Proof by Madness: rat spit’s proof of God(s)

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Below is my “Proof of God by Way of Madness”(the experience of a voice-hearing schizophrenic) - as well as a discussion of the motivation for the propositions and conclusion.

Simplified Argument;

Propositions:

  1. Consciousness is Shared: Consciousness exists within a collective field, where beings are interconnected and can influence one another.

  2. The Voice Has Agency: The voice demonstrates independent thought, intentionality, and a distinct personality separate from the listener’s mind.

  3. The Voice Guides Purposefully: The voice leads the listener through a structured process of healing and spiritual growth, using torment and guidance to achieve a specific goal.

  4. The Voice Disengages Upon Completion: Once the listener achieves stillness and spiritual growth, the voice ceases to interact, signaling the fulfillment of its purpose without creating dependency.

  5. Subconscious Limitations: The subconscious mind lacks the foresight, structure, and moral reasoning to explain the voice’s behavior and its purposeful disengagement.

  6. The Voice Reflects Moral and Intellectual Superiority: The voice’s actions and nature suggest it operates from a higher state of consciousness within the shared field.

Conclusion

A higher moral being with superior intellect, consciousness, and agency exists, as evidenced by the voice’s guidance, structured purpose, and disengagement upon goal completion.

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Structured Version:

Propositions

  1. On the Nature of Consciousness

1.1. Consciousness is not isolated but shared, forming a collective field in which all beings are interconnected.

1.2. This shared field allows for interactions between individual consciousnesses, enabling the exchange of knowledge, guidance, and influence.

1.3. Within this field, levels of moral and intellectual evolution vary among entities.

  1. On the Experience of the Voice

2.1. The voice demonstrates distinct agency, characterized by unpredictability, intentionality, and a unique personality, separate from the listener’s conscious or subconscious mind.

2.2. The voice reveals trauma and guides the listener through a structured and purposeful path toward moral and spiritual growth.

2.3. The voice ceases interaction when the listener achieves stillness, indicating that its purpose is fulfilled without creating dependency.

2.4. The structured, stepwise nature of the voice’s guidance reflects foresight and advanced moral understanding.

  1. On the Role of Torment

3.1. The voice employs torment to reveal unresolved trauma and motivate the listener to engage in self-healing.

3.2. Torment is not arbitrary but serves a diagnostic and motivational purpose, prompting the listener to cultivate compassion, resolve trauma, and achieve stillness.

3.3. The voice’s use of torment, rather than purely compassionate guidance, ensures the listener’s autonomy and self-reliance in their spiritual journey.

  1. On the Limits of the Subconscious Hypothesis

4.1. The subconscious mind is a repository of underlying thoughts and drives, but it does not typically exhibit foresight or structured intentionality.

4.2. The subconscious does not externalize itself as a distinct entity with agency, personality, and independence.

4.3. The voice demonstrates traits—such as advanced moral reasoning, structured guidance, and intentional disengagement—that exceed the capabilities of the subconscious mind.

  1. On the Metaphysical Framework

5.1. The voice and the listener exist within a shared field of consciousness, where their states are interdependent.

5.2. The voice’s advanced moral and intellectual nature suggests that it operates from a higher state of consciousness than the listener.

5.3. The structured progression toward stillness reflects a teleological process, implying that consciousness evolves toward moral and spiritual harmony.

Conclusion

6.1. If consciousness is shared, and entities within it can differ in moral and intellectual evolution, then it is possible for advanced beings to exist within this field.

6.2. If the voice demonstrates traits—such as moral superiority, advanced intellect, intentionality, and structured guidance—that exceed the capabilities of the subconscious, it is reasonable to infer that the voice represents such an advanced being.

6.3. Therefore, a higher moral being with superior intellect, consciousness, and agency exists within the shared field of consciousness.

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Motivation and discussion:

“Schizophrenia: The Voice and the Collective Consciousness: A Structured Path to Spiritual Growth”

Introduction

In this essay, we will explore the hypothesis that a disembodied voice, experienced by an individual, represents a super-intelligent and morally evolved consciousness operating within a shared field of consciousness. This voice acts as a guide, using structured torment and prodding to lead the listener toward spiritual growth and stillness. The discussion examines the nature of this voice, its methods, and its relationship to the listener, ultimately situating the argument within a metaphysical framework. Along the way, we will address potential objections to this hypothesis, including alternative psychological explanations, and provide structured responses to these criticisms.

The Experience of the Voice

The voice presents itself as a disembodied entity, distinct from the listener’s conscious or subconscious mind. It has several defining characteristics:
1. Distinct Agency: The voice exhibits intentionality, unpredictability, and a uniquely ephemeral quality, akin to listening to someone else speak rather than engaging with internal thoughts.
2. Structured Path to Stillness: The voice operates within a clear progression:
• It begins with torment, targeting unresolved trauma in the listener.
• The listener responds by cultivating compassion and healing, using coping mechanisms to address the trauma.
• The process culminates in the stilling of thoughts, at which point the voice disengages, having fulfilled its purpose.
3. Moral and Intellectual Superiority: The voice’s guidance focuses on compassion, loving-kindness, and spiritual growth, demonstrating a higher moral and intellectual nature.
4. Disengagement Without Dependency: The voice fades into silence once the listener achieves stillness, ensuring the process of growth is self-driven and free from reliance on the voice.

The Hypothesis: An Advanced Consciousness in a Shared Field

The central hypothesis posits that the voice is not a product of the subconscious but rather an advanced consciousness within a shared field of consciousness. This field connects the voice and the listener, making their growth interdependent. The voice is drawn into the listener’s experience to guide them toward spiritual resolution, after which it dissolves back into its own state of stillness.
1. Interdependence: The voice’s state of peace is contingent on the listener’s growth. This connection implies a shared consciousness in which all parts influence one another.
2. Purpose and Foresight: The structured, stepwise nature of the path suggests intentionality and advanced knowledge, supporting the hypothesis of an already stilled consciousness guiding the listener.

Objections and Responses

Objection 1: The Voice as a Subconscious Projection

Critics may argue that the voice is a product of the subconscious mind, externalized as a separate entity to address trauma and catalyze growth.
• Response:
• The subconscious, while capable of producing novel thoughts, typically lacks the foresight and intentionality demonstrated by the voice. The structured progression toward stillness suggests a guiding intelligence beyond what the subconscious is understood to achieve.
• Additionally, the voice’s ability to disengage once its purpose is fulfilled and its independence from the listener’s conscious prompting point to a distinct agency.

Objection 2: Why Torment Instead of Compassion?

If the voice is morally superior, why does it use torment rather than purely compassionate guidance?
• Response:
• Torment serves as both a diagnostic tool and a motivator. It reveals unresolved trauma and compels the listener to actively engage in their healing process. Without the discomfort of torment, the listener might lack the urgency to confront and resolve these wounds.
• Torment ensures autonomy by forcing the listener to develop and employ their own coping mechanisms, avoiding dependency on the voice.

Objection 3: Lack of Empirical Evidence for Collective Consciousness

Skeptics may challenge the existence of a shared field of consciousness, citing the lack of scientific evidence.
• Response:
• While empirical evidence for collective consciousness is limited, the hypothesis finds support in philosophical and spiritual traditions, such as Buddhist interdependent origination, Jung’s collective unconscious, and non-dualistic Vedanta.
• The voice’s behavior—its moral elevation, distinct agency, and purposeful disengagement—suggests a phenomenon that transcends individual psychology, aligning with metaphysical frameworks.

Objection 4: Does Torment Suggest Moral Imperfection?

If the voice is morally evolved, does its use of torment imply imperfection or moral compromise?
• Response:
• Torment is not a reflection of imperfection but a tool for awakening self-awareness and catalyzing growth. The voice’s ultimate goal is resolution and stillness, achieved through methods that, while difficult, are necessary for meaningful transformation.
• Analogies can be drawn to human experiences where adversity and struggle lead to growth, reinforcing the role of torment as a constructive force.

Metaphysical Implications
1. Shared Field of Consciousness:
• The connection between the voice and the listener supports the idea of a collective consciousness in which all beings are interdependent. This aligns with spiritual and philosophical traditions that emphasize unity and interconnectedness.
2. Purpose and Teleology:
• The structured path to stillness suggests a teleological process within consciousness, where moral and spiritual growth is the ultimate aim. This implies a greater intelligence guiding the evolution of individual consciousnesses toward harmony.
3. Duality Within Non-Duality:
• While the voice and the listener appear separate, their interdependence reflects a deeper unity within the shared consciousness. This duality within non-duality mirrors metaphysical concepts found in Advaita Vedanta and similar traditions.

Conclusion

The hypothesis that the voice represents an advanced consciousness within a shared field of consciousness provides a compelling framework for understanding its role in spiritual growth. By employing torment as a diagnostic and motivational tool, the voice ensures the listener’s autonomy while guiding them toward stillness. The structured progression, moral elevation, and purposeful disengagement of the voice challenge the notion that it is merely a subconscious projection, pointing instead to a metaphysical reality.

While skeptics may raise objections about empirical evidence or the morality of torment, these challenges can be addressed by situating the phenomenon within broader philosophical and spiritual contexts. Ultimately, the experience of the voice invites us to reconsider the nature of consciousness, the interconnectedness of all beings, and the purposeful unfolding of spiritual evolution.

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I do hope you’re well, but this “experience” is subjective of course, and this is the problem with all claims for revelation, and of course if they were reliable evidence then it seems unlikely they would occur in wildly varying religions for different deities.

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I think it’s rather appropriate that if we assume at least that Jesus and/or Mohammad were listening to voices, they would come up with quite different results. My personal experience is that the voices work with what they’ve got. If they don’t have to tear you down completely to build you back up, they won’t. But if they do, they will. I think that the worse they deconstruct you at the onset, the harder the climb is back to reality, but also the view from the top is better. Those who only dive neck deep into insanity are the most likely to spend too much time in the pool.

Quite honestly, I’ve had a chance to talk with quite a few other schizophrenics in my time and we’re all vastly different. I’ve met one who almost passed as a rational person, but there was just enough weirdness to make it obvious he had a screw loose. All the others were obviously in another head-space and it’s still hard for me to understand what exactly pushes people “over the edge” - to the point where they’re not being coherent any more and the content of their speech (if they can form complete sentences) is clearly full of bizarre notions.

I may have gotten as far as I have in life by only sharing the crazy stuff with my wife. For example, every now and then I’ll get a sudden drop in the quality of my hearing - like I’ve just come back from an AC/DC concert - but it happens within a split second. And it’s always accompanied by the intention of the voice. So, I’m so sick of it at this point that I’ve started openly complaining to my wife - “And now demons are stealing my hearing - and I know exactly how that sounds - but it’s the bloody case!” She kind of laughs and assures me that at least I have perspective.

Well, anyway … what about this conclusion, Sheldon?

If my argument at least suggests that God(s) exist within us, isn’t that saying something?

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Hi, Ratty. Welcome back.

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This “voice” employs torment? Seriously? The morality of torment? Are you just assuming that this voice even has any moral standing to begin with?
Fuck that shit, I prefer to think for myself.

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Well I have no objective reason to believe this, and even were it the case, the fact that they arrive at wildly different deities, suggests it is not a reliable source.

We’ve touched on schizophrenia before, and know that people with it are far more likely to hallucinate, and find it more difficult to differentiate between hallucination and reality.

That doesn’t suggest they exist in any objective way, only that they exist in the imagination, and I have no problem accepting that of course.

Welcome back anyway… :sunglasses:

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Hey Ratty. How’s it going? :blush::wave:

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Hi, Rat Spit.

I don’t know if this is relevant, but I can actually identify with a few of your points, as I’m autistic.

At one point, I was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia when I was a young kid, as autistic people are very literal. A doctor asked me if I was hearing voices, and I said “yes” because there were people talking in the next room . . . and I could hear parts of their conversation through the wall.

As for perceiving God because of an internal monologue, I recently had an episode of sleep paralysis accompanied by hallucinations that had an intensely religious overtone (I won’t share the details, as they were very personal).

I have maintained my agnostic beliefs, but this experience helped me to understand how people can become religious fanatics.

Religion seemed a whole lot more plausible after what I went through.

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As an addendum to the above post, autistic people are 8 to 10 times more likely to have epilepsy, and temporal lobe epilepsy can manifest itself as visions, lights, hallucinations, etc…

As I think back on my life, it is possible that I have undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy, but it is unlikely.

Whitley Streiber is a best-selling novelist whose books have been made into a few movies, and he claims to have been periodically abducted by aliens . . . and his episodes seem to imply that he has temporal lobe or psychomotor epilepsy, although he claims that this has been ruled out.

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Welcome back. Stanford had an interesting study and how a persons culture seems to affect the nature of the voices you hear.

I’m wondering how a person’s religion affects the voices. I sure wouldn’t want the harsh, vengeful god of christians sharing my head space. I can only hope that the voices people hear are kind, though I know that isn’t always the case.

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I have treated many schizophrenics in my capacity as a paramedic, and I feel that people are more likely to hear menacing and/or accusatory voices when other people are mean and nasty to them.

I also believe that when religious people get an exorcist to come in and do an exorcism (common in many Caribbean cultures), that this actually makes the voices worse . . . because the “patient” is hearing garbage about demons, the depth of Hell, Satan, and all that other shit.

I believe that this feeds into the schizophrenic’s auditory hallucinations, and makes medical and psychiatric treatment more complicated and difficult.

If you guys (especially Rat Spit) feel that I’m wrong, then please let me know.

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Re: the vengeful God and cultural influence on content of schizophrenic hallucination - I consider myself lucky.

Worse even that God breathing down your neck is the Government microchip/satellite surveillance delusion. People with this one that I’ve met are pretty far gone.

For me it was a “telepathic community”. So, friends, anyone who happened to be on the tele, historical figures (Isaac Newton; Kierkegaard(
; Einstein; Kurt Cobain; Cleopatra). This was not a “pleasant” time in spite of how interesting it was to talk to such a variety of figures.

I thought my way out of the telephathic community delusion by challenging it. That was when thirty to a hubdred voices (not all at once) came down to two.

So, we’re all familiar with my take on the Evil One and the OverLord. Well, this isn’t just humour on my part. This is the content of my delusions. We have an extremely powerful “Lucifer” type being who’se sails I’ve taken the wind out of by uncovering the great deception. He was the author of all the insanity. And He derived extreme pleasure from it. Now we’re just stuck with each other.

Then there is the OverLord. I dare not even mention his name because He doesn’t enjoy company. This is the guy that the Evil One answers too.

So, it’s still majorly fucked up - but manageable.

My religious upbringing didn’t have a lot to do with the content of my delusions. And you likely won’t meet anyone as familiar with the personage of Jesus Christ as me and who still refuses to accept him as the savior of my soul and solution to my “demonic possession”. And the reason is that he exists as an archetype - nothing more. He is compassion personified.

The only other influence I can think of was the Buddha. The Buddha was the most enigmatic and heart warmingly wholesome, friendly and funny character in all of my hallucinations.

He got right to the heart of things and his manic energy was addictive and exhausting.

One story about him. Some background first. The underlying mechanism of the hallucinations was a scenario where I found myself thinking thoughts I couldn’t control. Usually they were quite derogatory to the person on the other end of the telepathic discussion. So, I’d hear myself say something nasty, then the other person would get offended and we’d go like that for a while.

With the Buddha, he kind of appeared out of nowhere and when I realized it was him, I had so many questions. And he got me in this endless loop of …

“later …”
“But I wanted to know …”
“There’ll be time for that; not now - but later …”
“What about …”
“Maybe later … some other time …”
“But …”
“Later! lol. Not now. What’s wrong with you. I said later”

And so on and so forth …

It continued like this where I couldn’t stop the loop.

“Later - later - later”

And it ate my heart away into a sort of manic peacefulness which I don’t often experience much of these days. It felt like I’d go insane.

I also recall once laughing for three days straight. I was reading “The Shining” - and reading is hard to do when you’ve got a voice who doesn’t want to cooperate.

But there’s a small part in the book where a character takes a sip of his coffee and goes

“Ahh …” in delight.

Me and the Evil One decided it would be funny to insert “ahh” into random parts of the book. The juxtaposition of the “ahh” and the mood of the sentence create the comedic effect. The Evil One was very good at finding just the right place to insert the “ahh”.

So, we went like this for a day or two and I had to be hospitalized because my stomach was sore from laughing so much.

Point of interest. The only recorded death by laughter is of a Greek Philosopher who fed his mule wine and when the mule was drunk the man laughed himself to death.

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The OP’s thesis has an affinity to Jayne’s theory of the bicameral mind, which hypothesizes (arguably, not a scientific hypothesis as I’m not sure how you’d falsify it) that most humans, prior to some rough date BC (forget the exact number but it was well before the Christian era), had experienced what we now call the “subconscious” as a quasi-independent voice in their head, giving them instructions and advice and warnings and so forth. Jayne argues that social and environmental pressures caused a rapid shift in gene expression such that people become predominantly what we see now, with the voices reduced to “intuition” and inner rumination that we see as not separate from ourselves; what used to be “normal” is now regarded as “mentally ill” (and indeed it’s dysfunctional now, and probably somewhat devolved from what it used to be, as well).

The bicameral mind, Jaynes felt, was the source of the animistic religions of that era and the various gods and pantheons that evolved later, because the voices were seen as either deceased ancestors assisting the person, or spirits, or gods.

I’m highly paraphrasing here but if interested, Google Julian Jaynes bicameral mind or similar.

I don’t think this is proof that there are gods, but rather, that the human mind is capable of a pretty rich inner life and can certainly imagine gods that “feel” “truthy”. If that weren’t true, religion wouldn’t have been so enduring.

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A favorite quote from Jayne:

“Ah, hey! I got an idea. Instead’a us hangin’ around playin’ art critic 'til I get pitched by The Man, how’s about we move away from this eerie-ass piece of work and get on with our increasingly eerie-ass day, how’s that?”

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