These "methods" for revealing
the hidden occult significance of cups and doors and houses and fences
and cars is lots of fun, I'm sure, but is reading meaning into all things
not kind of... paranoid? Is a cup never just a cup? Shaw wondered about
Leo: "Does this sort of ever-fragmenting visionariness denote a sort of
madness on Leo's part? At times, at loose in this ultra-complex jungle
of signs and symbols, I ponder if this is what a mild version of schizophrenia
might feel like... the world becomes a highly-developed network of meanings
and messages that only you can see, and which separates you from others
who don't understand it the way you do."
There was the case of John Levinson, who joined the Emin in 1977. He had already had experiences of mental illness, but membership of the Emin for him ended with entry into psychiatric treatment. He had visions of colours about which Shaw wrote, "Anyone who has been in the Emin for any time would understand what he saw as part of the world of heightened perception that we were trained to achieve." Levinson went on to commit suicide.
There are comparisons with my third patient, Rosaleen Norton. In 1949 a psychologist with the University of Melbourne, L.J. Murphy, interviewed Norton so that he could write a psychological evaluation. As Nevill Drury reports in Pan's World: The Magical World of Rosaleen Norton, Murphy was fascinated by her paintings, which depicted visions of entities she would see and hear while in trances. She experimented heavily with trance states and self-hypnosis and believed "that the archetypal gods and cosmic beings contacted in trance states existed in their own right." Murphy, in his evaluation, found signs of a "schizophrenic type of personality." Norton deliberately lived in both "this" world and the world of visionary consciousness. Mister, em, Crowley did so too, mainly during his "Workings" in Cairo, Shanghai and Algeria.
Some occult practitioners are way ahead of us here and view what they do as a sort of voluntary madness. Through trance, sexual exhaustion, or other fun methods, they deliberately see and hear things that only the mentally ill would see and hear. There is a difference, though, between the magician and the schizophrenic. The magician can prepare him or herself and also has a framework for understanding what they experience. This was pointed out clearly by writer and occult magician Alan Moore, in a Cerebus interview:
When the event [an "extra-normal experience"] happened, I had at least some rudimentary means to classify it within a system and make sense of it. I've heard it said that all of our human perceptions might be seen as our individual windows on the Universe. The magician is consciously attempting to alter his or her window's width or its angle, so as to get a different view of the landscape outside.