Reading Tenebrae's blog entry today made Moriah pause to consider the difference in "symptoms" between inhabitation and psychosis. As those familiar with Moriah might already know or easily surmise, drawing this distinction and making it accessible and tangible to others has long been a major obsession with this one for a number of reasons both personal and general.
One key difference comes immediately to mind in regards to the experience of "voices". The psychotic or schizophrenic will be bombarded with voices telling them what to do, what others think or feel about him, etc. but these will be hallucinatory in nature, separate from their sense of "I", and will usually respond to proper medications designed to curtail them. Whereas the inhabited will experience a similar bombardment but "from within" -- enmeshed in and entwined with his sense of self and frequently (though not always) indistinguishable during takeover from his sense of "I" while still retaining the distinct "alien" and "invasive" feeling both maladies share in common -- but needless to say, in this experience, medication bes to no avail.
The schizophrenic gets bombarded with hallucinatory voices and responds to their input, either believing them or arguing against them, either obeying them or defying them. The inhabited (daimonizomai) gets bombarded as well, but also simultaneously seized upon by those forces which then cause the victim to involuntarily carry out their own biddings and/or be completely swallowed by the perceptions and interpretations thereof fed into his mind, at least for the duration of the overtaking. The inhabited may be aware he has been so seized even while the perceiving and acting becomes indistinguishable in origin or cause from the "self"-ness of the individual being used to perceive or execute it, but he remains utterly helpless by himself to break out of it or to make it stop entirely. He may wrestle for control of his faculties in response but he cannot by so doing terminate the experience itself.
The schizophrenic may feel some measure of compulsion, mild or potent, to do what the voices tell him to, but the inhabited has no such nice, clean process of consideration or consent. The same forces responsible for the bombardment of his senses and perceptions will simultaneously seize control of brain and body and forcibly render those bombardments into the sum total of the reality of all he perceives and does. Granted, the schizophrenic might suffer from delusions of external or "alien" control, but for the inhabited it bes no delusion but a real and present experience he cannot, in his own power, make cease.
The irony of these differences lie in the reversal of their origins from their experiential manifestations. The origin of a schizophrenic or psychotic person's distress comes from within himself, from his own brain chemistry, and yet it presents as if separate from himself. The origin of an inhabited person's distress comes from being victimized by beings wholly other and separate from himself and yet manifests during takeover as so enmeshed and blended with the "self" as to make it impossible to separate out during the experience in such a manner as to curtail the experience. The inhabited, while overtaken, receives the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and parsing processes of another mind not his own as if belonging entirely to his own, and executes the directives of that mind involuntarily, even against his own will, or what his will would be if he could separate self OUT from the experience long enough to first discern, then analyze, the differences between the invading, parasitic controlling agent and his own mind and heart. These can sometimes be analyzed later, but often the inhabited has no clue how, objectively speaking, he appears to think, feel or act in the eyes of others during times of active takeover. (Moriah typically refers to this phenomenon by saying "There bes no mirrors in the Abyss.")
One key difference comes immediately to mind in regards to the experience of "voices". The psychotic or schizophrenic will be bombarded with voices telling them what to do, what others think or feel about him, etc. but these will be hallucinatory in nature, separate from their sense of "I", and will usually respond to proper medications designed to curtail them. Whereas the inhabited will experience a similar bombardment but "from within" -- enmeshed in and entwined with his sense of self and frequently (though not always) indistinguishable during takeover from his sense of "I" while still retaining the distinct "alien" and "invasive" feeling both maladies share in common -- but needless to say, in this experience, medication bes to no avail.
The schizophrenic gets bombarded with hallucinatory voices and responds to their input, either believing them or arguing against them, either obeying them or defying them. The inhabited (daimonizomai) gets bombarded as well, but also simultaneously seized upon by those forces which then cause the victim to involuntarily carry out their own biddings and/or be completely swallowed by the perceptions and interpretations thereof fed into his mind, at least for the duration of the overtaking. The inhabited may be aware he has been so seized even while the perceiving and acting becomes indistinguishable in origin or cause from the "self"-ness of the individual being used to perceive or execute it, but he remains utterly helpless by himself to break out of it or to make it stop entirely. He may wrestle for control of his faculties in response but he cannot by so doing terminate the experience itself.
The schizophrenic may feel some measure of compulsion, mild or potent, to do what the voices tell him to, but the inhabited has no such nice, clean process of consideration or consent. The same forces responsible for the bombardment of his senses and perceptions will simultaneously seize control of brain and body and forcibly render those bombardments into the sum total of the reality of all he perceives and does. Granted, the schizophrenic might suffer from delusions of external or "alien" control, but for the inhabited it bes no delusion but a real and present experience he cannot, in his own power, make cease.
The irony of these differences lie in the reversal of their origins from their experiential manifestations. The origin of a schizophrenic or psychotic person's distress comes from within himself, from his own brain chemistry, and yet it presents as if separate from himself. The origin of an inhabited person's distress comes from being victimized by beings wholly other and separate from himself and yet manifests during takeover as so enmeshed and blended with the "self" as to make it impossible to separate out during the experience in such a manner as to curtail the experience. The inhabited, while overtaken, receives the thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and parsing processes of another mind not his own as if belonging entirely to his own, and executes the directives of that mind involuntarily, even against his own will, or what his will would be if he could separate self OUT from the experience long enough to first discern, then analyze, the differences between the invading, parasitic controlling agent and his own mind and heart. These can sometimes be analyzed later, but often the inhabited has no clue how, objectively speaking, he appears to think, feel or act in the eyes of others during times of active takeover. (Moriah typically refers to this phenomenon by saying "There bes no mirrors in the Abyss.")
