Sophie
It's only an issue when it's not dealt with or gets out of hand. Balance is relative, and - as I said - in traditional societies diviners are nearly always those considered 'mentally ill' by modern psychiatry.irisa said:And the major issue with bi-polar is exactly that lack of balance.
Forget 'not two bipolar people are the same' - that's a banal statement. No two people are the same, bipolar or not. But a higher-than-average number of bipolar people have deep connections with spirit.
The trouble is that in our society it's stigmatised and systematically medicalised. The idea that - like in traditional societies - there might be better ways of dealing with bipolar people and others who have other forms of mental difference just doesn't enter the crude Western mind. It's one way or no way. And since Western psychiatry doesn't recognise the reality of spirit and of divination, that potential gift is removed from them too.
As long as people who have different ways of experiencing the world from what is considered by spirit-denying psychiatry and our narrow-minded Western society to be the norm are stigmatised and labelled, as long as our society continues to reject them unless they are heavily medicalised into numb conformity, then their gifts will be hard for them to deal with, whether these gifts are genius in poetry, maths, or indeed, divination.
As for 'delusions' - how do we know someone is delusional? Who are we to judge? Some may be but some may really be encountering spirits! For the psychiatrists, it's all the same, because they don't believe in spirits and in the third eye. Wouldn't it be infinitely better to be able to investigate the gifts of their image-making brains (as potential shamans, diviners or other such spiritual intermediaries, for example) rather than label them as mentally incompetent to do something that is traditionally considered to be the province of those with a deep connection to spirit?
The day a psychiatrist decides who should or shouldn't touch tarot cards or become a diviner is the day I'll give up tarot - or go to the barricades. Enough. These people have successfully managed to medicalise 1/3 of the Western population at some point in their lives, and to stigmatise those who might be chosen by the gods as their mouthpiece. There is a good case to medicalise people who are a serious danger to themselves or others (provided the medication doesn't make matters worse!). But those people and their gifts need to be taken seriously, need to be respected for what they bring, not stigmatised for what, in the opinion of the psychiatric paradigm, they suffer from. And we need an end to the arrogance of the psychiatrists and neuroscientists for whom all spirit phenomena are brain glitsches.
Sad sad times we live in.
ETA: I have to add that such gifts need to be properly channelled and their owners trained in their use. That's the whole point of training under a diviner, which is how it's done in traditional societies. In our modern one, I can imagine that a gifted tarot reader and teacher, or some other serious spiritual teacher/shaman/magickal practitioner might take under her/his wing a person labelled 'mentally ill' to investigate their spiritual gifts and teach them how to use them well (which might mean - in their individual case - not reading for themselves when they are depressed; or at all)