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Originally Posted by fern46
I take a slightly different route, but I am with you on this in concept. It is my belief that the delusions we are drawn to, and especially the ones that we hold onto tightly or experience repetitively, are significant in some way.
When mine come up, I recognize them as delusions, but I do not just dismiss them. I try to see what they might mean symbolically. My subconscious is holding onto the belief, so I approach working with it in the language of the subconscious. I think your method of working with the belief to consciously 'know' it in a reality based setting is a beautiful idea. It can give the experience meaning and purpose and then perhaps one day unlock the 'why' which is what we need to discover.
Blue, about the definition of delusion... Take a point in time approach to it. What I hold as a delusion for a period of time can later be identified as a false belief. It is more of a state of consciousness thing to me. In one state, I 100% without any shred of doubt held these beliefs. They were truly fixed. Later, I moved into a more combined reality state and saw myself through other lenses and realized those beliefs were false.
In the same way I am both a mother and someone's child, there are versions of me who know delusions are such and a part of me that still holds onto them. The goal is to make sure the delusion believer stays in the back seat and does not take the wheel.
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So I have to agree they’re meaningful in some way. Basically I was drawn to shamanism by a new age friend I knew in grad school. She took me on a journey and found a spirit animal that was willing to help me. It must have been buried in my subconscious for 10-15 years. There’s just something super appealing about the concept to me, possibly because I was missing spirituality in my life.
The part of my brain that believes in shamanism is also is the part that believes in God...but this seems different than my conscious belief system. My conscious belief system is still a non believer in anything. It’s all very complicated in a way, but I believe there can be different areas of the brain with different levels of consciousness. Part of my delusions involved the right half of my brain as a distinct entity from the left, but it could not speak, auditory hallucinations were the result of it trying to communicate. Super weird I know, but there was one study where thy put half the brain to sleep and give questions and you can get different answers from each half.
Sorry I’m rambling on but the point is there is this spirituality belief that is disconnected from my conscious mind and also another delusion I had was that I needed to reintegrate my brain [emoji3447] and I’d be stable. It’s almost as if my brain were giving me instructions to get better again. I could never figure out what to do for the reintegration though. It’s possible it’s just a delusion, or it could be meaningful. My brain in th psychotic state was actually really good at providing a different type of answer than would typically occur to my conscious mind. For example, i was playing star ocean and very near to th end of the game. Suddenly my team of characters could not make it past soldiers with ranged weapons. I must have died 50 times and then a hallucination said I needed to fight ranged weapons with ranged weapons...well it worked. While I’ve always enjoyed video games I’m not particularly skilled at strategy so this was a revelation and it came somewhere from my own mind....should I disregard it just because it’s not coming from my conscious mind?
Given psychosis you can either dump everything in the trash in which case you’re ignoring part of your own mind or you can work though it in some way. I’ve chosen to work through it and respect all the inner subconscious components of my mind. This seems to provide peace for me.