“People who’ve never been through depression might assume it’s just an extreme form of feeling low.
Don’t we all find that our daily activities can sometimes lose their sparkle? Yet, accounts of people with depression point in a different direction.
As another person said to the psychologist Dorothy Rowe, recorded in her book The Experience of Depression (1978):
‘I awoke into a different world. It was as though all had changed while I slept: that I awoke not into normal consciousness but into a nightmare.’ (…)
Neuroscientists and philosophers of consciousness have recently coined a new term – the global state of consciousness – to describe the structural properties of experience that varies between ordinary wakefulness, dreaming, the psychedelic state and the minimally conscious state.
These states are called ‘global’ because the whole of conscious experience is altered, not just a particular element.
The fine detail of what we experience in everyday waking life changes all the time (sounds, colours, odours all come and go), but the structure stays largely fixed:
I feel myself to be present in the world, at the centre of an integrated, coherent point of view; time carries on flowing at the same rate; space has the same geometric structure.
The global state is this overarching structure and ordinarily stays constant as particular experiences pass us by.
When we dream, take psychedelics or suffer a brain injury, this structure can be altered, and we enter a different global state.
Could depression belong in this family too?
What people with depression describe as their ‘world’ or their ‘nightmare’ might be a distinctive global state, in which some of the structural pillars of ordinary experience (such as the sense of self, space and time) are distorted.
Not a ‘dream’ or a ‘trip’, but a state that belongs in the same group. (…)
But why might psychedelic therapy work as a treatment for depression?
One common suggestion is that psychedelics provide individuals with an uninhibited space or window for insight and emotional release.
Yet the idea that depression is an altered state of consciousness suggests a different explanation: it could be that psychedelics work by forcing a transition between global states of consciousness.
First, they propel a depressed patient into a new state of consciousness, the psychedelic state.
At the end of the episode, the patient must transition out of it – but into what?
Perhaps, after a psychedelic trip, the patient can emerge into a state of ordinary consciousness, rather than the ‘nightmare’ of the depressed state.
The idea is that psychedelics might work to reset or reboot a patient’s global state of consciousness.
On this hypothesis, being depressed is like being stuck in a dream from which you cannot wake. Psychedelics are the jolt that finally wakes you up.”
We are unveiling a memorial to Marx and Engels, the leaders of the world workers’ revolution.
Humanity has for ages suffered and languished under the oppression of a tiny handful of exploiters who maltreated millions of laborers. But whereas the exploiters of an earlier period, the landowners, robbed and maltreated the peasant serfs, who were disunited, scattered and ignorant, the exploiters of the new period, the capitalists, came face to face with the vanguard of the downtrodden people, the urban, factory, industrial workers. They were united by the factory, they were enlightened by urban life, they were steeled by the common strike struggle and by revolutionary action.
It is to the great historic merit of Marx and Engels that they proved by scientific analysis the inevitability of capitalism’s collapse and its transition to communism, under which there will be no more exploitation of man by man.
It is to the great historic merit of Marx and Engels that they indicated to the workers of the world their role, their task, their mission, namely, to be the first to rise in the revolutionary struggle against capital and to rally around themselves in this struggle all working and exploited people.
We are living at a wonderful time, when this prophecy of the great socialists is beginning to be realized. We all see the dawn of the world socialist revolution of the proletariat breaking in several countries. The unspeakable horrors of the imperialist butchery of nations are everywhere evoking a heroic upsurge of the oppressed and multiplying their strength in the struggle for emancipation.
Let this memorial to Marx and Engels again and again remind the millions of workers and peasants that we are not alone in our struggle. Side by side with us the workers of more advanced countries are rising. Hard battles still lie ahead of them and us. In common struggle capitalist oppression will be broken, and socialism finally won!
Scenes like this are great, because they go into religious horror without making the entire faith evil. Having a demon plainly state that the bishop is an arsehole and deserves hell is always a good plot, especially when the demon IS correct.
a demon telling you god is not real or god doesent care about humanity is easy to shrug off as demons lieing
but a demon telling you god is real, god is good and god hates your guts quite literally puts the fear of god in you, especially when your about to find out if hes right in about 20 seconds
(From Netflix’s Castlevania, which is excellent.)
I love this show and this scene but also it just makes me think of this
This blog is mostly so I can vent my feelings and share my interests. Other than that, I am nothing special.
If you don't like Left Wing political thought and philosophy, all things related to horror, the supernatural, the grotesque, guns or the strange, then get the fuck out. I just warned you.
