Split Thread Scorpion's Spiritualism

[Pixel42]

Nobody knows how or why schizophrenics hear voices.

The mechanism may not be completely understood but that does not alter the fact that hearing voices is a symptom of this particular illness. The illness causes the brain to malfunction, and that malfunction manifests as this symptom. It's no different to the other examples I gave, even if how this illness produces this symptom is less well understood than how, say, arthritic joints produce pain.

 

[P.J. Denyer]

As for the mediums who're giving you advice, I'd take them with a healthy pinch of salt, they don't seem to me to be your friends.

I hope you find a more effective treatment soon, but you won't get it from spiritualists and other woo merchants.

Quoted for truth.

 

[The Shrike]

I am going to see if the president of the spiritualist association knew what he was talking about when he said they would feel static electricity like fire and be ejected from my aura. Hopefully without electrocuting myself.

Hold on. You blew 100 bucks on a Wimshurst machine because some fool who heads up the local gullibles society told you that astral beings stuck in your aura can be ejected by static electricity?

• How does he know that?
• How do you know you can believe him (against, you know, all of science)?
• How big a charge is necessary to knock the astral beings out?
• Where do the astral beings go after being so rudely ejected?
• Are you worried that you would anger the astral beings?
• Is a Wimshurt capable of producing the necessary charge?
• Can a human survive such a shock?
• Why can't you use his?
• Have you discussed this plan with your doctor?
• As in, the person who prescribed Abilify for you?
• Wouldn't it be safer/cheaper to increase your Abilify dose a bit before intentionally electrocuting yourself?

 

[LongFuzzy]

No, but I will unbolt the door, so that if my sister cannot get me on the phone, she can get in without breaking down the door. I have been reading up on the safety of wimshurst machines, and as far as I can tell a low charge will not harm me, although it might be painful. I intend to try the machine out until I know how to store a low charge in the capacitors, then apply it to my stomach.

I seriously suggest you DO NOT DO THIS! You obviously don't know about electricity, and you could very well store a deadly charge. Playing around with high voltage is not something for the untrained. Please for your own safety, do not use any capacitors in your attempt to dislodge your spirits. You may end up dislodging yourself.

 

[abaddon]

I seriously suggest you DO NOT DO THIS! You obviously don't know about electricity, and you could very well store a deadly charge. Playing around with high voltage is not something for the untrained. Please for your own safety, do not use any capacitors in your attempt to dislodge your spirits. You may end up dislodging yourself.

Case in point. Old school TVs and monitors used to have a HT lead running the tube. Without due care and attention, it could easily cause insta-death.

Scorpion simply does not care.His spiritualst guru's? They don't care about him at all. They are happy and content to use him as a poster child for their woo.

I regularly get static shocks from my car/Clothes rails in stores/My ex-wife/random strangers/My cat and so forth. Scorpion thinks this is all evidence of something "other" despite the fact that static discharge is mundanely understood by pretty much anyone who has traversed a nylon carpet.

So why does Scorpion think that static lecky is evidence for spirits? Damned if I know. Damned if he knows either. It is apparently "spooky" enough to count as evidence. Or some such BS.

 

[8enotto]

Umm Scorpion....

Isn't this exactly what others did to you that you hated so much 50 years ago?

But now under less controlled circumstances.
Please be smarter than this.

 

[Scorpion]

Hold on. You blew 100 bucks on a Wimshurst machine because some fool who heads up the local gullibles society told you that astral beings stuck in your aura can be ejected by static electricity?

• How does he know that?
• How do you know you can believe him (against, you know, all of science)?
• How big a charge is necessary to knock the astral beings out?
• Where do the astral beings go after being so rudely ejected?
• Are you worried that you would anger the astral beings?
• Is a Wimshurt capable of producing the necessary charge?
• Can a human survive such a shock?
• Why can't you use his?
• Have you discussed this plan with your doctor?
• As in, the person who prescribed Abilify for you?
• Wouldn't it be safer/cheaper to increase your Abilify dose a bit before intentionally electrocuting yourself?

Good questions.
As I said the source of the idea you can drive out astral entities was the former president of the spiritualist association, his name was Thomas Johansson and he gave a lecture on the subject in the 1970s at the spiritualist headquarters in London. I wrote to him asking how the charge of static electricity could be safely applied, but he never answered me. So I am left to draw my own conclusions. It comes down to experimenting on my own to see if I can clear my voices with static. I have no information on how much of a charge it takes to electrocute astral entities. I do not care where they go if I get rid of them. I do not think they are evolved enough to get angry with me and I don't give a damn if they do. I would be quite pleased if I hurt them.
I have read that wimshurst machines will not kill, but a shock can be painful.

I have not seen a doctor or psychiatrist for years, and I obviously would not tell them what I plan, although I might want to tell them if it is successful. But they obviously would not believe me.

 

[Scorpion]

Another anecdote. I went for spiritual healing at a spiritualist church a few years ago.
There were two ladies doing the healing and working together. One of them looked at the other healer and pointed at my stomach. She other one looked down and nodded. I don't know what they saw, and they said nothing to me. But I have felt disturbing feelings in my stomach for 50 years, as if something is writhing around in it.
I felt the healing as heat, and felt uplifted for days after the healing.

 

[Gilbert Syndrome]

Another anecdote. I went for spiritual healing at a spiritualist church a few years ago.
There were two ladies doing the healing and working together. One of them looked at the other healer and pointed at my stomach. She other one looked down and nodded. I don't know what they saw, and they said nothing to me. But I have felt disturbing feelings in my stomach for 50 years, as if something is writhing around in it.
I felt the healing as heat, and felt uplifted for days after the healing.

Again, Scorpion, this is all very familiar to me. These are warning signs, and if you don't do something actually beneficial for your mental wellbeing, then you're going to end up being found dead one day, and I don't think any of those hokey spiritualist mediums would bat an eyelid or attend your funeral, but your friends and family will. There's very little difference in the things you talk about and the things my friend talked about before he lost his mind completely and killed himself. Do what you're gonna do, but why not give one of those mediums a call and see if they'll vouch for this "static healing," and if they'll take credit for it if you end up offing yourself.

 

[Scorpion]

I seriously suggest you DO NOT DO THIS! You obviously don't know about electricity, and you could very well store a deadly charge. Playing around with high voltage is not something for the untrained. Please for your own safety, do not use any capacitors in your attempt to dislodge your spirits. You may end up dislodging yourself.

Thanks. I do know something about electricity. I am qualified in Television and electronics, and microprocessors. But I know next to nothing about static electricity apart from the fact it can destroy processors, and I used to use a wrist strap to earth myself when working on electronics circuit boards.

As far as wimshurst machines I know they build up high voltages but use low current. Since it is the current that kills I figure I can risk a shock. I will not be rushing into shocking myself though. I figure the reason stun guns are effective is they use high voltage and very low current too, but they do not normally kill unless someone has a weak heart.

 

[Scorpion]

Been looking up the source of the lecture I attended on schizophrenia and I found out the name of the lecturer was Tom Johanson not Thomas Johansson. He is now dead and unless I get a message from him (joke) I cannot find out anything more about his statement that he used static electricity on people at the spiritualist association. Here is a link about him.

http://www.tomjohanson.com/

 

[Scorpion]

I searched for ' entities in the aura' on Google and found a lot of pages about it, but none about using static to get rid of them.
I did however temporarily get my computer taken over by a site that planted a program on my computer, and I had to find the program in windows 10 and delete it before I could reset my homepage.

 

[LongFuzzy]

Thanks. I do know something about electricity. I am qualified in Television and electronics, and microprocessors. But I know next to nothing about static electricity apart from the fact it can destroy processors, and I used to use a wrist strap to earth myself when working on electronics circuit boards.

As far as wimshurst machines I know they build up high voltages but use low current. Since it is the current that kills I figure I can risk a shock. I will not be rushing into shocking myself though. I figure the reason stun guns are effective is they use high voltage and very low current too, but they do not normally kill unless someone has a weak heart.

If you really know something about electricity, you would know why mixing a wimshurst (or a VDG) and capacitors is a bad idea. You really need to understand the relationship between volts, ohms, and amps. What you are contemplating can easily get you killed.

 

[Scorpion]

If you really know something about electricity, you would know why mixing a wimshurst (or a VDG) and capacitors is a bad idea. You really need to understand the relationship between volts, ohms, and amps. What you are contemplating can easily get you killed.

I am not contemplating attaching extra capacitors to the machine. I was referring to the leyden jars which come as standard with the generator. I believe they store the electric charge by capacitance.

 

[Dabop]

I am not contemplating attaching extra capacitors to the machine. I was referring to the leyden jars which come as standard with the generator. I believe they store the electric charge by capacitance.

They ARE capacitors (luckily for you if you are foolish enough to try this) very primitive and inefficient ones

 

[LongFuzzy]

They ARE capacitors (luckily for you if you are foolish enough to try this) very primitive and inefficient ones

Yep, but if you read the users manuals for this devices, they all say, Don't put your body parts in the path of the spark. But Scorpion is qualified in Television, and electronics, and microprocessors, so he must know what's he's doing.

 

[duffdav]

I searched for ' entities in the aura' on Google and found a lot of pages about it, but none about using static to get rid of them.

Scorpion
Are you familiar with Dr. Carl Wickland’s book “Thirty Years Among the Dead” ?

wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wickland

According to Wickland, he emigrated from Sweden to St. Paul, Minnesota, married Anna W. Anderson and moved to Chicago, graduating from Durham Medical College in 1900. Wickland's own autobiographical sketch lists accomplishments as a general practitioner of medicine, member of the Chicago Medical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and chief psychiatrist at the State Psychopathic Institute of Chicago.

Wickland turned away from conventional medical psychology and toward the belief that psychiatric illnesses were the result of influence by spirits of the dead. Wickland came to believe that a large number of his patients had become possessed by what he called "obsessing spirits", and that low-voltage electric shocks could dislodge them, while his wife Anna acted as a medium to guide them to "progress in the spirit world". Spiritualists considered him an authority on "destructive spirits" and he wrote a book in 1924, Thirty Years Among the Dead, detailing his experiences as a psychical researcher.

 

[The Shrike]

According to Wickland,

So sometime back in the 1970s at a spiritualist church (where and when most great scientific advances take place), a younger, mentally ill Scorpion with a drinking problem attends a lecture from a guy who read and paraphrased an anecdote from Wickland's book.

Fast-forward to 2019, and an older and still mentally ill (yet sober!) Scorpion eschews further medical treatment that he admitted was working to help treat his condition so that he can blow 95 bucks and potentially electrocute himself based on a wispy memory of a dude who once said something based on a book about nonsense.

 

[Scorpion]

Scorpion
Are you familiar with Dr. Carl Wickland’s book “Thirty Years Among the Dead” ?

wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Wickland

According to Wickland, he emigrated from Sweden to St. Paul, Minnesota, married Anna W. Anderson and moved to Chicago, graduating from Durham Medical College in 1900. Wickland's own autobiographical sketch lists accomplishments as a general practitioner of medicine, member of the Chicago Medical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and chief psychiatrist at the State Psychopathic Institute of Chicago.

Wickland turned away from conventional medical psychology and toward the belief that psychiatric illnesses were the result of influence by spirits of the dead. Wickland came to believe that a large number of his patients had become possessed by what he called "obsessing spirits", and that low-voltage electric shocks could dislodge them, while his wife Anna acted as a medium to guide them to "progress in the spirit world". Spiritualists considered him an authority on "destructive spirits" and he wrote a book in 1924, Thirty Years Among the Dead, detailing his experiences as a psychical researcher.

Hi! glad to see you here. No I have never heard of Carl Wickland. I do remember another medium, Ursula Roberts saying that ECT (electro convulsive therapy) could dislodge obsessing entities. I am not sure how high the voltage of ECT was, it may be in the region of 150 volts.

 

[Pixel42]

In order to establish whether any medical treatment is effective it is necessary to use a double blind test protocol, in order to eliminate the placebo effect and investigator bias. Do you understand why this is, Scorpion? If not I would be happy to explain it to you further. It is such protocols that enable us to show, for example, that aspirin is an objectively effective painkiller and homeopathic remedies are not, even though users of both will report perceiving some benefit from taking them.

Please describe the test protocol you intend to use to establish whether or not the machine you have ordered can "dislodge possessing entities".