I have a number of thoughts regarding this article. First is the idea of "dangerous gifts" and of a mind that is oversensitized to making (perhaps spurious) co

I have a number of thoughts regarding this article. First is the idea of "dangerous gifts" and of a mind that is oversensitized to making (perhaps spurious) connections and correlations between otherwise unrelated phenomena - related to the idea of aberrant salience in psychiatry: One approach saw the mad mind as a wounded mind – not wounded in the sense of broken, but in the sense of having survived painful life experiences. The experiences we call ‘paranoia’ – being hypervigilant to threats, seeing malicious motives everywhere – could be a protective response of the organism to real threats, rather than symptoms of a disease. The hypervigilance to threats and reading of malicious motives is the shadow aspect of an innate ability to notice subtle patterns and relationships given an absolute paucity of information; its well-dignified manifestation is best exemplified by the unstable yet incisive intellect of characters such as Dr. House or Sherlock Holmes, Waterhouse from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon or stock market wizards Max Cohen and (to a less psychotic extent, yet still neurodivergent in other directions) Michael Burry. An intellect that is too sensitive to patterns, capable of discerning the minutest signal out of a sea of noise, who can at times find the precise mental model that corresponds exactly to reality when no one else is able - yet also prone to confusing genuine noise for an actual signal. A confrontation with the "demons" or "malicious motives" seen everywhere is part of the process of coming to grips with the deluge of noise that increasing the cutoff frequency of your low-pass filters (so to speak) introduces. It's this decreased attenuation of spurious correlations, hypervigilance, indeed "reality itself" that is referred to by psychonauts, shamans, and other mystical seekers in the metaphor of "opening the doors of perception/the soul." Being receptive to such subtle suggestions and inferences from the psyche within given the minutest of perceptual signals from the world without is one such "dangerous gift," and learning to harness it is one of the objectives of the spiritual quest. Second is the obsolescence of roles once played by medicine men, shamans, faith healers, gurus, and priests in diagnosing such maladies of the mind/soul (which I consider exact synonyms of one another and are perfectly coextensive, metaphysical woo about spirits and energies need not apply) in the rising prominence of psychiatry and other "bottom up" approaches to treating psychological/spiritual (vide supra) conditions through pharmaceutical, chemical interventions that modify the "hardware layer" of the body instead of applying a solution "in software" at the level of mind/psyche/soul. While the mind/body, software/hardware relationship is bidirectional, and physical interventions can indeed result in lasting psychological change, what is de-emphasized in modern psychiatric treatment is the viability of applying solutions at a "software" or psychological level to correct maladies at the physical level. The best examples of such treatments are seen in CBT and various forms of mindfulness, though the latter's dilution and watered down presentation in western discourse is but a shadow of what practitioners of Eastern or mystical traditions will study through Vipassana, fire kasina [0], or even ceremonial magick; it is perhaps the foreignness of such traditions' languages and vocabulary, combined with the difficulty of capturing such slippery subjective experience in prose, that makes these approaches less amenable to western, analytical, quantitative discourse. Further, given that the subject matter of the psyche/soul is, necessarily, subjective, non-quantitative, and more or less opaque to outside inspection from objective observers, the tools of scientific empiricism, objective observation and reproduction, and quantitative methods, are probably ill suited for such phenomena. There are too many variables that comprise the inner phenomenological experience and internal state of one's mind/soul to control for, let alone measure, to faithfully reproduce any kind of experiment that captures, in whole and not in part, the totality of one's psyche at any given time. A third approach saw, in madness, a spiritual crisis or ‘spiritual emergency’, a term coined in the 1980s by Stanislav and Christina Grof but with roots in the work of Carl Jung and Abraham Maslow. In this view, the ‘self’ is a mere drop in a vast sea of intelligence, consciousness and love. What if what we call insanity is a form of unmediated contact with this cosmic intelligence? What if experiences of psychosis – disembodied voices, strange convictions, the sense of being out of one’s body – are precursors of a powerful spiritual change, one that requires a religious guide, not a doctor? The documentary film Crazywise (2016) tells the story of Gogo Ekhaya Esima, a Brooklyn activist who was diagnosed with schizophrenia, but who rejected her label, returned to her ancestral roots, and became a Sangoma traditional healer and peer counsellor. As such, as pseudoscientific as psychoanalysts such as Freud, Jung, and the latter's alchemical predecessors (see Jung's work Psychology and Alchemy, or the work of the Rosicrucians and "mental alchemists") are, if one wishes to attack such psychological/spiritual maladies from software (possibly in parallel to applying pharmeceutical interventions at the hardware level), a self-study of such traditions will reveal a centuries' long wealth of wisdom and experience from fellow spiritual seekers and mystical practitioners who have tread similar territory before. That being said, and in light of the previous paragraph's discussion re. difficulties in reproducibility, the inner landscape of everyone's mental terrain is different, and thus no one guru or methodology can show you the exact way out of darkness - it is truly the loneliest road, and only you can walk it for yourself; fortunately, you are also the leading expert on the geography of your inner psychological landscape. [0] https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-kasina.pdf https://firekasina.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the-fire-k...