I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.
However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.
I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.
There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.
The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.
B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.
Thank you, really insightful. Will listen to those episodes, thanks.
You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.
> In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
Oh this is so true--everyone thinks they're either demons or artifacts of your imagination. Thanks for sharing your story. These voices could be real entities that we don't understand or it could be figments of our brains which we also don't understand, yet everyone is so sure it's option B. But the point is, we understand neither, so how do we even know what the difference between the two is? Thinking in terms of materialism doesn't help.
A. Both.
I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.
However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.
I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.
There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.
The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.
B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.
So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.