how do I know i'm "ill"?

In this world we should be free to pursue what the society around us considers "our own destruction" if we so choose. I see all the time where a mainstream family wants a family member committed because they are giving away all their possesions, "throwing their life away", living homeless, etc, when from another perspective - that of the family member in question - they are happy, pursuing their own beautiful dreams, or following the demons into the demon world of their own free will. It should be up to each one of us to decide. It may be that the person will decide, years or decades later, that they can no longer take the strain of being so different and so want to come back to the fold, and ask for the "help" that their mainstream family prematurely offers, or they may ask early on after a particularly distressing episode, or like me they may never really choose to unite with consensual reality, I myself only learned to emulate them for 8 hours a day in order to get access to food and shelter, then for the rest of the day choose to let myself be floridly psychotic, because my floridly psychotic world is so much more beautiful, my warped mind so much more entertaining and interesting to me than the cold bleak one-horse-town reality of the so called normals - the "WEIRD" (western educated industrialized rich democrats), the military-academic-industrial complex.

How do I know I'm "ill", I know because I need to be aware of consensual reality in order to stay free, and I know that according to the DSM V I am floridly psychotic. That doesn't phase me. I realize I could come in and be medicated, and that that is what most of society would like to do to me, but I also know that in the liberal society of america's large cities, as long as I am not a "danger to myself or others", I will not be forcibly brought in, I will be allowed to roam free, in my own reality.

There are two different choices people can make, and the majority make the first, the choice or desire to "belong". But there is a different, mutually exclusive choice that about one percent of us make, in traditional societies it is the call of shamanism and in this society they call it schizophrenia, I call it practicing irrationality, myself, but it is the choice to "understand", to understand not as the rest of the herd does,not the understanding of consensual reality, which I find unsatisfying, but to really understand the way the mystics, the way the shamans, the way the spirits, the way the saints, the way the two year olds, the way the schizophrenics do. That is the path I choose, and I have been making my case all over america for decades, as they incarcerate me on their 72 hour holds from time to time because of their fears or misunderstandings. They seem to think that if they were as free as I then they would be dangers to the rest around them , but I at 47 have never hurt anyone or stolen anyone's property, have a job and a wife, rent a home, and behave myself.

You can force us to groom our madness, to hold a job or atleast find our way to an SSI check and maintain our lives, but you cannot legislate our beliefs, our delusions, away, and can't tell us that because the other 99% won't follow us out here in to the desert of true reality, unhumanized mystical reality, that just because we will be alone then we are making the "wrong" choice. It's just a different choice.

Not everyone who is called by what I call the demon world, what the psychiatrists call the "collective unconscious", not all of us who hear the call choose to go right away. Many call for the help of the meds to come back, they just want to be with you.

I have an analogy where there is a house, with a white picket fence, and the yard is brightly lit, and that yard is consensual reality, the world where 99% of humanity resides and clings to. Some of us out in the yard in early life play football and "go long", crash through the fence, either via near death experiences, drug trips, or reading the right things can actually lead you out there, practicing shamanism also. So some of us go out he yard, down the unlit street, past the demons that humanity is taught to shun (and for good reason), and we make it to the bus stop, where a benevolent spirit guide takes us on a trip through the neighborhood, gives us some guidance, and we get to the airport and take off. And we come back and say things back in the front yard of the well lit house of human consensual reality like "there's no cause for concern" on where we've been. I'm like that and I'm age 47 now, and my family and friends have been trying to talk me into staying close to the house of reason for three decades, and I just laugh.

I like to think that someday humanity will grow up, put aside their toys of "science" and "reason", put them away in a toybox to be wistfully remembered once in a while, but mean while to climb up out of the test tube of human knowledge into the great mysterious reality with our brothers the spirits, the shamans, the two year olds, and the schizophrenics, together will all our brothers the other species, to do what the taoists teach - to pursue inner nature and destiny and search for mystery and wonder.

How do I know I'm ill? Cause I write things like this and everybody comes back and says I have "agnos..." whatever, meaning I'm so ill I don't know I'm ill. I personally wouldn't call it an illness and always write essays defending it, but yeah, I know according to the DSM V and the powers that be, I'm very very sick and have been for a very very long time, and there's nothing their science can offer me or do now to bring me back. So ha!

-(w)onderdonk(ey)

John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty", 1859:

The only purpose for which power can be rightly exercised over any member of the community , against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant... Each person is the proper guardian of his own health.