The Presence Of Other Worlds
The Presence of Other Worlds: The Psychological and spiritual findings on Emanuel Swedenborg, by Wilson Van Dusen, “a Ph. D. in clinical psychology, spent his professional years working with schizophrenics.” It’s a book about Emanuel Swedenborg, a scientist and spiritualist before there was a spiritualist movement, before science had really taken hold. To hear Van Dusen speak on Swedenborg, you might imagine Swedenborg was an incredibly unappreciated giant in the sciences. Chapter 6, The Presence of Spirits Madness, could easily be translated to the Influence of Spirits in Mental Health.
“Emanuel Swedenborg was a Swedish pluralistic-Christian theologian, scientist, philosopher and mystic,” and lived from 1668 to 1772.
How Come Some People Believe in the Paranormal? by Sander van der Linden on September 1, 2015, answers that title, that question, with the sub-title: Those who favor Bigfoot, UFOs and ghosts share a thinking style.
Let’s examine me. I have a long history of believing in the paranormal. Partly because of my experiences. Also, I have tapped in on the harder side of mental health continuums. Seriously, but by the grace of God, I could be a bumbling idiot in a straight jacket. My family has so suffered. We also had our religion of origin. I don’t suspect it rose to hyper-religiosity with family, except within me. I was extreme.
And so, reading Van Dusen’s book and insight on Swedenborg’s perspective actually fits me well. Do Van Dusen and I share a thinking style? He and I both favor Swedenborg. He and I both work mental health. Schizophrenics are my favorite patients. There is a pattern that Van Dusens explores in chapter 6, and even writes a book about it, same title.
Spirit entities influencing humans is not my first go-to answer. That’s crazy, right? But Van Dusen did illuminate a correspondence, a correlation if you will, that reflects a pattern that perhaps we as human too quickly dismiss because, well, that’s crazy, right?! Everyone knows it’s crazy, and yet try and get people to sit down and play Ouija Board with you. Most people decline. So, do most people share the same thinking style?
The Shadow World
Swedenborg’s treaty, if you allow, on mental health and spiritual matters approaches the level of insight offered by Carl Jung. Swedenborg didn’t use words like synchronicity, or collective unconscious, but these words seem applicable when discussing the architecture of life in the other realms as experienced by him.
Whether it’s metaphysical or deep unconscious structures, there is a thing here worth exploring, because we all tap into this, by simply nature of being. Even if Near Death Experiences aren’t what they seem, the fact that so many people go there, and that there is consistency between reports, says something about the mind.
Even if you approach Swedenborg as merely describing the inner life of human as being completely psychological, there is still a surprising thing about that to unpack. Consistency between people not connected, suggesting brain artifacts, from psychology as the operating system and neurology as the computer hardware- finding archetypes and personality fragments may be a useful thing to study.
When pharmaceutical fail to change the hardware to allow better performance, one needs to examine the programming.
Too often, we don’t analyze narrative artifacts, but simply look for physical artifacts to explain dysfunction. In Is Violence Inevitable?: Biological Roots of Crime, Adrian Raine discusses criminology by noting brain structures as seen under an fMRI, and how it might relate to crime. I didn’t hear any opposition to his thoughts in the ask question section. (I did notice that only females asked questions, making me wonder if there were any males in that lecture hall other than the speaker.) Even when Adrian noted he had the same brain artifact that he is suggesting links to criminality, he emphasized correlation doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it means, but in a dismissive odd way that seemed to support his conclusion it is absolutely what it seems.
In the past, there were people who believe the white, male brain was superior to all other brains. That was determined to be false, and rightly so. It is bad science to absolutely link structure to functionality, and that statement was in a day before we had good measuring techniques. It’s also bad science to dismiss consistencies in narratives that corelate with criminology and mental health. Here’s a fact, women brains are actually bigger than male brains. We didn’t flip that early statement to all women are smarter than men.
Here’s another fact. If you’re in jail, in America, you’re most likely to be of lower economic status, male between the ages of 15 and 30, and black. Linking criminology to brain structures is as bad as saying skin color predicts behavior. That’s wrong and dangerous. More dangerous than thinking about spiritual influences, I dare add. Granted, the preponderance of people who have strokes or brain injuries don’t become savants, but it happens. Enough to have a term for it, Acquired Savant Syndrome. There have been people discovered to be missing important sections of their brain, and functioning at masters and PhD level of thinking.
We can absolutely link criminology to economic status and mental health. We can corelate mental health problems to economic status. I don’t see any medical professionals or insurance providers prescribing money to their clients.
So, if it’s not the hardware, could it be the software? Or is there another level to being human that we have yet discovered because no one wants to put their hands on the Ouija Board? If you don’t know me by now, I mean that as an superior, abstract metaphor, not a literal interpretation, though even the literal has some implications. If you’re resistant to the idea of that or hypnosis, do you have a similar thinking style that blocks you from looking under the hood?
The Software Problem
In Van Dusen’s Chapter 6, he organizes similarity in dialogue pattern he held with the hallucinations, translated by the person experiencing them. There are some nice hallucinations. There are downright not nice hallucinations. He referred to them as the hire ordered and lower ordered entities. The lower ordered are nasty, vicious, good hating, not just scientifically atheist and reasonable in a philosophical, but radically opposed to anything good as if we’re examining a polarity function. They're like the school yard bullies of hallucinations. They promote all sorts of ludicrous and inappropriate behaviors and thoughts, and when a person consents, considers, or engages they get ridiculed for engaging what they promoted.
Seriously, the darkness examined in such an undertaking can be brutal and horrifying beyond most people’s ability to appreciate. This work is not work for the weak of heart. Imagine wanting to help someone who has such horrendous thoughts that even they don’t want to communicate them because they know, ‘fuck, this is bad.’
Imagine being tormented daily, all hours of the day from a nagging voice trying to get you to do something, or actively disparaging you. How long could you hold out? In some ways, there is evidence that trying to be positive all the time results in person being vulnerable to attack to negativity. The book Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, by Barbara Ehrenreich truly highlights this point, such as when a cancer survivor gets kicked out of their talk group because they were too depressed on one occasion.
In contrast, the higher ordered beings always came with kindness. They always offered insight, using superior, symbolic language- many times at a grade level way beyond the person who was experiencing the hallucination, to the degree the person had to ask Van Dusen what they were talking about.
The higher ordered promoted free will over everything. In Van Dusen’s work, the higher ordered didn’t disparage the lower ordered, but simply stated- these entities are highlighting weaknesses the person needs to work on. To add on to that concept, one of his clients came at a lowered ordered voice as if she were doing therapy with it, and when that darkness was healed- that voice went away.
This correspond to another book I have read recently, Remarkable Healings: A Psychiatrist Discovers Unsuspected Roots of Mental and Physical Illness, by Shakutntala Modi, MD. Here’s a psychiatrist who utilized deep hypnosis to help patients who have had no success with pharmaceuticals. She discovered lower ordered and higher ordered beings, but she called it by their own self described terms; demons and angels.
Pharmaceuticals don’t always help. Sometimes the best you can hope for is lessoning symptoms, and the hope the side effects don’t outweigh the benefits. Many people would rather be psychotic than fat, as the meds tend to increase weight. Pharmaceuticals doesn’t cure. The overwhelming evidence in the literature suggests pharmaceutical simultaneously with counseling gets the best results.
There are to few counselors. Consequently, most community mental health limit counseling to people with depression, not Bipolar or Schizophrenics. Bipolar and Schizophrenic conditions also benefit to counseling, it’s just- when you have a limited resource, what do you do? I suspect Rogerian would benefit more than CBT, because if you have schizophrenia in America, you’re likely isolated, or ridiculed which drives you to isolation. Society's inability to support mental health likely reveals the same kind of bias referred to in Sander van der Linden, society’s unwillingness to look under the hood, or put their hands on the Ouija Board.
In Texas, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps is the philosophy, and that exemplifies why we’re 49 out of 50 states in terms of helping people with mental health problems. Is mental health science, or just some spooky taboo that we don’t want to examine? How many people don’t get help because of the stigma associated with getting help, which implies there is a philosophical undertone that suggest we still believe in ghosts.
When has covering ones eyes ever decreased the influence of ghosts? Doesn’t the very act of putting blinders on mean there’s something there?
And who are the counselor that are with clients and truly listening without judgement? Doctor Modi didn’t judge, she simply explored the information and offered pathways to heal those inner aspects. It didn’t matter to her if they were demons or angels or psychological artifacts. Bringing healing and light to demons resulted in transpersonal, transformation of that psychological agent, resulting in improved health to the client. That’s exactly what Doctor Brian Weis and Doctor Michael Newton said. Essentially they didn’t care what we call it, it only matters that it was efficacious- resulting in cures, or remission of illness, not just reduction in symptoms.
Carl Jung, psychiatrist, never recommended suppressing darkness, but integrating, moving beyond it because the light is on the other side. Suppressing and ignoring are useful, but tend to increase the likelihood of symptoms. Suppressing is the equivalent of putting air into a balloon, eventually the balloon breaks. For as hard as you suppress, the greater the rebound in the spring. Acknowledging the spring and recognizing it’s function allows mechanism to perform as intended.
If you add in all the other psychiatrists and psychologists who have suggested hypnosis has resulted in cures, even if you don’t accept the overlays of reincarnation or spiritual entities as anything other than place holders on a neural-psychological map, there is something here worth exploring.
Side observations.
There is another potential way to consider this problem, in terms of overlays. Simulation Theory suggest we live in a Universe that is artificial in nature. Whether that is true or not, we do actually live in a computer simulation that we refer to as consciousness. Even neural scientist will say consciousness is an illusion, a construct of the brain. The brain sorts internal and external data and uploads that info into the ‘conscious’ part of the mind after being filtered through brain regions and subconscious filters. Our ‘experiences’ are uploads!
Not only do you not see reality as it is, there is a time delay in you experiencing reality. It’s measured at about 80 milliseconds, and may go up to 3 seconds depending on who’s measuring and what activity one is engaged in.
Consider the sophistication of bots on the internet. Bots exists. They tend to be vicious, non-good loving, little bastards that manipulate social activity by putting derogatory comments into the comment sections of media. They’re not real people. They're influence is absolutely real. People respond to them as they’re real, because- how do you tell the difference between a bot and a person? It could be a person. It might not be.
What if hallucinations are the equivalent of bots, just brain algorithms that have taken on a life of their own? How do you make bots stronger? You react to them, by arguing with them or hitting dislike, or complaining to higher ordered agents, mods that are trying to keep the arena fair. Ignoring bots doesn’t work. Again, bots are sophisticated little bastards and if they don’t get responses, they mutate and divide and look for more clever ways to be noticed, becoming increasingly more obnoxious over time…
Same above, same below. The World Wide Web is by all intensive purpose a neural structure. There are many live agents, accessing nodes to contribute to the good and bad of it all. Some of the agents want to double their influence so they make bots. That’s probably not a good or bad thing, but simply a human thing of trying to manipulate our world. Our brains do that, and it promotes ideas that we favor looking for ways to enhance that, eliminating ideas that disagree with that world view.
Add to that when we look out into the universe and we see macro structures that reflect how we see our brains…
Again, structure doesn’t denote functionality. The underlying programming likely has more influence than structure.
Bots, angles or demons, hallucinations… Memory fragments of people and books and media influencing us… We are not who we think we are. We don’t even have a way of measuring what’s us and what’s not us. Schizophrenics often suffer because they become enmeshed with everything, cause it’s all connected. We, normal folks, suffer because we’re alone in a world that seems highly disjointed and unfriendly. Somewhere between normality and schizophrenia is truth.
It’s somewhere we have not wanted to examine because it requires us to open the hood, and put our hands on the Ouija Board. It might mean, the paranormal is actually hyper-normal.
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PS: one more recommended,
