Hi Ruth,
Thanks for the post. I am glad that you enjoyed my talk in Switzerland. I am sure that given more time the group would have debated the issues raised for many hours.
I am intrigued by your son's reaction as the plane descended. Could it be that it was something to do with the change in altitude bringing about a change in blood pressure in his cranium? My Father-In-Law has a similar problem. He has a trapped air-pocket in one of his teeth. When the air expands as a plane climbs it presses on a nerve and causes great pain. However as I understand it this happens as the plane ascends not descends.
Your comment regarding the film 'A Beautiful Mind' had me grab my copy of the book of the same name by Sylvia Nasar. I have to read this as part of my research for my next book. I had planned to read it on our little Greek island retreat (Halki for anybody who is interested) this summer. However your comments have fascinated me so I will bring it forward. I note Art's question about the temporal lobe focus and I am interested as to his opinions on this.
In early November I visited an organisation called The Hearing Voices Network and had an interesting chat with a young gentleman who, I presume, 'suffered' from schizophrenia. He simply amazed me at his level of knowledge and his analytical abilities. You will recall in my talk
I mentioned the 'Tower Analogy' of Australian schizophrenic physicist Raynor Johnson. The actual Raynor quote is as follows::
“We are each rather like a prisoner in a round tower permitted to look out through five slits in the wall at the landscape outside. It is presumptuous to suppose that we can perceive the whole of the landscape through these slits – although I think there is good evidence that the prisoner can sometimes have a glimpse out the top!”
My young friend was in total agreement with this saying that he felt that he 'sensed' the real nature of reality whereas we are 'protected' by the inhibitory nature of 'normal' conscious experience.
Does this bear any resemblance to what your son reports?
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6 comments:
Tony,
The touching of the forehead must be a prodromal sign. I somehow doubt it is in the Sylvia Nasar book on John Nash. Russell Crowe obviously spent some time researching the role and perhaps added this as his own touch, so to speak.It is interesting because to me because I have never read about this as a warning sign of schizophrenia, but somehow Russell Crowe picked up on it. But, I saw how it came about! That otta be worth something. Would be interested to hear if you learn anything more in this area.
Cheers,
Ruth
Hi, Tony,
I am back responding to my own response. I am still wading my way through your book and really enjoying it. It is hard to get my mind around some of the desciptions of Observers 1 and 2, Daemon and Eidolon, but I perservere. I have observed something interesting since I saw you. Your book does drive home a message about death and from my own son's experience with schizophrenia it became apparent through therapy that he was sort of acting out a living death, or at least that's the message I picked up on. The therapist centered out my own grandmother's death as having an impact on my son (despite the fact she died in 1923). Around the age of 10 he became very interested in Magic cards. If you are familiar with the game of Magic, you will know that it is a card game, similar to bridge or poker, but infinitely more complex. I am enclosing a short description from Wikipedia that you may find interesting.
"In a game of Magic, two or more players are engaged in a duel. A player starts the game with twenty life points and loses when he or she runs out of them. The most common method of reducing an opponent's life is to attack with summoned creatures, although numerous other methods exist. There are other ways to win or lose the game, but loss of life is the most common."
Hi Tony, et al,
I've a 22 year old son who has spent his entire life with some mysterious learning problem (which some diagnosed as Autism). He showed signs of Epilepsy, but apart from 2 tonic clonic seizures 3 years ago (that were never clearly explained)he has only the side effects of the medication to show for it (it might be argued). And now he is diagnosed as Paranoid Schizophrenic. The poor lad is wrecked. He has ambition that he cannot explain or understand. He has 'regular' physical feelings and emotions of a healthy 22year old and often this gets the better of him, again in a way he does not comprehend nor havethe social skills to make use of (a doubly wicked trick to play on this poor young lad). But he also seems to have some gift to 'know his future'. The truth or not of the latter we can only wait to see, although there is the theory that what you believe strongly enough will help direct your destiny - and we certainy want to make things happen for him.
But the real mystery was when he first took a small step down the anti-psychotic drug 'road'.. with his first tablet of about 1/10th of the average dose. His reaction was of someone released from imprisonment, with lucid conversation, clearer memories, logical and rational thoughts, a new 'inner peace' and behaviours you could argue were 'neuro-typical' for a male his age. It was as if someone had just turned the power on to a part of his brain that had been working in the background all of his life but hitherto had no live connection to the foreground. This phenomena lasted 36 hours and he then went back to the behaviour all the specialists had maintained for years was lifelong and incurable. Well, we told them he had more to him, and now we have seen it for ourselves that he has the potential. But is it just another case of 'Lorenzo's Oil', or is it something far deeper?? Did he ever have autism, or has it always been the onset of what afflicts him now? Perhaps he shares a rare brain structure with many others in history who have lived a life of tormented frustration, only to be told that they have a mental illness because they come up occasionally with the inexplicable??
I'll stop now because I can see myself rambling and, even to me, some of the above is looking a bit confused and pointless!
BUT... if anyone out there has a theory that connects autism-like 'symptoms' with epilepsy, with P-Schiz, with hyper-sensitivity to Glutamate products and AZO's, then do get back to me!
PS. Tony, thanks for your book. It's a real thought provoker.
Ed
Dear Ed,
I have been doing a lot of research into why my son became schizophrenic, which I now prefer to call his "spiritual crisis". His doctor characterized him as seriously schizophrenic and doubted he would ever get through this. Well, he is getting through this but in order to get him to this point we had to look deep into ourselves and the dynamics of our family origins. It is my belief that when something like schizophrenia or epilepsy (or many other things happen), it is a signal of a spiritual crisis with ancestral roots. In my son's case, the drugs didn't help him, although we thought we could see small improvements when we switched from one to another. He would seem better (to us)but in the longer run they didn't allow him to come back to the real world. We then noticed that any intervention we (his family) did produced improvements, but the psychiatrists administering the medications never saw improvement. After a while we decided the real problem lay elsewhere and wasn't something that mainstream psychiatry could fix. To make a long story short, here are the therapies we have used that have brought my son back. I am listing them from what I feel brought the most dramatic improvement to what I feel is very useful but may not necessarily be the whole picture. In order to increase the chance of success, many therapies should be tried. The one therapy that to me misses the mark is the reliance on anti-psychotics. Here is the list: 1. Family Constellation Therapy; 2. assemblage point shift; 3.nutritional/vitamin support; 4. Emotional Freedom Technique
Be prepared to be amazed. Here is a book that wrapped it all up for me: The Natural Medicine Guide to Schizophrenia by Stephanie Marohn.
She walks you through all today's the best practice. She also has a book on autism and bi-polar in the same series and many of the interventions are overlapping.
The child is then assembled to the universal mind or the external reality through the SAP. There have been recent arguments on the television about the position of the SAP in connection with reincarnation. It is well documented in the Tibetan book of the Dead as a vital force. The Tibetans believed that if the SAP traverses the navel and you die out through the navel then your spirit dies back into this world and you have to be reincarnated. So therefore they have developed special shamanic practices and pressures to assist the person dying so the SAP leaves the body through the crown chakra and they no longer have to be reincarnated into this world. They go out through a higher plane.
That’s in the Tibetan Book of the Dead?
Yes. It doesn’t actually say that but when one gets familiar with the book, which is rather complicated, then one soon gets that message so .. and when the red Indian shamans who work with the SAP’s for shifting states of consciousness and health purposes, they say that there are two ways of dying. One is where your consciousness is consumed and there is another way which is the Eagles Gift where there is a way out which can escape death with full consciousness.
The above quote is taken directly from the website of an interview with Jon Whale on the Stationary Assemblage Point (or SAP). I think it is very relevant to Tony's theory. On reading "Is There Life After Death" I was struck by the fact that there is no mention of the shamanic tradition. By shamanic I am referring to indigenous cultures such as the North American Indian culture. Jon Whale has developed the science of shifting the assemblage point to heal illnesses. The ceremony of shifting assemblage point has been documented by Carlos Castanada. Schizophrenia can be determined as a split assemblage point and like with epilepsy, the pivot point jumps to extreme locations. According to Jon Whale, the epileptic fit itself actually rejumps the SAP back to its normal position again.
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