Submitted by Open Minded on
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
I’d say it’s probably 50/50. Meaning, mainstream psychology / psychiatry only has half the picture. Like a flatlander trying to understand the cube and only being able to talk in terms of squares and hexagons. Terms like schizophrenia are really syndromes, as the causes are multiple. I mean you have this complete system involving 5 sense perception, ESP perception, the visual interpretation of that data, the conscious interpretation of what that data means, what beliefs those are interpreted under, etc. and an error in any of those can lead to schizophrenic symptoms.
Hence one guy is perfectly sane, brain is fully functional, only problem is he has an overactive psychic organ (say the third eye) and negative entities knowing this are appearing to him trying to scare him into submission. Maybe he can hear clairvoyantly and so they speak to him. He goes to the psychiatrist who determines he’s schizophrenic under DSM-V and that’s the end of that. Another guy has neither hallucinations nor internal issues, however he does believe that reality is strange and so he gets lots of synchronicities and thus logically engages in ‘magical thinking’ because reality has indeed become magical due to conscious biasing of probability; same psychiatrist would diagnose schizophrenia if it were severe enough. And then another guy has a severe vitamin deficiency and a genetic condition whereby his brain misreads information, so he starts thinking the television is talking to him and he seems to dream with his eyes open and doesn’t seem very responsive; likewise, a type of schizophrenia. Worse, perhaps this guy comes to the attention of negative entities who torment him on top of his own delusions.
If you imagine the “human being” to be a system of parts where some parts are physical and some are metaphysical, then for a person to be 100% normal and healthy that means all those parts need to be normal and healthy and have normal interaction with each other. If this system were to become sick or dysfunctional, the same symptom could be due to a physical part not working, or a metaphysical part not working, or both not working. Therefore we have a sliding scale or range/spectrum between physical to metaphysical where a problem anywhere along that spectrum can produce a dysfunction.
When it comes to mental illness, we have different areas of the human being’s system being affected. In some cases it might be more physical, in others more metaphysical, and in others problems in both areas that reinforce each other. So if mainstream professionals only have half the system understood, well that’s a real tragedy.
If a doctor were to open up your head and stick an electric probe on a certain part of your brain, you might suddenly feel like laughing. If he pokes another part, you might sense a presence standing to the left of you. Here it’s obvious the cause is mostly physical.
On the other hand, someone might indeed get some dark ghost or entity attached to him/her and start getting nightmares, then hearing voices, then having parts of the body involuntarily move as if they had a mind of their own. This happens when the entity has synchronized its frequency with the person’s own soul and grown etheric roots or tendrils into that person’s soul (by soul I mean etheric and astral body). Then by hijacking the person’s etheric circuitry, the entity similarly has command over certain neural pathways, and in this way can control the person’s motor functions like arm movement or voice (as happens in trance channeling).
Or consider a person who doesn’t get enough sleep and after two weeks the brain starts dreaming even while eyes are open and person is walking; in this case, the person will have hallucinations and talk at the air, because he is basically sleepwalking. The cause of him hearing/seeing things is different from the case of possession, and is different from a brain injury or abnormality that likewise causes such effects. What the person’s mind sees is just like what we see on a TV screen — does the image come from a DVD? Does it come from a digital radio signal broadcast by a station? Is it the white noise snow pattern or blue screen when it’s not plugged into any signal? To the viewer, each case is a picture but the causes are all different.
Obviously medical science doesn’t believe in, nor care to look for, the supernatural factors here. If a person goes psycho and tries to use his car to run over people, science is like the police who don’t believe in the existence of a driver, and so they weld the car doors shut and cut the fuel line; suddenly the car doesn’t kill people anymore — problem solved right? Science in that case would conclude that the fuel was what caused the killing, since by removing it the killing stopped. Well, same when science uses psychiatric drugs to numb a person’s brain. It gets rid of depression or makes a person less aggressive, but does it fix the source of the problem? of course not.
I think science is right to treat that which is solely caused by physical factors. If a person has a genetic problem causing a brain abnormality and not enough serotonin production, then sure a serotonin booster drug could help. But if the person is being hounded by demons, no way is that going to solve the issue. Thus if a shaman can solve a problem without any physical drugs, that proves the problem was at least partially metaphysical in nature.