I was wondering…If I believe in something or someone that nobody including me can see or hear…am I delusional? Am I schitzo?
Is this the same action seen through different eyes or perceptions?
If I tell everyone they are going to hell if they don’t do exactly what I say…is that incouraging paranoia? Or is it a form of kidnapping? or a friendly warning.
Any thoughts?
Schizophrenia is a difference in perception, not necessarily of belief. It is quite common for people with schizophrenia not to believe in their hallucinations. Moreover, a belief can be chosen but hallucinations are not a matter of choice.
BTW, if you’ve never talked to anyone with schizophrenia, believe me this will change your view on many things, not the least of which will be religion.
This comes down to two factors; the motives of the sayer and the attitude of the hearer. Manipulation is definitely a possibility, but it could be a friendly warning. Two people can say the exact same words, but the meaning and message can be completely different.
Faith and belief are different things. Belief comes from outside of oneself wheras faith is a sort of resonance with the thing one has faith in.
A
Where does belief come from? Do we not choose to believe in something? What do you mean with the beautifully poetic statement, “faith is a sort of resonance with the thing one has faith in”?
Well we all have beliefs which come from elsewhere. For example, I have had a belief that I’m supposed to get married and have kids. You know I’m a woman and that’s what we are supposed to do. Only upon refection, I’m not particularly interested in having kids and upon a deeper reflection, I realise that I don’t even think the idea of marraige is appealing to me. Seems like a really obscure thing for someone like me to be doing. Where did my belief come from? From society. From somewhere outside of myself. In fact I didn’t even choose to believe in it, I simply inhereted the concept.
Same with religion. It comes from our parents, from our teachers, our community, it comes from a place outside of ourselves and often our beliefs have no basis in reality.
Faith on the otherhand comes from inside of you. Not blind faith, that is belief. Faith as a manifestation of your spirit. As a virtue of your spirit. Without faith there is no spiritual cultivation at all. Without faith one is unable to walk one’s path. Walking one’s path is the only way to know and to understand our own spiritual nature. But faith is amazing. It’s a sort of ‘knowing’ in the heart. And there is a symbiotic relationship with the heart and with God. It is not only that we have faith in God, in our path, in our inherent ability to understand, it’s that God has faith in us. There is a connect. The connect is the thing, the meeting half way, a reaching out and knowing that when you reach out, God reaches back. Faith is a viirtue.
A
I was in the shower and I thought of something else.
Belief is knowledge. Faith is wisdom.
A
LA-
Thank you for the insights. I will address them shortly, but first I would like to clear someting up:
Notice that all the questions are about belief.
But the subject of the thread is
I was answering the body of the message, I had already forgotten the title. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you remembered the subject heading and wondered why I was writing about belief rather than faith. I myself was wondering why you were comparing and contrasting the two, then I noticed the heading/body verb disagreement.
Wow, I made that really tedious.
Anyhow, I believe I know what you are talking about. Belief is a grasping and holding, whereas faith is a letting go and relaxing.
Or belief is to culture as faith is to soul.
Anyway this explains why you never hear of a “leap of belief”.
Best!
QK
I was also trying to understand how powerful individual opinions or perceptions are. What is seen as a good thing to some…is viewed as a disease to others. How do we know which opinion is correct? Should we research each one for ourselves…or simply adopt someone elses without question…and defend it as our own?
The answer to this question I believe is far simpler than one would imagine.
Our inherent nature (the quality of wisdom) is all knowing. The trick is to know which part of us is our wisdom and which part is opinion. But we all possess this inherent ability to discern. It is our conscience - the voice of our heart - people say; ‘follow your heart’, but what does that really mean? It means to conduct your life through your conscience. Now the issue is whether or not we are able to hear our conscience being as we are so opinionated, so busy in our minds.
In terms of our teachers… Our teachers are simple to recognise. They are virtuous, they live their lives consciously, in harmony with life’s pulse. We cannot tell by their words, but we can observe through their actions.
A
Is faith and schitzophernia the same thing?
I don’t think Nicole Diver was Christian. I don’t think that a schizo is capable of any normal reasoning when it comes, let alone faith or belief. When the schizo is normal, however, she is simply quite normal, and she is fully conscious of her psychic condition.
What puzzels me is when the situation is such that she sees what is not there, not there for us. This kind of sureal imagination is surely distinguished from any normal imagination. What is the essential difference? If you keep asking in this direction, I think, you’ll end up having no choice but to start from Decartes all over again.
People like Nash freak me out. How do you know that Nash was merely daydreaming? How would you know?
People with schizophrenia have no problem with reasoning. In fact I have observed on several occasions that people with schizophrenia tend to be thoroughly logical– within the framework of that the altered perceptions allow. To use a computer analogy, it is the input that is in error, not the processor.
There is software that can be used with VR goggles, that is a simulation of schizophrenic experience. Audial and visual hallucination are incorporated into a routine of simple and complex tasks. I have not tried this myself, but one of my case manager coworkers did and described this to me. She said it was overwhelming, and gave her a new respect for her schizophrenic clients.
QK