schizphrenic as failed mystic: again with feeling

There is probably an innate capacity for mystical experiences. It is likely that these are adaptive rather than pathological. Schizophrenia on the other hand in its serious and late stage manifestation is unambiguously pathological, regardless of what culture you are in or how people react to it or interpret your thinking and behavior. Unlike mystics, schizophrenics do not at all tend to turn their unusual experience into something enriching, it worsens their plight. It isn't just how other people treat them, or a simple matter of reframing their experience, they are trapped to some extent in a way peopel we consider mystics are not.

I'll agree up to a point that one way to explain this is that schizophrenics have unusual experiences and thoughts and then form stable maladaptive inferences from them, and cascade into a worsening condition sometimes accelerating with the help of inhumane treatment.

On the other hand, there are some troubling differences between schizophrenic experience and mystical experience that make the comparison somewhat forced. The disposition for mystical experience varies with absorption, hypnotizability, fantasy proneness, openness to experience, and tolerance for ambiguity. Schizophrenia has no such correlation, other than somewhat in the negative direction. In fact schizophrenics typically suffer from a disconnected and flat affect and a remarkable poverty of the kinds of rich emotional experience that characterize fantasy prone people. They aren't having the same experiences but interpreting them differently, they are having somewhat differently bizarre experiences and then interpreting them in a systematically twisted way and they are stuck in that pathologically twisted world.

"Even in the lives of distressed individuals, mystical experiences can serve a positive function. There is no doubt, however, that mystical elements do sometimes appear in the symptomatology of seriously disturbed persons and that mystical teachings and practices can either exacerbate existing psychological disturbance, even precipitating psychotic episodes, or disguise them by giving them an acceptable form. It appears that some of the great mystics were themselves troubled, but there are no grounds for interpreting their exceptional experiences as psychotic reactions. Rather, for some of them at least, the experience seems to have helped them to live lives of exceptional dedication and productivity."

Quote from David Wulff, "Mystical Experience", Chapter 12,
"Varieties of Anomalous Experience," edited by Cardena, Lynn, and Krippner. This book is one of the best sources of balanced scientific information from the study of a wide variety of extraordinary human experience. The great advantage of their approach here compared to many others is that they emphasize the qualties of the experiences and their conditions rather than trying to explain what the experience represents.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:schizphrenic as failed mystic: again with feeling/missed my point, by Meditator, 06/30/02 The delicate balance of tolerant detachment, by Todd, 06/30/02 Re:The delicate balance of tolerant detachment, by Lindsay Smith, 07/04/02

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