Dahlia Fossen
New
G'day Dahlia
Welcome. I have just now scrolled up the page to discover your entry. I am intrigued by your chronic condition. I came down with GBS. It didn't deliver paranormal experiences - had enough of them before. But it did deliver profoundly transformative experiences.
Haven't seen you on the forum yet.
Hello Michael,
thank you for welcoming me.
I did not yet participate actively in many discussion threads here. But they are having their effects. Currently I am reading "American Cosmic" by Diane Walsh Pasulka which I acquired because of the thread here on Skeptiko.
I am what is called "chemically sensitive", the symptoms of which slowly developed, as I think, by long term exposure to pesticides and heavy metals and because of a partly dysfunctional biotransformation system and possibly some other factors. But I wised up on that, and as long as I am not sprayed (I have been threatened with that), I look like everybody else. :)
You wrote that you were laughed at because of your idea about how you contracted GBS? Being laughed at after coming down with a non-trivial condition seems to have become standard since the advent of "evidence-based medicine". (Or maybe since the advent of that which brought "evidence-based medicine" upon us, the faulty core of which to me is the deliberate discouragement of looking for causes / paths for certain diseases.) What you and The Ethical Skeptic wrote: "Bugger patient accounts" or that testimony is discounted - and for no good reason - I unfortunately know, too.
I do not know for sure that my opening up to certain phenomena was caused by my condition, but I remember that a few years into it, I read an account about a woman who wanted to keep her MS because only with MS she had command of her paranormal abilities. Sorry I can't remember where I read this, maybe Shafica Karagulla or Eileen Garrett or another famous female psychic.
That made me think about whether inflammation or other conditions are enhancing paranormal experiencing. Shafica Karagulla, as I understood, knew a lot about the interplay of substances, certain kinds of matter, with mental states, and I would have loved to talk to her about that.
Before I contracted my condition, I would describe myself as "dull and dumb" regarding knowledge about the body and disease in general. I had been taught that basically, when you are sick, you visit the doctor and soon after you'll be healthy again, just fear cancer, then it will get painful and you'll probably have to die.
When I fell chronically ill, I learned that a disease has to be "acknowledged", that it is possible to have a disease that is "not acknowledged" except in small expert circles (who probably had become experts because they or some relative had come down with it). I was totally flabbergasted that anybody - among them family - would attempt to deny what I said and question my ideas about it. The fact that there were clusters of people experiencing similar things ("Gulf War Syndrome" or "9/11 Syndrome") was somewhat comforting.
The experiences that followed put me in a state in which I found life boring to pointlessness. What kept me interested was a phrase that was, almost in passing, uttered in a conversation with a physiotherapist I knew who mentioned the possibility of mental communication. I had never heard of that before, seemed very difficult to me, even more difficult than ventriloquy. When I researched it, I came across the works of Ingo Swann, later Robert A. Monroe and several others. Then the realizations started - I began remembering paranormal things that happened in my past and also began actively looking for signs of the paranormal, which I found. Never since, I have been in doubt that "we" are so much more than or so different from what many of us are made to believe.
I found your personal introduction above in this thread.
There you wrote that the residue of your GBS has "added a profound spiritual, psychological and philosophical dimension" to your life. If that question can be answered and if you like to answer it - what was it like?
Dahlia