An opportunity to tell stories

Hey there @SkyView7 ! Welcome to our forums. I am one of the Community Manager's here, nice to e-meet you. I am just going to send you an email, keep an eye on your inbox 🙂

hi you have tabled the way you feel, which is whot this forum is about, the politics and covering mentors overseing the forum is ireliavent as its about venting and getting help as we all need help, just posting helps me...and I need help..as I would not be hear..

Welcome to the forum @SkyView7. We're all here to share our stories, learn from each other and help break down the stigma of living with mental illness, which is what you seem to be interested in, gathered from your post. We're happy to hear that you are a proud schizophrenic, but you mention that you have doubts about society accurately characterising schizophrenia but have you seen an improvement in attitudes towards the illness since your initial diagnosis?

A funny thing about the stigma of schizophrenia back in the 80s, I was probably more active than others in so far as I was inflicting the stigma on myself. For a long time after my diagnosis I avoided my family as much as possible. My sibs have all been successful in their careers which made me feel insecure. There was a time beginning in the 80s when I missed nine Christmases in a row which infuriated my mother, ha ha (sorry mum).

It's possible that the stigma surrounding mental illness has improved over the last 30 years or so in which case I should be more accepting of myself. But in social interactions I try to avoid disclosing my psychiatric status because it never seems to go very well. People just don't seem to know how to respond to something like that. It's difficult when the initial evaluation people make of others is on the basis of their careers.

What we need is for a schizophrenic to make a success of her or his career which would raise the profile of the condition, and which is what I'm trying to do with my writing. Unfortunately we live in a time when there are so many voicing new ideas that it has become difficult just to be heard.

I told you I feel compelled to express myself, so let me tell you how I arrived at the unlikely conclusion that I was in possession of telepathic powers.

As it happens I can specify the beginning of the schizophrenic period of my life at a place which defines a pair of geographic co-ordinates with some precision. I was an adventurous 24 year old in November of 1980 on holiday in Egypt when I made the mistake of a lifetime. I had come to Egypt specifically to vist the pyramids at Giza. I spent most of my second day in Cairo hanging around the largest of the three pyramids when in the failing light of day an Egyptian, who identified himself as a representative of the Egyptian Antiquites Authority, offered to let me climb the pyramid for the modest sum of just five Egyptian pounds.

I was delighted with the offer and wasted no time paying him the sum he asked, and about 20 minutes later I was standing at the top of the assembled stones gleefully enjoying the view, and sitting at the edge in pensive reflection. I spent about an hour up there quite innocently in view of what was about to happen because it wasn't until I returned to Sydney that I realised that something had gone disasterously wrong.

I had been an infrequent smoker of cannabis since late in my teens, and one evening after my return I was having a puff with a friend in North Sydney when, under the influence of the little THC molecules, it gradually dawned on me the enormity of what I had done. I experienced an hallucination of a beautifully ornate arabic design descending in motion before me, but it was suddenly interupted by a dagger rending the design in two in a very threatening manner. It became slowly clear to me in the following hours of hallucination and horrified reflection that the pyramid I climbed was not the harmless tourist attraction I had assumed it to be, but the pointy tip of an ancient cosmic organism, and an active sequencer of destinies.

It was during the following days and weeks that I began hearing voices. It wasn't long before I was consumed by thoughts of the pyramid. I started reading the Bible but not for the sake of comfort in my hour of need, but to feel closer to the ancient spirit which has dwelled in the Holy Land throughout the ages. I would have denied it at the time but, in spite of the exhilaration I felt looking across such vast cosmic landscapes, I was actually very scared.

There followed from these germinal moments the typical history of a growing schizophrenia. My body learned to hallucinate in the absence of narcotic stimulation, I became haunted by the new presence in my life and I withdrew from social interactions preferring my own company, and that of my new found 'friend'.

It wasn't a time of much rational thinking unlike the story I'm telling you here. It was an immersion in a deep bath of feeling. I could give the feelings names for the sake of remembering them, but it was a long time before I was able to achieve much insight with regard to what was happening around me. I was young, naive and utterly ignorant of the mystical world I had inadvertently fallen into.

Many years later I had established some control of my emotions. I had turned from the behaviours which ilicited hallucination which I had been actively encouraging throughout the early years, and I had begun to develop a bunch of paradigms I could use to give structure to these feelings. One issue I had to wrestle with was how to characterise the voices I was hearing which by this time had thankfully become thoughts I could observe at the fringes of my mind. I had to ask myself was telepathy a viable explanation when everyone around me dismissed my experiences as the insignificant aberations of a diseased mind?

During the winter of 1987 an extremely painful mental conflict erupted between my mother and myself which I alluded to in a previous post. It went on for many years which I remember as years of wasted energies except for the bearing it had on my attempt to prove the case for telepathy. She would invariably lie about her involvement in this conflict citing my diagnosis as evidence of the true nature of my vexation, so it proved to be virtually useless to me in practical terms. It wasn't until 1997 that I achieved a breakthrough in my investigation when I moved into a small farm cottage about 20 kilometres from town on the plains of northern NSW.

I had been living on the farm for only a few days when early one morning while I was dozing in bed half awake I heard a young calf bleating outside my window. The surprising thing was that I heard a translation of its bleating in the periphery of my thinking. "Where are you?" I heard it say. It was a question I was to hear quite often as this was evidently how calves relocated their mothers after getting lost among the herd.

It was a moment of triumph for me which was reinforced over and over during my time on the farm as I developed a telepathic rapport with the rest of the herd.

If you happen to suspect that telepathy could be a viable explanation for the voices you've been hearing then I suggest you try mixing with animals. My experience with all sorts of animals, since this episode on the farm, has shown me that animals are naturally telepathic. They are capable of complex thoughts and feelings which are hidden behind their grunts and barking. I suspect you'll have more success initially proving this to youself if you mix with animals in larger groups, such as a herd of cows or a flock of sheep, because they will be less guarded with their thinking. Animals tend to be defensive in their human interactions but will be quite open with you if you're merely an insignificant member of a larger group.

You'll get virtually nowhere trying to prove the case with human telepathic partners because they are even more defensive. It pays to be discreet in this business, so be very careful exposing your telepathic suspicions. They call it mental illness for a reason which is to make it easy for them to invalidate any suggestion of an individual's telepathic abilities.

No doubt you will appreciate how the ancient cosmic organism I mentioned above would have had plans for me when I first encountered it that fateful evening in North Sydney. Let me tell you now about a being who has waited a long time for us to arrive at this point in our evolutionary history.

About three weeks after the evening in question I moved into a rambling old private hotel by the harbour in Neutral Bay where I got a tiny room with a harbour view for just $28 a week. I had enough left over for food and a small amount of cannabis. The food I ate at the required times but it was three weeks before I could muster the courage to dip into the deep tranquil waters of a solitary puff.

On the day that I dared to enquire after this mysterious being I rolled the first joint at about 10 am and smoked probably half of it before I sat back against the wall silently anticipating a now forlorn confrontation with my distilled reflection. I tried to dismiss from my mind the chatter of trivial thoughts in anticipation of a sign of some sort. I had limited success in this regard because it wasn't long before I was thinking of a time many months earlier when I read Wu Cheng'en's classic comic novel The Monkey King, about a cheeky monkey who accompanied Tripitaka on his long journey west to fetch the sacred Buddhist texts.

I mentally traced the monkey's journey from Aolai, which I mistakenly assumed was Hawaii when I read the story, across China to India, and I began to compare the isolation of his island home with the solitude of Buddha and, in view of my Christian upbringing, with the unique experience of Jesus in first century Palestine. It was at this point that I conceived of each character as representing a chakra, echoing the Buddhist theme structuring the story, and I was then overcome by an image of the Earth as a planetary being in possession of such psychic nodes, or chakras such as the belly, the heart and the throat.

I was somewhat startled by this and my senses were quickly aroused. The image was left dangling in my mind while I mentally scoured a map of the world in search of topographical features which would either confirm or disprove a theory now assembling beyond my control. I looked at the North American continent and decided that it looked distinctly pelvic. I could ask myself somewhat facetiously, "Well, if the North American continent represents the pelvic region of a planetary being then where is the rest of it?" The North and South American continents I thought could resemble the hind legs of the planetary being. I looked at Africa and saw the possible appearance of planetary forelegs, and in view of the often dominant nature of European culture I had to conclude that Europe could be the capital of this planet.

My mind was racing with a vision of the Earth as an integral planetary being, but I made little further progress with this theory on the day that I conceived of it, and it was many years later that I was able to assemble all the confirmatory bits of observation, some of which I present to you as follows.

I'll begin with Australia, not because it is my homeland as it is yours as well most likely, but because it is the foundation on which we may understand a feature of European topography.

It is our humble service as Australians to represent the planetary foetus. If you turn your map of Australia upside down then you may see how the head of the planetary foetus is located in the vicinity of Tasmania, and how the tail of the foetal representation can be seen in the vicinity of Australia's western shores. In this case the foetal legs extend north to the equator where Australia is joined to the planetary mother by an umbilicus the Indonesian archipelago.

It is this crucial bit of topographical evidence which allows us to interpret the head of the planetary being because, in Ireland and the island of Great Britain, we see a diminution of the global representation in its entirety. In this case Ireland corresponds with Australia in so far as it depicts a child whose parent is the island of Great Britain. The legs of Ireland can be seen extending from its western shores while its head can be seen to coincide with the political boundary drawn around Northern Ireland.

The island of Great Britain itself depicts a diminution of the northern features of planet Earth. Scotland represents the head of the planetary diminution, its forearms can be seen extending west of Scotland's Southern Uplands and its legs can be seen east of Land's End in the south of England.

There are countless other features of global topography which are worth mentioning but I'll leave it up to you to discover these on your own. I will, however, mention two of them, one of which is of such a disturbing nature that I feel obliged to draw it to your attention promptly. If it is reasonable to propose that planetary topography is ultimately representational, and that representations are symbolic, then the coastal outline drawn around Italy presents us with a sobering representation indeed. The threatening tension between the Italian peninsula and the island of Sicily is unmistakable and unavoidably involves the Catholic Church and the crime families of Sicily in a conflict between good and evil on a grand cosmic scale.

The other feature I will point out to you is as fascinating as it is dramatic. If the North American continent depicts the pelvic region of planet Earth then we may expect to find in this vicinity a depiction of sexual fertility. In this case the Antilles archipelago can be seen to represent a fully motile male gamete while the Gulf of Mexico depicts an ovum and is fascinating because together they depict the very instant of conception. It is likely that the planetary organism has been storing representations of its experience since the dawn of creation in this vicinity.

Now, this is a startling observation whose implications scatter in every direction like a tumbler dropped from several metres onto smooth concrete flooring, so I expect you'll want to apply a measured circumspection. As it happens I've done a bit of polling over years which suggests that there is a modest belief in its validity. All the bits of observable data fit together too neatly to be a coincidence, is what this group of readers will say. But, by the same token, there is a substantial group who refuse to acknowledge its validity, they refuse to believe that stone and dirt could ever resemble flesh and blood which, they will say, is just too unlikely.

I'm content to propose on this occasion that the split between the two groups is 50:50 because it renders a proposition, which may be potentially alarming to some forum members, in terms which are more readily manageable. I doubt that my thinking will be of undue concern to either members of this forum, or the administrators who are charged with their protection.

Nevertheless, it is a formidable proposition whose relevance to sufferers of mental illness is borne out by its implications. Its implications lead directly to a theory of mind, of consciousness, and of the multitude of voices united in a single unified being.

I was driving a taxi around Sydney during the early stages of my psychosis. I was driving the night shift so I got a good look at the night sky, at least as good as is possible with all the city lights. I got out of Sydney later, and only went back occasionally to visit, so that I now get a good look at the sky any time I want. I now live in a small country town in the north of NSW.

I don't remember exactly when it began but it was while I was living in Sydney that I developed a mild obsession with the galaxy, which remains with me to this day. It would have been the likeness I saw between all the city lights and the stars above, so I began to think of Sydney as a little galaxy. In fact it wasn't long before my sense of scale went completely out of whack as a result of my new found acquaintance with the integral Earth theory. It wasn't the spatial dimension either which I've found is fairly difficult to relate to. It was the vast stretches of time I could now look across that really made an impression on me. The Earth organism seemed so old to me, and the galaxy was even older.

I also began to sense how much time is stored within the body, and so it was a natural increment for me to develop a new paradigm, the infinite regression of abstractions.

I mentioned earlier how the British Isles represent a diminution of the topographical configuration of the entire planet, and how this diminution is a defining feature of the organism's head. Well, to generalize this relationship, this will also be the case for virtually any of the creatures we see around us here on Earth.

You may be familiar with a Surrealist painting by Rene Magritte painted in 1934. (I won't post either the name of it or the image itself due to moderation concerns.) The painting depicts a face made to look like a female torso, breasts for eyes, tummy for nose etc. While Magritte's painting associates the mouth with the female genitalia, it is more consistent with the formality of my interest in it here to associate the mouth with the stomach so that head and body have an harmonic relationship. The head depicted by Magritte's painting represents the body just as Britain represents the entire planet, and so we have an infinite regression of summaries which summarise the accumulation of cosmic experience.

The scales of integral bodies extend beyond the reach of knowledge to both ends of infinity, both the infinitely vast and the infinitely diminutive. So we find ourselves logically half way between the two infinities, which is at once both somewhere very special, and nowhere in particular. While we may sometimes boast of being the measure of all things the truth is that there is no scale of existence which is privileged above any other. Each integral body wherever it may be represents a summary of the entire universe just as is the case with any other.

This seems like a particularly psychedelic perception to me, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.

That a universe resides within the body of each and every one of us is a proposition about which there can be no doubt. Not only is the body a universe of relative spatial dimensions but it is also one of time. While we may not be able to grasp the scale of such spatial dimensions, we are by virtue of the sentiments surrounding birth and death, more able to relate to the beginning and end of a body's experience of time.

While this may satisfy a cursory glance at the history of time there is another sense in which time is portrayed within the body. If the body consists of an assembly of symbolic identities, as the regression of abstractions suggests, then we may expect to find representations of the evolving universe on display in this context.

At the centre of any definition of the history of time will be the original big bang of creation. While the location of this momentous event may be difficult to establish in the starry skies, the heart which beats at the centre of the circulatory system provides us with a more concrete representation of this origin. In order to pump blood to the most distant capillaries in the body the heart practically implodes at a rate of a little more than once every second, and it is this tiny piece of cosmic violence which may be interpreted as a representation of the original big bang.

An interesting corollary of this is the suggestion that, in view of the pervasive nature of the circulatory system, the body is drenched in blood in a way not unlike the cosmic microwave background radiation we see arriving on our shores from every direction.

Now, you'd expect that a representation of the original big bang would depict the very beginning of time with some finality, but logically this is just the beginning of the matter. There is another organ which represents the beginning even more graphically than the heart, but it can only be interpreted as the opposite of yet another organ which represents the other end of time. The two organs will be the rectum and the centre of the brain, and can be differentiated from each other in terms of their relative sophistication. While the rectum depicts a very primitive organ the centre of the brain is much more highly evolved.

The vast tracts of time which fill the space between these two organs are filled with the journeys of a cosmic multitude. There are the nutrients and molecules of oxygen which travel the waves of the circulatory system, and the roughage which journeys through the gut, and it is these lives and many others which together constitute our own.

The temporal corollary of our dimensions, compared with the minuscule beings who inhabit the universe within us, is that we are lords who occupy all eternity. And as far as our own journey through the life of planet Earth is concerned, we may enjoy within our bodies a map of all time.

The things I've been telling you here may seem perfectly rational to you, but in the early stages of my psychosis they were nothing like it. I only learned how to rationalize these things much later. In the early days and nights they were just feelings, deep, strong feelings which often appeared as hallucinations of great cosmic beauty, infinities, and really vast intervals of time.

A lot of these hallucinations were so bizarre and unexpected that I had to suspect that my dreaming had been brought to the surface of my consciousness. For example, I was doing a lot of walking at the time, and after a long walk one night I stopped in a park to rest for a while when I looked up at the sky and saw an old 1960s convertible with the top down in freefall somewhere between Jupiter and planet Earth. Either the car was really big or the people in it were really small because they were sitting up high on a tiny seat next to the top of the door and the driver had his arm hanging out as drivers do sometimes. I found this sort of thing quite entertaining, but I couldn't understand where it had come from or what its purpose might have been.

By contrast an hallucination I could make sense of I first encountered while under the influence of the little THC molecules. Any cannabis smokers among you will probably recognise this one because I believe it's fairly common, and I've heard other smokers talk about it. I was visiting a puff buddy in Milsons Point one night, and after a smoke the effects were beginning to kick in when I experienced an odd falling sensation. I call it a falling sensation but without actually falling. It was more a sense of everything around me beginning to accelerate as if I was in a state of freefall. A car passed by on the street outside the house, and the Doppler shift was so exaggerated that I found it quite disturbing. I glanced over at my puff buddy and I could see from his expression that he was also experiencing this sensation, so it must have been something which had an objectively observable nature.

This was one of the hallucinations my body learned to perform in the absence of narcotic stimulation because I could experience this falling sensation at unexpected times such as when I was exhausted from a lot of walking. I would lay down, let my mind go and before long the inertial cues I depended on would fail on me, and I would enter a state of freefall. It happened to me so often that it wasn't long before I had a name for it, sequel reality, which drew attention to the sense in which I seemed to have entered a parallel stream of experience.

After some consideration several years later and the development of suitable paradigms such as the infinite regression of abstractions, I was able to rationalize this falling sensation as an encounter with an episodic multiverse.

I'll tell you more about my encounters with the multiverse in due course, but my objective in any discussion of it may not be what you would expect. Navigating the multiverse depends on being able to bring one's dreaming to the surface of one's consciousness, which may be interesting in itself, but there is another more urgent reason why I'm interested in it.

I don't think of myself as a particularly talented dreamer, unlike some I know such as Castaneda's Mexican informant Don Juan. But once upon a time during my childhood I know that I was. My memory is getting a bit rusty now that I'm in my sixties, but I remember that during my twenties I could remember a lot of things from very early in my childhood, and in view of my somewhat desperate predicament I made an effort to retrieve as much of it as I could.

I could remember visiting places I couldn't associate with the movements of my family. I could remember dreaming of old country houses which my family never visited. I could remember dreaming of derelict houses with the broken remnants of someone's life scattered on the floor, and in the garden the remains of a rusted car. I've always known that one dwells in a half light at this time of our lives, which is not to say that it isn't filled with colour, but that it consists of both waking and dreaming.

At the age of four I remember looking up at my family's house and realizing that I couldn't dream of all the other places anymore, and I remember making a mental note to myself to rehearse as much as I could of what it was like before. It was these memories that I was fetching in my twenties. I believe that my dreaming abilities were being stifled by growing up in a society which had no use for one with dreaming skills, but there was one last attempt by my dream body to make a memorable impression on me. It would have been when I was about ten and it was cold so it would have been the winter of 1966.

I remember it was cold because my father has the gas heater on in the room where I woke up from this dream. My father was an accountant who frequently brought his work home, so he was often up late doing his sums while everyone else was asleep.

It wasn't an ordinary dream so much as a strange tactile obsession I was having, and I call it a dream because I was asleep in bed at the time. It wasn't the first time I had this dream either, but this was the first time it had this surprising conclusion. It was a rough and spongy surface which may have been wet, and my brow furrowed as I tried to make sense of it. On this occasion my sense of the surface grew until I recognised the fabric of the armchair in the living room, and it was at this point that I woke up somewhat dazed across the room from where my father was working.

The chair was a little behind his, so my father had to turn before he said "Oh, hi Skyview. I didn't hear you come in."

The room had two glass doors which my father had closed to contain the warmth from the gas heater, and they made a distinctly clunky noise when either opened or closed, so his surprise was only to be expected.

Now, it is very likely that most of you will want to doubt the truth of a report like this. I won't doubt that waking up in the place you've been dreaming of is a very uncommon experience, but try to look at it from my point of view. My memory of this occasion is quite clear, and in spite of the apparent oddity of it the logic is water tight, so I find it difficult to contradict my beliefs about the matter. There were only two ways into this room, either through the clunky doors, or from the dining room which would have been in my father's line of sight.

I originally began thinking about the possible existence of a multiverse, in which one could go to sleep in one world and wake up in another vaguely different one, in order to assure myself that animals, and any suitably equipped humans, could survive a global extinction event. I believe that animals are much more successful dreamers than we are, and that some of them could bring their dreaming to the surface of their consciousness where they could develop an ability to navigate the multiverse.

If half of all time is contained within our bodies, and an equal measure of time fills the starry universe, then navigating the multiverse could provide some of us with a path to survival in the event of a worldwide disaster.