Yikes! I've never heard of sleep paralysis sending someone to the psych ward before. Though to be fair, my parents came from a very, very different place where shrinks and psych meds are concerned, and would not have gone that route. But... after being told "it's just a dream" a few times, I learned not to mention it. It wasn't any use. I mean, I knew, beyond all shadow of doubt, that it was NOT just a dream, that it was a THING, that it was real, malign, and that it was personal. As in, it wasn't some bad thing out there, it was a bad thing that meant harm to me, personally.
And the thing is, that's how nearly everyone who's experienced it describes it, the world over. Materialists like to say this is evidence that the thing is just a shared neural circuit being triggered. But IMO that's evidence that it's a real thing. Not bound by cultural expectations, not primed by experience, but shared by people all over the world with remarkable consistency. It's like chickenpox: kids all over the world get it. Some are naturally immune. The immune people don't say "Oh, that's psychosomatic anxiety triggering a blister reaction". They say "oh, all these people have caught the same pathogen". And they said that even before they could test for it. Why don't they assume haggings are the result of the same beast attacking, and that we simply don't have a way to test for it yet?
I agree that the sensitivity in general is tied to diet, but have had different experiences. My parents were vegetarians, so we were mostly vegetarian growing up, and I was seriously vegetarian for four years after I moved out of my parents' house. That made me *more* sensitive. I think JMG is onto something when he says eating meat is a good way to ground yourself. Certainly, it works for me. During my vegetarian years, I was getting frequent hallucinations of cats in my peripheral vision. Mostly, I could run through the checklist of "ok, we don't have any cats, so that was a strictly visual thing", but I remember one night at work, closing up the place, when I had to go and search the lobby just to be sure there wasn't a cat (because that would be a big health code violation!). Also during that time, I felt increasingly disconnected from the material world. It was not a good experience. I remember a roommate coming back from an outing where she'd tried a little LSD, and describing how everything had looked, and being like... geez, why bother? That's what everything looks like all the time anyway. For me, at least, eating a reasonable amount of meat puts a damper on that stuff, and that's a good thing. By veg year 4, I was starting to *feel* crazy.
Now, doing things like fasting before church services lets me open it up again more selectively in a safer context where the results are helpful and make a certain amount of sense. Guardrails and protections and all that.
Even so, there's still a lot of day-to-day visual background "noise". But that's always been there, and I've had a lot of practice ignoring it. Walls still shimmer, and nothing is ever quite as stationary as physics would like it to be, and I would still love to know what the dang cloud vortex is all about. But those things don't seem to be... meaningful?
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timeasmymeasure
Re: Sensitivities
Date: 2020-12-10 07:00 pm (UTC)And the thing is, that's how nearly everyone who's experienced it describes it, the world over. Materialists like to say this is evidence that the thing is just a shared neural circuit being triggered. But IMO that's evidence that it's a real thing. Not bound by cultural expectations, not primed by experience, but shared by people all over the world with remarkable consistency. It's like chickenpox: kids all over the world get it. Some are naturally immune. The immune people don't say "Oh, that's psychosomatic anxiety triggering a blister reaction". They say "oh, all these people have caught the same pathogen". And they said that even before they could test for it. Why don't they assume haggings are the result of the same beast attacking, and that we simply don't have a way to test for it yet?
I agree that the sensitivity in general is tied to diet, but have had different experiences. My parents were vegetarians, so we were mostly vegetarian growing up, and I was seriously vegetarian for four years after I moved out of my parents' house. That made me *more* sensitive. I think JMG is onto something when he says eating meat is a good way to ground yourself. Certainly, it works for me. During my vegetarian years, I was getting frequent hallucinations of cats in my peripheral vision. Mostly, I could run through the checklist of "ok, we don't have any cats, so that was a strictly visual thing", but I remember one night at work, closing up the place, when I had to go and search the lobby just to be sure there wasn't a cat (because that would be a big health code violation!). Also during that time, I felt increasingly disconnected from the material world. It was not a good experience. I remember a roommate coming back from an outing where she'd tried a little LSD, and describing how everything had looked, and being like... geez, why bother? That's what everything looks like all the time anyway. For me, at least, eating a reasonable amount of meat puts a damper on that stuff, and that's a good thing. By veg year 4, I was starting to *feel* crazy.
Now, doing things like fasting before church services lets me open it up again more selectively in a safer context where the results are helpful and make a certain amount of sense. Guardrails and protections and all that.
Even so, there's still a lot of day-to-day visual background "noise". But that's always been there, and I've had a lot of practice ignoring it. Walls still shimmer, and nothing is ever quite as stationary as physics would like it to be, and I would still love to know what the dang cloud vortex is all about. But those things don't seem to be... meaningful?