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.
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.
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.
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.
