The delicate balance of tolerant detachment

I apologize and take responsibility for missing your point. It sounds like we mostly agree. I surely appreciate that there are vivid multisensory experiences that defy explanation and are not "pretended," and I've spent much time learning about them as part of my research interest in suggestion and hypnotic phenonena.

My point was simply that mystical experience is generally adaptive and psychosis generally not. I was interested enough to write a thesis in college about mental illness and conformity, based largely on the work of Thomas Szasz, I still think many of his points are valid.

However I later briefly worked with schizophrenics in a state hospital environment and my perspective changed somewhat. I found the experience extremely sobering both regarding the plight of the sufferers and that of their treatment professionals and caretakers. It didn't entirely change my view of psychiatric treatment as oriented toward enforcing conformity more than alleviating suffering, but it did help me understand the pressures that make it that way. It also made me a bit more cynical about facile analyses of mental illness in terms of anomalous experience, unrecognized creativity, cultural differences, or simple eccentricity. Exposure to the peculiar worldview of the Scientologists helped me recognize where that thinking could take us if taken too far.

I also accepted the fact that Carlos Casteneda's wonderful sorcerer who successfully blurred fantasy and reality was himself as real as Yoda and that treating vivid adaptive fantasy the same as reality is different from being tolerant and accepting of its value.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:The delicate balance of tolerant detachment, by Lindsay Smith, 07/04/02

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