Hearing Voices Demonic And Divine

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781472453983, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivative 4.0 license. Experiences of hearing the voice of God (or angels, demons, or other spiritual beings) have generally been understood either as religious experiences or else as a feature of mental illness. Some critics of traditional religious faith have dismissed the visions and voices attributed to biblical characters and saints as evidence of mental disorder. However, it is now known that many ordinary people, with no other evidence of mental disorder, also hear voices and that these voices not infrequently include spiritual or religious content. Psychological and interdisciplinary research has shed a revealing light on these experiences in recent years, so that we now know much more about the phenomenon of "hearing voices" than ever before. The present work considers biblical, historical, and scientific accounts of spiritual and mystical experiences of voice hearing in the Christian tradition in order to explore how some voices may be understood theologically as revelatory. It is proposed that in the incarnation, Christian faith finds both an understanding of what it is to be fully human (a theological anthropology), and God’s perfect self-disclosure (revelation). Within such an understanding, revelatory voices represent a key point of interpersonal encounter between human beings and God.

In this insightful book, accounts of voice hearers are presented, evaluated and interpreted by a Christian theologian and psychiatrist. By listening to the first-hand experiences of voice hearers and evaluating them in the light of Christian theology, the book enables the reader to understand the experiences of voice hearers as a part of Christian experience and to engage with the theological issues raised by them, including the nature of revelation. This engaging and thought-provoking collection looks at a range of stories - ranging from comforting to complex to simply conversational - to encourage debate and search for meaning and also show how the reader can adapt clinical and pastoral practice to better aid people in this situation.

Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucination caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling sleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with sensory deprivation or certain brain disorders can lead to religious epiphanies or conversions. Drawing on a wealth of clinical examples from his own patients as well as historical and literary descriptions, Oliver Sacks investigates the fundamental differences and similarities of these many sorts of hallucinations, what they say about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.

The experience of 'hearing voices', once associated with lofty prophetic communications, has fallen low. Today, the experience is typically portrayed as an unambiguous harbinger of madness caused by a broken brain, an unbalanced mind, biology gone wild. Yet an alternative account, forged predominantly by people who hear voices themselves, argues that hearing voices is an understandable response to traumatic life-events. There is an urgent need to overcome the tensions between these two ways of understanding 'voice hearing'. Simon McCarthy-Jones considers neuroscience, genetics, religion, history, politics and not least the experiences of many voice hearers themselves. This enables him to challenge established and seemingly contradictory understandings and to create a joined-up explanation of voice hearing that is based on evidence rather than ideology.

National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry

The Philokalia, a collection of spiritual texts by fathers of the Eastern Church spanning the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, was first published in Venice in 1782. Significant in bringing about a renaissance of Orthodox spirituality since then, it shows deep psychological as well as spiritual awareness. The Philokalia and the Inner Life critically examines the nature of mental and spiritual well-being as understood in the Philokalia. It identifies the passions as 'hostile pleasures', with a seductive and addictive quality, which are detrimental to human well-being, and explores the remedies for the passions that the Philokalia prescribes. Like the Philokalia, contemporary psychotherapies seek to interpret human thoughts and restore well-being, although the 'talking cure' of secular psychotherapy contrasts significantly with the 'praying cure' of the Philokalia.This book is for all who are interested in spirituality, theology and the life of prayer, as well as students of the Philokalia. It is also for clinicians, counselors and psychotherapists, especially those who wish to explore the relationship between psychological and spiritual well-being.

Trance states, prophesying, convulsions, fasting, and other physical manifestations were often regarded as signs that a person was seized by spirits. In a book that sets out the prehistory of the early modern European witch craze, Nancy Caciola shows how medieval people decided whom to venerate as a saint infused with the spirit of God and whom to avoid as a demoniac possessed of an unclean spirit. This process of discrimination, known as the discernment of spirits, was central to the religious culture of Western Europe between 1200 and 1500.Since the outward manifestations of benign and malign possession were indistinguishable, a highly ambiguous set of bodily features and behaviors were carefully scrutinized by observers. Attempts to make decisions about individuals who exhibited supernatural powers were complicated by the fact that the most intense exemplars of lay spirituality were women, and the "fragile sex" was deemed especially vulnerable to the snares of the devil. Assessments of women's spirit possessions often oscillated between divine and demonic interpretations. Ultimately, although a few late medieval women visionaries achieved the prestige of canonization, many more were accused of possession by demons.Caciola analyzes a broad array of sources from saints' lives to medical treatises, exorcists' manuals to miracle accounts, to find that observers came to rely on the discernment of bodies rather than seeking to distinguish between divine and demonic possession in purely spiritual terms.

What does the women you’ll be tomorrow want you to know today? Show Up for Your Life by gifted writer, speaker, and worship leader Chrystal Evans Hurst will help young women ages 13 and up stop worrying about the small stuff and start embracing who they are in God’s eyes. From Chrystal Evans Hurst, popular author of the adult title She’s Still There, comes Show Up for Your Life, a book that empowers young women to appreciate their divinely created uniqueness instead of comparing themselves to others. Show Up for Your Life helps young women ages 13 and up: Remember all the positives in their life now and not get stuck in anxiety over the future Recognize their unique, God-given gifts Deal with distractions that throw them off course from God’s plan for them Stop comparing themselves to others Chrystal shares her own stories that will inspire young women to stop worrying—whether it’s about how to dress, who they hang with, or any of the other daily ups and downs of life—and face every day with an attitude of mindfulness and gratitude. Inside Show Up for Your Life, readers will love: Chrystal’s conversational tone, honesty, and humble wisdom The interactive sections at the end of each chapter that summarize what you should remember, pose questions to encourage reflection, provide a responsive activity to do individually, and provide Scripture verses to guide growth