On Second Sight and other Sensorial Siddhis, Hallucinations and Psychiatry.

If a psychiatrist experienced any hallucinations, he would nihilate them back to his worldview and paradigm; after all, we interpret everything back into what we know. After all, he does the same for his patients. Siddhis, such as "second sight,", clairsentience, clairaudience, magnetoreceptivity, clairvoyance, soul transmigration, are all symptoms of a disease, an overexcited mind, delusional attribution error. Historical events involving thaumaturgists, magicians, holy men, and seers are meaningless to a psychiatrist, inasmuch as he may relegate both the events and the personnel to his own discipline. Even clinical therapists of Jung's school rarely have anything to say about it, save for the art of interpretation and the "omnipresent unconscious" (after Pauli-Jung dialogue it was finally decided Jungiana has nothing to do with science).

In this brief, I offer both an explanation for some of these phenomena and a warning about blind-diagnosing patients whose lives are otherwise liveable because they use their skills to enrich their lives. There are unsufferable conditions at times, when the person with such abilities has an untrained mind, a societally-conditioned narrow belief system, an immature personality and yet attempts to make sense of it all. This is due to a lack of education in this area and a general rejection of such (rare) circumstances nowadays. Preparation for siddhis in India required a training in yogas, ethos, principles, they required a stout, tough, intelligent, shrewd mind that is firmly fixed in foundations that protect it from insanity.

Nevertheless, acccepting such phenomena in the modern world's societal logoi are numerous: scientifically dismissing such occurrences on the one hand does harm to the genuine events, while accepting them mindlessly, allows all forms of charlatanism to flourish on the other. I would like to issue a warning, therefore, that only people of a sound, ordered, and disciplined mind are well-equipped to manage situations in which siddhi may spontaneously occur. That would be a normative view, the real world is governed by its own laws, and often siddhis arise in people that are completely unprepared, either by spontaneous occurence, a botched initiation, or frivolous self-initiation. It is not my aim to critisise such happenings, but to advice to guide such people out of the confusion, and train their minds along the critical events that already occured, and are continuously challenging their lives.

In order to understand the background of Siddhis better, one would have to understand the whole complex of magicko-pneumatic consciousness-related entities, the laws governing them, and so on. This is not the purpose of this sketch, nor will I be contributing the exact terms of my subjective "theory of mind" here, which was relatively well-accentuated in "Occultosophia".

To avoid confusion, let me first define the terms I will be using here:

Hallucination (n.), after Etymological dictionary online:

"a seeing or hearing something which is not there," 1640s, from Latin hallucinationem (nominative hallucinatio), earlier alucinatio, noun of action from past-participle stem of alucinari (see hallucinate).

Hallucination, after John Hopkins Psychiatry Guide (Speed, T. M.D., Ph.D., Sedlak, T. M.D., Ph.D.)

"An hallucination is a perception without a stimulus. With true hallucinations, the individual is convinced of the reality of the experience. A true hallucination must be differentiated from":

Illusion - a misinterpretation of a stimulus (e.g., a crack on the floor is misperceived as a snake)

Pseudohallucination - occurs in inner subjective space (e.g., heard in one’s thoughts, not perceived as auditory, does not come through the ears)

Vivid imagery – increased imagination or mental images

Hallucinations can occur in any of the five senses (auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, and/or tactile).

Auditory hallucinations are the most common.

Hallucinations are not pathognomic for any specific psychiatric illness, including schizophrenia[1].

Hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations can occur in healthy people when falling asleep and awakening, respectively"

Seeing and hearing things that others do not:

We can’t hear the high-pitched sounds that bats use for navigation, using echolocation. That would require an instrument that is capable of recording ultrasounds and informing us that indeed, such stimuli unregistered by the human ear happen. This is to say that we can’t extract certain hidden categories unless we can register them, either using a device or our own senses. Hallucinations are registered sensually; they may be generated by the brain, in which case they are some form of misfiring, in some cases pathological, but they may also be stimuli that are simply registered by the brain and manifest as clear images, clear sounds, clear tactile sensations, clear olfactory sensations, and clear gustatory sensations. The brain is not a piece of meat in a box; it is an adapter, transceiver, conductor, and broadcaster, enclosed in a bioelectromagnetic field of a human being. It is a highly sophisticated modulator of conscious events, upholding awareness, memories, cognition, etc. Compared to cloud computing, the human nervous system is a datacenter, a process-running server, and a world-facing interface, yet our understanding of it is as miniscule as that of a real-life hardware server's skill to understand the whole human world from our perspective. Our human cognitive, emotional, and physiological apparatus is a minor component of the vast array of occurrences and strange spheres in which we find ourselves. It is hard to measure this immenseness by our perception because, by nature, we can’t extract ourselves from what is beyond our capacity. "Here be dragons," "any phantasy may be read into that," but that is not the goal; the goal is to sceptically structure certain phenomena experienced by people all over the world into a different framework, technical magick if you will, rather than discarding it entirely.