Everything is, because we are.

Rank asked why the artist so often avoids clinical neurosis when he is so much a candidate for it because of his vivid imagination, his openness to the finest and broadest aspects of experience, his isolation from the cultural world-view that satisfies everyone else. The answer is that he takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art. The neurotic is precisely the one who cannot create the “artiste-manqué,” as Rank so aptly called him. We might say that both the artist and the neurotic bite off more than they can chew, but the artist spews it back out again and chews it over in an objectified way, as an ex-ternal, active work project. The neurotic can’t marshal this creative response embodied in a specific work, and so he chokes on his introversions. The artist has similar large scale introversions, but he uses them as material.”

~Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.

To give context to my thoughts on this, as I find the mystic also fits into this category, I will add a paragraph of Joseph Campbell’s thoughts on the Mystic.

"The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.”

― Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By.

And as Joseph Campbell also stated, “The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.”

This quote sums up a very complex picture putting it into a simple frame, and the metaphor takes on its own meaning delivering it into the reality of the person whom creates such states of mind and being, and it is also where the mystic, artist and neurotic shake hands, the difference in them is, if they understand the conversation being had with themselves and the detours they decide to take after meeting. You can either sink or swim, your sane mind telling you to swim whilst the fragmentation pulling you towards the insanity which rests underneath, its tentacles reaching into the endless depths that lurk beyond. The split between the two becoming wider as the harsh world of cognitive dissonance sets in. The tug of war between worlds and the states of mind that rest in-between can be the most revealing of our human nature and teach us more about spirituality and psychology than any outer knowledge ever could. That is presuming that when you sink you somehow learn how to swim back to safety, and find medium ground between the two. The mystic revels in the mysteries of the psyche, he turns himself inside out inspecting all of his own fragments trying to piece them together, the more pieces he puts together the more he finds new ones to decipher, the more he deciphers the more he realises the puzzle is of complete foreign nature. So he rests in-between inspections, surrendering to the symbols and images that flash through his mind’s eye. The death of oneself gives birth to another, and inside the new is parts of the old, only revived in reformatted ways. They are the foundation of which we can test and change ourselves.

When the mystic drifts towards the metaphysical (which more or less remains undefined by language and reality as we know it) he reaches what he thinks is the heights of heaven. Perhaps the heaven he thinks he is in, is the inside of his own imagination and when using his capabilities of being able to distinguish between the two, he can efficiently, safely and completely escape inside his own psyche, becoming detached from his material reality, slipping into his spiritual and metaphysical being of the limitless worlds where he discovers esoteric troves within. The mystic tries to untangle old fishing line, unhooking himself from attachments, beliefs and any remaining bait the ego, alchemising it the best way he knows how, with the tools he has gained along the way. In theory it is the easy part, the hard part is putting it into practice, incorporating it into his daily material life, being here and there is a conflict within, he must learn to juggle both and not swim for too long inside the vortex of unbecoming. Whilst the alertness of his mind is napping he runs far away into the awakening dream-states of another self, where he brings back the memories or interprets the symbols through instantaneous art or automatic writing. I must add we can only theorize in these matters, whatever world he actually escapes to, I hope every human has at least one experience of becoming found inside the lost worlds, because every time I visit that place within, I feel a familiar sense of being, something language cannot simply articulate, a relic of what heaven assumingly would feel like if it were a certain place. The same can be said of hell, flying such heights as the mystic does would be very doubtful if he had never explored the depths of hell. The spectrum we live on is between heaven and hell and we hold the key to both gates. Metaphorically The psychotic hears “Face life and I will show you death” but the mystic hears “Face death and I will show you life”, and herein lies the fine line, to either sink or swim in the dark sea of one self.

The mystic reaches out for wisdom but also asks himself, “How can there be an absolute truth in wisdom?” It has but many. We have ancient philosophers that have set the bar for our own inner wisdom, but they have always been a rarity seeing as they are devotees of truth. Wisdom is a virtuous task in which the seeker searchers for answers only to discover it is in fact himself that is in the middle of all things he has known. But for the psychotic, the self has been deceptive, he sees his subjective truths tangling with the objective truths of the world, they fester into one where he can no longer distinguish between the two, and its not only the psychotic, the ordinary man also encounters similar experience’s, perhaps the difference is in the degree which constitutes the severity. You could say that you find things in the same place you lost them, the same can be said of the self, lost and found is just a nonlocality of distance that stretches itself beyond the capacity of immediate remembrance, therefore the lost person is never lost and only suffering temporary amnesia of their inner core. The entanglement of the falsity that grows on the corpse of truth and the egoic nature of man’s appetite for power, desires and dominance leads man to the ultimate decay of any true substance. It is in the denial of this lack that man finds his deepest grave, unknowingly filling this lack with shallow jewels containing only restricted air that will eventually drown him into the surrendering of his own soul, until the submergence floods further need of anything containing real substance, leading to the termination of his spirit.

What I say is nothing new as there is nothing new under the sun, just another cog in the spinning wheels of inspecting the psyche, meaning, life, spirit and truth etc. What may be slightly new is the way I convey it, but even then I have pulled it through the past and revived it into the new, after all, aren’t we all just recycled thought forms? Our limited vocabulary restricts what we can know, so we reuse the same words in different ways, bringing a multitude of meanings and context to each sentence, therefore we all create individually but from the same palate, our tastes varying in strength and colour, our psyches differ in complex shades of self-awareness and our senses perceive through different kaleidoscopes of though forms that weave in and out of layered observations, some view from quite a narrow lens whilst others allow for the expansion of the scope, which increases in proportion to their awareness. We are the same in our non-duality but base our distinguishes on the scale of duality which can slide up and down and change direction at any given time. We spin on the axis of ever changing states of mind, switching between sleeping and awakening. Living, reacting and alternating between the conscious and unconscious. The true quest lives inside the questions and what you measure yourself against becomes the ruler of your compass. We tend to live on the scale of comparison between everything that exists and ourselves, therefore we live in comparison to all things and are measured against them in accordance with our perceptive justification and reasoning of them. Without comparison, without the friction of opposites, without such understanding of true evil, logical paradoxes, natural law, moral principles, genuine inequality, deep self-introspection, analysis of quantum mechanics and the philosophical and metaphysical aspects of being, then it becomes hard to envision anything greater than we’ve already seen throughout history. The mistake I think some make is that people seem to think all of these fields of study are for the professionals, scientist or alternative folks etc. to investigate, but in reality it is up for grabs for anyone who wishes to understand and improve himself. In fact too much extroversion in the world is probably an essential part of why society is so divisive and uninterested in the self, the distraction from outer influences sway the pendulum one way for the many, which for the most part has always been outwards. If introspection and introversion leads to insanity in man then I must already be there. Which brings me to another point, and that is that perhaps it is society that is insane and the true individual is sane, after all, are we not living in an upside down world? And in the case that we are, true individuality never looked better, and who knows if I am even true in my individuality, perhaps just mixed fragments of the dual that interchange at will.

Everything is, because we are.

~ Leya Hunter.