Please keep quotes to one or two lines as it takes up space thank you.



Namaste

I wasn't saying you were right or wrong and that's not really what it's about. I was talking about mental health and you were talking about psychic phenomena, very different. And if you're talking about proof psychic demons have yet be proved too.

So what knowledge do you have of mental health?

JRO made interesting observations about psychic phenomena, which is not the subject of the thread if you want to stay on track. There's probably any amount of Youtube vids about it if you care to look. I was talking about mental health issues and how the mind/brain can create the reality of 'demons', and sometimes what people call demons aren't always ugly creatures with horns.

In response to the question in your final sentence I gave an indication of my position in posting #30 after earlier making the following points (quoting myself) "They're all interesting, but as yet unproven, points - unless someone can point out relevant data I'm not aware of. To the best of my knowledge the nature and significance of dreams remains a subject of conjecture rather than fact.

Mental health may be better understood and a link between seeing demons and mental ill-health may be logical but again - as far as I'm aware - is still unproven."

I accept you weren't saying I was either right or wrong but I was asking for your view based on your experience of mental health provision, something I have no detailed knowledge about.

On a later point it's not possible to prove so-called psychic demons any more than we can actually prove life after death. However with the latter there is - I suggest - abundant evidence but I do not know if that's the case with demons or indeed what demons are supposed to be.

The observations made by jro (to which I referred) were in posting #35 and said "Where I work, we are overwhelmed with cases and I know this is true of the entire area. People are signing up for mental health services and having to wait for weeks or even months. The psychiatric hospitals here are turning people away that they shouldn't be turning away because there just aren't enough beds. Yes, mental health is skyrocketing."
I was already "on track" with what I referred to.
I have absolutely no interest in viewing YouTube videos in the way you suggest. I much prefer to engage on the points under discussion and with the greatest of respect that's what I had been doing.

Frankly I don't know if there will ever be any empirical evidence on this, simply because of the way the brain operates and the current scientific understanding of it. What we do have is people's own experiences and the obvious links to chemical imbalances and the like, and we also know that the unconscious does 'communicate' with the conscious - dreams being the obvious way. There are certain ways that it can manifest in the brain and they often form patterns, for instance one common 'demon' is a black figure (sometimes multiples) with red or white eyes. If you think of dream interpretations you'll get the idea but Jung called them archetypes, they are representations/imagery given to the conscious mind from the unconscious.

Often what people see is relevant to them individually because the unconscious makes references to what that individual is conscious, the unconscious doesn't use language but it's the cliche of a picture paining a thousand words that an individual conscious would understand. The patterns remain consistent though and what is manifest can often give mental health professionals 'pointers'.

Psychic phenomena can't be proved by science either but there are plenty of people who have witnessed all kinds of things, myself included. There are plenty of witnesses and investigators, as well as photographs and videos. My wife's nephew is an investigator who will be filming nearby soon for television.
WQhere it was in danger of going o0ff track is the reference to the demons of psychic phenomena that JRO was talking about, and are different to the inner demons.
There are parallels between inner and outer realities, and it's often in the discussion of mental health and psychic phenomena that we can find insights as to how one can affect the other.

"There are parallels between inner and outer realities, and it's often in the discussion of mental health and psychic phenomena that we can find insights as to how one can affect the other."

As an untrained, uninvolved but analytical observer, one who has 'listened' to many contributors to many different discussion topics on various forum-websites over quite a few years, I've concluded that mental/emotional ill-health is evident in a fair number of accounts involving apparent psychic/spiritual matters.

We may gain insight from discussions but one major difficulty remains when we try to address online an individual's problems/difficulties/concerns. Difficulty too where they are interested in having additional experiences when really they need counseling and support.

Spirituality doesn't beget Spirituality, the brain/mind begets Spirituality, and schizophrenia and Spirituality light up the same areas of the brain. This is what many Spiritual people don't seem to want to understand. If people are reading books or posts and processing data - Spiritual knowledge is data as far as the brain is concerned - then it's susceptible to the frailties of the human mind/brain. People choose to believe that they are having a Spiritual or psychic experience. or what they are witnessing is psychic or Spiritual.

The largest and most dangerous issue by far is not that someone may or may not have a mental health issue, it's that too many people with nothing more than an opinion based on ignorance try and put themselves across as being mental health or Spirituality experts. I've seen enough of threads very similar to this one and they almost always follow the same patterns. The question I have is, of all the people who have offered what they think is advice, guidance or even common sense, how many of them have any experience in the field of mental health?

Some people don't want to know that they have a mental health issue and they'll do anything to deny they have one - even to the stage where they would rather believe the voices they hear are demons - rather than seek professional help. Perhaps it's better to create a monster and have to live with that rather than admit there's something wrong and have it dealt with.

Here's what nobody will tell you, and I'm saying this from the perspective of a Spiritual person who is a medium and has worked in mental health. Hearing voices is more common than people would admit to and it's not a mental health issue. The 'real' mental health issues stem from the voices being the manifestation of a deeper mental health issue if there is one, and how people 'respond' to the voices. Hearing a voice in the back of your head is regarded as more of an idiosyncrasy than a mental health issue. People hearing a voice they believe is God and they jump off a bridge because of it is considered to be a mental health issue that cause danger to the person hearing the voices or others. It's one of the reasons people get guns and lay siege to schools.

Schizophrenia is not a disease. What can happen - it happened to me and a few others I've talked to about the same thing on here - is that after a major trauma (almost dying qualifies as major trauma/PTSD) is that the brain/mind can compartmentalise the perceptual reality - the emotional responses, the inability to deal with the reality, beliefs. etc. That can be where the voices come from and many who have suffered childhood traumas have said that their voices are children's voices. It's as though the person has taken a 'snapshot' of their mental/emotional state that has been frozen in time and the mind perceives it as a 'being' in its own right. The voice(s) usually seem to reflect that, as if what the voices say would come from a 'being' in that state of mind.

The reason I mentioned that was because you said you'd almost died due to COVID. I'd suggest that unless you've dealt with your experience of that directly, it's likely that you still haven't really got over it. Pushing it to the back of your mind isn't dealing with it or resolving it. I thought I'd dealt with my childhood abuse but a couple of rounds of therapy after a car accident that I shouldn't have walked away with showed me something different.

Our reality is all about how what's rattling in our skulls perceive it to be, and schizophrenia can be something of a unique perspective. However, on saying that schizophrenia and Spirituality light up the same areas of the brain. Most people don't want to admit to having a mental health issue and that in itself can be a mental health issue itself. How I love irony. But having a mental health issue is certainly a window into how we create our realities that few see or want to see.

Neither, they have mental health issues.
All this demonic possession is nothing more than ignorant superstition that should have died out hundreds of years ago.
It really doesn't make sense and it doesn't help these discussions.