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Rip continued on with: "From the perspective of some of those who are spiritually intoxicated, if one were to use diagnostic criteria similar to the ones that you have described, David, many, if not most of us, probably would be diagnosed, at least in spiritual terms, as being quite insane. Let's consider some of the possibilities.

"For instance, in one of your categories of symptomatology, you spoke about catatonic immobility and catatonic agitation. Many of us 'normal' types, like our catatonic counterparts, also are locked into patterns of habitual behavior which completely immobilize us as far as pursuing spiritual activity is concerned. Furthermore, like the schizophrenic who is exhibiting catatonic immobility, many of our so-called 'normal' habitual patterns are bizarre, peculiar, and maintained for long periods of time, and we seem to be frozen into various postures of idiosyncratic or personal significance.

"On the other hand, many of us are caught up in a frenzied sequence of activities in which an enormous amount of energy is expended with little consideration given to the difference between what is, spiritually speaking, important and unimportant. We rush about our lives, going from school, to jobs, to meals, to career, to marriage, to family, to houses, to possessions, to entertainment, to hobbies, to vacations and back again with, quite frequently, only the most fleeting energy, if any at all, being expended on spiritual needs.

"From the vantage point of the spiritually intoxicated, many of us have lives filled with complex, peculiar, strange sequences of movements involving our fingers, hands, and limbs that really serve no spiritual purpose whatsoever. I'm sure our motor activity must look as strange to the spiritually intoxicated as the motor activity of schizophrenics looks to us.

"Another category of symptoms which you described concerned affect or emotion. If I remember correctly, you indicated that flat affect and inappropriate affect were the two major emotional indicators for diagnosing the potential presence of schizophrenia."

I nodded my head in confirmation of his recollection. I wondered if any of the people coming and leaving had just begun, or just completed, respectively, their clinical assessment of my spiritual condition.

Rip said, "Compared to the joy, ecstasy and sense of connection with the entire realm of Being that a spiritually intoxicated person experiences, most of the rest of us go about our lives as if we were schizophrenics. Like them, we spend inordinate amounts of time staring vacantly into space. Like schizophrenics, our eyes often have a gaunt, lifeless quality to them.

"Along with our schizophrenic brothers and sisters, we tend to exhibit a profound apathy toward a vast spectrum of stimuli. The stimuli to which schizophrenics are non-responsive are only sensory in character. However, the rest of us are non-responsive to the spiritual stimuli that Divinity is conferring on us every second of our lives.

"In addition, we often laugh uproariously amidst the horror, suffering, oppression and injustice that exists in the world. On the other hand, we cry grievously and throw kicking- and screaming-tantrums when someone comes along and tries to help us stop doing all the things which are generating the horror, suffering, oppression and injustice that we seem to find so amusing.

"Like schizophrenics, our emotional or affective priorities seem to be inverted. We laugh when we ought to cry, and we cry when we have reason to be happy.

"David, you also mentioned a category of symptoms which revolved about the character of the phenomenological quality of a schizophrenic's experience of, or way of attending to, the world. For example, you spoke about themes concerning the unreal, depersonalized, colorless and alien nature of that experience.

"From the perspective of a spiritually intoxicated individual, the experience of a non-spiritually intoxicated person cannot help but be seen as being unreal, depersonalized, colorless and alien in nature. When an individual is alienated from his or her essential nature, when a person is estranged from a fundamental sense of connectedness with all of creation, when one is absent from one's true spiritual identity and, therefore, exists in a condition of depersonalization, when we have permitted our awareness to be veiled and reduced to a colorless reflection of the true, vibrant reality of things, then do we not share a great deal in common with the various kinds of deficit present in the phenomenological quality of a schizophrenic's manner of engaging experience?"

Apparently, my state- was it a symptom of spiritual schizophrenic stupor?- did not permit me to respond. I agreed with him, but I gave no visible acknowledgment of my internal, affirmative response to what was, under the circumstances, pretty much of a rhetorical question.

"Disorders of perception," Rip continued, "were another category of symptoms to which you made reference, David. Among other things, these impairments of perception were said to involve hallucinations of both an auditory and visual nature.

"From the perspective of those who are spiritually intoxicated, most of us suffer from a disorder that is sort of the inverse of the perceptual problem experienced by schizophrenics. More specifically, schizophrenics tend to see or hear things for which there is no corresponding external stimulus. In our condition of spiritual psychosis, however, we tend to not see and hear realities that are present.

"The people of spiritual intoxication are responding to spiritual stimuli which are within, and around, us all the time. Yet, because we suffer from a condition of spiritual schizophrenia, we have become blind and deaf to the presence of these realities.

"We call the spiritually intoxicated crazy because we do not see or hear what they do. We, however, are the one's with the perceptual disorder."

"Another category of symptoms mentioned by you, David, concerned disturbances in both the content of thinking, as well as in the structure or form of a person's thinking. There were," he indicated, "two types of problems with thought content that you said might be interpreted as providing evidence for diagnosing the presence of schizophrenia in an individual.

" One of these difficulties involved the lack of insight exhibited by schizophrenics with respect to the pathological nature of their condition. The other type of problem revolved around the delusional character of the content of schizophrenic thought processes.

"As far as the schizophrenic symptom of a profound lack of insight is concerned, those who understand reality from the perspective of spiritual intoxication could easily maintain that such a deep lack of insight is precisely the character of the disturbance which exists in most of our thinking concerning the nature of our own spiritual condition. No matter how extensive and pervasive evidence to the contrary may be, most of us seem to persist in believing there is nothing wrong with us or our spiritual behavior, and we have little, or no, appreciation of the seriousness of the spiritual pathology that besets our being.

"Many of us also suffer from various kinds of disturbances or disorders in the content of our thought processes. In fact, for those who live the experience of spiritual intoxication, much of the religious and spiritual pronouncements, theories, beliefs and philosophies of those who have never had such an experience are, by and large, delusional in character.

"People try to impose their systems of thought onto reality even though there may be all kinds of data or facts indicating the former is not consonant with the latter. Yet, isn't this what schizophrenics try to do? Isn't this the essence of delusional thinking?

"Furthermore," Rip added, without waiting for an answer, "a great deal of our delusional thinking is quite paranoid in nature. We always seem to be suspicious of other people, or we seem to like to busy ourselves with thinking the worst of the intentions and motivations of other people. As a result, we often end up accusing them of entering into all kinds of plots and conspiracies against us.

"These disturbances in thought content are prevalent in the way we think about people from other races and religions, or about individuals of ethnicity and nationality which are different from our own. Even more unbelievably, however, such disordered thinking is reflected in the paranoid way we, all too frequently, treat members of our own families.

"Many of us also harbor these dark suspicions in relation to God. We often feel quite justified in hurling all manner of absurd paranoid, accusatory delusions in God's direction.

"The other kind of thought disturbance you mentioned encompassed issues of form or structure. If I have understood what you said, David, this sort of problem or disturbance has to do with the incoherent, unconnected, scattered flights of thinking sometimes exhibited by schizophrenics.

"Just as schizophrenics do not seem to be able to focus or concentrate and, therefore, tend to drift or jump from one topic to another, so too, many of us are incapable of maintaining spiritual focus. In fact, most of us are so challenged in this regard, a Zen master once likened the quality of our thinking processes to what one might expect from a barrel full of drunken monkeys.

"Furthermore, many of us engage in something very similar to the neologisms invented by schizophrenics. However, instead of inventing new words, like the schizophrenic, which have meaning for her or him but for no one else, most of the rest of us invest many of the words of everyday conversation with ideas that make sense to us but often do not make sense to those with whom we are speaking.

"We may use a common vocabulary, but many of us tend to give quite different interpretive connotations and denotations to the words we speak and hear. This is especially true in the realms of religion and spirituality."

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