I’m in the middle of going back through that article I found last night on shamanism and schizophrenia.

It’s not as mind-altering as I’d hoped, but there is some really good important stuff in it.

I’m particularly drawn to this one passage from a woman who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her family was about to put her in a psychiatric ward:

“The last thing I wanted was to go there. The way I felt at the time, I felt it would destroy me to go in there, but I was powerless to resist. I’d lost the ability to express myself - words held too much meaning. I would listen to something as banal as a football match commentary, and to me it would be the story of the last battle of the gods. Everything was so vast, so deeply mythological. I’d see the arcane history of the world in everything, every little detail would hold another clue, and I was trying to hold all this information together, launched upon a mythic quest that terrified and excited me in ways far more real, far more vivid, than my life ever had up to that point.”

Um, this is an extremely close description of what it feels like for me when I smoke enough pot to get really high. It’s usually not even that much that can push me into this kind of realm, so I have to watch my intake if I’m still trying to be sociable. But anyway, yeah, when it hits me really hard, it becomes like everything that is happening, that I am perceiving around me or inside me - or even inside others - becomes like really really filled with loads and loads of important information. Shit, that makes me want to smoke. I haven’t for a couple months, cause I don’t know anybody here who does, except for one dude I met kayaking…

Anyway, I also think this thing the author says about Jung is really interesting:

…one eulogy for Jung contained the remark that he was a schizophrenic who healed himself, precisely the definition of an initiated shaman.

Hm. Yeah, just finished it. That article has some good things to say. Definitely.

Also, this excerpt from a James Hillman book is good as well [pdf]. Here’s a passage I wanted to grab:

This is a restrictive perspective and it has led us to believe that entities, other than human beings, taking on interior subjective qualities are merely “anthropomorphized” or “personified objects, not really persons in the accepted meaning of that word. If we find
persons elsewhere than in living human bodies, we conclude that these persons have been transferred from “in here” to “out there.” We believe we have unconsciously put our experiences into them; they are merely fictional or imaginary. We have made them up just as the persons in our dreams are supposedly made up out of the experiences of our ego. We do
not believe that imaginary persons could possibly be as they present themselves, as valid psychological subjects with wills and feelings like ours but not reducible to ours. Such thinking we say is legitimate only for animistic primitive people, or children, or the insane.