If You Do Not Regard the Strange as Strange, the Strange Will Vanish of Itself
There are no miracles, only the routine.
— Zhou Youguang
During the days this August when I had a mental breakdown, once I went to dig the soil in my small vegetable garden, and as I dug I heard a splashing, fluid-shifting sound. I looked left and right; no one was watering nearby. In that moment I felt my hair stand on end, because digging earth should not produce a splashing sound. And at that time I was under enormous mental pressure; I began to suspect ghosts and spirits, feeling this must surely be an ill omen.
That morning, on my way to the garden, I had also heard someone in the park playing funeral music, which deepened my misgivings. Very anxiously I telephoned the most important people in my life, telling them not to go near water sources. I was then worried that this was a sixth sense warning me that something was about to happen to my loved ones; after the calls I remained highly tense. As an ordinarily strong-willed atheist, in that moment I too doubted the existence of gods. But in fact, from then until now, nothing has happened to any of my important relatives.
On National Day, I went again to dig in my small vegetable garden, and as I dug I once again heard exactly the same splashing sound as before. But by this time I was no longer depressed or anxious. I carefully analyzed the cause and finally figured it out: it turned out that my small vegetable plot was watered every one to three days, and each time I watered it thoroughly. So the deep soil of this small garden was very wet, and it was hardly surprising that digging produced a splashing sound.
Had I not heard the splashing sound a second time while digging, I might to this day still not understand the first one and would be inclined to regard it as a supernatural, mysterious phenomenon. But with the second splashing sound, I knew it was a natural phenomenon.
Even a convinced atheist like me, under the influence of intense inner grief, could experience this kind of doubting of ghosts and gods. So it is hardly surprising that mentally and mentally ill patients who are more psychologically fragile than I am often say in daily life that they see ghosts and spirits.
On Zhihu there was a patient with severe depression in the recovery period who drew how his room had felt to him during the depths of severe depression; at that time he felt his room was full of mysterious ghosts and spirits, and he could see them with perfect clarity. He accurately drew the images of these ghosts and spirits and even marked where each one was located. After he recovered with medication, those ghosts he had seen every day no longer existed; he himself became clear-headed and realized that everything he had seen before was an hallucination.
Many diseases can induce transient psychotic phenomena when the person is emotionally tense. When patients are in this state, they can see all kinds of visions and also hear voices; these are hallucinations and auditory hallucinations. Some see dead relatives; some see Guanyin Bodhisattva or other deities.
The folk "chuma xian" or shamans in our country exploit exactly this principle: through a method that stirs up the patient's emotions, they provoke hallucinations and auditory hallucinations. Some minor complaints may thereby be cured, but some hard-to-eradicate conditions easily become more severe because of these adverse influences. So this therapy, once popular, is now gradually abandoned because the risk is too great. The principal of my junior high school, in his later years, frequently summoned a chuma xian to perform rituals, and in the end went mad.
Speaking of the Guanyin Bodhisattva worshipped by us Chinese, this is purely a figure of Chinese folk imagination; she did not exist in history. If we understand the history of Buddhism, we should know that Guanyin Bodhisattva was originally called the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara and was a man, the son of a wheel-turning sage king. But through the Chinese folk telephone game of repeated mis-telling, he gradually became a female.
So if someone tells us they have seen Guanyin Bodhisattva, cannot we but wonder: the person who sees this female bodhisattva, who was itself a mis-told figure and never existed in history—are they not plainly having an hallucination? Moreover, if we study early Buddhist statuary, we will find that early Buddha images differ from today's; the Buddha images we see so vividly are purely hallucinations produced when we are in an extreme emotional state, and such hallucinations are unreal.
In fact, not only do the Confucian classics say that "the Master did not speak of prodigies, force, disorder, or gods"; orthodox Buddhism also does not permit wanton talk of supernatural powers. When the Buddha was alive he forbade his disciples from casually discussing psychic powers. Most of the sutras we see today are regarded as spurious scriptures, because they were compiled gradually by people hundreds of years after the Buddha's death. We can imagine how unreliable it is for people today to fabricate the words of an early-Qing-dynasty figure according to their own imagination. The early original Buddhist scriptures written in Pali consist of one philosophical parable after another, and much of their content differs greatly from the later Buddhist scriptures.
I used to read many Buddhist sutras, but now I gradually read only a few—The Sutra of Forty-two Sections, The Buddha's Last Teaching, The Dhammapada, and The Diamond Sutra—because these are recognized as the sutras closest to the Buddha's original meaning. The Sutra of Forty-two Sections is said to distill the essence of Buddhist doctrine; its content is as brief as Laozi's Daodejing and as plain as the Analects, and it speaks neither of ghosts nor gods, only simple, unadorned philosophy on how to conduct oneself and how to be free from spiritual suffering.
I also dabbled in divination and was quite surprised by a certain accuracy to it. But after further study I found that the ancient Chinese art of divination is truly a painstaking work of its original designers. Each hexagram corresponds to a personality trait; we can actually infer the major events that will occur in a person's life based on that person's personality traits, and even predict the ages at which various major events will occur. Developmental psychology and personality psychology both have precise summaries on this point.
If one has read monographs on personality psychology and then looks at the meaning behind the Zhouyi hexagrams, one finds with some surprise that there are many parallels. Our ancient ancestors had already conducted deep research on personality psychology, and this research was woven by the diviners into their art. It may be as the Bible says: there is nothing new under the sun. The content of personality psychology we study today was already summed up by people thousands of years ago, just not as precisely as now.
If we find a psychiatrist to give the patient a full psychological test, then diagnose the patient's problems based on the results, and then infer the patient's behavior from the general patterns of those disorders, the accuracy will be much higher than divination. But formal psychiatrists do not do this; they help patients treat their illnesses, improve their quality of life, and change their fate.
Many of my cancer patients have had their fortunes told; some were accurate, some were not. Some fortune-tellers asserted how long the patient could live, but with effective treatment the patient's survival far exceeded the span the fortune-teller had predicted.
Recently I saw that a certain female celebrity had divorced again and married for the third time. I noticed that each of her marriages lasted only seven years. I strongly suspect this celebrity has some personality disorder that prevents her from maintaining long-term intimate relationships. I also noticed that some fortune-tellers, when reading on relationships, like to use seven years as a period; and a phrase we often hear is that there is a seven-year itch between husband and wife. This shows that in male-female relationships, the seventh year is a hurdle; those who can cross it cross it, and those who cannot get stuck in year seven.
People who are fragile and sensitive easily become fatalists and easily experience transient hallucinations when emotionally agitated. But after standard scientific treatment, these patients no longer have such symptoms. The most typical example is schizophrenia: patients often have hallucinations and auditory hallucinations, but after taking antischizophrenic medication they become normal people, no longer have similar symptoms, and can work normally.
So when a person is ill, it is easy for them, through self-doubt and psychological suggestion, to produce all kinds of very abnormal thoughts. At such times family members must have a certain steadiness and grounding and not follow the patient's thinking. They must uphold the principle of "if you do not regard the strange as strange, the strange will vanish of itself," and bring the patient to scientific, standardized treatment. Once treatment succeeds, the patient will no longer have these hallucinations. One must on no account abandon standardized treatment because of such hallucinations, for in the end that will only harm the patient and destroy the family's happiness.