as small as a world and as large as alone

karalianne:

chavisory:

karalianne:

chavisory:

crankautodidact-deactivated2015:

Seattle Children’s Hospital used my religious status on my discharge sheet from the IPU to as evidence for possible hallucinations. I’m not even kidding.

I’ve said this before, but…I have consistently found explaining the nature of religious experience to non-religious people to be orders of magnitude harder than explaining what it’s like to be autistic to non-autistic people.

That’s how hard it is.

And to convey the difference between religious experience and hallucination to someone who is locked in the thinking that they’re the same thing…good friggin’ luck.

When I was in junior high and high school, there was a woman who called my dad regularly for prayer and counseling (and who stopped by our house without warning for the same thing). She had a number of things going on mentally, and one of those things involved God speaking to her through the TV or the radio and telling her horrible things. She would call our house in the midst of trying to figure out if the things were true (and if she should really kill herself and so on), and my father would pray with her and it would get better for a while.

But at church we always talked about hearing God’s voice, and listening to him, and people in the Bible heard him talk to them. Esther never did, and that’s part of why I like her so much: she did what needed to be done without actually hearing God speak to her in a voice.

God does speak to me sometimes, and for a while he did a lot (my spiritual life was much more rich then). But he speaks to me through images and feelings, not through words. Sometimes I might get an impression of a word, or I might see type, but I don’t ever hear anything. (Which makes sense given that I am very much NOT an auditory learner anyway.)

Once I was in counseling and said something about God speaking to me, and the counselor’s expression changed. She literally perked up. That was when I realized I had to watch what I said about my faith (even though it was originally a pastoral counseling centre) - and this was when it was most of my life at the time. (That counselor got me into the women & self-esteem group and found me the contact information for the psychologist who diagnosed me with ADHD, so I don’t hold it against her; it was her training. More a problem with her school than anything else.)

The way it is to me, to say that I “hear” God’s voice is…somewhere between a metaphor, an approximation, and using the closest available word for the physical sense that the experience is closest to.  And I hear it more in the patterns of natural sound, and in the spaces inside and between natural sound.  And I have long and difficult things to write about why certain music means what it does to me because of that experience of natural sound, but….

It’s distinctly not “hearing voices” the way that people who are hallucinating describe the experience.

(Not that there’s anything necessarily pathological about hallucination.  It’s actually a really common experience that can be provoked in a whole variety of ways.  And of course actual hallucination can probably overlap with spiritual experience for some people.  They just don’t for me.)

I never realized that about Esther…that’s really cool.  It fits, though…Esther has a sense that she is enough, and that might be kind of the ultimate faith.

Esther is amazing. I haven’t read the parts that are in the apocrypha yet, but just what’s in the Old Testament is so neat. She finds out that her people are going to be killed and she makes a plan and then she prays. This is the ultimate example; she doesn’t pray for guidance, because she’s already decided what to do. I figure she prayed that God would bless her efforts. And he did.

I have a serious problem because:

1.  Spirituality is one of the most important things in my life, if not the most important.

2.  I have temporal lobe epilepsy.

That means that any time I have a spiritual experience, someone is going to call it a seizure.  Even though it looks nothing like a seizure.  Even though spiritual experiences always change me on a deep level, in a lasting way, in a way that seizures simply can’t.

But there’s this stereotype that people with TLE are only spiritual because of seizures.  Because there’s one kind of seizure that can cause a feeling that some people also feel during spiritual experiences.

My answer to them is basically this:

During a seizure, you can feel all kinds of emotions that are not related to what you’re experiencing right then.  You can feel a rush of terror that is totally unrelated to anything you’re experiencing.  Are we now going to say that every time someone is terrified, it must be a seizure?  Are we going to say that terror is always a seizure and there is nothing in the world to be scared of?

Because that’s what people do when they say that people with TLE can’t be spiritual outside of seizures, or worse, that all spiritual experiences are basically seizures.  That’s like saying that all terror is a seizure.  Yes, people with TLE can feel the same emotions you feel during a spiritual experience. That doesn’t mean that a real spiritual experience is just those same emotions being tripped off without a reason to go with it.  And it’s perfectly possible to have a spiritual experience without those emotions at all, because not all spiritual experiences are identical.

I was always taught that the way you tell a real spiritual experience from a fake one (because fake ones can happen to anybody, not just epileptics) is that it changes you for the better in a lasting way.  Real spiritual experiences are deeply and genuinely transformative.  It’s a good rule of thumb.  And a seizure isn’t going to cause that kind of lasting change, no matter how much awe or expansiveness it makes you feel in the moment.

But it’s really insulting to me when people get that knowing look in their eye when they hear I have spiritual experiences and I’m epileptic.  As if they’ve just solved the puzzle of my spirituality and they need to look no further.  The spiritual experiences I’ve had, have come after years of hard work and discipline and prayer.  I’ve never heard of a seizure happening because of years of hard work and discipline and prayer.  Plus, my seizures are pretty uniform in nature and they don’t look like that, at all.

It’s also like.. those people who say they’ve found the “God region” of the brain.  Well yeah, and they’ve found a region of the brain that recognizes faces too, are they going to say faces aren’t real, next?

Like I have no need of proving my beliefs in front of an atheist, I’d just like if people, atheist or not, gave me the respect of understanding that my beliefs are not an illness.