Memoirs of Madness

Philosophy Forums Psychology and Mind
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Excerpts from Memoirs of Madness by Christopher Markowski (WW_III_ANGRY)

"I was in bed asleep; however there was another me in bed. He was laying just the opposite of me with his feet to mine laying down, his head towards the foot of the bed. Not only was he another me, he was my opposite and he was evil. I remember in the dream being paralysed in my bed, with him right there, thinking of what to do. It was my anti-me, a little terrifying version of myself sleeping in my bed. I quickly rose up and he did the same and we began choking each other. One of us had to die.

Chris, I had no idea, until now, of the suffering people have to endure with mental illness. Your story is one of triumph. Your eulogies for your Mother and Father are testimony to the truths of this world.

“…just like Dad did. He always gave everyone something to think about”

As you have done Chris.

Thank you.

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Ummm… this isn’t madness, this is Sleep Paralysis.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus

Has a very ancient, and modern, well documented history.

Everyone here experiences it, but only some remember it. It occurs naturally in the sleep cycle. I suppose all primates get it.

Clonazepam is usually prescribed, but best used only if your violently trying to break out to the point your hurting yourself or significant others (such as striking your boyfriend while blood currdling shrieking and leaping in bed). Extreme example, don’t mess with Texas. Enough said… (Call me)

The two nerve receptors to keep in mind when researching the brain regions and cognitive disorders down below:
GABAA Glycine
Metabotropic GABAB

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GABA_receptor

I can’t always control it, but your INTJ has a higher level of consciousness in regards to imaginative control, primarily cognitive branching of functions (holding one task as we complete others, juxtapositioning the conscious cascade).

Consider overall Brodmann Areas 9 & 10 in exact regards to these chemicals. The Dysregulation is overcome by being aware that in all primates, a “copy” of the outer neurologically fekt form of the body is maintained here in the mind, and involves these chemicals.

In primates, its fairly anatomically laid out in a fairly systematic fashion (easy to trigger the parts sequentially, as it has a logical layout easy enough for your average student training in neurology to trigger in live test subjects).

In humans, its all mixed up (due to our freaken massive, bulging brains). Our nervous system, for example in terms of phantom pains for a missing limb, can be scratched using seemingly random points on a face or foot. Everything seems mixed up, counters intuitive, but just as it unfolds in mappable patterns of the skin, how we dream, and choose to lucidly dream, effects the recurrence of sleep paralysis (for the most part).

Best way is to gain greater lateralization between abstract and concrete thought. Learn to identify left hemispheric thought, and tight. Try to encountry OCD behaviors in the imagination, as well as Ideo-Kenetic failures in intellectual exercises. Push your imagination harder in your waking hours, and look to resting and sleep not with apprehension, but as the continuation of the days exercises. What you visualize during the day, get list in at night. Push yourself to new extremes, and in the face of your worst fears, get angry, get excited, but always strive for conquest and control, meeting it as equals. This will help you develop neural inhibition… the capacity to put a stop to your impulses. Always press on with bolder dreams. Feel every sensation, temperature, read in your dreams, solve complex problems, and push yourself farther. Every morning, spend some time to rest and just absord the night, even if you can’t remember. Let it set in, and just be aware of your body, your motor-physical awareness. Balance. Appreciation and smoothness of thought. Thankful for the problems solved, and the awareness new problems need solving during your next sleep. You have all day to inspire the functions you undertake in your dreams (the type of dream you’ll have, if you swim all day, you’ll have a dream where you feel your still in the water, the imprint of the days struggle replaying).

Learn to appreciate the refreshing glory of the daybreak… those first few moments.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=RxabLA7UQ9k

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In his case it actually is madness:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=176372&p=2546634&hilit=schizophrenia#p2546634

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I’ve already adjusted for this in my analysis, as I remember WW3Angry, compare what I wrote to this study:

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3395964/

Notice I put emphasis on sensory focus, not interpersonal or facial recognition, or relativizing logical tasks. Schizophrenics have a high threshold for sensory data, but a inability to consistently integrate. The etiology therefore isn’t that much of a mystery as its commonly asserted.

One thing I wouldn’t tell a schizophrenic to do, for example, is in a dream to mold a clay face of a woman as water drips on it, and focus on aspects in concentration as you make other parts come alive. This would be a largely pointless exercise for them. Their lucid threshold is quite low to begin with, and only the repetitions of the drip, drip, drip would hold effect, but that would become quickly something in the background buzz of the mind, independent of scenario. The rest would fall apart and do odd shit, and they wouldn’t be aware it’s odd.

Scenario is the primary difficulty of schizophrenics, especially rewards and punishments, positive and negative stimuli. An example… a schizophrenic in town a few months ago was playing a board game left over long ago based on monopoly with a group of friends that offered a gift certificate card as a prize. Everyone was told in advance (especially him) no prize, this is just to pass the time. He got the card during the match, got really excited, and decided to keep it to redeem it later. I’ve been told he has been back some dozen times since, emphatic he rightfully won it. Its explained to him repeatedly, but he retorts shoeing his card. My county is also in the process of passing a very special law just for him regarding pan handling and free speech… he decided to collect donations for a cause by walking down the center lane of main street (which is also a state highway) waving signs, and trying to collect finds. He is threatening to sue for police brutality and false imprisonment, and denying his free speech.

Yet, he has a severe sense of paranoid avoudance revolving around trust and image. His social network is remarkably low in terms of who he freely associates with commonly, etc.

In other wards, for a typologist, a paranoid schizophrenic isn’t THAT unique. They share traits with many types, and we can get a good sense of their cognitive thinking style, and a few voids in their matrix.

Everything I said in the first post holds true. Follow that pattern in your lucid dreaming. Integrate yourself neurologically and sensory. Its the primary block, the inability to assert the self sensory. If they could do that, they could better adapt to noticing contradictions in normal lucid dreaming (the cues people are normally taught to lucid dream).

Hence, emphasis on OCD patterns, and Ideokenetic arrangements. Make a ball roam around in a maze, and backtrack. Get lost, and focus on being lost, and making sense of it. Can you feel your environment? Is it cold? Wind against your ankle? These are better tools.

My advice would be completely different if he had Williams Syndrome. This stuff would be pointless, as its near opposite to schizophrenic behaviors.

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I’m sincerely flattered. I don’t really come to this sub forum, but today I did. Glad you enjoyed it, glad I gave you something to think about :mrgreen:

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My illness was not normal schizophrenia like you describe. At out patient therapy I knew I was different from most other people there. There was only maybe one person who was similar to me, but everyone else was low functioning like the person you describe. Not to toot by own horn, but really, my intelligence might very well be the one thing that separated me from the rest of the delusional. Yes I was delusional, but I was also a little gifted as well, and that could make a major difference.

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There is more than one kind of schizophrenia, but they all seem to deal with white-matter connectivity, and spacial-emotive paradox in Ciceronian Cognitive Space (Cicero’s exploration of how space in imagination works, vs other unrealistic modes of imagination).

Schizophrena shouldn’t determine your personality type, or overall health of the brain unaffected by it, so given you were introspective enough to write a book about your experiences. I would certainly hope your more behaviorally acceptable than my local example under social conditions.

My normal approach, for example on this site, of rhetorical exchange would be inappropriate for a schizophrenic, as I target transitive assumptions underlining Anomies and Concepts of Self (which 90% of this forum in obsessed with), forums tend to be egoist. I work with people with two faces, and slight of hand approaches. It works best with egoists, not with schizophrenics.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

A paranoid schizophrenic seems generally to have a obsession with Anomic thought. The anger certainly comes out in this merger of concrete and abstract thought. The period between the late 19th Century to Late 20th century more or less the heyday of the outlook, when guys like the Unibomber could logically move between Utilitarian and Nietzschean concepts and work out fantastic theories that seemed to hold weight with the status quo “revolutionary, anti-psychiatric” thinkers. It was the era where the Khmer Rouge arouse out of the highest concepts of French philosophical thought after all.

I think it was more or less because the philosophers of this era never really learned his to integrate far flung, oftentimes contradicting theories and philosophical schools into one system that explains how the theories were generated in the first place. In a sense, philosophy was schizophrenic back then. Most posts on this forum are regurgitations of the movements of that era. Seems to be dying off mainstream in post-post-post modernism.

So if we take this farther, I’d prefer it in private. It wouldn’t be healthy for most here. I’m not too impressed with the mental stability of users like Primal Rage, Pandora, or Fixed Cross. If you give them too much of the wrong kind of information, they can hurt themselves. They aren’t aware of the voids in their thinking. In your case, its understandable, society told you, and you were undoubtedly bewildered by it. You took a very healthy and impressive approach. I’m impressed by it.

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The schizoid is the new warrior type. At least, it is the symptom of the new type breaking through the old fabric. Speaking personally, most of my close friends were at one point bordering on psychosis or well into it - these have perished, some died heroically and/or left legacy. In any case, I see this condition rather as a symptom of n open mind than of sickness; it is the sickness of the ethics and information we are fed and our good trust in it that causes the breakdown. There is no arguing against the thesis that the world is sick, that both mankind, and its environment are sick. With this in mind, it is absurd to bring up a human being to standards of purity. This absurd practice is what has caused absurdism - a direct reflection on the disjunction of cognition and reality. Absurdism is a dangerous art; it allows the disjunction to take on aesthetic, pleasing forms, and embeds it into the ‘sane’, and quite soon, it becomes difficult to discern the honest inquisition from the absurd commentary. And so the diary of the madman progresses; experience and claim become intertwined and the fiction takes hold of the brainstem, and purple ooze is radiating outward as the cities of truth are overcome with the zealots of love - all madness is love that finds no recipient, love is madness that finally does; in the end no words do justice if they speak reasonably, because justice and reason are unrelated at the stem, and only by their leaves begin to touch - those leaves that have fallen to the ground, as justice is always a response to loss.

Contra - I don’t claim emotional stability, only intellectual consistency.

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Fixed Cross wrote:

There is illness of the body, why not illness of the mind. A person seeks a means to heal or abate physical symptoms of the body, as one would also seek a means to escape the severe and distressing bouts for example, of depression. It is an illness, with real trauma and real pain, nothing to do with ethics or shame.

Read Memoirs of Madness and you will understand one man’s heroic journey, tackled head on, with an absolute willingness to acknowledge his personal suffering and at times his very real impaired ability, which took a toll on his ability to function. One cannot help but have admiration for him, because through it all, his honesty, his understanding and compassion for others very rarely left him.

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-I have relapsed recently. It has been 20 years since I had a manic episode, and it occurred recently due to work related stress. I believed I was going to get fired and was burned out as well. As a production scheduler/planner, I am required to be on point day in and day out, planning the demand to be produced by the most efficient means while meeting customer requirements and fitting it into our capacity, scheduling my resources to accomplish this as applicable. It is an intellectually demanding job and when operations decided to make things harder for me and easier for the production team, I felt slighted, overwhelmed, and feared for my job.

Nonetheless, I commenced into a downward spiral fueled by lack of focus on the details of my job, which are critical, but continued to perform to everyone else’s standards, except for my own. I felt defeated… beyond that information was not being shared with me properly, to the point where it would almost be seen as lying. I shared this with my manager and director however and expressed my concerns of being fired, however they assured me that was nowhere near the case and operations was acting inappropriately. Ultimately I know not even my director could prevent my termination, as the VP was in control over both of our teams, operations as well as my team, so I wasn’t very “assured”.

I ended up going into a manic phase where I was imagining things along the lines of my initial early 20 something delusions, a Catholic based religious war was playing out in my mind. I thought I was getting communications from the spirit world, suddenly I began believing in God again. This has been a sure fire sign of a manic episode to anyone but me at the time, and my family was concerned when I expressed my belief in our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I believed I had a divine task ahead of me, and was following the guidance of Michael the archangel.

I felt extremely attractive to females as well, and in a sense some of that may have been true. I was on point, I was keeping my delusional thoughts to myself, and I was getting words of flattery for my accomplishments on the job as well, from my team and others, regardless of the roadblocks put in front of me by some members of the operations team. I ended up conducting a meeting explaining how their plans were ultimately illogical, of course I didn’t say it in such a way, I demonstrated it and took my director and their director to the white board and wrote everything out showing them how their goals were impossible to meet and that I needed full control of the resources in order to mold the plan from my director into play. (yes, this is a shortened version of events, they were also trying to control the resources I needed for scheduling production.)

In any case, I nailed the meeting. But I left, I wasn’t feeling good, I was feeling anxiety. I had already taken a few days off before this meeting due to anxiety, and over the previous weekend went to the ER has my stomach was pulsating from my wracked nerves. While on anti anxiety medication, it didn’t suffice. I was delving into madness, unbeknown to me. I left the meeting abruptly telling the team I was still not 100%. That night my boss said I should probably take a paid leave, which I agreed to and welcomed.

I took Friday off as such, and began a spiritual journey that ended on Monday with myself being admitted unwillingly into the mental ward. That Monday morning, I was praying, at a location behind a Walmart where nobody could see me…

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Indeed Shieldmaiden, how fitting that his descriptions of his breakdown, which I wouldn’t call madness, that lacks a transparent breakthrough through the bounderiesseparating him from MADD, such terrors which we share of actual loss of reason with.

It’s tragic it’s not recognized as such.

Sorry I meant to say, that at the present time some people, and there is more and more, who anasthetise their fear of wars,by drink, confusing MADD (mothers against drunken drivers) with MAD (mutual assured destruction) and it is understandable for a mix up of this sort.

I pray for the return of our member WW3, as though abhorr that we have generally lost control of our minds for letting the bomb control the minds of the best of our generation.

‘Howl’, Allen Ginsberg

My gut level feeling remains optimistic that we will survive even this confusing election.feeling a resurfacing of our lost faithful humanity, through recreating the modus appears by which to achieve the fruits of this planted seed of hope and charity.

I pray for our brother, may he soon return.

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Apparently somebody could see you.

There’re cameras everywhere these days.

And even then, they have technology where they see things without cameras.

They can track flocks of birds that way.

But who knows.

Just because you have delusions about something doesn’t mean there is absolutely nothing true about that particular something. That is why delusions are even possible.

At least you have insight on hindsight. Assuming you do.

Make your delusions recognize personhood. Stay safe.

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While we’re hoping for his well being, we are doing so for our selves as well, because without realizing those zithers are really part of ourselves from then unto the future and beyond.

You too, may the Holy Spirit of God remain with You.

I take the liberty for replying to You, in case he will not have seen Shieldmaiden’s resurrecting this, forum)

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Scroll up.

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image750×1334 209 KB

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P.s. Christopher, I just realized you’re calling humans “resources”. That is not how things work in the kingdom of ends. It is how they work in the mouth of madness.

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Resources are the ontological term in my profession - for my current job, resources consist of machines, time and yes people. Not that they aren’t people first and foremost, just when scheduling they are a resource for me, a means to an end. They take vacation and are sick, they have feelings and can be overworked, overwhelmed, as I know too well.

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… The day prior I had visited the graves of my parents, left flowers for them. I had been reading Revelations again. Particularly this passage:

"The Woman and the Dragon

12 A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. 2 She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. 3 Then another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads. 4 Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to the earth. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth, so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. 5 She gave birth to a son, a male child, who “will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” And her child was snatched up to God and to his throne. 6 The woman fled into the wilderness to a place prepared for her by God, where she might be taken care of for 1,260 days.

7 Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. 8 But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. 9 The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.

10 Then I heard a loud voice in heaven say:

‘Now have come the salvation and the power
and the kingdom of our God,
and the authority of his Messiah.
For the accuser of our brothers and sisters,
who accuses them before our God day and night,
has been hurled down.
11 They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.
12 Therefore rejoice, you heavens
and you who dwell in them!
But woe to the earth and the sea,
because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
because he knows that his time is short.’

13 When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to the earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. 14 The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a time, times and half a time, out of the serpent’s reach. 15 Then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river, to overtake the woman and sweep her away with the torrent. 16 But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of his mouth. 17 Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage war against the rest of her offspring—those who keep God’s commands and hold fast their testimony about Jesus."

Again, as I had did 20 years ago, I attributed this passage to me personally. The fact that my father had been most likely evil towards me, while being someone who had wanted me to become a priest as well, I and my mother dealt with primarily verbal abuse from my father of all sorts. Cursing, accusations, horrible things that caused great stress on us both. My mother had a previous marriage, her offspring were Christians as well. I was not, until the madness strickens me. The Revelations passage can be seen as uncanny in the mind of someone experiencing grandiose delusions, as I was, my father being the dragon, my mother having grace and sadness, as the moon underneath her provided her rock to stand upon. Cloaked in the sun, her light shone through the pressure of dealing with my father, the dragon. The 12 stars were children between her previous marriage and the children of the dragon, my father, that were alive under her marriage. I was possibly the son who would rule with an iron rod, the 13th star?

My parents were fresh in my mind while I prayed behind Walmart as was this passage. I asked for guidance as to how I was to proceed. A vision in my mind formed of two entities, one being God another being my mother. I attributed this vision to a message from God, although it was not a hallucination, it was a typical imagined vision obtained through prayer and focus. The message I received from the prayer was clear, and it came from my mother who had passed in 2013, over 9 years ago. “You are Lucifer, I should have had an abortion” my mother told me. My world shattered, I believed this message. I begged for forgiveness… but how could God forgive Lucifer? I knew the rules. Twenty years ago while in my previous manic phase, while in jail for running from the police after believing everything was free for me, I read this passage from the Bible while in solitary confinement:

Matthew 12:31, “Therefore I say to you, any sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven.”

Not only did I read it at the time, angry at my situation I cursed and blasphemed the Holy Spirit to my best of my abilities in jail. It was in my mind that I did such, out of anger of my situation. This rose freshly to my memory as I bargained with God for forgiveness. I didn’t want to be the Antichrist. I didn’t want to rule the world with an iron rod and go to hell. Was that even a reference to the Antichrist? I didn’t know, for the child was “caught up to God and his throne”. Is the child an emobodiment of Michael the archangel who was cast down to earth after the great battle? My confirmation name was Michael, named after the great archangel. Who am I? What am I? Did I really curse the holy spirit? Or does it count if it was only spoken in my mind? These things weighed on me, as I got back into my car behind Walmart I decided to make it home, forsaking the things I was supposed to buy there for my children. The antichrist has children?

I drove, but I don’t remember but I didn’t remember leaving the Walmart area at the time, I believed I was in the back of Walmart in an open field and quickly lost most of my consciousness as I drove. I found myself in a peaceful serenity fueled by a manic high. I could not see anymore, if anything but the amber haze of parched late summer tallgrass, which apparently was what I was driving through. I didn’t know anymore, but apparently I drove. At times I heard the rustling of weeds beneath my vehicle as I drove, with a lost awareness of my situation… I was in peace. I woke abruptly to water rushing in on me inside my car, I had heard a thud. I stood up on my drivers side door, as my car was tipped on my side at that point. I thought I was going to drown as the water was rushing in fast. I reached for the passenger side window control above me, as I would be able to swim out from there at least…

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Nice cliffhanger.

Do you want feedback, and if so, now, or wait until we see if you got your questions answered?

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Up to you! I am writing this as I go for the first time here. This may be copied and pasted to a re-edited version of my memoirs. Or not. I don’t know what I’m doing. I do know that I got tired of writing this morning so I ended there. Now I have some coffee and am contemplating things. Not sure what I want to do today. The car accident happened Sept 16th, so trying to write it down as its fresh.

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So glad that you are back and made it through.

I have been practicing Buddhism, not incongruent with Judeo-Christianity, so it has given me some sense of solace:

Instead of quoting passages from it, the main idea is to accept whatever effects which causes determined that one should go through, and accept the pain, even if that pain has been induced by countless generations of relations. This is why ‘original sin’ ithat we are born with is not really original to any one birthed, and all of us share to various degrees the guilt of karmic participation.

Living through the birth that pains life from the birth and death duration , does offer , the chance of becoming aware of the poignant lightness which can be achieved , even in the midst of pain.

The terrors and pain literally lifts while enduring it, a kind of ‘Sickness unto Death, becomes solvable, more permeated with the deepest effect of empathy imaginable, and as we look into that mirror, we don’t see ourselves any more, because it is not really ourselves any more but an Other, with whose have always been tied to.

And when this cogniscence has arrived, then it will become clear if the true motives had been realized, and see through our mirror of deception

Ww3 we have talked only briefly, but I have included my experience with mental illness, and I hope it will help you too in some way.