There have been people in the past who had had sense about things they couldn't know but these are usually dismissed as myths or their ability disregarded by anyone of a poor scientific background. From Nostradamus to the Oracle of Delphi there are numerous examples of people who purported to have the ability to tell the future. There are examples of telepathy, past lives and knowledge available to certain individuals that they could not know from the five senses.
I have an example in my life. I experience an unusual form of consciousness and there are parts that are described by the mental health system. I have thoughts that are not my own and experience a force/s or an entity/ies in my life and in my consciousness. It is hard for me to work in consensus reality because there is a stream of the effect of this 'other' - something that I have no conclusion upon other than it is there and that the consensus theory of consciousness (that all the thoughts and interpretations of senses are all our own and without external influence) is wrong.
Whether these are the repeating, intrusive thoughts are OCD or the paranoia of schizophrenia is irrelevant to me beyond my ability to function in the world as a 'normal' person and learn the truth of what these experiences are actually about.
I went through a period of severe distress but have come out the other side a lot wiser, mainly thanks to staying well away from medical services. I think the experiences of psychosis, schizophrenia and other incorrectly psychopathologised normal experiences should be available for people to go through because they may be part of the path to a higher form of consciousness, albeit one that is hellish to get to and hellish to live with. It is individual choice to go through it and it is immoral for the state to impinge on this, however because of the complete lack of understanding of this experience there is a salient argument for control because of the possibility of suicide.
The three paragraphs above give context to the rest of this tale. Some time ago I was working in office and experiencing varying levels of what people in that office might call psychosis and schizophrenia. Part of this experience for me was the impression given through my 'other' that my emails were being checked and that I was going to loss my job. This is not knowledge in any sense that I could use because I had no evidence.
There was no one I could talk to who would understand - most would dismiss this because of the psychopathologisation of this experience and perhaps because of the root stigma of madness that is why any mental healthcare system every existed. Reality testing is hard, but one of the answers (perhaps) came out in a meeting where I resigned and revealed part of what I had been going through. I explained to my boss that I thought that I was going to be fired - that may have sounded like anxiety and not a facet of what she might think was schizophrenia. In truth I feel it wasn't - I went through several days of an insisting thought repeatedly impacting clearly upon my consciousness that I had lost my job, however I denied its truth because it is not 'real' (consensus reality real - its real to me). Diagnostically it was an anxiety or a worry - when it happened I was not experiencing those intrusive thoughts).
The other information from the other place was that my email was being monitored. I have no evidence of this - how could I? I continued to work and continued to disregard the information from the other place - it has tricked me, controlled me and tortured me to the point of desiring death before. It was only through reading fringe material like this that I came to understand that their may be a purpose to ego death or spiritual crisis - other terms that are useful to elucidate alternative views of this experience.
I have mentioned it to three people that I thought my email was being monitored. The first said no of course not and the other two have said nothing. The two that have said nothing may had said nothing because in their mind they were thinking, "Its definitely schziophrenia". Or they may have been good friends who knew the truth but couldn't say it and couldn't lie either so took the option of silence. Its possible that they were shocked into silence and didn't know what to say. So it is an almost impossible truth to know. One of these people was asked a direct question and was unable to provide a yes or no answer, but my experience is that inferences taken from silence are not the truth.
This is a problem with reality testing which, I believe, is a technique that may be advocated by the mental healthcare system. To test reality when having mad experiences is vital to surviving in reality . To test reality is to have oneself stigmatised as mad and those experiences dismissed as madness.
I can never know the truth of my unshared experiences. That's the worst thing. I think there may be a truth or a power that we all have that is part of who we are. Madness was where that experience was pathologised. Occasionally it was celebrated rather than vilified. I'm sure had I called my 'other' "god" there may be some communities that might accept my experience as real, though they would have their own interpretations and dogma to foist upon me.
In the past I've used an analogy of walking. In a world of apes the first apes to learn to stand up would be weird, different and probably disgusting to those who crawl. Those first apes would have no guide and no teachers. They would fall as they learnt this new way of walking. If the apes had doctors then they would chain down the apes who tried to walk - evidence shows that by chaining down the apes they wouldn't fall. There was never ever psychosanological ape thought about walking: it was an illness.
So when is walking an illness and when is walking, and falling, part of learning and a human experience?
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