Coping: With “Hearing Voices” – Addicted to Average

T’other day we were talking about a couple of topics that verged on World of Woo-Woo and a couple of the comments that came in were worth consideration.

On the topic of “hearing voices” a number of additional reader reports have come in, but floating up to the top of the reading pile was this from a reader who mentions that “voices” may signify a health condition developing…

Ever watch the movie “Phenomenon”?  It touches on the subject.  I had an engineer friend who retired to the Big Island years ago who didn’t like doctors, and chintzed it with no health insurance.   (Sadly, he was a millionaire!)  My friend began hearing ‘voices’ that advised him on various things.  He thought he was having an alien contact experience at times.   Well a year or two later he was dead of colon cancer.  The cancer had spread throughout his body, including the brain.  When it breaks down the sheath between the two halves of the brain, one frequently begins to experience “the other half” as an independent voice.    So your ‘silent subconcious’ half of the brain begins to speak in ways that other half ‘hears’ as voices.   Not to imply that everyone who ‘hears voices’ has brain cancer… but just be aware that is one mechanism.

Serious point to consider, except that it opens up another line of inquiry:”  Is the “health” of humans something that’s subject to (something akin to) “possession?”  We have to wonder about that one because of the role “voices” has been known to play in depression, suicide, and so on…

On the other hand, the jury is still out on the question of mass mind-control via just the “right” mix of radio waves.  Reader Lee has been sniffing that direction…

I’ve recently come upon something – which you may have already seen, though I have not seen it mentioned on your Blog… You have however mentioned the corpus callosum in the brain, which separates the two hemispheres of the brain. The item I’ve come across is tDCs – or Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation.

Being an EE-Jockey, I’m guessing its something you’ve seen in some form or fashion. If not, take a look. There are more that a few medically-oriented vids on tDCs, and even more from the ‘dirty, uneducated’ masses who seem to be leading the charge… all from a 9-volt battery and $20 in gear from Radio shack…

/resistance is futile.

Clinical Applications of Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation – This one goes into a few items in which they are testing tDCs to treat stroke damage, aphasia disorders, and other issues. I’ve also seen it bounced around the interweb in reference to ADD/ADHD/Depressions, etc… Maybe I’m late to the game though.

Oh, no, not late at all…this is a party that is just barely getting started.

Remember, 100 years ago, there was no radio.  While (obviously) radio waves are alternating current (and for Tesla fans perhaps some longitudinal) waves, we also seem to remember that certain chemical reactions (think body, neurons, synapses, etc.) can function as diodes, thus rectifying alternating into direct current and now we loop back to the tDC discussion.

Since it’s in the blood of my family (Andrew N. Ure, gggrandfather on dad’s side) was the fellow upon whom Mary Shelly based the novel Frankenstein), I’m naturally drawn to tinkering around with other than normally occurring energies.

The reason?  Quite selfish, I assure you!  Who wouldn’t want to be able to “plug-in an addition 20 IQ points?”  (Vitamins seem to do this for me, but YMMV).

Another one is transcending the veil of the “here and now” and technologies like binaural beats hold some promise.

And there’s also the matter of intense magnetic fields, and a search of [ghost apparition mri machine] will get you into a whole casserole of weird things to think about.

And how do we “grid” all of this information with the research done with hearing “voices of the dead” using radio static?  Or is electronic voice phenomena nothing more than optimizing the “personal noise floor” so that the two halves of the brain can communicate across the myelin sheath?

Go back and read our June 23 discussion of “Right Life-Signal Found?” and you can almost (but not quite) get a kind of Grand Unified Theory  emerging that we can use to develop a more-clear way of understanding how the world really works.

I think that’s also related to this intriguing reader comment from (p0rescient) JohnL:

You mentioned sci-fi plot, the moon is where people go when they die. Google this: “Gurdjieff and food for the moon.”

And sure enough, we find (second search hit) a savory article by Richard Myers “Gurdjieff, the Moon & Organic Life” which takes our notion of the “moon as the well of souls” much further, indeed and gets into the concept of a “death within death” and…

Oh, oh.

This gets us right up next to the line in the sand with original thinking begins to creep in and about here I’d need to open up a serious graphic program and begin to draw lines – what I call “idea vectors”.  It’s sort of like mind-mapping but with harder geometrics and none of the puffy clouds.

But the way it works is simple enough:  You assign “continuum scales” to each end of a phenomena all grouped around a single core “ball” in the middle of things.  (by the time I’m done, it begins to look like a ball has somehow been placed in a pile of Pick-Up-Sticks.

But the ‘sticks – all these discrete phenomena – tell us something, and then (assuming we have our ‘sticks” laid just so, we can then begin to consider new ways to “pick them up.”  And thus, perhaps arrive at new, integrative technologies, that can help us get past where humankind is now stuck.

Because in one of the odd conversations that drift through my office, one of them yesterday dealt with how all of humankind KNOWS that how we live right now is not optimized, healthy, or greatness-producing.  Yet none of us see ready to make the Big Change to Next because we aren’t quite sure what and how that’s going to work.

So here we are with one workday down (and Elaine and I packing for a trip, leaving Panama on armed guard duty for a month, or so), asking ourselves the cornerstone question of Life:

How stuck are we such that we fear change to such a degree?

Is our not-very-good solution more attractive than the great species we could become?  Are with that “addicted to being average?”

It’s a troubling question but one you answer every day through your actions:  If you accept the mediocrity of life without change and experimentation, you’re one of the sad billions who’s addicted to average. 

The most dangerous addiction of them all.

Resolve with me this morning to do something different today.  Hopefully it will be better, but most days I just try to focus on “more right” and “more in tune.”  The changes don’t have to be big, they just have to be in the right direction and on the right path….

Prepper’s Corner

My friend Gaye, over Backdoorsurvival, has a checklist of “Seven facts you should know about Ebola.” that should be on your reading list.

Check her site tomorrow, too, because she’s doing a piece on how to use Pool Shock as a disinfectant.  We covered that years ago (around Y2k)…but the topic is long overdue to be revisited…so her article is likely to be a “keeper.”

The Aging Reporter’s Notebook

Criticism from a reader vis-à-vis our coverage of the rioting up in St. Louis:

Rioting with racial overtones – seriously – you’ve worked with the msm too long – there are no “racial overtones” – it is totally racial – it’s the way (let’s be politically correct and not use the N word) black people are.  Look at Detroit, California, Chicago or any place else where they are a majority of that area population.

“They?”

Hold on a second…because this is very important stuff.

Yes, the rioters are black in St. Louis so there’s your overtones.  But the core issue that sparked it isn’t because a group of people living in Missouri happen to be black.  No, it was because of the (outrageous, community rallying) shooting death of a teenager.

I’ve been living in “the South” for more than 10-years, know black people,  and I’ve seen how the “two Americas” works up close.  Even the justice system has “two speeds” to it which I’ll impolitely call “White speed and Black speed.”

In the “White speed” justice system you get prompt trials, good defenses.  In the “Black speed” justice system you get lawyers who charge exorbitant up-front fees and then no-show for hearings.  You get judges who don’t call in, so when people do show up, lawyer money is wasted and so forth.  Resisting arrest charges because the officer had to run to catch a suspect, anyone?

Back in the early 70’s, during one of the “long hot summers” I spent an afternoon behind the sandbagged walls of the local Black Panther party headquarters in Seattle which was at the time near 23rd and East Cherry. 

I asked about the sand bags and you know, looking out instead of looking in, it’s a whole different world, Vietnam vets as some were, or not.

I don’t excuse lawlessness, looting, and all the rest of it.  But yes, I stand by the term “racial overtones” because there’s a larger fact that the MSM carefully hides in this kind of story:

We comes right down to it, one human usually take advantage of another almost any time they can.  It’s why we have “savings” like  Driving while Oriental, Driving while Mexican, or Driving while Black,.  You accidently exposed it with  how  “THEY” is built into majority-think.

In no time, it becomes “US versus THEM” and “We versus They.”

American Exceptionalism sounds great when preached from the White House, or taught in the schools.

But the fact is we’re not nearly so “exceptional” as we would like to believe.

Experience demonstrates that We can be downright shitty a lot of the time and then deny it to both they and the world.  When it comes to bullshit jingoisms, we are indeed exceptional.

And you know why the US/EU is demonizing Vlad Putin? The same crap.  Because now that they’re not rabid commies, the Russians are daring to call us out on our pretentious claim of exceptionalism and pointing out that America’s not really all we’ve made her out to be.

And the problem is? 

Putin and Russian media may have a point.

We cling to overtones of abuse and exploitation for any number of reasons: Money, power, peer-pressure. But cling, we do. 

The conundrum is that the looting and rioting in St. Louis just feeds the vicious cycle on both sides. Just like it feeds the cycle in Gaza…just like the cycle is fed in Iraq, …St. Louis is just a little closer to home.

So in the end, we’re all willing to “Kill for Peace.”  And that is about as close to crazy as we need to get this morning.

Except to wonder if that’s what Robin Williams saw?

More Thursday as we begin our adventures with another “Half Across America…”  Write when you break-even.

George  george@ure.net