I imagine asking my child to define what makes a person good in relation to nature, as a meditation that would, ideally carry with them all of their life. Honesty and integrity should guide the Golden Rule of their behavior, moreso than any Judeo-Christian threats of eternal torment or eons of burning pain in the next life. This is a distinction I would like for them to explore, as they search for their path through life: if a person acts “good” only when compelled by an authority figure under threat of great physical pain, punishment, or death, are those actions truly “good?” Their actual behavior may be identical to that of the genuinely good person, yet when the intention or impetus behind the behavior derives from fear or guilt, it is not true goodness. A full account of one’s moral standing requires an assessment of these emotional roots beneath the levels of outward behavior we can observe. With a loaded gun, you can compel a person to behave any way you want them to, including like the highest and most compassionate of pious saints. Yet, this is a performative morality, being done with fearful eyes never leaving the loaded gun that threatens their life. In this way, Hell looms over the Christian adherent, a threat beyond human imagining that insists on a set of behaviors, compelled by fear into a performative display of goodness. Nothing good blooms froma soil of fear, the negative emotions at the core of original sin or its eternal unrelenting cycles of guilt.
The empire of the selfless is a legendary myth, a story of the endless upward expanse, of possibility granted only by altruism and the love of one's neighbor. It is described in the cultures it has inspired as a utopia, a kind of heaven on earth where one's family extends beyond your blood, where felt kindness extends beyond your kin. This is a collectivist cultural model based on the trust, given and received, in service of the greatest possible good of the whole and, as such, is especially susceptible to corruption, as the PRC and USSR certainly learned the hard way, entranced by the fantasy of these higher forms of community they were promised by thieves and bandits. Selfishness, or the fight-or-flight-driven self-interest of our evolutionary ladder's lower rungs, represents an outdated adaptive strategy, with its desperate individuated behaviors longer serving our survival as it once did. We've come to integrate all of these defensive functions into the environment we created for ourselves. The bears aren't going to ride the elevator up to your apartment and will have significant trouble fumbling with keys if they did. The same cortisol dump that kept your ancestors alive half of a million years ago in the forest no longer serves a meaningful purpose but, instead, that keeps you up at night, or manifests as the grinding of teeth and nerves, white knuckling through hours of traffic. Understanding where these biological adaptations derive helps us to frame them within a larger scale view of self and other in the world, but as rational and sophisticated as such an evolutionary framework may be, the instincts still persist in cascading layers of response we are scarcely conscious of.
The milky white, fading to brown. The fat of the land settles in this way, into aging aristocratic names and families weakened, sickened by the diseases of affluence. Until there are these grand crescendos of narcissistic rage as the spoiled man-children become sundowning elderly tyrants, their insecurity now transitioning into delusional obstructions, hiding the degradation of what were once functional social filters, emotional self-regulation deficits, covering the memory loss made obvious to everyone who interacts with the man for any length of time. Attention span, memory, personality: these are the major components of cognitive decline made apparent within the DSM symptoms list for Alzheimer’s disease, yet within that literature, too, is an etiology for that symptomatic signature, the lifestyle that we can observe in those we can longitudinally study exhibiting in, a measured way, both the early onset and late stages of the disease. Sudden and irrational rage is commonly seen after that emotional filter, so essential for basic day-to-day civility, begins to perforate and recede irreversibly from one’s personality. The lifestyle is that of “type-III diabetes,” or, likewise, is deeply sedentary for stretches, as the baseline daily activity level declines into a new personal baseline. In that way, Alzheimer’s can be meaningfully seen as yet another disease of affluence, afflicting those who can afford to retire, to stop working or needing to be active, in a physical way, in order to survive. Even among the employed in America and other First World countries, a 40-hour work week, more and more, is primarily sedentary or information or transactional work done while sitting at a computer, contending with customers or managing some aspect of their information within the “feed,” the “stream,” contributing to the overall currency of the culture they are immersed. Expression is transmitted within these digital networks being managed and directed, with whole systems developing to carry the content of these new architectures, of intra- and inter- networks, bridging between institutions, corporations, governments, and the targeted citizen-consumers being recorded and archived within immense databases of personal information, harvested and collected, a new era of informational commerce develops to personalize what were broad target audiences during the eras of radio and television, into highly individualized, tailored advertising, including political advertising subversively influencing whole social media feeds, major tributaries of the overall range of information being brought in, manipulated, and sold by these social media platforms. Of special interest within the whistleblower Snowden’s immense CIA archive he was able to leak is the degree of access to our electronic devices, bugging and monitoring all social interaction, within any medium, without a legal warrant permitting that invasive recording and transcription of our phone and text conversations, emails and platform messages, our posts and feeds provide additional content for linking networks of people together within a set of apps’ collected personal information and data, held within immense CIA server farms was the sheer immensity of data requiring storage and some advanced program designed to filter through those massive datasets meaningfully.
This essay refers to a powerful passage from Joseph Campbell related to a personal experience I had while working at a residential mental hospital in San Francisco. The quote captures a distinction that anthropology, psychiatry, and consciousness studies have spent decades trying to parse: the same classes of perception can either overwhelm a person into dysfunction or be cultivated into a disciplined, prosocial art. Below, language and evidence are built around this thesis—“genetic predisposition toward hypersensitivity shared between the shaman and the schizophrenic”—and offer a respectful, non-reductionist framework for a range of exceptional human experiences that remain rarefied and largely unstudied.
1) A trait, two trajectories
Contemporary research supports a continuum between ordinary mentation, “healthy” anomalous experience (mystical states, voice-hearing that is not distressing, high openness), and clinical psychosis. Epidemiology and experience-sampling studies find psychosis-like experiences in a non-clinical fraction of the population; most such experiences never become illness unless combined with stressors (trauma, sleep loss, substances) and vulnerability (genetic load, neurodevelopmental hits) (Linscott & van Os, 2013). This is the same observation Campbell was gesturing toward: the waters are shared; the outcome depends on container and capacity.
From: Kaleb Smith To: Prof. Stanley Krippner, Ph.D. Subject: Documenting a multi-year series of shamanic/psi phenomena and proposing a Two-Eyed research protocol
Dear Dr. Krippner,
Thank you for agreeing to read my narrative. I write as a descendant of a Sámi noaidi line (maternal), and as someone who has spent the last decade moving—sometimes gently, sometimes violently—between ordinary life and states my elders would call initiatory. I am seeking (1) counsel on how best to understand and proceed and (2) methodological guidance so that ongoing events can be responsibly documented in the spirit of the Maimonides dream-telepathy studies and Dr. Charles Tart’s “Miss Z” OBE target work. UVA School of Medicine+3AbeBooks+3Amazon+3
What follows is not an argument but a trajectory. Part 1 of my autobiography (enclosed) covers nine clusters of events:
Ancestral disposition. Maternal line with explicit shamanic (Sámi) practice; my mother and grandmother reported “second sight” experiences. I have chosen to face, not suppress, similar sensitivities.
Trauma-linked onset + possession. Following my partner’s assault (asleep), she and I underwent nights of paralysis/forces, with one episode in which my arm struck her while I observed from an extracorporeal vantage. (I’d been an atheist until then.) The incubus-like phenomenology—pressure on the chest, paralysis, sensed presence—overlapped the literature yet departed in that paralysis occurred during full wakefulness. PMC+1
To enter the subtle realm of spirit with clear intention and mastery constitutes our species' oldest profession. Hypersensitivity to one's surroundings is the curse shared by the shaman and the schizophrenic, both. And it is no coincidence that, in the early stages of the disease, rare and unexplainable spiritual experiences are often described by both the afflicted and those close to them. These exceptional sensitivities, without the guidance, temperance, or education of a culture that values them, do tend towards social alienation and a gradual degradation of functioning. Losing all sense of self and its boundaries, drowning in sensitivity, is a good metaphor for the low latent inhibition, loose associations, and chronic hyperpriming characteristic of thought disordered schizophrenia's later stages.
The stories of the exceptional human experiences witnessed by the older clinical staff on the schizophrenia wing of the state hospital were always shared with me in confidence, one-on-one, in almost hushed tones, when they heard I studied the disease. I often use this quote of Campbell's for conference presentations on shamanism and psychedelics, as there is definite overlap, especially in regards to the genetic predispositions that constitute the lineage of heightened sensitivity; considered, in those shamanic cultures, to be a prerequisite for the mediumship abilities our species traditionally relied on so heavily.
Yea, that sensing of subtle ranges of energetic fields, even as children, is really central to what a lot of schizophrenics contend with. Only, in shamanic cultures, the heightened sensitivity of those kids is looked for early on. They are usually pulled aside from the other kids by the community healer in those cultures, placed on a different track where training and mentorship is arranged for them so they may learn to manage and eventually control and temper their sensitivity. This training usually entails, first, learning to more clearly sense those subtle fields — the energetic signatures of illness and of spiritual entities — and, later, how to interact, influence, and control them to help others.
Pathologizing that sensitivity and tranquilizing it away with Thorazine, as is done in First World materialistic cultures like our own, can eliminate the symptoms, it's true, but often cripples the kids, alters their development in genuinely detrimental ways, as the pills fail to address the core roots of the perceptions.
One head psychiatrist who had worked at my facility for decades told me about Charles, one of his patients who made a life-changing impression on him during his early years as a clinician. Charles was a catatonic schizophrenic who would spend weeks essentially frozen, staring off silently, unresponsive, as if not in his body. Yet, every so often, Charles would "come back" from wherever he had been journeying and would have long conversations with the doctor, revealing a wit, depth, and good humor as his beautiful and sensitive personality suddenly returned.
Once, during one such instance of Charles returning to the room, the doctor found him looking out the window onto the yard. He greeted Charles and stood beside him for a moment, sharing the view. Silently, Charles simply placed the fingers of his right hand onto the back of his doctor's neck saying, "The room is very active today."
In that moment, the doctor said that, all at once, he felt a flood of incredible energy enter his body and, looking around the room, he saw it was awash with millions of particles of ethereal light, all swirling in intricate currents and interacting fields, radiating as auras from every person in the room. He said his mouth simply dropped, eyes wide as he wept for the beauty of it. He said it was incredible, this hidden world quietly revealed to him by young, gentle, unassuming man.
Charles looked the doctor in the eye with a slight sly smile and walked away... This clinician said his understanding of life was forever changed by that one short interaction. He never thought of the "illness" in the same way again.
I remembered you had said you were going to see your aunt, possibly say your goodbyes, up North so I’ve gathered that must be where you are. I hope you are able to connect with her. Sounds like it could be tough. I’m here if you ever want to talk.
But, I’m going to guess that no, you don’t. Senor TMI strikes again!
Oh well. Let me at least clarify a few off put things . I hate leavin the offending parts of my rants hanging.
1) I was trying to say that, while I once sought and felt most comfortable with people who were, in some way, “broken”, as if a weird kind of camaraderie with them, this was actually a Bukowski line. That broken, together, they would sneer at the “perfect” people “with faces like the backs of thumb tacks.”
But, no, this is a pattern I noticed and sought to extract or recourse within myself. My broken parts are still there in me, but being mended and understood gradually. It’s a mending that isn’t complete yet, but I wanted you to know about both that pattern and the thinking that I identified with behind it. The party house my parents ran, the “down and outs” were our people. I still love them and, like my mother, my giving nature seeks to help them. I perhaps inherited her savior complex, but lets fucking not get too deep here, Senor!
