JAltaNeale

Hello  I am 53 years old and first heard voices when I was vseenteen, and had visions and foreign thoughts, delusions & hallucinations  as the medical community would say. I can say with absolute certainty that these effects were external, which confused me even more. Those were very difficult times due to the stresses in dealing with a single mom and a rebellious son. I was hospitalized 3 separate times and medicated with the various potions of the time. The strange events tapered off and eventually stopped with the help of the anti-psychotic drugs, vitamin therapy and the strong desire to not hear them anymore. I had been an accomplished guitarist before my perception began its roller-coaster ride, but after three years of not playing along with everything else, I had forgotten how to play! So I taught myself to play once more and managed to get minimum wage jobs and eventually got a job as letter carrier. I worked for 26 years there and retired two years ago because my knees were causing unbearable pain. But all of this is not why I'm writing here. Seven years into my postal job and 10 years after the last hallucinations, they returned. This time though there was something very different about them. The voice began tell me some very accurate answers to questions I had and the visions were concise pictures of people I knew. In example the first one wasof a girl I was interested in. The vision in one precise moment showed her to me as having a green tint. The immediate feeling I got was that she was very insecure, i.e jealous. These continued nightly and with great intensity for the next 10 years. As I was trying to determine the meaning of my newfound visions, I happened to notice some books that were in the room I was renting. They were the 2nd and 3rd book by Carlos Castaneda, A Separate Reality & Journey to Ixtlan. I remember reading these titles when I was 15 but eventually dismissed them as implausible. What did strike me from these books and had retained as a practice were three concepts that seemed of practical use. 1. losing self-importance, another term for reducing the ego and not being offended by the ignorance and self-absorbed behavior of our fellow humans. 2. Impeccability, the notion that one should attempt to behave at the utmost that one can. For me, during the time of my schizophrenic episodes  I had the realization at one point of what a burden and heartbreak I was causing friends and family. And the most important, 3. shutting off the internal dialogue. There is meditation and there is cognitive thought modification, both having their own value but none have the power that total silence has. Accomplish this and you'll see what I mean. Learning impeccability, losing self-importance and silencing the internal dialogue and the struggle to attain these elusive states is a process that never ends. When Castaneda's ninth book was released, THE ART OF DREAMING, the sycronicity between his works and what schizophrenics  experience has been cemented with me forever. Read these books. The difference of course between the psycho  and the  seer  is a very large gap which can only be bridged with discipline, knowledge and time. For those of you who hear voices  and  see  things, take that leap, find out what you are and find out where it leads to. Nothing is ever easy.