Just came across an interesting page on schizophrenia and shamanism. I especially dig this paragraph from it:

It seems that the whole world and every tiniest instance of anything within it is speaking to the schizophrenic of his/her singular destiny. Every utterance, whether by friends or the TV, every reported news item, every passing vehicle or fluttering leaf provides the schizophrenic with another piece in the jigsaw of the design that destiny has decreed for them. This perception is due to a dying or dead and lost ego. The normal perimeters between the individual and the rest of the world have cracked or broken, and the self finds itself identifying with anything and everything within its scope of consciousness. It is because of this primary state of ego loss that psychosis and mystical experience are so inextricably bound. When someone is able to return to an ordinary state of consciousness, society may view their experience and insights as mystical; when they are lost and unable to return, society will err toward a psychotic diagnosis.

This jives very well with another item I found a while back on the subject:

…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.