Quote:
Originally Posted by TimMason
People can separate themselves from what - from the point of view that holds to a constant self - should be 'their' pain. When someone at a vaudou ceremony, for example, is possessed by one or another of the Loa, the possessed body can cut itself, eat broken glass, put its hand through fire and so on. The person who has been possessed feels no pain. So it is possible to have stories in which ongoing body-states are not registered as 'belonging to' the self.
Under Prozac or similar drugs, the medicated person will feel removed from the site at which feelings are encountered. I was prescribed one of these things - I don't recommend them at all, but then my need was very minor - and the feeling was one of dissociation from the self that I had built up. Instead of experiencing (psychological) pain, I became a bystander to pain that was happening to someone.
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Indeed, individuals can dissociate themselves from what would normally be thought of and experienced as "their" experience - some forms of meditation focus on precisely that. But doesn't the fact that these anomalous experiences are possible through medication, ritual and meditation, "altered" states of consciousness in some sense, tend to suggest that in the normal case there is no such dissociation. In fact, unwanted and repeated dissociation is considered to be a mental illness, (not wishing to open up
that discussion, but simply pointing to the difference between the normal case and anomalous cases).