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Thanks Lep.
One of the first essay's that Leary used the term exo-psychology involved a guided hallucination through a shamanic-initation type trip, i.e lower-middle-upper worlds, and the ascension of the shamanic in succesive consciousness from each world. That's what I meant, they really don't touch on any of the circuits, but the type of feedback loop which can occur within the ego through guided hallucination.
dictionary.com defines schizophrenia as the following:
Any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances. Schizophrenia is associated with dopamine imbalances in the brain and defects of the frontal lobe and is caused by genetic, other biological, and psychosocial factors.
Withdrawl from reality and hallucinations are the only way to describe what occurs in the movie, to the main character. Max's flees the real world for his own fictive world of Planet Drool, a creation of his own imagination, and rapidly hallucinates an adventure. What Max is experiencing is cognitive dissonance, and though you can find examples of it in several similar high fantasy movies, like the never-ending story, or the labrynth, where the main character escapes the 'real' mundy world for some fantasy realm, the adventures of S&B and a singular element. The main character recognizes that this fantasy world is one which is totally fictional and exists only within his own head, and makes the conscious decision to escape into a fantasy world within his own brain rather than deal with the real world. If that doesn't qualify as withdrawl from reality I don't know what does.
At the end of the movie one of the main antagonists Mr. Electric flees Planet Drool, Max's fantasy construct, to do some damage in the real world, and winds up right in the middle of Max's school, where he starts laying down some major whoopass on the students and the teachers. So effectively, an entity Max constructed within his own recognized fictional fantasy world which exists only within Max's head enters the real world and become's a very real threat to the people there. This mean's only one of two things, either the entity is a poltergeist, a hallucination created by the main character for the brain's of all the other people witnessing it, and the damage done by is actually telekinetics originating in Max's own brain, or Max's subconscious manifests an actual body for the fictional construct to inhabit, either way it that's what i would call magic with a k.
and what does this have to do with schizophrenia, well Max enters into his own fictional construct reality and comes into contact with entities whose own goals, or Will, are independent of the actual goal's of Max. An analysis of this, for me, provides to be readily relevant. Max, seen as the personality in control of the body at the beginning of the story, creates a fantasy world in his head, and populates it with fictional characters, control of which Max relegates to the unseen working of the unconscious, giving them each individual personalities according to parameters he describes. Max then later chooses to enter this construct, with the full knowledge that it only exists for him personally, Max then goes from the pilot personality of his body, to a character-personality in a constructed reality, populated by many other character-personalities, some which have achieved their own Will-autonomy. These other character-personalities recognize that as the pilot personality, Max's Will is paramount. But once drawn into his own construct, shaped by his Will, it becomes possible for these created characteer personalities to enact their own Will, to a degree, as long as they control certain constructs in that construct reality, Planet Drool. On Planet Drool, Max created the Dream Cave as the place where Drool can be controlled from, i.e. the pilot seat of the construct, so certain constructed character-personalities learn that whoever controls the Dream Cave control the over Will, and if Max can be drawn into the actual construct, he becomes subject to its rules, that the Dream Cave is the pilot chair of the construct, and Wills are secondary to that, so upon entering the construct Max is attacked by several construct personalities, in the hope of killing him within the rules he set up within his construct, and with the once pilot personality out of commission, Minus, the primary protagonist and leader of the rival construct personalities would be left to take control of Planet Drool, and the actual body would be left pilot-less, and they could then conquer that. So the Minus personality wanted to kill the Max personality so he could take permanent control of Max's body. That's what's called paranoid schizophrenia, when rival personalities duel for control of the brain. The magus that deals with servitors, and totems, and loa, and whatever thoughtform you can come up with faces that similar danger. |
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