An Alternative Perspective

In recent years I've been wondering if my experience of schizophrenia is the result of a number of atypical factors. I guess my doubts started as I learned more about cannabis use and schizophrenia. A substance induced psychosis arising from intense cannabis use usually clears up relatively quickly with abstinence, but that isn't quite as clear cut as it sounds. Cannabis can probably cause schizophrenia in young users especially, and if users don't stop their use during treatment they continue to experience symptoms of psychosis/schizophrenia. The fact that someone experiences psychosis with substance use suggests they are more vulnerable to developing schizophrenia in the first place and you find quite a few people diagnosed with schizophrenia that seems have been induced by prolonged cannabis use. I smoked a lot of cannabis after I grew 20 lb. with a friend one summer. I grew the 20 lb. because cannabis was so important to me, giving me a self confidence I lacked, reducing my quite disabling social anxiety and shyness.
The two other factors that probably have played a major role in my eventual schizophrenia were Dioxin poisoning and the trauma I suffered in Victoria, B.C.. Psychological torture is experiencing a revival in human history with the American CIA pushing the islamic terrorists into psychosis and complete personality disintegration at Guantanamo and other clandestine prisons. The Delta block at Guantanamo is not going to ever be seen on CNN by the American public. My experience of poverty and severe dioxin poisoning in Victoria was essentially a personality disintegration.
Before failing graduate school I had learned about the poison Dioxin and realized that it had a profound effect on me during adolescence. My first contact was in childhood though. My father had received a case of Phisohex as a free sample from the drug company when he had his family practice as a doctor in Kitchener. He would have used it to wash his hands before and after examining patients, in order to reduce the risk of infections. I have a memory when I was quite young , before the age of six when I developed a severe rash on my left or right temple in my hair. I was given the Phisohex to wash the region but instead I would pour some onto a hand cloth, rub it into the wound, and leave it there. Sometime later, within a week or two, I essentially stopped moving and became very quiet, very unusual for me. In animal research this is the "wasting syndrome" that is fatal for the lab animals being poisoned by dioxin. My mother becoming very concerned took me to see my father, who enquired how I was using the Phisohex. When I showed him he got very mad at me, so mad he frightened my mother, and from that point I rinsed the soap from the wound when I washed it. The wound cleared up and I stopped using the Phisohex, until I developed acne in my early teens, when I used buckets of the stuff and finished off the case my father had ordered years ago. Neither my father or mother thought for a second about the toxicity of that Phisohex, even though my father eventually became suicidal in his family practice and left it to work for a government agency. Back before 1960 it would be many years before the toxicity of substances like dioxin was established. I stopped using the Phisohex during university at some point when I could no longer afford it. I remember a friend warning me about it, but I was so convinced of its safety, that I laughed at their suggestion. I still have acne at age 53 but it has been pretty quiet, and daily washing with soap is all that is required.

My experience of adolescence was very strange, full of crippling anxiety, self doubt, and alienation. I had no male friends during adolescence, and lost my first and only true romance to the emasculating effects of dioxin. When I started to read about Dioxin in graduate school in toxicology pursuing a Masters in Environmental Studies, I realized that Agent Orange during the Vietnam War was used as chemical warfare and the Dioxin was used as an exocrine, (an endocrine disruptor). The Vietnamese were poisoned during and following the war. I had been poisoned from the case of Phisohex my father had received as a free sample. I sought medical attention but within a few months I was experiencing psychosis and hospitalized. I suspect that dioxin was mostly responsible for that psychosis. The other piece was the heavy cannabis use the year prior to graduate school which ended the summer before graduate school. I suspect that suddenly ending the use of cannabis after a year of heavy use may have complications of its own that our medical science hasn't examined yet. Both cannabis and dioxin cause brain damage, although probably nothing comparable to the brain damage caused by schizophrenia.

After being forced to drop out of that graduate Environmental Studies program and after another year of mostly unsuccessful employment I headed out west to Crofton on Vancouver Island where a friend was working. Crofton is a pulp and paper mill with a bar and a corner store. I lived there for five months and observed my health rapidly deteriorating. My physiology just fell apart. I couldn't stay warm, I couldn't digest carbohydrates of any sort. I experiencing profound disorganization and anxiety. I was also experiencing symptoms of psychosis that had to some degree faded during the previous year. I was unemployed, feeling drunk if I ate sugars, and frightening headaches if I ate more complex carbohydrates like bread. I had no muscle strength and manual labour was very painful. Digestion became virtually impossible. I literally couldn't eat anything. I also had no liver function if I ate and was forced to keep moving, walking or running to rebuild my liver function. I remember I had to run long and hard just before bedtime in order to literally be able to lie down and be inactive while asleep for 8 hours during the night. I could never sit in one place for very long. It was probably the most horrific period of my life. I had no money, and couldn't work. I couldn't eat anything and I couldn't sit still for very long. I have never been able to understand the loss of digestion, liver function, muscle strength, and cellular metabolism, until I read years later how dioxin creation occurs in the bleaching of pulp and paper. Dioxin is a fairly simple Chlorine compound, that occurs in the presence of carbon, oxygen, chlorine, and a certain temperature. Simply burning PVC pipe creates dioxin. Chlorine was used to bleach paper so it was a marketable white color. There must have been an awful lot of dioxin in and around Crofton. I recently read that Crofton had to get a new water supply for the town since I left, presumably because the old one was so contaminated with dioxin. Very few pulp and paper mills use chlorine these days, but they were a major source for dioxin production for many years.

Dioxin itself is a quasi military secret. The KGB used dioxin to drive people to suicide. The USA dumped large quantities on South Vietnam, and has repeatedly prevented any funding to investigate what the medical consequences were for those people. The VA has avoided recognizing Agent Orange claims by Vietnam war veterans. The actual research is ambiguous and unclear. There are a myriad of effects, that seem to vary considerably with, and within each population subjected to dioxin. It is considered a carcinogen, but that is probably the least serious effect. Unusual things happen with dioxin poisoning that have really never been seen before. In Sveso Italy where a population was accidentally exposed to a single cloud of dioxin, the most striking result was the sex ratio of births following exposure. Many more females than males were born. This effect on the next generation continues into the following generations. In a documentary I saw on Vietnam, a Vietnamese soldier's son was born missing a toe on his foot but his son's son was born without any legs at all. Dioxin would appear not only to disrupt hormone function but to literally rewrite the genetic code of the individual. Since it is unlikely I will ever have children that is not my primary concern. Dioxin has impacts on the liver function, on the immune system, and on various components of the endocrine system. It has an impacts on cellular metabolism, that is, every cell of the human organism. But individuals have individual sensitivities and my father and I seem to have been exceptionally sensitive.
Because Dioxin is lipotrophic and stored in fat tissues it is a particularly dangerous chemical. Most of the food we eat contains some dioxin, especially those composed of animal fats like ice cream, any meat, and freshwater fish. Once ingested dioxin can similarly be stored in your fat tissues until such time as you burn that fat, most likely when you lose weight during the rest of your life. A single dose of dioxin has a half life of 8-9 years in a human. It took about that long for my digestion to return after leaving Crofton. My ability to be warm took a few more years after that. Recently I lost 20 lbs and again had difficulty staying warm outside. That occurs 28 years after my exposure to dioxin. I have never had very good health during those 28 years, and have for the most part had to focus a lot of my energies on maintaining a daily exercise program. My liver and digestive function and muscle strength have never fully returned 28 years later and I don't expect they ever will. I've been taking Olestra for the last year though, and there has been a little improvement.
When I headed out west to Crofton I became reacquainted with the Sakyapa Tibetan Buddhist lama there. I had met him briefly in 1975 while travelling with a fellow university student and slept a few nights at his centre. He couldn't speak English very well, but I learned that he knew I had been very abusive to my younger sister as a child, and new to Canada he was curious who us Westerners, particularly me, thought was responsible for the consequences. He did this by spending a couple of hours playing alone with two young kids before dinner. At dinner the young boy did something exceptionally mean to his little sister, and I looked angrily at the parents who did nothing to reprimand the boy. Many years later I found out that the young boy is held responsible according to the laws of Karma in Tibetan buddhism not the parents. Karma was originally a Hindu concept that mostly legitimized the caste system and supported the belief in reincarnation. In Tibetan buddhism the ordained lamas apparently spent most of their time cleaning their students' karma. I had to experience the consequences of what I was held accountable for. The dharma or way which is held so highly by Tibetan buddhists in essence becomes the rationale for revenge, the foundation of the religion. Although theoretically believing in the sanctity of life Tibetan buddhism places an extremely low value on human life, especially those of females. There is a tremendous disparity between those at the top and those at the bottom.
I had bad karma from the virtual murder of my younger sister and it was something that I was responsible for, even though I was a very young child, my parents never intervened, and my behaviour was probably a consequence of the dioxin poisoning my father and I experienced. It had to be "cleaned" before I could begin my spiritual path. Fortunately Tibetan lamas specialize in cleaning people's karma in a single lifetime. Normally your karma would require several, possibly many lifetimes to be undone. Tibetan lamas are of course exempt from the laws of karma.
Tibetan Buddhism is a unique religion in that some very extraordinary yogic powers from India have survived in some form through their religious practice. These oral teachings are highly guarded secrets and quite esoteric, but they tend to only serve their religous superstitions. There is some form of physics, particularly field energy physics that Tibetans won't share with western science, that will probably be lost as climate change and peak oil change the world we live in. I eventually was able to run away from the trauma I was experiencing by copying an article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists on the difference between violent and peaceful societies. In violent societies children didn't receive much sensory stimulation of their skin as babies and/or they weren't allowed to engage in sexual relationships when they were adolescents. Peace loving societies were the opposite, but even if the babies weren't touched a lot the society had a second chance by tolerating adolescent sexuality. The histories of yogis such as "The 84 Mahasiddhas" and the various tales of famous Buddhists important to Tibetan lineages like the Life of Milarepa, Tilopa, Naropa, and many others are essentially a kind of torture porn. They all suffer horribly and become enlightened beings. Their torture is part of the learning process because they are learning a tantric practice from another male instead of a female. It is the fundamental flaw of their religious practice, and one I payed dearly for.

I didn't really survive my experience in Victoria being cleaned of my evil karma. After I escaped I attempted suicide a few years later in psychosis in Toronto. I sometimes wonder if I wasn't purposely poisoned out west so that I could experience the Tibetan Buddhist hells and be clean of my bad karma. Tibetans have hot hells and cold hells and hungry hells. A Preta is a hungry ghost with a long neck, a small mouth, and a large appetite. They are constantly hungry because they can't eat enough. It drives them mad actually. With dioxin poisoning I couldn't eat because I couldn't digest the food. It was a frightening experience to eat anything because it would cause me suffering. I also developed virtual addictions with certain foods, like honey, halvah, chocolate, coffee. I ate 2 lbs of honey every day for several years when I had finished work. I worked 10-12 hours a day, was phenomenally incompetent at it because anything I ate made me really stupid. I was mostly a handyman gardener in Victoria. I remember once doing some wiring and getting shocked four or five times before I finally found the right breaker to switch off. I sliced half of my finger off with a hedge trimmer once. The gardens I maintained always looked pitiful. Because I was so incompetent I had to do and redo everything two, or three times, which meant I couldn't charge very much for my time. I was alone in poverty, poisoned by dioxin, and being tortured by the lama through the only yogic power that seems to have any value in Tibet, the ability to torture people at a distance using a telekinetic power. Ironically the Tibetan lamas have become pretas who feed on the suffering of others, usually the suffering they themselves cause for others. Sometimes I wonder if it wasn't the aliens I later believed in who orchestrated my torture. But it seems more probable that belief that you are special to aliens from space was my only defence and escape from the Tibetan religion of revenge. Their entire religion is based in revenge, and unlike Christianity there is no redemption, no forgiveness for your lack of perfection. It is not so surprising that most lamas are sadists. Tibet per se is merely a island remnant of some previous stage of human evolution where the sanctity of life became a fundamental religious precept only because taking life is what they were most likely to do to each other. Instead they have had to be satisfied with torture. Torturing someone to suicide is allowed though, and presumably happened frequently. Tibetan society in short was the ultimate torture state with lamas using their yogic powers to torture their subjects into total subjugation.
Much of what is considered historical fact in Tibet has been rewritten many times. Their attitudes to women are a good example.In Tibetan culture and Asian culture in general women are inferior. Tibetan buddhists consider women to be disgusting because they are weak and sexually attractive. Given the status of women's liberation in the western world the Tibetan Buddhists have gone to great pains to cover up their crimes against female humanity, their actual history in Tibet. I have personally witnessed a really beautiful and truly exceptional sensuous woman be completely trashed by the Tibetan lama in Victoria. At best they are treated like the children they are responsible for caring for. A new born baby girl receives the blessing that she be reborn a male in her next life by a Tibetan Buddhist lama. The survival of women in an essentially stone age religious culture is interesting too. In Tibet 25% of the population were monks in the monasteries and yet polyandry where one woman has several husbands is most striking in the Himalayan culture. Given that in such a culture the infant mortality before adolescence was approaching 40%, what would the sex ratio of that infant mortality be? There were many thousands of monasteries but very few convents. I think that if the truth be known that probably 75% of the child mortality was female, and only 25% male. Every Tibetan family would have at least one son enter a monastery where they were fairly likely to survive. The Tibetan lama in Victoria was extremely anti sexual. It was the single most important principle of his belief system. No one learning the secret oral traditions was allowed to engage in sex and ultimately everyone who seriously takes up Tibetan buddhist practice become divorced and celibate, usually within a few years. Essentially Tibetan lamas trash the wife, steal the husband, and turn them into neutered choirboys. Tibetan Buddhism attracts a lot of western groupies. I can't fathom that. It is an incredibly sick and disgusting tradition, and one that places virtually no value on human life whatsoever. Exgirfriends and wives are totally trashed simply because of the risk they present the neutered students, who are of course likely to get back together with them. Tibetan lamas are the closest human form to the relgious concept of Satan unloosed on the planet. They specialize in sexual torture, usually for an indivduals whole life. People like me are considered unworthy of their life, because of my karma. It allows the lamas to torture me for my whole life, which is exactly what I am experiencing. But beyond karma the most important, central belief that Tibetan religion expresses is a total disgust it has for sexuality between men and women. There is only one thing more disgusting to a Tibetan lama than sex, it is women who thoroughly enjoy sex. They don't last very long.
Tibetan buddhist lamas believe they are religious warriors. Their is no religious tolerance in Tibetan belief. There is only one correct religion, buddhism. Their bodhisattva vows obligate them to convert, or as they say "conquer" ignorant nonbelievers. Everyone must accept their version of reality, the dharma. It's ironic that the very thing they accuse the Chinese of, religious intolerance, is so characteristic of their own beliefs. Tibetans don't have a Live and Let Live philosphy. They believe the exact opposite. Their mahayanha precepts require that they convert or conquer every last person on the planet to buddhism, so that they can eventually reach nirvana. They can be excedding viscioous in this, much like the Hitler youth were in Natzi Germany. They grow up desenititized to the suffering they cause. There is no ethics to their employ of ancient yoga techniques. It is their weapon to be used in conquering, educating, converting, whatever, nonbuddhists. I remember a saying from the 60s and 70s, "make love, not war" which at the time referred to achieving sexual orgasm with a partner also achieving a sexual orgasm. The expression has now become transformed to mean being nice not mean. It's original meaning is completely unacceptable to Tibetan buddhists in the literal sense. They think sexuality is the cause of war, when I think it's probably religion. Religion always seems to place human sexuality as its most important domain. It is the religious shit that claims authority over what is acceptable and unacceptable practice. The Sakyapa lama in Victoria coould not accept any sexuality in his students, and anal sexual pleasure was the worst for him. I witnessed an incredibly beautiful woman, who I admired greatly be tortured so thoroughly by him, that she wished she was dead, and was only staying alive because of her child. Most Tibetan women end up as nannies. It's the only acceptable role for women in Tibetan society. I was reading that in New York, Tibetan nannies are considered the best

I experienced mostly abject humiliation with continuous and unpredictable physical pain. It involved constant guilt, unpredictable reality distortions, and constant persecution. I guess my addiction to sweets was being used to develop the self discipline not to touch them, but I always gave in to the pleasure, usually in a completely uncontrolled way. The physical pain was the cold, the work, and small wounds that never healed very fast that could be used to inflict pain while they remained wounds. Celibacy in itself is a type of torture especially when it is not by choice. In many ways I was denied pleasure experiences of any sort. I couldn't even take pleasure in the work I accomplished, or in the company of other humans. When I went to puja everybody had tea after and the lama introduced me to papaya juice instead because it has metabolizing enzymes that aid in digestion. I became a Tibetan groupie fairly quickly, agreeing at first that I had harmed my sister and maybe I had bad karma, and then later trying to escape and realizing I had lost the will to. I suffered 3 or 4 more years after that until I was finally released. Within a few months I was very psychotic, failed in my attempted suicide, and remained in an untreated psychosis for several years.

Torture in and of itself can lead to psychosis. I read an article about trauma in Guantanamo prison guards, a lot of which goes undiagnosed, and there are quite a few prisoners there apparently on the edge of psychosis. Excessive torture leads to complete personality disintegration and eventual suicide. Torture is an intensely personal, severely destructive experience. The individual is permanently damaged. I attempted suicide a few years later believing I was in contact with aliens who were offering me a new human body, the body of a wealthy man who lived in a civilized place, the French Riviera. My body was no longer fit for human habitation. I had dragged my corpse around for a few years in Toronto, after my escape from Victoria, taking pleasure only in the experience of sleep, which I looked forward to every day. Living in a cockroach infested rooming house with a painful job that I could never quit, I was willing to kill my body and force the aliens to move my consciousness to a better one. It was essentially an attempted escape from what I had become, an escape from my experiences of Tibetan buddhism in Victoria.
The aliens coming to my rescue is still something I'd like to believe in, although it's basically a quasi religious belief to find refuge from my human experiences. Every once in awhile during my life I hear a voice, usually laughing, which says something I don't usually understand until later. In Victoria it was an actual person who said they were going to give me a haircut. Their existence is really suspect because they communicate through movies and songs mostly, talking to me directly only occasionally. They were the last friend. All other imaginary friends became very powerful enemies. They poisoned me with dioxin, but in the end they had selected me to be the surviving male of humanity. The story I was told is that only one man and woman survive, much like Noah's ark, to restart humanity again. They are a coping fantasy that returned when a Tibetan lama moved to Guelph and I discovered that Victoria was not an exceptional experience. Torture is what Tibetan lamas do with their yogic powers. That is all that they do. I had personally expected more, but Tibetans were barely out of the stone age when the Chinese invaded, and their beliefs and values reflect that. After several attempts to learn vase breathing, a type of meditation that has very old roots in India, my previous buried trauma and subsequent belief in aliens reemerged. If the aliens realy exist I would have to conclude that they are actually worse than the Tibetan buddhists, although the two have a lot in common.
Eighteen years ago when I moved from Toronto to Guelph I started fresh, believing that everything could be explained by schizophrenia. I had trouble sleeping and many nightmares, both of which I still experience. I struggled on my own. My father said my letters were that of a 6 year old, but at least there were no Tibetans in Guelph. When I got depressed and frightened I even wrote to the lama in Victoria to see if I could come back. Now that my memories of torture have been reawakened, I've been reading about the long term effects of torture and dioxin, not very encouraged by what has been written. Torture for the most part is permanent, and while it may not be very visible on the surface, it more or less leaves permanent scars in functioning. Being in isolated torture is a critical quality. The Jewish people who survived concentration camps were still able to marry and raise families after the event because they had each other in the camps. The same is true for the Vietnam veterans who had each other during combat. When a group of Vietnam or World War two veterans get together, they almost always talk about their war experience, for the rest of their lives. Even then there were some Vietnam veterans who came back from the war and disappeared into the forests. It took a lot of coaxing to get them to come out and rejoin society. They would go into the forest with a Bowie knife, and years later be found wearing animal skins, looking pretty wild. I expect I will always love the forest. I have no male friends, no lovers, no real close relationships of any sort. I am also not worried about the extinction of humanity which seems inevitable, because I'm not really involved. A part of me wants to start the final nuclear war by dropping a nuke on Jerusalem. A part of me wants to develop the virus that kills 6.6 billion people. The nuclear war will be the end of humanity, the virus would save it. There are no other choices.
I'm convinced that male domination that has existed since the last ice age has predestined humanity to extinction. Everybody needs to see Al Gore's movie on global warming and also learn about Peak Oil. Peak oil happened in 2006 apparently. From here on in the production of oil in the world decreases. Peak Oil production follows the peak oil discovery. One curve is followed by the other. A geophysicist by the name of Hubbert predicted it some years ago. What he didn't mention though is that peak oil is inevitably followed by peak population. That is, at some point not too far from now the human population will peak and start to decline because there isn't enough oil to support the number who are being born. Peak population probably isn't going to be a pretty future. I was told by the aliens that cannibalism will re-emerge and become quite common. The Tibetan lamas access some type of energy force that is unknown to western science. One of the yogas called dummo yoga is the ability to dry seven wet blankets with your body heat on a cold Tibetan winter night. That energy form, what ever it is could be used to as a clean energy source. The Tibetan lamas will never share their secrets. They guard their lineages and they are not likely to give that up.
You would think there has to be some moral to this history, some lesson to be learned, but the truth is as Homer Simpson once said, "It's just a bunch of stuff that happened". Random chance. I still have to live with what approximates a schizophrenia spectrum disorder and the medication seems to help a lot. As I approach the end of my life there is unfortunately very few options available to me. Rome wasn't built in a day and there is no next time. I rather like the idea of simply being a cow in a green pasture, just existing in a contented kind of way until I decide it's time for me to die. I remember being at a music concert when I was in university and the audience and I were stunned by the musician's talent on a wide variety of instruments. He humbly pointed out that playing the instrument is a collection of cheap tricks. That's the way I feel about the Tibetan yogic powers. Their cheap tricks aren't worth the price you pay for them. I only wish you could be free from them if you so choose. Once they select their victim they will follow them, in my case twenty years after I escaped, and then torture you until you commit suicide. They have no respect for the laws of the countries where they live considering themselves vastly superior to mere mortals. They have nothing but contempt for democracy. They believe in a feudalism where lamas are the law, and where lamas torture at will. Sexual torture is what they enjoy the most, and it's what they have to share with the world. So take some advice I paid for with my life. Stay as far away from them as you can.

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