THE
PRESENCE OF SPIRITS IN MADNESS
PROLOGUE
ROY VINCENT WRITES:
I
have a number of friends who are Buddhist.
The main centre of their activity is in a former priory not far from
where I live. At one time, I was a
frequent visitor to the centre and became acquainted with several others of the
permanent residents. It was one of the
latter who quite unexpectedly rang one day and asked if I would help out at the
forthcoming summer fête – possibly in the café.
Surprised at having been asked, I nevertheless agreed, and turned up on
the appointed day.
There was a wide range of stalls, all
piled high and waiting for the influx of visitors. I am always drawn to books and made a beeline
for the bookstall. It was loaded – the
reason being that the resident Lama had emptied the library, having decreed
that only his own books would be studied in future. Among this bonanza, a small book caught my
eye – the title was intriguing, and it was cheap! Called The Presence of Other Worlds,
it joined the homemade bread and other goodies in my car while I immersed my
hands in the washing-up in the café.
It wasn’t until I was home and in bed
that night that I took a good look at the book, and was immediately grabbed by
the title of one of the chapters - the
one just below. I read and read, and it
was only the fact that it was now past midnight that I prevented myself from
ringing a number of friends to tell them – what? To tell them that what I was reading mirrored
my own experiences of voice hearing and spiritual intrusion so accurately that
I just wanted to shout out loud!
The author writes as a clinical
psychologist, and thus with the viewpoint of a mental health professional, and
so naturally he refers to his voice-hearers as ‘patients’, and uses such terms
as ‘psychotic’, ‘schizophrenic’, ‘delusions’, ‘hallucinations’, and it was in
this respect that I had my very minor intellectual dispute with him. As you will read, he became completely
convinced that the origin of the voices and other manifestations experienced by
the individuals was intrusion by spiritual entities. If this is so – and I agree completely with
him – surely then the ‘entities’ are real, and, logically, not delusions or
hallucinations, and the individuals are not psychotic, but ‘disturbed’.
I know that this might appear to be
semantic nit picking, but it reveals our different emphasis. Wilson Van Dusen had the aim of demonstrating
that the experiences of the individuals paralleled those of his ‘hero’ Emmanuel
Swedenborg, and he did not, in his book, apply his findings to their subsequent
treatment. My whole purpose in writing
my own book and these other articles is to plead for the knowledge of spiritual
intrusion to be accepted, and with the acceptance to create an entirely different
strategy of support for voice hearers.
I have posted this introduction here in order to draw your attention to the full text of what I regard as a very important contribution to an understanding of the world of the Voice Hearers.
The complete text is posted on a separate Blog, and I urge you to read it.
You will find it on -
www.roycvincent4.blogspot.com
Book:
"Listening to the silences
in a world of hearing voices"
www.royvincent.org
Book:
"Listening to the silences
in a world of hearing voices"
www.royvincent.org
