The Experience of Schizophrenia

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... We start again from the split of our experience into what seems to be two worlds, inner and outer. ...

The person who has entered this inner realm (if only he is allowed to experience this) will find himself going, or being conducted -- one cannot clearly distinguish active from passive here -- on a journey.

This journey is experienced as going further "in" as going back through one's personal life, in and back and through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam and perhaps even further into the beings of animals, vegetables, and minerals.

In this journey there are many occasions to lose one's way, for confusion, partial failure, even final shipwreck, many terrors, spirits, demons to be encountered that may or may not be overcome.

We do not regard it as pathologically deviant to explore a jungle or climb Mount Everest. We feel that Columbus was entitled to be mistaken in his construction of what he discovered when he came to the New World. We respect the voyager, the explorer, the climber, the space man. It makes far more sense to me as a valid project -- indeed, as a desperately and urgently required project for our time -- to explore the inner space and time of consciousness.

No age in the history of humanity has perhaps so lost touch with this natural healing process that implicates some of the people whom we label as schizophrenic. No age has so devalued it, no age has imposed such prohibitions and deterrences against it, as our own. Instead of the mental hospital, a sort of reservicing factory for human breakdowns, we need a place where people who have travelled further and, consequently, may be more lost than psychiatrists and other sane people, can find their way further into inner space and time, and back again. Instead of the degradation ceremonial of psychiatric examination, diagnosis and prognostication, we need, for those who are ready for it, (in psychiatric terminology, often those who are about to go into a schizophrenic breakdown) an initiation ceremonial, through which the person will be guided with full social encouragement and sanction into inner space and time, by people who have been there and back again.
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What is entailed then is:
(i) a voyage from outer to inner,
(ii) from life to a kind of death,
(iii) from going forward to going back,
(iv) From temporal movement to temporal standstill,
(v) from mundane time to eonic time,
(vi) from the ego to the self,
(vii) from outside (post-birth) back into the womb of all things (pre-birth),

and then subsequently a return voyage from
(1) inner to outer,
(2) from death to life,
(3) from the movement back to a movement forward once more,
(4) from immortality back to mortality,
(5) from eternity back to time,
(6) from self to a new ego,
(7) from a cosmic fetalization to an existential rebirth.
</blockquote>
[...]

One would hope that society would set up places whose express purpose would be to help people through the stormy passages of such a voyage.

Source: <a href=http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/039471475X/sr=8-1/qid=1151458135/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3659112-5412662?ie=UTF8>The Politics of Experience - R.D. Laing</a>