Believing voices in our head are causally powerful (as in deities) really reminds me of the theory of consciousness appearing from the collapse of the bicameral mind. Here's a good introduction to this idea: https://youtu.be/lgnMyF-o0sQ

Seriously, it's something I've never thought about, but once you hear "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" you kinda know what the theory is and it makes sense.

They did say that he had something there. AFAIK they didn't say that he spawned a whole field of research, though.

I assume the same. It's just that there is something nice about a theory that basically tells you the core of what you need to know from the name of it.

"We're making a new movie. It's called 'Snakes on a Plane' "

"Oh? What's it about?"

Consciousness might not be as essential to the human experience as is generally believed now a days. What percentage of the day are we really engaged in conscious rational thought anyways? And is it really what makes us human, or do subconscious processes play a much bigger role in the human experience than reason?

I have bipolar disorder and I accidentally ingested LSD at a festival by kissing someone who had just taken a tab on their tongue. I wasn’t aware that this could happen, yet it happened.

The next day I woke up with a Voice. It appeared to me to be the voice of God. It was very difficult to go against it but I could negotiate. It told me things that it couldn’t possibly know, like that I should ask a stranger for a cigarette so I could later get a towel when I needed it.

It seemed to have powers of foreshadowing and it would seemingly tell me things before they happened.

It was also a trickster and it would play cruel jokes on me. After a while it became hard for me to take.

At the same music festival I met a lady who would make songs just by looking at you. I carefully realised that she was likely in something like a permanent psychedelic state, which I had been before due to my bipolar condition. I asked her this directly and she confirmed it. She said I was one of the few people who could see it!

I had purchased a ticket to her retreat. So a month after the festival I went to her retreat. It was a very difficult time and the voice was giving me a lot of trouble.

I went to the song lady. I told her about my condition (the voice had told me to go and tell her!). She thought about it and said ok, I will help you, and you cannot do the retreat.

She then did a session with me where she told me where she saw the entity - she called it a “walk in” spiritual entity, and said that because I’m very “open” with my bipolar, adding the LSD made me even more open, it happened that a “walk in” sneaked inside.

She said she saw the entity down my legs, and kidneys, and she helped me expel it. She then taught me I could “close the door” to prevent it getting in.

My condition was immediately much better.

When she expelled the voice from my body, she spoke exactly like the voice spoke, telling me that the entity wanted to leave, didn’t really fight the expulsion, using the same tone of voice and words that I’d gotten used that the Voice would use. It was inexplicable and amazing.

Now I still have a voice, but it’s a whisper in comparison. It tells me things, still seems to have some ability to warn me about the future (it’s debatable how much of this is connecting the dots later of course, but it has done some odd things, like warned me I wouldn’t go to certain places).

Since the experience is not as intense, and I’ve lived enough to realise it’s not omnipotent or always right, I roll with it.

I have no scientific explanation for what happened to me.

Also, the “resolution” at the end that one might (meaninglessly) apply the word placebo to isn’t the interesting part IMO. What is interesting is seeing where our understanding of the human brain fits/predicts or fails to fit experiences like this.

I am an academic PI, and my research on brain energy metabolism is close enough to what we are talking about here that I don't need to look on wikipedia to tell you our current level of understanding doesn't offer anything close to a mechanistic explanation for experiences like this.

Some of my research has been inspired by thinking about peoples surprising anecdotal experiences and stories- and then investigating what that might imply about the underlying biology.

You seem to subscribe to a kind of scientism where genuine scientific curiosity and frank discussion about the gaps in our understanding is unacceptable. Your combination of being completely ignorant and condescending at the same time is awful.

I am generally very open minded and curious about peoples claims of supernatural and spiritual experiences. I believe it all has understandable mechanistic biological explanations, but I am very curious what they may be.

Before the voice did you have an inner monologue.

If so how did it differ? How does the current voice differ from the inner monologue?

I pondered whether that was it, that the LSD had just shattered my psyche in a way that I was hearing voices when they were once part of me. However for many reasons I don’t think that anymore, not 100% anyway.

A. It’s psychosis

B. It’s a spiritual entity that walked into me, just as the song lady said.

C. I should continue taking my medication.

D. I should also take care of myself spiritually and accept there are things I cannot understand completely

I honestly cannot say if it’s just a part of me. At one point I thought so, I thought it was my “intuition” embodied and removed from myself. But the voice played a trick on me and told me to trust someone I shouldn’t have. And then I realised A. I can’t trust it blindly and B. It doesn’t know everything. So C. It’s just saying whatever the hell it wants to say. It has opinions.

However, further proof of its bizarre nature is its continuing ability to predict the future. Granted, it’s much inferior to the original Voice, but it’s still there and it’s still bizarre. For example, it told me I wouldn’t go to a certain city to meet a friend when I had planned to (turns out my friend wasn’t there!) and things of the sort.

As far as driving me insane, I don’t have a great answer. I deal with it day to day. The effect of the voice under my bipolar medication is subdued. I know now that if I raise my medication I can make it even less intense. It’s just part of my condition now, and I fight it when I need to and roll with it if I don’t.

I know it’s perfectly fascinating and odd and even I would have a hard time believing in me 5 years ago.

For fun you could also keep track of other related data. How far fetched the prediction is. How confident the voice is. The time frame of the prediction. Just an idea...

The voice always speaks in the same tone.

Predictions are usually something I want to do or am planning to do. Plans it usually tells me as soon as they are conceived. Predictions come often when I am making plans, it tells me whether they will work or not.

HOWEVER, to answer your question, such an exercise could be totally futile as in actuality it changes its mind a lot. Sometimes it tells me something I intend to do won't work, without divulging why. I try it anyway and it kinda works, and I figure out why the point of failure. I fix it, and now the voice tells me it will work now, making the initial prediction kind of moot.

Sometimes something happens and something the voice initially thought was a great idea it now says will be an absolute failure. By that time I am often committed so I tell it there's no choice now, we can only keep going, and it kinda agrees and we do the thing anyway. Sometimes the voice is just plain wrong about things.

The predictions aren't so much predictions as they are opinions. Also, studying it with too hard a lens seems to bring out the worse in the condition, so I avoid it.

It would, however, require a lot of commitment from the patient and willingness to face the condition and even make the symptoms worse. And, considering how crude our tools are at this stage, wouldn’t likely yield much useful information.

We have many models of reality available to us (whether we're talking "statistical mechanics" or "quantum chromodynamics" or "chakra energies"). Categorizing them as "True" or "False" is not very useful (is Newtonian physics "True" or "False"?). Rather, we should be content with judging our models by whether they are _useful_, and that judgement must be made contextually.

Having a mechanistic view of your experiences grounded in neuroscience is useful: It suggests that you should take your medication and that probably helps.

Having a spiritual understanding of your relationship to your experiences caused you to do things that helped you and made your life better. Does that mean that model is "True"? Who cares. It's sort of a meaningless question. It was a useful model, and that's all there is.

Somewhat relatedly, I was quite influenced by this (unfinished) work: https://metarationality.com/

Also, I've seen and experienced too much to just say "it's not a spiritual being". I have compelling evidence that indeed, something was passed between me and the Shaman Song Lady that day, even though it would be impossible to prove.

Point being that it's entirely possible for the perceived sequence of events as described in the anecdote above to be true as experienced by that person, without the need for anything supernatural going on.

I would be curious to know why you think that scientific explanations will get more, not less, supernatural in the next 20 years.

EDIT: dug up the article https://danlawton.substack.com/p/when-buddhism-goes-bad

Good read, and it also parallels discussions in mental health forums where people with dissociative mental health issues generally recommend against meditation, or at least some types of meditation (e.g. walking meditiation is ok, watching your observer/stillness/awareness types are not).

I was so so lucky I was right next to one when it happened to me.

Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays.

Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).

I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.

  (Human) memory is extremely unreliable.

The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).

The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is.

The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.

You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

You're focused on unknown mechanisms for easily verifiable observations, while my focus is on the (lack of) proof that the song lady actually observed anything at all. For all I know she just listened to what you said and went along with it.

To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.

The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.

But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.

To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.

The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.

And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.

> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.

At this point I have no idea, but it's an interesting hypothesis to your question. If dark energy exists, and we never figure out exactly what it is, is it possible that when we take LSD we're actually perceiving it, or some equivalent part of the universe that's non-visible?

I mean if we have non-visible dark energy and dark matter, who is to say that when we solve dark matter/energy, we don't again go back to figuring out that "another 90%" of the universe is detectable but unexplainable? What if the borders of our knowledge will always remain incomplete?

> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much

Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.

At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

> At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have.

No, we don't. I'll even refer you to an expository article that describes some studies about what you are probably alluding to, and you can let me know how you think it adequately accounts for the parent's story [0].

Spoiler: it requires someone taking the effort to implant the memories (a pretty significant caveat worth mentioning, I would think), and I've certainly never seen it applied to some ongoing thing like a disembodied voice with apparent agency.

But even where memory implantation is relatively accepted ala coercive police interrogations, the mechanism in the brain is unknown. Was a new memory implanted or was a subject simply gaslit into remembering the conversation with the interrogator? Where in the brain is that belief encoded? How can it be simulated? Did the parent never experience a voice then? They just have a continuously updating memory being implanted by some researcher? You clearly haven't thought this through, so don't be so quick to shut it down.

The reality is that none of us here have a good explanation for the parent's experience -- brains are barely understood at all. Your skepticism to the parent's interpretation is fine, but your attempt to discredit with a blanket cop out statement that lacks any mechanism or reproducibility on the scale of the parent's story only serves to let you keep pretending like you know everything.

[0] https://www.bxscience.edu/ourpages/auto/2013/10/5/59413507/F...

  To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

  I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.

Practically though, there could be problems if the research interferes with a big industry, or disrupts 'well established practices'. Or if it damages the professional reputations of important people, or clashes with 'belief perseverance', or makes powerful people look bad, or makes the university likely to lose funding, or goes against the current cancellation third rail, etc, etc.

There's no shortage of historical examples: tobacco health research, Semmelweis, plate tectonics (!), lockdown cost benefit analyses, etc.

There was very little 'science' in outlawing cannabis research for decades. Same goes for MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, etc, all with massive therapeutic potential that has been held back for decades by politics & industry.

It was like someone doing a spot on Jack Nicholson impression, but Jack Nicholson was an invisible man in my head. How can one explain that?

She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.

(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.

Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.

People can mix up exact details and whether two things feel the same in that amount of time, especially if they recently took drugs.

> Good way to disqualify the opinion or experience of anyone.

Look, you specifically asked for a skeptical explanation. You're right that it's not a disproof, but it does mean your experience isn't particularly convincing as an anecdote.

Can you elaborate? I tried to keep a neutral tone.

It is not remotely a stretch to attribute "I recognized this woman's voice as someone else's voice" as just a run-of-the-mill fault of perception and memory. Especially when the alternative at hand is apparently something supernatural (or, at least, new physics).

Just because our current understanding hasn’t got all the answers doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, that’s the way I see it.

I think some things that we think of as supernatural now will have an “explanation” later. How much later I don’t know.

The world is not as the scientific rational model would have one believe. These substances show that indigenous cultures are thousands of years ahead of western society when it comes to understanding consciousness.

For anyone on the outside reading this; I can recommend The BBC's LSD The Beyond Within as a starting point.

It's not the world that is not rational, it's humans' mind. Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.

As humans we experience the world through our six sense doors e.g. eyes, ears, tongue, nose, touch and mind.

To try and separate the world from our minds is non trivial. It is our very mind that allows us to perceive the world.

> Doesn't require higher powers, just a glitch in our own matrices.

The matrices you describe are the sense doors.

I didn't imply that anything necessitates a higher power. If you are happier to exclude the notion I described from your world view that's okay. I'm not forcing you to be open minded!

I rather meant the logic gates ;) Or, more seriously, I was talking about the parts of the brain that handle language and reasoning, plus the memory bits.

I’m surprised that you have added “mind” as a sensory system of some kind, next to actual senses (I don’t think it is a sense of any kind on its own). Not sure what you meant, sorry.

Negotiation means bidirectional communication, right? So... have you tried running any tests on that voice?

I mean... I suspect everyone poked LLMs with a stick to some extent, probing their capabilities. I could be wrong, but I think it must be extremely natural for any human to interrogate anything unknown that exhibits any signs of potential consciousness. I cannot chat with my inner monologue as if it would be an independent entity (it simply isn't - just the same me), and this sounds like your Voice presented a personality and even an agency of its own.

It told me once that I would make love to a beautiful woman once. I joined a song circle and helped this really beautiful woman build her song. It then told me "there's a lot of different ways of making love". That one was not the worse, but it kept teaching me lessons through weird paradoxes like that, to break me open and rebuild me.

It also told me once that my tent was going to get robbed at the festival, unless I rushed in and got to it rapidly. I almost ran there, and everything was fine. It just laughed in my face, and said something cruel I don't even remember now.

Non-religious people were escaping pious people. But unbeknownst to either group, their God was a quantifiable being that could only inhabit higher order organisms experiencing a trauma, and then stay inside their minds, and help it interact in our plane of existence.

Might be some merit to this idea, given the shared experiences many psychedelic users have. Frequently there are some entities that were always there, just not perceptible.

I think it's possible, let's say that the spiritual hypothesis is true and I took in a spiritual being. The Shaman's description was that I am already "open" from bipolar, and I was "too open" after I took LSD, letting a walk-in sneak inside.

I have a lot of trauma, and I mean serious abuse, coming in from childhood. That I believe is correlated with me having bipolar.

So my idea is as follows - we know that the edges of mental illness like mine can be caused by trauma, often times because the mind is "protecting you" from the abuse in some extreme way that leads eventually to mental illness. In a way, the mind is running away from the traumatic event, it for instance often erases the trauma years from memory (something that's happened to me). So the mind is protecting you by removing you from reality.

The thing is - we say the mind is removing you and running away but to where?

My perception now is the mind "escapes" into the other world. The spiritual, mushroom, LSD world we perceive and learn from when under psychedelics. That means people with mental illness, like me, get to have psychedelic experiences naturally (my manic episodes pretty much match descriptions of LSD trips, and they don't go away, so I can stay in them for a week+). That means our mind, the mind of those heavily traumatized, is already "in between" worlds.

Having your foot in the other world, the Psilocybin-psychedelic-spiritual world, means you're protected somehow. Somehow, it actually works. Your mind knows what it's doing. Your mind is able to enter a psychedelic or latent psychedelic state to protect itself from the real world being too dark, too grim, and too horrible to think about/remember. In one hand, you could say it explains bipolar, schizophrenia, etc. if the mind is just protecting itself from true horror.

"Normal" people, or neuronormal people, who haven't experienced a lot of trauma, then find it immensely therapeutic to experience the Psilocybin / psychedelic / spiritual world for a few moments, thanks to the chemical changes of taking LSD or your drug of choice. And then they came back.

What happened to deeply traumatized people through trauma happens to neuronormal folks artificially through the introduction of a chemical change. But that chemical change happens naturally in heavily traumatized people, who had to use the same mechanisms to escape reality when they were young, thus "breaking their brain" a bit under conventional psychology. So it could be the mind knows enough to break into a psychedelic state for self protection, which is fascinating to think about!

But when someone like ME takes psychedelics however, someone loaded with trauma, we go too far and we don't come back quite the same. I suspect that explains why some people benefit immensely from LSD and Psilocybin for trauma, coming back healed, and why some people like me, it will just induce a psychotic episode.

Basically regular people get to do a shallow visit to the psychedelic-spiritual world, while people with heavy trauma go WAY TOO DEEP and lose themselves. That's what we call a psychotic episode.

That's because people with trauma are already one foot in the psychedelic world, or they have to go way too deep to find the origins of their trauma, and they "break". The sad reality is that shallow trauma is easier to treat, even in the psychedelic state, while deep trauma might just lead to a psychotic episode.

I have no idea whether this holds up or not, it's been something I think about ever since that experience.

My first two years after a hero LSD trip had me trying to parse the extended reality. I don’t have BPD or any voices so my experience is more recreational than yours. Now I just appreciate it without a need for explanation. I’m open to more research on the matter, but not holding my breath or speculating on it. I just like that so many other people have experienced it, and that I can tell they have.

So my first bipolar psychotic episode (or psychedelic episode, which I prefer) was in 2017. January February.

Then the LSD trip was in August 2023. Last year. It was funny because I went to that festival really wanting to try psychedelics in some safe way if I found out how.

I always felt like people who had done them and had good trips seemed to know something I really wanted to know, if that makes sense?

I think Ram Dass described it well. Some people after LSD look like they “get it”, and if you haven’t done it you wonder what the heck “it” is!

So the fact that I got a low dose of LSD through kissing someone, it was like the universe was teasing me and trying to both enlighten me and give me some advice - “here’s how it feels” and “it’s really dangerous for you”. It was a beautiful, transcendent and violent experience.

Was this before or after the mud ;)

Yeah there is something to appreciate about the journey

I went to the mud everyday brother

I’ve never felt so cleansed

(I’m assuming we are talking about a certain event that happens every 2 years in southern Europe!)

Also, trauma and drugs could be two of several ways of becoming open to the other world. Another could be genetic. Or there could be multiple other worlds or different categories of spiritual beings, some people susceptible to some and others to others.

Bipolar/schizophrenia are often very genetic, they run in families.

No, I don't "hear it using my ears" in the conventional sense. So I've spoken to other people who hear voices in my podcast about Bipolar condition (let me know if you want a link). The voices often have a definite physical location, even though they are not there. One person told me it was like two people behind them in the queue for a movie. She would overhear them behind her. Another person told me it would sound like was coming from the apartment above. Again sounded very real.

For me its like in the right lower abdomen. It emanates from there.

Because of this I never confuse with a person.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3004180/

>Two homogeneous subgroups of patients were defined based on the hallucination spatial location: patients with only outer space hallucinations (N = 12) and patients with only inner space hallucinations (N = 15). Between-group differences were then assessed using 2 complementary brain morphometry approaches: voxel-based morphometry and sulcus-based morphometry. Convergent anatomical differences were detected between the patient subgroups in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ).

That's for you specifically, but in the general case, it is not always easy to know if the voice came from a real person or not, right?

If the source of the Voice is your own brain then I assume the things it tells you are based on your own life experiences, is that right? Has the Voice ever given you any insights on a problem you are working on? Like for example things come to some people in a dream, so I assume the Voice can give you new insights too? Does the Voice usually only say things on certain topics, or category of topics? Or can it be on any topic, just like dreams?

The cure is explainable - an authority telling you something about your mental state that changes it is hypnotherapy. It helps to write it out that way. It's just someone suggesting you do something and then you agree to do it. The difference is you don't feel like you agreed.

Recursively, some people occasionally end up with stuck habits from trying hypnosis that they don't "actually want" (ie consciously), and one thing that works to fix this is saying to yourself "that's just my imagination and I can stop if I want to."

I interpret as "You were in an amenable state (consciously and subconsciously) for her to rewrite your software".

Edit: I have a couple of questions, if you don't mind (thank you for sharing your story):

A) You seem fairly neutral / Stoic about this entire experience, and it was clearly huge and transformative at a deep level. Do you perceive this as having a net positive or negative impact on your life?

B) Do you feel you are able to empathise with 'prophets' through the ages better than most? Not to single out particular prophets, but in general those with the Voice of God that wholly leant into to it rather than managing it (and then preached/spread their words)

A. Both.

I'll give you an example. It's similar to my bipolar. I love the psychedelic state it brought me into in my first episode. It was like being on MDMA+LSD for a week. It made me a more loving, caring, empathetic person. Before the episode I was spiteful, manipulative, uncaring. It changed me forever.

However, now I have to take daily medication, I have to take care of my diet due to Seroquel causing me to get fat easily, I have to be very careful about my sleep and I can't take psychedelics.

I believe thinking about it as "worth it, not worth it" or bad-good is the wrong way to go about it. I have it. That's my life. I deal with it.

There are advantages, and there are disadvantages.

The voice is pretty much the same thing. The first Voice, which I said sounded like God, was really cruel, yet it was clearly trying to teach me "lessons". I wish it had been kinder, but I having received value from what it was trying to tell me, it's hard to say I want to go back to when I didn't know these things. I just wish it had been delivered differently. It was mean and cruel, but sometimes it taught me things I had difficulty even grasping in any other condition.

B. Yes, but as I said on another comment here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443792 - I now believe psychosis and the spiritual-psychedelic world are kind of the same thing. I think we may have separated it out due to our current society's focus on materialism. But what we call psychosis before was treated as shamanism. But that is not to say that all shamans were made alike, or that they actually heard the voice of God. In my experience, not all spirits are made alike. I can't say much more than that as I'm not an expert.

So yes, I can totally see someone taking the experience I had and believing that they've become a prophet. I don't actually think that's what it is, not necessarily however. However if I had some kind of ability to see into the future as it felt like at that time, and people believed me, and my predictions came true, I can see people rapidly adopting that kind of thing as a true shaman.

You really honed in on the crux of my questions actually - Your original comment immediately made me think of shamans and prophets from an evolutionary biology and anthropology sense (and the arguments that it is a beneficial trait for a subset of a human group to have) and what that all might mean to you.

Oh this is so true--everyone thinks they're either demons or artifacts of your imagination. Thanks for sharing your story. These voices could be real entities that we don't understand or it could be figments of our brains which we also don't understand, yet everyone is so sure it's option B. But the point is, we understand neither, so how do we even know what the difference between the two is? Thinking in terms of materialism doesn't help.

https://open.spotify.com/show/2RgP7lRoyBzz6ATlTT4lG5

Episodes 3 and 4 both have people who heard voices in their past, and their descriptions are very interesting.

I suspect I have something similar to yours, but on a much, much lower degree : a "voice" that tells me things with an opinion of its own.

Well, the way it manifests for me, is that it is not a voice. More like, I can ask myself questions and my body (more often my head) will react in a binary way. Like just saying yes or no. It is useful for Tarot, which it pushes me to take certain cards or not and make divination fun for me and others around.

It does not know the future. It changes its opinion. It says it does not want to cause me harm and so far it hadn't, but because it changes its opinion I don't believe it 100%. It seems to "prefer" things from others. But it is not me. It seems that it "reacts" faster than me, which brings me to think that it's some sort of intuition or "id" or whatever.

Personally, I live with it through the concept of Daemon, like the one Socrates had. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daimon But it is just a binary one.

Also, funnily, I asked it if it had a name. It said "no". I asked it if it wanted a name. It said "no". So there's that. It reminds me of Venom in the recent movies, minus the "eating people" part.

In countries with women’s and children’s rights, the space of acceptable shamanic behavior is suddenly a lot narrower

Maybe kinda in some circles? I suspect almost none of the tech-worker urban liberals who are the majority on HN would embrace that as a parenting notion. Even among military veterans, your phrasing would likely sound a bit off the mark. They would generally see the call as being about protecting other people and serving their country.

To address your second sentence, most people see a big difference in morality between "Protect the innocent from people who would harm them" and "Harm the innocent".

[1] obviously there will always be outliers here but if we're exclusively considering 21st century America, I feel confident wagering that the amount of religious people who would take Abraham seriously is statistically insignificant, and similar to the amount of nonreligious people who would take him seriously. Also I'm specifically referring to how third parties react to Abraham nearly murdering his son, I don't think it's fair to hold Abraham himself to the same standards as long as we're assuming that he is suffering a mental health crisis.

Yes, it's called Christianity.

What's distinctive about modern Western culture isn't its traditional religions.

Western Christianity was primarily spread through imperialism and colonialism, and thus implemented in such a way that native traditions and cultures were either recontextualized within the Christian paradigm or else purged. The political and financial incentives involved in the spread of Christianity can't be ignored, as they formed the framework by which Western cultures now tend to interrogate and interpret the supernatural.

Within that framework, hallucinations and visions can either mark one as possessed by God (a prophet) or possessed by Satan (a witch.) There's no affordance for a third way ("shamanism") as might exist in other orthodox Christian traditions because that would undermine the authority of the dominant imperialist hierarchy.

Ah, yes, the ever-present institutional forces conspiring to oppress the agency of independent, freedom-loving, free-thinking people. I wonder where the oppression-focused, conspiratorial, paranoid, anti-authoritarian mindset steeped in the language of violence that is so prevalent in the industrialized West, especially among those with mental disorders, comes from....

And theories of mind (and associated disorders) tend to be culturally based and coded - see the syndrome/myth of the wendigo as an example. And it does matter if your culture is colonized and forcibly assimilated into a religious paradigm that explicitly suppresses "shamanic" practices as heretical. The degree of common cultural recognition of shamanism as an esoteric interpretation of hallucinatory experience in any Western culture is roughly in proportion to the degree to which colonizing powers sought to eradicate, and resisted syncretism with, existing native traditions. Because that just wasn't a thing in Christianity in the West at the time.

I don't know what the snark is supposed to be for, and your comment just seems to descend into a bout of logorrhea. It's difficult for me to know what point you're actually trying to make, or what you're trying to prove or disprove. I guess I did a wrongthink and short circuited your capacity for rational thought? Sorry about that.