Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Temple >

The voices in my head

10:51 / 18.05.04

i have a curious problem and wondered if any of you knowledgable folks had any ideas about whats going on, cos i sure don't.

basically, whenever i get into a "mystic" state through the use of either potent cannabis or salvia divinorum, when my sensory perception shifts and everything gets kind of "brighter" and weird, these noises keep starting up in my mind.

they are the same noises, and i think the same sequence, everytime, and are composed of seemingly random pieces of people talking, sometimes my parents, sometimes unrecognisable. for example somebody says "boring!" excitedly, then my dad says my name in an cross voice, then somebody says "and they're off!", stuff like that. the voices overlap each other and go round and round, and are juxtaposed with comedy sound effects like "bop bop bing!" and a big splash sound and other weird things.

these noises are VERY hard to ignore and get on with the business of meditation and ritual (i've been into magick for a couple of years but have only recently started making much discernable progress, so am starting from scratch again with basic grounding/connecting meditations, and now the LBRP as well) and stop me from getting too involved in the state and losing my conscious mind, though I try my best.

this does not occur when i try and achieve gnosis without psychoactive plants, though i have yet to achieve such deep gnosis through mind-work alone, so i'm unsure if its the plants doing this (interestingly salvia and cannabis produce exactly the same effect...) or my head, or a combination of both.

i just wondered if anyone had any ideas what this disturbance is, and how to get rid of it? or perhaps embrace it?! my guess is its some kind of blockage put in by my conscious mind to stop it from being bypassed, but i AM currently on anti-depressants and perhaps those alien chemicals in my brain are having more of an effect than intended... or perhaps the reason for my depressions lurks behind the voices... or perhaps its just latent schizophrenia brought on by smoking too much dope!

any thoughts would be welcome, thanks.

12:51 / 18.05.04

Drugs frequently induce effects that meditation does not, although once meditation gets advanced enough, the same things can start to happen. Question is, why do you see these as a problem? They're just the effects and by-products of the mind, and as such, ,they aren't a problem unless they undeniably start to produce problems in your life, such as command hallucinations with a concurrent powerful urge to follow them, (which is a SERIOUS problem). You'll find that they actually lessen easier if you don't fight them, (although they may get more intense for a time). Meditation and grounding exercises tend to still extraneous thought somewhat over time, so they will probably get less on their own. Relax and enjoy.

The Prince of All Lies

12:57 / 18.05.04

I wouldn't do any magick while on antideppresants, and I wouldn't do Salvia either..If you are deppresed you shouldn't attempt meditation, since it probably won't work or you might have an unpleasant experience..

13:45 / 18.05.04

Sounds like a hypnagogic state to me. I get voices as well (without drugs) but they haven't ever repeated themselves.

I wouldn't worry about it being a step on the road to madness; it's actually quite common and can be fun to play with (especially if your voices get new scripts!).

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

14:07 / 18.05.04

If I were you, I'd be very wary of smoking salvia if the anti-depressents you are taking are MAOI's (which is quite likely)...the effects of combining them are not well documented, and it's probably wise to just not do it at all...

17:23 / 18.05.04

I suppose if you followed scientology you may call it Engrams, or you may call it the Trickster Mind. I'd plump fer the latter.... A good banishing or just sensible breathing may do the trick - I dunno. Your Subconcious is caught in a Tape Loop and it may exist for dark anxiety dreamings material. Try and see if you can silence these voices either by attempting no-mind mediatation or imagining these voices as a stereo hook up to your biocomputer so you can experiment with turning them down in volume and then to Mute. Mebbe you could attempt some sort of Fast Phobia Cure (NLP stylee) that NLPers use?! You have to realise that the mind can play up alot esp. in interfacing with the recesses of your mind. What sort of medication are you prescribed then? Mebbe you could write it all down and then re-enact in some sort of gestalt pychodrama, or mebbe you could project that portion of your mind onto the chair opposite you, and then probe it and see what it could do for you positively. Tricky one... Banish often, never take the trickster gods face value and I'd imagine Salvia Divinorum would have alot of Trickster Spirits in it.

Unconditional Love

18:15 / 18.05.04

hi,

id try to locate the sounds related to memories and experience, could be that they are pointing at experiences that need to be delt with or memories that are unresolved,
may well be worth using the sounds themselves as a focus for meditation to see what associations come to mind, can give you a good understanding of what you are holding onto and perhaps could be let go of if you wished.

see if the sounds correspond to areas of the body, tensions in muscles, facial expressions, postures, what feelings they evoke, try to place them in the narrative of self, see what images they contain.

as other people have mentioned you can change there scripts and with time you become used to them and its best not to fight them,hope this helps.

Charlie's Horse

21:26 / 18.05.04

Hm. I had a friend who got audio hallucinations off his SSRIs while stone sober - in fact, that effect came under 'possible side effects' for those kind of antidepressants, according to his research. His were infrequent, short, fairly mundane, but still disturbing. Could be that the drug-induced gnostic states exacerbate this symptom, if you're on SSRIs.

Otherwise - ? Too bad you can't ask a doctor. Maybe you should direct yourself to Erowid's Library o' Drugs and see if they have any data about drug interaction.

The Knights Templar Boogie Machine

22:42 / 18.05.04

Scientology although being mainly a load of pseudo bollocks for about fifty threads worth of points, would say as phage said that they would be 'engrams', certain phrases spoken at certain times of stress that take root in our deepest mind and operate on a subconcious level and play a role in the reinforcing of our conditioning. For example, sometimes if i have music on really loud in a room when i'm by myself, i sometimes hear a voice shouting 'turn it down', which is probably an 'engram' derived from childhood (and crap rock music). The ‘round and round’ feeling could be applied to the tape loop idea of consciousness and habitual behaviour as discussed by Wilson and other such luminaries.

Crowley talks about that when one attains the state of dharana ( contracting consciousness to a single point , usually in the yogic case by meditating upon an object real or imagined, such experiences and desire for union spontaneously arise during psychedelic trips even if the drug user has no knowledge of occult exercises and techniques, its as if the mind when kicked has a latent natural ability to seek out such experiences ) one of the phenomenon encountered on the way to achieving it is that of radio transmission like atmospherics which are also in my experience analogous to the hypnogogic/pompic state occurs either before sleep or just before waking. I think after a while one can get used and thus detatch from the voices, rallying against them will just result in more agitation (and madness if you're persistent enough!

). Calm contemplation of them is the best way. Let them filter through you like aethyric transmissons...

14:48 / 19.05.04

thank-you very much everyone for your very interesting contributions! i have a lot to think about and investigate now, so i'll see how it goes...

p.s.
yeah i am on SSRIs and not MAOIs, but am going to attempt to come off them soon... a steady diet of meditation coupled with intensive talking-therapy has reawakened my joy for life, lost since childhood. which is nice.