I was just browsing through the site mindriddles, a schizophrenic carers journel when a memory of a experience at the ward, waiting to be discharged sitting outside in the corridor of the ward whilst they talked to me mum - popped into my head for no reason. The corridor was busy and i was on a chair that kept the door open to a large dinning room with a tv. Experiences like this are unbearable, my face starts to melt and crunch in disjointed, somewhat vacant experiession of trying to keep my attention on something - either abstract or material. But nothing ever works, nothing can withstand the heat - and anything that anyone might attempt to do would just flare up the fire and perhaps increase the temperature (although thats barely possible) wether 'good' or 'bad'. The best favour they could do me would to be aware as though i did not exist - its my existance that is the fire, constantly 'trying' - but absolutely fundamentally - to reaffirm my existance. These things cannot be known to a 'normal person', or to a person who experiences himself as real - i.e: someone grown into ontelogical security - they are not on the same continuum. If you were a genius and humble, you would understand it and the possiblity of its existance and therefore taste it, but you wouldnt beable to experience it unless you had the drive in you. Donnt get me wrong in saying this, i dont know why i am, but its only the great people who have this drive in them - Nietzsche, Kafka, Dostoyevsky; and the others who propel themselves to understand it - Laing, Camus, Satre etc. Although by all means it doesnt make you great that you experience this dimension, it certainly brings you closer to the great people who do. Only idiots of the 'world' dismiss this experience or the people who experience it. I take it thats what Nietzsche meant by "One word more against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be our invention, our most personal defence and need: in every other sense it is merely a danger. That which does not constitute a condition of our life, is merely harmful to it: to possess a virtue merely because on happens to respect the concept "virtue," as Kant would have us do, is pernicious. "Virtue," "Duty," "goodness in itself." goodness stamped with the character of impersonation and universal validity - these things are mere mental halucinations, in which decline the final devitalisation of life and Koenigsbergian Chinadom find expression. The most fundamental laws of preservation and growth, demand prescisely the reverse, namely: - that each should discover his own virtue, his own Catagorical Imperative. A nation goes to the dogs when it confounds its concept of duty with the general concept of duty. Nothing is more profoundly, more thoughrouly pernicious, than every impersonal feeling of duty, than every sacrifice to the Moloch of abstaction. - Fancy noones having though Kant's Catagorical Imperative dangerous to life!... The instinct of the theologist alone took it under its wing! - An action stimulated by the instinct of life, is proved to be a proper action by the happiness that accompanies it: and that nihlist with the bowels of a Christian dogmatist regarded happiness as an objection... What is there that destroys a man more speedily than to work, think, feel, as an automaton of "duty," without internal prompting, without a profound personal predilection, without joy? This is the recipe par exellence of decadence and even of idiocy... Kant became an idiot. - And he was the contemporary of Goethe! ..." Although ive got better at 'handleing' it now, when ive got some purpose, like when the secretary called me when i was sitting on that chair a few feet away from the office, my face lit up with a mask and i was - not structured because i wasnt, there was still no Self there - but theres was purpose, a place to direct my energy, my mind out of the blast furnace onto a tenuous line. She wanted to know where i had a social worker, i said no and hse asked me another question to which i replied, turned round, and found a nurse had stole my seat! So i had to go and sit in the dinner room, which was for the most part just as bad as the corridor except for my heart sinking at the fact that i had to do it. I chose that picture of the arrows because, i initially wanted one of the arrows pointing into the circle, one that another schizophrenic drew in Laings book The devided Self, but foudn this more abstract one instead. It describe perfectly to me what happens in my head to some extent. My thoughts go through intense (unimaginable) to a breath in the emptiness that follows, and they go round in this circle until something catchs my attention. That why my face is so inexplicable in these situations.