geogeller

response and tangent to jeff pulver Facebook note A Time to Listen to Yourself
interesting question about voices jeff

i think we need to have the courage to be creative to be there for ourselves – to think and to catch our dreams and to some that might be delusional and crazy but it also might be brilliant one thing i know is that as a liver of life and artist its better to ask for forgiveness then permission and to pay attention to what you are thinking of and if you can’t stop thinking about something that might be the gift or it as below might be the curse too – its a fine line we walk

but to digress from your point jeff – for me i am interested
in how the mind works and how we think and feel and make
decisions and also voices and visions among other things and
working on a few documentaries including one that explores
our thinking and how we look at mental illness
this is not where you were going but i think for many people with mental issues the voices they hear are unbearable to say the least

though i believe that somewhere there is a light voice a light at the end of the tunnel that is our conscious which never goes out – its like most of us are pretending we are zombies to go along to get along but down deep we know what is humane – anyway conscious is different then our imagination -  our conscious might be thought of as more intuitive, insightful and dealing with non-physical/time/spacial realms where as our imagination might be thought of as more fantasy, imaginary and more physical – in any case i believe we need to pay attention too that which is positive in us – but one thing i am learning is that there are many voices that are in our heads that are having ongoing conversations with ourselves or in the case of schizophrenics maybe between themselves and many that can be misleading and cause us to do (dark) unspeakable and unthinkable things – at the moment i am working on a doc that highlights some of what i call reality check tools that people might find useful when going through hard/dark  times and feeling like they are drowning in a downward spiral and need some tools to ward off thoughts that are troublesome
many of the people i am working with are friends who have been ill and are in or now out of mental hospitals due to mental of physical abuse or drug abuse have damaged imaginations and decompensated to the point of needing to be hospitalized often more then once as a direct response to hearing voices and visions and don’t know what voice to listen too – the mental institutions are filled with people who have the gift and curse of hearing voices and visions and mental issues and are fighting with their inner and outer selves and often they are tormented and hear ruthless voices and vision but also as artist (in full disclosure i consider myself a recovering artist) we want to be as sensitive as possible – people with mental issues are often too sensitive for their own good -

there are many people who are high functioning who are aware of reality check and deal with mental issues and some are diagnosed and others are undiagnosed and they are often the more creative, imaginative, inventive types that change the world or how we see the world – many of the inventions and artists projects of the world came from people who had a vision and caught that vision and nobody believed at the time the world would or could change – look around you and you will see many things that came out of the minds of people who many thought they were mad and crazy and maybe they were and maybe you have to be too but maybe they saw things that were before their time too and coincidentally these are the things we take for granted today and what we people are doing today people of the future will use tomorrow and it will again come from people who are/were visionaries in what ever form you might want to label them

so back to one of the things that is confusing with the inner voices and hearing voices and seeing visions – well, it is said a person who talks to god is religious a person who thinks god is talking to them is schizophrenic – and many diagnosed and undiagnosed people, some with tormented damaged imaginations and diagnosed with depression, bi-polar, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, OCD obsessive compulsive disorder seem to be caught in a revolving door a chemical imbalance that is addictive in nature much like fear or anger addiction – and this leads them to stranger then fiction places that for some reason their reality checks are not able to deal with and only medicine, chemicals seem to calm their minds down so that they can reflect on the voices they hear and determine their actions – food for thought