Reality, A Many Splendored Thing...

... psychiatric diagnoses must take into consideration the cultural background of the patient. In the Western individual, such as one reared in the United States, a diagnosis of schizophrenia can be considered if the person presents bizarre delusions -- odd ideation or magical thinking, superstitiousness, clairvoyance, telepathy, "sixth sense", "others can feel my feelings", unusual perceptual experiences, sensing the presence of a force or person not actually present, delusions of being controlled with thought broadcasting, thought insertion or thought withdrawal...

... however, in the Yaqui Indian or the Haitian Vodouist, some of these remarks are part of their cultural construct, part of their own reality. We will see later the epistemological problems (reference to limits or validity of science) arising from the presentation of Vodou as neurosis or psychosis. Psychiatric diseases exist in all cultures, from neurosis and personality disorders to the major psychoses of schizophrenia and manic-depressive illnesses. The content of their presentation must be analyzed in the light of the cultural constructs. A mental disorder such as pathologic anxiety can be associated with some degree of breakdown in reality testing. Depersonalization disorder, a feeling that healthy people occasionally experience, may become frequent or prolonged feelings of unreality or of strangeness, such as the feeling of not being one's self; looking in a mirror and feeling as if one were seeing a stranger; being in familiar surroundings and interpreting everything as foreign or changed. In the nineteenth century, Pierre Janet described this feeling of irreality in the disease complex called psychasthenia, which is a milder form of breakdown in perception of reality compared to the total disruption of schizophrenia, a term introduced by Eugen Bleuler in 1911...


The Magic of Quantum Reality...

... we have already learned from the dialecticians that contradiction is not negation of reality. Contradictions and paradoxes are part of the make-up of the universe, like impermanence and the alteration of order and chaos. However, many intellectuals have tried to imprison the world within the confines of the Euclidean and Newtonian laws. The new principles have created an uproar. Briefly we can enumerate: the principle of indeterminism or uncertainty of Heisenberg; the principle of duality of Louis de Broglie; the principle of complementarity and the principle of correspondence of Niels Bohr; the superposition principle; the principle or law of least effort; the principle of ubiquity; the bidirectional arrow of time; the parallel universes; the tens or more dimensions of reality; the criss-crossing of the principles themselves; the Poincarré return; the objectivity of nature as determined by our subjectivity...

-- The Vodou Quantum Leap