I realized the other day, while reading Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances (A Study in Idolatry) that Schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis/mental divergence — may have to do with the attempt by the mind to ‘participate’ (as the ancients naturally did with nature) with the contents of our Collective Representations (which are dead/lifeless inside). This would go a long way toward explaining many of the problems and bizarre situations that even we who are not severely mentally unstable experience. A world of things and money is an anti-world, and ‘what or who’ is ‘behind’ this? Only demons would produce a world like this… or machines… So the helpless schizophrenic imagines ‘a network’ of estranged beings or forces that are producing their experience ‘inside their minds’, not because they »think this… but because it is »their experience that this is so.

It’s a reasonably sensible perspective in a world where the Collective Representations are all objects. Things. Why are there billions of things and no experiences of meaningful roles, relationships, vocations and social experience? Some of us are able to sustain something beyond the framework as it appears… some of us are able to have something resembling meaningful life experiences, roles and vocations… but the vast majority of humans alive today are not able to make of the shreds of meaning that they occasionally experience anything resembling a life or identity. This is not surprising. The context is an anti-context, and it’s aggressive, toxic, and accelerating toward apocalypse at ever-increasing rates in every new domain of departure from meaning that it’s possible to invent.

The archaic peoples (in Barfield’s view) ‘participated’ (experienced beyond thought and ordinary sensing) their ‘representations’ because their representations were experienced more than they were cognized. Thus ‘the sun’ was both ‘more than merely a being’, a person, and more than a human person. What is our ‘sun’? A thing. A physics process. How can one participate this? If we suppose that schizophrenics are participating »modern representations, which are empty within… and the result of eons of representational tokenization… it’s clear that the resulting mind states would be terrifying, isolating, empty of meaning… and, perhaps, overtly threatening.