Vegan Bookclub

This is Nota's review of the book "A Philosophy of Madness: The Experience of Psychotic Thinking" by Wouter Kusters 🌱📖😁

#philosophy #mentalhealth #thinking

This is a work of philosophical thought in line with mad pride and patient liberation movements. These social movements are obscure and not much has come out of them compared to let’s say feminism. They try to destigmatize madness and get rid of harmful hospitalizations, confinements and forcefully injected drugs. These movements seek to show that unlike how psychiatry paints other people that they are still in control of themselves and know more about what is happening to them than is commonly thought, what they try to express does have a certain logic, it is humane to hear them out and let them speak. People who define themselves as mad in this movement don’t see themselves as diagnosable nor suffering with ailments, but simply as people who have a different mode of existence, they reside in the emotional and reflective extremes. The book goes into those states in detail, capturing them from every angle and showing every method how to get to them whether through philosophy, religion, drugs or mysticism, perceiving or thinking.

The book goes over how people express the same ideas and yet because of the way they present themselves some get locked up in wards and others get to be philosopher kings, queens. Our society unfairly judges and stigmatizes certain behaviors, depending on the environment they can get demonized or worshiped as sacred. The work goes through literature, history and references a ton of philosophers, pop culture.

Insanity is an eternity, a singular point encompassing everything, the more dimensions it holds the more real it feels, sight, hearing, touch, taste, quantity, duality- expansion and contraction at the same time all work towards creating a more concrete image that escapes and repeats itself at any given moment beyond time and all limits. It catches you at a special moment and then your world is altered forever, it makes you see your own death at all times, besides the fear it brings is also ecstatic, curious, fascinating, and can be blissful or horrific depending on the person. In other words it is the mind trying to capture the impossible that can lead to lapses in judgment as is empathized in our culture, but this book argues that it can also lead to brilliant insights like any other tool. Besides we all try to capture something impossible as we all are mortal and our lifespans are limited, the concepts and beliefs we hold don’t make as much sense as we would like to believe, our language has flaws and limits just like all of our communication methods. The impossible of insanity is different as it seeks experiences containing the totality of everything, to live in a world where communication does make sense, where just by thinking actions happen, everything is abundant in meaning and happens for a reason, for the mad person to see. It is not a better, more efficient method, it is simply different and it makes these people experience life differently. Insanity blends thoughts and physical objects together, mad people can recognize whether what they see is real or not for the objects created by the mind are different in nature, they have more control over these objects than is recognized.

I don’t think I am capturing all the elements and everything that goes into it, but we have this 800 page book for that which does just that as much as it is able to. If you want to truly understand it you cannot condense it into a definition, it is something that has to be conceptualized. It went through so much and made so many things about creativity, mysticism and life click for me, it connects so much and now I see how certain creators I love wrote their fictional universes because they used so many similar concepts and just highlighted them in different ways.

While reading this book I randomly met a person who knew all about shamanism, they weren’t from here and they after the talk were about to get to another city. That experience was so surreal and I think induced some level of mania to me because I don’t really get to talk to fellow writers that have a similar style of writing that is very emotionally charged. I don’t know their name or how to meet them again at all, and it seems that they are constantly trying to get away from society in all sorts of ways so it is very unlikely that I will meet them again. But since I am weird I suppose I fell in love on some level and yet separated this connection at the first sign when I felt that they wanted to leave, I probably misinterpreted it. I feel quite ridiculous. I am not sure how our lives would have been compatible at all on a ton of levels if we did have a method of meeting, but I had someone to talk to about art in person which never happened to me yet. They had quite ridiculous plans, I loved them all.

Another thing that happened is that while I just food poisoned myself so now this is day 2 of writing it since I just slept it off. I am not quite sure what mad people mean when they say they died which must mean I haven’t died. I had a lot of dreams where I died throughout my life, but I am pretty sure it is not the same. I wonder how you cope seeing your death all the time, I suppose it’s the same, just a bit of a different experience, if you take away something that something gets added elsewhere. Two days ago I walked barefoot through a large part of the town so they hurt now and I am now not sure if I will go to read about the philosophies of eastern religions now. There are so many books and so many perspectives that tackle the nature of reality, our journeys are all the same and lead to the same place even though they look so different. We might try to uphold our morals and have a sense of justice, but when you start thinking from such a wide and all encompassing perspective we all just are chest pieces on a board and without the opposition- evil traits there wouldn’t be any good traits.

Everything is just how it is and I am not sure what to make of it or if there’s anything that you are supposed to make of it. Nothing exists yet you are supposed to act like it exists. Anyways, let's hope my review sounds like it was made by an intelligent and well off writer and that I attract energies which make me sound like a person who gets supported by their environment and communities. In the end the best places on earth might just be the same as the worst places if you shift your perspective and thinking a bit, but let’s pretend like it matters to me and like I will achieve things I want for no reason at all. I hope reading works like this attracts the beauty of uncertainty whether it is worth experiencing it or not, I will have to keep experiencing something so it might as well be this… for now anyways.

I am not sure how to finish this review or how to structure it at all, it is very uncertain just how this whole book is. It is constantly getting at some point just how life itself gets at some point, but not really and it all just repeats and I suppose you can read this review again just to feel the high and the low points of it. At some point you will have to stop or existence itself will make you stop, but maybe it already is part of the eternities that some people are able to witness. Yes this review is part of eternity and it comprehends and captures it in its own way, it is just another cycle, you see this review everywhere and all the time, it is just that universal and yet personal because this time it is me who wrote it. The book makes me feel like I can actually put a lot more stuff to words now and write whatever I had in mind out without feeling as much pressure anymore, and whether that is true or not I suppose doesn’t matter. I will pretend that making sentences like this is totally socially acceptable if you review a book like this, this review has intrigued you and now you are reading the book because you have no choice anymore. There are no other options but to read this book because it is everywhere and you can see it everywhere, there is no escaping it. It is the maps, the streets, the cities, everyday objects and paintings, it is made of every substance, it is the black light and the white dark.

#spiral #repetition #everything #nothing #all #oneness #duality #writer #writing #affirmations #shaman #miracle