Schizophrenia & the Hero's Journey

Joseph Campbell on the Mythological Significance of the Psychotic Experience

Hey Folks!

I’m on a new schizophrenia kick.

As some of you know, I am a diagnosed schizophrenic who has been living medication-free for almost 15 years. Given that I’m living proof that schizophrenia is not an incurable disease, I’ve decided that I really should share some of what I know about healing from psychotic illness.

If you’d like to see me announce my intention to (eventually) write a book about schizophrenia and shamanism, I refer you here:

As for what you are about to read, it is an essay by the great Joseph Campbell, who combined the depth psychology developed by Carl Jung with the structuralism of Claude Levi-Strauss. It is taken from a book called Myths To Live By, a wonderful collection of essays published in 1971.

In it, Campbell argues that the psychotic experience of the schizophrenic closely mirrors the structure of what he called “the mono-myth”, the archetypal hero myth that he identified in The Hero With A Thousand Faces, the book that inspired George Lucas to create Star Wars.

When I first encountered this essay more than 10 years ago, I was blown away. My own experience made much more sense to me than it had previously.

Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that psychosis is very much akin to a descent into the underworld… and this is likely how a shamanic society would have regarded it.

Psychosis certainly is a form of madness, but a psychotic episode is not proof of an incurable disease called schizophrenia. That’s simply a misinterpretation of the psychotic experience. Psychosis is a temporary non-ordinary state of consciousness which can be brought on by a number of internal and external causes, and may be caused by incongruence between aspects of the psyche. The word schizophrenia means “split mind”, and this is an apt descriptor for the psychotic state, which can feel like one’s mind is at war with itself. But it is not true that it is a “permanent disability” foreshadowing lifelong suffering. That’s a modern myth perpetuated by psychiatrists blaming their victims for failing to respond positively to their abuse.

Those who have been through psychosis and emerged from the other side know something valuable. I hope that one day the world will start listening to people who have healed from schizophrenia. We know a thing or two about madness, and the fact is that psychiatrists don’t know how to cure schizophrenia. Would it really fucking kill people to put aside their prejudices long enough to listen to what people like yours truly have to say?

Psychiatrists claim schizophrenia is incurable, but it’s not. What that they’re really saying is that they don’t know how to cure it. To this day, they’d rather fry people’s brains with electric shocks than entertain the possibility that their assumptions about mental illness might be mistaken.

Anyway, I hope someone out there finds this essay as helpful as I did.

for the Wild,

Crow Qu’appelle

Schizophrenia—the Inward Journey

by Joseph Campbell, excerpted from Myths To Live By (1970)

In the spring of 1968, I was invited to deliver a series of talks on schizophrenia at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur, California. I had lectured there the year before on mythology; and apparently Mr. Michael Murphy, the imaginative young director of that highly interesting enterprise, thought there should be a connection of some kind. However, since I knew next to nothing about schizophrenia, upon receiving his letter, I telephoned him.

“Mike, I don’t know a thing about schizophrenia,” I said. “How would it be if I lectured on Joyce?”

“Why, fine!” he answered. “But I’d like to hear you on schizophrenia, just the same. Let’s set up a dual talk in San Francisco: you and John Perry, on mythology and schizophrenia. How’s that?”

Well, I didn’t then know Dr. Perry; but in my youth, I had had the very great experience of kissing the Blarney Stone—which, I can tell you, is worth a dozen Ph.D. degrees. So I thought, “Okay! Why not?” And besides, I had such confidence in Mike Murphy that I was pretty sure he had something interesting in mind.

A few weeks later, and sure enough, there came in the mail an envelope from John Weir Perry, M.D., of San Francisco, containing the reprint of a paper on schizophrenia that he had published in 1962 in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. To my considerable amazement, I learned upon reading it that the imagery of schizophrenic fantasy perfectly matches that of the mythological hero journey, which I had outlined and elucidated back in 1949 in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

My own work had been based on a comparative study of the mythologies of mankind, with only here and there passing references to the phenomenology of dreams, hysteria, mystic visions, and the like. Mainly, it was an organization of themes and motifs common to all mythologies; and I had no idea, in bringing these together, of the extent to which they would correspond to the fantasies of madness. According to my thinking, they were the universal, archetypal, psychologically based symbolic themes and motifs of all traditional mythologies; and now, from this paper of Dr. Perry, I was learning that the same symbolic figures arise spontaneously from the broken-off, tortured state of mind of modern individuals suffering from a complete schizophrenic breakdown: the condition of one who has lost touch with the life and thought of his community and is compulsively fantasizing out of his own completely cut-off base.

Very briefly: The usual pattern is, first, a break away or departure from the local social order and context; next, a long, deep retreat inward and backward—backward, as it were, in time, and inward, deep into the psyche; a chaotic series of encounters there, darkly terrifying experiences, and presently (if the victim is fortunate) encounters of a centering kind, fulfilling, harmonizing, and giving new courage; and then finally, in such fortunate cases, a return journey of rebirth to life. That is the universal formula also of the mythological hero journey, which I, in my own published work, had described as: 1) separation, 2) initiation, and 3) return.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won. The hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow men.

That is the pattern of the myth, and that is the pattern of these fantasies of the psyche.

Now it was Dr. Perry’s thesis in his paper that in certain cases, the best thing is to let the schizophrenic process run its course—not to abort the psychosis by administering shock treatments and the like, but, on the contrary, to help the process of disintegration and reintegration along. However, if a doctor is to be helpful in this way, he has to understand the image language of mythology. He has to understand what the fragmentary signs and signals signify that his patient, totally out of touch with rationally oriented manners of thought and communication, is trying to bring forth in order to establish some kind of contact. Interpreted from this point of view, a schizophrenic breakdown is an inward and backward journey to recover something missed or lost, and to restore, thereby, a vital balance. So let the voyager go. He has tipped over and is sinking, perhaps drowning; yet, as in the old legend of Gilgamesh and his long, deep dive to the bottom of the cosmic sea to pluck the watercress of immortality, there is the one green value of his life down there. Don’t cut him off from it: help him through.

Well, I can tell you, it was a wonderful trip I had to California. The conversations with Dr. Perry and the talk we delivered together opened a whole new prospect for me. The experience started me thinking more and more about the possible import to people in trouble today of these mythic materials on which I have been working in a more or less academic, scholarly, personally enthusiastic way all these years, without any precise knowledge of the techniques by which they might be applied to the needs of others.

Dr. Perry and Mr. Murphy introduced me to a paper on "Shamans and Acute Schizophrenia" by Dr. Julian Silverman of the National Institute of Mental Health, which had appeared in 1967 in the American Anthropologist, and there again I found something of the greatest interest and of immediate relevance to my studies and thinking. In my own writings, I had already pointed out that among primitive hunting peoples, it is largely from the psychological experiences of shamans that the mythic imagery and rituals of their ceremonial life derive. The shaman is a person (either male or female) who, in early adolescence, underwent a severe psychological crisis, such as today would be called a psychosis. Normally, the child's apprehensive family sends for an elder shaman to bring the youngster out of it, and by appropriate measures, songs, and exercises, this experienced practitioner succeeds. As Dr. Silverman remarks and demonstrates in his paper, “In primitive cultures in which such a unique life crisis resolution is tolerated, the abnormal experience (shamanism) is typically beneficial to the individual, cognitively and affectively; he is regarded as one with expanded consciousness.” Whereas, on the contrary, in such a rationally ordered culture as our own—or, to phrase the proposition again in Dr. Silverman’s words, “in a culture that does not provide referential guides for comprehending this kind of crisis experience, the individual (schizophrenic) typically undergoes an intensification of his suffering over and above his original anxieties.”

Now let me describe to you the case of an Eskimo shaman who was interviewed in the early 1920s by the great Danish scholar and explorer Knud Rasmussen. Rasmussen was a man of the broadest human sympathy and understanding, who was able to talk in a marvelous way, man to man, with the characters he encountered all the way across the Arctic lands of North America in the course of the Fifth Danish Thule Expedition, which from 1921 to 1924 trekked the whole long stretch from Greenland to Alaska.

Igjugarjuk was a Caribou Eskimo shaman of a tribe inhabiting the North Canadian tundras. When young, he had been visited constantly by dreams that he could not interpret. Strange unknown beings came and spoke to him; and when he woke, he remembered all so vividly that he could describe to his friends and family exactly what he had seen. The family, disturbed but knowing what was happening, sent for an old shaman named Peqanaogq, who, on diagnosing the case, placed the youngster on a sledge just large enough for him to sit on, and in the depth of winter—the absolutely dark and freezing Arctic winter night—dragged him far out onto a lonely Arctic waste and built for him there a tiny snow hut with barely room for him to sit cross-legged. He was not allowed to set foot on the snow but was lifted from the sledge into the hut and there set down on a piece of skin just large enough to contain him. No food or drink was left with him. He was instructed to think only of the Great Spirit, who would presently appear, and was left there alone for thirty days. After five days, the elder returned with a drink of lukewarm water, and after another fifteen, with a second drink and with a bit of meat. But that was all. The cold and the fasting were so severe that, as Igjugarjuk told Rasmussen, “sometimes I died a little.” And during all that time he was thinking, thinking, thinking of the Great Spirit until, toward the end of the ordeal, a helping spirit did in fact arrive in the form of a woman who seemed to hover in the air above him. He never saw her again, but she became his helping spirit. The elder shaman then brought him home, where he was required to diet and fast for another five months; and, as he told his Danish guest, such fasts, often repeated, are the best means of attaining knowledge of hidden things. “The only true wisdom,” Igjugarjuk said, “lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind of a man to all that is hidden to others.”

Another powerful shaman, whom Dr. Rasmussen met in Nome, Alaska, told him of a similar venture into the silence. But this old fellow, Najagneq by name, had fallen upon bad times in relation to the people of his village. For shamans, you must know, live in a rather perilous position. When things go wrong, people tend to blame the local shaman. They imagine he is working magic. And this old man, to protect himself, had invented a number of trick devices and mythological spooks to frighten his neighbors off and keep them safely at bay.

Dr. Rasmussen, recognizing that most of Najagneq’s spirits were outright frauds of this kind, one day asked him if there were any in whom he himself believed; to which he replied:

“Yes, a power that we call Sila, one that cannot be explained in so many words: a very strong spirit, the upholder of the universe, of the weather, in fact, of all life on earth—so mighty that his speech to man comes not through ordinary words, but through storms, snowfall, rain showers, the tempests of the sea, all the forces that man fears, or through sunshine, calm seas, or small, innocent, playing children who understand nothing. When times are good, Sila has nothing to say to mankind. He has disappeared into his infinite nothingness and remains away as long as people do not abuse life but have respect for their daily food. No one has ever seen Sila. His place of sojourn is so mysterious that he is with us and infinitely far away at the same time.”

And what does Sila say?

“The inhabitant or soul of the universe,” Najagneq said, “is never seen; its voice alone is heard. All we know is that it has a gentle voice, like a woman, a voice so fine and gentle that even children cannot become afraid. And what it says is: Sila ersinarsinivdluge, ‘Be not afraid of the universe.’”

Now these were very simple men—at least in our terms of culture, learning, and civilization. Yet their wisdom, drawn from their own most inward depths, corresponds in essence to what we have heard and learned from the most respected mystics. There is a deep and general human wisdom here, of which we do not often come to know in our usual ways of active rational thinking.

In his article on shamanism, Dr. Silverman had distinguished two very different types of schizophrenia. One he calls “essential schizophrenia”; the other, “paranoid schizophrenia”; and it is in essential schizophrenia alone that analogies appear with what I have termed “the shaman crisis.” In essential schizophrenia, the characteristic pattern is of withdrawal from the impacts of experience in the outside world. There is a narrowing of concern and focus. The object world falls back and away, and invasions from the unconscious overtake and overwhelm one. In “paranoid schizophrenia,” on the other hand, the person remains alert and extremely sensitive to the world and its events, interpreting all, however, in terms of his own projected fantasies, fears, and terrors, and with a sense of being in danger from assaults. The assaults, actually, are from within, but he projects them outward, imagining that the world is everywhere on watch against him. This, states Dr. Silverman, is not the type of schizophrenia that leads to the sorts of inward experience that are analogous to those of shamanism. “It is as if the paranoid schizophrenic,” he explains, “unable to comprehend or tolerate the stark terrors of his inner world, prematurely directs his attention to the outside world. In this type of abortive crisis solution, the inner chaos is not, so to speak, worked through, or is not capable of being worked through.” The lunatic victim is at large, so to say, in the field of his own projected unconscious.

The opposite type of psychotic patient, on the other hand, a pitiful thing to behold, has dropped into a snake-pit deep within. His whole attention, his whole being, is down there, engaged in a life-and-death battle with the terrible apparitions of unmastered psychological energies—which, it would appear, is exactly what the potential shaman also is doing in the period of his visionary journey. And so, we have next to ask what the difference is between the predicament of the “essential schizophrenic” and that of the trance-prone shaman: to which the answer is simply that the primitive shaman does not reject the local social order and its forms; that, in fact, it is actually by virtue of those forms that he is brought back to rational consciousness. And when he has returned, furthermore, it is generally found that his inward personal experiences reconfirm, refresh, and reinforce the inherited local forms; for his personal dream-symbology is at one with the symbology of his culture. Whereas, in contrast, in the case of a modern psychotic patient, there is a radical break-off and no effective association at all with the symbol system of his culture. The established symbol system here provides no help at all to the poor lost schizophrenic, terrified by the figments of his own imagination, to which he is a total stranger; whereas, in the case of the primitive shaman, there is between his outward life and his inward a fundamental accord.

Well, as I have said and you may imagine, that was an extremely interesting trip for me to California; and when I returned to New York (it was all happening as though some guiding spirit were setting everything up for me), a leading psychiatrist in our own tortured city, Dr. Mortimer Ostow, invited me to be discussant to a paper that he was about to read before a meeting of The Society for Adolescent Psychiatry. This turned out to be a study of certain common characteristics that Dr. Ostow had remarked, which seemed to relate, as of one order, the “mechanisms” (as Dr. Ostow termed them) of schizophrenia, mysticism, the LSD experience, and the “antinomianism” of contemporary youth: those aggressively antisocial attitudes that have become so prominent in the behavior and accomplishments of a significant number of campus adolescents and their faculty advisers of the present hour.

And this invitation, too, was a major experience for me, opening my own thinking to another critical field into which my mythic studies might play—one, moreover, with which I was already in personal touch in my role as a college professor.

What I learned now was that the LSD retreat and inward plunge can be compared to essential schizophrenia, and the antinomianism of contemporary youth to paranoid schizophrenia. The sense of threat from every quarter of what is known as the Establishment—which is to say, of modern civilization—is not altogether a put-on or an act for many of these young folk, but an actual condition of the soul. The break-off is real, and what is being bombed and blown up outside are actual symbols of interior fears. Moreover, many are unable even to communicate, every thought being so charged for them with feeling that in rational speech there is no name for it. An astonishing number cannot bring forth even a simple declarative sentence, but, interrupting every attempted phrase with the irrelevant syllable “like,” they are reduced to mute signs and feeling-loaded silences, pleading for appreciation. One feels, sometimes, in dealing with them, that one is indeed in a lunatic asylum without walls. And the indicated cure for the ills that they are shouting about is not sociological at all (as our news media and many of our politicians claim) but psychiatric.

The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is an intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are, in fact, the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical one? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that, there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are, in many instances, identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning. Can he be saved? If a line is thrown to him, will he grab it?

Let us first ask about the waters into which he has descended. They are the same, we have said, as those of the mystical experience. What, then, is their character? What are their properties? And what does it take to swim?

They are the waters of the universal archetypes of mythology. All my life, as a student of mythologies, I have been working with these archetypes, and I can tell you, they do exist and are the same all over the world. In the various traditions, they are variously represented; as, for instance, in a Buddhist temple, medieval cathedral, Sumerian ziggurat, or Mayan pyramid. The images of divinities will vary in various parts of the world according to the local flora, fauna, geography, racial features, etc. The myths and rites will be given different interpretations, different rational applications, different social customs to validate and enforce. And yet the archetypal, essential forms and ideas are the same—often stunningly so. And so what, then, are they? What do they represent?

The psychologist who has best dealt with these, best described and best interpreted them, is Carl G. Jung, who terms them “archetypes of the collective unconscious,” as pertaining to those structures of the psyche that are not the products of merely individual experience but are common to all mankind. In his view, the basal depth or layer of the psyche is an expression of the instinct system of our species, grounded in the human body, its nervous system, and wonderful brain. All animals act instinctively. They act also, of course, in ways that have to be learned, and in relation to circumstance; yet every species differently, according to its “nature.” Watch a cat enter a living room, and then, for example, a dog. Each is moved by impulses peculiar to its species, and these, finally, are the ultimate shapers of its life. And so man too is governed and determined. He has both an inherited biology and a personal biography, the “archetypes of the unconscious” being expressions of the first. The repressed personal memories, on the other hand, of the shocks, frustrations, fears, etc., of infancy, to which the Freudian school gives such attention, Jung distinguishes from that other and calls the “personal unconscious.” As the first is biological and common to the species, so this second is biographical, socially determined, and specific to each separate life. Most of our dreams and daily difficulties will derive, of course, from the latter; but in a schizophrenic plunge, one descends to the “collective,” and the imagery there experienced is largely of the order of the archetypes of myth.

Now with respect to the power of instinct: I recall once having seen one of those beautiful Disney nature films, of a sea turtle laying her eggs in the sand, some thirty feet or so from the water. A number of days later, out of the sand, there came a little multitude of tiny just-born turtles, each about as big as a nickel; and without an instant’s hesitation, they all started for the sea. No hunting around. No trial-and-error. No asking, “Now what would be a reasonable place for me to head for first?” Not a single one of those little things went the wrong way, fumbling first into the bushes, and there saying, “Oh!” and turning around, thinking, “I’m made for something better than this!” No, indeed! They went directly as their mother must have known they all would go: mother turtle, or Mother Nature. A flock of seagulls, meanwhile, having screamed the news to each other, came zooming like dive bombers down on those little nickels that were making for the water. The turtles knew perfectly well that that was where they had to get, and they were going as fast as their very little legs could push them: the legs, by the way, already knowing just how to push. No training or experimenting had been necessary. The legs knew what to do, and the little eyes knew that what they were seeing out in front of them was where they were going. The whole system was in perfect operation, with the whole fleet of tiny tanks heading clumsily, yet as fast as they could, for the sea: and then... Well now, one surely would have thought that for such little things those great big waves might have seemed threatening. But no! They went right on into the water and already knew how to swim. And as soon as they were there, of course, the fish began coming at them. Life is tough!

When people talk of going back to nature, do they really know what they are asking for?

There is another impressive example of the infallible rule of instinct; again of some tiny things just born: a brood of chicks just hatched, some even with fragments of their eggshells still adhering to their tails. If a hawk flies over their coop, they scurry to shelter; if a pigeon, they do not. Where did they learn the difference? Who or what, shall we say, is deciding when such determinations are made? Experimenters have fashioned imitation hawks of wood and have drawn these across such coops on a wire. The chicks all scurry to shelter; but if the same models are drawn backward, they do not.

Both the readiness to respond to specific triggering stimuli and the ensuing patterns of appropriate action are in all such cases inherited with the physiology of the species. Known as “innate releasing mechanisms” (IRMs), they are constitutional to the central nervous system. And there are such mechanisms in the physical make-up of the species Homo sapiens as well.

This, then, is what is meant by instinct. And if you should still have to be shown, if you are from Missouri and still doubtful of the governing force and wisdom of sheer instinct, just read in any biology book about the life cycles of parasites. Read, for example, about the hydrophobia parasite, and you will ask yourself whether a human being is worthy to play host to such a prodigy. It knows exactly what to do, where to go, what to attack in the human nervous system, how to get there, and just when to get there, to convert what we have been taught to believe is the highest creation of God’s hand into its abject slave, rabid to bite and so to communicate the virus to the bloodstream of the next victim, whence it will proceed again to the salivary glands for the next event.

Now in every human being, there is a built-in human instinct system, without which we should not even come to birth. But each of us has also been educated to a specific local culture system. The peculiar thing about man, which distinguishes us from all other beasts of the kingdom, is that we are born, as already remarked (supra, p. 45), twelve years too soon. No mother would wish it to be otherwise; but so it is, and that is our problem. The newly born has the wit neither of a newly hatched turtle, the size of a nickel, nor of a chick with a piece of eggshell still adhering to its tail. Absolutely unable to fend for itself, the infant Homo sapiens is committed for twelve years to a season of dependency on parents or parent substitutes; and it is during these twelve dependent years that we are turned into human beings. We learn to walk as people walk, as well as to speak, think, and cogitate in terms of the local vocabulary. We are taught to respond to certain signals positively, to others negatively or with fear; and most of these signals taught are not of the natural, but of some local social order. They are socially specific. Yet the impulses that they activate and control are of nature, biology, and instinct. Every mythology is an organization, consequently, of culturally conditioned releasing signs, the natural and the cultural strains in them being so intimately fused that to distinguish one from the other is in many cases all but impossible. And such culturally determined signals motivate the culturally imprinted IRMs of the human nervous system, as the sign stimuli of nature do the natural reflexes of a beast.

A functioning mythological symbol I have defined as “an energy-evoking and -directing sign.” Dr. Perry has termed such signals “affect images.” Their messages are addressed not to the brain, to be interpreted there and passed on, but directly to the nerves, the glands, the blood, and the sympathetic nervous system. Yet they pass through the brain, and the educated brain may interfere, misinterpret, and so short-circuit the messages. When that occurs, the signs no longer function as they should. The inherited mythology is garbled, and its guiding value lost or misconstrued. Or, what is worse, one may have been brought up to respond to a set of signals not present in the general environment; as is frequently the case, for example, with children raised in the circles of certain special sects, not participating in—and even despising or resenting—the culture forms of the rest of the civilization. Such a person will never quite feel at home in the larger social field, but always uneasy and even slightly paranoid. Nothing touches him as it should, means to him what it should, or moves him as it moves others. He is compelled to retreat for his satisfactions back to the restricted and accordingly restricting context of the sect, family, commune, or reservation to which he was attuned. He is disoriented, and even dangerous, in the larger field.

And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of ensuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such as will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world in which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one’s heirs one’s own paranoia. More normally, rational parents will wish to have produced socially as well as physically healthy offspring, well enough attuned to the system of sentiments of the culture into which they are growing to be able to appraise its values rationally and align themselves constructively with its progressive, decent, life-fostering, and fructifying elements.

And so we have this critical problem, as I say, this critical problem as human beings, of seeing to it that the mythology—the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs—that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is to be theirs for life, and not to some period of man already past, some piously desiderated future, or—what is worst of all—some querulous, freakish sect or momentary fad. And I call this problem critical because, when it is badly resolved, the result for the miseducated individual is what is known, in mythological terms, as a Waste Land situation. The world does not talk to him; he does not talk to the world. When that is the case, there is a cut-off, the individual is thrown back on himself, and he is in prime shape for that psychotic break-away that will turn him into either an essential schizophrenic in a padded cell, or a paranoid screaming slogans at large, in a bughouse without walls.

Let me now, therefore, before proceeding to an account of the general course or history of such a break-off—the inward journey (let us call it) of descent and return—just say one more word about the functions normally served by a properly operating mythology. They are, in my judgment, four.

The first is what I have called the mystical function: to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of being is the mystery of his own deep being as well. That is what the old Alaskan medicine man heard when Sila, the soul of the universe, said to him, “Be not afraid.” For, as beheld by our temporal eyes, nature, as we have seen, is tough. It is terrible, terrific, monstrous. It is the kind of thing that makes reasonable, existentialist Frenchmen call it “absurd!” (The wonderful thing about the French is that they have been so imprinted by Descartes that anything that cannot be parsed to Cartesian coordinates must be absurd. Who or what, however, is absurd, we may ask, when judgments of that kind are set forth as philosophy?)

The second function of a living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences, and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed. In our own day, of course, the world pictures of all the major religions are at least two thousand years out of date, and in that fact alone there is ground enough for a very serious break-off. If, in a period like our own, of the greatest religious fervor and quest, you would wonder why the churches are losing their congregations, one large part of the answer surely is right here. They are inviting their flocks to enter and to find peace in a browsing ground that never was, never will be, and in any case is surely not that of any corner of the world today. Such a mythological offering is a sure pill for at least a mild schizophrenia.

The third function of a living mythology is to validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live. And the fourth is to guide him, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life.

Let us review, briefly, the sequence of these stages.

The first is, of course, that of the child, dependent for those twelve years, both physically and psychologically, on the guidance and protection of its family. As I have already remarked in Chapter III, the most obvious biological analogy is to be found among the marsupials: kangaroos, opossums, wallabies, etc. Since these are not placental animals, the fetus cannot remain in the womb after the food provision (the yolk) of the egg has been absorbed and the little things have to be born, therefore, long before they are ready for life. The infant kangaroo is born after only three weeks of gestation, but already has strong front legs, and these know exactly what to do. The tiny creature—by instinct, again please observe!—crawls up its mother’s belly to her pouch, climbs in there, attaches itself to a nipple that swells (instinctively) in its mouth, so that it cannot get loose, and there, until ready to hop forth, remains in a second womb: a “womb with a view.”

An exactly comparable biological function is served in our own species by a mythology, which is a no less indispensable biological organ, no less a nature product, though apparently something else. Like the nest of a bird, a mythology is fashioned of material drawn from the local environment, apparently altogether consciously, but according to an architecture unconsciously dictated from within. And it simply does not matter whether its comforting, fostering, guiding images would be appropriate for an adult. It is not intended for adults. Its first function is to foster an unready psyche to maturity, preparing it to face its world. The proper question to ask, therefore, is whether it is training up a character fit to live in this world as it is, or only in some Heaven or imagined social field. The next function, accordingly, must be to help the ready youth step out and away, to leave the myth, the second womb, and to become, as they say in the Orient, “twice born,” a competent adult functioning rationally in his present world, who has left his childhood season behind.

And now, to say just one more nasty thing about our religious institutions: what they require and expect is that one should not leave the womb that they provide. It is as though young kangaroos should be required to remain in their mother’s pouch. And we all know what happened in the sixteenth century as a result: the whole pouch of Mother Church went to pieces, and not all the king’s horses or all the king’s men have been able to put it together again. So it is now destroyed, and we have no adequate pouch anymore for even our littlest kangaroos. We do, however, have “reading, ’riting, and ’rithmetic” as a sort of plastic substitute. And if you are going on for your Ph.D., you may be in that inorganic incubator until you are forty-five. I have noticed (haven’t you?) on television that when professors are asked questions they usually hum and haw and mmmm and uh, until you have to ask yourself whether it is some kind of interior crisis they are experiencing, or just a loss of words for exquisite thoughts; whereas when a professional baseball or football player is asked even a pretty complicated question, he can usually answer with ease and grace. He graduated from the womb when he was nineteen or so and the best player in the sandlot. But this other poor chap was held sitting under a canopy of professors until well into middle age, and even though he must now have acquired that degree, it came too late for him ever to begin developing what used to be called self-confidence. He has the imprint of that professorial canopy in his IRMs forever and is still hoping that no one is going to be giving him bad marks for his answer.

Next, no sooner have you learned your adult job and gained a place for yourself in this society of ours, than you begin to feel the creak of age, retirement is in prospect, and remarkably soon it arrives with its Medicare, old-age pensions, and all. You have now a disengaged psyche on your hands, your own; a load of what Jung termed “disposable libido.” What to do with it? The classical period has arrived of the late-middle-age nervous breakdown, divorce, alcoholic debacle, and so forth: when the light of your life has descended, unprepared, into an unprepared unconscious, and you there drown. It would have been a very much better situation if, during your childhood years, you had been given a sound imprinting of childhood myths, so that when the time came for this backward, downward plunge the scenery down there would have been a bit more familiar. At least for some of the monsters encountered you would have been given names and perhaps even weapons: for it is simply a fact, and a very important one, that the images of mythology that in childhood are interpreted as references to external supernaturals, actually are symbols of the structuring powers (or, as Jung called them, archetypes) of the unconscious. And it will be to these and the natural forces they represent—the forces and voices within you of the soul (Sila) of the universe—that you will return when you take that plunge, which is to befall you one day, sure as death.

And so, with that challenge before us, let us try to become acquainted with some of the tides and undertows of our inward sea. Let me tell you something of what I have recently heard about the wonders of the inward schizophrenic plunge.

The first experience is of a sense of splitting. The person sees the world going in two: one part of it moving away; himself in the other part. This is the beginning of the regressus, the crack-off and backward flow. He may see himself, for a time, in two roles. One is the role of the clown, the ghost, the witch, the queer one, the outsider. That is the outer role that he plays, making little of himself as the fool, a joke, the one kicked around, the patsy. Inside, however, he is the savior, and he knows it. He is the hero chosen for a destiny. Recently one such savior did me the honor of paying me three visits: a tall, beautiful young man with the beard and gentle eyes and manner of a Christ; LSD was his sacrament—LSD and sex. “I have seen my Father,” he told me on the second occasion. “He is old now and has told me just to wait. I shall know when the time comes for me to take over.”

The second stage has been described in many clinical accounts. It is of a terrific drop-off and regression, backward in time and biologically as well. Falling back into his own past, the psychotic becomes an infant, a fetus in the womb. One has the frightening experience of slipping back to animal consciousness, into animal forms, sub-animal forms, even plantlike. I think of the legend of Daphne, the nymph who was turned into a laurel tree. Such an image, read in psychological terms, would be the image of a psychosis. Approached in love by the god Apollo, the virgin was terrified, cried for help to her father, the river-god Peneus, and he turned her into a tree.

“Show me the face you had before your father and mother were born!” We have had occasion before to refer to this meditation theme of the Japanese Zen masters. In the course of a schizophrenic retreat, the psychotic too may come to know the exaltation of a union with the universe, transcending personal bounds: the “oceanic feeling,” Freud called it. Feelings arise then, too, of a new knowledge. Things that before had been mysterious are now fully understood. Ineffable realizations are experienced; and in fact, as we read about them, we can only be amazed. I have now read dozens of accounts; and they correspond, often amazingly, to the insights of the mystics and to the images of Hindu, Buddhist, Egyptian, and classical myth.

For example, a person who has never believed in, or even heard of, reincarnation will begin to feel that he has lived forever; that he has lived through many lifetimes, yet was never born and will never die. It is as though he had come to know himself as that Self (atman) of which we read in the Bhagavad Gita: “Never is it born, never does it die. . . . Unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval, it is not slain when the body is slain.” The patient (let us now call him that) has united what remains of his consciousness with the consciousness of all things, the rocks, the trees, the whole world of nature, out of which we all have come. He is in accord with that which has indeed existed forever: as we all are, actually, at root, and therein at peace—once again, as stated in the Gita: “When one completely withdraws the senses from their objects, like a tortoise drawing in its limbs, then is one’s wisdom firmly fixed. In that serenity is surcease of all sorrow.”

In short, my friends, what I find that I am saying is that our schizophrenic patient is actually experiencing inadvertently that same beatific ocean deep which the yogi and saint are ever striving to enjoy: except that, whereas they are swimming in it, he is drowning.

There may come next, according to a number of accounts, the sense of a terrific task ahead with dangers to be met and mastered but also a presentiment of invisible helpful presences that may guide and help one through. These are the gods, the guardian daemons or angels: innate powers of the psyche, fit to meet and master the torturing, swallowing, or shattering negative forces. And if one has the courage to press on, there will be experienced finally, in a terrible rapture, a culminating overwhelming crisis—or even a series of such culminations, more than can be borne.

These crises are mainly of four typical sorts, according to the kinds of difficulty that will have conduced to the regressus in the first place. For instance, a person who in childhood had been deprived of essential love, brought up in a home of little or no care but only authority, rigor, and commands, or in a house of tumult and wrath, a drunken father raging about, or the like, will have been seeking in his backward voyage a reorientation and centering of his life in love. Accordingly, the culmination (when he will have broken back to the start of his biography and even beyond, to a sense of the erotic first impulse to life) will be a discovery of a center in his own heart of tenderness and of love in which he can rest. That will have been the aim and meaning of his entire backward quest. And its realization will be represented through an experience, one way or another, of some sort of visionary fulfillment of a “sacred union” with a wifely mothering (or simply a mothering) presence.

Or if it had been a household in which the father had been nobody, a nothing, of no force in the home at all; where there had been no sense of paternal authority, no one of masculine presence who could be honored and respected, but only a clutter of domestic details and disordered feminine concerns, the quest will have been for a decent father image, and that is what will have to be found: some sort of symbolic realization of supernatural daughterhood or sonship to a father.

Schizophrenia—the Inward Journey

A third domestic situation of significant emotional deprivation is that of the child who feels itself to have been excluded from its family circle, treated as though not wanted; or with no family at all. In cases, for example, of a second marriage, where a second family has come along, a child of the first may feel and actually find itself excluded, thrown away, or left behind. The old fairy-tale theme of the wicked stepmother and stepsisters is relevant here. What such an excluded one will be striving for in his inward lonely journey will be the finding or the fashioning of a center—not a family center, but a world center—of which he will be the pivotal being. Dr. Perry told me of the case of a schizophrenic patient who was so completely and profoundly cut off that no one could establish any communication with him at all. One day, this poor mute person, in the doctor’s presence, drew a crude circle, and then just placed the point of his pencil in the middle of it. Dr. Perry stooped and said to him, “You are in the center, aren’t you! Aren’t you!” And that message got through, initiating the course of a return.

There is a perfectly fascinating inside report of a schizophrenic breakdown in the next-to-last chapter of Dr. R. D. Laing’s book The Politics of Experience. This is an account given by a former Royal Navy commodore, now a sculptor, of a schizophrenic adventure of his own, at the culmination of which he experienced a fourth type of realization: a sense of sheer light, the sense of a terribly dangerous, overpowering light to be encountered and endured. His account suggests very strongly the Buddha-light described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is supposed to be experienced immediately upon death, and which, if endured, yields release from rebirth but is for most too great to bear. The former Royal Navy man, a certain Mr. Jesse Watkins, thirty-eight years of age, had had no previous knowledge of Oriental philosophies or mythologies; yet, as the climax of his ten-day voyage approached, its imagery became all but indistinguishable from that of the Hindu and Buddhist faiths.

It all had begun with an alarming sense of time itself running backward. The gentleman, at home in the living room, had been listening inattentively to a popular tune on the radio when he began to have this uncanny experience. He got up and looked into a mirror to see what might be happening, and though the face that he saw there was familiar, it seemed to be of a stranger, not himself. Taken to an observation ward, he was put to bed and that night had the feeling that he had died, and that those in the ward around him had died too. He continued falling backward in time into a sort of animal landscape, where he wandered as a beast: a rhinoceros making rhinoceros sounds, afraid, yet aggressive and on guard. He felt, too, that he was a baby and could hear himself cry like a child. He was at once the observer and what he observed.

Given newspapers to read, he could make no headway because everything, every headline, opened out to widening associations. A letter from his wife gave the feeling that she was in a different world, which he would never again inhabit. And he felt that where he was, he had tapped powers, powers inherent in us all. For example, a nasty cut on his finger, which he would not let the attendants treat, he actually healed in a single day by putting, as he declared, “a sort of intense attention on it.” He found that by sitting up in bed and staring hard at noisy patients elsewhere in the ward, he could cause them to lie down and be still. He felt that he was more than he had ever imagined himself to be, that he had existed forever, in all forms of life, and was experiencing it all again; but also that he had now before him a great and terrible journey to accomplish, and this gave him a feeling of deep fear. Now these great new powers that he was experiencing, both of control over his own body and of influence over others, are in India called the siddhi. They are recognized there (as they were experienced here, by this Western man) as powers latent in us all, inherent in all life, which the yogi releases in himself. We hear of them in Christian Science; also, in other types of “faith healing,” praying people to health, and so forth. The miracles of shamans, saints, and saviors are, again, well-known examples.

And as for the sense of an experience of identity with all being, all life, and of transformations into animal forms: consider the following chant of the legendary chief poet, Amairgen, of the first arriving Goidelic Celts, when their leading ship came to beach on the shores of Ireland:

I am the wind that blows o’er the sea; I am the wave of the deep; I am the bull of seven battles; I am the eagle on the rock; I am a tear of the sun; I am the fairest of plants; I am a boar for courage; I am a salmon in the water; I am a lake in the plain; I am the word of knowledge; I am the head of the battle-dealing spear; I am the god who fashions fire [=thought] in the head.

We are thus on well-known mythic ground—strange and fluid though it may seem—as we follow in imagination the course of this ten-day inward journey. And its culminating passages too, though strange, will be curiously (in some secret way) familiar.

The voyager, as he tells, had a “particularly acute feeling” that the world he now was experiencing was established on three planes, with himself in the middle sphere, a plane of higher realizations above, and a sort of waiting-room plane beneath. Compare the cosmic image in the Bible, of God’s heaven above, the earth beneath; and the waters beneath the earth. Or consider Dante’s Divine Comedy, the temple towers of India and the Middle American Mayas, the ziggurats of old Sumer. Below are the Hells of suffering; aloft, the Heaven of light; and between, the mountain of ascending souls in stages of spiritual progress. According to Jesse Watkins, most of us are on the lowest level, waiting (en attendant Godot, one might say), as in a general waiting room; not yet in the middle room of struggle and quest at which he himself had arrived. He had feelings of invisible gods above, about, and all around, who were in charge and running things; and in the highest place, the highest job, was the highest god of all. Moreover, what made it all so terrible was the knowledge that ultimately everybody would have to assume that job at the top. All those around him in the madhouse, who, like himself, had died and were in the middle, purgatorial stage, were—as he phrased it—“sort of awakening.” (The meaning of the word buddha, let us recall, is “the awakened one.”) Those all around him in the madhouse were on their ways—awakening—to assume in their own time that top position, and the one now up there was God. God was a madman. He was the one that was bearing it all: “this enormous load,” as Watkins phrased it, “of having to be aware and governing and running things.” “The journey is there and every single one of us,” he reported, “has got to go through it, and you can’t dodge it, and the purpose of everything and the whole of existence is to equip you to take another step, and another step, and another step, and so on…”

Now is it not amazing to find such a set of Oriental themes set down in the log of the night-sea voyage of a British wartime naval officer, briefly mad? There is an early Buddhist fable of just such an end to a journey, preserved in a famous Hindu book of fables, the fable of “The Four Treasure-Seekers” in the Panchatantra. It is an account of four Brahmins, friends, who, having lost their fortunes, determined to set forth together to acquire wealth, and in the Avanti country (which is where the Buddha once lived and taught) they encountered a magician named Terror-Joy. This impressive fellow, when they had described to him their plight and begged for assistance, gave to each a magic quill with instructions to go north to the northern slope of the Himalayas, and wherever a quill dropped, he assured them, the owner of that quill would find his treasure.

Now the leader’s quill dropped first, and they found the soil in that place to be all copper. “Look!” said he. “Take all you want!” But the others chose to continue, and so the leader, alone, gathered his copper and turned back. Where the quill of the second fell there was silver and its bearer was the second to return. That of the next revealed gold. “Don’t you see the point?” said the fourth member of the party. “First copper, then silver, then gold. Beyond there will surely be gems.” But the other held to the gold, and the fourth went on.

And now, as it happened, he encountered there, in the Himalayas, a race of lion-bodied, human-headed beings known as the Kimpurushas, “who do not stay long in the places of men, but love the wildest hills and forests.” These beings brought him to their king, a great lion-man of terrifying aspect, seated on a lion-throne. And when he had inquired why he had come and the Brahmin had given his reply, the great king, the lion-man, laughed and said, “Good! In this place is a vast treasure, hidden underground. It will be opened only when you sacrifice yourself to the goddess of this place.” To which the Brahmin, unsatisfied with copper, silver, gold, and gems, agreed, and accordingly was killed, sacrificed; and then he achieved release.

One might call that “going the whole way,” and this Mr. Watkins apparently did. He experienced the burning of himself to ashes, and a kind of yielding of himself to the will of God, and the realization, when he had burned himself out, that he was not himself God, but a part of the total unity of being. At which moment he had the sense of the realization of total understanding. This was the moment of the overwhelming vision of light. He was, as he described himself, the Ancient of Days. He had known everything, been everywhere, had been the consciousness of all things at all times, a light of total understanding. The only trouble was that he had not realized that that light was too strong for him to handle, and he had simply burned himself out. He had experienced total understanding, which was total love and oneness. The light was the energy of love, which is the radiance of total understanding. He was the light and had become love, and what a love it was! And this is the sense of compassion that has informed the lives of all the great teachers of humanity. There was total understanding of the total process of being, and it was himself. He was not mad at all; he had gone through the psychological death of himself, the light being a source of both terror and beatitude. For although he could not stand it, he did not try to get out of it. He burned. And it was after that that he came back to his body and the world. This, said he, was no belief or faith; it was knowledge. This experience was direct and personal, and with the realization of the sense of death came the end of fear.