Mental Health

2. Mental Health

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Argument number 2 for putting me into a mental hospital, is that I am no longer in the ‘real world’. That the drugs that I take ‘distort reality’, ‘cloud the senses’, that I ‘escape into a fantasy world of illusions’. And the official reality is not an illusion? It is ‘real’? I have my doubts about that. To use a cliché - raise a generation believing in angels, and they will see angels in the sky; raise a generation believing in UFO’s, and they will see UFO’s in the sky. The sad monkeys just have to be shown firmly while they are still young and defenseless what must be seen and what must not be seen, what must and what must not be thought, into which type of faces and bodies to freeze their muscles, and off they go, hurrying to complete their sick patterns of life demanded by their shared illness, before their misshaped bodies reach the point of no return of decay.

I believe that the prevailing attitude – the belief of the people of all the societies within, and on the border of our civilization, that they experience Reality – is quite unfounded, childish and dangerous. They wave a holy book, knock on a table with their knuckles, or show a picture of a molecule and believe that in this way our experience of reality is proved. What follows in the next page and a half may be tedious to some, but is very important as example of simple logic which can be used to underline untruths upon which our miseries are built.

I know very little of biology, physics or cognitive sciences. But I am nevertheless aware of the following positions, which are based on information freely and easily available to anyone who is interested. What we do actually ‘experience’ - see, hear, smell and touch - is just a tiny, microscopic part of the universe, to which our biological senses react. The final reality is beyond our reach – we can only experience what we were designed to experience, at best we can magnify with machines the experience we were designed to experience.
When a tree drops and no one is there to hear it drop, it indeed does not make a sound. Sound does not exist outside of the ears of living beings. Sound is a vibration of the air, and it actually becomes ‘sound’ as such, only when these vibrations come in contact with the ear, or any other hearing apparatus of a living creature. There are no sounds outside of us – living creatures. Only vibrations in the air. Or, to be more precise – the unknown process or thing, which we perceive with the help of our instruments as ‘vibrations’, ‘in’, ‘the air’. What is out there we can not know, only what our senses translate into sounds, smells, colours, etc. The infinite reality is way, way outside our reach.

I suppose at this point lazy ‘common sense’ counter-arguments within some readers appear – “if colours and sounds exist only inside us, how come we all react to them? If fifty humans hear a sound, does that not mean, that the sound exists outside them?” Not at all - it simply means, that the sense organs of the fifty humans are standardized, and therefore certain aspects of reality are translated into similar information (similar internal realities) by similar organs. If there were five dogs with the fifty humans, and they reacted to the sound as well, this would only mean, that some sense organs of the dogs are similar in construction to those of the humans. Not that there was an objective ‘sound’ outside these humans and dogs – there was something else, to which their ears reacted and created a ‘sound’ inside them.
This is biological standardization – humans experience one reality, pigeons another, snakes a third one, spiders a fourth, flies a sixth, fish a seventh, etc. These realities do not exist ‘outside’, but rather ‘inside’ each creature, which is synchronized with the other creatures of the same species. Each of these ‘realities’ is real enough for a species to survive, so all of these realities are real. And yet – they are different – as many different type of organisms, of senses exist on our Earth – that many are the different realities, different impressions of the environment on the organisms. Our world is a collection of an impossibly huge number of overlapping realities – but we only experience ours.

Quite apart from this biological standardization, is the social standardization – when a group of humans is programmed by other humans, to see, think, speak, live and die in the same way. Different societies in different centuries and decades, exist in (or rather ‘maintain’) different realities. These realities are constructed by humans, but not consciously. A little part – the visible, the legitimate part - of every reality is constructed and maintained consciously, the rest, the millions of details and hidden mechanisms, the lies and fears, the daemons and angels – are all subconscious. The invisible matter, the hidden patterns and logic of human realities, are subconscious. Therefore – the human race lives in different dreams. Usually – in nightmares. And each dream is experienced as a waking reality. To the great misfortune of us all.

The infinite reality is beyond the socially and biologically standardized experience of the human – the finite realities are many, the majority of them are also inaccessibly to any specific human, and they are all equally unreal. Some societies have realized this to some extent, and allow some diversity within the reality market. The different political parties mirror different realities, different dreams. What is self-evident truth concerning the nature of man and society to a socialist, is questionable to a centrist and outright nonsense to a right wing conservative. You can’t say that one party offers the real reality, and that the others are deluded madmen. Well you can, but I think that one-party societies suck, and if you prefer living in one, it would be pointless for you to continue reading this book. Also religions – each religion offers a different reality, sometimes radically different realities. You can’t pick one out and say: “This is reality. All other religions are upheld by a bunch of hallucinating retards.” The same goes for art, music, the various meditation and philosophical schools.
And let’s not forget the thousands and millions of ‘faith healers’, ‘clairvoyants’, ‘astrologists’, ‘black magic’ people, ‘white magic’ people, and anyone who waves hands, adjusts energy fields, sees into the future and speaks to shining beings from elsewhere. As long as the kneeling Christian or Muslim who speak to God are considered normal, as long as an old lady is not locked away when she looks into the future with the help of a spirit, there is no logical cause to lock me away because I happen to see weird shit when I’m high. I’m supposed to be crazy? Compared to whom? Who is the person that is the standard of normality? I have yet to meet a normal person. All I ever meet is ‘slightly crazy’ or ‘intensely crazy’, ‘slightly ill’, or ‘very ill’ - never have I met anyone with such a perfect state of the organism and psyche, to be ‘completely normal’, ‘completely healthy’. Pretending that you are normal and healthy, while knowing quite well that you are not, and suppressing this knowledge with alcohol, pills, excessive masturbation, tobacco, soap operas or religious zeal, will only drive you deeper into the maze of lies and pain, why not give it up, experience a sharp but limited period of pain, and then with a lighter heart begin a fresh start?

In this human world which we inhabit and create, there are interchanging flows of different realities, and while I believe that there should be a free market of realities, the state and church believe that they have the self-evident right to be reality monopolists. I think that any church member or lab researcher can believe what they want to believe, but this should not be state law – states are meant for other things. Humans live together and follow rules for mutual protection and to achieve things which one human can not. Exchange of products, services and ideas happens. The ‘state’ should be a number of social structures for the maintenance of a safe environment for the exchange of products, services and ideas. It should make sure that people do not steal, kill, rape, torture, deceive each other. That the strong do not take advantage of the weak, that those who can not survive by themselves are protected by others. Instead it acts like God, assuming that is has final knowledge about Man and the Universe – assuming that what I eat, drink, smoke, what I think, see, and hear and feel, should all be the way which I am told to do it. Because, you see, the state not only has the ultimate perception of the present, it also foresees the future… It knows that if I smoke marijuana or sniff some coke, I’ll become a thieving hallucinating rapist.

B
‘Decent folks’ can never admit that it is they, and their official reality, their lies and pretences, that break souls, creating the monsters around us – they can not take that responsibility for turning their children and partners into hysterics, schizophrenic, sadists and murderers, and always look for an evil outside agency – the devil, the conspiracy, the drugs, the bad music, the bad films… Spending every waking moment protecting their fragile primitive realities from information which might destroy them, and pretending all the while that they are not doing this. With not relaxation, but relapses into uncontrollable mental spasms during sleep, followed upon waking by quick ‘zipping’ of the mental files concerning what was dreamt.

What I see, do and think is my business. It becomes the business of society, when I either kill, steal or rape; or when I am so socially inadequate, that I walk into walls, crap into my pants and generally can not survive for an hour without someone’s help. And please note: not if it is assumed by someone that in a number of months or years I will begin stealing, or walking into walls – this is wild speculation, unfounded bullshit– but if I actually do begin stealing or walking into walls. These are two very different things, one is paranoid speculation of ill monkeys, the other is what is called a ‘fact’. I, my friends, and millions of drug abusers the world over, neither steal nor walk into walls, but still are singled out for prison and compulsory mental hospitalization, due to the fashionable theories, the fashionable ‘certainties’ of what we will do in the coming years and decades. And even if I do kill someone in the year 2030 – and not for any other reason, but because ‘drugs made me do it’ - is this reason to put me in jail in 2007? This is insane – not acceptable even by early Star Trek logic, but amazingly enough – accepted by politicians, doctors and citizens in all the countries of the world. But this is the topic of another chapter, to return to ‘mental health’ issues: whatever goes on inside my mind, whatever goes on below my skin, while I am able to carry out a conversation, earn money, and cross a street, I am socially adequate, therefore not ‘crazy’ and whatever I see, do or think must not be controlled by the policeman, the doctor or the politician. If a chronically depressed, guilt ridden emotional sado-masochist who works a boring job and has a wall of lies between him and his partner and friends, thinks that he is the one to judge whether I am ‘normal’, by taking himself as an example of ‘normality’, it is his right to do so, that is ‘freedom’, but if his views are imposed on me by use of police-forces and medical institutions, this ‘sucks’.