The memory of God's love Or maybe just The words that echo it And that might be enough?

Peace with the world of waking dreams To be at unreality's mercy Vulnerable to the utter strangeness And not crushed by the raw terror of it But finding trust in God's will

The love of family Of friends Of community That answers the call That bonds In the quiet times and the wild times alike

A log of blog posts Reminders That I am a writer That I create From time to time

Perhaps some new reflections On the nature of consciousness Might stick around

A thirst for more growth More skill, more abundance of spirt More preparedness Should madness come again More preparedness Should it not

What will I take with me? In the end, just myself

But who knows what God has in store

No longer trapped in a new playlist Or listening to people psychotically Free to wander my more accustomed musical prison Free to let talk just pass me by The torrent of tears And the flood of ideas Abated both

“Are you ok?” most people ask Of course not I miss my tears I crave the ideas I'm an addict for the presence of God's love Though this was the first time I felt it in this way I was warned divine encounters can be addicting As much as any drug And I see that And I move forward I let it all go But it's hard

“Are you ok?” My dear Then That was when I was ok The rest of the time I'm only ever just muddling through Why, aren't you?

Thoughts are given Feelings are given Memories are given

Perception is given Volition is given Attention is given

At least, so I'm told And I think It's all too plausible

So, then Is there anything That is not given?

There is no doer At least Not within the bounds of awareness So what is it I do, then?

I know, I know There is no “I” Deep down Or something I don't author thoughts, therefore, I am not But bear with the unenlightened a moment And let us treat “I” as some sort of Convenient fiction

And I I am no epiphenomenon I experience speakers Speaking of qualia And I understand Exactly what they mean Or so it seems

And I experience myself Speaking of pineapple And its taste And of the redness of red

And I assume that my listeners Are also experiencers And that they experience “my” words And that as the words drift out of awareness Something in those minds Searches through memories And something in those minds Retrieves the memories most salient And something in those minds Thrusts those memories into attention And there, those memories are experienced Just like mine And there, they understand Exactly what I mean Or so it seems

And how could this be Unless all this experiencing Has some causal stick With which it pokes the mind back? I do not do, but I do something Or so it seems To me

Imagine a person with Bipolar Disorder, Type I, having a serious manic episode. Consider the following very rough and uninformed-by-the-literature model for psychosis formation. Our subject experiences some classical flight of ideas, rapidly generating and connecting concepts in a way that is or at least seems far too quick to communicate fully to others; and also because of <-something something impaired metacognition?–> those ideas are more prone to in some way fail to track reality. So maybe 9 out of 10 things they're thinking are quite normal and valid – at least if they make an effort to slowly and carefully explain them to someone – but there's a lot of these sets of 10 ideas in play, and the 1 in 10 errors can quite quickly accumulate into various delusional complexes.

Now imagine this Bipolar person attempting to have a conversation with a friend, and at some point they notice that something the friend said has a double meaning in the context of their delusional complex and that the double meaning makes it funny – and so they laugh out loud.

“What's so funny?” asks their friend.

They might try to explain the relevant delusional context, but that would be hard, especially if they are making an effort to control their affect and to speak at a normal pace, intonation etc. So they say something like “Oh, nothing, I was just enjoying a joke God made.”

Note there's not necessarily here any actual specific delusion that God made a joke – although they may feel in a mystical or abstract sense that God as the ultimate source of all causality was in some sense “behind” the joke as She is behind everything, this is not so radically different from what many ordinary theists experiencing no psychosis would hold. Putting that aside, the critical point is that the meaning of the joke feels like – which is to say, it has the qualia – that it was generated within the laugher's own mind. “God made a joke” is really just a cute way of saying “I thought up a joke”.

---

Now imagine this same person with Bipolar in a similar situation but a couple of manic episodes down the line, and this time they're subjectively at least experiencing no flight of ideas, but rather psychosis that as they perceive it is of a different kind.

This time, they listen to other people speak, and listening to them speak has the qualia that there are two layers of meaning – and those layers seem to be a “surface” layer that the speaker consciously means to speak, and also a “hidden” layer that is being communicated by some other entity – let's say for the sake of this example that they believe the entity to be God.

Now, again, the friend says something.

And this time when the Bipolar person notices something funny, in the second layer of meaning, and laughs, and explains that “God made a joke”, they are being much more literal about how the experience subjectively feels to them.

This time, the new delusional unit of meaning has the qualia of coming from the world outside the self, of being externally rather than internally generated.

---

So my question to you, world, is this: is the dichotomy between these two classes of experience a reasonable division of what we observe in psychotic people, and if so, is there language for it in psychiatry?

”'Twas Grace that taught my heart to fear And Grace, my fears relieved How precious did that Grace appear The hour I first believed

Through many dangers, toils and snares I have already come 'Twas Grace that brought me safe thus far And Grace will lead me home”

• Amazing Grace, John Newton

---

Finally, then, we meet another named character (sort of). How exciting for you! Now that J and B are on the scene (but surely it should be J and T?) do we expect to find more action in the story, perhaps finally some movement toward answers viz a viz, “Who are the Joker and the Thief?”, and, “Why do we give a shit?”

But in all honestly there is not as much to say of B as I would like. Their interaction with J rapidly escalated into a bizarre psychotic friendship that feels very hard to describe to anyone who has never experienced psychosis. For a night, it turned hostile, which became the focus of much of J's subsequent paranoia. And then, almost as soon as it had begun, it was over; B left the hospital ward, by paths unknown; and J wrote a short story, “The Joker and The Thief”, about that brief and especially strange time.

And as I said from the beginning, this story is not that story. Indeed, really it's less a story about the Joker, or the Thief, than about J, and how he came to be a person who tells stories about The Joker and The Thief.

And really, there's only a little left to say on that front. You see, for years, J was, whenever manic, desperate to be heard; desperate for the strange portents he came across in the spirit world to be made known far and wide.

Yet at the same time, he was cryptic. When not manic, he was slow to tell others of any real details of his bipolar. When manic, he would surely shout many things from the rooftops, but other things he would make only impossibly obscure hints about in things he said or wrote.

But while there are surely things that are not yet ready to be shouted to the whole world, yet there are other points on the spectrum between shouting and secret keeping. Are there not people around a person who can be trusted, who will listen to simple truths and strange ideas alike, when spoken quietly and calmly and taking the time to put them in context?

And so gradually over the years J worked on his vulnerability, with a little help from a slowly growing faith in God, and some wondrous, glorious friendships; until, at the tail end of one episode, he decided to write another story about the Joker and the Thief, and post it in a place where he could easily share the story with anyone it made sense to share it with.

So this is definitely not the last story about the Joker and the Thief; in some ways, it is the first. Let's see where we go from here.

“Sunday morning Is every day for all I care And I'm not scared Light my candles In a daze, 'coz I found God”

• Lithium, Nirvana

---

Lothlorien, as we shall continue to call it, was so named because it was a quite magical place. And it was even forested, or at least, there were parts of a much higher tree density than is typical so close to the centre of the city, which was definitely satisfactory.

And there were wide open fields of grass to run in, when given leave to go outside the narrower bounds of the ward, which was reasonably often. There were art classes and yoga classes and bookcases of books and even some board games.

J spent a fair bit of time making a probably strange impression on his visitors, who were thankfully pretty frequent; quite a lot of time writing and making art; only a little time struggling with the minimal patience required for much reading; and as for that most important of activities, despite the rather potent regime of medications he was now taking, he still wasn't sleeping more than 3 or 4 hours a night – although he usually managed to at least squeeze in a decent chunk of not-quite-asleep breathing yoga.

Eventually, he more or less decided he was not the Messiah, despite a significant delusional inclination in that direction; in part, because that seemed somewhat harder than even he though he was capable of. Although his interest in historical Messiah figures and especially Jesus Christ remained quite piqued; he attended chapel services for the duration of his stay. Instead, he settled on identifying as a Morpheus-like figure – Morpheus being the heroic resistance leader, for those unfamiliar, from the Matrix movies. So that was a much more reasonable and quite perfectly sane grandeur-y thing that would not at all be an ongoing issue.

Also, over this time, J had begun having an interesting little series of interactions with a person we will call B.

(to be continued)

“Put me in the hospital for nerves And then they had to commit me You told 'em all I was crazy They cut off my legs Now I'm an amputee, God damn you”

• Flagpole Sitta, Harvey Danger

---

Evidently the psychological clinic didn't have the authority or expertise or resources or something to schedule J directly in a psychiatric facility. Instead, they took him in the back of a fortified station wagon to the nearby St Vincent's Hospital. And there he sat, waiting to see the clinical staff, in some sort of public foyer area, meters from the sliding glass doors, and freedom. Maybe he was being watched, but it sure felt like he could have just stood up and walked out at any point, for what seemed like a long time. Yet, despite a certain difficulty with sitting still, he opted to stay (perhaps because it seemed the more likely course for getting to see that eminent scientific expert).

After a while they moved him to a small room to wait in until he could be assessed. Now there was all the fun of trying to keep reasonably still, with the added joy of Not Being Around (Let Alone Talking To) People, and the attendant acceleration of J's internal monologue – a monologue that was already Pretty Fast and wasn't exactly crying out for further acceleration.

By the time he left the room and headed for assessment, J now considered himself a Person of Historically Significant Mental Capabilities.

He answered one of the standard battery of mood assessment questions they give you, honestly enough, by writing and drawing various symbols and diagrams representing infinity and so forth, where normally one is expected to circle a number on a more mundane scale of 1-10. 10 is not such a large number, after all, in the scheme of things.

At one point, a member of clinical team informed J he was being scheduled – that is to say, involuntarily admitted for treatment under the Mental Health Act.

While he waited, he made some phone calls, and had some visitors. He tried to explain some Things to them, but it didn't come across so well.

Eventually, after a few actual hours of real time spent at St Vincent's, he was transferred to Rozelle Hospital, at Callan Park – or Lothlorien, as it would come to be referred to in J's writings.

(to be continued)

Akrasia

Oh, hi. You're back. Of course.

When I try In my unskilled way To inspect you You don't seem like Some mere absence A lack of energy But rather a positive force A shifting wall of un-will Between me and my goal

You're not just depression Depression happens next Days spent in bed, Weeks spent inside For want of anything to do which you'll permit It's a spiral With you at the start

So here we are At the start And I prefer to keep writing Maybe not quite so fluently But so far, I persevere I prefer to get out and move, at least a little And not just retreat to a warm bed

Maybe tomorrow Maybe after lunch You'll have better luck We'll see.

“You took a trip, and climbed a tree At Robert Sledge's party And there you stayed, 'til morning came You were not the same after that

You gave your life to Jesus Christ And after all your friends went home You came down, you looked around You were not the same after that”

• Not the Same, Ben Folds

---

So J kept ranting – there was, I want to emphasize, a lot of ranting – and not doing much sleeping (although thank God for some restful breathing yoga techniques on a CD he was given); until eventually after a couple of days, he had a booking with a psychologist that one of his relatives very kindly escorted him to.

The psychologist asked if her student could stay in the room for the appointment, to which J agreed.

So the psychologist asked J what was happening, and J very carefully and methodically gave the version of his life history and recent events that he figured he would have given a few days ago – that is, back when he just had regular Bipolar Disorder, before he developed cognitive super powers and cured himself.

The psychologist carefully and methodically took notes about it all, in that calm and friendly manner that is quite common among psychologists.

J asked if the student could leave the room (he wasn't confident at pulling off what he wanted to achieve with more than one person present). The student left.

J dialled things up from maybe a 7/10 to... much more than 7/10.

He explained very, very rapidly to the psychologist that while all the stuff he'd said earlier was technically accurate, what was much more important was that he now had some unique event happening in his brain; and that he needed to be put in touch with some leading scientific authority in order to begin the urgent study of this profound and potentially revolutionary phenomenon. (It's worth remembering at this point that J had only skimmed a Wikipedia article on Bipolar, and wasn't across any finer details such as the Type I/II distinction).

The psychologist started crying, and pressed the button to call security.

(to be continued)

“So I’ll tell you all the story about the Joker and the Thief I said I’ll tell you all the story about the Joker and the Thief I said I’ll tell you all the story about the Joker and the Thief in the Night”

• The Joker and The Thief, Wolfmother

“There must be some kind of way out of here Said the Joker to the Thief”

• All Along the Watchtower, Bob Dylan

---

I can’t tell you the story about the Joker and the Thief. For one thing, there are now many stories, and who’s to say which one is the one you mean? And for another, if you mean that story… well that story really was written for benefit of the Joker and the Thief, about what transpired between them, and it has been said it won’t be retold in full until they meet again. Also... I might have temporarily misplaced my copy.

But I can certainly tell you a story about the Joker and the Thief.

Once upon a time, there was a man, let’s just call him J. J had been a bit all over the shop for quite a few years of his life, as has been known to happen to people on occasion. One day J was having an excellent day. He had won some minor award at work, the sun was shining, he felt well rested and distinctly unhungover, rather than his usual precarious grip on functioning fuelled by a few too many energy drinks. He returned from the award ceremony to his station of work. He started on a simple task – stuffing some envelopes. But, try as he might, not one envelope could he stuff. His hands were shaking.

“Ah, curse my sleep deprivation, making my hands shake.”

“But… you’ve slept soundly at reasonable hours some three nights in a row”

“Oh, right. So I guess I’m over caffeinated.”

“No, you’re not. You haven’t even had one coffee today. Because you didn’t feel tired, because you slept well.”

“Ah, well, this is a hangover?”

“We already went over this. You haven’t had anything to drink for a couple of days.”

“Oh. So this is…. A Mystery Shaking?”

“It would seem so. Dun dun dun etc.”

J pondered the situation.

“Am I shaking because… I’m too happy? Because my day is going too well. Is that, like, a thing?”

Fortunately J lived in the Golden Era of the Internet, after the popularisation of Wikipedia but before the popularisation of Facebook. A quick trip to the Wikipedia page for “Bipolar Disorder” confirmed a vaguely remembered suspicion – there is a known mental illness where you sometimes feel “too happy”.

Unfortunately, this discovery had the side effect of making J even happier.

“Wow! A Real Actual Mental Illness! I guess I was not just faking being miserable and messed up these last few years. Now they can diagnose and treat me and I Will Be Fixed!”

J told his boss of his amazing discovery; she seemed a little sceptical, but was supportive of his need to go home for the day and then seek treatment.

So J left work, observing as he travelled that he was starting to brim with so much confidence, on some emotional level, that he could almost imagine stepping out into heavy traffic or in front of an oncoming train and expecting to come to no harm. “My, that’s interesting.”

He made his way back to an apartment where some relatives of his lived, to spend some fair portion of time ranting to them about his discovery and its many implications.

J did not get a lot of sleep that night.

(to be continued)