Spirituality vs Insanity

a reply to: meomy

Why is one person considered a spiritual leader or having a spiritual experience while another considered to be going through psychosis?

My opinion is its because some people don't have their feet on the ground while pretending they do.
Not psychosis...just having idealistic attitudes not based in reality.

The people who are all "we are one with nature" have never spent a single night alone out in the woods.
You can have bear attacks,wolves in packs come into your camp and you can freeze to death out in nature....so no,we are not all one with nature unless you consider being pooped out of an animal one with nature.

Just people who are idealistic mixed with ignorance.

I get loving looking at the stars and loving our existence...I just don't get the new age garbage.

I am here because I know a lot about INSANITY.

originally posted by: LesMisanthrope
Some people think they're having a mystical experience when they're really having a stroke.

I've had plenty of mystical experiences while stroking.

To the OP: The difference is primarily in the individual's skill with the brush, canvas, and observer.

a reply to: Peeple

I'm not judging... Might be a question of personality.

If you weren't judging, you wouldn't call me judgemental. Perhaps dishonesty is another trait of the spiritual.

a reply to: Itisnowagain

I'm doing some reading online about non duality right now, so I will come back when I'm pretty sure I understand what you're meaning.

Right now I'm thinking non duality isn't really possible as to even think of it as a separate state of mind is dualism, but I want to make sure I understand what I'm reading first.

a reply to: meomy

It really comes down to what you are channeling...if you can channel and what you "choose to channel"

Know yourself, is it a good self?



Cheers

I don't know to tell you the truth, it depends on your own interpretation and who you are. Even if you yourself were to experience it behind a logic and reason kind of mind, the loss of control over yourself and the myriad outpouring of vivid unfounded ideas would leave you hating every minute during and the analysis afterward will make you cringe. If you are creative/spiritual then you could incorporate your experience in your work, life, relationships, outlook, well everything. You would embrace it I'm sure. There are no shamans, those who dedicate themselves to bring forth from the ether new ideas.
But it is changing, people are opening up to unfounded ideas, dreams, musings. It seems that all the logic in the world won't bring us closer to escape the horrors of this life, so why not space out? Also, we should all have an hour in the day to day dream or meditate, but I like day dreaming.

a reply to: meomy

“The world thinks eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy”
- Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Psychotic or manic episodes can in many ways be a catalyst for increased understanding and expanded consciousness, a natural initiation some would say.

The trained shaman or magician will learn to control this madness but this takes time and effort.

"Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence; at odds with the majority; in short, unusual. It is noteworthy that persons are pronounced mad by officials destitute of evidence that they themselves are sane."
- Ambrose Bierce

a reply to: intrptr

About your paranormal experience(s) were there other people besides you that witnessed it? Just wondering because you said… I couldn't tell you for sure if these things were real or just real to me. I was with others that saw the same things. It tends to remove doubt about it being "real" or not. Sometimes other things occur in conjunction that only when added up make the experience more credible.

On a few occasions yes. On a few occasions no.

To start with the no: there was a little storage room in the basement of my house that I used to store office documents and to hide the Christmas gifts and such. One day I went into the room and felt a strange tingling sensation on my head and neck and strange urge to get out of the room. This kept happening to me for a week whenever I went in the room. One night my husband and I were laying in bed and heard an awful crack come from somewhere in the house and couldn't figure out where the sound came from. The next day I felt drawn to check that room. The outside wall was pushed inward slightly at the bottom. I made my husband tear the drywall off and hidden behind were studs that were bending and one had cracked. The wall was caving in because of bad building. What led me to check that room were all the completely subjective creepy feelings I had suddenly began to have while in the room previously. There's no way anyone else could verify that I had bad feelings about the room and felt a weird creepy tingling in it that happened nowhere else in the house.

I honestly don't know if it matters much if other people are present when something strange happens because we will each give it our own meaning. I'm the type of person who tends toward "I can't explain what happened, but I'm not going to jump to conclusions. My kids were for a while convinced there was a ghost in our house. Strange things were physically happening and they all saw stuff, sometimes all together. One daughter's speakers flew off her dresser in the middle of the night. Another said the bead curtain in her doorway began moving as if someone had walked through it. They went through weeks at a time of wanting to move because of odd stuff. They were convinced it was a ghost. I was convinced I had no idea what was going and my husband was convinced the kids were imagining things. I had odd things happen to me alone too. A door opened in front of me as I was walking towards a room. It freaked me out and then I tried to laugh it off. I kept stepping on different spots on the floor to try and make it happen again, trying to convince myself it was a weak spot in the floor caused it to swing open. I couldn't reproduce it. A few days later I walked in to the bathroom at a walmart and all the waters in the sink turned on, the ones where you just put your hand under to turn them on. Another lady walked in and the water stopped. When all this was going on I had a teen daughter who had been through a trauma and was very depressed. I was worried about all the weird stuff going on and began to wonder if it was related because strange things just hadn't usually happened to my family. I really felt like I was going to lose my mind because of it all. To shorten things I discovered my depressed daughter had begun cutting herself in building herself up to committing suicide. I forced her into a doctor which she had been against, and all the strange occurrences stopped for the whole family. Each thing really could be chalked up to coincidence and probably easily explained. I don't know what I believe. I haven't decided and other people saw all the same things I did. My kids are almost all adults and they've decided the house is haunted until proven otherwise lol. I'm still debating everything in my mind.

When I nearly died I went through an incredibly strange night and afterwards several weeks of intense spiritual growth. The strange night consisted of being so sick and in so much pain I wanted to die. I was done. I began to see flies crawling all over me and then slipped into a nightmare of my youngest child being buried in sand and me being unable to help her. It was so real I woke up in a panic and realized I didn't want to die because I wouldn't be there for her. I slipped back out of reality and awoke to the feel of an arm around me holding me. It was so real I was grasping in the dark for my husband who was in another room. I could see three people in the room with me who I didn't know. As I became more aware they disappeared, but then there were lavender orbs circling the foot of my bed. It was all incredibly soothing and I was strengthened physically enough to get through the night and to the hospital in the morning where they said it was a miracle I was alive for one and not paralysed for two because I had a massive infection pressing on the nerves in my spine. Before my strange dream, and orb encounter I had no strength and could feel with my fingers that my pulse kept fading out and fluttering. I don't know if I actually saw these things as in them being real or if I hallucinated them. I know I had the experience. I know I was dying because of the symptoms I have the doctors and I was a medical responder and know when things have gone bad in the body.

As for the celebrity mediums, it just all seems too handy and too big, but to me many of them do seem to believe themselves so does that make them delusional or not? And if they're delusional why aren't they being forced into a hospital? Involuntary committal does happen. Why not to those people?

What makes the celebrities believable, but if Susan from up the street tells the neighbor she's been talking to a ghost then begins to speak with a strange accent saying it's the ghost talking through her we automatically think the neighbor is delusional and her doctor would no doubt medicate her to make this stop. I don't think there's many of us who would say to Susan, "You should publish all this and see if you can get on Oprah". But it happens.

Psychosis is the result of predispositions that as a result of stress can be expressed. Essentially a stressor if difficult enough, can cause any one to become psychotic in the common sense. An example of how that is? Is in relation to PTSD.

A person, with that level of stress due to some tragedy in there lives can ultimately cause them to re-experience the event. Not only in dreams but in full blown auditory/hallucinatory experiences, where they relive the same event.

Then there are individuals like this.....

By Nancy du Tertre, guest writer

Several years ago, a retired New Jersey police chief told me this story. He had gone to a police convention where there were several hundred police officers in attendance. The speaker came out on the stage and asked for a showing of hands for how many police officers had ever worked with a psychic. Almost everyone in the audience raised their hand.

Then he asked how many would ever admit to it. Only two or three hands went up. To me, this indicates the existence of a problem in law enforcement that needs to be resolved once and for all. It is time to stop being embarrassed about working with a psychic detective!

I am a trained psychic detective (notice the emphasis on the word “trained”) and an attorney specialized in securities litigation. I am a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton University and a published Law Review honors graduate of Pace Law School.

I spent nearly a decade apprenticed to a well-known psychic detective who has been the subject of many TV shows. My teacher, Nancy Orlen Weber, was given an honorary police badge from the State of New Jersey for her psychic work with law enforcement.

Source

Any thoughts?

a reply to: Peeple

Spirituality is two different things. If you mix it with a purpose outside your personal growth, like let's say make a living with it, it isn't very spiritual anymore but material. True spirituality are the journeys your mind makes to grow. It's not ment to be materialising or manifesting in touchable outcomes.

I tend to agree with you to a point. I tried several jobs that were really bad fits for me as a person. One was direct sales. I couldn't do it. I was overwhelmed by guilt. It wasn't a bad product, but I felt bad. When I talk to people I tend to be told their problems. Deep problems that the product could not fix. I couldn't even attempt to sell because I got so wrapped up in thinking what they really needed was a good friend, spiritual help, a better job or whatever their issue was. I got nowhere with sales to say the least. Later I found a job that did fit me spiritually, working with the disabled. I would have liked to do it for free, but bills and food and such. It tied in with my spiritual beliefs and increased my growth and hopefully I gave as much as I received.

a reply to: LesMisanthrope

The former is self-diagnosed, while the latter is diagnosed by professionals. In any case of illness, self-diagnosis is rarely beneficial.

But someone is believing in these people enough to give them publishing contracts and have them on tv. They have thousands upon thousands of of believers.

I'm not sure all professionals would be willing to diagnose. A Course in Miracles is a channelled book, and the medium was a psychologist. This is where it gets confusing for me. She diagnosed herself with talking to Jesus telepathically as far as I know.

There are so many more. I think most of the religious texts on Earth claim in some manner to be derived from what we would call auditory hallucinations or mediumship. To believe they are all a matter of psychosis would mean in essence we are almost all basing our lives on someone else's psychotic break.

a reply to: WhiteAlice

Maybe it is just charisma that makes the difference. I don't know. Maybe I'm weird but I find the more charismatic a person, the less I trust them. I know people who attend Pentecostal churches and thoroughly enjoy themselves and believe in what is happening. I watch on tv once in a while and I just can't get into it.

I have listened to things from Esther Hicks when she "becomes" Abraham with the strange voice and accent and I'm just left feeling like I was witness to something crazy. But the answers come so fast from this voice that I find it hard to believe she's faking it unless she's really good. I guess that's why people believe.

a reply to: AgentShillington

It's a good question. The only time I saw things I know weren't there was when I was very ill. I right away wrote it off as hallucinating from being so sick and near death and the level of pain killers I was on. I even saw orbs although I didn't know what they were at the time. It was curiosity later that got me google searching for what I saw and orbs was the answer.

I only know it wasn't the drugs because I was on more meds after that experience than I was on at the time and nothing strange happened visually.

originally posted by: LesMisanthrope
...Some people think they're having a mystical experience when they're really having a stroke.

...

That is an interesting thought.

My dad had a stroke...
Was virtually shut-down for a while, thereafter...
Was very religious/spiritual

- When considering the effects in Zecharias after the 'conception'... 'til birth ...and announcing the name - "John" (the Baptist)... - - - you may have...a point - but, a point which doesn't work entirely with the subsequently-immediate recovery -

My father had another stroke 13 months after the first...which took him to the end.
So - in that regard, there is no parallel with the story of Zecharias...but - I wonder, because of his 'philosophical bent' if, trapped behind that mass of quasi-mutedness...he wasn't living another life/parallelism...in what we might call "insanity" (but that fit perfectly with his world-view - which was markedly different from the norm, in any case).

On another hand... ...if my own 'mystical experience' was a stroke... ... ...I am left enticed...to seek...more.

~~

originally posted by: meomy
Maybe I'm weird but I find the more charismatic a person, the less I trust them.

Don't confuse circus hucksterism with charisma. While a lot of people fall for hucksterism and a lot of hucksterism depends on a degree of charisma... real charisma will look no different from a real friend until some critical moment.

a reply to: meomy

Really what has happened is that one has "broken" their mind, and when this happens, the subconsciousness streams into the conscious mind. The "dreaming" or the "dreamer" is awake, and much like a nightmare, one cannot tell the difference between the nightmare that they are having, consciously, and the real world.

Usually channels are on the positive spectrum, in a sense, they are having a "dream" whereas those diagnosed with "conditions" are having nightmares.

a reply to: DrumsRfun

I have this same issue with being at one with nature. I love to be in nature. I find it very calming. For a little while. Then I will hear a strange noise and get scared. Or too many pesky flies will interrupt my peace. It was the stage of breaking out in hives every time I went under the sun in midsummer that led me to believe someone allergic to nature can never truly be at one with it.

We are a part of nature, but so are fluffy bunnies, viruses and bacteria. I'm still not so sure the people who believe we are one with nature are insane though. Just different.

a reply to: SystemResistor

That makes sense to me. Same physical experience but different subjective experience is what you're describing? And all of it just tapping into their own subconscious mind.

originally posted by: meomy...
...just tapping into their own subconscious mind.

"Just"... because of course the subconscious mind is little more than a trivial bag of tricks the conscious mind can regard as a second class citizen of existence. Perhaps it's the little flickers of conscious mind that are "just" being tapped into by the subconscious for god knows what.