Originally posted by Dae
A friend of mine was going through an 'episode' (she hospitalised herself later on) when I visted her house once. She had a few friends there and
they were telling me about the lighter demon thats in the house. Im all like, "oh yeah?" and they all back her up, saying lighters are doomed in
her house. Im thinking oh god she really doesnt need this.
I then ask for my lighter back (the reason for the lighter demon conversation, someone needed to borrow one) and it was thrown at me, but wasnt thrown
hard enough and landed on the floor, in the middle of us. The damn thing exploded. Now, Ive seen lots of lighters (the plastic see-through
disposable type) dropped and never have they exploded, Ive only seen this when a lighter has been thrown with force on the ground. It was also my
lighter, so no 'hoaxing'.
I remember thinking "Bloody hell universe if that was just a coincidence then that was NOT funny, she doesnt need that BS right now"
Pyrotechnocracy23 -
I'm still working my way through the thread. I'm really glad that you seem, thus far, to be having a positive experience from it. My own contact
with schizophrenia is limited and second-hand.
An ex-girlfriend of mine had a sister who eventually committed suicide after beginning what were diagnosed as schizophrenic episodes. I never met the
girl, but I read some of her writings and she was clearly an awesomely intelligent woman. Her dissociation manifested late, in her thirties, and was
consequent upon a combination of circumstances, the dominant factor being possibly a split from a boyfriend whom she loved. She showed classic
paranoid tendencies - for example, if there was a TV news item about a fire, she would tell her mother and sister that she had caused it.
A pronounced theme in her sad story was the way the medical profession treated her. She went to her GP (in the UK, that's General Practitioner or
family doctor) because she was becoming depressed, but getting VERY scared as well because of the onset of episodes in which she lost the ability to
think rationally. For someone of her intelligence, that must have been terrifying. Her doctor - in notes which surfaced at the inquest - made the
observation that he didn't want to turn her into a patient, and prescribed medication that, it later emerged, had side effects that actually caused a
lot of suicides. In her periods of hospitalisation (which began after her first suicide attempt) the psychiatrists were no better.
I attended the inquest with my then girlfriend and her mother to provide moral support for them and I was shocked at the behaviour of the psychiatrist
concerned. Unlike the nurses, who were genuinely upset and sympathetic to the bereaved, he sat with a rather distant and superior "why am I here?"
demeanour, and at one point actually sat sucking the tip of his tie. Bizarre and infantile, frankly.
There's quite a lot more but I don't want to dwell on it.
The reason I replied with the quotation above is that I, like so many of the posters here, have had my own personal experiences which lead me away
from an orthodox view of our world and our place in it. I guess I'd call myself a Taoist: and while the Taoist model doesn't quite map onto the
"chakra" model, it has some commonalities, which I might go into at a later post.
But the above episode, which Jungians might refer to as synchronicity, is for me explicable in two ways. Either there really was a 'lighter demon'
in the room - not ruled out by Taoism - or it occurred because what we call perception is actually a two-way process, and it is possible for one to
affect one's surroundings through what is termed "the body of causality" which, when accessed, can cause "coiincidences" to occur in accordance
with one's preconceptions.
There is also a psychic component to your own experiences. The idea that you picked up a thought and turned to find yourself looking into someone's
eyes should really cause you no confusion or worry I believe.
There was a rather fascinating BBC experiment that deals with this. The programme makers built a smallish room which adjoined an entranceway to one
of their TV studios, separated from the public area by a one-way mirror. Inside the room were perhaps thirty people on swivel chairs. As the
audience began to arrive for the programme to be recorded in the adjoining studio, they would pass what would seem to be a mirror. A researcher would
alert the people in the room to someone in the crowd with a distinctive item of clothing, and at a signal, the people in the room, who had been facing
away from the one-way mirror (through which they could see the arriving audience) would turn, pick out the distinctively dressed person, and stare at
them hard
VERY OFTEN, that person would look around in a distracted way at just that moment, sometimes even looking right into the mirror. When subsequently
interviewed they often admitted a creepy feeling.
