Do you experience something like this?

[Tennessee Jed]

Why not? What did your response have to do with mania? You were describing 2 states of mind: one characterised by the ego, and another by the unconscious. If I had already concluded that what I experience is intricately linked to the notion of the unconscious, then your response, if it was in line with truth, would therefore be valid.

My goal is to get away from mental health professionals. Actually, a major reason for making this thread is to help myself in being able to explain to mental health professionals what I go through, so as to demonstrate that it is not a "pathological condition" but is in fact, I suppose, more-healthy-than-healthy.

The problem is that I don't know to what extent the general population goes through this splitting of experiences between the ordinary and the fantastical, or what the status quo view of this phenomenon is. I myself am confident in the belief that it is a highly beneficial experience to go through, but I need to be able to anchor it in something that makes it more communicable to a hostile audience.

Just talk to someone who actually knows something about the subject: A professional. If you're happy with the quality of your life and aren't a danger to others, then a professional should be perfectly willing to help and advise you in any capacity you want.

Alternatively, read the Wikipedia articles on "neurosis" and "psychosis." (Neurosis isn't currently used as a term in modern psychology, but the major disorders are still informally divided into those two categories of illness.) And then follow the links in those articles to other articles on disorders and mental states that might match what you're describing.

 

[Pionart]

Just talk to someone who actually knows something about the subject: A professional. If you're happy with the quality of your life and aren't a danger to others, then a professional should be perfectly willing to help and advise you in any capacity you want.

Alternatively, read the Wikipedia articles on "neurosis" and "psychosis." (Neurosis isn't currently used as a term in modern psychology, but the major disorders are still informally divided into those two categories of illness.) And then follow the links to disorders and mental states that might match what you're describing.

Talk to someone who knows something about the subject and talk to a professional are contradictory phrases. Mention anything to a psychiatrist that isn't in their psychiatry textbooks and they don't know what you're talking about and assume you're wrong. Turns out their understanding is highly flawed in the first place, and is a long way away from being an accurate description of human states of consciousness.

"Talk to a professional" is a trap for getting people into the web of psychiatric forced drugging and all kinds of abusive practices. I've been stuck in that web for years, and I'm trying to get unstuck. Your responses are not helpful. Your initial post may have been helpful if you'd followed up with questions and not deleted it, but now you're being "that guy" and suggesting I should get "help". You're also not listening to me, or if you are you're not taking what I said into account.

I don't want to GET professional help about this, I want demonstrate to the system that their treatment of me is ethically unjustifiable and completely out of line with the realities of how humans function. I also want the views of people who are NOT utterly corrupted by false psychiatric practices, and who can give me interpretations that will contain legitimate insight, rather than being manifestations of a political agenda.

Piecing together what is going on here involves going beyond anything I've ever read. I've read plenty of stuff that somewhat explained what was going on but nothing that was truly satisfactory. I am piecing this together myself, so that an understanding of these states will one day exist.

 

[Tennessee Jed]

Your responses are not helpful. Your initial post may have been helpful if you'd followed up with questions and not deleted it, but now you're being "that guy" and suggesting I should get "help". You're also not listening to me, or if you are you're not taking what I said into account.

Fine then, post queries on message boards and commune with random strangers who know little or nothing about the subject (and I'm including myself in that group).

But my initial post concerned normal fluctuations of mood and creativity as part of "normal" functioning; it didn't take into account people with a more serious mental illness because I don't know anything about that stuff. So I can't be of any help to you. Sorry, and I do wish you the best of luck.

 

[Pionart]

Fine then, post queries on message boards and commune with random strangers who know little or nothing about the subject (and I'm including myself in that group).

But my initial post concerned normal fluctuations of mood and creativity as part of "normal" functioning; it didn't take into account people with a more serious mental illness because I don't know anything about that stuff. So I can't be of any help to you. Sorry, and I do wish you the best of luck.

Why do you say I have a mental illness let alone a serious mental illness? What about the OP qualified me as mentally ill? I view my experiences as a gift, not an illness. Psychiatrists can't understand that extreme experiences can be positive, it's all pathologise pathologise pathologise.

You never know who will pop up on a message board. Someone could come along who knows about this stuff. And apart from that, I was looking to determine whether or not other people experience this.

Understand this: psychiatrists in general barely understand this stuff. Worse than that though, they think they do and have the legal power to enforce their opinions.

Maybe some people find psychiatrists helpful. I am not one of those people. Or maybe some psychiatrists are helpful, and my psychiatrist is not one of them.

I'll keep doing as I'm doing, thanks.

 

[Vendrah]

Yeah, I probably had stuff like that happen before my "break from (conventional) reality", where I started becoming aware of a greater story occurring than the conventional narrative.



I don't know what thread you're referring to - can you link me to it? I also don't know what your last line means.

The link is here:
https://www.typologycentral.com/for...ions/102720-please-help-type.html#post3178705

There is one thing that I realized, one of some other things, at reading you and Reckful on that thread, is this thing about subjective and objective and the meanings behind them.
There is a big difference into exact sciences objectivity and "human" sciences objectivity.
When you do an experiment of an object falling into vacuum, in every proper experiment the object falls. If your instrument measures on the acceleration of gravity arent too precise, every "experimenter"/researchers are supposed to find the same result anywhere, if they followed the experiments guidelines strickly.
Still on gravity, if you throw an apple out of window on a building, it will fall to the ground every time.
That doesnt happen on humanities and partially on the biological experiments and experiences. In humanities, metaphorically, if you throw an apple on the window the apple can go up for some people, keep the height for others and fall to the ground for the majority. Thats mostly due to the human science nature than their fault on the approach (sometimes its their fault).

I think there are two big mistakes, one in your side and one on Reckful, sorry if I was rude for using the word mistake so directly towards you and him.
On your side, I think that you might end up with the idea that, if it works for you, it should work for everybody else. Not in everything, but specially in these personalities assumption.
On Reckful side, Reckful might not realize that, if something happens for most people, it doenst mean that that something happens for every people. Same for NOT happening.
Giving an inside MBTI example.. It happens that, for most cognitive function stacks, most INTPs dont have tertiary Si and most INFJs dont have tertiary Ti and so on. However, it happens that a few INTPs actually get tertiary Si and a few INFJs gets tertiary Ti, so, in one side, if one INFJ have tertiary Ti, and perhaps if the very few INFJs he knows have tertiary Ti either, that still not enough to imply that all INFJs have Ti. On the other side, if the average INFJ dont have tertiary Ti, that doesnt imply that all INFJs dont have tertiary Ti. This goes with entire MBTI thing... MBTI profiles are written based on statistics that mostly persons from the same type do... For example, being open mind is a ENTP/ENFP trait, because most ENTPs/ENFPs are open mind, but that doesnt imply that all ENTPs and ENFPs are open minded.

This can get really ugly and complex in politics. Very few people asks themselves "What makes a country development?" but rather instead they answer the question before doing the question itself. They already states what makes a country developed, and then they point out one or two countries that "it worked", meaning that these are examples to be followed and that, if it worked on that country and in the other one, then it should work in all countries. And thats answering the question before asking the question, because there is a big difference in someones approach of asking the question and then starting to look for all countries for patterns, by instead starting with an answer and then picking up a few cases that worked out and then suddenly starting creating truths out of that. It is in these conditions where I start to lose temper (and Reckful in typology), but politics gets even worse because even when you carefully explain people will keep still on that (and I do believe that there are bad intentions out of it) (although Reckful would say the same for typology, switching the word bad intentions for irrationality).

This goes the same for some medicine/drugs. In some drug studies, the drug works into all patients or in most patients? Its different. Due to specialization and for some other reasons, it seems that most studies doesnt care to study exceptions (sometimes even I dont when im looking into something) and that some media the phrase "works for most of the cases" which is written mostly on article as "there is a correlation between...", "the average increased after..." switch and transforms to "works for everyone", "after you do that, the results are sure, because studys says so", which have different meanings.

At the very end, asking "if this works for me, will it work for everybody else?" and "does it works mostly or always?" always does some good. No, wait, mostly does some good actually. In typology, I believe on the comprehension between sides and approaches, in politics I tried explaining, but from the very few cases where I had the patience, all of them arrived me concluding that, in the end, it was all about hidden intentions and desires rather than a matter of comprehension, with approaches reaching wrong conclusions not by mistake, but by hidden desires.

EDIT: I derailed a little bit of what I was talking and ended up not explaining my last phrase on the other post.
Scientific approach of today dont reach mostly of what is untested - actually, it does through theories. Understanding that it is possible that some spiritual things are out of scientific approach, but some of them arent and they can end up being proved wrongly, so its a matter of looking for spiritual things that arent testable (or that are testable and its going to work out, which if somebody ever manages to do it it will make a good jump straight-foward). Always looks for beliefs that are out of test and avoid quackery/sciolism (portuguese word "charlatanismo").
Second thing, if something is "the truth", then it must be "universal" (or mankind universal) and valid from a man living in the middle of the forest without any contact with "todays society" to someone flying in a space station. Most religions arent universal and some of these spiritual things arent either.

 

[Pionart]

[MENTION=32874]Vendrah[/MENTION]

That thread is not a science versus spirituality debate. Rather, it is a contrast between two different scientific approaches.

The thing to understand is that psychology by its very nature tends to demand a translation between the subject and object. There are purely objective measures too, but subjectivity is often necessary because you're studying processes of the human mind.

So here we have two approaches:
1. Use one high resolution case, and several lower resolution cases. Data requires a large degree of interpretation to understand, and is subject to error.
2. Use a large number of data points. Data is in quantified form, however requires indirect measures to obtain (i.e. test items).

So, in the first case the researcher must make the translation between the subject and object, and in the second case it is done by each participant in the study. The first case aims to be more direct in the data it obtains, by reading people (or the researcher themself) in terms of the real-time manifestation of their cognitive processes. The second case is indirect in that it relies on self-report, so the results are framed in the context of the test's validity. The first case involves a somewhat artistic process in that the identification of cognitive functions is not a skill which has been made exact, whereas the second only needs statistical analysis (although it also requires the artistic process of test design).

The two methods are both valid as I see it, and as I mentioned in that thread, if an observation is made based on one method, it should be taken seriously whether the other method makes the same observation or not. At the very least, it involves explaining why the inference from the observation is invalid, if it's to be disproven.

This thread utilises the self-observation method in understanding a phenomenon. Basically what I'm doing is trying to describe the experience as best as I can, and cross-reference with the experiences of others while also determining effective theoretical explanations for what is occurring. Connected with this is a prominent ethical question regarding the understanding of and treatment of diagnosed mental illness.

The self-observation method is probably very underused in psychology. I did hear about an early prominent psychologist who used this approach, but general advice was given to use usual experimental methods rather than trying it. However, if you can piece together what is occurring in your own psychology - and you've certainly got a privileged viewpoint of that particular data set - then you can be guided to develop new levels of understanding about a phenomenon, which can then be used for further testing.

So what we have here is an approach for uncovering psychological truths. It's not exactly new, people try to make sense of their experiences all the time, and some do a particularly good job. When used in conjunction with existing theories regarding the function of mind, it becomes one means of testing prevailing models against the terrain of human experience. It helps alleviate a rather unfortunate aspect of much psychological understanding, in that observable phenomena are focused on too much, and the art of interpretation is largely ignored. Of course, it requires that the researcher knows what they're doing. It's not for everyone.

What's clear is that psychiatry needs a major shift in its understanding. At present it fails in a number of ways. It's unlikely that this change will come from within psychiatry, so it has to come from outside of it. Alternate conceptualisations etc. of the phenomena which psychiatry concerns itself with would be needed in order to balance out the prevailing viewpoint. Of course, the alternate views would need to be based in truth, or expressed in a way which indicates to what degree they are. And while much needs to still be discovered, there is much that already has been discovered that isn't being utilised anywhere near as well as it could. It's about finding the truth.

 

[Vendrah]

[MENTION=32874]Vendrah[/MENTION]

That thread is not a science versus spirituality debate. Rather, it is a contrast between two different scientific approaches.

The thing to understand is that psychology by its very nature tends to demand a translation between the subject and object. There are purely objective measures too, but subjectivity is often necessary because you're studying processes of the human mind.

So here we have two approaches:
1. Use one high resolution case, and several lower resolution cases. Data requires a large degree of interpretation to understand, and is subject to error.
2. Use a large number of data points. Data is in quantified form, however requires indirect measures to obtain (i.e. test items).

So, in the first case the researcher must make the translation between the subject and object, and in the second case it is done by each participant in the study. The first case aims to be more direct in the data it obtains, by reading people (or the researcher themself) in terms of the real-time manifestation of their cognitive processes. The second case is indirect in that it relies on self-report, so the results are framed in the context of the test's validity. The first case involves a somewhat artistic process in that the identification of cognitive functions is not a skill which has been made exact, whereas the second only needs statistical analysis (although it also requires the artistic process of test design).

The two methods are both valid as I see it, and as I mentioned in that thread, if an observation is made based on one method, it should be taken seriously whether the other method makes the same observation or not. At the very least, it involves explaining why the inference from the observation is invalid, if it's to be disproven.

This thread utilises the self-observation method in understanding a phenomenon. Basically what I'm doing is trying to describe the experience as best as I can, and cross-reference with the experiences of others while also determining effective theoretical explanations for what is occurring. Connected with this is a prominent ethical question regarding the understanding of and treatment of diagnosed mental illness.

The self-observation method is probably very underused in psychology. I did hear about an early prominent psychologist who used this approach, but general advice was given to use usual experimental methods rather than trying it. However, if you can piece together what is occurring in your own psychology - and you've certainly got a privileged viewpoint of that particular data set - then you can be guided to develop new levels of understanding about a phenomenon, which can then be used for further testing.

So what we have here is an approach for uncovering psychological truths. It's not exactly new, people try to make sense of their experiences all the time, and some do a particularly good job. When used in conjunction with existing theories regarding the function of mind, it becomes one means of testing prevailing models against the terrain of human experience. It helps alleviate a rather unfortunate aspect of much psychological understanding, in that observable phenomena are focused on too much, and the art of interpretation is largely ignored. Of course, it requires that the researcher knows what they're doing. It's not for everyone.

What's clear is that psychiatry needs a major shift in its understanding. At present it fails in a number of ways. It's unlikely that this change will come from within psychiatry, so it has to come from outside of it. Alternate conceptualisations etc. of the phenomena which psychiatry concerns itself with would be needed in order to balance out the prevailing viewpoint. Of course, the alternate views would need to be based in truth, or expressed in a way which indicates to what degree they are. And while much needs to still be discovered, there is much that already has been discovered that isn't being utilised anywhere near as well as it could. It's about finding the truth.

Despise everything you said, it stills turns out that if something is true for one people, it is not true for any other people. The method 1 isnt that much scientifical; I still havent read directly about some scientific standard, but Im familiar with some, and there isnt a single one I know that the start, middle and ending are all towards oneself without any external observation. High resolution cases is not a scientifical method, sometimes the number of cases analysed are lower than the whole and some cases are "zoomed" due to lack of resources and effort (not in the lazy way, but in the case that it would require too much effort), not because thats a scientific method. Random samples are done because the resources are too limited to do the entire sample, rather than just being an alternative method.

 

[Pionart]

Despise everything you said, it stills turns out that if something is true for one people, it is not true for any other people.

ok, some things actually work like that though
once you get your results you check against the population
but to some extent you don't need to because certain things generalise from one to the general population
gotta think: is this one of those things?

For example: a feature of my mind is the cognitive function order of INFJ. If this isn't a generalisable results, why does it apply to me and not others? Has my interest in typology changed my thinking THAT drastically?

 

[Vendrah]

ok, some things actually work like that though
once you get your results you check against the population
but to some extent you don't need to because certain things generalise from one to the general population
gotta think: is this one of those things?

For example: a feature of my mind is the cognitive function order of INFJ. If this isn't a generalisable results, why does it apply to me and not others? Has my interest in typology changed my thinking THAT drastically?

At the very ending you still have to make the research on general population anyway. However, method 1 and self-observation can be good methods to draw hypothesis (that are meant to be tested later) and inspire patterns searching and creations, although the creative and inventive departament isnt exactly scientifical.

You cannot generalize things from one, you can draw hypothesis through your own observation and then go out to test the hypothesis you made on others. Its like "Im insightful person"-->"Im INFJ"-->"Then, perhaps all or the majority of INFJs are insightful". You can say: "All INFJs are insightful"--> "Im INFJ" --> "Then, Im insightful". But you cannot reverse that, going "Im INFJ" --> "Im insightful" --> "Then, all INFJs are insightful", that doenst work and is considered to be false because you are INFJ, but the others INFJs arent you. Actually, this is getting on logical reasoning departament, and it envolves basic theorical/conceptual math with no numbers, but teachers generally use numbers for explanation (in my language it is called "conjuntos", which google translate returns as set, joint or group).

 

[Pionart]

At the very ending you still have to make the research on general population anyway. However, method 1 and self-observation can be good methods to draw hypothesis (that are meant to be tested later) and inspire patterns searching and creations, although the creative and inventive departament isnt exactly scientifical.

You cannot generalize things from one, you can draw hypothesis through your own observation and then go out to test the hypothesis you made on others. Its like "Im insightful person"-->"Im INFJ"-->"Then, perhaps all or the majority of INFJs are insightful". You can say: "All INFJs are insightful"--> "Im INFJ" --> "Then, Im insightful". But you cannot reverse that, going "Im INFJ" --> "Im insightful" --> "Then, all INFJs are insightful", that doenst work and is considered to be false because you are INFJ, but the others INFJs arent you. Actually, this is getting on logical reasoning departament, and it envolves basic theorical/conceptual math with no numbers, but teachers generally use numbers for explanation (in my language it is called "conjuntos", which google translate returns as set, joint or group).

So I guess this is just some semantic debate about what counts as science.

The stuff you said is obvious and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. It's like you're not listening to me, just repeating certain things like I didn't say them already, and making arguments that are already addressed by earlier things I said.

So having said that I don't really know what other point to make here.

 

[Vendrah]

So I guess this is just some semantic debate about what counts as science.

The stuff you said is obvious and I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. It's like you're not listening to me, just repeating certain things like I didn't say them already, and making arguments that are already addressed by earlier things I said.

So having said that I don't really know what other point to make here.

Ok, this is an awkward moment where I dont have much to say, really. Yeah, I have been repetitive, I know...

 

[Pionart]

This video is illuminating...

First a mention that psychiatry is bad at understanding this stuff (spiritual emergency),
And makes mention of a metaphorical view of the process, in terms of
Plato's cave - watching flickers from a fire in a cave, ignorant of the outside world,
And the one who travels outside of the cave and returns. Without integration -
They appear crazy to the ones in the cave - they know nothing of this outside world
(and who's keeping everyone in the cave?)
But the world outside is real - more real than the consensus reality of the cave.

So it is with the psychotic patient,
They step outside of consensus reality,
Immerse themselves in higher truths,
And struggle against the backlash of ignorance,
They are kept subdued, in an attempt to stop their progress,
By whom? The ones in the cave, or the ones keeping them there?

"We've got a lot invested in this fabricated reality,
We don't want you going around and waking everyone up!
So we're going to incapacitate you,
Cut off your access to your own mind,
Tell you you're crazy,
And break your spirit.
Then you will know -
That you are as much a part of our reality as the rest of them."

Interesting state and what to do.

 

[Pionart]

No and now I feel jealous that I'm not an Ni dominant (even though people think I am and I occasionally consider it because my mind likes puzzles).

I was just thinking, and I realised that you're quite likely right that this is an Ni thing. The only other function that would have anything similar, according to my guess, would be Ne.

I was thinking about how, as an INFJ, I have a far greater awareness of my Fe use than I do of my Ni use. I thought, well, that's because Ni is kind of "invisible" so you can't really see it working. And I thought, I can see all my other functions as well, except for Ne. But sometimes I can see Ni and Ne more clearly. Ni really does work a lot on "a-ha!" moments, like mining for gold for a long time and then finally you find it and "eureka!", Ni can go looking for something in the mind and it might not know what it is but it's always searching until it finds it. And Ne comes alive for me at certain times when I'm generating lots of possibilities/inferences, perhaps in response to Ni's discovery.

So what I'm describing in the OP may essentially be a months long process of searching, followed by a weeks long "a-ha!" "moment" (and these "episodes" do indeed contain a large number of a-ha moments). Perhaps Ne is the more "bipolar" one, but Ni runs a similar course. The other functions seem more consistent in their output, so they probably function at a more even level, as opposed to a low energy with occassional peaks of high energy.

 

[á´…eparted]

I can't say that I do, but this also sound familiar in may ways. The world never feels unreal or hyperreal to me. However, there are times where I will see, sense, or experience particular aspects of the world at a very intensified, or very reduced way. When I say intensified its more that I will process the sensory data I receive at much more detailed or faster pace than normal. My processing of this is already on the rather high end of this by default, but it does go up and down. It's like an extended awareness. For example, I can look at a tree and in an instant become "aware" that this tree has biological and biochemical processes happening in it at an extremely rapid pace. Phenolic monomers polymerizing to lignan, extending the tree upward, the slowed and hastened timeframe the tree experiences the world at, the seed that it came from and how all the information contained within it lead to the form it exsists in now, seemingly a sum greater than its original parts but at the same time this in many respects was already predetermined. Having all this information hit me at once can sometimes be rather strong and result in somataform-like feelings and sensations that I fail to adequtely describe. It does feel drug-like or similar to tripping, but I would not categorize it as such, it's just merely familiar. I've always been this way too even as a child, but the more I learn about the world the more agumented and detailed this becomes.

 

[Pionart]

I can't say that I do, but this also sound familiar in may ways. The world never feels unreal or hyperreal to me. However, there are times where I will see, sense, or experience particular aspects of the world at a very intensified, or very reduced way. When I say intensified its more that I will process the sensory data I receive at much more detailed or faster pace than normal. My processing of this is already on the rather high end of this by default, but it does go up and down. It's like an extended awareness. For example, I can look at a tree and in an instant become "aware" that this tree has biological and biochemical processes happening in it at an extremely rapid pace. Phenolic monomers polymerizing to lignan, extending the tree upward, the slowed and hastened timeframe the tree experiences the world at, the seed that it came from and how all the information contained within it lead to the form it exsists in now, seemingly a sum greater than its original parts but at the same time this in many respects was already predetermined. Having all this information hit me at once can sometimes be rather strong and result in somataform-like feelings and sensations that I fail to adequtely describe. It does feel drug-like or similar to tripping, but I would not categorize it as such, it's just merely familiar. I've always been this way too even as a child, but the more I learn about the world the more agumented and detailed this becomes.

I suppose that the equivalent version of this to what I'm describing is if you had an extended period of time where this awareness was sustained, rather than just a brief awareness.