Mindfulness and Hearing Voices

Mindfulness is the permanent and impartial attention to our body, our sensations and our mental states. The habit of mindfulness, according to the Buddha, is the path that leads to the elimination of suffering and hence to the blossoming of inner harmony. Though some people seem to be mindful by nature, most of us must work on our faculty of awareness through the practice of meditation.

Psychologist Eleanor Longden, a researcher at the University of Leeds, England, was not acquainted with or interested in the Buddha’s teachings; she developed her mindfulness out of necessity. As reported by her, the careful observation of her auditory sensations and her mental states was the approach that helped her out of the annoying imaginary voices that tormented her for many years.

It was an ordinary day when Eleanor, leaving a college class, heard for the first time a voice, coming out of nowhere, that clearly said, "She is leaving the building." The terrified girl ran home and, as she arrived, heard the voice again, "She is opening the door." The drama, which soon after included a repertoire of phrases, unknown narrators, hallucinations, doctors, psychiatrists, hospitalizations, medication and, sadly, the social stigma of schizophrenia, lasted several years.

 

Thanks to the continued support from a few people and, in particular, from a fair-minded doctor, Eleanor began to understand that the voices resulted from traumatic events in her life and were subtle guides to see into her emotional problems. The realization that the voices would facilitate her healing brought her to the careful attention to the signs that both these voices and her mental states were communicating.

Ten years after the first 'spooky' messages, Eleanor earned with honors a degree in psychology, soon followed by an also lauded master's degree. Now, when she stills hear voices, the psychologist is completing a PhD in Leeds.

Until recently, medical science attributed hallucinations to unknown genetic factors that condemned their victims to schizophrenia or predisposed them to such grievance. This verdict is changing.

Psychologist Longden is now an activist of a group that promotes the natural acceptance of the ‘noisy inner voices’. According to her, "a high proportion of the 1.5 million people who are diagnosed each year with schizophrenia are not victims of chemical imbalances or genetic mutations; rather they are exhibiting a complex response to abuse, loss, neglect or other past trauma."

The occurrence of hallucinations is much more common than we recognize. Our brain has embedded the neural design to generate such experiences; our dreams confirm this statement. Perhaps the children's imaginary friends are more 'real' than what we adults think. Likewise, this 'natural anomaly' could eventually explain the apparitions of sacred prophets, virgins, angels and ghosts that devout people often report. Soon we will know much more about these mysteries.

Returning to schizophrenia as such, even in its extreme cases, as the well-documented experiences of Dr. John F. Nash, it is in the blunt acceptance of the 'unreality' of visions—what a paradox!—that healing starts. (Do you remember "A Beautiful Mind,” the movie?) The 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences expressed it frankly in an interview, “I would be sweeping the delusions under a rug and they were able to come out later on, and could be triggered, and I would move very quickly to accepting it again. A delusional state of mind is like living a dream. Well I knew where I was.”

"Society has a long way to go before fully shakes the stigma associated with schizophrenia," says the future Dr. Longden. "One place to start is by asking not 'what's wrong with you?' but rather 'what's happened to you?'" She concludes, "Treating 'voices' like a symptom rather than an experience can only worsen the condition."

Only every individual —not her analyst—can observe and draw reliable conclusions from what is happening within her life. Mindfulness is personal. The professional's role is helping, not judging. In these matters, the patient-therapist interaction is likely to be imprecise. The 'expert' compares the collected data with her diagnostic manuals and extrapolates cloudy symptoms to verdicts that most patients tend to consider definite. Their suffering, already severe, becomes more intense and the determination to look keenly and impartially to their mental states becomes hardest to pin down... Precisely when it is most needed.

 

Gustavo Estrada
Autor de ‘Inner Harmony through Mindfulness Meditation’

gustrada1@gmail.com



Which God do you deny?

I do not deny or defend the existence of God. My agnostic approach to the Divinity, which I expressed in a recent article, generated quite a variety of reactions. The notes at the extremes, from radical atheists or ardent believers, were both much more intolerant than open-minded. Out of the received comments, I assigned the gold medal to someone who defined agnostic as "an atheist who does not want to come out." Does this mean that I feel comfortable in my skeptical seclusion? I do not think so; it is not comfort but realism. It is impossible to accept or reject something that is confusing.

Agnosticism claims that human understanding has no access to notions such as the Divinity that are beyond direct experience and the scientific method. Many thinkers agree. Mythologist Joseph Campbell defines God as "a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.”

The difficulty with the notion of God is that, due to its abstract nature, every religion has its own version of Him, and its followers eventually develop their own personal profile of their Creator. (Every devotee, of course, considers other faiths’ gods as fictitious and mythological). Likewise, atheists should also have an accurate idea of ​​the god they are rejecting; before denying something we should have a representation of it—you cannot say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a puzzling question.

There should not be such confusion. Dictionaries generally have only one entry on the ‘Almighty God’: "the Supreme Being worshipped as creator and ruler of the universe.” The interpretation of God, however, is dynamic. As belief systems disseminates to other societies or they are enforced on them, they change the mores of the conquered culture but, in the process, the newly converted also adjust the invading religion to their own habits. Consequentially, there are many versions of every creed.

Christians and Muslims worship one single God but their numerous branches have remarkable differences in their saints and angels as well as in their beliefs and rituals. Hindus are amazing:  They can be monotheists, polytheists, atheists or agnostics. What brings Hinduism together is their principle of unity in all existence. Could such principle correspond to the God of other faiths? The Hindu spiritual leader Mata Amritanandamayi Devi says, "God is pure Consciousness that dwells within everything.”

There is no possibility of agreement on what Divinity is. Some definitions are less rigid. For architect Frank Lloyd Wright, God is "the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature"; for novelist Leo Tolstoy, "that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part”; for philosopher Baruch Spinoza, "the orderly harmony of what exists”; for biologist Stuart Kauffman," the ceaseless creativity of the universe.” You have to accept, atheist friends, these interpretations are rich points of view.

If we are to argue about the notion of God, we must first delimit the subject to discuss. (Right up front, agnostics, say, "we pass"). Religious wars start out of non-sense because the God of each cult is ‘the only and absolute truth’ for His followers.

Religions originated both from our curiosity about the remote start of everything (where did we come from? how did all this start?) and from the fear of our uncertain end (where will we go when we turn off the engine?).

According to cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, among many other scientists, before the big bang that supposedly started the universe, there was nothing—neither matter nor energy nor space nor time. With apologies to the atheists, for me to accept such statement is an act of supreme faith. (The math involved is beyond my brain’s skills.) Musing over so huge mystery, American science journalist Steve Nadis suggests that, while the universe itself may have resulted from nothing— explain, please!— the laws of physics had to be in place beforehand “to govern the something-from-nothing moment that gave rise to our universe and the eternal inflation that followed”. These laws of physics, I add, could well be another definition of God, quite different from all the previous ones.

 

Gustavo Estrada

Author of 'INNER HARMONY through Mindfulness Meditation'