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Tag: mental illness

  • We kill our shamans

    We kill our shamans

    One of the problems I encounter living as a mystic in the western world, is there is no respect for individuals living in altered states of consciousness. Whether drug induced, pursued through meditation or ecstatic practice, or the product of full-blown psychosis. The individual in an altered state is uniformly shunned, feared, beaten, incarcerated, or killed. It has been repeatedly shown even by western science, first in the 50s and 60s, then again starting with new research in the early 2000s that psychosis is functionally the same as dreaming while awake. (Tyrelll and Griffin BMJ 2007;335:91) In the developing world, and throughout history indigenous cultures have treated this as a gift and a source of great wisdom, while western culture has decided that it would rather harm or outright kill the waking dreamer.

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    As a mystic who entered my path as a result of repeated psychotic episodes, I have experienced first hand the carceral abuse and chemical destruction of the mental health industry, even going so far as to join that industry as a worker for a brief time to try and mitigate some of the abuse for the few people I could reach, and to validate the experiences of the psychotic. My research, both academic and subjective has led me to the conclusion that this society has shut out any hope of contacting greater reality in favor of the comfortable somnambulance of the world of death and destruction.

    Plato’s Cave

    Academia and science have had a choice, the whole academy was based on Plato who explicitly stated that this world was an illusion and that pointing out the path to reality would likely get you killed. Furthermore, continuing hard scientific evidence that consciousness is fundamental to the nature of reality gets ignored or explained away when quantum experiments should absolutely prove that we should be studying the power of consciousness. Instead we rely on the medical model and the theory of disease to “treat” those we should be training to reveal visions, heal the sick, and predict the future as well a showing the gate to a realer reality than the one we are interacting in.

    Frater Ponderator, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

    On the Tree of Life the path upwards from our material world to the higher dimensions goes through the unconscious at Yesod. The only living people that can guide us on this path are those gifted individuals who are able to tread the unconscious while awake. They are the evidence that there is in fact another world. We can thank them for even knowing there is a possibility of an afterlife. The somnambulist, well adjusted to a sick and dying world, cannot be our guide out of the four-dimensional prison that we are in. While science edges ever closer to the admission that higher realms exist and magic is real, the increasing stress of just existing in the modern world pushes more and more towards psychosis. The disease is forcing us towards the cure whether the doctors like it or not. More mystics and shamans are slipping through the cracks. More weirdos are finding their comfort in alternative spiritualities and finding their voice on the Internet. Listen to them. Not everything the active psychotic says can be applied to the current reality, and you might have a hard time picking gems from psycho-babble but those of us that can travel back and forth between worlds do have something to offer. We need you normies of the West to please stop killing us and give us a space to share our gifts.

  • So you think you’re a psychonaut

    So you think you’re a psychonaut

    The Way of the Psychonaut [Extended Trailer] from Susan Hess Logeais on Vimeo.

    Dr Stan Grof is known to many alternative thinkers as a pioneer in psychedelic research or the developer of an intense breathwork program that can produce regressions of consciousness back to the womb and beyond. But I’d like to share one of his discoveries that gets much less attention.

    Stan Grof has been influential on my thinking and spiritual development process for a long time, and I’ve practiced some of the “holotropic” breathwork he developed, which led to some life changing experiences. One of the features of his work that has been little recognized by the mainstream media, but is creeping slowly into academic research, is that severe mental illness often comes from fetal or birth injury. We as a society, need to recognize that severe mental illness is a response to injury and trauma, and stop blaming non-neurotypicals, for they way they have to experience the world. We’re heaping trauma after trauma upon people who have a more limited capacity to deal with it, and treating it as a character flaw, when often we need to blame the mother. Once upon a time in psychiatry, there was the concept of the schizophregenic mother. It was thought this woman had caused their offspring’s schizophrenia through their cold and aloof nature. This concept was abandoned, not because it was false, but because it caused stress upon families who were already dealing with extreme issues, and because the mothers themselves were insulted, causing them to withdraw from treatment. This was a mistake on the part of the psych profession, which should have pursued this line of reasoning further. What Dr. Grof uncovered through his breathwork, was that huge percentages of schizophrenics were actually born after failed abortion attempts. That is, the babies had been attacked and viciously injured in the womb, and later in adulthood started experiencing psychosis. We are not going to be able to actually help these people until we recognize the source of their trauma and validate their experience, rather than siding with the oh so sacred Mother, dictated to us by a childish society. Not all mothers are good. We shouldn’t be giving schizophregenic mothers a pass on damaging their babies, and we certainly shouldn’t let them raise the baby they tried to kill. The levels of injustice that society’s veneration of the mother causes to the severely mentally ill is unconscionable. What needs to happen at this point in our development is an acceptance and understanding that, not all women want or need children. That some mothers are really not good at it, nor responsible enough to deal with a pregnancy plus 18 years of raising a child, and that some people have been irreparably damaged by their mother (or father) and we can’t hold them as responsible for their actions as a healthy adult, who wasn’t brain-damaged in the womb. Unfortunately, like so many disorders, there is no cure. But the way our systems treat the mentally ill is disgusting, and appears so much worse when you realize the schizophrenic homeless person you are looking at was actually a victim of attempted murder. I am not sure we can do any better.

    Rant over