In recent times, the subject of consciousness has emerged as an important paradigm of scientific investigation and research despite most of its concerns having roots in philosophy, religion and occultism. What is consciousness? What is the substance of consciousness? Is it material or immaterial, mortal or immortal? How is it connected with a body? Has it a particular seat in any particular body as the brain does? Is consciousness synonymous with mind? Is it eternal and non-local? These questions have interested thinkers for many centuries. It is the object of this book to demonstrate, through a series of cases reported across the world at various times relating to many curious mind-related phenomena like the creation of mental entities, the imprints of indelible images on the human body, stigmata, birthmarks and bodily deformities corresponding to the injuries sustained in the previous life, thought-photography, materialization experiments etc., that: · Human mind can bring into being thought-forms and can exteriorize them, giving them some objective consistency. · There can be continuity of thoughts even after the destruction of the physical brain. · These psychic entities are sometimes given a kind of autonomy so that they may act and seemingly think without the consent or even knowledge of their creator. The book does not stop with the mere reproduction of recorded cases and just messaging the dimension of the problem, but extends over to solve it by suggesting a bio-holographic theory of body and mind. The book is alike novel, fun-filled, profound and useful, thus affording the blend of interest and instruction which cannot fail to render it interesting to the inquisitive and candid mind.

What is consciousness? What is the substance of consciousness? Is it material or immaterial, mortal or immortal? How is it connected with a body? Has it a particular seat in any particular body as the brain does? Is consciousness synonymous with mind? Is it eternal and non-local? These questions have interested thinkers for many centuries. It is the object of this book to demonstrate, through a series of cases reported across the world at various times relating to many curious mind-related phenomena like the creation of mental entities, the imprints of indelible images on the human body, stigmata, birthmarks and bodily deformities corresponding to the injuries sustained in the previous life, thought-photography, materialization experiments etc., that: Human mind can bring into being thought-forms and can exteriorize them, giving them some objective consistency.

Hallucinations, for most people, imply madness. But there are many different types of non-psychotic hallucination caused by various illnesses or injuries, by intoxication--even, for many people, by falling sleep. From the elementary geometrical shapes that we see when we rub our eyes to the complex swirls and blind spots and zigzags of a visual migraine, hallucination takes many forms. At a higher level, hallucinations associated with the altered states of consciousness that may come with sensory deprivation or certain brain disorders can lead to religious epiphanies or conversions. Drawing on a wealth of clinical examples from his own patients as well as historical and literary descriptions, Oliver Sacks investigates the fundamental differences and similarities of these many sorts of hallucinations, what they say about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture's folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all.

Inner Speech focuses on a familiar and yet mysterious element of our daily lives. In light of renewed interest in the general connections between thought, language, and consciousness, this anthology develops a number of important new theories about internal voices and raises questions about their nature and cognitive functions.

Psychopathology lies at the centre of effective psychiatric practice and mental health care, and Fish's Clinical Psychopathology has shaped the training and clinical practice of psychiatrists for over fifty years. The fourth edition of this modern classic presents the clinical descriptions and psychopathological insights of Fish's to a new generation of students and practitioners. It includes recent revisions of diagnostic classification systems, as well as new chapters that consider the controversies of classifying psychiatric disorder and the fundamental role and uses of psychopathology. Clear and readable, it provides concise descriptions of the signs and symptoms of mental illness and astute accounts of the varied manifestations of disordered psychological function, and is designed for use in clinical practice. An essential text for students of medicine, trainees in psychiatry and practising psychiatrists, it will also be useful to psychiatric nurses, mental health social workers and clinical psychologists.

A philosophical account of the structure of experience and how it depends on interpersonal relations, developed through a study of auditory verbal hallucinations and thought insertion. In Real Hallucinations, Matthew Ratcliffe offers a philosophical examination of the structure of human experience, its vulnerability to disruption, and how it is shaped by relations with other people. He focuses on the seemingly simple question of how we manage to distinguish among our experiences of perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. To answer this question, he first develops a detailed analysis of auditory verbal hallucinations (usually defined as hearing a voice in the absence of a speaker) and thought insertion (somehow experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's). He shows how thought insertion and many of those experiences labeled as “hallucinations” consist of disturbances in a person's sense of being in one type of intentional state rather than another. Ratcliffe goes on to argue that such experiences occur against a backdrop of less pronounced but wider-ranging alterations in the structure of intentionality. In so doing, he considers forms of experience associated with trauma, schizophrenia, and profound grief. The overall position arrived at is that experience has an essentially temporal structure, involving patterns of anticipation and fulfillment that are specific to types of intentional states and serve to distinguish them phenomenologically. Disturbances of this structure can lead to various kinds of anomalous experience. Importantly, anticipation-fulfillment patterns are sustained, regulated, and disrupted by interpersonal experience and interaction. It follows that the integrity of human experience, including the most basic sense of self, is inseparable from how we relate to other people and to the social world as a whole.