Mental Health and Spirituality – Part II

In the first post in this series two weeks ago, we looked at general circumstances regarding the connection between spiritual experience and mental illness.  We will now get a bit more specific.

A question was asked about how entity attachments can occur.  That depends.

First a definition: an “entity” as we use it is any sentient being.  Specifically, in this framework it is not incarnated – it’s just a cohesive ball of energy, an individual piece of consciousness with intelligence.  A soul is an entity, but an entity is not necessarily a soul.  An angel is an entity, but an entity is not necessarily an angel.  Furthermore, in my work I only deal with negative entities.  These have chosen not to work with Light (Spirit, if you will) and not to evolve spiritually  – they therefore have no source of power unless they can induce negativity in an individual soul.  That’s why they seek to attach.  They are, in effect, parasites.

Negative entities attach to a soul when it’s incarnated into a body…when it’s in the learning process and so subject to making mistakes.  Often, the life lessons connected with the learning process are so onerous as to cause the person in question to look for easy solutions.  In that case they are vulnerable to an attachment.  A negative entity is attracted to the situation’s energy, and an offer is made (usually very subtly and unconsciously) that appears to offer some relief.  Naturally such a being will not literally appear with the classic devilish  horns and  tail; it will offer an attractive solution and half-truths, while downplaying the downside to the arrangement.  Catch more flies with honey, etc…

Therefore, entity attachments are a choice we make.  True, it can be because we were tricked somehow…but we’re still responsible.

That said, entity attachments in themselves don’t seem to be all that prevalent in “causing” what we think of as serious metal illness.  They may be more of a symptom, in that one who is already in pain and  in a weakened state will be more vulnerable to seeking shortcuts.  In the other post I mentioned soul facet loss; I believe that this (and related or similar breakdowns of the psychic structure) are more often at the root of mental dysfunction in this life.  The soul, if we could see it, would look like a multifaceted gem; and each facet or group of facets serves a particular function.  As mentioned before, the partial or complete loss of these functions is extremely disruptive to the personality.  As little as 10% loss can show up as mental illness; at 30% loss, psychosis is pretty much a sure thing.  The functions affected or lost may very well be ones that aren’t critical in the dimensions of pure spirit…but the loss of them can be highly detrimental when a soul does incarnate and attempt to lead a physical life.  These can be retrieved, but as stated before it becomes much more difficult when the person in question has lost a goodly portion of his or her faculty of free will.

These are just two of the energetic roots that can underlay mental infirmity.  There are likely as many different causes as there are for, say, head trauma in the physical body.  You can get bonked on the head, or you can fall down the stairs.  Slightly different causes, slightly different effects.

And, there can be multiple causes complicating the issue.  I am aware of one case where the individual had lost 11% of his soul facets (which were in fact recovered).  However on top of that, in a recent past life he’d naively taken massive amounts of psychotropic drugs because he wanted spiritual enlightenment.  This literally “blew apart” parts of his psychic structure, like throwing a box full of index cards into the air.  Most continuity and organization was lost.  And to heap insult onto injury, there was another situation: he had a portalway open to a past life – not a very pleasant one, either.  In that lifetime long ago (which as it happens did not take place on this Earth), he was a member of a warrior-priest cult whose custom was to not allow wounds to heal until the war was won – this was to honor fallen brethren and likely to keep the memory of the pain inflicted by the enemy fresh.  The way this negative conceit now manifested in this person’s life was that he could not heal…any hurt or emotional wound was kept open.  Quite interesting, but extremely problematic.

But so far we’ve only been looking at severe mental illness… psychosis, mainly.  But what about the less severe variety of neuroses and personality disorders like depression, anxiety, and obsessiveness?

Many of those can also be symptoms of entity attachments and fragment loss – it’s just a matter of degree.  We often find such attachments specifically bringing depression and the rest; but it can also be a secondary symptom.  If the entity is bringing an energy of, say, abstinence, the inability to find or keep a satisfying sex partner or enjoy a good meal can easily lead to depression.  We can even produce some kinds of entities ourselves.  The constant, strong repetition of negative thoughts can eventually lead to the formation of an independent “thought form” – in other words, the energy of our thoughts take on a life of their own and become an actual entity; and even if the one who produced it wishes to stop the process, the thought form remains attached, cranking out the negative energy and keeping the cycle going.  A few percent loss of soul facets could have a similar effect, depending upon the area they dealt with.

As well, there are environmental influences – which is why we clear properties like homes and businesses.  Even if the negativity isn’t connected to a particular person but to a place or thing, that dark  energy can still have an influence. For instance, you may have a family get along fine when they go out to eat, but begin fighting like cats and dogs when they get home – that’s a good example of a house that should be cleared.  It may be no accident that you feel badly when you go into a particular place of business, or workplace.

But, a caution: we mustn’t be so quick to blame some evil entity for our gloom.  We can make the choice to be depressed, or fearful, or anxious.  Even if there had been a negative attachment but it’s been cleared, we might be in the habit of being depressed.  How to tell the difference?  Not easy, and the only way I know of is to have an intuitive like myself take a look.  If it’s not an outside influence, painful as it is it may be what we’re used to – and thus is a comfort zone for us.  It’s simply what we’re accustomed to being.  In this case we need to use our free will and make the choice to be happy…or at least not sad.  When I find this in a client, the way I advise them to get out of it is to not aim too high at first.  Some think that you should just wake up one day and decide to be happy.  Studies have proved that “thinking happy thoughts” only depresses people more because it’s a lie.  Much better to acknowledge where we are and to accept that we’re feeling bad, and that there’s nothing wrong with that – it’s just the way it is for us.

When acceptance is realized, we can then work on proceeding from negative to neutral.  If you think of a thermometer, for example, you can see that it’s impossible for it to go from -5 degrees to +5 degrees without passing through zero degrees.  In other words, we’re trying to first get to a point where for all practical purposes we have little emotion at all.  Popular touchy-feely, sentimental spiritual concepts would have us believe that it’s better to have negative emotions than none at all.  This is a well-meaning and superficial lie.  Having negative emotion as a comfort zone leaves no space for more productive and pleasant experience.  But if we empty that emotional space, we then have the opportunity to gradually introduce positive emotions – which will quickly have a snowball effect and eventually become the comfort zone.

Another trick that I myself used: years ago I saw the movie, “What the Bleep Do We Know?“.  I had varying degrees of interest in the concepts in it, but the one that hit home for me was the idea that bodily chemicals like hormones (or the lack of them) can be in a sense addictive.  Like alcohol or heroin, we become acclimated to being under their influence.  So, the minute that our bodies or minds receive a signal indicating that we need another fix, we unconsciously do something about it and produce the chemical (or inhibit it, depending on the mechanism).  In order to produce or inhibit it, we need to induce a condition that will do that for us.  In the case of depression or anxiety,we need to feel depressed or anxious to get our fix of the chemical.  But a rational mind needs a reason to feel depressed.  Do you see where this is going?  When I decided to take a close look at this phenomenon in myself, I had a eureka moment:  I discovered that indeed, a split second before I began to feel badly, my mind began to search for a reason to feel badly.  Needless to say, there’s always at least one or two things that we can come up with in this regard.  The dog’s sick…the car’s broken down…the mortgage is due – it doesn’t matter what it is as long as we can come up with something negative to back up the emotion we wish to evoke in order to get our jolt of sadness.  In my own case, once I truly understood this sequence, it was fairly easy to stop the cycle.  For anyone who experiences depression or anxiety on a regular basis, I recommend a close examination of how your mind tricks you into a negative mode.  It then becomes a simple matter of taking charge.

It is to be hoped that the reader who has been himself diagnosed with psychosis or another personality disorder will take these words in the spirit in which they are written.  Remember that no one (especially a professional) is going to tell you that you’re “crazy” for no good reason.  On the other hand, at the same time you need to realize that any non-ordinary things you’re experiencing need to be related to people in a way that won’t frighten them.  Find someone you trust and talk to them about it.  You may indeed be experiencing a paranormal or spiritual phenomena; but because of the fact that our perceptions of our own reality can become distorted, some kind of confirmation is a good idea if at all possible.

So far we’ve covered some of the possible “spiritual”  root causes of both serious mental illness and less debilitating but undesirable dysfunction.  The next installment will delve into the often-neglected area of the challenges presented to family and friends of those who have been diagnosed with serious “mental illness”.