The Mysteria, 12: Hearing Voices

On spirits and schizophrenia

This essay is part of my recurring series The Mysteria, which is also the name of a book I am writing. Normally, these essays are for paid subscribers only, but I’ve decided to make this one free for everyone. If you’d like to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber, or you can also buy me a coffee.

“Oh, they’re gonna be a handful, those two. One’s eyes brown, one’s eyes blue.”

Over a decade ago, I worked at a residential shelter as a counselor for mentally-ill and chronically homeless people. My job was dealing with the everyday issues of the many residents, making sure they were taking care of themselves, not having any dangerous crises, and not burning the place down.

One of my co-workers, Laura¹, was a university-certified social worker who dealt with some of the deeper issues the residents encountered. On what would have otherwise been a completely normal day, she told me — in a perplexed, shaken whisper — what one of the residents had just said to her.

That resident? Well, let’s call her Susan, since it wouldn’t be right or even legal for me to use her name. Susan had moved into the residential shelter soon after it was opened, having lived for decades on the streets of Seattle. You wouldn’t guess her history or her address just by looking at her, though: she dressed and held herself with a disarming elegance. She seemed much more the sort of dignified widow you might encounter in a Paris café or browsing in boutiques, rather than a schizophrenic who’d lived out of a grocery store shopping cart.

We were never supposed to have favorites as social workers, but Susan had utterly captured our imaginations — and our hearts. She was impossible not to adore, and was relentlessly witty, funny, and fascinating. That is, when she was in some of her better moods.

Susan’s history was a relentless mystery; she was what we called “an inaccurate historian of her own life.” What she would recount to us rarely made any sense, and also never fit into any possible linear time frame. Then again, nothing was linear with Susan. Instead, as with many other residents bearing similar diagnoses, everything was curved, cyclical. Draw out a map of her life and you’d get something that looked like a strangely-drawn mandala, every line returning back to the center of her fragmented self before spiraling out again.

What we could definitely see was that she was brilliant. She played piano with such skill that we were certain she must have had classical training in her youth, but she swore to us repeatedly she’d never had a lesson. She could also sing with a hauntingly beautiful and operatic voice, but again insisted to us she’d never been taught.

Weirdest of all was that she knew things she could not possibly have known.

Laura, my coworker, was shaken after the old woman’s strange words. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get Susan to return to the subject. It was easy to understand why Laura was ill-at-east. Laura had been trying for quite some time to become pregnant, and like many older would-be-mothers, she worried that time had run out. But finally, the hoped-for moment had happened.

The thing was, she’d not told Susan, or anyone else in the office for that matter. Yet somehow, the woman knew. And wilder still, she also knew they’d be fraternal daughters, with different hair and different eyes.

Susan was only one of the many strange prophets I encountered during my six years as a social worker. And I need to tell you something else about Susan, lest I be accused of romanticizing her life and being dismissive of the very real trauma of schizophrenia.

Susan was really fucking crazy. Even in her best times, her behavior was incredibly erratic and unpredictable. She’d seem lucid for a little while, her speech measured, careful, and much more eloquent than those to whom she was talking. She’d say something quite profound, displaying her deep intelligence, and then suddenly start screaming, throwing things at other residents, and becoming quite frightening.

The others like her were just as erratic, often violent, and rarely remembered the prophetic things they’d said. I remember especially a man at a different site who always accurately predicted the impending death of another resident. He’d never remember that he’d said anything after the event occurred, and when we’d ask him about it, we’d start to feel like the crazy ones. When he’d predict a death, he’d tell us it was because a strange light in a houseplant “from the CIA” had passed along the information to him.

At one of the residential shelters where I worked, which was set up specifically for those diagnosed with the most severe mental illnesses, I encountered so many of these strange prophetic experiences that I worried for my own sanity. In fact, I’m not sure I wasn’t going a little crazy myself while working there; as soon as I had the opportunity to transfer to another location, I took it.

Strange events like these weren’t limited to my workplace, though. I remember particularly an odd moment on a bus empty except for the driver, myself, and a woman sitting four seats in front of me. I’d never seen her before, nor again, and we’d had no interactions the ride. She had quite a wild look to her, and her manner of dress suggested she was maybe not exactly in her right mind.

I’d given little more attention to her, since I was quite lost in my own thoughts. I’d just written a rather long essay critical of certain commercial trends I’d seen in American Paganism. I was thinking about what the reaction would be once I published it, and was trying to decide whether I should soften some of the harsher parts of the essay.

While I was thinking on this, the woman on the bus suddenly spoke. “You think Paganism is a joke? You’ll see.”

I looked up. The woman hadn’t turned back to say those words. She’d just said them aloud, and then fell silent.

“What did you say?” I asked.

She didn’t answer me directly, but instead starting talking about something completely different. Again, she didn’t turn back towards me, and spoke to the empty seats in front of her as if they were occupied with an invisible audience. And though I’d wanted to know more, I also didn’t want to get involved with whatever strange dramas were playing out in her head.

Even if I were ordered at gunpoint to present a definitive explanation as to why such things happen, I’m not sure I could. Of course, I have my theories and suspicions, and I’ve read well-reasoned arguments about similar situations from others, but I’m still never fully convinced. Worse, still, I’m never able fully to trust my own recall of the events.

One of the persistent problems is that I’ve only ever encountered these events when I wasn’t looking for them, and I’ve always been in a distracted state. This has meant that I’m not always certain I’ve heard the person correctly, and I’ve never been able to get the person to repeat themselves. One of the clients in the residential shelters would just laugh at me mischievously when I’d ask what he meant, while another would respond with such offense that she’d soon start screaming.

Another recurring problem is that even when there are other witnesses, they don’t trust their memory of the situation any more than I do. As with my co-worker Laura, as well the co-workers who encountered the client who predicted others’ deaths, waving off the strange experiences seemed almost an urgent matter. They needed to protect their psyches, I think, the same way we shut out horrifying accidents, physical abuse, and all the other traumatic things everyday life sends our way.

In fact, the mechanisms of trauma processing fit seem to apply quite well to these events, too. I think particularly of a line from the first poem of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton.” Eliot describes an experience of seeing visions in a garden pool while hearing the voices of hiding children. Suddenly, the vision ends when a cloud passes, and a bird sings:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

Just as we need to protect our minds from horrific events, we often need also to protect our psyches from encounters with unexplained phenomena. I think we need this because we cannot bear too much mystery while still functioning in societies. That’s why mystics usually lock themselves up in monasteries or cloisters, or become hermits living far away from others.

This leads to a rather difficult matter, though. At least in our Secular-Christian societies, you’re much more likely to encounter these events among people suffering from mental illness. Schizophrenics, especially, have what many have described as “porous” or “highly-permeable” boundaries between themselves and others. Often, it can be hard for them to discern the difference between themselves and their surroundings, a problem which Deleuze and Guattari tried (quite irresponsibly) to turn into a liberating political program.²

Also, schizophrenia as a diagnostic category is quite messy and contested. Like autism³, there are vast differences in the symptoms and behaviors of those you’re likely to find in homeless shelters or in psychiatric words, versus other highly-functional people bearing the same diagnosis. I’ve known quite a few of this latter group, while also having a close family member — my mother — who is part of that former group.⁴ So, it’s not really possible to make broad statements about schizophrenia’s relationship to these strange events in a way that accurately describes all schizophrenics.

Still, the notion of porousness or permeability is really quite useful, because it isn’t something limited to schizophrenia. Many drugs, especially the long list of entheogenic substances used in spiritual rituals throughout the world, temporarily dissolve the barriers between our egos and the world around us. While it’s been several decades since I last did any kind of psychedelic, my experiences with LSD and psilocybin during my early 20’s certainly altered my sense of who I am.⁵

But what is actually going on in such moments of porousness? That’s where things get much more difficult to explain through recourse to science, and where my own understanding tends to be in conflict with the majority of theorists of alternate consciousness.

Those theorists, what I broadly call the “humanists,” tend to have no problems whatsoever accepting that these events happen. For them (and again I’m describing them broadly), what is happening in these moments of porousness is that the person is tapping into an unconscious state and doing something we have forgotten that humans can do. For instance, a schizophrenic woman accurately predicting someone else’s pregnancy and even the eye color of the children is able to do so because it’s a human capacity to do this. We’ve just collectively decided we cannot do this, because such skills don’t fit well into our societal priorities. The most optimistic of them believe that, with enough social change and perhaps more widespread use of entheogens, we’ll start to accept and even cultivate these skills again.

I’ve always liked this position, and for a long time held it myself. Despite still being less respectable than dismissing such events outright, it offers a completely naturalistic explanation for what is happening.

The problem, though, is that there’s always been a much more robust explanation, the one used by what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins named “most of humanity.” By that phrase he meant the vast majority of human societies throughout history who interacted — and still interact — with spirits as part of their daily life.

For “most of humanity,” spirits have always provided the most accurate and workable explanation for what happens in such situations. Spirits tell people things, because spirits know things and are quite happy to communicate what they know — whether we want to hear it or not. Also, spirits can “possess” people, because people are porous. Spirits get into us, pass through us, use (and are also used by) us, and generally crowd all our human interactions with their presence.

In actually-existing animist societies, what the many people I mentioned did wouldn’t have seemed strange at all. Nor would there have been a need to find a non-spiritual explanation for what had happened. Instead, when a person accurately predicts an event for which they could not possibly have had direct knowledge, it’s assumed they learned about it in the same way humans learn about more mundane things they didn’t witness: someone tells them.

That’s not to say such societies wouldn’t question these events. Along with the belief in spirits comes an ecology of spirits and, most importantly, the understanding that some spirits are really not helpful or even safe. In fact, some spirits are quite evil and will wreak havoc if allowed to run amok. Some spirits tell lies, or tell things that shouldn’t be known, or worst of all speak truths that can cause great harm to those who hear them.

This is where my position on these matters becomes rather unpleasant, because yes — I believe in evil. Some spirits are quite helpful to humans, many are neutral, and some are really quite awful. This is also what “most of humanity” has believed, though those societies didn’t always use the same metrics for deciding what was evil and what was just merely unhelpful.

The Judeo-Christian cosmology of the West heavily skews our attempts to understand spirits as anything other than an authoritarian trick to cultivate superstition and fear. The story we’re told is that the belief in demons was a matter that humans needed finally to throw off so as to see things as they clearly are, but there are several problems with this narrative. First of all, demons were never the only category of spirits within Christianity, and they anyway borrowed the term from the Greeks.⁶ Besides angels, Christians generally held that there were a whole host of other “intermediary” spirits, often associated with aspects of nature, the elements, and natural processes, and this belief was a dominant up until the Reformation.

And importantly, the Reformation and the subsequent “Enlightenment” and “Age of Reason” never fully eradicated these beliefs, either. The easiest place to see how this is the case is in the persistence of fairy lore in Ireland well into the early 20th century, as well as the many persistent ghost stories you still hear in rural villages throughout Europe.⁷ Such persistence isn’t only a quirk of Catholic or Orthodox belief, however: the “charismatic” sects of Protestant Christianity (Pentecostals, etc), have a very robust cosmology of spirits who affect humans.

That last group deserves more attention, since the human behaviors they associate with spirits is quite complex. One hears of a “spirit of rage” coming over a person, causing them to become angry and temporarily lose control of themselves. Also, one can find descriptions of spirits of jealousy, of lust, of gossip, and also of despair. In some of the less doctrinaire groups, there are also more helpful spirits, such as that of prophecy or of generosity.

Charismatic Christian beliefs aren’t very far off from some of the things that animist societies have held about spirits, especially regarding strong emotional states like obsession, rage, and jealousy. More importantly, even those outside those groups who don’t believe in spirits or demons still describe these moments as if there were an external agent. “I don’t know what came over me,” we might say after an uncontrolled moment, or even “I haven’t been myself lately.” Or when someone is acting strange, angry, or depressed, we often ask: “what’s gotten into you?” And though the clinical language around schizophrenia and other disorders is usually that a person is responding to internal stimuli, it’s still common also to speak of a person “hearing voices.”

In other words, many of us still believe in spirits, even if we’d never actually state it this way. Press us on the question and we’d likely deny it, but interrogate the language we use and the conceptual frameworks we employ, and eventually you’ll find we nevertheless act as if there are unseen, external agents acting upon human behavior.

The problem with this unacknowledged belief in spirits is that it isn’t situated in a cosmology which helps us understand how they interact with us. Again, that “most of humanity” which believes spirits to exist also believes that some spirits are quite helpful and others can be quite rude, malicious, and very dangerous. Without such an understanding, it’s easy to then misunderstand the mechanism around such things like schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

To be completely clear, I absolutely don’t think that spirits actually cause schizophrenia or similar conditions. Instead, I think it’s the other way around: schizophrenia (or what we call by that name, anyway) makes a person more susceptible to spirits, just like other conditions might.

Anything which lowers the boundaries between the self and the world can lead a person to become permeable, porous, and vulnerable to whatever spirits are around. This is just as true for addicts (of drugs or experiences) and for emotionally abused people as it is for schizophrenics. Mental breakdowns, exhaustion, traumatic experiences, and even just not taking good care of yourself can lead to this same state.

And again, this is why “most of humanity” has used entheogens, sacred rituals, lucid dreaming, meditation, questing, and many other practices. Becoming porous is the goal of the mystic and the shaman alike, but they are only able to survive such experiences because they also learn how to close themselves off again.

That’s the thing that strikes me most about Susan, or my own mother, or any of the other schizophrenics I’ve known. None of them could close themselves off, and this was a terrifying matter for them. It always seemed for them that the voices were never really the problem. Instead, it was that neither they — nor I — could make those voices shut up when they needed some peace and quiet.

1. I’ve changed the names and some of the details here to give anonymity to the people involved. The general thrust of the story is completely true.

2. I’m increasingly convinced that most of the problems with the modern “left” can be traced to their work.

3. The comparison to autism is also relevant in that some have suggested schizophrenia should be categorized as just another form of neuro-divergence, rather than a disease or illness.

4. It was from my mother that I first experienced these strange prophetic moments. She had her schizophrenic “break” quite late for an adult, around the time I was thirteen.

5. The porousness or permeability induced by entheogens can also be induced without such substances. Meditation, controlled breathing, fasting, and even really intense exercise can lead to these moments, though they require a lot more discipline to achieve.

6. The Greeks, from whom the Christians got the word “demon,” had two categories: the helpful eudaemon and the malicious kakodaemon.

7. I just had the extreme delight of hearing one such local story two evenings ago.