Hortensia de los Santos

Seeker of Ancient Echoes

The Mind Beyond the Veil

In honor of a soul who walked among stars and shadows

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Schizophrenia—Illness or Initiation?

What Is Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is classified by modern medicine as a severe mental disorder affecting thought, perception, emotion, and behavior. Its symptoms often include auditory hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, and a distorted sense of reality. It typically appears in early adulthood and affects about 1 in 100 people worldwide.

Scientific Viewpoint

Neurological research associates schizophrenia with:
- • Dopamine and glutamate imbalances that alter perception and salience.
- • Overactivity in the Default Mode Network (DMN), responsible for self-referential thinking and inner dialogue.
- • Auditory cortex activation without external stimuli, leading to voices that feel real.
Treatment
- treatments usually involve antipsychotic medications, which may reduce symptoms but often blunt the emotional and intellectual life of the person affected.
- Psychotherapy and social support are crucial but underutilized.
A Forgotten Lens: Ancient Cultures
In many Indigenous and ancient traditions, schizophrenia-like states were not seen as illness but as a spiritual threshold:
- • Shamans were initiated through dreams, voices, and visions that today would be diagnosed as psychosis.
- • In India, such experiences could be seen as kundalini awakenings—a sacred energy rising in the body, dangerous if unmanaged, powerful if guided.
- • Greek philosophers spoke of “divine madness,” a state through which prophecy, poetry, and wisdom flowed.
These cultures did not medicate the visionary—they mentored them. They saw the fragile mind not as broken, but as open to realms most never reach.

The Modern Dilemma
Today, we fear what we do not understand. People with schizophrenia are too often abandoned, institutionalized, or silenced. Their experiences are dismissed rather than interpreted. The spiritual, symbolic, and existential dimensions of their suffering—and their insight—are rarely explored. What if we are not dealing with a broken brain… but with a portal without a guide?

For the One Who Held the Cosmos

She sat in silence, once, in the corner of a classroom— not absent, but watching from somewhere deeper. While we chased beauty and laughter, she listened to something none of us could hear. Later, she mapped the heavens. Equations were her brushstrokes, and galaxies, her grammar. She reached for the origin of light with hands no one had taught how to tremble. Then the world called her sick. They labeled her with names colder than any star. They locked the doors and silenced the voices that might have been messengers from the edges of the known. Had she been born in another place— beneath temple bells or beside sacred fires— she might have been called a seer, a vessel of Shakti, a walker between realms. But instead, she suffered. Thirty years, she said. Forty. And I, her friend, had no answer but the only one that mattered: I stayed. Now a stroke has stolen letters and numbers— but it cannot erase the constellations engraved in her soul. She was not mad. She was wide open. And the world, too narrow to understand her, called her broken. But I remember. And I will say it plainly now: She was a door the universe opened— and we forgot how to step through.

Schizophrenia—Illness or Initiation?

What Is Schizophrenia?

Scientific Viewpoint

A Forgotten Lens: Ancient Cultures

The Modern Dilemma

For the One Who Held the Cosmos