Dear Barry, You have decided that the best course of action at this point is to argue that I am insane, or at least, suffering from some mental disease. I don't believe you are sincere in this; that the context of your own experience when you describe me as emotionally disturbed and delusional does not have a natural or truthful correspondence (one with the other). In other words, Barry, you are lying. Of course it is always theoretically possible that I am all the things you say I am: a person out of his mind and deeply troubled. However by the subtext of your posts along this theme, you are, essentially, giving me a clear bill of health.
You see, if I believe (or anyone believes) someone is psychopathological, then this means that the sense they are ill, disordered, and unstable takes precedence over any other consideration: for example, that we don't like what they say about us, that we don't like what they say about certain people we ourselves like. Once we believe in the diagnosis of mental illness as the explanatory basis of their behaviour we are in this very determination freed of any personal reaction to what they might say that is unflattering or critical about ourselves or other persons. If I believe someone is suffering from hypomania or paranoid schizophrenia then whenever that person (the would-be patient) turns his attention on us and, for example, tries to analyze us, or challenge us, or even appeal to us, we are unable to essentially focus on what they are saying independent of our experience that this is an insane person. So, then, we don't take it personally. And this sense of detachment born of a spontaneous and indefeasible perception of their abnormal mental state will be present in whatever we say about them to another person. We reject the objectivity, the appropriateness, the truthfulness of what they say, not out of personal pique or animus, but because what they say (or write) is inextricably bound up with their pathology; therefore it cannot touch us, because by definition their words and feelings have their origin in something very far away from truth. So, in order for me to trust in the honesty and good faith of what you have said about me, Barry, I must detect some, however oblique and implicit, sympathy for me, since, if I am as alienated from my true self as your diagnosis suggests, then what motivates all that you say about me arises from this perception of how my words do not bear any correspondence, or little correspondence, to reality, to what actually is the case. Do you understand me, then, Barry? It means that this very letter to you affects you primarily in only one sense: "Robin thinks he is saying something important and significant here, but all that I can detectquite innocently, quite unmistakablyare symptoms of a serious mental disorder." Which entirely spares you the discomfort or unpleasantness of wondering whether what I am saying has any truth value in and of itself. I suppose a demented person can perhaps speak truth; but the context within which he does this will always upstage that truthfulness; or at least there will not be a context of normality surrounding those accidental truthful remarks. There cannot be any other possible interpretation than the one I have given in this post, Barry: You are not bothered or angered or frustrated or inconvenienced whatsoever by all that Robin has said in his enumerable and wordy posts. Because what comes through to you is a psychological context which gives his posts a quite different meaning than the one he, Robin, assigns to them. That meaning is driven home to you, and it amounts to: This guy is truly insane. I can't even separate what he says from what he is, and what he is simply extinguishes any coherence or truthfulness in what he posts at FFL. Well, Barry, is there any proof at all that your Amsterdam posts of December 28, 2012 fulfill this logical and common sense criterion? If they do, I must be even more mentally deranged than I already am, because it is my distinct and overpowering experience that you are not at all convinced in the truth of what you are saying. Not in the least. There is not even any sense of sincerity, of the real person Barry showing his feelings, his real experience of himself, his own existential self. The posts you have written today, Barry, serve only one very obvious agenda: to ventilate your antipathy towards this Robin guy, to cast aspersions on him, to retaliate against the critical mass of skepticism and doubt about your own integrity as a human being (based on some of your posts:and the animus behind these posts preceded my coming onto FFL) that has gathered over the course of the last several months. I notice a flatness of affect, (thus a disengagement of the heart), an intellectual sterility and dogmatism, and an entirely dissimulated conviction in what you are saying. I don't believe you, Barry; and it is obvious you do not believe yourself. For anyone who has closely read all my posts and then compared them to what you are saying they represent in terms of a certain imbalanced and dysfunctional psychological state, there is a radical and incommensurable disjunction. You have persuaded any impartial and unbiased (not knowing either of us, for instance) person that it just cannot be the case that you told us the truth here. You know you have not told the truth, just as you know you have no response to this post. As I say, Barry, all that you have said about me may be true, but you have succeeded in convincing me that I must be supremely sane and stable, because in attempting to make the case that I am insane and unstable, you have so perfectly failed that I must never again doubt the soundness of my state of mind. I know you did not intend to create this result, but it is nevertheless, apart from your motives, a kind of powerful endorsement of me. And for this, as inadvertent and even antithetical it was in terms of your original purpose, I thank you. Your impoverishment of spirit has made abundant the serenity of my soul. This is ironically, then, the best way of proving to myself that I am a very healthy and coherent human being, even after my dislocation into Unity Consciousness 35 years ago. So, it's Merry Christmas all the way, Barry. You have had the courage to write to Emily; tell me what your reasons are for not writing back to myself. After all, in the beginning I gave you plenty of opportunity to save me from myself, but you refused. You only hurled abuse at me. Was that exercising your Smile Mindfulness? Was that exercising your duty to me as a troubled and deceived human being? I may be a nutcase, Barry, but you have certainly done nothing to inspire me to seek help. Indeed, as I have argued, you have virtually provided irrefutable proof that I am as solid and secure and reasonable as any human being I know. And this, as you can imagine, is very comforting to me, Barry. No, there must be some entirely different reason and motive actuating your posts of today, Barry. Would you like to hear what that might be? Identify the symptomology first, Barryand while you are at it: make certain you are in contact with a a believable experience which can reinforce and make credible what you are saying. Because, you see, if your real experience of Robin is an variance with what you are saying about him, this will show. That first person ontological thing.
