Okay, I've wanted to fix this for weeks, but didn't feel like I was ready.

This is going to be a rather disorganized cluster of thoughts.

This is mostly directed at anndelise and pianosinger. But it might be of interest to anyone else who was involved in that other 'angry rant' thread. I just wanted this thread to be more peaceful this time since I'm not in the same mood I was in when I wrote the other. I'm putting this in the 'delta' section as a way of signalling that 1. it was mostly directed at a couple of deltas who I had been arguing with, although anyone else can still participate, and 2. I wanted to feel like I'm in my 'safety zone' where I'm surrounded by people who mostly understand me pretty easily and where we won't be fighting and arguing too much, hopefully.

I have to acknowledge a couple of things.

1. Some people have positive experiences with psychiatric drugs, and they don't have a lot of bad side effects, or if they do, they think it is worthwhile anyway because of the benefits.

2. Hypnotism and the placebo effect are two different things. Hypnotism can be useful. The placebo effect is a whole separate issue and I have to explain why I was talking about that and what it means to me.

Pianosinger had said that she herself was greatly helped by some drugs that broke her loose from being stuck in a bad situation. Anndelise had said that she works as a hypnotherapist (if I'm using the right word) and that the mind has great power to make the body do things that you would be surprised it can do.

This will probably be somewhat disorganized. I keep thinking of bits and pieces of things I wanted to say, and so it might come out in no particular order.

First, I was thinking about something that came up in the chatroom right around the time when I wrote that thread. We started talking about the 'ice man,' a guy who can tolerate extremely cold water. They say that he's able to do it by using some kind of mental technique.

When I hear about something like this, I don't explain it as being something mental. I explain it as something physical. If it were merely mental, then anybody could do it merely by wishing that they could. There has to be something different in that man's brain or body that lets him do that, and it's a physical difference, not a difference of beliefs, not a difference of how much will he uses to control his own body.

My personal experiences: I myself attempted to use self-hypnosis in the past. I've also attempted to use meditation. This is the reason why I say that hypnosis isn't very powerful. Hypnosis works for some people, but not very well for other people.

I was unable to focus mentally whenever I attempted to meditate. At the time, I didn't know what was happening. Later on I discovered that I am constantly being attacked by electronic weapons. That is the reason why I am unable to silence my mind and focus it myself.

I was just thinking about this today and I remembered a doctor who I went to several years ago. He monitored my brain waves and he told me that every so often, my brain would suddenly switch to REM sleep while I was awake. He was observing this happening on the monitor. Whenever I'm meditating, I experience 'zaps' where I suddenly hear bursts of noise, fall asleep suddenly and then wake up, see visual images, hear voices, or feel like a cattle prod just zapped me - an electric shock sensation. I suspect that those experiences are happening in the moments when my brain suddenly goes into REM sleep, and I believe those are the attacks, not something that my brain naturally does on its own.

Because of all that, because of my experiences with electronic harassment for the past several years, I myself am unable to use hypnosis or meditation. I also believe that everybody is vulnerable to being attacked and controlled, and so, as a result, hypnosis may be unreliable, or it sometimes won't work as well as it should.

This is an extremely long post. I'm going to break it up into several segments. The purpose of this was to make peace, mostly with pianosinger and anndelise, because of how we argued and never really resolved it, in the other 'angry rant: drugs cause suicide' thread. I'll put a few more post fragments up after this one.