On voices

There are people amongst us who hear voices in their head. This phenomenon is a known symptom of some mental illnesses, but the mystics of all times have been able to use these voices to travel in the unknown, unseen world - and come back.

How to develop communication in the unknown, with the unknown, staying sane? How to work with these voices so that they do not alter our everyday life?

The Buddhist teachings emphasize that in meditation, one should note everything passing through our consciousness in order to build consequential patterns between phenomena. To my experience, all voices do have a source; the most irritating ones (that keep looping over and over again) are based in our feelings, altered by our surroundings, changing our state of mind to an unexpected one. When we are able to reach understanding in this pattern, the voice disappears.

A wise man once said, when asked about hearing voices, "There is no inside and outside of the brain. There is only the entirety of cognition." I couldn't agree more; voices are one of our links to other dimensions, and when we are able to work with them, they can enrich our capability to understand this world.

Voices should never be trusted, and a person hearing voices should be warily trusted when they tell what the voices talk about; especially when something bad happens, we can not know whether the voice really told the person to do the bad thing, or did the person do it to get rid of the voice, having somehow misunderstood the message, or from old experience (when you do bad enough, your feelings certainly change to another state which might free you of the voice - for some time).

When I hear a voice, I take it as a message from another, surreal, dimension, that might not have a physical correspondent, a true, objective sender, in our own reality. Actually, I never hear a voice telling me to do something; I only hear cheering, curses, and other kinds of short sentences. Anyway, you hear what you hear, I ask you to be extremely cautious when establishing communication with any kinds of voices; this path is never set beforehand but the end of the path is easily a long-lasting mental illness, I believe, very often schizophrenia.

So do exercise extreme caution with this communication channel, and never let your physical reality be altered so that it would affect your everyday life. The other worlds are interesting but they are not worth sacrificing sanity.