Egocentric

On my post the other day about my psychotic experiences and belief that things that had happened to me in my life harboured a divine message, kodeureum left the following comment:

please remember that you are just one infinitessimally minute fragment of that entity called humankind.

At first it stung. Like: "get real BPG, you're just an inconsequential piece of shit in the wider scheme of things". Ouch!

But actually K had a very good point. The classic symptoms of psychosis:

• feeling that people on television or radio are talking about, or talking directly to them
• believing that headlines or stories in newspapers are written especially for them
• having the experience that people (often strangers) drop hints or say things about them behind their back
• believing that events (even world events) have been deliberately contrived for them, or have special personal significance
• seeing objects or events as being deliberately set up to convey a special or particular meaning

quoted from Wikipedia

In other words psychotics think that the world revolves around them - LITERALLY. And maybe that's why 'Tart (a friend who has also suffered genuine grade psychosis) recently said:

I actually walked out of 'The Truman Show' because I could not stand the psychoticness of it. It bothered me so much.

Funny thing is that I've watched the Truman show 5 times (one of my best). And, just like Tart, the reason that movie sticks out with me, is that it comes the closest to showing what psychosis really feels like (but unlike Tart I taunt myself with these memories in a kind of masochist way) In the Movie, the central character Truman eventually works out that:

• feeling that people on television or radio are talking about, or talking directly to them
• believing that headlines or stories in newspapers are written especially for them
• having the experience that people (often strangers) drop hints or say things about them behind their back
• believing that events (even world events) have been deliberately contrived for them, or have special personal significance
• seeing objects or events as being deliberately set up to convey a special or particular meaning

What makes the movie so brilliant is that, in fact, the world IS revolving around him. Which just makes it even the more psychotic-like.

But if, unlike Truman, you are not starring in a One Man Reality TV Show, then it's nearly a certainty that you're going through psychosis. The other certainty (by implication):

You are, at that point in time, the most EGOCENTRIC person on earth.

In fact at its very extreme psychosis can translate into SOLIPSISM - the belief that you are the only person in the universe and everybody/thing else is just a figment of your mind.

The very interesting thing about SOLIPSISM is that it is has always been a fairly central concept in philosophy. More than that, it is one of the most difficult to disprove. Because at the end of the day the only certainty you can have was arrived at by the French philsopher, Descartes:

I think therefore I am

What Descartes failed to recognise is that what he was actually saying was:

I think I think, therefore I think I am ( - BPG)

And now a little coincidence to end: The first time I watched "The Truman Show", i felt so unnerved and psychoticish afterwards that as soon as I got home I had to reassure myself that reality was just plain ol' reality. So I switched on the TV set. What did I see:

A Y shaped twig flying by itself through the blue sky. DINfuckingKIM!! People in South Africa may remember the advert for household insurer Santam, where a guy threw a branch in the sky for his dog to fetch. And it was round about the time I had started writing my first book "A Branch of Wisdom", a book centred around a Y shaped twig that was on the psychiatrist's table during my first psychotic hospitalisation. Yeah, get your head around that one...

(or was it just egocentricism 123% ???)