Holy Psychosis!... Schizophrenia as the "Scourge of God"

Tongues of fire (Holy Spirit) descend upon
Hildegard of Bingen as she writes down her vision.

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The medieval mystics spoke of the "via negativa" or negative way by which God is ex-experienced through a negation of the separate ego. This experience of God is often accompanied by physical and/or mental illness. St. John of the Cross had bouts of unexplained sickness; Nietzsche became de-mented; and Hildegard of Bingen, speaking about her revelations, said, "Laid low by the scourge of God, I fell upon a bed of sickness; then, compelled at last by many illnesses, I set my hand to the writing. While I was doing it, I sensed the deep profundity of scriptural exposition; and, raising myself from illness by the strength I received, I brought this work to a close – though just barely – in ten years. [...] And I spoke and wrote these things not by the invention of my heart or that of any other person, but as by the secret mysteries of God I heard and received them in the heavenly places. And again I heard a voice from Heaven saying to me, 'Cry out therefore, and write thus!'"

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The Voice that is All in my head could well be viewed as madness from a dualistic human perspective; so why is physical and mental dis-ease associated with a divine encounter? In Jungian psychology schizophrenia (link) is an invasion of the personal psyche by an archetypal force or god from the collective unconscious; and Jung said that an encounter with an archetype has a disintegrating effect upon the boundary of the ego. Therefore, Love could be considered to be such an attack; the disintegration of the ego would explain the feeling of oneness; and jealousy would be a form of paranoia. A Christ experience would be another form of archetypal or alien invasion from above.
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This inundation of consciousness could be called a "holy psychosis," a break with reality, but our human reality is really a false duality or state of separation from the Totality of life; a Cartesian mindset governed by thinking, and we do not see that thinking, though relatively necessary, is ultimately a mental illness that conditions us into a separate thinker; an ego conjured up by words who can no-longer see the one Word, which is the Page of light on which our thoughts are spread.
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Hence, our thoughts can be atomized back into quantum dust; returned to the Word that underlines all human ideas and figmentations of shameful good-and-evil knowledge. Ultimately, only God knows, and by that quantum shining we are all known into being. We are star-dust, literally, scientifically, and spiritually; "as above so below".
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Rasputin, the mad mystic.

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Jung also said that humans function in a dualistic environment whereby we rely on polarity (i.e. desire/fear, attraction/repulsion, hunger/satisfaction) to animate or drive us. In a transcendent, non-dual, archetypal experience the play and conflict of opposites is cancelled out in the paradox of divine unity where good/evil, life/death, male/female, etc dissolve in the reSonation of quantum Singularity. Without the life-current between positive and negative the ego's mechanistic mindset can become catatonic (link) or stuck. This may denote a resistence or blockage in the libidinal flow of life, or fear of mortido, the ebb of the death wish. One has to learn anew how to operate from the non-dual or quantum field of the Lord; be in-Spired by archetypal forces instead of external human motivations. Then the motions of life and death are seen as the flow and ebb of the same primordial Ocean of consciousness. 

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"Life, being an energetic process, needs the opposites, for without opposition there is, as we know, no energy. Man cannot conquer the tremendous polarity of his nature on his own resources; he can only do so through the terrifying experience of a psychic process that is independent of him, that works him rather than he it."
Jung, Psychology and Religion (Page 93 and 190).
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Van Gogh is the epitome of divine madness, alternating between creative genius and schizophrenic attacks of disintegration. The problem with invasions from above is whether I have the ability to integrate into human consciousness the divine energy that is trying to take me over. The real uni-verse or one-song is a non-dual Singularity of vision which dispells the illusion of time and its tick-tock of twoness. But my ego is based in the polarity of earth; my spirit is split in the biology of my bi-lobed brain matter.

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Driven mad by the Sun-flowering mind, Van Gogh's 
self-expressive art started out as quite dark and colourless, 
which is commonly a sign of depression's blackness, nigredo,
 the first stage of the alchemical process. But as his so-called 
mental illness deepened into schizophrenia, the second phase
of albedo in alchemy, the whitening of consciousness, his art 
became bright and psychedelic (cauda pavonis) before 
he reached the third and final stage of divine madness, suicide/
sacrifice, alchemical rubedo; but he took it literally instead 
of symbolically, unable to integrate sunyata. Perhaps cutting off
 his ear was a way of "acting out" in a final attempt to silence 
the voice that was all in his head?

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The true cure for human madness is to see that thinking is ultimately a mental illness that schizophrenically splits the mind. Every war was started by a belief. Visions of Truth belie beliefs by revealing that the underlying premiss behind every belief is false. For example, the dualistic belief that "I am under attack and need to defend myself," is seen as a lie because in Truth I am indestructible and cannot be attacked. Both Christ and Buddha taught to "turn the other cheek." The bi-ological belief that I need to survive may be a necessary fact at the human level, but the Truth reveals that I cannot not survive because I am eternal.

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The "polarity premiss" behind human existence pre misses the Truth and continues in its mistaken way, building up lies upon lies until the Truth is buried deep in the collective unconscious. The trick for me is to uncover my original in-no-sensory innocence. My split-mindedness can only be healed by an apocalyptic revelation of Truth, which is a catastrophe for my separate ego.

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A final quote from Hildegard. "And I heard from the Living Fire a voice speaking to me: 'Oh, you are wretched dross and a female ignorant of any teaching by earthly masters, unable to read books with philosophical understanding, but since you are touched by My light, whose fire kindles within you like a burning sun, declare, proclaim, and write these, My mysteries, which you see and hear in mystical vision.'" (Secrets of God, p19). Soon after Hildegard's death in 1180 the Catholic Church clamped down on people having personal experiences of God, especially nuns, and 500 years of witch burning began.
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Nietzsche, apparently "gaga" for the last ten years of his life,
holding the space of divine madness as the mind
disintegrates back into the sunyata (emptiness) of
the primordial pleroma (fullness). The solarization 
of consciousness negates the ego.

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The god of divine nectar and divine madness, Dionysus, unhinges the mechanistic mindset of Cartesian separateness. Dismembered and de-mented drunkenness inspires chaos to rise-up in dangerous celebration! But, paradoxically, I now feel safe in the danger-zone of conscious volatility. Human safety is ultimately a false premiss that pre-misses the Truth of Child-like invincibility.

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Dionysus, the divine Filius, alchemically 

circulates the Holy Spirit of eleMental Wine.

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How strange?... to feel safe in the chaos of whirling forces; reconciled in the revelry and revelation of apocalyptic explosivity; the so-called "big bang" of original con-fusion, born from the Fusion of the underlying Song of Singularity. Everything becomes crystal clear in the paradox of clarity, which appears to be empty in its sheer clearness, but is also full and overflowing with the meaning and spirit of divine Wine that fills the golden cup of the Son.

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