Opinion No. Uniform Borrower Assistance Form: Fill & Download for Free

Uh, this question. The struggle is real and will definitely keep your stress level up and steal your sleep.I’ve been known to be thorough, so before we dive into the “solutions”, let’s look at the “problems”. All of this information is the product of a year and a half of research (7 months while being a student, the rest while I was still in my country), so many closed doors that I’m surprised my nose is not broken, 21 meetings with so many members of my faculty that I lost count and hundreds of emails that lead to nowhere:Your country of origin: This was my first obstacle to getting my education. If you come from a country with a significantly smaller economy than the US (probably 95% of countries in the world), you will be unable to request loans in your own nation that could cover the sum of money that the US (Ivy leagues in particular) charge for tuition. Just to put things into perspective. The costs of my tuition for a year at Yale are 10 times higher than the costs of my yearly tuition for undergrad in Chile. To be able to finance my education that way, I would have had to request for a mortgage (that of course they denied. I didn’t have a cosigner, I had a job that paid 4 dollars an hour, was going to stop working soon, and I was leaving the country. I was the definition of a financial liability). The few scholarships that my country gave weren’t an option for me either since my 3-year program made me ineligible for all of them (You could only apply for masters that lasted a maximum of 2 years from beginning to end).Costs of paperwork: Applying to a university in the US requires a pile of paperwork and standardized tests that cost a lot (a looot) of money, especially since I was coming from a country with a different native language. Two months worth of salaries working as a midwife to be exact. So I had to kiss most of my savings goodbye just to be considered (I risk I decided to take. I’m fully aware that I brought this to myself. No one forced me)Limited support from your University: If you’re an undergrad at Yale, you have access to many more funds than if you’re a grad student. I’m a grad student at one of the professional schools, and all professional schools are self-sustained, meaning that they don’t have full access to donations made to Yale University. The school does receive some donations since it’s small, but never as much as Yale University. Just to put this into perspective: The last Annual Report of Giving to Yale 2017–2018 listed 592.5 million dollars received between July, 2017 and June 2018, just in gifts and pledge payments, and 1.3 billion dollars in endowments.Lack of awareness of the reality of students in your situation: I’m also studying at a school that is not very familiar with low-income students, especially international ones. Faculty and staff are unprepared to deal with you (I once had to explain to a member of my school why getting a car was financially impossible for me. She answered by telling me that 2K couldn’t be that big of a deal and that my financial problems couldn’t be that bad if I still had good grades). They will also make you buy things without giving much thought to how that could be incompatible with your finances (like buying books and programs that cost 120 dollars, that you cannot just borrow because they come with quizzes that are a part of your final grade, or demanding you get a car, or increasing your costs of tuition without really thinking that someone wouldn’t be able to afford it or ask for more loans to pay for it).Limited support from your family: My immediate family is in no way considered poor in Chile (where they still live. I came to the US by myself). My extended family is poor, my parents are working class making a great salary for Chilean standards, but not for US standards (we wouldn't even be working class in the US). He already helps our families in Chile, and he does his best to help me in any way he can, but any support that comes from him (when I’m choking and absolutely need to accept it. My family always needs it more) is very limited. In fact, once my costs of tuition increased, the only option we had for months was to sell our family home (Something I was never going to let them do, and something they fought me relentlessly to be able to do. Luckily, it never came to that). Mostly, I keep them in the dark about most of it unless I have found a way to solve my problems. The guilt they feel, and their desire to support me means that they wouldn’t think twice before cutting their own expenses to give me some money, and as I said, their needs come first. I got into this problem all by myself.Lack of access to other forms of financial assistance: An an international student on an F1 visa, I don’t have access to federal loans and other scholarships since those are only open to nationals and/or residents. You can’t really work much either. My program discourages their students to work during the first year since the hours are not flexible and we had classes and clinical rotations 6 days a week. But even if you do, you can only be employed by the University, and can only work a maximum of 18 hours per week (restrictions that come attached to your visa status). You also don’t have the resume to apply to several types of jobs. Research positions (that were somehow more flexible) asked for published work in english (That I didn’t have since my thesis was written in Spanish), or an example of academic writing that I didn’t have either (It was also written in Spanish).Limited access to anything that requires a Social Security number, or a credit score: If you had no idea what credit score was, welcome to the club. I still don’t really know what that means. I was told I needed to start building one soon, and that I could do that with a credit card, but as an international student, you can’t apply to credit cards. Anything from a regular phone plan, to leasing a car or renting an apartment will also ask for a credit score and an SS number. So your options are drastically reduced.Now that you understand where I’m coming from, let’s go to the solutions:Special loans: Yale has a special loan for international students that require no cosigner and no credit score. They come with a hefty interest rate and a limitation to the maximum amount of money you can request. In my case, my loans covered the full cost of my tuition for the first year and about 65% of my tuition for the second and third year. That’s the only reason why I was able to study here.Scholarships: I have two scholarships that cover a part of my living expenses. These scholarships didn’t come easy. I was offered very little financial assistance once I was accepted. I had to send several emails a day to several people at Yale for about two weeks after getting my acceptance letter to finally get them. That’s the money that keeps a roof over my head, food on my table at least once a day, and the bills paid.Affordable housing: International students don’t have an option to rent from anyone. A credit score is a requirement I didn’t have, and New Haven, in particular, takes full advantage of the fact that they have a steady number of rotating people coming in and out in desperate need of housing, increasing their costs almost to NYC prices (Something I took into consideration before applying to a school. Believe it or not, New Haven had the lowest living expenses of all my options). That’s when off-campus housing came in. My university (like many others) has an association with many real state companies that will rent to students and scholars. The rates are not generally as convenient, but I was lucky to find a very small apartment that was “relatively” affordable. I will have to move soon since my building was sold and the new company will charge 230 USD more once my lease ends. But once you have rented at least once before, renting from other companies becomes a little (a tiny bit) easier.Affordable (or free) food and groceries: Cutting costs wherever you can is a creative process that helps a little. A lot of universities (unlike Yale) provide some form of “food scholarships” if you ask for them. In my case, I was given some free meals after asking for financial support for 7 months and for leftovers from the office that manages all diners at Yale (they denied my request). But you can find free food. I go to as many events as I can that offer meals for free (I’ve eaten so much pizza, cocktail sandwiches, and cookies this year. I also carry a Ziploc bag with me and take as many leftovers as they allow me to take. I once made it home with a whole catering tray and ate for 6 days). My classmates have also helped. They have given me a little of everything, from over-the-counter meds they didn’t use, to rolls of toilet paper, to perishable food that they wouldn’t be able to eat before leaving for spring break. One classmate has also taken me out to dinner once or twice.Donations, coupons and fast sales: I moved to a city with a different climate. I was used to rain and some chilly days, but never to freezing temperatures and snow. So I had to be smart. Buying a warm jacket for snow took two months of research (but I found one for 39 dollars. It’s original price was 220 USD), buying snowboots took 3 months of research (60 dollars for two pairs of LL Beam duck boots). I also walk a lot to buy groceries because I know exactly what stores have sales on things I buy regularly like coffee and shampoo. I carry two travel mugs with me at all times so I don’t have to buy a cup of coffee on the go. Two coats currently hanging in my wardrobe were donated second-hand by people. My microwave and toaster oven was a lucky find a week ago that someone threw away. I also ask to accompany classmates to bigger grocery stores where I know things are cheaper.Limiting/cutting expenses: I spent 2 months eating one meal a day to save money to cover costs I could not have been able to afford otherwise. I found ways to use the utilities included in my rent (for example, cooking gas is covered, electricity isn’t, so I rarely use a microwave now that I have one. I have spent months living without one, and only use pots and a stovetop espresso maker to heat food, milk and make coffee) I’m transparent whenever a classmate asks me to go out because those costs are luxuries I cannot afford (a few times people just ask me to come and invite me). I don’t buy anything I don’t absolutely need, and I have only indulged in restaurant food once or twice a month and only whenever they lower their prices (I’m certain I know almost all restaurants that put some type of special pricing, like lunch specials, and always get two, or ever three meals out of a single dish)Meetings, meetings and more meetings: Yale prides on their support to diversity and inclusion. Unfortunately, they do not put their money where their mouth is when it comes to grad students. I have had 21 meetings with members of my faculty to talk about my situation and look for help, mostly because everyone was sorry for me, but no one had a solution. So I was sent to one person that sent me to another, and another, and so on. I wonder if they were waiting for me to give up, but whenever need calls, giving up is not really an option. You do what you have to, and that’s exactly what I did. Nothing came out of it (yet), but making faculty aware of my situation helped to make them somehow aware (and gave me some questionable reputation I’m hoping won’t be used against me). Today, the most pressing financial issues are relatively solved (due to point 8), but I have not stopped. My 22nd meeting is just around the corner, since I stopped advocating for myself a long time ago, and began advocating for students in my position, just to see how far I could go. Giving meaning to this struggle is the one thing I have left to make this worth it, and if anything I do can somehow prevent another student from going through something similar, then all this will be worth it, even if it’s too late for me.Crowdfunding and building community: This was my life-saver. The first crowdfunding campaign I ever organized happened before I came here, when I was trying to show proof of finance to get my visa (a requirement. You need to match the sum of money given in your award letter once you’re accepted to get an F1 visa to the US). I got 10% of my goal (Thanks to so many Quorans, including Jonathan Brill, Tatiana Estévez, Stephanie V, Andrew Weill, Eivind and David S. Rose who gave made the biggest donations, matching the exact amount I was unable to cover in my award letter, and the money to pay for my visa application. Quorans who donated to my campaign were basically the reason I made it to the US). My second campaign was not organized by me. It was organized by Kim Scheinberg (I now call my fairy godmother) after reading one of my last answers about the Varsity bribe scandal (Camila S. Espinoza's answer to How do students at Ivy League schools feel about the Varsity Blues bribe scandal?). Many Quorans offered to donate to a campaign if I organized one in the comments. I didn’t make one, so she solved that problem for me, and helped me get 15,201 USD in donations (Also from Quorans) that covered all the extra costs of my tuition. Even GoFundMe, the company, donated 500 dollars to that campaign. Since I still have an 36K gap to cover for the next two years (18K per year), GoFundMe themselves and some Quorans have suggested I keep the campaign going and increase the goal (I’m open to opinions about it, since it feels like a massive abuse of people’s incredible generosity). They have become my very magical community of supporters after having no support, and I post regular updates on there to keep them informed of my whereabouts.This answer is long enough, so I’ll end it here. I hope it was informative. If you read through it without falling asleep, you have my eternal gratitude.

Icke and PhysicsI just watched a David Icke video in which he repeats his basic tenet that reality is “ just frequencies of vibration”. I don’t think “reality is just” anything since it seems too complex to be easily summarised in some gnomic statement. Unless you are a string theorist. But rather than just calling him mad, something I don’t like doing to anyone after having had it happen to me, I want to de-construct and comment more on his ideas. No ad hominem attacks or denigration such as one often hears.I believe that there is a world “out there” which is objectively real. We interpret reality and the interpretation is down to us, within our minds, but the thing we are interpreting is physical reality not a projection. We are bound to the physical world and part of our being is a mass of physical phenomena we call the body, from which our consciousness emerges. If you get knocked down by a car you really do get hurt, its not an illusion.If I look at something like a banana in my fridge and you call it “a fruit that grew on a tree” and I call it “what I’m having for supper” then we are pointing at different aspects of it and using different terms. But there is still an object out there that we are both looking at. So the mind doesn’t create reality it represents it. I don’t believe that I could turn the banana into an orange just by altering my internal representation of it by somehow adjusting thoughts. If I did this the banana wouldn’t change I’d just be making an error in what I saw. Incidentally this is very hard to do because a hallucination that is completely wrong as a picture of reality is almost unheard of when looking at physical objects. It is much more common to hallucinate social processes involving people, usually for emotional reasons. The chief example being the auditory hallucinations “hearing voices” in schizophrenia.He has also said that because reality is a projection, you get situations like the Jews having a “persecution complex” that creates actual oppression against them in the outside world. I don’t believe this. I personally will cling to the idea that there are objective things “out there” and that nothing in my mind can change that. Otherwise I’d just dream I had a million bucks in a golden pot and enjoy myself. But nothing I ever do in my mind can make that true unless I win the lottery or what have you. This is an example of the “you create your own reality” doctrine I have tracked among occult revivalists, new agers etc. It may be connected to a Buddhist concept that if one suffers bad karma, in some sense one asked for it.It is this misunderstanding about the nature of the mind that acts as a loose cornerstone for all his thinking.So consciousness is amazing but the universe is made of matter, energy, space and time, not shifting magical mind energies. Kant might disagree since he thought concepts of physics were inventions by the mind to render ineffable reality graspable. Or a pan psychist like Ben Goertzel. I don’t care. I go with Dr Johnson when he kicked a rock, that is real and no amount of philosophy can stop it being real. We can’t lotus up and spend eternity in Nirvana if there’s an asteroid about to smash into the earth. Some things are real. Common sense ! Its departure from my life meant insanity for me. More of that anon.But I know why he is saying this, and I sympathise for the following important reason. Social processes involving people are sometimes so complex that no-one can place one final objective interpretation on them. Our understanding of social realities is indeed mentally constructed, and a matter of interpretation. If Maria says something and it hurts my feelings, then what is primarily hurting me *is* my interpretation of what she said, as opposed to the actual vibrating air molecules hitting my ear which is what the sound of her voice really was. The sound hitting my ear is just information but the meaning I give it does originate in me. So I see a kind of near miss in what he is saying, he should just try and distinguish between the real nature of the universe and the nature of human beings socially constructed reality.Brains only evolved to create a slice through the immense complexity of the universe that specifically benefits the chances of survival of the possessor.There is an objective level out there, but because of complexity and chaos, we often only see one conditioned aspect of it. And no one can really say we are wrong , when a finite mind can’t get enough of an overview to resolve these complex human questions into one answer.Its true that the mind is crucial, for instance if i persist in thinking negatively and interpreting a situation as bad, I may get depressed and make myself ill, while another more positive thinker would breeze through it.But sociologically the thoughts and opinions of others do affect my reality, when I learn about them. If a group of politicians think people with my disability are scroungers then this does affect my life. In that sense their pictures of reality and mine conflict with each other, this is politics. But they don’t conflict because “consciousness is an energy field” that spreads from the mind, but because I am an interacting human who pays attention to the social world around me through my physical senses.I interact with their minds in my thoughts and in my movements and activities within the universe, and within the sub-sector of it that is the Earth where I live and the places I go in Britain. I possess mental models of others I know, and they in turn possess mental models of me, so our relating is socially constructed. But it all takes place on the stage of the physical real world. If mental models talk back to you independently you may need to think about seeing a doctor.If I become involved in an imaginary discussion with the politicians who want to cut my benefits and it gets so compelling that I can’t talk to the friend I’ve just bumped into in the street because I am preoccupied, then again this is moving closer towards a clinical situation.I also don’t believe in telepathy. If the thoughts of others affect my thoughts, then they do so through the physical embodiment of me hearing them speak, reading what they write, or in the last case just dialoguing with a model of them I hold in my mind. That model is an abstraction built from sense data I’ve experienced, so even if I feel I’m telepathic, which I sometimes do, ultimately it is just another inner dialogue on the inside of my head. If you can see that you are alone but you still think there is a voice or voices talking to you then something is getting hooky.One of the reasons the human environment is rich enough to have driven the emergence of the most powerful brain in the natural world is because we model the thoughts and feelings, attitudes and behaviours of other humans. Social animals like ants that can’t talk live in social worlds, but the total complexity wasn’t enough for evolution to drive the explosion of the frontal lobes like in humans. Most of our realities are socially constructed, and immensely complex. Of course this all may be merely an act of faith on my part because I am a devout acolyte of a notable modern fundamentalist religion called “The Scientific World-View”, but I don’t believe that myself, despite people who defend “spiritual” authors.In this matter he is using the word “mind” to equate to something pretty similar to what Buddhists call Maya – illusion, a concept inhertited from Hinduism. I think he’s making a reasonable point in most of it, which is simply that some aspects of how people construct reality is as if they are a bit delusional. But by mystifying consciousness as he does I think he is doing magical thinking. He also seems to be talking about a term I like which was originated by the psychologist Charles Tart, namely the “consensus trance”. Groups of people who share questionable cultural beliefs like “female circumcision is just necessary for health reasons”. But these are groups who need to be challenged with communication and debate.You could live a whole lifetime waiting and trying to wake up to “cosmic consciousness” where everything is perfect, and it wouldn’t happen. Don’t mean to sound cynical. And this “spiritual” set of beliefs is the hardest to challenge.During a conversation with a relative about UFOs, they once said that when the first trading ships arrived at the south sea islands the natives didn’t “see” them because coming from a near stone age culture they didn’t believe such a big ship was possible, they never dreamed that a ship could be in that place in that way. So they simply didn’t see them until men in boats arrived on their shore. They quote this as if it explains why some people can’t see UFOs – they just don’t believe its possible, so their mind censors it from awareness. Kind of a Philip K Dick thing. I don’t buy this myself. It’s also like the Empire Strikes Back where Yoda levitates Luke’s ship using the Force. Luke had tried and couldn’t do it, so Yoda did it, by lifting the ship out of the swamp. When Luke sees him do it he says “I don’t believe it” and then Yoda turns to him and says “that is why you fail…”What is crucial for David is that he tries to keep evolving his ideas towards a better grip on the truth, by responding to critics in debate. He seems able to change his mind and develop in some contexts but he still has the magical thinking which all stems from his incorrect view of the nature of the mind. If this magical thinking becomes melded with a grandiose conception that he is always right then the danger levels will rise a notch.I agree that “consciousness is about evolution”, but this happens slower and for the whole human race as we develop towards greater knowledge. “personal evolution” as an idea of New Agers is really a completely different use of the word, and much woolier. It may be that as science and technology improve we will find humanity with ever more power to live their dreams, perhaps in the future we will have powers that enhance our experience out of all recognition. If we get through the current sticking points of war and ecological destruction.So it is possible that the ultimate destiny of life in the universe is expansion of consciousness, freedom, satisfaction, infinite knowledge and wonder. But I disagree on how this is to come, it happens in long time periods as the knowledge and capabilities of the race as a whole evolves, and is not a question of pushing the right meditation bubbles and opening a psychic doorway to nirvana “just like that” in your “current lifetime”.Icke and Politics(Wrote this a while ago to an academic who published an article about Icke, but never sent it.)Dear Professor Douglas,I was interested in your comment in the 2011 Telegraph article “David Icke – would you believe it”.I am interested in this right now because Icke supports Brexit (which either will or will not have happened by the time you receive this…)I am a 45 yr old part time computer programmer with a curtailed university experience in Physics and Maths, then another in International Relations. My mother and sister are both lifelong “new agers”, and I have inherited a kind of ambivalence about some of the views that compose that belief system. I have read and watched a lot of the popular conspiracy material online, and mostly enjoyed the parts that didn’t veer too far from consensus reality, particularly the Adam Curtis “Century of the Self” documentary which is popular among conspiracy people, but which I am assuming is more factual than not.I approach Icke’s teachings as a kind of allegorical call to action phrased in a language which borrows from mythology, and so perhaps is kind of fact/fiction hybrid. So that when he refers to “Reptilians” he is using an almost schizophrenic metaphor that depends on the perceptions as followsreptile = inhumaninhuman = cruelilluminati = ruling class“the ruling class are cruel”=> “the illuminati are reptiles”or also“I was humiliated on television aired to millions of viewers”as“TV emits an evil psychic field that destroys our spiritual potential”This is how delusions work because they are often “re-figurings” or “re-statements” of real things in a different way. So, again, the human mind of the delusional person is still trying to express thoughts about reality. But the process has gone awry.I have to say personally I feel a sense of liking for the man, perhaps because of my upbringing by such a mum as I describe above. But wrong physics and wrong reasoning should put me on my guard.I am interested that people who use the word “spiritual” about themselves have gravitated towards Icke, and I notice that since he is Brexit, there has been a kind of mingling of camps between different groups like Tea Party and UKIP also, as well as a lot of people who believe in “spiritual awakening” also starting to use conspiracy theories as part of their thing too. I get a lot of this on my facebook feed.I am surprised that the “spiritual” and anti-organised religion people aren’t coming to the conclusion that social values like equality and fighting injustice, which seem to be “spiritual” or “humane”, are actually stressed more by the Left than by the Brexit people and the alt right.I enjoyed Oscar Wilde’s writing about Socialism which really shows that Socialism is more “Christian” than its alternative. So that if Spiritual means “ethically concerned with living a good life”, why are these self avowed so-called spiritual people getting drawn into the far right? If they are fighting negative forces why do they opt for a politics that stems from the darkness of paranoia?I know that Hitler was essentially a kind of new-ager, holding a panoply of occult beliefs, a vegetarian etc.When I look at this I feel an irony that a community of people who say they are “waking up” are actually “going to sleep” if you take the usual implication of the wake vs sleep metaphor (perhaps thanks to Gurdjieff), that understanding the truth, or reality, is to be wakeful. While being deluded by lies is to be the opposite. It is an ancient rhetorical device.Really this growth in people believing they are “spiritual” in that usage is more dangerous to our world than first appears, in the same way that mindfulness training seminars may cause a percentage of psychotic breaks in participants. Or that cutting out carbohydrates causes kidney stones. Or that denying your children vaccinations threatens their lives. Or that denying yourself the chance to seek sympathy during difficult life events because you are “being negative” is unhelpful. Any of these kinds of misconception that are going around on social media.It is obviously connected with the internet too, because the dissemination of freely available and generated information can enlighten but it can also spread rumours. Having instant answers for any question can free the mind but it can also lull you into laziness and failing to practise critical thinking. Icke and all those people are on average heavier internet users. Again ironic when the inventor of http saw it as a way for physicists to communicate.So this is about scientific education too where the ability to form hypotheses and eliminate unfit ones is crucial for our world. It is important in a way that stretches beyond what some would think was merely about “The Sciences”. That implies debate, where ideas can be criticised, not being hurt and offended by someone who contradicts you, then just resenting them and framing the view that they are “negative”.I am currently a combination atheist and agnostic, and the agnostic bit has evolved to help me with communication and averting conflict when I talk with people about this kind of thing. To say I don’t know is softer than implying “I disagree and the consequence of my belief is that I have to conclude you are wrong”. A big heavy triggering word “wrong”. But in a soft way I don’t mind Icke saying that the elite super-rich world potentates are conspiring, because loosely I have some sympathies. I also defend his right to talk about deep personal (or so-called “spiritual”) insights and choices without being ridiculed, as with what happened on Wogan. Then there is the impossibility of not being partially subconsciously influenced by my mother for whom aliens (grays, nordics, reptilians) were a big part of “reality” as I grew. (The best refutation of UFOs in my view is the correlation between the universality of camera-phone ownership and the reduction in the quantity of any proposed hard evidence.)Then there is also an interest in Quantum and other Physics, although Icke does make a mess out of those, but again you can be tolerant and enjoy an attitude best embodied in a kind of Douglas Adams approach, where the Cosmos “may surprise you yet”… Or turn out to have a sense of humour. So that is also a kind of agnostic adaptation I have formed to help with conflict.I’d like to thank you for the tolerance in your statement to the papers, this is something I have had to develop with my family situation, and many friends who are self declared “spiritual” in this way.Yours sincerely,LukeWhy I had to think about thisThe reason I write like this is because of personal experiences of being delusional, and the subsequent journey back to reality that I negotiated. I’ll explain more.It is not to me an act of vanity in my view to pose oneself the question that one might be the Messiah. Or “Axis of the Age”, “Chosen One”, etc. Nor is it a personal process that should be kept secret as if it were some strange occult mystery whose spell would be broken if the secret were ever told, or if you see 7 magpies! if a person becomes delusional (I’ve met many) it is better for them to speak to someone, either a friend or a professional, about it than not. I imagine many people went through partly similar enthusiasms at the turning of the last millennium too, in the year 1000, by the way. One thing is sure, David Icke is not remaining silent!I tortured myself with this inner struggle for years, and hardly spoke about it. I struggled to try to practise risky acts of virtuous behaviour in terms of helping others as much as I could, sometimes inappropriately. I tried to think compassionate thoughts and laboured for the establishment of equality among all people. But then the thoughts turned darker and I began to suffer fears “what if I should fail?” I wondered if I would become like Annekin Skywalker who was meant to be the chosen one, but turned to evil. “This is what will come to pass if you are to fail, Frodo”. I had been entrusted with the guiding role of humanity and I had failed. I began to feel guilty, and to fear Hell-fire on account of my betrayal.I was the “Shiemash in Universe VI”. I got this from a Gurdjieff book. I was “The Disembodiment of the Word”. Really weird stuff. As a Psychiatrist would have it “Bizarre Ideation”.It worsened when I began to associate with an ex-boyfriend of my sister who was involved in a “spiritual group” who practised Kabbalah. I met the guru at the centre of it and when he first saw me he spoke some kind of oath in Hebrew. I took this as a sign that I had a special destiny, again “destiny” being a word that should be treated with care. It is often combined with the kind of mystical attitude of which the usually harmless Star Wars movies show. My illness was beginning, although I didn’t know this then.There had been a physicist from some London Uni at the meeting I attended and she was challenging them. The teachings were rather like a very complicated system of astrology, based around the Tree of Life. I was trying to “awaken”. It became interleaved with all the delusions caused by my mental condition, and was very bad for me in the end. Smoking pot sadly worsened it also.My mother used to want to become a Sufi, after she read all the books of a British author called Idries Shah, who was criticised by respectable authors as being a charlatan. She also became interested in the guru Gurdjieff and was a member of another spiritual group led by a guru named Mervyn who claimed to be able to instruct you to “wake up from sleep”. I have known several people whose schizophrenia was fundamentally connected to their involvement with groups like this, or books such as one sees promising “spiritual growth”. One person I knew had an obsession with Gurdjieff’s teachings and eventually committed suicide, sadly. Gurdjieff groups are often places where psychological bullying to “break down” a person’s “ego defences” happens.I cannot say which came first, the madness or the spiritual ideas, but in my understanding they are interlocked in mutual feedback. If psychosis is defined as a loss of contact with reality then it is important to add that these traits are actually distributed across the whole population. No one is ever 100% psychotic, and no one is ever 0% or completely and perfectly in touch with reality. Does believing in a falsehood constitute a symptom? These are grey areas which illustrate that psychosis is not black and white, something you either have or don’t have. Of course life would be easier for mentally ill people if everyone knew that, because the stigma and scapegoating with which we are sometimes face would reduce. It would reduce because more understanding means less prejudice and alarmism.Science proposes a form of extended common sense where theories are tested by experiment. This gives a feeling of reliability in a belief system where you are immersed in “The Natural“, which keeps us as safe as can be expected given our mortality. Spiritual teachings which claim to take you to a “place” where all conventional thought has broken down. You are naked in union with the infinite and its mystery so it is said. These kinds of “initiation” are very powerful transformational things that must be treated with caution. In these you are actually trying to be immersed in “The Supernatural“. If the supernatural was comprehensible it would not be called that, and so supposed experiences of it are likely to be disconcerting and scary. I think exploring this stuff is what destabilised Icke.Personally if I had to err, I would err on the side of total scepticism because my common sense world-view is part of my survival skills. To relinquish it completely, to be plunged into a bizarre world of portents, signs and spiritual agencies was completely terrifying to me. I would still state: There is no supernatural, all is natural and governed by the music of the spheres, or simply the laws of physics if you prefer.This is the safety of a rational world-view that someone delusional has to receive help in finding their way back to. Its not perfect safety, as we understand it organic life is not invulnerable. There is mortality. But through bitter experience I know that illness can amount to fear, pain and distress. If I was to wax lyrical about such a distressing subject I would suggest, given the possible harm schizophrenia can do to a person, I would change “fear” to “terror”, “pain” to “agony” and “distress” to “total crisis”. But still a common sense founded world-view is the best we can get if the mind is troubled. I really invest in this, having known “double figures” of friends or acquaintances lost to suicide, often connected with thought processes involving magic and spiritual topics. Try having a psychiatric unit as your primary source of social interaction for more than two decades - this can happen.So here to summarise I notice that despite my outpourings I have not directly answered the question as given. My short answer is that I am sure that Icke is delusional, but not as seriously as some cases. For one his behaviour has not grown problematic enough to necessitate involvement with the criminal justice system. Nor has he received compulsory psychiatric treatment. This is often likely in serious cases of psychosis. For another his ideas are bizarre, but I have seen worse. He does not self-harm, unless you count the couple of cans of Tennent’s Super he drinks after his lectures.So if the asker of the question felt kinship or sympathy with his ideas once then it is, to me, still more likely to be a minor intellectual sin of magical thinking than full blown psychosis. Furthermore the fact that the asker is prepared to consider whether they are delusional is evidence of personal insight, which is less present in real psychosis. The likelihood also depends on their age. The usual onset of schizophrenia is in young adulthood. Late-onset is rarer.But again, seek good mental health and personal help if you are in doubt. Challenge your own thoughts, seek to establish logic and critical thinking… form helpful relationships with people who assist you in all of the above. And write. Yes, that. I have hoped to show that with these tools you can come through it just about safely, as I have.References:Prose | PythonismTroubled Souls: Spirituality as a Mental Health Hazard