Psychosis is like living in a dream that goes left.

By dream I mean a wonderful imagining had while asleep, if life is the new sleep. And by left I mean that with which ‘left’ has always been linguistically associated … the opposite of right with all its glorious professions of a single truth, of power and freedom!

When you enter a state of psychosis, there is nothing sacred, nothing true, all questions are asked, and answers resound in deep echoes around your head, as if knowledge had never entered and your mind is indeed a dark cavern where the most primeval of fears evolve into truth.

Psychosis is the feeling a caveman must have once experienced while being chased by a very large dinosaur through jungles too thick for man, and too crowded for dinosaur feet.

Psychosis is a condition in which at first instance you are drunk and looking through rose-coloured glasses at a world surrounded by friends and good times. Within seconds the rose turns to a blood-coloured tint in which friends have turned to foes, and you have become an enemy of their state.

The tiers of thinking you must climb to attain this sense of psychosis are at once horrific and complex. It may begin by making stories up in your head about those that surround you. Unlike the normal limits and restraints you put on yourself when dealing with those you are familiar with, you begin to suspect yourself of crimes, and your friends of trying to hurt or imprison you. It is not so much a false reality, but a wholly separate reality based on fears which are usually suppressed as we seek to enjoy the day by day without fear.

Psychosis listens to the gunshots. It reads the news with utter seriousness. Explores the full consequences of the ‘what if?’ Gets deeper into the hypothetical. What would happen if? But the IF, becomes yes, and suddenly you are under the pressure of something you believe to be true, even though it is not.

But truth is so thinly disguised, that psychosis seems kind of natural enough. Like a Tibetan meditation on death. You must meditate on those things that you are most afraid of. Psychosis is like an extended meditation on what it would be like if people really did want to lock you up, or vote you in as leader, or if you were Jesus… and perhaps the Jesus psychosis is the ultimate. Because, let’s face it… what did he do to deserve to be killed?

Were Jesus’ teachings the result of an extended psychosis? If you had been somehow told that you were the Son of God for so many years, of course you’d get a bit edgy. A bit like if Paris Hilton actually had to get up in front of a lecture hall and teach people what it is to be famous for being famous and giving the world oh so much. That she is the chosen one.

Once you ponder the Jesus question, the question of why a man who preaches peace has to die, just like Martin Luther King, or JFK, or Ghandi, or John Lennon, you realize that life isn’t fair, and if you survive a holocaust there is nothing written to say that your body won’t end up strangled and in a wheelie bin like that poor woman in the Eastern Suburbs of Sydney recently who met her drastic and undeserved fate just before Christmas.
 
Famous preachers of peace have to be murdered so that the Gods of War can survive. Humans are made up of the old Ying and the old Yang, and both have their right to survive. There is no perfection. Perhaps that’s what psychosis really is: a person, in an extreme fashion, thinking about the nature of his or her own humanity. At first feeling good about their goodness, then freaking out about their badness, only to return to a state in which balance must be respected, and no one can ever truly be either. Saddam Hussein paid for a hell of a lot of people’s educations, Hitler loved Eva, Jesus claimed he wasn’t here for peace (read Luke), and Buddha didn’t really like gay people.

During psychotic moments the fine line between joy and fear are completely merged. There are no walls behind which you simply, grimly and courageously say: “that is life.” You feel a fear you would not normally let yourself feel… that those closest to you are capable of hurting you the most. And that you as a person are capable of hurting those you love… And that in the mixed up place that is the world, these are nature’s rules.

That though you love you can also hate.

That you can kiss someone one day, and on the next, never speak.

That you can argue with those that bore you, and then be indifferent your whole life to the person that gave you life.

Psychosis is a meditation on fear.

I am writing about it because I have had various psychotic episodes since the millennia began. I am not sure what they mean. I know why I have had them. But I am not sure what to call them. And I am not wont to throw them into the basket of ‘too crazy’ before they are fully analysed, not by a psychiatrist (God, I find them the most crazy of all people), but by the only person who can truly know my future whereabouts: me.

Once upon a time the state of psychosis was akin to having visions.

Back onto psychiatrists: I find it amazing that you can speak to one of these fellows in the space of an hour, and in that time, reach a point at which they soon claim to have diagnosed you with one of the many ‘mental illnesses’ they can choose from, and on the basis of such little information. It is that part of the societal machine which somehow grants sobriety and ‘rightness’ to the medical profession, and yet illness and craziness to fans of the absurd.

For one: I am not ill. A medical person might tell me that I am, and then claim that because I am denying I am ill, I must be ill, because their diagnosis is based on that one hour of therapy and their ‘professional’ experience, while my diagnosis is based on a lifetime of understanding who I am and why I act the way I do. That ‘psychosis’, in whatever form, is meant to be fixed and dealt with so one can get on with the business of ‘living.’ If I was afflicted by a consistent and daily form of psychosis then perhaps I may well heed a psychiatrist’s diagnosis. I’m not.

But life is not business. I am not one of those who places aspects of my life into a plethora of pigeonholes pegged against the wall, and after difficult experiences then places them in the too hard, too crazy pigeonhole never to be repeated because our lives should always be full of sanity…

I have occasional bouts- usually after long days of drinking, and then mistakenly toking, and so I know the cause of my brain acting this way.

What I am curious about is the path of thoughts my brain takes to get there. I am amazed that in my head reside such a large array of vastly different tendencies/memories/wants that at some stage it decides to say: “Hey, drop everything for the next few hours as I am going to take you on a ride you have thought about subliminally, but never really truly deeply pondered. It is time to take you to an altered stage. Be an LSD Beatle for the day and stare into the Glass Onion.”

As a creative person I question a diagnosis of mental illness. I question whether psychosis is actually a dormant state within all of us. Some of us quell it through logic. Some of us extend it through substances. Hell, the President of the United States is perpetually psychotic, as is the Prime Minister of this fair country. And they are the worst kind of psychotics: men with fear, paranoia, sociopathic tendencies and whole friggin’ armies at their disposal.

I consider mental illness as a state that never changes. Like the kind of people you may speak to who always have something to complain about. Or those who suffer from excessive sadness. Or those who devote their whole life to working in the stock exchange. Or those who sit at home and smoke dope all day…

We are all mentally ill. There is no normality. If we weren’t all so mentally ill there would be world peace and everyone would know what a joy it is to be happy and help others to be so. But the facts are, many people have many problems, and problems, big or small, are evidence of how mentally ill we all are. Presidents and Prime Ministers, especially so.

And psychiatrists are people. Any person who can sit in an office all day and legally prescribe extreme mind altering drugs for the biggest and smallest of problems? It’s a worry…

As a teacher I am always questioning how on the small scale of things people really do get along very well. Any English language class is an example of the true wants of people. Peaceful co-existence brought about through mutual communication and understanding. Bring elected leaders to the game and abruptly you have a number of men with considerable egos pretending to know and own everything and be able to protect the public’s interests. We find consistent liars to the 9th degree who will claim that war is the path to peace.

The public doesn’t experience enough psychosis, at least the public here in Australia, that is. I am sure psychosis is setting in in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine. There it is likely that people want to kill and plot against one another on a regular basis. Jesus was the true psychosis fan. What more psychosis can you want than to go into a desert for 40 days to battle demons? He was also the original Palestinian.

And yet this man that these wonderful leaders aspire to believe in would today be considered insane. I don’t see the leaders of our countries going into the desert for 40 days without their flak jackets and security men, endless gallons of water and food, and of course a mass advertising campaign telling all their fellow people that this is what they propose to do and why (which would be public relations-mindful lies anyhow).

So psychosis is an alternate reality in which the man made rules are man made bent and broken. You no longer have the capacity to believe what you should or try to believe, so you believe that which is actually sitting somewhere dormant in your head… Thoughts that you will genuinely believe to exist and be true, if for but a few hours of insanely drunken moments.

To finish:

It is obviously better not to be living in a state of mistrust and suspicion, extensively wrangled by various substances grown on the earth to give all animals a leg up over reality.

It is better to be trusting of our fellow man: Arab, Jew, Asian, German, Spanish pornstars and Italian gangster.

But who is sane?

I am for 99% of the time. It is my job to teach a common language to all who want to learn and communicate it with their brothers and sisters.

It is just strange that maybe 20% of the rest of the world would prefer to live in a perpetual non-drug-induced psychosis, a psychosis brought about by political policies, inane television, reaches for power, striving to compete... the list can go on.

A list of common psychoses:

The more money you have the more you fear others, because you never really know if you are getting the real them or the one that wants your money.

Rich psychosis.

The more powerful you get, the more you fear others may want to hurt you, however unfounded these fears may be. Hey, I don’t walk around with twenty men dressed in black with earpieces in and big friggin’ guns looking out for assassins.

Power psychosis.

The more bigoted you get, the more convinced you are that those not into your religion may want to persecute you. Ask the happy clappies. For many years they were writing about the end of days, and how Christians would all be put to death like in Roman times. It’s true people, look it up.

Religious bigotry psychosis.

The more time you spend on the internet, the more convinced you may get, depending on how wacky you are, that Jews control everything, and that every move you make is being monitored by a super Jew ready to pull the plug on the whole of civilisation as revenge for Hitler’s doings.

Extreme anti-Jew psychosis.

The more time you spend at university tutorials run by the extreme Left (not all, but some) the more you will believe that big corporations do no good at all, that Bill Gates engineered the whole modern information revolution for himself and that we are powerless to do anything, because capitalism is ‘just like that’. Bill Gates invented capitalism and he should know. He controls everything.

Bill Gates/ Corporation psychosis.

To conclude my finish:

People should share all their psychoses, big and small.

Then again, revealing our innermost fears and biggest sins are usually done in secret- to priests, priests who work for the Vatican, and as we know the Vatican controls everything, and man, Catholicism is really fucked up man.

Is an internet site the new priest?

Can I take communion on MySpace?

My body is not yet broken and I am afraid of person-to-person contact – perhaps I best prefer to interact with people in cyberspace (but is this now online psychosis?)

Yours Psychotically.
Bunter J Hobson Jr.