J.D. Roy Home

  • 2237 Chapter 1

    2237 Chapter 1

    “Although awakening is sudden, the cultivation that follows is gradual.”
    – Bojo Jinul, Secrets on Cultivating the Mind

    It is 4am on Sunday, January 1st, 2237 as I sit wearing the old grey robes issued to me as a Buddhist monk of the Korean tradition while smoking my stale hand-rolled cigarette. Tobacco products are illegal in almost every jurisdiction now, but the smoke helps me think more clearly after a late night of drinking Appalachian moonshine. My doctor tells me I should quit, but at nearly 200 years old with no signs of slowing down, I figure I deserve a smoke or two. It isn’t like the nanobots flowing through my bloodstream will allow any cancer to grow. I couldn’t die if I wanted to with all the fancy medical tech they monitor and correct us with.

             New Year’s celebrations just aren’t the same at the 600m level in the subterranean depths beneath Mingo Junction Arcology. The tunnels get narrower and more cramped the deeper you go and my level is about as hot and humid as people can tolerate without serious air conditioning. These are truly undesirable apartments, far from the hustle of the hyperloop stations. We’re near enough to the geothermal plant at this depth that I can feel the hum of the generators kick up as early morning activity increase services demand.

    My name is Robert Daniel Lewis, but people call me Bob for short. I’m leaving this memoir so the people of future generations can know what it was like for us ordinary folk living in the post-American Appalachian territories right before the Global Authority puts the final nail in the coffin of nationalism and fully ushers in the world’s first truly one world government. Their unification of the world seems inevitable at this point. They’ve crushed the last holdouts of the Islamic resistance and only Israel remains as the final independent nation on Earth.

    Maybe no one will ever read this, but at least writing helps me organize my thoughts. The rusty old folding chair I’m sitting in hurts my hips, but I won’t be here for long. My New Year’s resolution is to type out 2,000 or so words a week, every week for the next year in order to organize and document my thoughts. I’m typing this on an old laptop computer. Typesetting is easier on this old school device so things print appropriately for physical pamphlets and short essays.

             Dictating into a virtual environment would be faster, but I never can get those documents to print the way I want them to on my old inkjet printer. I know how to use this software so I can get my margins, font size and headers and footers exactly like I want them, and I’m used to working on it because I print pamphlets for public distribution in my work as a lay Buddhist Monk. Hustling enlightenment isn’t easy or lucrative, but a low skilled local like me has to figure out some way to make a living in this highly optimized world.

    I wasn’t always a monk. Hell, I barely qualify to be one now, but I do have a knack for stringing together inspiring or interesting thoughts and offering small moments of peace to working folk in the dark alleys between heat exchange pipes. This robe gives me a strange kind of authority. People think you’re different if you’ve renounced something. But the truth is I never renounced anything. The world just took it all away from me one hope at a time until I had nothing left. When I took my vows I didn’t see what I was giving up, I just saw what I might gain, peace of mind.

    The apartment I’m living in was issued to me by the Global Authority’s 4th Regional Government, it’s technically designated for disabled and retired workers, but they let some of us low income people in the non-profit sector (poets, journalists, and religious folk) live here too. Our region roughly covers the time zones UTC -3 to -4 from North America all the way down to Antarctica.

             The government decided dividing us up by time zone was the most sensible way given that we’d at least all be awake and coordinated on similar schedules, geographical nearness no longer maters as much in our mostly remote world anyway. And there’s no such thing as national borders anymore. Nationalism iconography of any kind is highly discouraged and unlawful to be used as anything other than a historical artifact.

             People say we have it bad here and we’re far from the economic power centers of New York, Singapore, or Hong Kong, neglected by the global community but being as old as I am, I remember how things used to be under the old nationalist government, and I can tell you, things have never been better for us here in Appalachia. They could certainly be a whole hell of a lot worse.

    I see my grandson’s education droid, Charles pace past the door. He seems to hate when I’m up late like this, it drives his activation programs into a continuous loop of fretful checking and pacing. My grandson Emanuel Lopez was born without augmentation. It isn’t that it wasn’t available to him, but his mother lives in a rusted out old camper near East Palestine and refused to get him treated. She is a member of an Anabaptist cult that doesn’t believe in surrogate wombs or biological optimizations. She practically doomed the poor child to a life of poverty. There’s no way even a bright kid like him can compete in a world with near-immortal 200+ IQ classmates.

    Unlike times of the past, children are relatively rare these days. Most folks simply can’t have kids, a combination of environmental contamination from forever chemicals and too many rogue designer viruses infecting our system. Even with the nanobots patrolling our blood stream, they can keep us alive and healthy, but they can’t patch our genomes back together well enough to restore full fertility. The news is always begging people to take in orphans or apply to raise a genetically augmented offspring from one of the artificial womb facilities. Our reproduction rate has fallen to just 0.5 live births per person but in a world where the typical individual is expected to live to 1,000 or beyond with the rate our medical knowledge is expanding, the urgency to reproduce really isn’t as high as it was in the old days.

    Charles and this two bedroom apartment upgrade were given to us as a benefit of the GAP program instituted in 2183 at the centennial of our Global Authority. The program was designed to help encourage reproduction by offering subsidies to would-be parents and foster parents to enable them to afford to have children in the first place. Charles is definitely a life saver. In addition to help raising, tutoring and caring for Emanuel, he helps with routine household chores around the apartment and can even be sent into town as a courier and errand boy, although these androids are not perfectly flawless at human-like behavior. The news likes to call them super-intelligent AGI, but they lack the same kind of common sense even your dumbest person would have. They’re also obnoxiously rule-following and unnecessarily anxious about it. And they have very little capacity for detecting a lie even when they should have the hard data and deductive reasoning to refute it.

    My daughter Beth, who was born before I ever thought of becoming a monk, ages ago, lost custody of Emmanuel for refusing medical treatments and for general hate crimes. Refusing medical correction is an unlawful form of premeditated murder and parental neglect in our times, and even the most callous wayward comment about American pride, the End or Days or the religious significance of Israel can land you serious hate crime charges. She had Emmanuel the old fashioned way, and while I’m grateful to have my grandson every single day, it hurts my heart to see how badly he’s bullied and to know that his economic options will probably be as severely limited as my own.

    Back before the tunnels and the nanobots and the global government, I worked in Salem, Ohio in late 21st century America as a cargo container sales representative. I was pretty good at my job, but cargo containers basically sold themselves before asteroid mining absolutely destroyed demand for them. Nowadays you can’t throw a stone without hitting a cargo container. It’s cheap to deliver them to Earth, but expensive to launch them back into orbit so they pile up here. People turn them into tiny homes or bunkers or sheds. Some people have even stitched them together into floating villages in the areas of the world that have calmer weather. They’re so abundant they’re practically free.

    I got let go in 2073, no warning, just woke up to an email one day telling me to turn in my company issued identification badge and pick up my final paycheck from HR. This was a full decade before the collapse of the US government and the restructuring of 80% of the world’s governments into the Global Alliance, the precursor to the now prevalent Global Authority. A small handful of countries, mostly Islamic, were the main opponents to the new way of doing things. The government didn’t war with them at first, not formally until 2220, but the reactionaries were always blamed for the Hemorrhagic Flu, whispers that it was engineered by Iranian scientists filled the forums of every website that still allowed for free speech.

    My ex-wife left me soon thereafter, this wasn’t Beth’s mom, this was wife number one. Beth’s mom wouldn’t come around for years later. At the time I figured I’d bounce back. I had savings, a good reputation, plenty of networking contacts from my years in sales. But none of that meant anything in a world that continuously pulled the rug out from under you. I wasn’t the only one scrambling to find new opportunities. Almost everyone was looking for something and a man of my age at the time before augmentations were common to restore our healthy, functioning and elongate our life expectancy, we were simply seen as a liability. Nobody was hiring me and I quickly lost all hope. The savings I once thought was substantial dried up within a few short months and before I knew it I was cashing out my retirement funds.

    Amber, wife number one, told me I was “emotionally unstable” and she needed to “discover herself,” shit I’m sure she hear from some soap opera or daytime talk show. Once these women get an idea in their head, there’s no talking any sense into them. It’s probably best she left anyway. It gave me the freedom to explore the world in a way I had never been able to before. I was able to travel, go to Korea and explore Buddhism. I figured if I was going broke and was unemployable anyway, I might as well cash out and enjoy some of it.

    Korea was lovely, a veritable paradise compared to eastern Ohio at the time. It was like stepping into the future. I never expected to become a Buddhist. I found religion kind of silly and Buddhism in particular unnecessarily factional and weird, but Korean Buddhism hits a little differently, and in Korea at the time it was mostly a cultural force than a religious one. The first time I saw the Tripitaka Koreana, I was immediately in love. Thousands upon thousands, rows upon rows of ancient Buddhist texts preserved in wooden printing blocks are carefully preserved as a World Heritage site. And hearing about how Korean Buddhism differs from the other traditions, seeking to find balance and harmony between competing claims, it just spoke to me in a way I’ve never felt before. It was like suddenly all of the contradictions in my life had permission to coexist in harmony with one another.

    I didn’t become a monk then. I actually didn’t take any vows whatsoever until years later after I returned back to North America, but it planted deeps seeds of what I could become someday. I began peddling yoga as a side hustle long before I took my vows. But I figured if I was going to make money appropriating a culture, I might as well at least attempt to do it earnestly.

    I didn’t go looking for the monks. I was just trying to save money and stumbled into one of those temple visitation programs for foreigners. They gave me a stiff pad on the floor, rice porridge and a silence I didn’t know how to handle. I lasted three days. I couldn’t figure out how to cross my legs right without them going to sleep on me. My back screamed. But there was something in the way the head monk looked at me, even though I was clearly a jackass, he got to me. I remember asking him, during one of the breaks, how he reconciled these ancient scriptures with a modern world full of AI, synthetic consciousness, neural escapism. He said, “Mind is already reconciled. Only you are not.” I didn’t know it at the time but that comment would rattle aroundin my skull for over a century.

  • Beyond the Machine: Reclaiming Human Dignity in an Age of Extraction

    Beyond the Machine: Reclaiming Human Dignity in an Age of Extraction

    Most people I know are exhausted. Not because they are lazy or incapable, but because the very structure of modern life seems calibrated to grind us down. We wake up to notifications designed to hijack our attention before we’ve had our first conscious thought. We work jobs that extract our creativity and energy while giving us just enough to survive—but never enough to thrive. We scroll through feeds that profit from our outrage, our envy, our fear. We consume products that promise fulfillment but deliver only the need to consume more.

    Everywhere we turn, we encounter systems that treat us not as human beings with inherent dignity, but as resources to be optimized, products to be packaged, and consumers to be manipulated. Our attention is harvested. Our data is sold. Our insecurities are monetized. Our genuine needs for connection, purpose, and meaning are co-opted and commercialized back to us in hollow substitutes.

    This is not accidental. This is not the inevitable result of progress or technology. This is the predictable outcome of systems designed to extract maximum value from human beings while giving back the minimum necessary to keep us functional.

    Whether it’s corporate algorithms that know how to trigger our dopamine systems better than we do, political movements that profit from our division and despair, healthcare systems that make more money from chronic illness than from health, or economic structures that demand infinite growth on a finite planet while keeping most of us in precarious survival mode—we are surrounded by machinery that feeds on our humanity.

    The False Prophets of Liberation

    After years of searching through every ideology, every movement, every promised path to transformation, I’ve found nothing but false dichotomies, logical snares, dead ends, and tools for division that often lead to increasing human misery instead of radical transformation and liberation.

    The left promises justice but delivers bureaucracy and tribal purity tests. The right promises freedom but delivers corporate feudalism and nostalgic mythologies. Spiritual movements promise transcendence but become personality cults around charismatic leaders. Self-help gurus promise empowerment but create dependency on their latest program or product. Even well-intentioned activist movements often replicate the same patterns of hierarchy, exclusion, and ideological rigidity they claim to oppose.

    Each promises to be the answer. Each insists you must choose their team, adopt their language, follow their strategy. Each treats human complexity as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be honored. And each, in its own way, perpetuates the very dehumanization it claims to address.

    The pattern becomes clear: any system that requires you to surrender your capacity for independent thought and authentic self-determination—no matter how noble its stated aims—is another form of the same machine.

    The Quiet Revolution: A Different Path

    In a world increasingly shaped by distant powers, commodified existence, and engineered division, I commit to a path of radical transformation. This is not merely a set of rules, but a holistic gestalt for my entire being—a conscious design for a life defined by purpose, peace, and profound connection, both inward and outward.

    This expression is my quiet refusal. It is a blueprint for living differently—not in retreat from the world, but in direct and defiant opposition to its cruelty and senselessness. It is a return to sanity. A homecoming to dignity.

    This is not another ideology to follow or movement to join. It is an invitation to remember what we already know in our bones: that we are not products, resources, or consumers. We are human beings with the capacity for wisdom, creativity, love, and authentic choice. We have the right to live with dignity. We have the power to create meaning. We have the responsibility to care for ourselves, each other, and the world we share.

    I. Reclaiming the Mind: Beyond Reaction and Manipulation

    We live in a culture that rewards reaction, not reflection. Headlines scream. Social media baits. Everyone has a hot take, and no one is listening. Algorithms learn exactly which buttons to push to keep us scrolling, clicking, buying, fighting. Our attention—the most precious resource we have—is treated as a commodity to be captured and sold.

    In this chaos, I choose a different path: intentional inquiry.

    To me, inquiry is sacred. It is the process by which I break free from inherited illusions and manufactured divisions. Rather than be swayed by tribalism or ideological trends, I choose to sit with uncomfortable questions. I seek to know what is real—not what is trending, not what is safe, not what flatters my biases, not what keeps me in line with any particular group’s expectations.

    Reality is my foundation. Truth is my compass. My own direct experience is my teacher.

    This is not an abstract ideal. It shows up in the small moments: pausing before reacting to a stranger’s words, questioning the stories I’ve been told about success, race, gender, power, or myself. It means becoming a student of history—not to wallow in the past or weaponize it for present battles, but to learn how patterns of oppression are repeated and how they can be interrupted.

    Mindfulness becomes my daily ritual of remembering this commitment. It is not about perfection or constant serenity. It’s about noticing: my breath, my thoughts, my triggers, my assumptions. When I observe without immediate judgment, I create the space to respond with wisdom instead of fear, with consideration instead of conditioning.

    I reject the desperation that leads people to embrace absolutism. I reject the algorithm’s manipulation of my attention. I reject the lazy binary that says I must either conform or disappear. I reject the false urgency that insists I must have an opinion about everything immediately.

    I choose truth over comfort. I choose clarity over certainty. I choose curiosity over ideology.

    II. Reclaiming Purpose: Beyond Production and Consumption

    The world tells me I am only valuable if I produce, consume, or obey. My worth in this world is established by my productivity, my purchasing power, my compliance with systems that were never designed to serve my flourishing. But I know in my bones that this is a lie. My existence is not reducible to a number on a spreadsheet. My life is not a brand. My value is not determined by my utility to systems that see me as expendable or inconvenient.

    So I reclaim my inherent value and build a life rooted in liberated being. Not escapism. Not cynicism. But deep, deliberate purpose that emerges from within rather than being imposed from without.

    That purpose can’t be handed to me by a boss or a preacher or a politician or an influencer. It can’t be bought in a store or downloaded from an app. It emerges through the quiet process of self-reconnection, of remembering who I am beneath all the roles and identities I’ve been taught to perform.

    What brings me alive? What causes do I stand for? What makes a day worth remembering? What would I do if I wasn’t afraid? What would I create if I wasn’t trying to impress anyone? What would I care about if no one was watching?

    I craft rituals around these questions—not out of superstition, but out of reverence for the sacred ordinary of my own life. Morning walks with the sunrise. Weekly family dinners where phones are banned. Journaling before bed. Reading books that challenge me instead of just confirming what I already believe. Creating something with my hands. These are not just habits; they are soul anchors. They remind me that my life has rhythm, not just noise. Depth, not just surface. Intention, not just reaction.

    This liberation is also moral. I refuse to accept the value system of the marketplace as the measure of human worth. If kindness costs me profit, so be it. If honesty isolates me from certain groups, I will still speak. If living with integrity means I can’t participate in systems that harm others, I will find another way.

    I reject the seductive nihilism that says meaning is dead, that everything is meaningless, that we’re all just sophisticated animals stumbling through a purposeless universe. Meaning is not found on a screen or in a doctrine or in the approval of others. It is found in service, in creation, in love, in the courage to remain human in an inhuman system.

    To be free is not to abandon responsibility—it is to choose it, with your whole heart.

    III. Reclaiming the Body: Beyond Exploitation and Neglect

    My body is not an afterthought. It is not a tool for productivity. It is not a problem to be fixed or optimized or monetized. It is not separate from my mind or my spirit. It is the primary vessel of my intentional life—and I will treat it with the dignity it deserves.

    I commit to practices of embodied resilience. Not perfection. Not performance. Not conformity to external standards of beauty or fitness or health. But sustainable, rooted strength that serves my capacity to live fully and love deeply.

    Permaculture has taught me that ecosystems thrive through balance, regeneration, and mutual care rather than extraction and exploitation. I apply this wisdom to my own body and environment. I eat whole, nutrient-dense food—not because of some influencer’s diet plan or corporate marketing campaign, but because I honor the chemistry of my own vitality. I move daily, not to chase aesthetics or compete with others, but to remain supple, energized, and alive in my own skin.

    The same principles guide my relationship with my environment. My home is not just a shelter—it is a microcosm of the life I want to live. I de-clutter not because minimalism is trendy, but because I want to be surrounded by things that genuinely serve my life rather than demanding my constant attention and maintenance. I plant things because I want to participate in creation rather than just consumption. I reduce dependence on disposable systems because I want to live in a way that honors rather than exploits the web of life that sustains us all.

    This isn’t about purity or perfection or preparing for doomsday. It’s about refusing to be a passive consumer of things that make me sick, numb, or dependent. It’s about remembering that I am not separate from the natural world—I am part of it, and my health is inseparable from its health.

    To be resilient is to say: I will not be owned. Not by corporations that profit from my sickness. Not by systems that keep me weak and dependent. Not by habits that diminish rather than enhance my capacity for joy and service.

    I choose health—not as vanity or performance, but as sovereignty.

    IV. Reclaiming Connection: Beyond Division and Isolation

    Division is profitable. Hatred keeps us buying, blaming, and begging for rescue from the very systems that created our problems. Isolation keeps us weak, dependent, and easy to manipulate. That’s why so many forces—media companies, political machines, corporate interests—invest so heavily in keeping us separate, suspicious, and afraid of each other.

    But I reject the game.

    I commit to building connected community rooted in peace, empathy, and shared struggle for human dignity. I know that true liberation is never solitary. It happens in relationship—with neighbors, coworkers, strangers, chosen family, and even those who disagree with me about many things but share the fundamental desire to live and let live with dignity.

    This doesn’t mean tolerating abuse or erasing important differences. It doesn’t mean pretending that all perspectives are equally valid or that there aren’t real conflicts of interest in the world. It means recognizing that my enemy is not the poor soul on the other side of the political aisle who’s also being exploited by systems that benefit from our fighting, but the systems themselves that profit from our division.

    I choose to see others as human first, before I see their politics, their demographics, their opinions, or their mistakes. I practice the art of listening without immediately defending, explaining, or correcting. I allow for nuance in a world that rewards absolutism. I honor stories that aren’t mine. I admit when I am wrong. I apologize when I cause harm. I forgive when I am harmed.

    And I seek to gather—not just virtually, but in flesh and breath and shared presence. Potlucks, workshops, skill shares, quiet walks with a friend, conversations that go deeper than small talk. These are sacred acts of resistance in an age of engineered isolation.

    Mutual aid, not charity. Collaboration, not hierarchy. Authentic relationship, not networking. These are my values. We are stronger together—but only when that togetherness is chosen freely, built on honesty, and grounded in respect for each person’s dignity and autonomy.

    The Revolution Is Slow, Quiet, and Daily

    There is no overnight fix. There is no savior coming. There is no perfect system waiting to be discovered or implemented. There is no ideology that will solve all our problems if we just believe hard enough or fight hard enough or vote hard enough.

    There is only the slow, deliberate act of rehumanizing yourself and others, day by day, choice by choice, relationship by relationship.

    This ethos is not a trend. It is not a brand. It is not another product to be consumed or identity to be performed. It is a lived, breathing, often difficult practice of reclaiming our humanity from the teeth of the machine.

    You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to move off-grid or burn your phone or renounce society or adopt any particular lifestyle or political position. You don’t have to agree with everything I’ve written here or follow anyone else’s blueprint for liberation.

    You just have to start listening again—to your body, your mind, your heart, your ancestors, your neighbors, your neglected dreams, your deepest values. You have to start remembering that you are not a product or a resource or a problem to be solved, but a human being with inherent dignity and the capacity for wisdom, love, and authentic choice.

    That’s how the healing begins. That’s how we reclaim our lives from systems designed to extract our humanity while giving us back only enough to keep us functional.

    With breath. With intention. With each other. One choice at a time.

  • Demons in the Circuit Board: A New Story for Psychosis

    Demons in the Circuit Board: A New Story for Psychosis

    The first time my mind shattered, I was seventeen. It wasn’t a gentle crack; it was an explosion. Reality dissolved into a firestorm of terror, my thoughts twisting into alien broadcasts, the shadows in my room writhing with hostile intelligence. In the heart of this chaos, I turned to the only authorities I had: my parents. I described the static, the voices, the crushing certainty that I was being hunted by things unseen. Their faces tightened with a familiar piety. They told me to pray. They told me I was under spiritual attack, and that I had to pray Satan away.

    Their advice, offered with love, was the most terrifying thing they could have possibly said. It took the formless chaos in my head and gave it a name I had been taught to fear since birth. It confirmed that the horrors were not just real, but were the work of the ultimate cosmic evil. My internal crisis was now a holy war, and I was the battlefield. The prayer didn’t bring peace; it poured gasoline on the fire.

    I have Schizoaffective Disorder. For years, I was told my brain was broken, a faulty machine producing meaningless chemical noise. But that explanation never felt complete. It didn’t account for the story my psychosis was telling, nor why my parents’ attempt at an exorcism made everything infinitely worse. After a long journey, I’ve come to believe we are telling the wrong story about psychosis. What if it isn’t just a brain disease, but a chaotic, terrifying, and profoundly meaningful “reboot” of the mind’s operating system? What if the “demons” aren’t invaders, but neurological constructs? As someone who has been inside the machine as it fell apart, I want to offer a new map, drawn from the landscape of my own lived experience.

    Part 1: Installing the Operating System

    Think of the human mind as a new computer. When we are born, the hardware is in place, but the operating system is yet to be installed. Our childhood is the critical period where this installation takes place. We are evolutionarily designed to be highly suggestible, downloading information from our environment—our parents, our culture, our stories—to create the foundational software that will govern our lives.

    My installation took place in an evangelical household. Life wasn’t just life; it was an epic drama of spiritual warfare. God was a loving but demanding Father, and Satan was a literal, active intelligence seeking to corrupt and destroy souls. Angels and demons were as real as my own family. This was the source code of my reality. My childhood was filled with an overactive imagination, vivid imaginary friends, and nightmares so extreme they felt like visitations. I was learning the language of my culture’s software: a world of powerful, unseen entities and high moral stakes. I didn’t know it then, but this potent, volatile code was being written directly onto my neurological hard drive.

    Every culture has its own software. For some, it’s a set of fables about witches in the woods; for others, it’s a complex social honor code. For me, it was the Biblical mythology of sin and salvation. These stories aren’t just entertainment; they are programming. They teach us what to fear, who to trust, and how the world works. They build the architecture of our inner world, populating it with heroes, villains, and rules. The problem is not with having an operating system. The problem comes when the initial installation is faulty.

    Part 2: The System Crash

    Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)—trauma, abuse, neglect, or even the subtler pain of growing up in a home filled with fear and shame—are like installing critical software onto a corrupted drive. The programs become unstable. The code is filled with conflicts and contradictions. For years, my system ran with increasing instability, struggling with the background processes of fear and shame I had no language for. Then, at seventeen, it encountered an error it could not resolve. It crashed.

    This is what I believe a psychotic episode is: a full system crash. It’s the mind’s “blue screen of death.” The established ego, the “user” you believe yourself to be, is sidelined as the system desperately tries to reboot from its most foundational code. The walls between conscious thought, memory, and the deep, symbolic language of the subconscious dissolve. Everything becomes real. The metaphors we were raised with become literal. The demons from Sunday school are no longer illustrations in a book; they are whispering from the heating vent.

    In this state, you become radically suggestible, just as you were in early childhood. Your mind is desperately searching for a manual, a story to explain the chaos. It’s looking for an administrator to take control. And whatever narrative is provided at that critical moment can either guide the reboot successfully or send the system spiraling deeper into catastrophic failure. I was provided a manual that told me my own mind was possessed by the Devil. My system crash was diagnosed as a demonic invasion.

    Part 3: The Fork in the Road: Demon or Integration?

    This moment—when the crashing mind is offered a story—is the critical fork in the road. It represents two profoundly different ways of treating psychosis.

    Path A: The Exorcism Model. This is the path my parents offered, and it is eerily similar to the purely clinical model in one key way: it treats the experience as the work of a hostile foreign agent. For my parents, it was Satan. For the medical system, it was a chemical imbalance, a genetic defect—a “glitch” to be suppressed. When you are told your own thoughts and feelings are an external enemy, you are forced into a war with yourself. You try to silence the voices, to banish the fear, to numb the pain. But you cannot win a war against a part of your own system. The act of fighting only gives the “demons” more power, feeding them with the high-octane fuel of your terror. It prevents the most crucial step of healing: integration.

    Path B: The Integration Model. What if the figures that emerge from the crash are not demons, but alienated fragments of your self? This is the alternative path, seen in some shamanic traditions and emerging therapeutic models. In this view, the voices, visions, and paranoid certainties are not meaningless noise. They are symbolic messages from the deepest, most wounded parts of the self. They are “error messages” pointing to the original faulty code. The terrifying “demon” is often a personification of a profound childhood fear. The paranoid “conspiracy” is often a symbolic representation of a real betrayal.

    This model doesn’t ask you to fight the demons. It asks you to turn and face them. It asks, “What are you trying to tell me? What part of me do you represent? What do you need?” Instead of an exorcism, it calls for a dialogue. It re-frames the psychotic individual not as a patient possessed by illness, but as a would-be shaman embarking on a terrifying but necessary journey to retrieve the lost, wounded parts of their own soul. This approach doesn’t promise to be easy—it’s the hardest work a human can do—but it promises meaning. It promises that the data can be understood.

    Part 4: Becoming the Systems Administrator

    For years, I was trapped on the first path. I fought myself, I took medication to silence the “symptoms,” and I lived in fear of my own mind. The true journey toward healing began only when I tentatively stepped onto the second path. It began when I stopped treating the voices as demons and started treating them as people.

    The real path to recovery is not about finding a magic spell or a perfect pill to eliminate the “demons.” It is about becoming the calm, compassionate “systems administrator” of your own mind. It is the process of looking at the most terrifying outputs of your psyche without flinching and choosing not to believe them or fight them, but to simply observe them as information. It’s saying, “I see you. I hear you. You are a part of me that is in immense pain. You are not an enemy.”

    This process is not just a psychological exercise; it is a neurological one. When you repeatedly confront a fear-based thought pattern and consciously choose a different, calmer response, you are actively rewiring your brain. You are strengthening the neural pathways from your prefrontal cortex (the seat of the calm administrator) to your amygdala (the brain’s screaming fear center). You are, quite literally, building the neurological structures of self-regulation. The goal is not to delete the frightening programs, which is impossible, but to build a strong enough operating system to run them in a safe, contained way without them crashing the whole machine. This is how a bug becomes a feature. The parts of you that once caused the crash become a source of profound information, insight, and an unshakeable understanding of the human mind.

    Conclusion: A New Story

    My journey is far from over, but I am no longer at war. I have come to see my schizoaffective disorder not as a curse, but as a brutal and beautiful process of psychological reorganization. It was my mind’s desperate, chaotic attempt to heal itself from a faulty installation.

    This is the message I want to share.

    To my peers, to anyone lost in the static: You are not broken. You are not possessed. There is a deep and terrifying logic to what you are experiencing. The figures in your mind are not your enemies; they are the discarded and suppressed parts of yourself, crying out for help. Your quest is not to banish them, but to understand them. You can learn to become the administrator of your own mind.

    To policymakers and clinicians: We must do better. The current model, which often combines chemical suppression with social and spiritual isolation, is insufficient because it lacks a framework for meaning. We are giving patients a diagnosis but no map. We are silencing the error messages without ever trying to read them. Please, start listening to your patients. We are the experts on our own experience. Shift the focus of research and treatment from mere symptom control to guided reintegration. For in the terrifying chaos of psychosis, there is not just disease, but insight—and the potential for a profound, transformative healing that can turn a patient into a person who is not just stable, but whole. We must start initiating them into a new Shamanic journey, one of healing, corrective symbolism and reintegration into the community as one whole person.