Article on intentionally interacting with auditory hallucinations

[Stranger]

A different approach to dealing with the "voices" typical of schizophrenia.  I've always found the phenomenon fascinating.  

Link

[Reaper]

My internal world is an ongoing conversation. There seem to be an awful lot of me in here! It is difficult to achieve collective silence in something like meditation, but it is also often a comfort to me.

When I was younger the voices would constantly say nasty things, telling me to kill myself, hurt people I loved, etc. For a while it became so bad that my personality fractured and I would act out each voice individually, sometimes becoming very violent. It got me locked up a number of different times. Eventually, when the medications became unbearable, I changed my approach and looked at each voice as a part of myself that wasn't being heard. It was difficult deciphering that language, seeing through all the anger and hatred, but once I got the gist of it, the voices became helpful, giving advice, warning me of potential dangers and occasionally correctly predicting the future. I can ask any question and get an answer I would never have expected of myself. This has been an advantage in automatic writing and channeling attempts as well. I constantly hear voices, and am also an active, productive member of society who takes nothing but herbal supplements to keep up her health.

It is a shame that so many people are branded crazy and put on a lifetime of poisonous meds for something that is much less debilitating than it initially seems.

Note: I am not in this post encouraging anyone with mental illness to simply stop taking their medications- doing so is quite dangerous. I'm merely offering another perspective to the idea that the only cure for mental illness is a barrage of narcotics.

[Stranger]

Yera, if you have time, I would love to hear in more detail how you "got the gist of it" and were able to transform the voices from angry to helpful.

[Reaper]

The answer itself is quite simple: an enormous commitment to self-honesty. It involved first realizing the barriers I had erected around my perception of myself in order to protect my ego, then the removal of those barriers to allow an undistorted view of the self.

In doing this, I ran into many things I found ugly, disgusting, scary, confusing...there were times I hated myself so much I wanted to just stop existing, but I told myself that I couldn't get any better until I could see what was already there. For a time I adopted quite a negative perspective, seeking to know my flaws only so that I could destroy them and replace them with better things. I felt I could shape myself into something superior this way. In time, however, as I uncovered more and more, I began to feel inevitable compassion upon these parts of myself that had been locked away and denied expression. All of the anger and hatred, the desire for violence and control...all of it stemmed from a child who endured traumatic experiences and hid herself away in an attempt to stay safe.

When I could see the child beneath the roaring monster, the monster ceased to be, yet it was only by acknowledging the monster that I could see the child to begin with.

[Dekalb_Blues]

Interesting subject, Stranger, with ties to practical challenges encountered in lucid dreaming, entheogen-tripping, and many other adventures in consciousness where one's multiple selves of all persuasions are brought to the fore-- sometimes alarmingly and frighteningly, sometimes sweetly and ecstatically.  It all would seem to depend on one's animating framework of knowledge, one's belief system, one's conditioning set-and-setting.  Hence the importance of learning, learning, learning how best to approach such experiences in the first place, and how best to profit from them, be they nominally good, bad, or indifferent.

Lest in the press of everday life we forget the radical actualities, I think we need to remind ourselves often and deeply: our current human life-experience in time and space is itself, in fact, an ongoing multisensorial hallucination (as the Wise, discarnate and incarnate, have perennially attested) with an ineffably deep validity of multiplex rhyme and reason, as it were, that can only be "grokked" by means of itself, rightly lived-through and perceived.  The odd subdominant hallucination or two (involving mainly this or that particular sense) that we encounter within the dominant one may be usefully taken as relatively simple allegorical preliminaries to practice with (like learning how to ride a bike in preparation for someday having to operate a jet airplane) and upon which we can sharpen our wits in preparation for the tricky act of properly self-referencing ourselves, in vivo, in media res.  I believe the Ra have commented innumerable times on this matter, as it would seem to be the practical basis of all higher-evolutionary activities of any real avail in this extremely challengingly obdurate realm, submerged in sorrow at the moment, even while at least equally chock-full of bright prospects... 
 
I myself hear strange voices in my head peremptorily commanding me not to listen to Voices In My Head.  But-- if I don't... I do! And if I do-- I don't!!  What a dilemma-- reminds me of George Carlin's remark: If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?  I'm now working on corralling three of the most melodious voices so as to form a barbershop and doo-wop quartet with me singing lead.  Admittedly, no one else will be able to appreciate the harmony, but it will keep me amused, at least.  Cheers!

[AnthroHeart]

The only auditory hallucination I had was like sonic booms and doors slamming shut. Not exactly like I could talk to them.

[isis]

Hallucinating/Hallucinations fascinate me so much. When I was 15 my pop started hallucinating bc of pain meds. The voice he was hearing in his head was telling him things that were making him ecstatic - like promising he would be a billionaire & stuff like that. If you asked him who he was talking to he'd say he had a phone in his ear. There was no way to keep him from interacting with the hallucinations. It was very entertaining & caused lots of laughs. He wasn't just hearing voices in his head - he was also seeing people that weren't there. At one point he pointed to strange place in the dining room then asked me if I could see the guy sitting there. I told him I couldn't. Then he says, "His name is _____ & he likes you." Then he smiles & walks off. Then, for a really long time, I looked at the location where he told me the guy was thinking that maybe a guy actually was there & I just couldn't see him. I ran the name thru my head over & over & made sure I'd never forget that moment in time. Then about 7yrs later I met someone with that name & I'm almost certain the person I met is the person my dad saw when hallucinating. I hope to one day find out.

[AnthroHeart]

My dad only believed in astral projection. That was the limit of his spirituality. Now he's just religious.

[Bluebell]

Isis that's crazy! do u think he was astral projecting? if so, not cool! get him drunk, ask him if he astral projects.