before they killed him) and killed over thirty five million persons before death put him out of his miserable existence. Human existence is such that any one who so wishes could kill people and or kill himself and no God would stop him; only other human beings, those motivated by desire to live, could stop him. This means that there seems no intrinsic value to human existence. Human beings idea of their worth seem make belief and not real. Yet human beings must believe in their value and worth and must believe that their lives have meaning and purpose in order to do what they have to do to earn a ling in our impersonal world. Consider the Scientist who sits around in his laboratory seeking to understand how atoms work. He has figured it out. He figured out how to develop nuclear weapons. He probably tells himself that in developing nuclear weapons that he is giving his life security. Now that he has this awesome weapon his enemies no longer could kill him, for if they tried, he would unleash the weapon on them and destroy them. His motivation for developing nuclear weapon seems his desire to live and his fear that other people could destroy his life; he wants to protect his life. But now that he has shown that we can manufacture nuclear weapons, other people, sooner or latter, learn how to do so. In the long run, most countries would know how to manufacture nuclear weapons. We can only delay the spread of the weapons of mass destruction for a while longer; eventually, they would spread to all counties. Now what? The weapons that the scientist developed to protect him (and his people) would be used to destroy him and his people. Give two centuries and mankind would unleash nuclear weapons on itself and kill as many people as is possible. To nature this behavior does not seem to matter, after all nature itself erupts in earthquakes and destroy thousands and in tsunamis and drown thousands of people. Nature does not seem to give a fig for human existence and would not bat an eye if human beings destroyed themselves with nuclear weapons. Human beings and all animals live because they want to live and if they choose to destroy themselves that seems perfectly fine with nature. Who cares? (Some posit imaginary gods that seem to care for them. In the real world, as was the case in Nazi ruled Europe, no god seems to stop those bent on murdering their fellow human beings. The concept of God found in extant religions seems a figment of the human imagination.) For our present purposes, the human sense of worth, value, meaning and purpose seem make belief; they seem not self evident yet people believe in them. People believe in what is not true as true and behave as if they are true. This makes human existence delusional. To be a human being is to be deluded. All human beings suffer from delusional disorder. (The normal person seems merely a more flexible deluded person, whereas the abnormal person seems a more rigid deluded person. The abnormal person takes himself too seriously whereas the normal person, while still seeking importance, knows that he is not that important and, as such, is able to make fun of himself. It would also seem that human beings are not only deluded but hallucinate. The world they seem to live in seems a dream world. They seem to see what is not there and hear voices that only dream figures, not real persons, speak. In that sense, human beings seem psychotic, for they seem deluded and hallucinate, the two indices of psychosis. Human beings seem insane, mad and lunatic; the world seems a nut house.) A self that needs to be perpetually defended to exist is not a real self. That which is real should not need defenses (physical and psychological) to exist. In as much as the human sense of self always needs defense to make it seem to exist it is unreal. Life in human body seems like one huge joke, a joke that we defend and in defending it make it seem important in our estimation. Defense makes important! That whose importance is made by defense obviously is not important. The human sense of self, the separated self and the body that houses it are not important. They exist temporarily. Consider: At night we go to sleep. During our sleep some times we dream and at other times we are not dreaming. When we are not dreaming where are our selves? We certainly do not know where what we call we are during our non dream-sleep. When a patient is anesthetized he does not have an idea of where his self is. Similarly patients in comas do not know where their hitherto sense of selves went. Yet upon waking up from sleep, anesthesia or coma the individual resumes having a sense of self, a self that is continuous with the self he had before going to sleep, anesthesia and or coma. Where was that self when he was not aware of its existence? (And when he dies where is his self? Could it reappear in other forms, bodies and continues to live, just as it reappears from deep sleep, anesthesia and coma, even though at those times it seems non-existent?) The individual often has the illusion of his own importance and power. Yet he cannot predict what is going to happen the next second in his life. Nothing is within his control. Billions of people are out there and are independent and do their own things and he cannot control what they do. Animals and nature do what they want to do and he cannot control them. He cannot predict what other people are going to do during the next minute. Yet he often has the illusion that he is powerful; where is his power, if he cannot predict the next second and has no effect on it? The individual’s sense of power is make belief and unreal. WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A HUMAN BEING A human being is that animal creature that upon birth on planet earth gradually constructs a sense of who he thinks that he is. As far as we know, he does not seem to have a self before he came to the world. At any rate, he does not remember having a self prior to being on planet earth. Indeed, he does not even remember having a self during the first five years of his existence on earth. The human child, building on his inherited body and social experiences, constructs a self concept for himself. By age six the human child pretty much has a self concept in place and subsequently behaves in accordance with that self concept and its pictorial form, the self image. The self concept, self image, personality is an idea of who the individual thinks that he or she is. It is an idea based on his childhood experiences. These ideas are largely not true. For example, the individual has the idea that he has a separated self housed in body, a self that lives in space and time; and a self that is special. If these sets of ideas are examined closely they prove false. The universe is a joined whole. The individual cannot be separated from other things. The individual is not special. Nature does not treat human beings as if they are special. The individual’s sense of worth and importance is exactly that: his ideas, ideas not corroborated by nature. It is simply not true that the set of ideas one has of ones self are true. MEDITATION In meditation (both Hinduism and Buddhism teach meditation), the individual consciously negates his self and the thinking of that self. The individual tells himself: I do not know who I am, I do not know who other people are, I do not know what any thing means; whatever I claim to know about me, about other people and things in general are my opinions, opinions based on the incomplete information available to me. The conclusions of my thinking are based on incomplete information hence are always incorrect. Therefore, I am generating false ideas about the nature of the world. Since all I produce are false ideas about the nature of reality, I might as well stop thinking. Thus, the individual attempts to stop all conceptual thinking. He negates his thinking. Of course, his mind continues to think, ego chatter, but he reminds himself that they are mere noise, not the truth. If he continues along this line what happens is that at some point his mind stops chattering. He feels silent. At this point, he feels as if he has no self. At the realization that his hitherto self was a smoke, a chimera that he had valued, he may be seized by fear of dying, fear of finitude and fear of oblivion. It is like the self he had thought was real was disappearing and he no longer exists. He may panic, feel terrorized and return to his old self concept and may even reconstruct a more grandiose self concept. In psychotic decompensation, which is akin to what happens in meditation when the individual loses his sense of self, the individual feels ego depersonalization and derealization and recompensates with a deluded self concept and may even hallucinate. If while in meditation the individual does not give in to fear and terror and hangs in there and accepts the extinction of his self, what happens is that he learns that what he had called his self are nothing but a compendium of ideas, mostly false ideas. Where he had thought that he had a solid self he learns that there is no such thing as self. The self is exactly that, a self concept, a set of ideas that the individual thinks is who he is and defends them with the various ego defense mechanisms. As long as he defends them, they seem real to him but if not defended, not only are they not real they actually do not exist! Consider the person who sees himself a very important person. He dresses up in a manner to seem very important in other people’s eyes. If other people collude with him and see him as he wants to be seen, as a very important person, he feels validated and important. On the other hand, if other people see him as the clown he obviously is, he feels not affirmed and feels demeaned and angry. He feels easily slighted, demeaned, belittled, degraded, disgraced, humiliated etc. He is forever quarreling with those he believes do not treat him as his idea of himself, his ego, wants to be treated: a very important person. His life is characterized by social conflict. In meditation, the individual witnesses his vaunted important self vanish before his eyes. Where he had thought that he had a self is no self. This is literal, not figurative. Where we see our selves are mere collection of ideas but no actual self. There is no such thing as a separated, special self; the separated special self is a delusion the individual has in his thinking, mind, and defends but does not exist. If in meditation the individual stops defending the false self that he had called himself, what he now experiences is one life. There is one life with infinite units. Each of us is a unit of one life. Each human being, each animal, each tree etc is a unit of unified life. To unified life, it is all units of life. Life (if you like, you may anthropomorphize life and call it God) is one. Life is one self that is simultaneously infinite in numbers, all of which are unified, joined and connected. Where one unit of life ends and another begins is nowhere. There is one life in the universe. That life, in its true state, is formless, not in human body, not in animal bodies and not in trees. Life is nowhere and is everywhere. Life, in its true state, is formless and undifferentiated; life is the same and equal everywhere it exists. It is eternal, immortal, all knowing intelligence, it is permanent and changeless. That which is united must exist in a sea of calmness, peace and joy, bliss really. We are all part of that unified peaceful life. We are all in the unified state called life and while in it seems to be sleeping and dreaming that we are separated from each other. In our dreams we project out this world and see ourselves in it. Each of us seems separated from others and from the whole. We also do this when we sleep at night and dream and see a world that seems outside us and see ourselves living in it. The seeming outside world is not there and we do not see it when we wake from dreams. Our wake world is like a dream in a corner of life that seems to sleep and see itself as us on earth. When we tune out this world we return to the awareness of that unified life. That unified life cannot be explained in the categories of this world, for in it all things are joined and are in each other, whereas in our world all things seem separated. The categories of union and separation are different and cannot be employed to explicate each other. There is no subject and object, no seer and seen, no you and I, no perception in unified life. The self concept and its body are objects in a dream and seem real because we defend them. When we stop defending them, in meditation, we know that they do not exist in fact. Our empirical world is a figment in our thinking, in our minds. We think and our thinking is represented in images, pictures that seem to have solidity hence reality. In our dreams at night we see mountains and while we dream they seem real and are obstacles to our movement, but when we wake up we know that no mountains, no obstacles existed where we had seen them. Our world is a dream in our minds. The self as we know it is a fiction and does not exist, in fact. Do not defend it, tune it out and it disappears into the nothingness from whence it came. In this light, the self is a delusional, for it does not exist; it is a make belief self that ego defenses make seem to exist. If one wants to heal ones delusional disorder, one needs to stop defending ones supposed separated, special self. Accept that you are not separated and is not special. Believe it. Do not defend any idea you have in your mind that you think that you are. If you do so, suddenly the self that you think is you disappears from your awareness. This includes your physical body, for body is a figure in a dream. You vanish from empirical existence, not to be lost but to be enlarged in the unified formless self. It is like you were a drop of water that imagined yourself apart from the ocean and now sunk back into the ocean and knows itself as part of the ocean. That drop of water that you had called you did not disappear from existence, it simply now knows itself as part of the entire ocean. (One can call the ocean life or God; all these are analogies and metaphors which are not what they represent; what they represent is beyond words. God is nameless.) When our separated special self is let go we do not die, we merely know ourselves as part of unified life. This new self, actually, the always self, is not the human personality, the ego separated self concept; it is a formless self that is ineffable. CONCLUSION We can let our deluded self concepts go and we seem to disappear from this world. But should we still want to live in a separated, special self housed in body, a self that lives in space and time, we remerge in our world. If we have had unified experiencing we learn to see the separated self as an illusion and not defend it as rigidly as we did before. Of course, we have to defend it with food, medications; clothing etc for it to exist in our world. We can reduce or eliminate psychological defenses of the self. We can give up our false pride and not see us as very important self and stop being conscious of how other people treated us. This way we become less narcissistic and grandiose. We reduce our deluded sense of importance but not entirely eliminate it, for to live on earth one must have some false self, and some false sense of importance. Paranoia can be healed but its healing requires one to give up the separated self and return to a non-differentiated formless unified self, what the religions of the world call the spiritual world. As long as the individual lives on planet earth, he must have the delusion of a separated self and defend it hence paranoia cannot be completely eliminated from people on earth. The earth itself is a delusion, something which does not exist, but believed to seem to exist, defended and its existence seems real to believers in it. Let go of your belief that the world exists and it stops existing for you; let go your belief that your separated special self exists and its stops existing for you. The world you seem to live in is your invention and when it is no longer cherished it disappears and the individual returns to an undifferentiated unified world of sameness and equality. To heal is to join, to reconnect that which in our current awareness seems separated, to its reality of union. The self is always joined to all selves; the universe is always unified. But in our ego awareness we seem separated and see a separated world. In separation we are deluded; when we return to the awareness of union we are healed. Obviously, no one on earth, in a place of separation, space and time can live in perfect union. If one is in the consciousness of perfect union one would not see our world. As long as one is in the world of separation and perception, the most that one can do is improve ones perception so that one sees all people as joined to all people and love all of them. If while seeing other people as separated from you, somehow you realize that appearances are deceiving, that we are all connected and you love all people and forgive all people the wrongs they did to you (and in doing so forgive you the wrongs you did to other people), your perception has been improved. You now see interconnectedness; where separation still seems to exist but are overlooked to experience the union behind appearances of separation. Your improved perception would give you a bit more peace and happiness than you obtained from your hitherto belief in total separation and different interests. You are still in the world of separation but are now at the gate to the world of union. In religious metaphors, you are now at the gate of heaven. You have approximated heaven, union, but not completely. Because you have met heaven’s conditions, you are now having a happy dream; your life is now peaceful and happy, but not as peaceful and happy as the absolute bliss of no separated self, oneness, heaven. To enter heaven you must let go of all ideas of separation. If you let go all separateness, you would escape from the world of separation and its perception and return to the world of union and its knowledge. You would finally be healed of your delusion disorder, your belief that you have a separated special self. You would know that in having no separated special self is peace and happiness. To have a separated special self and defend it is to be in hell. On earth, we who believe that we have separated special selves are in hell, in bondage, in a jail house. Our freedom lies in our having no separated special self, in living out of our true self, unified self. In separation we are deluded; in union we are psychologically healthy. The solution presented here for delusion disorder is the same solution for all the other mental disorders. All mental disorders are caused by the individual’s wish for a separated special self. The solution to all mental disorders is the relinquishment of the wish for separated special self and return to unified state. This goes for schizophrenia, delusion, mania, depression, anxiety disorder, the personality disorders and all mental disorders. How beautiful and simple is salvation! There is only one cause of the problem and only one solution to it. No matter how small or big the problem seems to be, it has the same cause, our wish for a separated special self. Mental disorders seem complex because each mental (thinking) disorder is disguised in body. Each specific mental disorder is presented in a seeming unique biological type hence seeming different biochemical causation of the different mental disorders. If one is schizophrenic we could see the role of dopamine in it; if manic we could see the role of norepinephrine in it; if depressed we could see the role of serotonin in it; if anxious we could see the role of GABA in it. We then concentrate on coming up with specific medications to heal these seeming different brain disorders. Nevertheless, all these seeming different disorders have one cause, the wish for separated, special self, a wish projected to the human body, make it sick, so as to disguise the origin of mental disorders, and deceive us from knowing how to heal them. If you want to heal your specific mental disorder simply do this: recognize that in reality that we all share one formless unified self; forgive all those who wronged you, to have your own wrongs forgiven you; give up your wish for separation and specialness; work for our common social interest; serve all people with whatever talent you were born with; relinquish your ego. See you as part of one undifferentiated life. You would experience peace and happiness. Peace and joy are the indicators of mental health. * Those who believe that they have separated special selves and defend their imaginary important separated selves are living in hell but do not know it. Our job is not to blame them, for one does not blame those who are causing themselves unnecessary pain. Our function is to teach them about the fact that they live in hell and to show them how to return to heaven by jettisoning their separated special selves and living from the unified self, aka the Christ self, the Holy Son of God, our shared one self. * Finally, nothing said here prevents folks from taking their medications. If you have clinical delusional disorder, you would benefit from psychotropic medications. By all means see your shrink for medications. Any thing that calms your body down tends to help reduce paranoid thinking and behavior. As long as you believe that you have a separated self housed in body you tend to project your otherwise mental issues into your body. Your body would seem the sick one. If your body is treated with medications you would seem to be improved. This is part of the delusion that body and the separated self it houses are real. Therefore, take your medications, for they do work. But when you are ready to understand that only thinking exists, that there is a thinking agent in the universe, A THINKER that currently thinks itself as a separated self housed in body, then you can choose to correct your thinking. * There is a process to healing. First you change your self perception, from separated to Unified self and finally let go of all wish for separation and return to the awareness of our eternal union. * Every one, in the long run, like the prodigal son, will return home from the journey away from his true self, a journey to nowhere and a journey without a distance. But until you are ready to begin the journey home, do what you have to do to improve your sleep-dream state: eat good food, take medications, and live well on planet earth. Reduce your pain. However, pain is totally eliminated in formless unified state. Ozodi Thomas Osuji November 7, 2006
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Posted by Robot| 07.11.2006 23:34