Recently I found a new stance that is incredibly helpful. It's about dividing the world into three categories: the immanent, that which could be immanent or transcendent, and the transcendent.
This can be understood better if we see it from the point of view of the psyche. Some things are from this world, they are real, their mental image is paralleled by something out there which fits it quite well. I call this immanent, and the second category appears to the mind almost quite the same, but there is the added possibility that our mental images have some connection to the supernatural. And the third category would be things that are supernatural alone, that do not exist in a normal way, and cannot be perceived by everyone.
The fine part of this is that it's not necessary to make a philosophical decision about whether the supernatural really exists or is just a hallucination. You can be a shaman or a materialist, in the first case the second and the third category have to do with otherwordly beings, in the second case they're just about some weird processes in the brain.
So, a schizophrenic person doesn't need to buy the common western view about seeing things that are not real, she can adopt a practical attitude and train herself in these three fields.
It is quite necessary that the first field is conquered before the second is entered, and that the second is conquered before venturing into the third, or there might be confusion that could even lead to dangerous and harmful consequences.
I was very astounded to find out how many things can be interpreted both as psychological mechanisms and as spiritual experiences, and that it is maybe just an interpretational distinction, a matter of taste whether the angels in your vision exist somewhere up there or whether they're complex patterns in your brain. In the practical work with them, this distinction is superficial.
But of course it's a long learning process about how to treat them right, and I had to cover some field in this process in the last months, that's why I was not continuing this book. Also I'm not sure whether it was a good idea to try to write it in English, after all German is my first language and I'm more fluent there. That's why I have no idea about how or if this blog will be continued.
(Should the book be written and translated to English I'll announce it here.)
