I sometimes engage in imagining if there is an afterlife, what would it be like to be there (if there is a there there--similar to what they say about Los Angeles). Recently, I phantasized about what dialogues may be taking place there. I imagined a dialogue between R.D. Laing (God rest his crazy, wonderful, restless soul) and Emil Kraepelin. It went something like this:

Ronnie: Well Emil, you really made a mess of things, parading those poor souls onto the medical theatre to demonstrate how to humiliate them by having all to see how disorganized and crazy they were. Brain pathology? Did anything else ever occur to you? Wasn’t Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the observer’s effects on the observed known to you then? Maybe that came after. Anyway, you really treated those persons like they were objects of medical curiosity, not persons who may have been reacting to the power differential between you, the medical staff and themselves. I am schizy, but boy, you take the cake.

Emil: Ronnie, I was doing the best I could at the time. By the way, how come you are not showing any empathy towards me? Are you wondering what happened in my development that made me a bit schizy?

Ronnie: I suppose you are right, we are all a bit mad aren’t we? I just needed to point out the dangers of objectification. You make a good point. Your schiziness probably arising from good old German rigidity and formalization, as well as whatever happened to you existentially with your parents and society, definitely had an impact on your work. Look at what’s happening right now in the USA. G.W. Bush is at it again. When he was a little boy and his sister tragically died, the parents reacted by going golfing the next day! Is that not dissociation or what? Who are we to judge. How can we help that guy? The New Orleans disaster is really revealing. His lies about WMD to the world is a bit sociopathic. His brother Neal remembers GW shooting him with a BB gun in the ass when GW was about 12 and he was a bit more than a toddler. The guy is still shooting people in the ass. We have to do something to stop the madness!

Emil: I cannot fit him into any of my schemas.

Ronnie: There you go again Emil. In heaven we are supposed to have reached a more enlightened state.

Emil: Yeah Ronnie. I forgot. Well, whatever he has, I hope it’s not contagious.

Ronnie: You just can’t get away from the reductionistic biological paradigm. Let’s ask G_D for help. How about it G_D?

G_D: Love your enemy and blessed are the peacemakers! You are all, as Einstein and the Buddhists theorized, all interconnected--part of the same ocean of compassionate mercy.

Ronnie: That sounds like jargon to me.

Emil: Can we systematize those words?

Ronnie: I think Emil and GW need some LSD to usher in some enlightenment.

G_D: Yes exactly Ronnie: Love, Solidarity, Devotion to all sentient beings.