In my experience religion/spirituality felt very much like controlled schizophrenia (or my experience felt like an unconstrained version of it to be precise.)
We had a discussion a while ago here (see my comment history) where I shared my experience of schizophrenia (through a drug-induced schizoaffective disorder which I subsequently got under control.)
I haven't read the book yet (it's on my Kindle by now though) but from what I've read it's very similar to that state of mind and, if that is so, then many 'mystics' actually do stil live that way.
In the schizophrenic consciousness God is very similar to the scientific method for today's consciousness: it's the most obvious and useful representation for reality.
Basically; if you integrate everything into a coherent worldview as a schizophrenic then you arrive at one of the gods; whether it's the teachings of Allah, Buddha or Jahweh.
It's essentially about defining your 'self' as 'the universe / all that is' and then following that path to it's eventual conclusion.
"Weirdly [...] the voices she hears are of a Christian-like "God"."
Not so weird if you get the causality around the right way. That such visions caused the idea of God is a much more parsimonious explanation than the reverse.
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That's so very, very true from what I can tell. It actually feels like a precursor to modern day thought; like a more basic/basal form of though/reasoning.
In a way it's more comprehensive than normal thought but it's also fundamentally incompatible with the current style of thinking though, because it brings us a much greater degree of being able to manipulate reality.
That reminds me I really still need to read the bicameral mind book...
As a recovered schizoaffective (bipolar with schizophrenic qualities in the ups and downs) I very much believe that schizophrenia reveals a lot about the brains inner wiring.
Schizophrenia is, from my experience, very much like autism. It is actually also along a spectrum; but more importantly: it's not even necessarily a bad thing.
Just like autistic people have started referring to normal people as 'neurotypical,' I'm fairly certain schizophrenics once used to be a very important part of society: the mystics.
From my personal experience schizophrenia is extreme pattern matching to the point of solipsistic union not with 'reality' but with all of your sensory inputs.
That might have to do with my personal experience, where there where not so much voices as an all encompassing ubermind which would manifest itself as a single voice which you would call 'intuition' but for me was more of deity.
One of the best sayings I've found since then is: 'The mystic swims in the same ocean the schizophrenic drowns in.'
In my experience religion/spirituality felt very much like controlled schizophrenia (or my experience felt like an unconstrained version of it to be precise.)