Comment by throwaway920102
3 days ago
I read parts of this and found them quite interesting! One of the annoying things about schizophrenia is when someone you care about is in treatment/remission/managing their symptoms, if they use metaphor or symbolism or other similar linguistic devices it can be hard to tell if they are doing that - intentionally using metaphor/symbolism/imagery to make a point, or if they are veering off into a strange delusional statement and something you think is meant to be metaphor is actually written or spoken literally.
I had a similar reaction when first skimming this book in that some of the sections sort of looked almost like allegory or something similar to allegory, but I wasn't sure if it was an artistic/linguistic device or if it was something resultant from schizophrenia.
Do you care to comment about that OP? EG: Metropolis chapter (page 10) through page 19 (Yoshu Prophecies). FWIW my takeaway was to have the charitable view that given your ability to even write this book, these sections are a depiction of some of those psychosis period for some illustrative purpose. But I have a small question in my head about it.
I understand it must be a burden to do have do so, but I wonder if you'd find that others would understand you more if you loudly prefaced usages of these sorts of techniques with their announcement. EG: "This is a metaphor, but _____" or "Here's an example:", or "I don't mean this literally, but ____". Dunno what the preface would be for these parts of the book, and I like I said I skimmed because I'm supposed to be at work rn.
From where I sit today, I can say that I see things others don't. I have a hard time saying they aren't real, though, as experience has been a zero-knowledge proof the the commentary.
The front half of the book, up until a clear pivot chapter, is me trying to put to words a coherent schizophrenic vision; both to establish credentials and to give people a sense of what it can be like.
A common theme I've seen both in myself and in others who have spoken to me about their experience is that it's common to have a delusion that you are at the center of a religion.
Personally, I've been blessed with insights at the core of every major religion that I know more than a slight deal about. It just so happens that the episode I detail in this book has me at the center of a prophecy; It rings in my head as truth, but I don't have any proof of that truth to produce.
In the latter half of the book, I introduce a conversation with Master Yoshu that I feel is critical to the message. It would have been awkward to say, "I heard this from a voice" without the setup to give that.
Regarding your last paragraph, I think what you'll find is that life is rarely ever centered around something that you can ever adequately put to words. Even if someone is always 100% literal, their concepts will not match your concepts; labels are the source of much of our suffering, and trying to label something as example or metaphor or "not literal" already betrays that you're unable to falsify it; thus, there's something to it.
I don't want to dismiss you though: If I went through that burden of categorizing my own text, how would your life be improved?