Paranoia or Awareness?

I think there's a state between paranoia and awareness that involves the best attributes of the two. "Wariness"; more than purely aware, and conscious of the perils or threats that may exist, without tipping over into full-blown paranoia and imagining all things as hazardous or dangerous.

Imagine these states on a sliding-scale....with pure awareness without filters on one end, ( can a video camera be considered aware? It captures all images effortlessly without filtering them through a perception bias.... ), on the other end is paranoia, perception run through distorted filters.

[edit on 19-2-2008 by MrPenny]

I'm attempting to give an examination from my experience in psychology [Psych minor ] and my own personal dive into the conspiracy world.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Skyfloating


I'm not saying do not explore the unknown, but do keep perspective when doing so.

reply to post by MrPenny


I think the idea of a scale works. I´ll be thinking about what an awareness-to-paranoia scale from 1 (sanity) to 10 (insanity) with paranoia at 8 and keen awareness at 5 might look like (well, Ive already started I guess).

Originally posted by benign.psychosis
I'm attempting to give an examination from my experience in psychology [Psych minor

] and my own personal dive into the conspiracy world.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Interesting stuff (should have gotten more responses). Care to break it down into one paragraph?

Originally posted by MitchMagic
I always think people are talking to me when I'm on the bus or something. Do I think I have some sort of gift? No... I think I simply have some disease that I am unaware of and have been blinded not to see it by my parents.

Some might call that mad!

If you mentioned any other transportation but a bus I would agree with you. However I do relate, I seriously think grey hound long trip busses and the sort might have secret riders to help people and what not.
I just had a conversation with a stripper about this kind of thing the other day.
Long bus trips seem to be so damn crazy for me I get way paranoid on bus trips. To the point where I checked myself into a psych ward once.
Not all of it is paranoia in my opinion.

Paranoia is by definition not being aware. It's when you're connecting dots that don't exist, due to reasons that have not basis in observed fact. If you think your neighbour is talking about you, and you have no evidence to support it, then you're being paranoid. Being aware doesn't even come into this. If you've got some sort of higher awareness super-ability, then you should be able to document your feelings and perform a scientific test on them.

If person A says something and person B says they're paranoid, it's most likely because person A hasn't demonstrated any evidence that suggests they're correct. Person C might chime in and say "oh that's spot-on!", but then they've forsaken the need for evidence in order to believe something they want to.

But as they say, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you

Originally posted by dave420
Paranoia is by definition not being aware. It's when you're connecting dots that don't exist, due to reasons that have not basis in observed fact.
If you think your neighbour is talking about you, and you have no evidence to support it, then you're being paranoid. Being aware doesn't even come into this. If you've got some sort of higher awareness super-ability, then you should be able to document your feelings and perform a scientific test on them.

Another poster (projectvxn) also hinted at this, but I have to disagree somehow.

If everything were based on observable facts (what I can see with my eyes) I´d make a lousy detective. I´d have to discount hunches, feelings, Precognitions, recognitions, ideas, speculation.

I once knew a woman who (rightly) knew her spouse was cheating on her, without a shred of evidence.

I have to admit this also makes me a bit angry. This is why the conspiracy-theorist gets a bit paranoid. We are always taught:

"Only what you see in front of your eyes is true. Nevermind the man behind the curtain".

In contradiction to that, we have thousands of people posting here saying "Only what is observable as a fact is true".

Truth is a come and go basis one mans truth is another mans paranoia, so in the equation will mankind go beyond his five senses to feel out intuitively his alive unknown universe is to be seen through you all.

One can gaze into existance without being biased because the enormity of that complex organism is beyond words.

Beyond the scope of vision is just a feeling and sensation..

Good thread.

This is an old thread. I'm in the backroom of ATS looking for something else and I stumbled on this. It's interesting so I"m going to bump it ahead and think about it before responding. *BUMP*