One hears that he sought police protection, a doing that would play into his paranoid grandiosity: for one must be important for the police to be protecting one individually. Nobody wants to harm him. He ought to join all people and work for their mutual good, rather than always trying to pull them down; he must give up his perverse paranoid interest in pulling people down and develop the healthy trait of accentuating only the good in people.)

A STORY OF CREATION/METHOLOGY

I believe that every human being must have a story of creation, albeit a mythology. We do ask questions such as: how did we come into being? In as much as we ask such questions, an answer must be attempted.
Science provides an answer in the area of energy and matter. I am talking about the Big Bang hypothesis that claims that fifteen billion years ago, all matter was in a ball the size of an atom, called state of Presingularity and that this ball shattered and threw its contents out and in nanoseconds space and time were invented and subsequently particles came into being, out of nowhere, and that these particles, in time, combined to form atoms and in time atoms differentiated into the 104 elements we have on the current Chemical table and that the elements formed molecules that in time produced the stars and planets and eventually biological life forms and ultimately human beings. The Big Bang story is a fascinating imaginative fairy tale. We work with it in the area of physical science but we do not have any illusions that it is the truth. It is simply a mythology that seems to answer our question of how matter came into being.
We also need a story on how we, as human beings, came into being. We have Charles Darwin’s views on how animals evolved. Interesting hypothesis, that. However, it does not explain how the sense of I, the self came into being.
No one knows how the self came into being. Neuroscientists claim that the self is epiphenomenal, that is, a product of the configuration of atoms in our brains, the result of the dance of electrical ions in our nervous system. Oh, really? Let us amuse ourselves differently.
There are millions of stories on how people came into being. Indeed, every human group had its own story, and every individual has his own twist on his group’s story of creation, all of them false. These stories, false as they are, respond to our need to understand our origin.
As the world moves towards one universal culture, clearly, all the particularistic stories of creation will die and a universal story of creation will replace them. (See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth.)
The story of creation in the Christian bible, the story of Adam and Eve is obviously not true and, as far as, such stories go is not particularly interesting, certainly not as interesting as the Igbo story of creation.
In as much as we need a story of creation and past ones seem not to satisfy us, consider this story of creation; it is not the truth, but it approximates the truth. I will merely summarize it here for I have elaborated on it elsewhere.
There is God. God is one. God is everything and everything is God. God is everywhere and everywhere is in God.
God extended his one self into other selves. He gave all of his self to each of his extended selves. All of God is in each of his extension; aka the son of God. The Son of God is in God and in other extensions of God, other children of God.
God is in us and we are in God and in each other. There is no space or gap between us and God and each of us and the rest of us. Where God ends and his son begin is nowhere. We are all joined as one self, the one self of God. We all share the one self of God; we all share the one mind of God.
God is creative and created us; he gave us, his creations, his creative ability and we do create, like God. We create with the creative power of God in us, not with our own powers. As it were, we co-create with God.
God and his children are infinite in numbers.
God has always existed. God has no beginning and no end. There was never a time when there was no God.
Since each Son of God is an extension of God, therefore, each Son of God has existed for as long as God has existed.
Yet God created his children; they did not create God and themselves. Though all creation is changeless, permanent and eternal yet God created them all.
The difference between the Son of God and God is that God created him and he did not create God.

The Son of God resented the fact that God created him, pretty much as adolescents on earth resent being the children of their parents and want to reverse the process and be their parents’ parents. We wanted to create God, create ourselves and create each other.
In other words, we wanted to kill God and become God, chase God out of his creatorship throne and usurp it and sit there. (All these are metaphors, so do not get carried away and think that we are talking literal truth here; enjoy the metaphor, they actually approximate the truth but are not the truth.)
We cannot create God and ourselves. But the wish to do so was so strong that we cast a magical spell, what Hinduism calls Maya, on ourselves, and seems to have gone to sleep. In our sleep, we dream that we are the author of reality, that we created God, each other and ourselves. We invented our separated self-concepts, our egos, our self-images, and our personalities. Our personalities are replacement selves; we use them to substitute the selves God created us as. God created us as unified with him, a unified self; we seem to have destroyed that holy self and invented separated selves housed in bodies for us. On earth, in the dream of specialness and separation, we see ourselves as in bodies and separated from each other.

Our world is the opposite of heaven: separation is the opposite of union, time is the opposite of eternity, change is the opposite of changelessness; mortality is the opposite of immortality, hate is the opposite of love etc.
We are on earth to oppose heaven’s will. God wills union and we wish separation; God wills sameness and equality and we wish differences and inequality. What we wish we saw in dreams. (See Helen Schucman, A Course in Miracles. Also see M. The Gospel of Ramakrishna.)
(The paranoid person wishes that he were superior to other persons, acts as such, and seems so in his dream world, hence the paranoid personalities called Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin seemed like superior persons, when, in fact, they felt inferior; in truth they are the same and equal with all people).
Each of us wishes to seem superior to other persons and invents situations that would make him seem so. The paranoid personality invented an inferior body for himself, feels inferior and compensates with a superior feeling self-concept. We have seen how he goes about feeling superior to other people when, in fact, he is not superior to any one. Hitler and the Nazis felt superior to other people, when, in fact, they were not. They felt superior to Jews, and killed Jews. They felt superior to Slavic people and killed them. People do act on their insane ideas.
The paranoid Igbo brother in naija-politics feels superior to other persons and acts as such. He sets himself up as god and from that imaginary standpoint criticizes every person. He satisfies his desire for superiority by making other people’s lives very miserable. Of course, he is not superior to any one; he is merely dreaming superiority.
But make no mistake about it: people act on their wishes. Thus, the brother acts on his delusion of superiority and does not want to see himself as the same and equal with other members of the forum. He is capable of doing harm to other people. In pursuit of his fictional superiority, he can hurt, even kill people. One must, therefore, keep studied eyes on him. Paranoid persons do kill people, so he must be watched and if he acts out arrest and place him in a psychiatric hospital.

In my experience, Igbos tend to fancy themselves smarter than other Nigerian groups. They behave as such. But in truth, they are just like other Nigerian groups. The Igbo sense of superiority is delusional sense of superiority. No ethnic group is superior to others, just as no race is superior to others. But like deluded paranoid persons, Igbos tend to think that just because they want to seem superior to others, that other Nigerian groups should accept their delusion and see them as their superiors.
In terms of material culture, most other Nigerian groups are, in fact, more developed than Igbos. The Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba and Edo are certainly more developed than Igbos in terms of socio cultural structures.
The relevant point here is that Igbos tend to deceive themselves into believing that they are superior to other Nigerian groups when, in fact, they are not so.
What the individual and group needs to do is relinquish his/their sense of superiority and come to see himself/themselves as the same and equal with all people.
To the extent that a human being accepts his sameness and equality with all people, and behaves as such, he unifies with all people.
In union with all people, the individual attains inner peace and joy.
I must confess, however, that the temptation to seem superior to other people is not easily relinquished, even by those of us who know the truth of human equality. I still find myself wishing to seem superior to other people, if not in my conscious life, but in my dreams at night. Consider the following dream that I had two days ago.

DREAM AND DREAM INTERPRETATION

Sigmund Freud attempted to understand people’s dreams. As he saw it, in their daily lives, people seem to behave in a very rational manner, but that they are not really rational. He believes that people’s dreams give us an opportunity to really understand what is in their minds. (He also employed other means to get to understand the real person; he believed that we tend to repress our true wishes into the unconscious mind and that if only we can reach that level of our mind that we would get to see what is hidden there; thus, in therapy sessions, he had his clients lay on a couch and speak without checking to make sense of what they said; they were to say whatever comes to their mind, uncensored; they were not to block their thinking, free associate, to not try to make them rational and just to let them come out, flow; the idea was for them to bring what was repressed into their unconscious to the conscious mind; to dreg it out, catharsis, and Freud would then analyze it. Freud believed that people wished to have sex with both men and women and are polymorphous sexual perverse and hid this socially unacceptable idea in their unconscious; that, in fact, they want to have sex with their parents but hid such wishes in their unconscious mind; this is the so-called oedipal complex. See Freud, Dream Interpretation.)
Freud believed that in dreams we gratify what we wish that we could not gratify in conscious living; society prevents us from doing many things, we internalized social norms as our superego and that checks our Id wishes and the ego balances the two wishes. In dreams, we gratify our day time wishes that we could not gratify lest society punish us. To Freud, dreams are the royal road to the unconscious.
Other psychoanalysts also employed Dream analysis to understand the true individual. Adler, Jung and others explored dreams.
I believe that dreams are useful for the individual to understand his real wishes and real self. However, I do not believe that other people can accurately interpret the individual’s dreams, for dreams are highly specific and particular to the individual; there are no universally accepted dream interpretations.

My wife’s alarm clock went off at 7AM and woke us up. I went back to sleep. I dreamed. In this dream, I and other members of my family were walking along our suburban street. I looked back and saw what, as kids at Lagos, we used to call agwuepo, a shit carrier. During my youth at Lagos folks had tins in out houses into which they defecated. Once or twice a week, “shit carrier” would come to their house, pour their shit into a large tin and carried it off, usually on their heads. If you were walking down the streets at night, you would likely see the shit carrier doing his job and, as would be expected, spreading the smell of shit with him.
The shit carriers wore rags over their face, perhaps to cover their noses and breathe less of the feces they were carrying and to disguise their identity, so that no one knew who they were. Their covered feces and the shit they were carrying made them look scary to little boys and we fled from them. (We used to think that they could kidnap and put us in the tin of shit on their heads and go throw us away.)
Shit-carriers were low in the social pecking order and were dreaded by us kids. No one wanted to be an agwuepo. That is to say that folks wanted to be superior to them.

Now back to my dream. I was walking on an American middle class suburban street and looked behind me and saw the shit carrier coming towards us. I ran to the bank of the street to avoid contact with him. The other members of my family did not make much ado about him, they just stepped aside, as he walked pass them, indeed, my wife even said hi to him. (The dream has relevance for me, not other people.) We continued on our walk. Then I looked behind me, again. I saw another shit carrier coming towards us. Again, I jumped to the side of the street. The shit career followed me to where I jumped to. Somehow I got home and was lying on a humongous bed, a bed that could contain the entire family of five (husband, wife and three children). We were all lying comfortable on the bed when I noticed that the shit carrier was lying with us, right in our middle. I freaked out and jumped up, wondering what in the world the man was doing on my bed?
He got up with me and went to the refrigerator and came up with fruit cocktails in small plastic cuts and began handing them out to the members of the family. I was aghast; thinking that the man must have contaminated our refrigerator by touching it and certainly the fruit cocktails was filled germs? I was not going to eat what the man touched. In the meantime, other members of the family accepted the cocktails from him and ate them and thanked him graciously for preparing such a delicious meal for them.
My face was all contorted as the man handed me a cup filled with cocktail of grapes and other fruit goodies. I was thinking of a polite way to refuse it, and not to eat it. At that point, I woke up, aware of the cocktail in my hand. I looked at the clock and it was exactly 7:15 AM. That is, the sleep and dream took place within an interval of fifteen minutes.
The dream was very vivid in my mind, so I went to a room we converted into our office and sat in front of a computer and typed it.
After typing it verbatim, I began to wonder what it meant. Here is the thought that came to my mind. The shit career represents lower class persons, that is, inferior persons. I was running from the low class shit carrier. I did not want to have anything to-do with him. I wanted to be superior to him. I had no respect for him.
The significance of this dream is that despite my conscious acceptance of my sameness and equality with all people that at the unconscious level that I feel superior to some people, the shit carrier of this world. Shit carriers symbolize poor people. I wanted to seem superior to poor people.
I kept reflecting on the import of the dream and the obvious hit me. I talk about equality but, in truth, avoid the poor. Generally, if a person is not well read, I tended to avoid him.
What is the point? The point is that at the unconscious level, I still had the wish to be superior to other people. Consciously, I do not want to be superior to other people, but unconsciously the wish is still there.
In my dream, my wish was satisfied for me, for dreams provide us opportunity to satisfy our wishes that we cannot gratify in wake life.
The salience of the dream is that I still had work to do; I still must work to see every person as the same and equal with me.
The dream teaches me that we are all a family, that shit carrier are part of my family…he was laying in the same bed with my family and eating with us, so he is symbolically my family member and I must treat him as such, for all people are children of one family, God’s unified family.
On a different note, the dream means that it is very difficult for people to accept their sameness and equality. I found it difficult to accept the shit carrier as my equal and family member.

The paranoid personality finds it almost impossible to see himself as the same and equal with all people. Can you imagine our Internet paranoid Igbo character accepting that he is the same as other people? The man has the illusion that he is better than other people.
A few minutes again, I minimized my typing and read his posting on the forum and, as usual, he sounded pedantic, convoluted and superior, all in a childish effort to seem erudite and superior to other people.
This man admires the achievers of this world and has contempt for the losers of this world. His talk is replete with admiration for the powerful men and women of the world and disrespect for poor people. No, this man would rather die than accept his equality with poor folks. (See Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality.)
The point is that it is difficult to give up the wish for superiority. Even when one has consciously done so, as I have done, unconsciously, one still wants to be superior to other people.
The mentally ill wants to seem superior to other people; paranoid persons, in particular, want to seem superior to other people.
Mental illness lies in the wish to seem superior to other people, to disobey God’s will that we are the same and equal and remake us in such a manner that one is now superior to other people.
If you can get the paranoid person and other mentally ill persons to give up their not so secret wish for superiority and accept sameness and equality, you are on the way to healing them.
If a person sees all people as the same as him, loves and forgives all and serves all in some form, he is as mentally healthy as is possible in this world.
Nobody here on earth, the world of forms, can be totally mentally healthy, for to be in body is to have interfered with reality.
Our reality is spirit, not body. Body is means of seeming different and separated from other people. That is to say that to be in body at all is to be insane. The most that one can do is using ones body to love other people in bodies. When one uses ones body to love other people in bodies one approximates normalcy, normal insanity, and not mental health. One attains what Bahaullah called the lesser peace, what Ramakrishna called ego love and what our poetess, Helen Schucman calls happy dream, gate of heaven and real world.

COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY

I believe that it is possible to understand how people think and where there is thinking disorders change them. Thinking tends to be reflected in behavior. Where there are thinking disorders there are behavior disorders. Therefore, we must correct our thinking disorders and behavior disorders.
Cognitive behavior therapists like Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck attempt to teach their clients how to reconstruct and reorient their problematic thinking and behavior. Ellis, for example, tells his clients that it is not what happens in the world that makes them depressed, anxious or angry (or any other emotional upset) but how they interpret it. As he sees it, one can choose to interpret the same event in such a manner that it depresses one or makes one happy.
Let say that a white man called a black man nigger. The black man may feel offended by it and feel angry. He may then fight the white man. On the other hand, he may choose to see the name caller as not worth responding to. Indeed, he may even pity him, from the understanding that mature persons do not put people down, but find ways to elevate them.
The point is that whether one feels anxious, angry or sad is up to one. One can respond to the same situation differently. Therefore, one is responsible for how one feels and acts.
Ellis built his therapy on Epictetus’ philosophy. Epectatus was a Roman stoic thinker, a slave who found a way to be happy despite being a slave. He did not feel diminished by his low social status. Obviously, any human being could rationalize whatever he wants to rationalize. If a woman is a prostitute, she can tell herself that she is making a living out of it and not feel degraded by her profession. Be that as it may, it is probably better not to be a prostitute, since as a prostitute, one is likely to be infected by diseases and die from them. Ellis is therefore not a very profound philosopher for his ideas could lead to tolerating abuses by other people. If you slap someone, you inflicted pain on him and ought to not do so. Because you did so, that person may choose to forgive you. I will forgive you but insist that you do not repeat the offensive action again. If you do, I want you arrested and jailed and while in jail re-socialized, so that you learn to help and love rather than inflict pain on other people.
My approach to cognitive behavior therapy is different from what Western therapists like Ellis and Beck do.
I teach people to think and behave differently. In this paper, I have pointed out how paranoid persons think and behave. I have pointed out how they need to think and behave differently. They think in terms of inferiority and superiority; they can learn to think in terms of sameness, equality, love and forgiveness.
This type of change in thinking and behaving tends to lead to healing mental disorders. Try it and find out whether it is therapeutic or not. See all people as the same and equal with you, forgive and love all people and find a way to work for our common good and see whether you would not feel peaceful and happy. We do not need to argue, for the taste of the pudding lays in the tasting, try it and find out for you.

SHRINKING THE EGO THROUGH PRAYER AND MEDITATION

Many therapists do not want to work with paranoid persons; they throw their hands up and think it hopeless trying to help paranoid persons. The reason for this is that of all the people who come to therapy, paranoids are the most difficult to help. They are difficult to help because they desire to retain their separated ego selves. Paranoids desire to seem important persons and do not want to let go of their big selves. On the other hand, the business of psychotherapy is to shrink the big ego self to normal size. That is why they call therapists shrinks: they really aim at shrinking people’s swollen egos down to manageable size.
The person who does not want his ego shrunk to rational size obviously is not going to come to shrinks…paranoids seldom come to therapists, unless forced… and are not going to benefit from therapy. Indeed, paranoids come to therapy hoping to strengthen their big egos and when they learn that the therapist aims otherwise, they get scared and quit coming. They leave and go retain their big ego selves. Unbeknown to them, as long as they maintain their big ego selves, they will live in pain and suffer.
The problem of man is that he believes that he has a separated special self. I will put it bluntly to you. Man does not have a separated special self. The separated special, that is, superior self, is an illusion; it is a self that exists as in a dream but, in fact, does not exist. What exists in truth is the unified self.
There is one God, if you do not like the word God, then say one life, for God is life.
That one God, one life, extended himself to each of us and we are united with him and with each other. Our true state is formless spirit; we are unified spirit. This is a fact, not conjecture.
We desired to seem separated from our real self and went into a dream where we dream as separated selves housed in bodies and each seeming separated self seeks specialness and importance.
The paranoid person seeks specialness and separated from God and other people to go seem special and superior. On earth, in the dream, he strives to seem self created and creator of God and all people; he struggles to be important. All these strivings are part of his delusion, and that is why they call it delusional disorder, he wants to believe in what is not true as true. He is unified with all and he wants to seem separated from all; he is the same and equal with all and he wants to seem different and superior to all; he is created by God and he wants to seem self created; in a word, he is deluded, insane. It is because he is insane that he needs healing, although he does not know it.
Healing for the paranoid, as it is for all human beings, is to relinquish the paranoid’s outward movement, ego, and return to the inward process and rediscover his true self, unified same and equal self.
Meditation is the best way to reconnect to ones real self. I practice Buddhist meditation, every day, for one hour, at least. I recommend it for you. However, you can practice any kind of meditation, Hindu, Zen etc that you like. The name does not matter, what matters is that you know what meditation is trying to accomplish and do it consciously.
Meditation is aimed at eliminating your separated special self. That is correct, meditation aims at destroying what you currently call your self concept, self image and personality and replacing them with your real self.
Twenty five hundred years ago, Gautama Buddha recognized that what human beings call their self concepts, self images and personalities seem to exist but, in fact, do not exist. This is literal not figurative. What we call our selves are dream figures, not real selves. The human personality is a pipe dream, a smoke that does not exist and only seems to exist in a dream setting, Maya. It seems to exist for those who want it to exist and defend it (with what psychoanalysts call ego defense mechanisms, such as, repression, suppression, denial, dissociation, projection, displacement, rationalization, intellectualization, sublimation, reaction formation, avoidance, fantasy, minimizing, acting out, fear, anger, pride, shame, paranoia, depression, hallucination etc). People have non-existent selves that are housed in bodies and defend them and their defense makes them seem real. Withdraw the defense and those selves are non-existent.
Do you want to find out that your so-called ego self is not real? Then try meditation. In meditation, you consciously deny the existence of your ego. You tell yourself that the self you know is not real, is a fiction. You tell yourself that what the self you know thinks is not true, is as false as itself. Thus, you negate all your conceptual thinking. You say, in Hindu terms, neti, neti, not this, not this. You deny the truth of whatever the empirical self tells you. You deny the empirical self itself. You deny knowing anything. You firmly tell yourself that you do not know anything. You then ask to be told who you are, who other people are and what things mean. Your superficial ego rushes in and tries to tell you who you are and what things are. Neuroscience, the latest ego noise, tells you that you are a product of the dance of atoms. But firmly reject whatever the empirical self tells you are the truth and try to be quiet.
In effect, you destroy your empirical self and its world. You, in Buddhist terms, aim at having no separated self. If you can truly aim at this and keep denying the reality of your ego self, you will get to a point where you attain inner silence, peace, bliss (for peace is synonymous with joy).
You feel like you do not exist. You are not any particular thing; you are NOTHING. Nothing is everything! You are part of everything.
If you continue with self negation, you literally rise above our empirical world and enter a world where all are the same and equal, where there is no you and I, no seer and seen, no subject and object. In Buddhist term, this is called Nirvana (Zen calls it Satori and Hinduism calls it Samadhi). It is a world of one unified light, a continuous light that begins nowhere and ends nowhere. All beings are part of that eternal light. It is formless, it is spirit, and it is permanent and changeless. What am I talking about? It can not be described in human terms, it is ineffable.
But to attain knowledge of our real self, unified self, one must give up the false ego self one made to replace it with. One must give up identification with the separated, special ego self. One must give up the human personality. One must give up ones self concept and self image. One must give up the substitute self one identifies with and come to ones God as he created one, unified and holy.
Our true identity is a holy self, that is, a unified self, what Christians call the Christ and Hindus call Atman and Buddhists call Buddha self. Call it what you like, it has no name, it just is.
To attain awareness of the real self, one must overcome the false ego self one currently identifies with. Additionally, as Buddha taught, one must have compassion for all sentient beings and as Brother Jesus the Christ taught, one must forgive and love all human beings and as the last of the prophets, Mohammed taught, one must submit to God; one must have no other God but Allah.
Forgive, love all and then come to our God in meditation and behold that God is real. God is the only reality that exists, all else is noise.
What is salient is that the individual, and for our present purposes, the paranoid person must give up his cherished special separated self and its facial intellect.
The Igbo chap that makes a whole lot of noise at naijapolitics forum must seek his true self. If I were him, I would do so under some religious forum. It really does not matter what religion one accepts; all religions are paths to God: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, New Age Christianity such as propagated by Unity Church and A Course in Miracles, they are all useful in enabling the individual to shrink his swollen ego and return to the awareness of his real self, unified spirit self.
But the brother is lost in ego superficial reasoning and embraces the flippant ideas propagated by childish scientists that there is no God. He quickly tells you that there is no God and that he does not accept any religion. Indeed, he has a condescending attitude towards religionists; it is as if they are not rational enough and cannot cope with the exigencies of life without seeking protection from an illusion called God.
We have heard that one before. The character called Sigmund Freud wrote a book called the Future of an Illusion in which he claimed that religionists are like children seeking a powerful father figure to protect them in our precarious world. To him, God is a fiction and belief in him is neurotic (in as much as neurosis is belief in what is not true as true). Poor Freud, he knew so much that he was addicted to a mood altering drug, cocaine, and could not overcome his anxiety and his numerous phobias. The man talked shop about anxiety neurosis and yet could not overcome his various fears and actually had to be blind folded to be dragged out of Vienna before the murderous Nazis got to his flippant ego.
The paranoid person is totally identified with his spurious ego and its intellect and finds it difficult to relinquish it and explore other ways of knowing. But to heal his paranoia, he must give up his ego; he must voluntarily not identify with the ego; he must stop trusting the separated special self and trust in God, (God as God, the transcendent God is not in this world, but an aspect of God, the immanent God, the Holy Spirit is in this world) his unified real self.
Meditation is the quickest way of attaining awareness of the real self, the unified self (hence Hinduism called Raja Yoga, the royal yoga…the other Yogas: Jnana, the path of the intellect; Bhakti Yoga, the path of worship; Karma yoga, the path of public service; Tantra yoga, the path of sensual pleasure etc ultimately lead to real self realization but take longer to do so; meditation, raja yoga is the quickest path to real self realization, to awareness of the reality of God).

Prayer and meditation are indispensable in any effort to know the truth of who we are. One must constantly pray to God to guide one, to lead one on the path of righteousness (forgiveness, love, social service etc what Buddha called the eight noble paths…recall that Buddha talked about how all life is suffering, how suffering is caused by our desire to live ego separated life, how suffering is overcome when we stop desiring ego separated self, when we give up attachment to the ego and are detached to the egos world and its ephemeral things; how we must live a moral life, always speaking the truth, not harming other people, not stealing, and having compassion for all people).
Yes, one must pray for the Holy Spirit’s guidance and relinquish the counsel of the ego self.

Prayer is talking to God. Meditation is listing to God. One must talk and listen to God hence both prayer and meditation is crucial in all efforts to know who we truly are.
Western psychotherapy generally does not include prayer and other religious practices. However, it is gradually coming around to embracing meditation. In time, it would overcome its present adolescent stage of evolution and become adult. As an adult profession, it would encourage a return to religion, and return to prayer and meditation as a means of knowing who we truly are.
In the meantime, the paranoid personality is full of him self; his ego is swollen up and he finds it difficult to pray to God. He sees himself as in competition with God. God, he thinks, is his rival for power. He wants to eliminate God and replace him and become the creator of himself, creator of other people and creator of the world. The paranoid is on a power trip. That is why he is deluded.
His delusion disorder is healed when he stops the childishness of trying to replace his father, God, and accept him as his creator.
One must accept God as ones creator and pray to him and ask him for guidance in everything one does. Before one makes any decision, one must pause and go inwards, pray and ask God’s Holy Spirit to guide one. Invariably, God asks one to act out of forgiveness, love and public service. Whatever one does out of love cannot be totally wrong.
The paranoid probably will not give up his egotism in this life time. But if he learns that the ego is his problem and makes some effort to be egoless, he will benefit.
To the extent that the individual thinks and behaves egolessly, he feels peaceful and happy.
Peace and joy are the gifts of God, are reward for being ones real self, while still in the world of forms, bodies, space and time.
Our paranoid friends must learn to start working on their swollen egos and start giving their false selves up; they must give up their self concepts, self images and personalities; they must give up the masks of specialness that they wear, so as to see their true self, a unified spirit self, a loving and forgiving, hence peaceful and happy self.
In the meantime, paranoids live a tumultuous existence, almost always alienating those around them and experiencing social conflicts everywhere they go. Sadly, they do not recognize that it is they themselves that generate their conflicts by attaching to the ego self.
To be identified with the ego self is to live in hell, a hell of ones making. To be released from the ego jail house, one must jettison the ego and embrace ones real self, the unified self, the holy self, the Christ self, the Atman self, the Buddha self, the Chi self. In the Chi self lay peace, happiness and material abundance.

CONCLUSION

My experience as a human being and from working in the mental health field leads me to conclude that people, by and large, think and behave in a manner that is not always conducive to mental health. Biological and social factors contribute to the manner people think. We need to address those. However, we also need to teach these people how to think and behave in such a manner that they are at peace with their world.
People need to see all people as the same and equal; they need to love and forgive all people; they need to find out what they like doing and good at doing and do it for all of society.
Do all these and I am convinced that you would be peaceful and happy. Peace and happiness are the indices of mental health.
I have elaborated the ideas summarized in this paper in my book, Real Self Psychology. If you are interested in this manner of thinking and behaving, you may want to take look at that book.

*This has been a year during which I introduced myself to folks. Next year, I will focus on politics; each week I will do a write up on the political economy of an African country.
Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year by Thinking and Behaving Differently: from Ego to Christ Thinking and Behaving patterns.

Ozodi@africainstituteseattle.org

December 20, 2005

FOR FURTHER READING

Adler, Alfred (1999) The Neurotic Constitution. New York: International Library of Psychology, Routledge.

Allport, Gordon. (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: John Holt, Rinehart.

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, (1994) Washington, DC. American Psychiatric Press.

Ansbacher, H.L. (1985) The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Ayer, A.J. (1968) The Origins of Pragmatism. London: Macmillan.

Beck, Aaron (1990) Cognitive Therapy for Personality Disorders. New York: Guilford Press.

Camus, Albert, (2003) The Stranger. New York: Sparks Publishing Group.

Ellis, Albert (2004) Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. New York: Prometheus Book Publishers.

Eriksson, Erik (1993) Childhood and Society. New York: W.W. Norton.

Freud, Anna. (1936) The Ego and its Mechanisms of Defense. Amazon.com

Freud, Sigmund (1961) The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Ed Ernest Jones. New York: Lionel Trilling and Steven.

Fromm, Eric (1947) Escape from Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Horney, Karen (1991) Neurosis and Human Growth. New York: W.W. Norton.

Jung, Carl G. Basic Writings of C.G. Jung. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kelly, George. (1955) The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W. Norton.

Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness. New York: Penguin.
(1961) Self and Others. New York: Penguin.
(1964) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. New York: Penguin.

Maslow, Abraham. (1998) Maslow on Management. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

(1970) Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper.

Meissner, William W. (1994) Psychotherapy and the Paranoid Process. New York: Aronson, Jason Publishers.

Pierce, C. S. (1955) Philosophical Writings of Pierce, Ed Buchier, J. New York: Dover.

Popper, Karl. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge. and Kegan Paul.

Rogers, Carl. (1951) Client Centered Therapy. New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co.

Ross, Elizabeth Kubla. (1969) On Death and Dying. Amazon.com

Sartre, Jean Paul. (2003) The Philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre. New York: Knopf Publishing Group.

Schopenhauer, Arthur. (1995) The World as Will and Idea. London: Everyman.

Schucman, Helen (1976) A Course in Miracles. Tiburon, CA: Foundation for Inner Peace.

Shapiro, David (1999) Autonomy and the Rigid Character. New York: Basic Books.
----------------- (1999) Neurotic Styles. New York: Basic Books.

Skinner, B.F. (2002) Beyond Freedom and Dignity. New York: Hackett Publishing.

Sullivan, Harry Stack. (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry. New York: W.W. Norton.

Swanson, David et al. (1970) The Paranoid. Boston: Houghlin, Mifflin.

Tzas, Thomas. (1961) The Myth of Mental Illness. Amazon.com

Underhill, Evelyn. (1911) Mysticism. New York: Dutton.

Vaihinger, H. (1935) The Philosophy of “As If.” London: Kegan Paul Publishers

Wittgenstein, L. (1969) Zettel. Oxford Blackwell.

Zimbado, Phillip. (1986) Shyness. Jove Publications.