I am curious because there’s a mental state that occultists enter remind me of schizophrenia. Like for example, sleep deprivation can cause schizophrenic-like symptoms but it’s beneficial for certain practices.
Drawing by a schizophrenic:
No. The mind of a schizophrenic is far too scattered and unfocused to be successful at magick. Magick requires strong concentration and focus. When you can’t tell actual spiritual phenomena from hallucinations caused by your own brain, your intention is weak and your functioning impaired.
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Magic has been known to cause mental health issues but it’s not necessarily true that there is inverse causality.
Notwithstanding certain traits may cause someone to be highly organised and how perceived weaknesses can be strengths depending on the circumstances I would say that magic is highly individual and whether someone is good or better at magic depends on a whole variety of factors rather than just one.
For example: how long the person has been practicing, how dedicated they are etc. rather than any predisposition to any mental health issues
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For a long time I thought schizophrenics were going through spiritual awakenings and were better at the occult
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Sometimes a mental health disorder is just that. To trivialise it as anything else can be dangerous. I think it’s important to know the difference between magic and a mental health condition
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No.
Having certain mental illnesses/disabilities doesn’t determine how good one is at magick.
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That is propaganda created to make mental disorders seem special and unique. In ancient times, schizophrenics were thought to be “touched by the gods.” However, just because people believed it didn’t make it true. They also thought disease was caused by the wind back then (hence pestilence demons like Pazuzu) and that dragons could swallow the sun.
To remove the stigma attached to disorders like schizophrenia, some people have
taken it to the extreme and actually hold up mental illness as something to be envied rather than helped. There has even been a new occult practice spring up called tulpamancy where people basically create a pocket within their own consciousness and then pretend it’s a real being. Basically, it’s a thoughtform inside their own head which gives them the symptoms of schizophrenia and/or Disassociative Identity Disorder.
There has been a trend in modern times to idealize things of the past and to ignore the very real suffering people with mental disorders go through. If schizophrenics were really having a spiritual awakening, then their symptoms would eventually abate once they made it through the “dark night of the soul.” However, the fact that they don’t, and that those with the condition have to deal with it all of their lives, proves it’s not anything spiritual at all.
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Adding onto this: there were also some places in the world that demonized schizophrenics (as well as people with other disabilities) and would go to extremes to try and “cure” them.
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I wondered about this too, but we have had a few people on the forum with untreated symptoms stating they have been diagnosed, and if they make a reputation for themselves, it’s always negative and in the area of becoming insulting and belligerent, stating UPG as fact, disrespecting boundaries (such as telling other members about visions they’ve had on them without permission) and a very few have claimed that being on the forum has made them have a psychotic episode and that BALG “made them” want to be violent.
We tend to ban such people as soon as there’s an issue, as it’s not an either their or our interests for the forum to be causing them difficulty. It also raises the question of legal implications for the forum owners if people known to be having mental-emotional issues should do something… unfortunate… in real life and that gets traced back to the forum. This has happened before and people worried the forum would be shut down, so we don’t go there. Excessive lack of discernment is also just annoying for most forum members.
Former mods have banned people stating they have such a diagnosis immediately, not just schizophrenics but also people with multiple personality disorder, for the same concern that the forum is an unhealthy place for them. Today we tend to give them an opportunity to be here and work it out, but we guide them on what’s appropriate until or unless they break the rules. We can help with thing like a temporary suspension or placing the account on Hold for a period until an episode passes.
On the plus side we have had the occasional member talk about how using magick helped them gain mental-emotional stability and clarity, but they specifically worked with healing entities on that it didn’t come automatically.
After that, it’s obvious lots of the UPG we get can sounds like it’s in this ballpark of unqualified, hallucinations/imagination gone wild, but as noted above the different is in control, and I would say a high functioning lifestyle, results and verification of UPG by others - it’s not isolated to one person’s brain. Any occult book you pick up has this issue, and yet get they get results… and the author is able to maintain a regular lifestyle in society with a family, friends and bills, all that jazz, which people with very severe random hallucinations and paranoia are disadvantaged in trying to do.
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They tend to be a lot better at receiving and communication because their mind does not have the normal mental blocks average people to communication and visitations by nonphysical entities, however lacking will and control they tend to be useless as anything more than a medium for someone else to communicate with beings or gates to let beings into the world through them.
The main issue with them is that they cannot tell their own thoughtforms and random stray thoughts from anything meaningful for the most part unless that recognition is forced upon them. If they gain the discipline and control to build their own mental barriers and control the flow of thoughts then they would likely be unmatched in any activity regarding perception or communication as their natural condition is the condition that is replicated to willingly communicate or perceive other layers of reality though that is done through lenses and focused direction so to speak and is not the natural default state which renders it safer to a point.
If you are near some I would recommend you study their mental structure and aura best you can and figure it out for yourself the mechanics of how those perception gates in the mind work between them and normal people and where the bad wiring so to speak is that is breaking the whole system.
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No. That idea was spread by Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot of the Saltpietre School of Hypnosis in 19th century Paris. He used that idea to discredit females who were institutionalized for showing psychic tendencies.
Dr. Charcot made it his life’s work to investigate psychics alongside mental illness patients at his asylum to find similarities between them. When psychics showed real hypnotic and magnetic ability, he and his fellow doctors assaulted or tortured them to see how long they could sustain the ability. This included many rapes which led to pregnancies.
The belief persists because it is scientifically attractive to paint psychics as idiots. To this day, many magickal and psychic abilities are classified as DSM IV disorders.
Well, almost anything in the occult can be classified as a “mass hysteria” and just coincidences, not just psychics. Of course some mediums are treated as schizophrenics, but that doesn’t mean that the opposite should be true. Some people with schizophrenia are literally being haunted by parasites, this is not something good to be seen. There are demons that cause madness and schizophrenia in people as a form of curse. Many of the mages in the past were unable to reach their full strength in the physical world because their brains were fried by paranoia and obsession with spiritual energies, so that they did not know how to differentiate what was physical from what was spiritual.