THE PRESENCE OF SPIRITS IN MADNESS

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