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Its been ten years or so since the more active parts of this took place, but to try to answer your question. For a period lasting one to two years, with residual activity several years after that, i had pretty much full on auditory alterations every day. As in, i would think a thought (ego-based, considered my own) and an interloper voice would respond usually with a counterpoint of some sorts. Now it would be easy to say that "oh my thats just your unconscious manifesting itself", but that breaks open whole new areas of inquiry as to just how you can have a part of your own brain break away into what is considered a non-ego aspect capable of perfect responses and behaviour/expression mimicry of all the people you know. And in a way that is a rehash of an inquiry into the nature of dreams, as that is what happens there as well (barring some novel non-local verifiable explanation into the things one encounters there, but lets not go there just for the time being...), but interacting with it in a waking state fundamentally breaks an aspect of the individuals common human experience up to that point which makes it very difficult to deal with. Especially if its an antagonistic environment, which it was for me a lot of the time. (Granted, there were also a lot of really magical and mentally powerful moments, but it usually required a lot of strenous ego-counter-thought to get there.) It can in no way compare to "thinking internally", it is at most times a very distinct non-self-ego ego expressing itself (for me it was in the voices of everybody i've ever known, but thats probably a YMMV thing). The thing is, its kind of hard to explain if you've lived in your own brain your whole life, because once you experience it ownership and privacy relating to your internal monologue disappears, so it alters something very basic about the pre-voice mentality most people have. What the clinical distinction eventually ends up being is hard to say. Eventually we might have the tools needed to monitor brain and matter activity whilst also having the knowledge required to translate brain/matter activity into our experience as beings and vice versa, but we're not really there yet. Wish i could write it up better, but thats at least a first person attempt. |