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Revelation or Psychosis?

wellwisher

Well-Known Member
Faith is unfounded belief. It's unreliable.

The experience is quite credible. People have them all the time. How they interpret them varies considerably, though.
Not everyone has vivid audio and/or visual experiences. The more common experience may be intuitive and involve subtle feeling tones more than just once. Even those who may not have religious affinity, can feel awe when seeing the valley from a maintain top. This sense of awe and even our feeling of smallest, in the mix of things, can become an internal data point on which faith can appear. The experience is real and one in a timeless place that many humans have shared.

I was brought up Catholic, but became Agnostic. I was more like a person schooled in science in math, that still had an affinity with spiritual and even mystical things, from many cultures; logic and feeling. In terms of learning about the brain, I did this from the inside, out. This began with an interest in Psychology, in general, and Jungian Psychology, in particular.

Jung's theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious could explain the religious nature of the agnostic. To me the archetypes were like apps of the brain's operating, being projected, and could appear with neural damming and natural brain adjustments. I did not see that as discounting these religious things. Rather the religions of the world could help teach me, about the coding of these apps, since they have worked the neural IT for centuries, albeit, in a more symbolic way. I also learned collective human symbolism, from the works of Jung, so I could interpret religious symbols and learn the secrets of their brain IT.

At the time when Jung was developing his theories, there were very few computers, like we have today. There was no easy cultural way to offer a parallel between the brain and archetypes, to something more tangible, like computer apps or firmware, that could reflects how the brain and consciousness work.

Now we have a way to make these parallels without a knee jerk Atheist religion deflection. For example, when we surf the web, it is no longer linear like reading a book from cover to cover. It is now more like a dream, in the sense of skipping around, in some spontaneous way, often without knowing where you are going. The web is mimicking the dynamics of the dream scape, at an unconscious level, which is why it is so familiar, even to young children. I see mythology, as the apps of various cultures, describing the human brain's operating system at that time in history. Their teachings are like the coding.

From that wide range of internal experience; inductions from focused learning and attempts to translate; dams and release, I could eventually begin to attribute what I saw in the software, with what I knew of in the brain's hardware. The hardware approach had limitations; empirical. But based on that I could reverse engineer, from inside data, I could learn new things as to how hardware needed to work to explain both the software and the hardware parallel. Rest and action potential to describe neuron firing are far less descriptive of realty than energized and action potential. The word energizes leads to new questions about directed free energy.

When it comes to consciousness and the brain, science is like someone looking at an alien machine, that learns how to use it, but they are not fully clear about the coding; software/firmware. This approach is more empirical, with the software in a black box. I have the advantage of lots of inside coding and simulation data, and I could merge this with the work of those who see from the outside.

I have learned the importance of religions; useful command lines for brain IT. This can help you get mainframe time. This IT and main frame time is why extremes of human group activity are often associated with religious IT; full power.
 

IndigoChild5559

Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
I actually don't like posting this, since It may influence how people here see me going forward, but I'm not that active anyway so I guess it's okay.

Late afternoon yesterday, I had an episode. I am currently in a state where I alternate between belief in God and denial of his existence until I have proof. Yesterday I leaned more toward belief, and I was praying earnestly, begging that if God exists, if he could just talk to me directly without human interference. I spent a few minutes doing that, and afterward wanted to play some video games since it was still early, but something changed.

I suddenly felt uneasy, and I could not sit down to play. I paced around and became overwhelmed with emotion and an intense desire to sleep. It was about 6pm and way too early. It's hard to explain, but my perception of the world seemed to close in around me, closer and closer until it felt like I could only perceive as far as my bedroom walls, like the world outside ceased to exist. I still felt bothered and confused and compelled to sleep. So I lay down on my bed, and the world closed in more to an area of about arms reach. I proceeded to go into a kind of waking dream, where my eyes were open but I was in a dream, and for about two hours I was overwhelmed by emotion and twisting thoughts. I did not feel in control, but like an observer or passenger.

My thoughts were of the resurrection of Christ, and I could not steer my mind in another direction. My thoughts became visual images of Christ, his face blurred since I don't know what he looks like, but I somehow knew it was him. My thoughts became his words, and he spoke to me with authority. He told me about the resurrection and for once things made so much sense. He explained it in a way I had never thought about or heard about before. It was like a fever dream. I became very emotional and started to cry. The feeling lifted and I quickly wrote down what he said.

I snapped back to...let's say reality, and my mind was clear. I just stood up and went to my pc and played a game like nothing happened. My mind wondered what the hell was going on but I pretended nothing happened and just focused on the game, I guess I was, and am afraid of what this means.

Am I becoming schizophrenic?
Is God talking to me?
Should I see a priest or a psychologist?
First off, if you find yourself hearing voices or seeing things that others can't hear or see, that's a hallucination needs psychiatric intervention. But what you are writing about above doesn't sound like that.

People can have a variety of experiences that, while unusual, are not psychosis. They can be do to a sugar spike, or menstrual hormones, or indigestion, or a host of other underlying factors. Like for me, I don't know what it is about 3 am, but everything is always much scarier then. Every little sound is a burglar breaking in, two spots of light reflecting on the ceiling can seem like demon eyes. I have learned with time to simply ignore my thoughts at that time of night.

You speak of seeing Jesus inside your mind. This is actually not uncommon among Christians. Some people are simply more imaginative than others. I've had instances reading books where my mind's representation is so vivid and so detailed that it is astounding, like I will "smell" the sweat of the crowd, or "feel" the wind on my face. I wouldn't worry at all about your inner visions, but at the same time I wouldn't take them to be a vision from God either.

If these inner visions ever become upsetting to you, that might be an occasion to find someone to talk to.
 

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
I think growing up in a cult really messed up my thinking patterns, hence the black and white, truth and lie views, and my perspective that reality is cold.

There was one way that was truth, and everything else was false and evil. The cult said: Do x and you have hope and safety.

The cult said 'the world is meaningless'. Their favorite scripture was:

15Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

So I've grown up feeling that way, but after discovering the lies I abandoned all religion in search of certainty, but now that 'world' is all I have.


I have nothing much to say that hasn’t been said; except, Good luck on your journey. And do not be afraid; we have nothing to fear from a loving God, regardless of what the “reality” of such a God may be.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Hallucinations aren't that uncommon, and delusions are practically the rule. How common are hallucinations?

People accepting these 'revelations' as real and important are common, as well. Sometimes individuals and social situations are such that these hallucinations and interpretations are accepted by significant numbers, and a new religion is born, or an old one validated.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Not everyone has vivid audio and/or visual experiences. The more common experience may be intuitive and involve subtle feeling tones more than just once. Even those who may not have religious affinity, can feel awe when seeing the valley from a maintain top. This sense of awe and even our feeling of smallest, in the mix of things, can become an internal data point on which faith can appear. The experience is real and one in a timeless place that many humans have shared.

I was brought up Catholic, but became Agnostic. I was more like a person schooled in science in math, that still had an affinity with spiritual and even mystical things, from many cultures; logic and feeling. In terms of learning about the brain, I did this from the inside, out. This began with an interest in Psychology, in general, and Jungian Psychology, in particular.

Jung's theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious could explain the religious nature of the agnostic. To me the archetypes were like apps of the brain's operating, being projected, and could appear with neural damming and natural brain adjustments. I did not see that as discounting these religious things. Rather the religions of the world could help teach me, about the coding of these apps, since they have worked the neural IT for centuries, albeit, in a more symbolic way. I also learned collective human symbolism, from the works of Jung, so I could interpret religious symbols and learn the secrets of their brain IT.

At the time when Jung was developing his theories, there were very few computers, like we have today. There was no easy cultural way to offer a parallel between the brain and archetypes, to something more tangible, like computer apps or firmware, that could reflects how the brain and consciousness work.

Now we have a way to make these parallels without a knee jerk Atheist religion deflection. For example, when we surf the web, it is no longer linear like reading a book from cover to cover. It is now more like a dream, in the sense of skipping around, in some spontaneous way, often without knowing where you are going. The web is mimicking the dynamics of the dream scape, at an unconscious level, which is why it is so familiar, even to young children. I see mythology, as the apps of various cultures, describing the human brain's operating system at that time in history. Their teachings are like the coding.

From that wide range of internal experience; inductions from focused learning and attempts to translate; dams and release, I could eventually begin to attribute what I saw in the software, with what I knew of in the brain's hardware. The hardware approach had limitations; empirical. But based on that I could reverse engineer, from inside data, I could learn new things as to how hardware needed to work to explain both the software and the hardware parallel. Rest and action potential to describe neuron firing are far less descriptive of realty than energized and action potential. The word energizes leads to new questions about directed free energy.

When it comes to consciousness and the brain, science is like someone looking at an alien machine, that learns how to use it, but they are not fully clear about the coding; software/firmware. This approach is more empirical, with the software in a black box. I have the advantage of lots of inside coding and simulation data, and I could merge this with the work of those who see from the outside.

I have learned the importance of religions; useful command lines for brain IT. This can help you get mainframe time. This IT and main frame time is why extremes of human group activity are often associated with religious IT; full power.
Feelings are as varied and unreliable as hallucinations. It's objective, demonstrable evidence that launched the explosion of knowledge and technology that created the world we now live in.

For thousands of years we had visions and revelations. They got us nowhere. Knowledge and technology advanced at a snail's pace.
 

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
Faith is unfounded belief. It's unreliable.

The experience is quite credible. People have them all the time. How they interpret them varies considerably, though.


That’s not what faith is. Belief in that which is unproven, I’ll grant you; but if faith were without foundation it would not be said, by those who have come to rely upon it, that it moves mountains.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
That’s not what faith is. Belief in that which is unproven, I’ll grant you; but if faith were without foundation it would not be said, by those who have come to rely upon it, that it moves mountains.
If faith were well founded it wouldn't be faith; it would be knowledge.
Poorly evidenced belief can, indeed, be influential, bur the ability to motivate and ontological reality don't correlate.
 

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
If faith were well founded it wouldn't be faith; it would be knowledge.
Poorly evidenced belief can, indeed, be influential, bur the ability to motivate and ontological reality don't correlate.


It appears you are evaluating faith as if it were an intellectual quality. It isn’t; it’s a quality of the spirit. And any world view which, relying only on mind and body, dismisses the spirit, is as unfounded as a two legged stool.
 

IndigoChild5559

Loving God and my neighbor as myself.
It appears you are evaluating faith as if it were an intellectual quality. It isn’t; it’s a quality of the spirit. And any world view which, relying only on mind and body, dismisses the spirit, is as unfounded as a two legged stool.
Really? You think the mind is not directly involved in faith? Wow.
 

Saint Frankenstein

Wanderer From Afar
Premium Member
Am I becoming schizophrenic?
Is God talking to me?
Should I see a priest or a psychologist?
Nah. I wouldn't worry about that. It sounds like you had an overwhelming, basically mystical, experience that intensely touched you. I would accept it as a gift and praise my deity for answering my prayers. It sounded beautiful. Not something to be afraid of.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
It appears you are evaluating faith as if it were an intellectual quality. It isn’t; it’s a quality of the spirit. And any world view which, relying only on mind and body, dismisses the spirit, is as unfounded as a two legged stool.
If you're using it as epistemic tool, to assess reality, then you are substituting emotion for intellect. and attributing it to some nebulous stuff you're calling "spirit."

Think about it: Given a certain set of objective, measurable facts, intellect will usually yield a pretty consistent assessment. Faith/emotion, on the other hand, will not. A tool that yields inconsistent results is not a dependable tool.

Faith may be an option for questions of purpose, meaning, or value, but for questions of concrete reality, after millennia of usage, it hasn't produced any consistent, much less testable, results.
 

RestlessSoul

Well-Known Member
If you're using it as epistemic tool, to assess reality, then you are substituting emotion for intellect. and attributing it to some nebulous stuff you're calling "spirit."

Think about it: Given a certain set of objective, measurable facts, intellect will usually yield a pretty consistent assessment. Faith/emotion, on the other hand, will not. A tool that yields inconsistent results is not a dependable tool.

Faith may be an option for questions of purpose, meaning, or value, but for questions of concrete reality, after millennia of usage, it hasn't produced any consistent, much less testable, results.


Dismissing faith because it lacks epistemic value, is like dismissing sunlight because it lacks substance.

And as for questions of concrete reality, it is by questioning reality that we learn it is anything but concrete. Everything is in flux, nothing is fixed, and reality is seldom what it appears to us to be. In this regard science, over the last century, is just now catching up with what philosophers intuited millennia ago.
 
I actually don't like posting this, since It may influence how people here see me going forward, but I'm not that active anyway so I guess it's okay.

Late afternoon yesterday, I had an episode. I am currently in a state where I alternate between belief in God and denial of his existence until I have proof. Yesterday I leaned more toward belief, and I was praying earnestly, begging that if God exists, if he could just talk to me directly without human interference. I spent a few minutes doing that, and afterward wanted to play some video games since it was still early, but something changed.

I suddenly felt uneasy, and I could not sit down to play. I paced around and became overwhelmed with emotion and an intense desire to sleep. It was about 6pm and way too early. It's hard to explain, but my perception of the world seemed to close in around me, closer and closer until it felt like I could only perceive as far as my bedroom walls, like the world outside ceased to exist. I still felt bothered and confused and compelled to sleep. So I lay down on my bed, and the world closed in more to an area of about arms reach. I proceeded to go into a kind of waking dream, where my eyes were open but I was in a dream, and for about two hours I was overwhelmed by emotion and twisting thoughts. I did not feel in control, but like an observer or passenger.

My thoughts were of the resurrection of Christ, and I could not steer my mind in another direction. My thoughts became visual images of Christ, his face blurred since I don't know what he looks like, but I somehow knew it was him. My thoughts became his words, and he spoke to me with authority. He told me about the resurrection and for once things made so much sense. He explained it in a way I had never thought about or heard about before. It was like a fever dream. I became very emotional and started to cry. The feeling lifted and I quickly wrote down what he said.

I snapped back to...let's say reality, and my mind was clear. I just stood up and went to my pc and played a game like nothing happened. My mind wondered what the hell was going on but I pretended nothing happened and just focused on the game, I guess I was, and am afraid of what this means.

Am I becoming schizophrenic?
Is God talking to me?
Should I see a priest or a psychologist?
You have no proof of any god's existence. No one does. However, there are mental health therapists who exist and many are religious. It wouldn't hurt anything to set up an appointment just to talk to someone. Am I wrong in thinking you have had a hard life? Regardless, the episode you had, you were able to identify it. That is good. Go speak to someone who is a mental health counselor. I wish you the best. :)
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
You have no proof of any god's existence. No one does. However, there are mental health therapists who exist and many are religious. It wouldn't hurt anything to set up an appointment just to talk to someone. Am I wrong in thinking you have had a hard life? Regardles the episode you had, you were able to identify it. That is good. Go speak to someone who is a mental health counselor. I wish you the best. :)
Sounds like a self-induced religious fugue; whether a product of a serious mental disorder or not I've no idea.

However, these are neither unusual nor objective evidence of an ontological reality. The experience tends to confirm the mythology familiar to the experiencer. Christians see/hear Christ, Hindus see/hear Krishna, Norsemen see/hear Odin.
 

Quester

New Member
Am I becoming schizophrenic?
Is God talking to me?
Should I see a priest or a psychologist?

I've been involved in this "experiences" picture since the mid-1950s. I'm going to keep this simple, and we can go on later if you want.

These type of experiences can be a problem, but only because we fail to enlarge the picture. In other words, there's a vast difference between classical teaching and constructivism. Classical teaching is what we got in school, where we were "handed" the answers, and all we had to do was remember what we were told. As we got older, unfortunately, we kept that picture in our heads and if you look at conversations, people always ask what a particular topic subject is, and never look into it.

Constructivism is the teaching method that makes YOU do all the work. If you don't do it - oh well. A good example of this was my first "information" experience back in the mid-50s. I was getting dressed, and suddenly, from out of the blue, I got: "The Catholic Church is wrong." What does a five year old child do with that?

It took DECADES to straighten that out - but - it was right. Oddly, what you went through and the research I did coincide. I could answer your questions, but lets leave it for now.

Regarding your statement about seeing a psychologist... don't worry about it ... you're not "nutz" LOL ... you are being used by a paranormal source. Oddly, I knew that I might have been going down that road too, and talked with 3 psychologists (2012, 2015, 2018 ... the last one had a PhD) who had an interest in this subject ... bottom line all 3 times - not nutz LOL.

I've had the paranormal attempts at disruption too. But the bottom line is, when you don't know who said it, then it's all about what was said. If you want to take it apart - go for it - welcome to constructivism. If not ... just let it go.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
I think you oughta allow yourself to have faith.

Even if you don't understand the nature of reality at this moment, or the mysteries of God, I don't see any reason to dismiss what I feel is an incredible experience.
So one should just uncritically accept all manner of mysterious and non-credible ideas, and that would help to understand the nature of reality?
 

JustGeorge

Not As Much Fun As I Look
Staff member
Premium Member
So one should just uncritically accept all manner of mysterious and non-credible ideas, and that would help to understand the nature of reality?
Of course not.

Everyone knows you do that by trying to debate strangers(who weren't interested in engaging the first time) on the internet.
 
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