[hedgew]

A hallmark feature of psychosis and schizophrenia is lack of "insight", meaning that the patient can't recognize that they are having delusions, nor the fact that they are suffering from the illness. The belief that you are a Star Trek captain feels as real as knocking on wood.

The illnesses simultaneously cause hallucinations that enforce delusions, and twist your belief systems so you pick up on the most insignificant details to support your delusions. Almost all patients end up believing that they are god, Star Trek captains, or stalked by a government agency, because this best explains their (hallucinatory) experiences. For example, if you hear voices in your head, the patient can't usually understand it as an illness, but has to explain it in some other way, so you end up with CIA/god/whatever beaming voices into your head.

[shaky-carrousel]

Seems like when you are dreaming, where the part of you that can assess if something is realistic or not is shut down.

[kayodelycaon]

For myself, my imagination and view of reality merged. My senses were fine but all of the processing and my imagination started writing to the same memory spaces.

I was aware that my senses didn’t match what I was processing. It didn’t matter.

[shaky-carrousel]

That's what happens to kids. Up to eight years old, if I recall correctly, they're unable to tell apart imagination from reality. If they think of something, say a monster hiding at home, it exists in reality. Which is a big problem while watching movies that can have scary parts as they now think they're real.

[kayodelycaon]

This is way, way different.

A six year old can perceive normally. They really don’t see people who aren’t there. They consciously know the difference between seeing a monster and thinking it exists. They can mis-attribute information by categorizing something they see as a monster. They play and they get really invested in it. Children are not psychotic. They are using their imagination to explore reality.

I see the monsters in the room. I spent four months as a bipedal wolf feeling wind in my fur and the motions of my tail. I truly believed I wasn’t human and the humans would kill me as soon as they found that out. My childhood memories were replaced by imagined ones.

I still remember being a wolf. It was real to me.

[shaky-carrousel]

Well, the part of believing they are something they aren't, I agree, it doesn't happen to them. But I have kids and they positively believe there are monsters in the house, and they positively believe toys are alive, because they saw toy story. Nothing I can say will move them from that belief.

[zackmorris]

I've had sleep walking episodes for most of my life since I was about 5, probably driven by sleep apnea. I've also had experiences that are as real as this waking life while meditating and especially back in my party days.

The real awakening for me was when it finally clicked that we are always hallucinating everything. The mind separates our conscious awareness from the 3D world, like in Plato's Allegory of the Cave. So what we see and hear isn't what's objectively real, but what our mind interprets it to be. Even though everything is real in our subjective reality, based on the contextual state that we've built up from the sum of our experiences.

Some examples of mass psychosis:

  * Many people don't know that their boss charges more than they're paid in wages.
  * Many people work administrative and loss-leader jobs and perceive their work as a cost on the organization (programmers, engineers, most people outside of sales).
  * Many people think that those around them are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than they are, and don't realize that their manager or boss is mostly winging it based on a probabilistic estimate of the best course of action.
  * Many people think that they are more knowledgeable and/or experienced than everyone around them (egocentric people working in IT/tech, doctors, lawyers, billionaires, etc).
  * Many people think that everyone else shares their spiritual worldview, everything from a man in the sky to we're all one in universal consciousness.
  * Many people think that others don't share their spiritual worldview (Christianity and Judaism may not see parents giving up their meals for their starving children in a bombed out Islamic community).

How can we have civilized society, including free and fair elections, under such mass hysteria? When people have so many delusions that politicians can pit half the population against the other merely be selecting sides from a short list of wedge issues?

My personal feeling is that western culture can't really endure spiritual awakening. And that we are seeing the breakdown of western society under late-stage capitalism with societal psychoses like much of the working class having to pay 50% of its income in rents. And corporate-greed-driven inflation rising unchecked without updated tax brackets for progressive taxation. And social safety nets being shredded to create a desperate working class dependent on service work while corporate profits are at an all-time high.

I just wish I knew how to wake up from The Matrix, whatever all this is. The points above have concrete solutions like a national tenant union, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing unrealized stock gains the same way as property taxes on homes, etc. But those obvious solutions assume a level of lucidity that will probably never exist while the powers that be lobby the government and engage in regulatory capture while handing out million dollar checks at random to voters who selected the candidate that promises to cut rich people's taxes. All to keep most people worried about the price of groceries and immigrants stealing their jobs.

But hey, I'm the delusional one.

Edit: the best answer I've come up with so far, after suffering for a lifetime under self-imposed limitations driven by many of the psychoses above, was to quiet my internal monologue entirely, acknowledging each thought but not indulging it, just being consciously aware of the process of living, without attachment or expectation on outcomes.