Trying to Reason When Your Reasoning is Messed Up

It seems to be of great importance to my well-being to believe that my delusions were more than just the result of a chemical imbalance in my brain.

This is actually a big topic, but I don't have a lot of time to write so I'll try to make this as brief as possible. First off, it's not of great importance to my well-being to believe I DON'T have a chemical imbalance in my brain. However, whenever I have symptoms which resemble bipolar mood cycling, it introduces doubt that my delusions were more than just a mental illness. But it's also relevant to mention that I never have psychotic symptoms.

I don't remember if I mentioned it on here before, actually I think I did, but I'll say it again. One time last summer, I was feeling some doubt about this, so I made a list of 24 good reasons why there's a spirit. I realize now that not all of the reasons are good reasons. Nonetheless, the list convinces me every time I read it that there's something seriously funny going on with my life, and it's not a chemical imbalance in my brain.

But here's the the thing that gets me: Can I trust my own brain? Maybe there is some serious flaw in my thinking that I can't see, because I can't escape the flaws of my own brain and think with a more universal perfect God-like intelligence. But if I can't trust my brain when it comes to this, how can I trust my brain when it comes to making any logical conclusion? One thing I know is that everytime I come to the conclusion that this is more than a mental illness, it's not a conclusion I come to based on emotion, because that would be unreliable. It's based on the facts, because it happens when I examine the facts.

I remember when I was delusional and my thinking was off. I remember thinking, if I am delusional, then that would mean that this certain event (which I had no evidence of) never happened, but I KNOW it happened so therefore I am not delusional! But that conclusion was based on emotion, because I just felt so SURE that this certain event had happened.

One of the things I see when I examine the series of events that lead to me being delusional, and that followed from me being delusional, was how one unusual thing lead to another. Each event seemed to happen on purpose, and I don't believe these events were coincidental. Is this observation I'm making based on emotion? I don't think so, and I feel very strongly that these things did happen on purpose.

And here's where that last paragraph makes me go off on a tangent. Each event had a purpose, and it led to one final event. WHAT WAS THE PURPOSE OF THIS FINAL EVENT?! Lately I've been thinking that it may have to do with the effect it had on the other person involved with this final event, whatever that effect was. Will it lead to another event? I can't answer this because I don't have the answers. Like I've said before, life is about surprises.

Life: It's All About Surprises

So I'm sitting at the library, and I really feel like writing so I'm going to write but I'm trying to organize my thoughts enough so that I can write about something and not have it turn out incoherent and all over the place.

I find myself confused. There are things on my mind that I really wish I knew the answers to, and then there are things that I'd kind of like to know the answers but I don't really need to.

Sometimes, you "just know" things. But the thing is, sometimes you "just know" something, and what you just know isn't so. Then again, sometimes it is, and when it is it's like, "wow, no one told me that, I just suddenly realized it and knew it was true and wow, I was right!" So how do you tell the difference?

One thing I've learned is to trust your past experience. Ask yourself, what does this experience remind you of? What happened then? Trouble is, sometimes what you're currently experiencing doesn't match with anything from the past.

I've got about a million things on my mind right now, but I'll focus in on one of them. The things that people tell you in your dreams. I had a dream a couple nights ago where I was receiving information from the great beyond. Actually, what was happening is my psychic sister was whispering information to my mom and she was telling it to me. She told me something that made me extremely happy. And I started freaking out! Like seriously, I was freaking the fuck out, because I knew I was receiving this information from a reliable source, and I had just heard exactly what I wanted to hear and I knew it was a dream so that means I was lucid but in most lucid dreams it can be extremely hard for me to stay asleep. I wake up very easily from lucid dreams. But I was going crazy in this dream and I still didn't wake up.

It's weird, because right now I'm staring at what I just wrote, and I've realized that the process of writing that last paragraph convinced me that the information I received was true.

I've said before that you should heed what people tell you in dreams. This is true. Except, they've told me conflicting things. See, I have trouble with my love life, or lack thereof. I have trouble finding people who are interested in me, and when I do, I'm not interested in them. I had a dream a month or so back where someone told me I'd never be in another relationship again. A couple nights ago in the dream I was just talking about, someone told me I'd be in a relationship again before I turned 26. That isn't what I got excited about, I'm not going to say what I got excited about. Later on in the dream, someone told me the thing I got excited about wasn't true. But that was later on in the dream, and the spirits may have left at that point if they had ever been present, as spirits can only stay for so long, because even in dreams mediumship requires you to raise your vibration and the spirits to lower theirs, and this is difficult and the connection doesn't last very long.

I was and still am fully convinced that the night the spirits told me in a dream to leave Innercept, I was talking to the spirits. I'm not fully convinced that the other night I was making contact with the spirits or my great infinite wise self or whatever. It might have meant something, but I'm not sure. Thus why I am confused. I'm also confused at why they told me something good and then took it back. But I feel it might be because they didn't want me to be too sure about this, because then it might not happen, and also because the future is supposed to be a mystery.

Life is all about surprises. Some people hate surprises. That's too bad for them, because life is about surprises. You've got to learn to live with it.

The Coming of the Future

So it started at the end of last year on my birthday. I just started feeling... funny. A good kind of funny. Like good things were on the horizon for me.

My sister and I talked about how when we were younger we both felt that we would grow up to be famous. I had a sense of being the kind of person who would be of great interest to other people. And I felt special in a good way. When I got a little older, I felt like maybe I was different in a bad way, because I was so quiet, and I felt kind of dead inside. But when I became delusional, something inside me awakened and I felt alive like never before. And so it was believable to me that I was Jesus, because I had this feeling of being special in a Jesus-like way. It wasn't that I thought I was really great though, this is kind of hard to explain. I thought the feeling went away when I became undelusional, but then I realized that it didn't really. The feeling never goes away. I wonder if all delusional people who believe they are Jesus feel this way.

But anyway, I thought that if my sister and I were to become famous it would start with me and my book. Then earlier this year, for the first time, my sister, who is more psychic than I am, said that she knew that this is how it was going to happen. So I believed that this feeling I was getting was real. And one thing I've learned is that when you have a funny feeling about something, the less you doubt it the more real it becomes.

So I felt the change inside of me, and it influenced what was interesting to me. At its strongest, I had no interest in anything that didn't have to do with the publication of my book. I went to Hastings, and the only thing I was interested in was books about getting published. I wrote query letters, many different query letters, sent them off, got lots of form rejections. I got frustrated. I sent one last query letter (for the time being), lost interest in query letters and decided I would start out by getting published in a magazine and I would hope that it would lead to a book deal. I felt quite certain that I would succeed at this game, but I no longer felt that strong drive to act, act, act. Innercept took away my computer. I figured I would resume my efforts when I got to aftercare.

I finally heard back from the last agent, after an unusually long wait, and it was request for my manuscript. I was happy and I sent it off, but I no longer felt that strong drive, that funny high that made me believe that good things were on the horizon, though I definitely still believed that good things were on the horizon, but the feeling went dormant.

Right now I'm still waiting for a reply. And I keep telling Caitlin I feel the coming of the future. And now, I'm starting to feel that high again. Will I get an offer for representation? I can't say now because only time will tell. But that's kind of why I think I feel this way, because something good is about to happen.

The future is coming, and I feel the urge to prepare. I chose classes for the fall that will help me prepare. I feel that I am doing this because I know that something is going to happen.

Psychics: My Professional Opinion

A few days ago I was looking at a Skeptical Inquirer magazine and I have to say that I disagree about a number of things. One thing I believe I know is that psychic abilities are real. I went through a phase that I'm not proud of where I would talk to psychics on the internet. I've talked to them in person too. So I consider myself experienced on the subject.

Yes, psychics sometimes know things that there is no way for them to know, even when taking into account that they might be talking to each other. They accurately predict things, but more often than not they predict things that do not end up happening. They can get things right when the chances of them guessing and getting it right are very, very small. They also like to decieve and scam.

I wish I had more time to write, but I have to go to class soon so I'll keep this short. Psychics aren't worth your time or money. Even if they somehow know things they shouldn't know, that doesn't mean that anything else they say is going to be right. They want to make the customer happy, at least at the time of the reading. In other words, they will tell you what you want to hear.

The worst time to talk to a psychic is when you think you might be delusional. No one wants to hear that they are delusional.

Predictions about the future are the most unreliable. Don't take any predictions about the future seriously.

There are some things that you aren't supposed to know until the time is right. Sometimes though, you need advice, and you need it from people who aren't living. At least I do. In this case, you wait for the spirits to talk to you.

But most people aren't mediums! That's not a problem. There's this thing we do every night called sleep. If someone not living really needs to tell you something, this is a good time. My advice: always take seriously the advice you receive in your dreams, if you do receive advice in your dreams.

You can waste money on psychics if you have a lot of cash to spare, but remember that if a psychic says something, it doesn't really mean anything at all.

Narcissism of the Spirit

First off, the reason I am talking about this is because it is something I personally struggle with. Here we have some of my perhaps incoherent musings on souls and existence.

Self-esteem is a tricky subject. If yours is too low there's really no way you can go through life being happy. But if you have high self-esteem does that mean you think you are better than other people?

Because let's face it, if you thought were merely average in every way, you probably wouldn't feel that good about yourself. Or if you felt you were above average in some ways but that the areas you were below average in outweighed the areas you were above average in, or they cancelled each other out, you wouldn't feel that good about yourself either. You need to feel like you are in general above average. Problem is, only half the population is above average.

In order to be healthy, you have to break the competitive mindset and focus on unity. You have to feel that you are a member of the group, the family of humanity, and that you contribute something unique to the group yet you are no better than anyone else in the group. But the tricky part is that you have to really believe that, not just say you believe it.

Because the truth is, or rather, my current understanding of the truth is, all souls are equal. Because your physical attractiveness isn't who you are, you're intelligence isn't who you are, nor is your sense of humor. Who you are is your soul and the knowledge that it contains. Not the knowledge that your brain contains, but that your soul contains, which transcends death. Some souls are further along in the process of knowledge acquisition than other souls. Some souls move along at a faster pace than others. This is their own choice and doesn't mean they're better. Being an old soul doesn't mean your soul is better. We are all merely a different piece of a shattered whole, and there is distance between us and other people and we strive to make that distance smaller.

But we have to be competitive to survive, and when you find yourself winning it's extremely hard to view all people and their souls as equals, because some of us have more advanced souls and we all have unequal temporary earthly traits. I know that I for one suffer from narcissism of the spirit.

And if you do suffer from this, you better not let it show. Because people don't like people who seem to think that they're better than other people, or who admit to it. Which I just sort of did. God dammit.

Writer's Block

So I've sat down to write and I can't figure out what I should be writing about. There are always topics flooding through my head, but in order to write about one of them I have to feel a certain passion about it or else it just kind of flops and it doesn't come off as good as it could. Which is why I'm wondering now if I should even go off Adderall because that's what generates that spark for me which allows me to write passionately. No, I haven't gone off it yet and now I'm questioning whether or not I should. I was going to write about a dream I had last night but now the meat of the dream is covered by a large blank spot in my memory. I hate it when that happens, and that always happens. I wonder why I always have good dreams on Sunday nights.

Actually, as I write this I'm starting to remember. It was struggling to find a computer to get on Facebook. Why did I need to go on Facebook? I don't remember. There were a lot of houses, and someone suggested I go into a random person's house to use their computer. I think there was something about my book.

The ending part was about water parks. Water parks made me feel sick, but it was an emotional sickness and not a physical sickness. This has delusional significance to me but I'm not sure it was about my delusions. I wanted to get on this one elliptical that sprays water but it was too close to the ocean, or something like that. There was the color blue.

I think Freud would have a good time interpreting this dream.

Freud: An Amusing Weirdo

I'll keep this blog entry short as I don't have much time. It seems that I reject Freudian theories in my dreams without knowing that they're Freudian theories.

I had a dream a few months back where there was this guy putting people under hypnosis, and then he would ask them about the first time they were cut. "Was it traumatizing?" he would ask. And he thought that this was a pretty intense question, too intense for some people to answer, because being cut for the first time would be pretty traumatizing. He put me under hypnosis and I answered: "The first time you are cut is not traumatizing! It's normal, natural, and necessary! Start by asking a different question!" And that's when the hypnosis starts going somewhere. I realized after I woke up that the first time you are cut is when they cut your umbilical cord. I wrote about this dream in a Facebook note.

I realize now that I was rejecting Freud. It says in my sociology book that Freud believed growing up was a traumatizing process. I used to read about him and he believed that what everyone desires is to return to the womb. Guys can do this in a sense by having sex with their mother. Freud was kind of a screwed up nutcase.

I used to read about Freud because I was interested in dream interpretation. Freud believes that women envy the male sex organ. I read about this in my sociology book but I already knew this. This is actually a very amusing theory. I probably don't need to say that it is not true. I would be very upset if I had a penis. It's actually a very disturbing thought. And it shows how ridiculous Freud was.

I always liked Carl Jung. He was awesome and understood things better.

If you ask me, I think that what people desire more than getting off is to fulfill the ideal role for their gender. Children get an idea about gender roles at a very young age from television and movies. It becomes ingrained and subconcious. I have a desire for long hair because the princesses in Disney movies always had long hair. But my hair isn't as long as it used to be. I never made the decision to cut it, one time a hairdresser cut it more than I wanted it cut, I never got it even trimmed again but it never grew back, it just stayed the same length. The hair continued to grow though because I still got roots. True story.