MORE ON "HEARING VOICES" TO REFUTE THE LIES OF PSYCHIATRY REGARDING "MENTAL ILLNESS"
by Justice Lover

If you tell a shrink that you hear voices he would immediately label you "mentally ill" (most likely "schizophrenic") ,and follow with the next label "psychotic" which would "require medication", meaning one or more of the Antipsychotics poisons, and if you refuse then a CTO would be issued to have you locked up and forced to take the "medication". If you continue to refuse then "ECT" (electric shocks) would be administered to you, and if you still resist then "psycho-surgery" would be performed on your skull to open it and to butcher your brain. This is in a nutshell the gist of the entire psychiatric dogma and practice put together.

It is obvious then that psychiatry is not only a fraud, but much worse - a barbaric and arbitrary torture of innocent people which is legalised and protected by state laws. Hence the importance of telling the full truth so as to warn the public. The following information is serving this need.


Hearing voices is experienced by a great many people, without becoming ill
(exerpts from the June 1st, 2008 issue of the newsletter by Peter Myers, peter.myers@mailstar.net )

Hearing Voices Movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement

Hearing Voices Movement is a philosophical trend in how people who hear voices are viewed. It was begun by Marius Romme, a professor of Social psychiatry at the University of Limburg in Maastricht, the Netherlands and Sandra Escher, a science journalist, who began this work after being challenged by a voice hearer as to why they could not accept the reality of her voice hearing experience. They advocate an approach of using techniques employed by those who have successfully coped with their voices. This can include acceptance and negotiation with the voices.

The movement

The Hearing Voices movement can be said to have been established in 1987, by Professor Marius Romme, a social psychiatrist and Sandra Escher, a science journalist, both from the Netherlands, with the formation of an organisation for voice hearers and others interested in this phenomenon, entitled Stichting Weerklank (Foundation Resonance). In 1988 an organisation was also established in England, with the active support of Marius Romme (James, 2001) entitled The Hearing Voices Network. In the following years, further networks have been established in other European countries including Italy, Finland (1995), Wales, Scotland, Switzerland, Sweden, Austria, Germany (1998), Norway & Denmark; and also in other parts of the world including Japan (1996), Israel, New Zealand, Australia and most recently the USA (2006).

In 1997 a meeting of voice hearers and mental health workers was held in Maastricht, Netherlands to discuss developing the further promotion and research into the issue of voice hearing. The meeting decided to create a formal organisational structure to provide administrative and co-ordinating support to the wide variety of initiatives in the different involved countries. The new network was called INTERVOICE (The International Network for Training, Education and Research into Hearing voices).

INTERVOICE holds annual steering group meetings, encourages and supports exchanges and visits between member countries and the translation and publication of books and other literature on the subject of hearing voices. In 2006 INTERVOICE set up a website and in 2007 was incorporated as a not for profit company under UK law. The president of INTERVOICE is Professor Marius Romme.

INTERVOICE is supported by people who hear voices, relative and friends and mental health professionals including nurses, psychiatrists and psychologists. INTERVOICE members assert that the most important factor in the success of their approach is the importance placed on the personal engagement of the people involved, meaning that all participants are considered an expert of their own experience. They see each other first as people, secondly as equal partners and thirdly as all having different but mutually valuable expertise to offer. This can either be through direct experience of hearing voices or having worked with voice hearers (and/or wanting to).

INTERVOICE is critical of psychiatry in relation to the way the profession generally understands and treats people who hear voices and holds that their research has led them to the position that schizophrenia is an unscientific and unhelpful hypothesis which should be abandoned, (Romme, 2006).

The Hearing Voices movement regards itself as being a post-psychiatric, (Bracken, 2005 and Stastny/Peter Lehmann, 2007) organisation, positioning itself outside of the mental health world in recognition that voices, in their view, are an aspect of human differentness, rather than a mental health problem and that, as with homosexuality (also regarded by psychiatry in recent times as an illness), one of the main issues is about human rights. Therefore by changing the way society perceives the experience, they believe, psychiatry, as it did with homosexuality, will follow.

The Hearing Voices movement is also seeking more holistic health solutions to problematic and overwhelming voices that cause mental distress then what it regards as the generally reductionist, disease based model offered by mainstream psychiatry. Based on their research they hold the opinion that many people successfully live with their voices and that in themselves voices are not the problem. For this reason they are prepared to accept a range of explanations offered by people who hear voices including spiritual ones and assert that recovery (see recovery model) from overwhelming voices can be achieved by seeking to understand the meaning of the voices to the voice hearer.

A detailed and neutral account of the significance of the Hearing Voice Movement entitled "Can You Live With the Voices in Your Head?" was published in the New York Times Magazine in 2007, the author Daniel B. Smith noted that the movements "brief against psychiatry can be boiled down to two core positions. The first is that many more people hear voices, and hear many more kinds of voices, than is usually assumed. The second is that auditory hallucination — or “voice-hearing,” H.V.N.’s more neutral preference — should be thought of not as a pathological phenomenon in need of eradication but as a meaningful, interpretable experience, intimately linked to a hearer’s life story and, more commonly than not, to unresolved personal traumas."

Movement history

Baker (2000) in OpenMind in an overview of the challenging new research and practise initiatives, developing across Europe, charts the progress made from a view of voice hearing as bizarre and dangerous towards a recognition of voices as real, meaningful, and related to peoples' lives. This recognises that the experience can be overwhelming and deeply distressing, but also, that the attempt to understand their meaning can be part of a solution.

Leudar and Thomas

In a recent book, Leudar and Thomas (2000): voices of reason, voices of insanity, review almost 3,000 years of voice-hearing history, including that of Socrates, Schreber, and Janet's patient 'Marcelle', amongst others, to show how we have moved the experience from a socially valued context to a pathologised and denigrated one. Foucault has argued that this process can generally arise when a minority perspective is at variance with dominant social norms and beliefs.

Romme and Escher

The work of Romme and Escher (1989, 90, 91, 92, '94, '97, '98, '99) provides a much needed theoretical framework for these new initiatives, and provides much of the impetus for the self-help movement in recent years. They demonstrate:

1.Not everyone who hears voices becomes a patient. Over a third of 400 voice hearers in Holland had not had any contact with Psychiatric services. These people either described themselves as being able to cope with their voices and/or described their voices as life enhancing. ...

5.70% of voice hearers reported that their voices had begun after a severe traumatic or intensely emotional event, such as an accident, divorce or bereavement, sexual or physical abuse, love affairs, or pregnancy. In a recent study, Romme et al (1998) found that the onset of voice hearing amongst a 'patient' group was preceded by either a traumatic event or an event that activated the memory of an earlier trauma. There was a high association with abuse. These findings are being substantiated further in an on-going study with voice hearing amongst children (Escher, 2001)

6.Some people who hear voices, regardless of being able to cope with this or not, may have a burning need to construct a personal understanding for their experiences and to talk to others about it without being 'written off' as mad.

7.A long-term developmental process of psychological adjustment was identified by surveying the considerable range of experience and the negotiation methods that people reported

Romme, (1991, '98) has developed this appoach with several studies showing that hearing voices can be associated with memories of emotionally 'undigested' events, usually connected with key relationships.

Romme et al, (1999) find that these important connections can be addressed using CBT and self-help methods.

Romme describes a 3 phase model of recovery.

Startling. Initial confusion; emotional chaos, fear, helplessness and psychological turmoil.

Organization. The need to find meaning, arrive at some understanding and acceptance. The development of ways of coping and accommodating voices in everyday living. This task may take months or years and is marked by the attempt to enter into active negotiation with the voice(s).

Stabilisation. The establishment of equilibrium, and accommodation, with the voice(s), and the consequent re-empowerment of the person.

Alternative to medical model

The Hearing Voices movement reflects significant disenchantment with the medical model, and the practises of Mental Health services through much of the Western World. ...

Romme and Escher (2000) have developed a method they call "Making sense of voices" to explore the problems in the life of the voice hearer that lie at the roots of the hearing voices experience. This approach was adopted as a consequence of the results of the studies they carried out, that they claimed, showed that to hearing voices, in it self, is not a symptom of an illness, but in most people is a reaction to severe traumatic experiences that made the person powerless, and are in effect, a kind of survival strategy. ...

Summary

The position of the hearing voices movement can be summarised as follows:

Hearing voice is in itself not a sign of mental illness
Hearing voices is experienced by a great many people, without becoming ill.
Hearing voices is related to problems in life history.
To recover from the distress caused, the person has to learn to cope with their voices and the original problems that lie at the root of the experience ...

(3) Intervoice - The international community for hearing voices

http://www.intervoiceonline.org

The international community for hearing voices

The INTERVOICE Network: Information on national initiatives

Working across the world to spread positive and hopeful messages about the experience of hearing voices

If you hear voices (aka auditory hallucinations); if you know someone who does; if you work with people who hear voices; if you want to know about more about this experience. Then this site is for you. ...

Welcome to our site

A message from Professor Marius Romme, MD, PhD, President of INTERVOICE

We are people who hear voices, family members, friends, mental health workers, activists, and concerned citizens.
Find out how we work together here

Did youKnow?

* Studies have found that between four and 10 per cent of people across the world hear voices.

* Between 70 and 90 cent of people who hear voices do so following traumatic events.

* Voices can be male, female, without gender, child, adult, human or non-human.

* People may hear one voice or many. Some people report hearing hundreds, although in almost all reported cases, one dominates above the others.

* Voices can be experienced in the head, in the ears, outside the head, in some other part of the body, or in the environment.

* Voices often reflect important aspects of the hearer's emotional state - emotions that are often unexpressed by the hearer.

Talking to Voices

"Many people who hear challenging voices have found that a turning point in learning to cope with this experience has been finding different ways of talking with and understanding their voices. Learning to understand the motives of your voices and different ways of talking with them can help the relationship to change between the voice hearer and the voices...."

Click on the title above to read the highly recommended article by Dirk Corstens, Eleanor Longden and Rufus May about the methods used by Rufus May in "The Doctor who Hears Voices" shown on UK TV on the 21st April 2008. Over a million people watched it when it was broadcast and thousands of people are now down loading from several Internet sites. It has provoked a strong response from viewers. Many people have been inspired by the film, others more attached to a medical approach to distress have been outraged, read Rufus Mays' reflections on making the film here

Also

We talked about the voices ... Eleanor Longden, a voice hearer, describes her experience of talking to her voices in the UK mass circulation newspaper The Daily Mail, 07/02/2008
I discovered that if I engaged with the voices, they became less frequent. I also learnt to challenge the more threatening voice, refusing to do what it told me and telling myself it was no more than a symbol of my own externalised anger. .. One by one the voices gradually disappeared, until I was only occasionally hearing one... Three years on, I am healthy, happy and perfectly stable.

Talking to Voices DVD: Professor Marius Romme
See Marius Romme explaining the theoretical basis for voice dialoguing, then with the help of a voice hearer demonstrates the voice dialoguing technique. buy your own copy here ...

Angels and Demons

broadcast on ABC in Australia on the 7th April 2008

This well regarded documentary made by Andrew Denton as part of the "Enough Rope" series considers what it is like to hear voices.
You can watch it here
and read the programme transcript here

Well known people who heard voices: Past and Present


http://voices.schublade.org/2006/12/3/examples-of-well-known-people-who-heard-voices

The international community for hearing voices

Page last updated 03/08/2007

Here are some examples of famous people who acknowledged they heard voices, if you know of any more people we could add to this list please let us know.

WILLIAM BLAKE

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, visionary, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts. From a young age, William Blake claimed to have seen visions. The earliest instance occurred at the age of about eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, when he reported seeing a tree filled with angels "bespangling every bough like stars." According to Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home to report his vision, but only escaped being thrashed by his father through the intervention of his mother. Though all the evidence suggests that his parents were largely supportive, his mother seems to have been especially so, and several of Blake's early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber.

On another occasion, Blake watched haymakers at work, and thought he saw angelic figures walking among them. In later life, his wife Catherine would recall the time he saw God's head "put to the window". The vision, Catherine reminded her husband, "Set you ascreaming."[25]

Blake claimed to experience visions throughout his life. They were often associated with beautiful religious themes and imagery, and therefore may have inspired him further with spiritual works and pursuits. Certainly, religious concepts and imagery figure centrally in Blake's works. God and Christianity constituted the intellectual center of his writings, from which he drew inspiration. In addition, Blake believed that he was personally instructed and encouraged by Archangels to create his artistic works, which he claimed were actively read and enjoyed by those same Archangels.

In a letter to William Hayley, dated May 6, 1800, Blake writes:

"I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother, and with his spirit I converse daily and hourly in the spirit, and see him in my remembrance, in the region of my imagination. I hear his advice, and even now write from his dictate."


PHILIP K. DICK

Philip K Dick was a science fiction writer, who died in 1982. Eight of his stories have been adapted into films to date, including "Blade Runner", "Total Recall" and "Minority Report".

"In earlier interviews you have described your encounter, in 1974, with "a transcendentally rational mind." Does this "tutelary spirit" continue to guide you?

Dick: It hasn't spoken a word to me since I wrote The Divine Invasion. The voice is identified as Ruah, which is the Old Testament word for the Spirit of God. It speaks in a feminine voice and tends to express statements regarding the messianic expectation. It guided me for a while. It has spoken to me sporadically since I was in high school. I expect that if a crisis arises it will say something again. It's very economical in what it says. It limits itself to a few very terse, sucinct sentences. I only hear the voice of the spirit when I'm falling asleep or waking up. I have to be very receptive to hear it. It sounds as though it's coming from millions of miles away."

Philip K. Dick's Final Interview, June 1982, [source: Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, June 1982

Click here for "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick"

CHARLES DICKENS

The experiences of Charles Dickens were widely publicised by the author himself. He used to tell the tale with relish about becoming so involved with his characters that they actually spoke to him, the best known being the disgusting old ‘nurse’ from his novel Martin Chuzzlewit, Mrs Gamp who, he said, would tell him dirty stories in church during Sunday service and make him laugh out loud.

SIGMUND FREUD

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis wrote, “During the days when I was living alone in a foreign city….I quite often heard my name suddenly called by an unmistakable and beloved voice….”

MAHATMA GANDHI

Mahatma Gandhi, the man who almost single handedly achieved Indian independence from Britain, relied on an “inner voice” for guidance. Toward the end of his life the voice said, “You are on the right track, move neither to your left, nor right, but keep to the straight and narrow.”

ANTHONY HOPKINS

In 1993, in an interview in the News of the World, the Hollywood actor Anthony Hopkins made a remarkable admission, he claimed he heard strange voices in his head, "I've always had a little voice in my head, particularly when I was younger and less assured", he said. "While onstage, during classical theatre the voice would suddenly say, "Oh, you think you can do Shakespeare, do you?" and he added; "Recently, I was being interviewed on television and the voice inside my head said to me, "Who the hell do you think you are. You're just an actor, what the hell do you know about anything". Anthony Hopkins locates the root of his voice hearing experience in the insecurity he felt as a child, he says "I've always had a little voice in my head pulling me down, particularly when I was younger and less grounded...My school days were not always happy and I wanted to get away from Wales and be someone else. I was stupid at school, I just didn't know what was going on. I thought I was on Mars, I didn't know what they were talking about." Many voice hearers share this description of the trigger for the voice experience and a recent survey showed that Hopkins is by no means alone. Social circumstances are related to the onset of the voices and examples of this include unbearable living situations, recent or childhood traumas, conflicts between the ideal and reality of people’s lives and the person's overall emotional development.

JOHN FRUSCIANTE from the Red Hot Chili Peppers

“I had just so many mental problems. It wasn't until I was 28 that my brain actually felt like a spacious place. When I was 18, 19, 22, my brain was just clogged all the time - non-stop voices. I couldn't figure out what was going on. There was a lot of confusion inside me, this flood of voices, often contradicting each other, often telling me stuff that would happen in the future, and then it would happen, voices insulting me, telling me what to do.”

SAINT IGNATIUS (Íñigo) LOYOLA

Caption: "Having sought divine help from the Blessed Virgin he spoke with God and saw the infant Jesus in Mary's arms. All this pleasantly energized him."

Íñigo was born at the castle of Loyola, in the municipality of Azpeitia, 16 miles southwest of Donostia/San Sebastian in the Basque province of Guipúzcoa, Spain. The youngest of 13 children, Ignatius was only seven years old when his mother died.

In 1517, Íñigo took service in the army, defending the small town of Pamplona against the recently expelled Navarrese monarchy. Highly outnumbered, the Spaniards wanted to surrender, but Ignatius persuaded them to fight on. One leg wounded, the other broken by a cannonball, Ignatius was returned to his castle by the Navarrese.

Ignatius was recuperating from the battle injury when he had the first of his visions, and a nervous breakdown. His emotional condition, combined with the fictitious stories of the Catholic saints whose lives he studied, resulted in a series of mystical visions, conversations and other encounters with God, Jesus and Mary.

JOHN FORBES NASH

On October 11, 1994, John Forbes Nash, Jr. won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in game theory. Nash was 66 and, for most of his adult life he'd lived with the diagnoseis of paranoid schizophrenia.

Nash began his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1948 - when he was just 20. While he was still only 21, he wrote a 27-page doctoral dissertation on game theory - the mathematics of competition.Nash put a whole new face on competition, and he drew the attention of theoretical economists. They turned game theory into a tool. This young genius brought the field to fruition.

He went on to MIT and for eight years dazzled the mathematical world. He worked in economics. He even invented the game of Hex, marketed by Parker Brothers. He married in 1957. New York Times writer Silvia Nasar tells how "Fortune magazine singled him out in July 1958 as America's brilliant young star of the 'new mathematics.'"

Nash engaged in sporadic same-sex relationships throughout his life, despite having married a woman. As a graduate student, in his circle,his homosexuality was mostly accepted,or at least tolerated. However, upon graduation, homosexuality was less accepted in the McCarthy era government department in which he worked; he was fired from the job after being arrested for "indecent acts" in a men's room at a public park. As an adult,Nash was involved in a serious relationship with a man, which may have contributed to his hesitancy to marry Alicia.

He began hearing voices. He'd once astonished mathematicians with his unlikely results. Now his results stopped making sense, and the dividing line wasn't clear at first. He began looking for secret messages in numbers. He disappeared for days. He could, in Nasar's words, "no longer sort and interpret sensations or reason or feel the full range of emotions."

Throughout his years at Princeton (1945-1949) he believed he had a roommate while records show he lived by himself. He became paranoid and was committed into the McLean Hospital, April-May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild depression with low self-esteem. After a problematic stay in Paris and Geneva, Nash returned to Princeton in 1960. He remained in and out of mental hospitals until 1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medications, usually as a result of being committed rather than by his choice.

From 1970, by his choice, he never took antipsychotic medication again. According to his biographer Sylvia Nasar, he recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his wife Alicia, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted.

Nash's "hallucinations" were exclusively auditory, and not both visual and auditory as shown in the film "A Beautiful Mind". The film also has Nash saying at the time of his Nobel acceptance speech in 1994 "I take the newer medications", when in fact Nash didn't take any medication from 1970 onwards.

Interview with John Nash on his experience of hearing voices

SAINT JOAN

In the preface to Bernard Shaw's play, saint Joan (page 13 14, Penguin Edition) he says of her voices: "Joan's voices and visions have played many tricks with her reputation. They have been held to prove that she was mad, a liar and impostor, a sorceress (she was burned for this), and finally a saint. They do not prove any of these things; but the variety of the conclusions reached show how little our matter of fact historians know about other people's minds, or even about their own. There are people in the world whose imagination is so vivid that when they have an idea it comes to them as audible voice, sometimes uttered by a visual figure......The inspirations and intuitions and unconsciously reasoned conclusions of genius sometimes assume similar illusions. Socrates, Luther, Swedenbourg, Blake saw visions and heard voices just as Saint Francis and saint Joan did.... On the subject of the eleventh horn of the beast seen by the prophet Daniel he was more fantastic than Joan.... Her policy was also quite sound: nobody disputes that the relief of Orleans, followed by the coronation at Rheims of the Dauphin as a counterblow to the suspicions then current of his legitimacy and consequently of his title, were military and political masterpieces that saved France. They might have been planned by Napoleon or any other illusion proof genius. They came to Joan as an instruction from her Counsel, as she called her visionary saints; but she was none the less an able leader of men for imagining her ideas in this way".

JOSHUA SLOCUM

Joshua Slocum became the first person to circumnavigate the world single handed in 1898 aboard a boat called Spray. He claimed to have been aided by the ghost of Christopher Columbus's helmsman, who guided him safely through storms and bouts of illness.

AIDEN SHINGLER

Aiden is an artist and is also diagnosed as a schizophrenic. He calls himself a schizophrenic artist, one of his pieces of work made up of four crucifixes stamped in indelible ink with his hand and foot prints and on one crucifix, the nails have been replaced with syringes. Aiden says of the work that it "... is about the time I was forcibly injected with neuroleptic drugs. I'd heard a voice within saying I had been chosen and I could feel a halo around my head. This image is representative of the crucifixion of the Christ within me by the clinicians. Instead of the halo there is now a wreath of white flowers."Spingler was hospitalised twenty years ago the first time he experienced visions and voices until his family insisted on his release and since that time he has had eight sustained periods of altered consciousness, lasting from one to six months. He does not regard them as frightening, rather he says of them "there's a wonderful sense of freedom, a great expansion of mind, clarity of thought. Colour becomes so heightened. All the senses do...". He does not regard schizophrenia if it has to be called that as an illness, instead he sees it as a condition, a more colourful way of seeing things. When his doctors told him he was disconnected he told them they should be so lucky, that he was making new, wonderful, poetic connections. Aiden now experiences his episodes of altered consciousness as gentler and less exhausting. Yet for him these epiphanies, the visions and voices are just as inspiring.

ROBERT SCHUMANN

Robert Alexander Schumann (June 8, 1810 – July 29, 1856) was a German composer and pianist. He was one of the most famous Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, as well as a famous music critic. An intellectual as well as an aesthete, his music reflects the deeply personal nature of Romanticism. Introspective and often whimsical, his early music was an attempt to break with the tradition of classical forms and structure which he thought too restrictive. Little understood in his lifetime, much of his music is now regarded as daringly original in harmony, rhythm and form. He stands in the front rank of German Romantics.

Inspired by E.T.A. Hoffman’s mad fictional musician Kappelmeister Kreisler, Schumann’s “Kreisleriana” was one of many musical works written at the urging of the inner voices that alternatively plagued and blessed him throughout much of his life. As long as his mind remained whole enough to organize what he was “hearing,” these voices brought some of his finest work to him, sometimes fully realized and orchestrated. When his mental state began to disintegrate, however, the ghostly music brought him terrible suffering. His wife, the pianist Clara Schumann, described a tortuous night :

“The night of Friday, the 17th, we had not been long in bed when Robert got up and wrote out a theme that, he said, the angels had sung to him; after doing that, he went back to bed and hallucinated all night long, his eyes open and looking to heaven; he was firmly convinced that angels were hovering over him and disclosing the most wondrous revelations, all expressed in glorious music: they extended us their welcome, and we would both be joined with them before the year was past...Morning came and with it a dreadful change! The angel voices had turned into the voices of demons with horrible music; they told him he was a sinner and they planned to cast him into Hades, in short, his condition increased literally into one of nervous convulsions; he shrieked in pain (as he told me later, it took the form of tigers and hyenas tearing at him and trying to grab him) and the two doctors, who fortunately came in good time, were hardly able to hold him. I’ll never forget this moment, I was suffering the very agonies of torture with him. After about half an hour, he was less agitated and said friendlier voices could now be heard giving him encouragement...”

SOCRATES

Socrates' reliance on what the Greeks called his "daemonic sign", an averting (????????????) inner voice that Socrates heard only when he was about to make a mistake. It was this sign that prevented Socrates from entering into politics. In the Phaedrus, we are told Socrates considered this to be a form of "divine madness", the sort of insanity that is a gift from the gods and gives us poetry, mysticism, love, and even philosophy itself. Alternately, the sign is often taken to be what we would call "intuition"; however, Socrates' characterization of the phenomenon as "daemonic" suggests that its origin is divine, mysterious, and independent of his own thoughts.

An Islamic Scholar, Mirza Tahir Ahmad, argues that Socrates experienced what can be called a prophetic revelation. He writes in his book, Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth, that "Socrates seems to have a very personalized and intense relationship with the Supreme Being. His very personality is built on the pattern of the messengers of God.

DORIS STOKES

The late Doris Stokes, the renowned English medium heard the voice of what she regarded as her spirit guide, the guide was called Ramonov, a Tibetan monk. At first she didn't know where he came from until whilst watching a travel film on BBC television, she said "It was all about the Table people. Ramonov said "That's where I come from. Tibet." She first heard the voice of her deceased father when she was 13 years old when she herself met a medium. She always understood her experience to be a spiritual one and became a best selling writer, regularly appeared on TV and had a sell out show at the London Palladium.

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688 – 1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, Christian mystic and theologian. Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. At the age of fifty-six he entered into a spiritual phase, in which he experienced dreams and visions. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, where he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons, and other spirits. For the remaining 28 years of his life, he wrote and published 18 theological works, of which the best known was Heaven and Hell (1758) [4], and several unpublished theological works.

Around 1744 he began having strange dreams. Swedenborg carried a travel journal with him on most of his travels, and did so on this journey. The whereabouts of the diary were long unknown, but it was discovered in the Royal Library in the 1850s and published in 1859 as Drömboken, or Journal of Dreams. It provides a first-hand account of the events of the crisis.

He experienced many different dreams and visions, some greatly pleasurable, others highly disturbing. The experiences continued as he travelled to London to continue the publication of Regnum animale. This cathartic process continued for six months. It has been compared to the Catholic concept of Purgatory. Analyses of the diary have concluded that what Swedenborg was recording in his Journal of Dreams was a battle between the love of his self, and the love of God. [26]

In the last entry of the journal from October 26-27 1744, Swedenborg appears to be clear as to which path to follow. He felt he should drop his current project, and write a new book about the worship of God. He soon began working on De cultu et amore Dei, or The Worship and Love of God. It was never fully completed, but Swedenborg still had it published in London in June 1745.

One explanation why the work was never finished is given in a well known and often referenced story. In April 1745, Swedenborg was dining in a private room at a tavern in London. By the end of the meal, a darkness fell upon his eyes, and the room shifted character. Suddenly he saw a person sitting at a corner of the room, telling Swedenborg: "Do not eat too much!". Swedenborg, scared, hurried home. Later that night, the same man appeared in his dreams. The man told Swedenborg that He was the Lord, that He had appointed Swedenborg to reveal the spiritual meaning of the Bible, and that He would guide Swedenborg in what to write. The same night, the spiritual world was opened to Swedenborg.[

TERESA of AVILA

1515 - 1582, Birthplace: Avila, Spain

Teresa of Avila was a nun who reformed the order of the Carmelites, an ascetic who had mystical visions and communications from God. Charismatic and controversial, she founded monasteries throughout Spain, and is known by works that include her autobiography and The Way of Perfection. She was beatified in 1614 and canonized in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, and in 1970 was made a Doctor of the Church.

ZOE WANNAMAKER

Zoe Wannamaker, the successful English actress talked about her voice hearing on the radio programme "Desert Island Discs" (BBC, Radio 4), she said: "It's like a little person sitting on your shoulder saying "No that's wrong. Don't do this. Don't do that...It's got in the way when I was working, because my concentration would be tripped by this voice in the back of my head. You think you're concentrating, but the voices were also saying "your not concentrating". I know it sounds like Joan of Arc, but it was a sort of chatter that would be going on while I was on stage." When asked if the voices had gone she said "They come back occasionally and have a good chat."