And what I feel by extension is that the evolutionary purpose of psychosis is qualitative change within fixed brains. There has to be nothing there for a moment, for something new to emerge. The problem in our contemporary world is that if you cannot embrace this radical change, then the process can never complete, and you get stuck in the intermediary ground between one sanity and another. And our system, by labeling, encourages people accidentally to stay there. It medicates them so the process cannot complete.
I think many rituals of past tribal peoples, who knew much more about many important aspects of life than we do with what we assert to be our “science”, understood that a butterfly is nothing for a period of time after it is a caterpillar, and that if you break open the cocoon too soon, what you see and get is a muddled mess. You cannot conclude from that that nothing was happening, or that butterflies are impossible.