E Rehmus - The Magician's Dictionary

SCHIZOPHRENIA It has been defined as a cognitive handicap in which reason is limited to purely concrete processes and neither symbol nor abstraction can be used or understood. What we see, however, is not necessarily impairment, but misplacement. The schizophrenic demands exactitude because he needs firm guidelines in a world that is arbitrary, hostile and irrational.

The world, however, believing itself to be sane, views such allergy as a disease, rather than as the simple, psychic defense that it obviously is.

Far from being despised as socially undesirable, schizophrenia should be hailed as one of mankind's invaluable resources. Functional schizophrenia is not madness but a focussing of consciousness that is simply not sanctioned by ordinary society, except in sleep. Animals also inhabit worlds of their own -- the elephant world, the eagle world, the rattlesnake world, etc. which society misunderstands and condemns. Both "incurable" schizophrenics and "untameable" wild animals, therefore, are systematically crowded out to make room for the breeding, conforming multitudes of homo sap.

Admittedly, the "afflicted" have little or no control over their mental state and often feel themselves to be drowning in raging psychic seas, but that is generally in reaction to the insanity of the consensual world and lack of special training in how to use these precious, divine talents. At any rate, our society's longing to "medicate" it totally out of existence is stupid. We can only wish that schizophrenes were better provided for, even pampered -- and very carefully educated -so as to help them cast off the miserable and crippling paranoia which is its natural enough accompaniment, given the hostility of our world for anything it fails to understand. Most schizophrenes are as abysmally ill-educated as the rest of our society and so can't take advantage of their talent or defend themselves. Their "madness" is, more often than not, no more than the quite "logical" result of ignorance, confusion and fear. If anything, schizophrenics are superrational beings coping with enormous burdens of logic.

Marijuana produces a similar panic which has to be overcome. It too removes the filter that normally keeps us from experiencing the underlying, fundamental chaos of the world. From a functional (i.e., not physically diseased) standpoint, the paranoia resulting from schizophrenia is a normal and successfully adaptive reaction to an extreme and untenable situation, e.g., contemporary society in its habitually evil and mindless mode. And society, in failing to provide a place for these people, is doing all of us a great disservice.

It is as if we forced athletes to run in lead-soled, lumberjack boots and to keep their hands in their pockets at all times. It is as if we expected Rembrandt to content himself with a monochromatic spray-paint gun and an untagged bus.

Since schizophrenia bypasses the psychic censor, it affords tremendous insight into many metaphysical mysteries and considerably increases the level of extrasensory perception. Moreover, it is out of the same matrix that art, discovery, invention and genius evolve. Even "chemical" schizophrenia (whether naturally or artificially induced), can, to a moderate degree be a positive condition. But it is logic and reason, unhampered by any fawning to authority or family values, that most often lead the schizophrenic person into trouble. That is hardly an "illness" to be "cured." It's a line of inner resourcefulness, originality and survival.

Oddly enough, talk like that doesn't, as you might think, go right over my shrink's head. We both realize that he only nods to the establishment flakes in order to survive professionally.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------SCHOOLS OF MAGIC There are, traditionally, three schools of magic in the world: Black, White and Yellow. These colors, however, have nothing to do with the usual understanding of them as "good" or "evil," they are simply three avenues. The black school warns that life is pain and sorrow. The white school teaches that it can be transformed into joy. The yellow school practices passivity and non-interference (occasionally it interferes to keep the black and white schools from destroying one another, lest the winner turn on the yellow school).

-----------------------------------------------------------------------SCIENTOLOGY L. Ron Hubbard's religion, based on sci-fi, psychology and occultism. It attempts, after clearing the psyche of engrams, to place one in touch with former incarnations in order to put the information to further spiritual growth as an Operating Thetan who no longer depends on the body for spiritual effects. The church patterns its worldly foundation on the proven techniques of the Catholic Church, Christian Science, etc.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------SCORPIO The Tacere of the Tetramorph. Sign of "Sex & Death," it may stand as the archetype of Alchemical Transformation.

Beginning with the lowest level, the scorpion, it rises to the highest level, the eagle, via the evolutionary link of the