It's Art, Stupid

An opening polemic on mysticism

As I mentioned in my opening post, one topic I’d like to harp on is the rhetoric of new age mysticism and consciousness raising cults which assumed “schizophrenia” as being within their purview in the 1960s.

True story: last autumn my friend Logan and I were at a Friday night show at a small bar downtown. There were some punk bands performing, some local, some touring in. We made an acquaintance early in the evening—an intense, wild-eyed sort of guy in an impeccable outfit. Dressed to the nines. Beautiful, heavy chain around his neck. His nostrils flared with his breath, and he had the slight sheen of a constant sweat the entire evening.

He introduced himself with a ridiculous nickname which we were to refer to him as—for the sake of anonymity, let’s call him Pure Pete. Pete bought us drinks all evening, so we were all friendly—and within five minutes of talking about the girls in the room, he suddenly veered the conversation toward his Kundalini experience. He told us about the severe, ritualistic beatings he had endured, and his near death experience. He was in bed for months. He undertook this, he said, voluntarily so as to achieve spiritual ascension. He told us it was something that all the men in his family—a high European lineage—did. He then busted a huge-ass book out of his bag. I asked to see it, and when he wasn’t looking I took a photo.

Pure Pete was full of wild stories. And all the time we talked, his nostrils flared and his eyes darted about the room, taking events in at random. The conversation went that way too. He spilled his drink. He told us he was now the incarnation of a long-dead king—the old him had died in the ritual, and the new him was royalty. He rated the women in the bar, loudly. He bragged about how his guru was the most renowned there was. He wanted to find a crazier party. He was a spiritual soldier in a holy war which had been culminating secretly for centuries. He wished he had brought his Lambo, and could park it outfront, so that chicks would believe his stories and stop laughing at him. He communed with the dead.

After he knocked over a table, we bee-lined him out of the bar for a walk. Logan and I had to cool the tension when Pete started hitting on a pair of teenage girls out front for a smoke, giving them a way out of his brazen advances. It was after eleven and my friend and I were ready to call it a night, so we unleashed our mysterious acquaintance, starry-eyed and hungry, upon the unsuspecting downtown Ottawa night-scene.

I have no idea what was and was not true in Pure Pete’s story—apart from the obvious. If he truly did recover from violence inflicted by his “brothers,” then I more suspected that he was severely abused or punished for something—and was then told it was an occult initiation. And the fool believed it. But I have no idea—maybe it was just a car crash.

But even though I didn’t know what had happened to him, I knew what I exactly what I was looking at. Pete was low-key psychotic. Absolutely clinical. At first I thought it was coke—and hell, maybe it was that, too—but he was just operating at a higher frequency. He felt and acted like he was constantly in touch with something higher, and invisible.

Today, as Dr. Leiberman explains in Malady of the Mind, schizophrenia is understood primarily as a brain disease. The psychotic symptoms are caused directly by physical events in the brain—particularly the dis-regulation of dopamine and glutamate systems.

Too much dopamine leads to an breakdown of salience systems—basically, you stop blocking out sensory stimuli, and your attention is stretched to try and pay attention to and make meaning out of everything. That’s why Pete’s eyes were darting around, why he was always so “on.”

I’m sure that the brain science and genetics which Dr. Leiberman draws on is sound—but I do suspect that it can’t be the whole picture of the etiology of psychosis. Dr. Leiberman makes only disparaging remarks of the psychoanalytic approaches of preceding decades, which sought to understand the cause of psychosis in terms of family life, society, and impossible, contradictory demands or “double binds.”

I’ll have much to say about all that later, but for now, I’ll tell you that a great deal of vaguely-Eastern mysticism and occultism is centered around, basically, schizophrenia as part of a spiritual cycle of death and rebirth. And there is an entire market of books, like the one I was handed that night at the bar, discussing psychosis and schizophrenia in spiritual terms. The reviews on the Amazon page for this particular book, for instance, are full of stories like this:

When the student is ready, the master appears. I’ve been researching on Kundalini since 2019, after I had my awakening the year before, trying to understand what was happening. After months of digging my head in books and articles online, watching YouTube videos, none have been as reader-friendly as this book…

Another reviewer writes:

I know there is a chance of a full kundalini awakening while doing these practices. So I wanted to be prepared and educated on this permanent state because I know it can be intense. This book gave me all the info I needed should a full and permanent awakening occur in the nearby future.

Explaining to someone experiencing a blown-open sensory gate the neuroscience of why they’re finding meaning in everything does nothing to address all the meaning they’re finding everywhere. And they will need to address that meaning somehow—search for answers to all the things they’re realizing, sane or not. The “quest” for sense making has been initiated, and the older order is on shaky ground.

To get straight to the chase—I feel very blessed to have gotten into Marshall McLuhan’s work before I encountered any of these more, ahem, traditional approaches to the experience which modern medicine terms psychosis and schizophrenia. At this point, I interpret McLuhan’s larger body of work as something of an ark, or an inoculation against the spiritual and religious interpretations of such a personal experience.

McLuhan, again and again, framed it in terms of the development of artistic techniques. Perception, as he well knew, was not innate—it was learned. Trained, slowly, with diligence. Artists spend years learning to use their senses. Their eyes and ears and hands are tools to be maintained and sharpened with constant work.

While never directly referring to any of the terms by name, I now see the majority of his work as a means of explaining the psychotic or schizophrenic “consciousness raising” or “awakening” experience as a psychological phenomenon, requiring the same discipline of perceptual training as the artist. The senses aren’t for perceiving realms above or below or beyond the secular, material world—they’re for perceiving and surviving in that world itself!

This is the most clear in his early, largely ignored work.

The arts from Homer to the present day indeed form an ideal order, as Mr. Eliot has said, because they have been representations of the spiritual quests of the pagan rebirth rituals. “Rebirth” in pagan ritual amounts to retracing the stages of the decent of the soul in the hell of matter and chaos which is existence. As such, the pagan rituals are in reality representations of the process of abstraction, or the stages of human apprehension. From this point of view, may not the pagan rituals be valid as art and metaphysics in spite of their own assumptions, but impotent as religion? James Joyce seems to have been the first to grasp all of these relationships. — Marshall McLuhan, “Heart of Darkness”, 1953

This isn’t art therapy in the sense of expressing one’s self, or processing one’s trauma or the like. This is art in the sense of actively developing one’s artistic technique, or sensibility. Learning to see and hear and sculpt—just as children learn to understand the world, as explored in developmental psychology.

I hadn’t read the above quoted essay when I started reading McLuhan. I started with his popular, published books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. But the very technique of those books guides the reader toward this appreciation of what our senses are for, and what “spiritual awakening” really is. How we can think about sudden changes in our sensibility, in our senses making, not as spiritual but as psychological and artistic. Needing to be addressed not through spiritual studies, but studies of what our world is really made of.

I was luckier than most to have had McLuhan’s books at hand—and not books by a Kundalini guru or a quack mystic shrink or, heaven forbid, YouTube videos—when I started looking for answers as to what the hell was going on with my major psychotic break.

Because even when it really felt religious, a part of me knew that it wasn’t. It was just art, stupid.