Hearing Voices and Public Awareness

Public awareness is both a political and a mental health phrase and concept. It is also a psychological one. Whilst public awareness and social consciousness are usually described as something external to the individual mind and objective, there is also an internal and subjective experience of public awareness, and which is absorbed and exists in a dialectical relationship to the intellectual mind, feeling, and thinking.

I sometimes have discussions and debates with my positive voices, and one main function of these voices, is that they ask me questions about things that is based upon common sense and public thinking, and which I would otherwise not think of asking myself. The positive voices, critique and ask me to clarify some of the things I have written in my mental health articles, for the benefit of both subjective and objective public and intellectual understanding.

The questions the positive voices ask me, are unlike intellectual thinking, not of an individual nature, but are much more of a collective way of thinking, and when I am asked these questions by my positive voices, I am asked by a group of many positive voices, and these questions are then asked or represented individually by one, two, or three voices at different intervals.

As an intellectual, I am a lateral and not a common thinker, but I need this inner public awareness in order to think more in terms of how the actual public might or could respond to my ideas, discoveries, and writing, and to both bring knowledge to the public, and to bring some of my thinking, consciousness, and awareness more down to earth.

My positive voices often ask me very common sense but very relevant questions, and which again, I would otherwise not think of asking myself. Ideally, I need this kind of public debate in my actual social life in response to what I experience, think, and write, but I find that the actual
public are usually not willing to debate intellectually at all, or not willing to debate with intellectual people.

It is sometimes assumed by medical psychiatry that hearing voices is due to low intelligence, or due to a lower form or level of consciousness. In my experience of my own voices, and my experience and understanding of other voice hearers, I think that hearing voices can be due to both a higher and lower form of consciousness and awareness - simultaneously, and at different
times.

Whilst politically in mental health, we are often told about raising public awareness and social consciousness, and whilst I very much agree with doing this, I think we also need to be realistic about it, and to realise the higher process and dialectical interaction of higher and lower consciousness psychologically and socially.

I find that I have to lower my intellectual consciousness and awareness, in order to think in terms of common sense, and to debate and discuss with my positive voices, and which are like the voices of ordinary people. As a result of this interaction between my intellectual thinking and feeling and a common sense form of debate, I am able to once again raise my consciousness and awareness and come up with more intellectual thinking, discovery, and ideas.