It's impossible to describe if you haven't been in such a state and don't know where to go. The contempt people have for you when you are on the street is unbearable. Compared to other places, people at HVRP loved me because many of them had been there. That turned out to the magic ingredient. The power of Love is remarkable.
“Legacy of R.D. Laing,” Michael Guy Thompson, on Madness Radio. Is psychosis a journey and a breakthrough to somewhere more authentic? Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing was a fierce critic of the mental health system, and saw madness as a rational adaptation to irrational family and social constraints. How are Laing’s provocative insights about politics and culture still relevant today?
They were considered nonsense when he first put them out, too. That's what happens when you challenge a field at its foundations.
The most famous of Laing's experiments was Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists (though presumably they didn't use those terms) would live together, and where the focus was on helping through simple presence and relationship rather than techniques or treatments. Here is a striking, even astonishing story from one of the houses Laing started after Kingsley Hall: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/11/living-one-r-d-laings-p.... I posted it here years ago, where it didn't get one upvote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6713259), but I still think it's one of the most interesting submissions I've made to HN.
The author of that piece, who at the time of the story was a young therapist enamored of Laing's approach, is now the founder of the new(ish) Gnosis Retreat Center in San Francisco, along with a bunch of other people who worked with Laing. Here he is talking about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4-lJWwwRc8#t=8m53s.
I think it's interesting that they are making a fresh start at reviving what Laing did, and that it's in San Francisco. That's why I posted this, though I certainly didn't mean to bork their server!
Gnosis literally means knowledge, but most often it is used to indicate mystical knowledge.
Also https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA1MQyM14pcKhu96Zr5e2WA
Not in Greek, though. I've never seen it used in English before, so I couldn't say about that.
This does not appear to be one of those, but rather is formed by a collection of psycotherapists, asking for rather sizable donations. Authentic gnosis will never have fees. These people have a 'free consultation' followed by $100 individual fees for family support, from what I can make out.
