Like if I heard voices saying weird stuff I would just know that's obviously so not real. If I found myself wondering if my family was poisoning my food I would tell myself that's ridiculous and move on. I just think I could outthink it, I'm built different idk
Honestly having been psychotic from drugs at a point in my life it’s kinda hard and fucked because you think like that on the surface, but you believe that shit deep down. It’s like, you see a message on a TV or something and you feel like it’s a message to you from the universe or something— so deeply believe it, but you know completely logically it’s nuts. You know if you said it out loud people would look at you weird. You can even think, man, that’s kind of a psychotic thought to have. Doesn’t seem rational. But your brain believes it anyways and you feel a certain type of way, like maybe you should change your actions even if it’s not logical.
its a tough fucking thing to learn to live with even if its transient, like theres a perfect balance of rationalizing but not overthinking that steers you through to where you didnt set anything big on fire or cause too much damage lying to yourself. you can earn a little magical thinking as a treat though. kind of helps innoculate against spinning out if theres a next time
That’s the hard part that’s so difficult to get past is how much it feels like the truth even when you intellectually know it’s not.
It’s like if a group of people are all eating apples and someone gives you one but when you bit into it every sense in your body tells you it’s an orange. You know it’s an apple, it looks and feels like an apple, if you ask anyone else they’ll tell you it’s an apple but deep inside your brain something is telling you everything’s a lie and that it’s an orange.
You're exactly right, it’s not something you can explain if you haven’t experienced it.
Delusions feel as real as hard facts, it’s like if someone told you that you didn’t actually grow up with your parents. No matter what reasoning they put forward, you would believe wholeheartedly that you were raised by your parents.
You can win the first 100 fights but it wears you down. It catches you off guard. And if it snags you even once it only gets worse from there.
Life in itself is magical. So believing in synchronicities isn't any crazier than not believing in them per se. I think a person can believe in irrational things and be fine. The issue is more about if those irrational beliefs stop the person from functioning or succeeding in their own life.
Like I think the world can speak to you in ways that seem unexplainable or don't make sense to an outside observer. But the metaphorical calcification of our pineal gland by modern society prevents such things.
But, also the beliefs you gain from the astral world and entities, can trick you into believing something negative. Like a demon or nephilim. If you've ever experimented with LSD, shrooms, DMT etc, you may've pondered something similar.
Schizophrenia sucks on all accounts, there is no benefit to it at all.
The one benefit is learning to empathize with the crazies who don’t have support systems and family members who will take care of them and keep them safe - and learning deeply how pathetic our emergency mental health care can be, and that even professionals lack the theory of mind or ability to explain to you what is happening.
Oh, and if you are a creative, your schizo journal is a great source of ideas.
This has been the only thing positive to come out of my drug-induced psychosis tbh
Yes, schizophrenia and autism are debilitating conditions.
However, schizotypal thinking and aspergers can be both productive and innovative through creativity and iteration.
The magical thinking isn't a primary symptom of schizophrenia, it's a side effect of much deeper cognitive disorganization. I agree about the astral world but schizophrenia isn't a good ticket into it
I'm a bit confused by this comment. Are you saying that the astral world and entities are real, and that synchronicities are not mere coincidence, or that they're fake but still useful for tools for dealing with this weird existence?
I've been shocked by the I-Ching aka the Book of Changes. Using it felt a lot like what the guy you replied to said. Deep down it was hard not to believe that I was talking to an actual magical Oracle while a side of my brain could tell it was just the Barnum effect at work. Shit shook me to my core. Eventually my rational side won but it took a surprising amount of effort.
I'm saying many people, myself included, who’ve taken psychedelics report experiences that feel like communication with entities, clouds, trees, animals, reality, etc. And experience heightened synchronicities afterward.
It’s up for debate whether that’s true revelation of something magical, or just a powerful neurological state produced by the substance. You can entertain both possibilities without accepting either. I personally lean towards the former.
That book you mentioned reminds me of Philip K Dick’s "Valis", which I believe is also about not being able to fully verify the divine.
As for the Barnum effect, I think it can easily become a blunt tool for normies and narrow-minded people to flatten anything strange or esoteric into nothing’s happening. History’s full of people like Newton, who were deeply engaged with mysticism alongside their rational work. He wrote more about Esoteric topics than he did physics. But normies want to disregard that part of his genius.
It's very likely it had a lot of influence on it! He used the I-Ching to develop the plot of his earlier work "The Man in the High Castle", and characters within the novel also use it.
whether it was magical or not, it did help me be a bit more decisive at times which was very helpful. I think cleromancy in general is underrated as a tool for getting unstuck things like from excessive rumination. I should probably use it again.
Interesting. If I get back into reading, I might check the I-Ching out.
How did you use it? I really want to get into it but it's overwhelming. People may laugh, you may laugh, but I had this same experience reading Richard Tarnas' Cosmos and Psyche and then casually following transits for a year or two. Try it you might be shaken again too.
It's so funny to me that you think this
"I promise you man those spiders all are a true revelation that the meth has shown me"
That's funny, because your comment makes me feel sad for you.
reddit
Crazy how many people I’ve met who changed their opinion on this stuff because of the I Ching. The Chinese have had real divination this whole time??
Check out Marie-Louise von Franz's "On Divination and Synchronicity: The Psychology of Meaningful Chance" for the most lucid overview of it (and more).
It doesn’t help if you’ve had that desire instilled to be special in you. It’s confirmation from the universe itself that you are unique force of positive change for the world, and the world is full of magic, color, and forbidden esoteric knowledge. You even gain the ability to bs the hospital/doctors and play it cool - you end up thinking schizophrenia or bipolar is some form of prophet gene that enables you to recieve and channel messages and spirits.
It’s just so wild to experience actual audible and visual hallucinations and the only explanation after is essentially your brains imagination ran amok.
Sounds like it’s being slightly superstitious. As in, I know logically that knocking on wood doesn’t have any impact on things but sometimes I will, just in case…
Yeah it’s very similar to just OCD tbh
My understanding is that it's like being in a dream and you don't know you're dreaming
that feels too romantic
it's true in the sense that schizophrenia is not only characterised by hallucinations and delusions, but also an impaired ability to recognise hallucinations and delusions as being such. plus a lot of the time these things can be mundane or integrated into the environment in a plausible manner. I believe a few people have managed to train their dog to "check" if a hallucination is there or not, which can bring some relief to the person with schizophrenia.
If you are troubled by delusional thoughts that you consistently can recognize as such, you have OCD
In western countries, positive symptoms usually manifest as paranoia and fear centered. There are other cultures where hallucinations are more likely to be positive, but yeah. It’s more like a nightmare, it’s usually very distressing
puritanical christian culture is my guess. the biggest study contrasted western countries and china and found that they had neutral/positive hallucinations in comparison
More like a combination of silly dream logic and the thoughts, inspirations, and even increased colors and feelings of a psychedelic trip that never ends.
honestly i think you could too
All I’m saying is, if those voices had been in my head, it wouldn’t have gone down like that
It's hard to imagine believing hallucinations until you have them. Your brain is the filter through which you experience everything. There's no higher order system observing it, so when there's catastrophic failure, you're fucked. Sometimes people, especially when healthier, do have enough healthy metacognition to deduce that they're hallucinating, but these things can be tenuous.
I recently had a brain tumor that caused hallucinations. It took me about a year and a half to recognize them as hallucinations, in part because they were brief and sporadic. I started telling people (my therapist, a relative) about the hallucinations because I thought I was developing schizophrenia, though I initially thought it was caused anxiety. My hallucinations involved others' facial expressions, and I also had delusions, or emotional hallucinations, not sure exactly how to describe them. All of my hallucinations/delusions only last about 30 seconds at a time because they were actually focal seizures caused by the tumor. I guess because they were so brief and only affected one small portion of my brain, I was able to reality check. My hallucinations were always the same and always brief, so I imagine if you have a lot of variety in your hallucinations and they're sustained, it's a lot harder to work out what in your reality isn't real.
Also, I know it's not cool to be so earnest, but fuck it in case this helps even one person: new onset hallucinations in an adult always requires a full workup and brain imaging. Don't just assume you're suddenly crazy.
Idk who told you being earnest isn't cool but this is interesting and helpful and I hope you're doing better. Can you say more about the hallucinations?
When they would happen, I would have the impression that anyone in my line of sight was feeling the same way I was feeling due to the facial expression they were [not actually] making. I also felt compelled to make a certain facial expression myself. It was always the same. When I learned they were seizures, I was better able to discern a difference between seeing and "seeing," but only after the seizure was over.
I also had a similar experience with music or podcasts. When the seizure happened, I would have an overwhelming, indescribable feeling. It was sort of an understanding that the person singing or talking was feeling the exact way I was feeling in that moment when they recorded that part of the audio. In the beginning, I would playback the portion of the audio that made me feel that way, and I couldn't recreate the feeling because it was actually the seizure creating it.
Most of the time my brain was operating normally, so it was easier for me to perceive when something fucked up just happened, but again, only after it was over.
I’m too street smart to fall for it
I know this is tongue in cheek, but I genuinely used to think this about ‘being crazy’ when I saw homeless people losing their minds.
After a couple of mental breakdowns, I realised the first thing any sort of psychosis takes away is your rationality.
Everything you feel in the moment becomes Truth and any previous opinions you had that informed your worldview and tethered you to reality become wrongthink borne from years of brainwashing. It really feels revelatory.
I think a big part of it is that there is always some sort of disordered thinking. It's not just (or sometimes not even at all) auditory or visual hallucinations, it's that the reality that you live in and take for granted is not the same as the one everyone else is living in. 2+2 no longer equals 4 (metaphorically speaking).
I’ve seen a loved one who into psychosis due to a medical issue that involved hallucinations and delusions and it was shocking how quickly this stable, rational person went insane. As in, completely normal to unrecognizable within an hour.
He accused me of being an imposter, that I was hiding the real me, that he could hear “them” whispering in the other room. I had to call the police because I was truly afraid he was either going to kill me or run away and get hurt. 1 week stay in the hospital later he was 100% back to normal.
The brain is pretty terrifying
The scary part about schizophrenia is not positive symptoms, positive symptoms you just take your antipsychotics to quiet the voices, but the negative ones: reduced emotional expression, poverty of speech, lack of motivation, inability to feel pleasure, and asociality. Barely treatable and more like dying from dementia, just ceasing to think or exist mentally. They turn into husks.
You're probably right. I have mice in my walls and a paranoid schizophrenia diagnosis - they're doing a number on me this winter. I will say, they sound much bigger than any mouse I've seen but what do I know.
I've had one psychotic/severe hallucinating episode when I was severely sleep deprived, and I remember at the tail end there was a Police chopper above my house. It was the loudest sound I have ever heard in my life - like jet engine loud. Covered my ears but felt like my eardrums were gonna explode. Guessing magnifying sounds is a thing?
I guess all the senses can't be "trusted" to an extent. Hard when technically the sounds are real and realistic. You end up looping "how loud is a mouse" and friends start worrying when you keep asking "you hear that too right???".
That sounds hellish - I hope the mice give you some peace soon bud.
🥲 I didn’t think anyone would notice the extra pounds 🐁
No worries, the walls have space for all. Enjoy the bird food, it's not exclusively for birds!
I thought this way too…. until i took a magic mushroom. Even though I didnt “hallucinate” at all (I didn’t see or hear anything) it made me have an intrusive thought about a demon and the fear omfg…. It was so IMMENSE that even though rationally i knew it wasn’t real, i truly felt like something was watching me and about to get me. I was shaking so bad I could barely hold my phone or speak. I tried to distract myself but it was like an itch inside my brain that kept coming back
mind you I was still ABSOLUTELY AWARE that I was under the influence of the mushroom but the feeling was so strong i genuinely thought about going to the hospital. Thankfully it wore off but It literally took about a week and a half to shake the fear off and that experience truly fucking humbled me. I have a new found empathy for schizophrenics/people experiencing psychotic episodes after that.
so when it comes to paranoid thoughts, what I’ve learned it a lot of the time it’s not thought but the emotion that drive you crazy. The FEAR, anxiety, panic, confusion… I wouldn’t wish that shit on my worst enemy. I didn’t even take that much maybe 1g
It's impossible to do it consistently.
Everything you believe, like or dislike is due to brain chemistry, hence why alcohol can turn off even your biggest fears.
With schizophrenia, it’s not an additional filter or lens on top of your normal experience, it becomes your experience.
You hear the voices as clearly as you hear a real person, you can't outthink it because it is 100% real to you.
It’s the same with visions, they are as real as anything else, there's nothing to outthink because that is your reality, you can't compare it to anything else.
Are there schizophrenics who hear voices but they only provide funny and/or helpful commentary? That would be sick.
Sometimes when you're on ambien you can get this kind of sense of someone else being in the room with you, and when I was briefly prescribed it in college it was always Fred Flintstone telling me to do things
The fan in my room became my best friend usually
Yeah my friend Nick Mullen is like that.
Yes actually
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/voices-heard-people-schizophrenia-are-friendlier-india-and-africa-us
Watched one too many comedian compilations in the prodromal phase
Some of my bipolar thoughts were really funny. Like I thought I had cause a time bubble of sorts around me that was trapping people on the Big Island because locals kept trying to kill me, and was reading peoples thoughts, one of those being from a tourist who got wrapped up in it and was just begging to go home, she was so confused. The government had to step with “Operation Normal Day in Hilo” where everyone just went had to go about there day and not think about it in anyway in order to reset it and avoid a local tsunami because of disruptions from the normal timeline. I had driven around in weird circuits for like 5 straight days, getting maybe an hour a sleep each night at that point.
Oh, and during this there was a secret society takeover happening to bring about Judgement Day but porn stars I’d psychically allied with ended up squirting all over Tom Cruise doing a nefarious ceremony suspended over it on Times Square on live tv my mind to make a mockery of it.
I also went camping on Molokai, ended up hiking to a fertility rock while some local old people were visiting the nearby park, and swore I heard an agonizing scream because I messed up some local ritual/made myself a target of prophecy (the penis rock was made for young women to find husbands.) That island also was secretly more psychic and were deeply annoyed and divided by my haole ass being there and suggestions to put stuff there like tampons at the park bathrooms and reasonable hours, or a music festival to bring in revenue. And we’re concerned I was there to marry one of their mermaid descendants daughters (confirmed when a day or two later a cop checking my camping permit asked if I was there to find an island wife IRL.) I messed with them and their hunters watching me by doing the stuff that attracts night watchers and evil spirits, like whistling to show them I wasn’t afraid.
Also, on my trip to the Big Island from another island I had been tracked by assassins hired by various secret societies and governments to stop me, but it turns out it was an elaborate trap set up by the good secret societies there aligned together to hunt them down - I sent out a really powerful psychic message that had those evil assholes fleeing from the plane knowing they were doomed.
It could also be really sentimental. I shared my first beer with my Mormon dad psychically because back home he was marked for execution by the deep state after turning in my mother who had let them experiment on me as a child. It was a beautiful sunset and I picked up lots and lots of trash everyday for year, including that trip.
If I can do it, so can you!
On a few occasions when I used to use drugs a lot, I would start hearing voices. It was always the people I knew were nearby, like roommates or guests, and they would always be talking about my insecurities, mocking me. I knew it wasn't real, but it was so perfectly in their voices.
I was actually amazed at how my brain could produce it. For example, if I could see them but they were far enough away (or on the other side of a wall) I couldn't understand their speech, they would be shit talking me, but as I approached it would blend into normal conversation suddenly.
I knew it wasn't real but it was hard to ignore or sleep through it. Other effects happened where I essentially saw things that in my mind confirmed I was in a reality akin to the Truman show, these were much more painful and hard to dismiss, but always stopped once I was sober. I don't use drugs anymore.
OK now we're posting
When I suffered from psychosis caused by sleep deprivation, there were lucid moments where you can just feel it’s all fake. Though that’s perhaps not the same as full on schizophrenia.
The heart of it is the (surprisingly correct) discovery that logic is not an actual complete theory of deciding what is true and what is not. There are plenty of propositions that are logical but not true (Zeno’s paradoxes, etc).
And when we speak of empirical evidence, how could we possibly assume a living body of information free from conceptual gaps? Is it empirically true or false that the entire planet is actually a farm of human souls being cultivated by some more advanced alien race? The answer is that neither logic nor empirical evidence are actually enough to decide this question.
The antidote might seem like shutting it off and not caring, but it seems that a prerequisite to these psychotic conditions is a certain amount of salience. It is not any easier to move on from these ideas than it is to move on from a realization that everyone in your life has been replaced with an automaton and has no internal world. It is not actually sustainable to be someone who shrugs off uncomfortable or ambiguous lines of truth; if everyone were such, there would not have been an expulsion from Eden, but there would not have been a Prometheus stealing fire from the gods either.
The only actual way out, if that “certain amount of salience” is there, is to understand the psychological element of subjective truth. It sounds confusing, but when logic and empirical evidence are incomplete (not in not saying that they fail, but they reach a limit) then the subjective sphere, because it is actually also hierarchical in its arrangement of facts, can be used as an extra axis of falsification to keep the theories from spinning off into nonsense.
When reaching the event horizon of the limitations of human knowledge, the psychological element is the only thing that actually can trailblaze into that next domain, because as I’ve said many times: projections lie in what we do not know, and so to conjure that super-logical moment that flint meets steel and the spark of a genuinely new idea is minted, a genuinely fruitful one, it requires an extrapolation of those metaphysical priors, the essence of the subjective experience that ties to the ancient causal and acausal elements of human history. If all of logic is deductive, and all of empiricism inductive, it is that psychological element that breathes life and existence because it is by true sheer experience alone that we collectively choose those priors that create the ontological nuclei latent in all of math, all of science, and especially all of language verbal and nonverbal. Without this experience, our epistemologies would lose all sense of effectiveness towards describing this world we live in. It is for this reason that the further we uncover our psychological roots, the further our systems can grow and evolve. We are constantly trying to discover what has always been there, these objects outside of time and space.
The great psychological truth, if it had to be summarized blatantly, is that reality is becoming. It is not a coincidence that all religions point to the catastrophic effects of divorcing oneself from equilibrium; becoming requires adaptation, to painfully hold together the seams between spirit and matter and not forego one for the other. There is a reason why clinging to anything in excess is bad not only for the body but for the soul, because there is no progress when the cosmic dance is denied in some Faustian effort to cheat death. Hopefully this illustrates in a clear manner exactly why it is that the more we die, the more we live. Psychic truths operate in this strange language of opposites.
It is rightfully so that the schizophrenic senses that we as human beings, in the dwelling of the psyche, are not alone in our own house. Because of that, we could say he is more tuned in than many “normal” people. The problem, structurally speaking, is that he loses his sense of hierarchical structure. It is certainly not a lack of trying. In fact, he is willing, to the very last breath, to hold the seams… but they split him apart down the middle, and the spirit that dared all heights and all depths must, as synesius says, suffer the divine punishment: enchainment upon the rocks of the Caucasus.
time for your seroquel
I thought their hallucinations were different from psychosis and delusions and they kind of could do that anyway.
I've heard that the type of hallucinations people with schizophrenia experience varies heavily based on their culture, apparently some cultures are more likely to experience benevolent entities.
Also maybe you'll find this interesting: https://youtu.be/M3a1txtSDn0
I've seen a few different versions of these who knows if they're accurate.
If I was in that white room it wouldn't have gone down like that
You might not hear voices, but you could be fooled by schizotypal thinking pretty easy. Meaning you gain some very idiosyncratic beliefs after an episode. I like this influencer Shanin Blake, and she believes in aliens now after one-shotting her brain off DMT. Not that DMT and schizophrenia are the same thing, but they're very similar in many ways.
I was listening to a podcast the other day where the speaker was talking about the “Big 5” personality traits, and she described schizophrenia as what happens when the “openness to experience” trait is turned up way too high— so high you accept every sensation and belief as legitimate. She also said those are the people who end up getting sucked into cults.
Probably not super scientific, but it was an intriguing way to think about it.
That’s really interesting. Do you remember what podcast it was?
New Theory: schizos are just dumb!
Well unfortunately Sigmund I think they would have taken you along for a ride. So what do you say about that? Because all I can think of is you showing up to the DMV to get your Cinderella license after your DUI bicycle arrest wearing a tin foil hat to prevent "electronic transference"
Do you believe your own thoughts?
only the non-gay ones
Love this ngl