Part 9. Schizophrenia and Paganism

Now I would like to turn to a perhaps unexpected topic such as insanity, especially schizophrenia. But, as we will gradually see, it will open our eyes to many things in human nature and history.

What is schizophrenia? Commonplace opinion associates with this word a number of things that actually have very little to do with the topic. A schizophrenic is not an idiot who drools and climbs the wall. If a person is hit over the head with a stick, he may also begin to drool, but he is not schizophrenic and generally not mentally ill. Therefore, he is treated by completely different doctors. Such a person simply got injured and fell into a specific physical handicap state. This does not mean that his consciousness is impaired. We compared the brain to a monitor and consciousness to a processor. So, it’s like breaking the computer monitor. The processor is working, but the monitor does not adequately display its signals. The problem is purely technical: you need to fix the monitor, and everything will function normally.

Schizophrenia is something completely different. The problem here is not in the monitor but the processor. This disease can occur without any external, physical cause. A perfectly healthy person who has not undergone any injuries suddenly begins to hear some voices, for example… 

In the Arab tradition, Avicenna called schizophrenia “junun mufrit,” that is, “severe madness.” Schizophrenia is the primary and most mysterious form of mental illness, so to speak, the “king of insanity,” which differs from milder forms, such as neurosis, where a person continues to maintain control over his actions.

Schizophrenia today affects approximately one percent of the world’s population, and despite tremendous efforts, modern-day psychology knows too little about the disease. Its causes are unknown; it is unclear how to treat it. Even the very definition of schizophrenia is still highly debated. This disease indiscriminately affects people of all classes, religions, nations, races, all types of the psyche, levels of intelligence, and education. Therefore, it is impossible to connect this with any reasons from anatomy, physiology, or psychology.

Today schizophrenia is treated mainly via antipsychotics, i.e., sedatives that relieve symptoms but do not affect the cause of the disease. The disease is not treated; only its symptoms are extinguished. It is like treating a cancer patient with pain relief. Yes, this will relieve the secondary symptoms but not affect the true cause of the disease.

The name “schizophrenia” derives from the word “schizis,” that is, “splitting.” This means that a person’s mind creates a parallel reality for itself that exists along with the accepted one or even displaces it. One should distinguish this from fantasies and illusions to which all people are subject. Each of us can imagine something, but he still understands that this is a fictional object. The horror of schizophrenia is that the phantasms are completely real here. A person with schizophrenia sees some creatures and hears voices, just as you see and hear your friend sitting next to you. And no matter how he tries to drive them away – he can not. And it’s really creepy…

Typical symptoms of this disease include the following:

– Thoughts cease to belong to a person. It seems to him that instead of his thoughts, the thoughts of someone else are being put into his head or his own thoughts are being taken away; that he does not control the process of his thinking; someone thinks for him.

– The body or some parts of it seem to be a kind of automaton, which begins to be controlled by someone else’s will.

– Voices in the head that comment on the patient’s thoughts, talk, condemn, argue with the patient or with each other. One of the most common symptoms of schizophrenia.

The emergence of an imaginary world that becomes more real than the one most people live in. The schizophrenic creates a myth in which specific forces of cosmic proportions are fighting; someone is hot on his tail, a universal catastrophe occurs, etc. In psychiatry, this is called “delusional ideas.”

– The so-called “negative symptoms” of schizophrenia include the loss of logical thinking, a break in relations with society, emotional dullness, as well as – in some severe cases – the so-called “catatonia,” that is, the body freezing in some a bizarre pose in which the patient can be for whole days.

As we said, the worst thing about schizophrenia is that these voices or creatures seem completely real to the patient – just as, for example, a burglar who broke into our house would be real for us. Nobody will laugh if a person reacts to a robber in one way or another, for example, runs screaming or starts fighting him. Schizophrenics are laughed at; their actions are considered strange because for us, what they see is unreal, but for them, it is absolutely real – more real than our ordinary world, which seems to them to be somehow secondary, not interesting, and generally unnecessary.

The result of this process is the gradual fading of consciousness and the death of personality. Jaspers writes, “The deepest differences probably exist between the type of mental life that we can intuitively feel and understand and the type that cannot be understood in its own way, distorted and schizophrenic… We cannot empathize with it, we cannot make it understandable, although we are trying to grasp it in some way from the outside.”

We cannot somehow sympathize with the schizophrenic or understand him. Before us, some new, non-human being is born, fundamentally different from us. This is the distinction between schizophrenia and other mental disorders. For example, we understand a person who has manic-depressive psychosis, we can delve deep into his feelings, we can sympathize with him on a human level, and he can understand us. Many geniuses had manic-depressive psychosis, which did not prevent them from creating their works but even helped. Whereas between a schizophrenic and a normal person, all connection is lost: before us, in the literal sense, is some other creature that cannot understand us, and we cannot understand it back. 

Therefore, schizophrenia is always associated with leaving society, losing all emotions, isolation, refusal to communicate and observe hygiene standards, etc.

In the case of neurosis, everything that happens occurs within the framework of a single personality is integrated into its very structure. The personality continues to function, albeit with some “oddities.” In schizophrenia, the “I” collapses, and something completely different takes its place, some unknown currents, forces, and beings. Therefore, neurotics remain within the human field while the schizophrenic leaves the human framework. He is “on the other side of the human,” according to Nietzsche, who himself ended up with a severe form of schizophrenia. 

Schizophrenia is the washing out of a personal soul by a cosmic stream. And what can be brought there by the stream is completely accidental. That is why there is an endless variety of schizophrenic mythologies and forms of delusion, which are rarely repeated in detail, although structurally similar.

The neurosis is concentrated mainly around personal mental life. For example, he had some mental trauma in childhood, which caused oddities in his behavior. Everything here revolves around a personal biography. With neurosis, there can also be delirium, hallucinations, persecution mania but within the framework of one personality. Whereas the schizophrenic broadcasts transpersonal myths which have nothing to do with him. For example, a poorly educated, illiterate person from the lower strata of society suddenly begins to express complex dualistic mythology, close to the teachings of Zoroastrianism, about which he did not hear anything at all during his conscious life. From his biography, he could take nothing like this; it comes from a completely different source…

And in fact, we can reduce all the symptoms of schizophrenia to one thing: a person’s mind becomes, as it were, a gateway for certain entities or forces that walk through him back and forth, so he is no longer able to control this process somehow. In the end, they replace his consciousness. In its place, something else arises, a kind of new being.

So, schizophrenia is different from other mental disorders because, in their case, a person remains himself, and his personality is not replaced by something else. This personality has some problems: falls into depression, experiences neurosis or an obsessive state, etc. In schizophrenia, precisely the replacement of the personality takes place, dissolution in some streams, forces, or beings. Schizophrenia is an occult illness that actually has a distant relationship with the department of psychiatry. Therefore, the very name “schizophrenia” does not quite correctly describe reality. Rather, it would be correct to call it “personality displacement disease.”

One of the most famous cases of schizophrenia is described in the book “Memoirs of My Nervous Illness” by Dr. Schreber, a German judge of the late 19th century, who described in detail the picture of his delirium. An extensive literature is devoted to this case. Freud wrote a separate book on the subject (“The Schreber Case”).

Schreber’s delirium is, in fact, a detailed and complex metaphysics. At first, he began to experience depression and insomnia; it seemed to him that the walls of his house were cracking. Then voices and light rays appeared. Schreber claimed that his body was decomposing, that he went through the most terrible decay processes, and asked when he died… Then it began to seem to him that he was in direct contact with God, but God is divided into two parts, which, by the way, is very reminiscent of the two-stage hierarchy of pagan deities – higher and lower gods.

They tried to destroy his “I” and replace him with someone else. At the same time, his body absorbs the entire universe. He is confident that he can influence the weather and even world processes. This interval, he said, lasted several months in human time, but in fact, it lasted for many centuries. The Supreme God resembles the Sun – which leads us to the traditional solar symbolism presented in all contemplative religions… God sends rays, which are the world’s nerves, and He has countless such nerves. God is composed exclusively of nerves. The nerves of God, unlike human ones, are not limited in number but countless and eternal. Having created something, God gives a part of His nerves a different form (such a kind of “wahdat al-wujud”). When people die, they merge with God again, returning His nerves back to Him.

However, sometimes the nerves of God can be pulled too strongly by people, which becomes the cause of His suffering. This happened in the case of Schreber himself. To overcome His suffering, God requires him to become a woman. Schreber agrees to it. As a matter of fact, he slowly begins to transform into a woman. He claims that his body is filled with female nerves, that he has breasts and female genitals. He is sure that he is destined to redeem the world, save humanity, and become the progenitor of a new race in this role. This process will take decades, if not centuries, and hardly any of his contemporaries will be able to live to see its end. However, when this finally happens, the transformation of the universe and the era of everywhere happiness will come…

It remains to add that Schreber wrote his memoirs more as a kind of message to humanity than a description of the disease. He is absolutely sure of the reality of his delirium, and it was impossible to convince him otherwise, as indeed is the case for every schizophrenic.

I think this case will be enough to illustrate a rough idea of ​​what happens with this disease. In the book “Psychology of Schizophrenia,” Kempinski writes, “In schizophrenia, metaphysical problems come to the fore. This is one of the features that distinguish schizophrenic delusions from other types of delusions. The main feature of schizophrenic cosmology is fantasy and magic. <…> The schizophrenic world is filled with mysterious energies, rays, forces, good and evil, waves that penetrate human thoughts and govern human behavior. In the perception of a schizophrenic patient, everything is filled with a divine or devilish substance. Matter turns into the spirit. Fluids, telepathic waves emanate from a person. The world becomes a battlefield between the devil and God, political forces or the mafia, endowed with cosmic power. People are duplicates of creatures living on other planets or automatons controlled by mysterious forces.”

So what’s going on here? In the previous parts of this series, we described the normal structure of the human Haikel, in which the body is a hologram of the soul, and the soul is a hologram of the spirit. With schizophrenia, a certain hole appears in a person’s nafs, i.e., in his higher speaking soul. And into this “gap” in his Haikel, a cosmic stream begins to pour. Against his will, he becomes a “courtyard” for various kinds of cosmic forces, beings, symbols, and phenomena. After that, he begins to broadcast all this to us through the language he still speaks, which we perceive as delirium.

So, the cause of schizophrenia is an imbalance in the human Haikel. We said that the soul is a mirror reflecting the Universal Soul. Or a ship sailing in the ocean of the cosmic Soul. Now let’s imagine there was a hole in its bottom during the manufacture of the ship. At first, this is not noticeable, but as you sail, the hole will increase more and more until the ship is filled with water and drowns. The same thing happens in schizophrenia. In the early stages of the formation of the human Haikel, a certain hole forms, and then it manifests itself.

In schizophrenia, the same process of “drowning” or “dissolution” of consciousness occurs as in the framework of the pagan contemplative paradigm. We have said that our consciousness is primarily a tool for cutting off, subtraction, filtering the sea of ​​meanings contained in the Universal Soul, so if there were no such filter, this sea would simply wash us away. So, all these manipulations with mantras, meaningless repetitions of the same phrases, music, drugs, and intoxication lead to the same goal: turning off the filters of individual consciousness so that the door to universal consciousness opens and the worlds of meanings engross the human consciousness.

The schizophrenic is a semblance of a mystagogue, a pagan contemplator, who, however, set off on a mystical voyage not of his own free will but regardless of his desire, finding himself floundering helplessly in this sea…

Here we should make a small digression and say a few words about matter and form… This topic itself is very long. So we will only mention some points that are important precisely in the context that we are talking about now. And we see that one topic opens up another for us…

So, it was noticed long ago that all things have matter and form. For example, the matter of the door is the tree from which it is made, and the form is the very image of the door, thanks to which we call it, in fact, “door.” We could give the same tree a different shape, so this will be not a door but a table. Or a bed. All these are forms, and their matter is the same: tree. 

All things in the visible and invisible worlds consist of matter and form (madda and sura).

In traditional, pagan, contemplative metaphysics, derived from the ancient Greeks, it is generally accepted that form plays an active role in all things, and the matter is something passive, dependent, a kind of lower principle. However, the metaphysics of Monotheism will correspond to the understanding that, on the contrary, the matter is an active principle, and form is passive. The matter is the existence of things, light, or water, from which Allah created all things, as said in the Quran. Of course, this is not about our physical matter …

In each of the created things, there are two components: its existence (matter), which is light and the consequence of Allah’s action, created out of nothingness – on the one hand – and that goes from the thing itself in the degree of its acceptance of taklif, i.e., its answer to Allah, – on the other – and this is the form of thing, its individual essence. The primal matter, or initial being, or primordial light was the light of Muhammad and the Family of Muhammad (S). Then, Allah created the Intellect, which is the upper right pillar of the Throne, out of the radiance of this light.

After that, He created the souls of the Prophets, then the souls of believers, and so on. We have compared this to the Sun and the perception of its light…

Each stage of being has its own matter. Higher matter cannot be a matter for a lower degree, and vice versa, just as iron is a matter for a sword and ink is a matter for letters: iron cannot be a matter for letters, and ink cannot be the material from which the sword is built. And also, the matter of the intellect cannot be the matter of the soul, and the matter of the soul cannot be the matter of the physical world (body). 

We can understand this through our thoughts. If I mentally imagined a person, for example, Zeid, then this thought has matter (madda) and has a form (sura). And so, the matter of my thought is not the matter that the real Zeid is consisted of. It does not eat, drink, die, cannot be touched, etc. The matter of the spiritual world is much more subtle than the matter of our world, which is frozen light. The matter of our world is like clay, and the spiritual world is like water, which easily takes any form. 

In our world, Zeid cannot be headless. However, in that world, you can assume the image of Zeid without a head or whatever you like because it easily turns into any form.

The matter of Aql (intellect) or spirit is even more subtle. All these are stages of being, coming from the highest Light, or the highest matter, which is the Light of Muhammad and the Household of Muhammad (S).

And – moving on to our topic – the point is that the contemplator, like the schizophrenic, really sees certain regions of the World Soul, i.e., its lower layers, located on the border between the World Soul itself and our earthly world. This region is also called the “world of images,” alam al-mithal, which also has many regions. And in the higher regions of alam al-mithal, real bodies and figures of this world are transformed into certain symbolic meanings, which can also be seen in a dream state. There are many hadiths about this. That is, our reality is being transformed into certain symbolic figures. That world is like water, as we have said.

The contemplator, setting off on this “navigation,” sees some symbolic figures and images there and then transforms them into the language of myth. (And here we can remember Jung’s theory of symbols, which he considered an expression of the “collective unconscious.” In fact, the “collective unconscious” ​​is what we have called the Universal or World Soul).

That is why the delusions of the schizophrenic are so reminiscent of pagan myths. We can call schizophrenia a “metaphysical disease” because the schizophrenic’s worldview is intrinsically metaphysical and transpersonal. 

Let’s remember how we said that reality is incredibly redundant in relation to our consciousness. Our mind is not a mechanism for creating reality but for filtering it. Earthly consciousness is a filtering mechanism for our cosmic consciousness. If these filters were turned off at once, the reality would flood us with its redundancy, and we would not be able to “digest” it.

Therefore, the destruction or removal of these filters would end up in delusional states. Mystical experience and delusion are essentially one thing. 

Let me put it another way. The mechanism of pagan occult initiation consists in inducing intentional and (presumably) controlled schizophrenic episodes in a person. Visually, it can be imagined as follows. There is a wall between our outer and inner mind. We can sometimes go “to the other side” through a special door in the wall (for example, in a dream).

However, in the normal state, this door is closed. The essence of schizophrenia is that a hole is formed in the wall in an uncontrolled way. Through this hole, forces and beings climb out “from the other side,” and since “this side” is nothing more than a hologram of “that side,” these beings look completely real. Visions of a schizophrenic are hallucinations only for us, i.e., normal people. For him, they are absolutely real – just like friends you are talking to.

 “Behind” our physical reality is the World Soul or Malakut (and this is what Jungian psychology calls the “collective unconscious”). Our reality, in which we live now, is like a movie projected onto the screen by a film projector, i.e., by the World Soul. The difference with cinema is that a film broadcast passes through ourselves, that is, through our consciousness, our psyche, our mind. The beams of the projector are directed not at the external screen but our, relatively speaking, “cranial box.” The screen is ourselves. The result is everything that we see around us. We project external reality from ourselves.

However, the projector broadcasts the movie not in its entirety but in a truncated form because this film of reality passes through our filter system. In the process of broadcasting, many things are filtered out by us. As a result, only a very small, negligible percentage of what is “on the other side” passes “to this side” (and this is what we call our earthly world). In this case, the occult esoteric tradition of both the East and the West will be nothing more than an attempt to go “to the other side” and watch the entire movie or at least some of its most interesting scenes. To this end, this tradition has developed special methods that (they believe) allow to carefully make a hole in the wall through which it will be possible to peep at what is shown there.

Or, to put it better, it is an attempt to change how the filters themselves work. Filters are like gateways that function according to a specific scheme, letting certain contents through and delaying others. If you change the scheme of functioning of the gateways, then you can change the contents themselves.

As I have said, the difference between a schizophrenic and an occult pagan adept is only that in the first case, the filters were damaged as a result of some traumatic situation (usually going back to childhood), while in the second case, the adept himself did the work of destroying the filters and “perforation” the wall.

But it’s very dangerous. By destroying the filters of everyday consciousness, a person enters into reality, which is redundant for his comprehension. He simply does not have the mechanisms to understand and control it. Therefore, all mythological systems created precisely through such experiments with the filters turned off are, in essence, delusional. When we read about the adventures of Dionysus or Krishna, this, roughly speaking, does not differ much from the statements of the schizophrenic that he is Napoleon. The schizophrenic declares that he is Napoleon because he really sees himself as Napoleon. He speaks the truth. When the mystic asserts that he is “the All,” that he is identified with the world or God, we face typologically the same phenomenon.

Now you see where all these pagan myths come from, where Purusha is dismembered, the bull generates the world, one god grows out of the head of another, etc. Even from a literary point of view, no logic is found in the plots of pagan mythology. Like a kaleidoscope, scenes of murder, dismemberment, copulation, incest, cannibalism alternate – without any scheme or plot. The gods transform into each other, die, revive again… This does not even look like a fairy tale because a fairy tale has a plot and a specific structure. The closest picture to this is the concept of schizophrenic delirium.

For example, here is a quote from the “Bhagavad-Gita”: “I see in your body many, many hands, wombs, mouths, eyes, stretching everywhere without limit… I see how You belch flame and burn the entire universe with your own radiance… All the planets and their demigods are thrown into confusion by the sight of Your great form with its many faces, eyes, hands, hips, legs, belly, and many frightening teeth… Your gaping mouths… All people will rush into your throats like moths flying into the fire in order to perish in it… I see how you swallow people from all sides with your flaming mouths… I cannot maintain balance at the sight of your flaming death faces … Our main warriors rush into Your fearsome mouths.”

Take any fragment from the “Vedas” – the main Indian monument, for example:

“When Purusha (that is, the first man) was dismembered, how many portions did they make?

What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?

The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rajanya made.

His thighs became the Vaisya, from his feet the Sudra was produced.

The Moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the Sun had birth;

Indra and Agni from his mouth were born, and Vayu from his breath.

Forth from his navel came mid-air; the sky was fashioned from his head;

Earth from his feet, and from his ear the regions. Thus formed the worlds.”

As you can see, there is no fundamental difference with the delirium of Schreber, who considered his body to be as wide as the universe. It would be about the same if Schreber tried to express his mythology in verse.

So, I want to say two things here. First off, schizophrenia is an occult disease associated with the destruction of the mental filters, resulting in which the human mind plunges into the ocean of surplus worlds. As long as this disease is viewed from the standpoint of materialistic science, it will continue to deceive the researchers again and again.

Second, there is a clear connection between schizophrenia and what we call “paganism.” We said that the task of paganism is to remove the filters of the human Haikel so that the “human” himself would be abolished, dissolved in cosmic elements. We see all the same in schizophrenia, with the only difference that the schizophrenic does not control this process.

And here, it is necessary to mention such an archetypal pagan tradition figure as shaman. The fact is that shaman is a combination of a contemplator and a schizophrenic in one person. In the pre-agrarian, pre-literacy era, the symbolism and rituals of various pastoral or hunting groups were based on the experiences of shamans. After all, the cell from which every pagan religion multiplies is ecstasy. Ecstatic rituals, such as shamanic ones, in which the mind changing is experienced, were the basis for the birth of paganism. As a result of ecstasy, various phantasms, as it were, gush out from the mind, freezing and turning into pagan discourse, into a Myth.

Ethnographic research established that shamans were usually selected according to mental pathology. A person became shaman if he was experiencing what we now call “schizophrenia”: voices, hallucinations, etc. Parents sent for an old shaman; he took the child to himself and raised him as a successor, able to regularly fall into ecstasy and draw from this state the information considered as divine. Thus, schizophrenia became a divine sign and evidence of the chosenness. Then the young man underwent shamanic initiation, which most often consisted of some terrifying rites. The purpose of these rituals was the destruction of his body and soul (in our terminology, the annihilation of the human Haikel) and the erection of some new being in its place. We see that this is analogous to the experiences of schizophrenics, for example, the same Schreber.

The existence of a traditional pagan man was only partly conscious in our understanding. It was half-submerged in a sea of ​​hallucinations. Cosmic hallucinations. Here we understand hallucinations as something quite real, not just an illusion. So, the consciousness of the pagan world, so to speak, only half protruded from this ocean of psycho-delusion. All pagan civilizations were like that. In India, this is still the case – at least where the remnants of Brahmanism-Hinduism have been preserved.

They live in the streams of the impersonal cosmic ocean, which go back and forth, glare flickers, waves rise and fall… Undoubtedly, the same were the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Sumerians. The whole pagan world of statues with empty eye sockets, living outside the message of the Prophets, unwilling to accept this message…

The first volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam” can be purchased on Amazon at this link.

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