Psychosis is also a conceptual framework that affects how the sufferer perceives and interprets the "facts" of his or her experience, just as the conceptual framework a scientist is under will affect how he or she interprets and perceives "objective data". If I already believe the FBI has bugged my apartment, and is monitoring me, I will see confirmation in this when I go jogging, and see a van drive by very slowly, its driver with an earphone in one ear. My conceptual framework will determine how I interpret, and perceive, my world.

But more explanation is needed. Why do I believe the FBI is after me in the first place? This was a delusion I actually had in the mid-1990s, so in order to explain it fully, I will explain first what I believed, as best as I can remember.

I believed the FBI was after me for murder, but that I was innocent. Whom had I murdered? Jason Stuart Ratcliff, who they thought was dead. Did I think I was not Jason Stuart Ratcliff? No: I really was he, but the FBI was under the mistaken impression that I was an imposter who had murdered him.

This is what the FBI believed:

When had this imposter murdered him, and taken his place? The imposter had murdered him with his father (my father) when his father had brought JSR to California. The imposter had then presented himself to the hospital where JSR was supposed to be admitted, and no one there knew what JSR looked like. This imposter was presently bugged and spied upon, in order to gather evidence to make an arrest. The arrest was imminent.

This is what I believed. It is so complex it is somewhat difficult to explain in a clear way.

Notice that the belief system itself is orderly. I am not being bugged by some friend I had in Colorado; it would take quite a bit of convincing to get me to believe that. But I know the FBI regularly bugs its suspects, and so if I am a suspect, it makes sense that I am being bugged. If I really am under investigation, it is perfectly logical that I would be bugged. But why do I think I’m under investigation? I am, after all, innocent. But many innocents are, after all, put in prison for murder, and even a trial does not show that they are innocent. Do innocents have to worry about being under investigation then? Well, if innocents are put in prison for murder, and are later cleared only on DNA evidence, I would say this is reasonable concern for any innocent.

Notice that I am by now leaving behind the webs of significance of my culture. My culture says of innocents put into prison, "That’s unfortunate but unavoidable," but it does not say, "I ought to be concerned about this happening to me." But when we read of cultures that persecute witches, we say, "Isn’t everyone afraid that someone will accuse him or her?" which seems a logical concern, though inside these cultures they may not worry about such things.

The schizophrenic shifts his webs of significance, so that the same events or facts have a different impact on him than they would to "normal" people. The impact these have on him are not necessarily less rational; they merely lead him into beliefs not shared by everyone else. But let us get back to the delusion.

If innocents are put into prison, this is cause for concern for all innocents. So I ought to be concerned. Would I know it if the FBI were monitoring me? Probably not; they monitor people in secret, because if the people knew it they would not say anything to incriminate themselves. Here is where I begin to look into an unknowable situation, and, with creative imagination, begin to render that situation knowable through a belief system. I would not know it if they were monitoring me. Are they monitoring me? I do not know. I do not like not knowing. (Consider this unconscious.) It would be better if I knew.

Since this unknown disturbs me, I must do something about it. It worries me, and so I begin to fantasize with "if, then" type reasoning. Soon, I have built such a system with "if, then" propositions, that I cannot keep track of it all. I have forgotten the original "if", though in fact there are many of these, drawn from disparate sources, which would appear unrelated to a normal mind. I connect all these together with "if, then" thoughts, so that disparate observations of the real world make sense in the context of the belief system I am building.

In the context of that belief system, these disparate events are related, in a way no more irrational than disparate events in history or mythology come together in the webs of significance of society. Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin. Abraham Lincoln became president. These are not necessarily related in any logical fashion, but their relation has significance to the culture. What I was doing with this delusion was (not intentionally) seeing my own meaning in disparate events, leaving behind to a degree the webs of significance of my culture, and creating my own.

And so once I had the idea in my head that the FBI was monitoring me, I began with this irrational idea as a premise, and tried to logically figure out what they could believe I had done. I appeared much different than I had when I had lived in Colorado. The FBI, if they looked at photographs, would certainly notice this. Perhaps they thought I was an imposter who had murdered the real me. The transfer to the hospital in Los Angeles was the perfect time for a murder and replacement by an imposter, provided my father was in on it. This went on and on with seemingly logical steps, so that, for every question, a logical answer was supplied. Merely thinking about this whole scheme, and obsessing on it, tended to make it become more "real" to me.

The logical manner of my thoughts, the way these "if, then" thoughts were perfectly logical, as long as one does not realize that the original "if" is an unknowable and is being merely speculated, tended to make me believe I was not being irrational in my thought processes. I was suffering before the incomprehensible, not knowing what my daily experiences "meant" in the way that normal minds naturally do. Cast into this incomprehensible world, I began to obsess on things I could not know—was I under investigation?—and render the incomprehensible familiar and knowable. Logic was not lacking; the intuitive way in which we all know what experience and our world "means" was.

Once I had this personal, paranoid worldview, I would speak to the bugs in my apartment. As I was doing so, I simply assumed there were bugs in my apartment, in the way that in our culture we assume things, true or not, based on reason or not, are true, merely because of the significance we see in these beliefs. The idea that the FBI had bugged me was only one concept in a vast web of concepts which I could not think about all at once. I could only live at any given time with one part of it in my consciousness, though that particular part was full of significance and meaning for me. Our culture is the same way: we are not conscious at any given time of all the reasons behind the reasons for all our customs and beliefs: but any particular belief has meaning for us, and so we are able to believe it without always being conscious at a particular time of all the evidence for it.

So far, we have seen that schizophrenia is a disorder that affects the meaning seen in events and actions. Seeing different meanings in the same event alone does not make one psychotic. The psychiatric community is well aware of the care that must be exercised in diagnosing people from alien cultures schizophrenic. The meaning they see in events may seem bizarre to us, but they may not be bizarre in the native culture. If bizarre meaning is seen in events because of a cultural context, it is not psychosis; if bizarre meaning is seen in events due to a personal shift in the webs of significance with which all minds, with one belief system or another, apprehend the world, it is psychosis.

The causes of the disorder won’t be made clear here; they are not even clear to psychiatrists. This is a description of the disorder as it was manifested in my personal case, which I believe will apply, to varying degrees, to some other schizophrenics. It is a disorder that attacks the mind’s ability to see the significance of events as it has been conditioned to see it, and replaces this significance with meaning that is created by the imagination.

Many beliefs of our society are outright bizarre, and others are blatantly false. We assume Al Qaeda is evil: evil is their motivation, and they only want to perpetrate evil. I do not know much about Al Qaeda, but I do believe that very few cultures champion evil, and even sacrifice their lives to perpetrate it. I have no doubt that they believe what they are doing is good, and that their webs of significance put them in a meaningful struggle for God and justice. To them, our attack on Afghanistan is just as evil and unjustified as their attack on the World Trade Center. But it is not psychotic for a member of our society to say, "Al Qaeda only wants to bring about evil," even if this belief is false. The belief has truth to our culture, without being true. It has a place in our own webs of significance. When a culture at large believes irrational falsities, it is not psychosis; when an individual believes irrational falsities that have nothing to do with what anyone else believes, it is psychosis.

Once the meaning of events and actions is disordered, and not seen through the webs of significance of society at large, concepts begin to form which serve as a framework for all experience. These can be expressed in the paranoid statement "The FBI has bugged me" and others like it that are involved in the delusion. So the schizophrenic begins to develop his own, personal "cultural" context. "Culture", though, as the word is defined by anthropologists, can never be personal, but must be shared. Nonetheless, schizophrenia seems to put the mind into the mode of automatically creating its own culture.

Once this paranoid worldview has been firmly established as a belief system, it becomes the means by which all perceptions and experiences are perceived and interpreted; and thus experience takes on the appearance of supporting this belief system, everything only being analyzed in terms of its ideas. What if an experience flatly contradicts it? In my own case, the delusion crumbled.

Let me explain. My friend called and asked if I wanted to meet him at Carl’s Junior, as we often did. Through my paranoid worldview, I perceived him, in the meaning I imposed on our conversation, as suggesting (hiding his meaning from the wiretap) that I meet with him so that he could help me escape to Mexico. Were the situation actually real and happening, one can imagine such a suggestion being covertly communicated. This was the way I "perceived" the phone call. A normal mind, if the FBI really were wiretapping his phone, could accurately discern such covert meaning from a friend who really was trying to help him escape, though not based precisely upon merely the words used in the conversation.

To make a long story short, I met him at the restaurant. He suggested we go to his place to watch a movie. He did not often suggest this, and I thought this was when I would make my escape. When we got there I felt I had to communicate plainly with him, so we could make our plans. I told him we should speak outside, as his house was probably bugged. He explained to me that I was paranoid, and he had in fact no intention of helping me escape, and he had no idea what I was talking about. Since my delusion had so much involved his intentions toward me, this experience simply could not be interpreted or explained through means of the delusion, and the entire delusion left me. The next day I woke up, and knew it had all been fantasy, shaking my head and saying, "How was I fooled again?"

This does not mean that any delusion can be cured in this way. In the past, when a delusion has been significantly well-entrenched, if an experience could not be explained by means of it, this experience has served to alter my belief system to account for the experience. The experience becomes absorbed into the belief system, and the belief system is changed to make allowance for it. When I was suffering from thought broadcasting, believing everyone knew my thoughts, someone at the hospital explained to me that he could not hear my thoughts. But I was so caught up in my delusion that I thought, "He is lying, because he knows if I knew I was a telepath, there would be no way for me to get control of my thoughts again. He is trying to get me to forget I’m a telepath, to make it easier for me to avoid the thoughts I don’t want others to hear." And thus I began to believe I had come to the hospital to forget I was a telepath.

Many schizophrenics have bizarre personal "customs". A female schizophrenic will wear two dresses, one over the other. Another schizophrenic will not bother to tie his shoes. This can be explained by either a loss of the meaning things like tying shoes has to other members of the society, or a positive replacement of this meaning with a personal meaning in going with one’s shoes untied. I suspect both cases happen.

I remember a time shortly after being released from the first hospital I mentioned in Part 1. I was not under any delusion. But as I was shaving, I somehow forgot if one is supposed to shave only the face, or all the way to the hairs on the Adam’s apple. I had hairs on the Adam’s apple; but that was not the face, and people generally talked about "shaving the face". I remember standing there wondering what to do. The act of shaving was no longer natural to me. Most men do not stop and question this: they merely shave all the way past the Adam’s apple without thinking of it, and this to them is what you call "shaving the face". But I had to actually try to figure out what exactly is meant by this phrase. I ended up letting the hairs on my Adam’s apple grow, until someone told me I ought to shave them.

Since the delusion I have examined in this chapter took place so long ago, and I have an unclear memory of how exactly it first came into my mind, it would be good to examine another whose beginning I do remember, and which was somewhat less complex.

This delusion happened upon the occurrence of two events. The Catholic church in my neighborhood was set fire to criminally one night. The police were investigating. The next day, I found a pair of new shoes that were my size in an alley in my neighborhood. I needed new shoes, and they happened to be a style I liked, so I took them. These two events I could not interpret in any meaningful way. Who would leave new shoes by the trash? This was an unknown I would seek to render familiar and knowable with a belief system. Why had they left them the night of the church fire? The connection between these events had meaning for me. Most minds would not infuse such a connection with meaning, but my mind did. I ended up believing I was being framed for the arson. The shoes were tainted with evidence of the crime, and were the police to find them in my possession, this evidence could be used against me in court. Thus, someone had left them knowing they were a style I liked and my size, hoping I would take them into my possession. But why was I being framed? Obviously, the Catholics at that church could not frame me had the arson really been by someone other than them—they wouldn’t be able to taint the shoes with evidence. Bit by bit, after first establishing answers to my incomprehensible experience—which I cannot infuse with meaning to the same degree of accuracy as everyone else—I follow the logical consequences of those answers and render my experience comprehensible. I ended up with a belief system such that the Catholics had gotten a copy of the short story I wrote years ago (with anti-Catholic symbolism) and had decided I was a danger and had to be framed and put into prison. Thus, the Catholics had set fire to their own church, tainted the shoes with evidence, and left the shoes where I would find them. Notice that the only answers I wanted to know, the only experiences I wanted to understand, were the burning of the Catholic church (why would someone burn a Catholic church? I thought only African American churches were targeted for arson) and the new shoes found in the alley, which was such a lucky find I couldn’t make sense of it. The rest of the delusion was only made up of logical consequences of my answers to these two experiences—the answers only led to more questions (who would frame me? etc.). Had I the tools to accurately interpret all my experience, such that a healthy mind is given with socialization and personal experiences, I would not be left to interpret my experience in my own fantastical way.