Schizophrenia

Hi OW, thanks for taking the time to reply

The odd interests that Andre had wasnt what I meant, what i meant was his incoherent sentences sometimes ( Must watch the movie again to give you examples). Also, his inappropriate laughs (really loud laughs), and why was the Maitre D giving them those odd looks the whole night ...

Owlwise, you just summed up one of the biggest problems with today's society

Hi Ben, thank you very much for your informative reply. I understand that the Findhorn group do have bizarre beliefs, but Andre's speech was extremely incoherent in some parts, add to it his inappropriate laughter, and you get something that is very close to a type of schizophrenia called (Disorganized Schizophrenia.

I think that most if not all of the specifics that Andre talks about are not based on reality - it's not how things actually happened but how he dreamt or imagined that they happened. For instance, the photograph he shows seems to be totally at odds with his demeanor when recounting the story of Poland. If we assume that he actually did go to Poland then I think what happened there was not at all like what he recounts. I think a lot of his stories were just based on dreams he'd had.

Andre's stories may sound far-fetched today, but in those days, the post-1960s, they were fairly reasonable ... or at least, people were far more open to seemingly impossible possibilities, and the definition of reality was a lot more fluid. It's a matter of tastes & changes in culture, worldview, and acceptance (or denial) of metaphors & human experience. Current definitions of what human experience can be are far more restrictive & reductive than they were then. It's a matter of the experiential pendulum swinging back & forth as society changes. Did all of Andre's stories "really" happen? Better to ask, what did Andre "really" experience within his psyche & his life, which were then in a state of flux & uncertainty as he tried to break out of what he considered robotic living.

We're not merely talking about different worldviews, but different innate temperaments: what the more pragmatic person sees as crazy, the more artistic person may see as visionary. Was William Blake "just a nutcase" when he wrote about his many visions 200 years ago? By current standards, he'd probably be carted off to the nearest mental hospital. Yet he created magnificent art & poetry, and understood the effects technology & what he called "single vision" -- a reductive view of life, the very thing Andre was trying to escape from -- would have as it increasingly became the prevailing outlook of industrial civilization. Currently even basic human emotions, in all their mystery & richness & complexity, are turned into mere pathology: illnesses to be curbed & cured, preferably with an array of drugs. There's event an attempt to (re)define rejection & defiance of authority as a mental illness, something to be treated as sickness, rather than faced & grappled with as an expression of moral outrage or political dissent. All very handy for the powers that be -- as Andre warns at one point in this film, which is now more than 30 years old & yet all the more timely.

Perhaps you're trying to explain Andre through black-&-white vision, while he's living in a world of vivid color -- and since you can't see it, can't understand that it's his inner experience of life & the world, you reduce him to "a nutcase" rather than at least question whether you might be missing something yourself.