The trajectory of secondary psychosis in individuals and groups
Dragonsphere Report
I’ve identified four stages to secondary (environmentally obtained) psychosis:
The false self: A person grows up learning to act entirely according to an alien logic. They internalize it. Their outward life is entirely constrained by a kind of method acting in accordance with it. Their inner life becomes more and more artificial. This leads to the second stage
The flood of meaning: This is associated with harbinger dreams, obsession with reading (often political, metaphysical, or spiritual documents), and the gradual development of obsessive focus on an intense sense of meaning they can’t articulate. Often, this is directed into existing symbols, metaphysical doctrines, or political persuasions successfully. When it is not, this is usually denigrated as Unverified Personal Gnosis, or just the onset of psychosis, depending on whether it is being discussed from a spiritualist or psychological framework.
The collapse: If this psychosis runs it’s full course, it eventually breaks everything else in a person, though to what degree depends on the individual. This is what is known as mature psychosis. From here on, attrition sets in, and more and more of them becomes whittled down. Neither the original false logic or the obsessive psychotic logic are stable, and they degrade over time, taking more and more of a person with them.
Degredation to empty syntax and symbol: An attachment to the symbols associated with the psychosis persists, but they have less and less emotional salience and content. The ultimate result is a hollowed out human being who remains attached to symbols and ways of speaking that no longer have any associated feelings or meanings. Their body may or may not remember core skills or strongly internalized skills and be able to execute them, but their brain is permanently stuck in the sand, out of gas.
Something similar happens to civilizations, in my view. This is something like a hauntological analysis of individual psychosis.
Thus ends another Dragonsphere Report