Back to Phase 2 HA again, and the gym closes. At this point I don't even know if I want to go to the gym anymore,since I could just go for my jog at the nearby reservoir. Also, a confession. A month ago I called up the clinic where I collect my meds and check in with the doc to see how i'm doing, and they didn't call me back to tell me when my meds are ready to collect, so I kinda just let it wait and I've been off my antidepressants for 3 weeks now. I'll get nagged to death about this, but since it happened, I thought I'll let see what happens if I skip my meds from the day 3 weeks ago when my meds ran out. Turns out literally nothing happened. I felt some weird brain zaps, but other than that, everything is going on as smoothly as when I was on meds before. I'll probably pay my doc a visit some day just to let him know what I did. Previously though, when i went down from 40mg to 30mg, there was a big change and it took 2 weeks to stabilize. and before that, when i was traveling, sometimes I forget to take my meds for a day or two and I can feel my mood swing. So I guess everything turned out ok right? I guess there's no more excuses left to not find work, besides waiting for my 2nd jab on the 31st and then writing up and sending my cvs anywhere. Imagine being able to find work in a pandemic lol.
Sooo,i decided to read a big book on philosophy of madness, it's interesting and all,mostly focused on mystics, madmen and philosophers, but i thought there's some stuff that made a lot of sense in a spiritual way (for me at least).
Indeed, humans show a natural predilection for the affirmative just as much as they turn away from the negative. Everything that is outpouring and goes forth from itself is clear to them. They cannot grasp as straightforwardly that which closes itself off and takes itself, even though it is equivalently essential and it encounters them everywhere and in many forms. Most people would find nothing more natural than if everything in the world were to consist of pure gentleness and goodness, at which point they would soon become aware of the opposite. Something inhibiting, something conflicting, imposes itself everywhere; this Other is that which, so to speak, should not be and yet is, nay, must be. It is this No that resists the Yes, this darkening that resists the light, this obliquity that resists the straight, this left that resists the right, and however else one has attempted to express this eternal antithesis in images. But it is not easy to be able to verbalize it or to conceive it at all scientifically.
In the clear night of the nothing experienced in dread, there occurs the original revelation of the 'is' of what-is : the fact that things are and are not nothing. The more our preoccupations turn us toward what-is, the less we let it slip away in its being. Thus the more easily we turn away from the nothing, the more likely we are to fall into superficial, 'public' ways of being-open.
Philosophy begins only when our own existence undertakes a personal commitment to the basic possibilities of being-open as a whole. What most matters in this commitment is that we first open the space for beings in terms of a whole; then liberate ourselves for the nothing, i.e., free ourselves from the idols that each of us has and goes cringing to; and finally, as we are left hanging, let ourselves be swept back into that basic question of metaphysics, the question that the nothing imposes itself imposes: why are there beings instead of nothing?
Arriving at a 'deeper' philosophy and a less superficial existence apparently requires this 'springing forth' and being swept into nothingness. In nothingness we are free of the idols we usually worship. This resembles that idea that the journey through nothingness is not necessarily harmful in itself, as long as you don't let yourself be distracted by illusions, images hallucinations, idols and demons. When nothingness looms, it is a mistake to resist or flee it. Rather, one must 'go through it' and 'let it come and go'. In this sense, idols are not a temptation, and in fact nothingness is the place where you are safeguarded from idols.
All life must pass through the fire of contradiction. Contradiction is the power mechanism and what is innermost of life. From this it follows that, as an old book says, all deed under the sun are full of trouble and everything languishes in toil, yet does not become tired, and all forces incessantly struggle against each other. Were there only unity and everything were in peace, then, forsooth, nothing would want to stir itself and everything would sink into listlessness.
In psychosis, contradictions rub up against each other, while normal adults have lost the ability to detect the truth of a paradox. A psychosis is an extreme condensation of experiences, and we must learn to accept, gauge, and cherish in the depth of our being the paradoxes that are ours.
There is no choice, where there is at least apparent worth and dignity on the wrong side - or at least attraction to apparent worth and dignity. The original fall is entirely in the nature of compulsions, or modes of imprisonment. So the difference is this : evil has the dignity of an option for an apparent good; sickness has not. The person being treated is now being approached as one who is being incapacitated. He has less dignity than the sinner. So what was supposed (therapy) to enhance our dignity has reduced it. We are just to be dealt with, manipulated into health.(Modern image of madness as sickness)
Not every psychosis represent the truth, but there is a remarkable, self-referential, paradoxical element of madness hidden in the depths of the truth.
Perplexity not only proved to be a diagnostic feature of psychosis, but it also pointed to the absurdity of psychiatry and society in general.
First,madness has to be experienced; then controlled. And to do this is to discover all kinds of sanities, of ways for operating skillfully in the world. To be controlled by insanity is to be feeble. To be controlled by sanity is to be even feebler. Bu when you have become so mad you are prepared to leave the purity of your madness behind then the memory of it, preserved in every cell in your body, will stop you ever becoming contaminated by sanity. This is what it means to live in two worlds and not be limited by either.
Madness is liberating. You rise above the reasonableness and , consequently, can move within it more freely. The funniest thing is that those who know the ins and our of reason, its back doors as well as the front ones, have a far better grasp of it than those who stay trapped inside it for the whole of their lives.
The secret is to be able to see this whole world as an illusion and still function in it as if it's real; to seem bound while inwardly staying quite free; to act bewitched like everyone else, but in doing so, to be deceiving rather than deceived.
Antichrist sustains bodies and nature, while Christ represents their negative power. The Antichrist interferes with access to the Absolute by means of belief in life. ???
