Into the Void

Spirituality doesn’t have to take the form of a belief in a god, or even in an intelligence. It especially doesn’t equate to organized religion. In fact, churches have to discourage religious epiphanies in the general membership, lest their god tells someone outside of the power structure something the church elders don;t want to hear.

I am an electrical engineer, and I really, really like what I do. I am also a Master in Usui Shiki Ryoho. I like that too, but for different reasons. Reiki isn’t a religion, it is a modality with spiritual overtones. This isn’t the Occult, it is a simple technological limitation, that frequencies outside our limits of detection actually exist. After that, make the great leap into the void… in some way that I do not yet understand, we can act as transducers. Do headphones understand piezoelectricity?

Chaos in the extreme becomes perfect order. Chaos also has a fractal similarity with scale that enables us to understand the cosmos through generalization of human-scale ideas. Make chaos your god, and try to find the order in it.

What Kind of Soul Are You?

You Are a Visionary Soul

You are a curious person, always in a state of awareness.
Connected to all things spiritual, you are very connected to your soul.
You are wise and bright: able to reason and be reasonable.
Occasionally, you get quite depressed and have dark feelings.

You have great vision and can be very insightful.
In fact, you are often profound in a way that surprises yourself.
Visionary souls like you can be the best type of friend.
You are intuitive, understanding, sympathetic, and a good healer.

Souls you are most compatible with: Old Soul and Peacemaker Soul

The Hidden Messages in Water by Dr. Masaru Emoto, scientific researcher, healer, and popular lecturer.
Masaru Emoto: Miraculous Messages from Water contains some beautiful photos of these snowflakes.
For the engineers in the audience, perhaps you remember the discovery in the 1980’s of the Josephson Junction. The Josephson Junction is a silicon device that is so sensitive to electromagnetic waves that it can detect the small EM waves emanating from a person’s brain. In fact, it has been tested in mice as a brain-machine interface.
I submit that water crystals may be a natural manifestation of the Josephson Effect.

I’m told that besides bipolars and schizophrenic visionaries, political dissidents and “subversive herbalists” were also tortured and burned at the stake. Let’s add Lesbians to the list. It makes sense that a single woman might make her living from herbalism. Which she may have learned from a lesbian mentor. Which was part of that Old Time Religion, not Christianity. Herbalism, that is, not lesbianism!
Hallucinogenic plants are very effective in treating certain kinds of ailments. Sort of like early transpersonal psychology. Until one of the Good Townsfolk took the belladonna and had a bad trip. She’s a witch! Burn the witch!
According to the infamous “Hammer of Witches” gay men were to be thrown in with the bundles of sticks as kindling, hence faggot. It was so prevalent that the word for kindling became applied to gay men as a pejorative.
The mentally ill are *still* seen as being demon-possessed in some places, even in the US. I have talked to folks who have been forced to undergo exorcisms. Of course, there was that unfortunate incident in Romania where the Romanian Orthodox church crucified a schizophrenic nun.
On the other hand, you could see an exorcism as an extreme form of psychosocial therapy. I mean, the whole family had to commit themselves to the new, well person. If you think about it, you spend years in therapy and your family still bears a grudge for the things you did in episodes 15 years ago. You can never live it down, not ever. It would be nice to make believe that some demon left and took my sins with it.

Technorati: schizophrenic schizophrenic nun burned at the stake Christianity lesbianism hallucinogenic transpersonal+psychology exorcism faggot demon demon-possessed psychosocial therapy

The anthropological literature has whole books on how different cultures view mental illness. A bipolar makes a perfect shaman, because unmedicated we tend to have periods of remission between any episodes of talking to Dog.
How we perceive our own level of functioning is an important part of the diagnostic criteria. I quote from pendulum.org:

The symptoms are a cause of great distress or difficulty in functioning at home, work, or other important areas.

It seems fairly obvious that if your job function is to have psychotic episodes, then the symptoms aren’t going to create difficulties at work.
I completely agree that many of the prophets and Christian Mystics were mentally ill. I believe that they were putting forth Truths that were only available to a shattered mind, a mind that has no stake in the status quo. This is the meaning of “thinking out of the box”.
We are stigmatizing mental illness in ways that go far beyond any distress or difficulty in functioning that we experience.