Introduction

In no way should a person who experiences hallucinations look at this work as being a substitute for adequate psychiatric help. I want to call to attention right at the start that the hearing of voices is often very dangerous and can have very damaging consequences. Hearing voices can lead people to do stupid and even criminal things. It has been proven scientifically that among a group of hallucinators, IQ's decreased after the onset of hallucinations (Johnson, 69).

It should be noted that I am making a distinction between people who hear voices and do not show other symptoms of schizophrenia, and those that are diagnosed and treated as schizophrenics. Even though many psychologists and even psychiatrists have rejected the classification of "schizophrenia," it's not the purpose of this book to engage in such topics and I am staying free from that controversy. I am not describing in this book anything more than the experiences that are often reported today by functional religious people. Such experiences make up the volume of many religious books. Hallucinations are only one of many symptoms in schizophrenia. I am merely pointing out that this book does not pretend to be a cure for mental illness. A point of this book is that many mentally healthy and functional people hallucinate as an unnecessary byproduct of their religious experience, and this book occasionally looks at ways that might help them avoid putting too much belief in such experiences. Therefore, if one does not feel mentally healthy, one should seek professional help instead of using this book for serious therapy.

I have to say that I am by nature a religious person. I respect traditional religious values as well as secular and scientific ones. I have a great prohibition in me of trying to explain away possible spiritual experiences as being mere hallucinations. I see what I am doing as trying to help liberate those who are religious and are bound by negative experiences. Just because one sees lights and visions, does not mean that these experiences have a spiritual nature. The fact that many seriously mentally ill people also have such visions and voices proves that such experiences are as much of a warning sign as a sign that one is being visited by heaven. These experiences can take place in the brain, in the same part of the brain that can be called for the lay person, the "dream hemisphere." The position of the historical Judeo-Christian churches and other world religions has been to avoid "spirits" perhaps for this very good reason: that in fact one is avoiding the causation of the brain to hallucinate. I do also believe that a holy power does guide people, and perhaps by understanding hallucinations, one may better see the power of the holy when it does manifest.

It is well known the major world religions believe that visions and voices can come from the dark side, forces that actually are mischievous and want to do mankind harm. If one merely looks at the illogical and "evil" behavior of some human beings, one could see the possibility that beings from other realms may act in similar ways to the worst in our world. The lack of logic in people acting poorly in our world at least suggests the possibility of the lack of logic operating in other worlds. The idea of evil spirits is present in virtually all world cultures and religions. There are religious books that deal with ways of handling such spirits by spiritual methods. This book is a way of dealing with similar symptomology but taking another approach.

Many who have visions, voices and the other types of experiences do not easily seek psychiatric help. For many of these people, this phenomenon falls under the heading of being spiritual. People who have religious-based hallucinations can spend many years under them. Some never try to get help for them, for they do not believe in the model of psychiatry. They may read this book because often visions and voices can become confusing. Once they find out there is a modern scientific explanation for some of these experiences, written by someone who even shares their belief that sometimes such experiences are in fact of a divine origin, they may see that many of the voices were really not divine at all. This change of thinking can have dramatic, even life saving consequences. They may possibly see they are finding a dead end in life by trusting in these hallucinations and decide to identify them as a problem and get help for them.

Some people fall under the delusion that just because they are having an extra-sensory experience, that makes it supernatural and hence divine. This problem happens to many people. The person does not see their condition as a mental illness, so it is a diagnosis in which it is hard to do therapy because the person doesn't admit that they are sick. In these cases, the hallucinations are often solacing to the person. They may give the person esteem or be an extension of the type of experience of having imaginary companions in childhood. When a person realizes such experiences are probably subjective, and the experiences may even affect one's better judgment or thinking processes, they may then begin to realize that the experiences are problematic.

I believe more people hear voices, or hallucinate in some way, than most would imagine. It could very easily be that 30 percent of people at some time or another experience, or if you will, "hallucinate," some type of voice or guidance. It is believed heavily in modern fundamentalist or evangelical Christianity that feeling God's presence or experiencing demonic persecution is something one can experience, as it is believed in New Age circles that spirit guides can lead them and that it is possible to talk to the deceased. I do believe that ultimately a sincere and educated religious seeker will understand what has a divine source and what has a personal source, but surely some guidance is needed.

If this book is successful, a fight may be won in generalized mental health care that is represented on the level of such groups as Alcoholics Anonymous and other Twelve Step programs. I believe that the problem of hallucinations is very high, but it is not something that one can readily admit to because of the stigmatization associated with it. Right now the hearing of voices is considered a stigma, except of course when it is confessed as a virtue of many religions. That is, people often do not stigmatize the religious as mentally ill who hear God's voice or who sense the oppressive presence of demons or "Satan." Many people often consider hearing or experiencing some kind of guidance part and parcel of the mentally healthy who happen to hold a certain religious belief. This belief can range from a type of biblical fundamentalism to an Eastern philosophical or New Age belief in the so-called "astral planes." For this very reason, that it is both accepted by some and stigmatized by others, the problem is not often approached by people in a logical way because there is no guide for people to understand the situation outside of a personal religious context or a wholly scientific psychiatric one. Experiencing hallucinations in an unprepared way may underlie some problems in the mental health of the elderly. It would be good if more was known among the general populace about the "non-psychotic" or "non-schizophrenic" experience of hallucinations.

The religious should be able to take on both aspects of fighting this problem: seeing it as a medical condition that exists only in the brain and seeing it as a situation that can develop from the spiritual path that can sometimes be overcome by spiritual means. Many people are trying to fight this problem in themselves and often do it in one of the two ways, not knowing the benefits of the other methodology. The medical way of fighting it does not have to be the use of medication, as psychologists recently authored a book on cognitive therapy for overcoming voices ("Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices and Paranoia" by Paul Chadwick, Max J. Birchwood, and Peter Trower (John Wiley & Sons Inc, 1996)). It is written however at the doctoral level.

The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a readily identifiable and popular psychoanalytic therapy for the treatment of the hearing of voices, only the psychiatric prescription of taking medication seems to be the well-known cure for this. So, while still stating medications can be helpful, this work tries to identify non-drug therapies against the hearing of voices for those who are not diagnosed as schizophrenic. These therapies can be used in unison with medication. The main therapy that this work describes is the simple insight that visions and voices often have no objective external reality.

Medication is simply not a welcome option for many people. The type of medications used to fight hallucinations are thought to not be tolerable by those who must earn their own living, or at least by those who don't want others to think they have a mental problem. Those medications can create physical side effects like the slowing down of movement, the stopping of thoughts, the slurring of speech, and other problems. When one is on such a medication, sometimes others know it, and one then one may receive the cruel stigmatization that the mentally ill often receive. There is the possibility that medications may be developed that do not have such side effects.

For simplification, I will call the "hemisphere" of the brain, in which the unconscious attains visual imagery and auditory sensation, the "dream hemisphere," and avoid scientific terminology that refers to parts of the brain.