My personal experience is of course subjective, but the beginning of channeling is experienced as a type of schizophrenia. I had a spontaneous shamanic activation (a term I even came across months later) almost 5 years ago. It wasn’t completely spontaneous as in the months leading to the event I would spend a considerable amount of time pondering in my head about the world and my place in it, and occasionally I would “hear” an answer to the questions I posed for myself. “Sounded” like me, but shockingly didn’t come from any part of my human brain which left me puzzled. It started slow, but the frequency of “hearing” answers increased to such a level that I searched for symptoms of schizophrenia. Of course at almost 35 yo and without family history, I didn’t fit the profile. Besides, it was just a single voice and it wasn’t telling me to harm myself or others - instead it was helping as the answers were on point. As it turned out, I was talking to myself… The whole experience still made me question if schizophrenia is just a symptom of “antenna” activation before the person is mentally mature enough to filter the incoming information and gets hijacked by STS. Just my two cents in hopes that it helps someone.
When I first had a hallucinatory, abduction experience, at 17, I didn't talk about it. I didn't think about it but I didn't of course forget it.
I simply didn't have any place in my world view to put it.
I didn't want anyone to think I was crazy, but privately I thought, f, I'm schizo.
For me it was a time of incredible emotional upheaval and wild sometimes transformative intensity. With major depression, the separation was formative not immiadiate, happening painfully over a number of years.
The answer, of course, is to develop nous, something I've never heard of.
That I have the power to love, that I have the responsibility, faith, to protect myself.
And it is within this Christian faith, in the heart, that I see, not here, a type of schizophrenia that is like a fanatical scar tissue covering up, but not truly healing in response to waking up to the terror of the situation. Still, with all the rampant drug use and manufactured terror it's understandable.
But it isn't just in the fundies.
Lefty ideology hides it's hysteria in a divisive attempt to seek comfort in ideologic security. There's no healing from that.
But in all this there is the social fabric that does provide healing.
Families, children, laughter, security that is transformative whether unconscious and for me more and more learning and being conscious of.