Hello Dave:

This is from P.M.H. Atwater's book "Beyond the light." Have you experienced something similar? Reminds me of higher self in a disk/oversoul sense.

Starting on page 109:

"Regression sessions serve only one purpose, I came to realize, and that is to assist the client in gaining detachment and perspective.

Then I happened upon the human soul. It was most unusual how that occurred. The soul just  "popped in" and took over a session one day, surprising me, and changing the "rules" I thought applicable to hypnosis.

After this first encounter, I discovered that the soul, anyone's soul, is unlike any individual or personality type or supposed incarnation. It is unique unto itself. I came to recognize the soul as an objective and loving source of limitless knowledge. The room temperature would feel warmer when it emerged during a session, and the client would seem to glow. Advice would be given either for the prostrate client, for me, or for another not present. The soul never limited itself or played favorites. Sometimes discourses would issue forth on life and its purpose--gentle, effective discourses that seemed somehow awesome and sacred. The soul's voice, no matter from what client, nearly always sounded the same or similar. It is without identity, eternal, yet personal enough to offer valuable insight about what seems mundane.

Soon after this discovery I closed my practice. Prospective clients preferred finding something to blame their problems on, rather than opening up to the voice of their own soul. ...

Years later, I was reading a professional journal when I saw mention of Inner Self Helper, or ISH, that was identified in the treatment of multiple personality disorders. Using hypnosis, therapists had at times been able to isolate a peculiar "voice" that was unlike any of the patient's varied personalities. Stating that it was eternal, the voice had no identity, was compassionate and loving, gave objective advice for the patient's best interests, and would guide and instruct the therapist--rather than the other way around. The ISH seemed to be the central organizing "core" of the individual's essence. I smiled when I read that, thinking counselors had at last encountered what had once surprised me so long ago--the very real power of the human soul (or, as they termed it, the ISH).""

Albert

Wow, great, recoverer! I have been looking for something like this a long time. I will get this book. Thank you very much!
Like I was telling Alysia, things are really coming through now.

Boris:

You're welcome. An interesting thing about Atwater's book is that she interviewed about 3,000 near death experiencers. Unlike other studies, she found that one out of seven people had a negative experience (which sometimes evolved into a positive experience). She found that people who had negative experiences always had an issue with either anger, fear or guilt (sometimes a combination).  She also found that people had negative experiences, because this is what they needed.

My feeling is that near death experiences aren't influenced by our psychological limitations alone, but also by what we need to experience and what we need to share with others. Regarding sharing with others, just as people need to have different types of NDEs, different people need to read about different types of NDEs.


Boris wrote on Sep 25^th, 2007 at 1:46pm:

Wow, great, recoverer! I have been looking for something like this a long time. I will get this book. Thank you very much! Like I was telling Alysia, things are really coming through now.

Sounds a bit like channeling, with the difference that it seems not to be such a personal being like often in traditional channelings.
Anyway, the question is what is this "soul" and this "inner self helper", what relationship is there to the individuum? Is it the higher self? Or the higher self of all higher selves? Or is it something like the "wise core" of someone?

And yes, have others come across this? If not, then maybe it's the hypnosis-style of Atwater which triggered this, so then we had to know how she did it.

Spooky

Just wondering,

Does anyone know if ATwater is related to the Atwater who's a director of something at TMI?  If so, maybe he, the TMI Atwater, would know how she interpreted it.

Bets

Spooky:

The ISH/multiple personality part suggests that others have run accross it. I can't say anything definite about what is contacted. Atwater gives the impression that a soul came through unexpectantly. The rest of the book speaks about other things.

Here are some more thoughts.

When I read parts of the story of Sybil, it occurred to me that perhaps multiple personalities are sometimes created by a higher self so a person can deal with a very difficult lifetime. Attached is an article by a person who has visited Bruce's site, and he expresses the same possibility at the end of his article. Neither of us state we know for certain.

http://www.qnet.com/~bklug/test/peamg1.htm

I looked up inner self help and found the below article.

http://www.dissociation.com/index/Definition/

Below is a key part of the article.

Characteristics of the Inner Self Helper (ISH)

A. Prime Directive of the ISH is to keep patient alive until her Life Plan is completed and fulfilled. The ISH will prevent suicide in any way possible.

B. Has no date of origin; has always been present.

C. Can only agape love; is incapable of hatred.

D. Has awareness of and belief in "The Creator."

E. Is aware that the Celestial Intelligent Energy (CIE) put her in charge of teaching this person how to live and move forward properly.

F. Is able to work on the inside of the patient's mind, as co-therapist, while the human therapist works on the outside.

G. Knows all about history of patient and can predict short term future.

H. Possesses no personal sense of gender identity, but will assume either gender the therapist is comfortable with.

I. Talks intellectually instead of emotionally, carefully chooses precise words, speaks in short concise sentences; prefers to answer questions; gives enigmatic instructions. ("Teach her humility today.")

J. Avoids using slang; does not have the capacity for put-downs or guilt-trips.

K. Is aware of patient's past lifetimes.

Hi Albert-
Two immediate thoughts, my practice, and Ramana Maharshi.

In my own practice I work with the "soul" as it manifests through the medium of the present day physicl embodiment. Like any musical instrument, there is need of a "sonding board", and the body offers the apropriate and convenient apparatus. The abstract nature of that with which I work is usually undefined, but would fit in with common ideas. Placement in the cosmic hierarchy seems to be somewhere between the everyday level of experiences, and direct awareness of God. The session might have been called in order to deal with smekind of past life trauma, fixation or other issues, but once in awareness of the "spirit world", the viewpoint is free to move about the entirety of "inner space". In the usual case, the location of God is in the middle of a lot of light and activity that is some distance from the viewpoint as it moves about the rest of the spirtual space.

I've never worked with multiples, and my efforts with schizophrenics has been unsuccessful. The personality structure is interesting, but I have yet to clarify it, even for myself.

While I have done little with respect to direct access to Godhead, I very often use an analogy in which people go to a Library, Magic Shop, Warehouse or other place in which one can "read the book of your life", or a good habit can be bought for the price of giving up a bad habit. I usually suggest looking for "the one in charge", and then afterwards point out that in the spirit world there is only one entity in charge, but at that moment, in the guise of a Librarian, Storekeeper or whatever.

The only part of the "soul" that seems to be more or less constant, at least to my mind, is the part at the very root, where it attaches to Godhead, which is what is commonly acessed under the name of "Higher Self". That carries both the idea of God and also of person-hood, and seems to exist as a sort of projection that has not quite crystallized into a life form. All the rest is tied to some kind of material extension.

It is this "Higher Self" that I address when I suggest that a person, "Go back to a place at the Beginning, or just before, and sense the Creative Joy bursting forth, the Infinite Understanding, and total uncompromised Love. - And now, as the world forms, select a place and lifestyle for yourself." (Or sometimes with spcific instructions, such as to forgive, release pain etc.)

Because this is, in its ultimate nature, a way to view God, it is impossible to give materially limiting properties, like size, shape, appearance etc. Functionally, however, it seems to work as desired, providing only that the person accepts God.

I'm not sure that this answers your question, but this is what I've experienced.
dave

Thank you for the answer Dave. My guess is that whatever it is that answers, is flexible about how it is referred to. The important thing is that answers are received.  That which answers cares very much about the one being helped.

When it comes to multiple personalities, I figure none of the personalities represent the original personality. Perhaps when it comes to schizophrenics, the original personality becomes confused. Must be hard to work with a self that is confused.

Difficult and very frustrating!

Multiples seem to be pretty easily produced - usually severe sexual abuse coupled with intensely frightening bodily threat evokes a personality fragment that declares something like "I can take it, and you can't conquer me," after which, if it has enough resources to sustain a stream of consciousness, it becomes permanent. I've seen one case in which there was "almost" a multiple, and which receded when the threat was detoxifed in therapy.

Schizophrenics give me the impression of partial personalities that are calling up remote personality fragments in order to be whole. I get the impression of a piece of fabric with gaping holes, and rips. The fragments that occur, not the core presenting personality, always seem totally negative toward the presenting personality, as if they deeply resent that the person made some poor choices and has failed to maintain integration. This might occur if a large amount of the personality is based on self-contradictory actions (like "making peace" by killing people, or "making love" through rape) which take out chunks of the personality system as they self-destruct. (The pain of having them burnt up in the lake of fire is not a far fetched analogy. Consider the lake to be the brimstone around Gehenna, and the self-destructive factor to be like tossing various defective parts of the person onto the dump heap there.) Then all that's left is prior personality states with which to fill in some of the gaps, and these are always cruder and less caring than the present state, hence more likely to be hostile. This fits the usual expression of the schizophrenic as being a pastiche or collage of poorly integrated fragments.

To my mind, it is a truly heroic thing for a soul to reincarnate as a schizophrenic etc. Yet when we face our own errors in the presence of God, the sense of love is so intense that it forces us to seek to reform and perfect ourselves. That's one heavy load of "reform and perfect" that these guys take on.

dave

Yes Dave, I am not in your field, but it is interesting to hear you, a professional, cofirm some conclusions I reached from my contact with schizophrenics.
Various parts of the mind become disconnected from each other and the whole, and thoughts do not go through the process of being modified in the appropriate part of the mind/soul. Like an impulse will not be orperly tempered by further checking. Some normal facilities seem to be missing.

They also seem as if they are dreaming while awake, and cant tell the dream from reality.

Improvement comes from some reintegration.

Reintegration?

OK Boris - If you have any insight into how to accomplish that I'd be very happy to learn it. As far as I've gotten, it seems that in a totally calm, quiet, safe place, and maybe secluded from external stimulii, there's a chance for meaningful conversation with many schizophrenics who are not being medicated. But their range of emotional tolerance seems to be extremely narrow, and I've yet to find a way to broaden it.  Intead, any minor disruption tends to generalize to everything and chaos erupts.

Those that are medicated are more or less numbed, so they can interact in the present moment, but only with part of their faculties. And even for them, all the drugs do is interfere with the panic aspect, and not with the underlying crazy experience.

I had a patient once who recalled being "crazy" for a lifetime as a way to get out of the karmic rat race, but she also was unhappy that it didn't do anything but waste a life. She just sat in the sun and played with her dolls for fifty or sixty years. She resisted being contacted during that period, and as I recall, her present problems in this life were associated with interactions of some kind.

There is some evidence that heroin might be useful for schizophrenics because it can overload some of the receptors for catecholamines, more or less forcing a stable state for a few hours - and I suppose that one could argue that opiates have the virtue of reminding you to take the next dose.  :-)  

This is something I once looked into, with the idea of using DXM instead, since its addictive propensity is slight and withdrawal trivial. For high function borderline schiz there is some justification of this idea, but that's about all I could discover. On the other hand, DXM intoxication is hardly the most enjoyable state, between the nausea, lack of steadiness, and hallucinations. And there's the sweaty secretions that smell strongly like cat urine. Even the late Terrance McKenna said, "DXM is a lousy high." I can't argue with that.

There are times that I speculate about the fate of people whose personalities are built around murder, rape, war, torture, and so on. Those are the parts that presumably "fall off" in transition. But maybe if we can get enough documentation about this kind of thing some day people will think twice before acting in a hostile manner.

dave

Interesting stuff. I've no proper knowledge of the topic but the reality is presumably that most of us are to some degree schizophrenic. My own experience (described elsewhere) of getting sucked into a persona that sought conventional business and career success above all as a result of my buying into conditioning was surely headed in this direction.

I was lucky enough that I probably never quite got deeply enough into the dream to loose total touch with myself, but it's presumably the case that that's what happens to many - they get lost in separate dreams, and toggle between them depending on circumstances. It presumably explains the apparent inhumanity of many too.

Society seems to often define maturity as immersion in a persona of this sort to the point where often awareness of true self is lost - it then goes on to build up all sorts of convoluted rationales to justify the resulting behaviour. (like making hereos of people acting against their normal compassionate instincts)

Another example is possibly the way we unconsciously toggle between personae or whole suites of behaviour patterns depending on circumstances. Dominant in one situation, manipulative in another, subservient in another and so on.

Buddhist teaching argues that loving treatment and meditation are the way out of this situation. That meditation and the absence of external triggers creates the space and insight in the mind that's needed to get below the critical stress levels and see through the circumstances that trigger the sub personae. Which if not activated and fed energy will then die off over time.

Not sure how workable this might be for a seriously ill person though, especially since it requires a fair degree of motivation and persistence. Not to mention an incredibly caring and giving support structure.....

As I went through the kundalini unfoldment process, fragments of mind that were suppressed came to life. Some of these fragments were completely irrational and functioned according to their own little World of programming. They couldn't be reasoned with because their programming was as it was.  They would latch onto whatever thoughts are similar.

The key to overcoming them wasn't to transform them, but to see that there is no point in providing them with the energy that allows them to come to life. They are provided with energy when they are believed in, considered important, and resultantly provided with attention.

One way I overcame them is by sitting down with a pen and notepad, and writing down all the reasons they are false. After doing so I would first intellectually determine if my conclusions about their being false were true. This confirmed that I discerned them correctly. Next I would "feel" how I don't need to become involved with them. This enabled me to dissassociate myself from them at the heart level.  For some fragments this process would have to be gone through several times. Overcoming these fragments was more than a process of negation. It was also a matter of determining what the positive side of a story is.

Since this post is about ISH, I believe it is appropriate to add that my higher self provided me with lots of assistance when I overcame these unwanted fragments of mind.  It used methods such as asleep dreams, waking dreams, symbolic visual messages, thoughts, and out of body experiences. These methods provided me with various perspectives.

A key factor is that I was willing to admit that some of my fragments of mind are false.  Even then it took some effort. If a schizophrenic person isn't able to get to the point where he or she is willing to admit that unwanted thought patterns are false, I don't see how he or she can overcome them.  

One thing I found is that fragments of mind can come from all kinds of places. For example, you might watch something in a movie you consciously don't agree with, but a part of your mind will take notice and form an unconsious fragment. When this fragment no longer stays suppressed and is brought to life when something you experience stimulates it to come to life, you'll find out that a way of thinking exists within you that is quite contrary to how you ordinarilly think. It can be quite unerving when this takes place.

I've heard that schizophrenics tend to spin out imaginary Worlds according to what they've learned and experienced throughout their life. Hopefully they haven't done something such as watch a lot of horror movies, because this is the type of imagined reality their mind will create.

I'm in agreement with Vajra and R, but it seems useful to point out that the kind of logic used in everyday reality is "secondary process".  This is rational in nature and allows us to form abstractions, intermediate levels of truth or partial applicability of ideas. We learn to act in this way somewhere in the first year or so.

Those whose chemistry and internal wiring prevents secondary process from developing fully have to make do with "primary process", which is emotional logic. This is nominal in nature, and has no ability to abstract except to view other nominals as equivalent. Those who think in this manner have poor discriminatory apparatus because one nominal instance of eg. a typewriter is identical to all other instances of the same nominal, hence all typewriters are the same typewriter.

Secondary process leads to a state of hysteria if we allow ourselves to brood and fret about things, and can lead to the famous "nervous breakdown" when all our imaginary ego-supportive world collapses and we're left with reality.  The primary process equivaent is that the entire world becomes dangerous, and it is not possible to isolate the dangers.

The core "self" is thus very much evident in hysterical type function, which is how we all get along normally in problem solving. We fuss a bit, then we make changes, then we feel good (or fuss some more) and that's it. The core of personality is available, and if properly directed can regress into meditation where it resolves into a primary level as we enter samadhi.

For the schiz actor the core personality is only visible through gaps in the collage of rules, fears, habits, feelings and poorly integrated data - thus the same event may or may not be viewed as similar to its predecessor. Connections obvious to us may not be visible in schiz, because we can abstract details, some good, some middling, some unpleasant, while the schiz is forced to deal with the entire nominal chunk as a single indivisible fact with nothing but a global feeling attached to it. In a sense, the schiz state brings the entire afterlife state into the everyday world, and deals with it much as we deal wth stuff in dreams - not very well.

Hysterics are great - we normally operate in this general realm, and are more or less inclined to emotional  reactions. Therapy is essentially a matter of relaxing away interference so we can go on with life. Very simple.

Schiz is generally untreatable except with drugs. Shakuntala Modi (Remarkable Healings) claims to have developed a method of hypnotherapy for schiz, but I'm unable to replicate her findings, and therefor I wonder at their validity. Modi's approach is to view the hostile fragments or subpersonalities as demonic beings that use tools like psychic hammers, screws and nails to attack the person.  All I've been able to discover is that these are hostile essences of some sort, but they seem to me to be part of the actor's own repertoire.

Oh well - we do what we can. Fortunately, for cases with abrupt and severe onset, there is a very high probablity of equally abrupt and spontaneous remission.

d

Very interesting, Albert, Dave, and Vajra.
I find that what you are saying also helps me in organizing my
normal thought processes, by giving insight into how we think,
normally.

quote:
-------
I've heard that schizophrenics tend to spin out imaginary Worlds
according to what they've learned and experienced throughout their
life. Hopefully they haven't done something such as watch a lot of
horror movies, because this is the type of imagined reality their
mind will create.
-------

True. I have found that you can deal with this imaginary world by
feeding information to this imagination. Like, don't say, "you are
crazy, that is not how it is at all", rather give them a book to
read, or whatever, with the accurate information in it, and they
will weave this into their partly imaginary world, and with luck,
adjust or replace some of it. Your job then becomes the providing
of a corrective environment to counteract the false things coming
from their imagination. This of course is for a case where they are
not that far off, and are partly rational. I certainly don't envy
Dave and the cases he describes.

Telling them they are crazy may be a good idea some of the
time, but it is damaging to their ego, which is fragile, so they
will try to protect their ego or their mental structures. It may be
part of their imaginary world to insist they are not crazy, and
this can block some of the input they need. There may be a curious
flexibility that enables them to adapt something to fit a
contradictory idea to an inflexible idea.

I see examples of this in the thinking of "normal" people.
Like "God does things in strange ways" is a device, an adaption,
to help explain something that happens that would not be proper
for a good god. This enables retaining the rigid immovable idea of
a good god, in spite the reality of something bad that was allowed
to happen, like accidents, natural disasters or diseases.


What I deal with in the middle East is a kind of mass delusion,
that is culturally normal, and some of this thinking about
schizophrenia may be applied there also.There, the delusion is not
coming from a functionally disturbed mind, but from a cultural
delusion that is taught in religious schools called Madrassas.

Just wondering guys.

Is it that the schizo mind creates secondary views/personalities, but that they are not very well worked out or grounded in any coherent observable reality. And that they merge with each other and with primary perceptions too.

With the result of this 'mish mash' being that its responses to circumstances seem to a 'normal' person to be delusional or inappropriate?

Or is it as I'd thought that these secondary views while not very well grounded are very clearly partitioned   - to the point that it hops between them without being aware that this is happening. Giving rise to separation from primary perception, and the appearance of switching between distinct personalities?

Hysteria  is presumably the result of worry/loss of confidence in views. Is intensity a factor too - being a tendency to commit heavily to views?

::) Or have I got it all wrong?

quote:
-----------
"Or is it as I'd thought that these secondary views while not very
well grounded are very clearly partitioned   - to the point that it
hops between them without being aware that this is happening."
-----------

There can be some of each: various degrees, of clear partition with
awareness of the partition, or not much partition.

In multiple personality disorder, the partitions may be clear, such
that the person may go through a process to change personalities,
which may be deliberate and take a minute or less. Where you have a
mixture of schizophrenia and spirit attachment, it is hard to tell
which is which. The person may go through a process of allowing a
spirit to come in, which is a specific moment of change. This may
be well partitioned, so you know when the spirit enters of leaves.

But there can also be less partitioned situations, where the
person's imaginary life is mixed in with their ordinary real life,
such that the division between what is real and what is imaginary
is not clear.

Albert in his post described a moment of truth in which he began to
recognize which was real and which was false, and to define that
for himself. I am thinking that I should head toward that in the
case of a person I am dealing with. At the present this person
insists that her imaginary world is true. This is further
complicated by the possibility that some of it could sometimes be a
legitimate paranormal happening of some kind. That is, some of it
could be true. This is very difficult to sort out. I have to keep
picking up each piece of the puzzle and looking at it and wondering
what it means.

Ta Boris. So much for my naive sense that schizo means split personality and implies clear partitioning. ::)

That makes for an incredibly difficult diagnostic and treatment strategy situation - there's the possibility of a more or less infinitely mixed continuum of symptoms presenting. Kind of like what happens when most theories meet reality!

I wonder if instead of trying to describe the condition at the level of manifested symptoms (which it seems may be so complex as to be hard to draw any conclusions from) if it's a case of looking for some sort of root cause.

We talk blithely of love, wisdom and compassion, and that these originate via our connection to the Godhead. Which is a rather 'mythical' explanation to our Western ears. But is it possible as I think somebody has already suggested that the critical loving/sense making/discriminating capability does in fact come from some higher level. (e.g. is not brain generated at all, but is communicated by say quantum means from the zero point energy field)

Is it possible that schizo individuals either due to a physical brain impairment of some sort, or due to the blocking static caused by incredibly high (mis) perceived threat/stress levels and the resulting intellectual churn (or both as seems likely) are simply unable to access the source of this higher sense making capability?

Is it for example possible that they are simply a more extreme version of what is basically the normal untrained human state of mind? Most of us have to work hard with meditation and the like to get the mind calmed enough to create the opening for love to come through, but despite patches of loopiness we somehow instinctively have an urge to health. What if the schizo mind gets so isolated that it loses this compass almost entirely?

One very clear characteristic of the intellect/discursive part of mind is that it can by blocking out conflicting information and using selective logic decide (especially over time) that almost anything is true. We do this all the time when we selectively perceive situations to suit our pre-conceptions - e.g. they are all against me.

Basic sanity/objectivity/stability/lovingness are meanwhile very obviously increased by the calmness and space or slowing of compulsive thought brought about by meditation or other means.

Very high levels of mental intensity and churn can and do for sure 'deafen' us insofar as these higher abilities/feelings are concerned. (which feelings just emerge as 'knowing' - they are not the conclusion of any rational/intellectual process)

It's easy to see how (especially if mixed with some glitches in conventional discursive/intellectual logical processes) a mind in such a state of total isolation could go on to adopt some pretty inhuman and deluded views, and could be very hard to bring back....

A better interpretation of "schizophrenic" is "fragmentary mind", with the sense of a lot of islands of function, but little connectivity. This might reflect some of the neurological divisions of the brain's operation that have failed to integrate.

The model I use is based on the attitudes of the subpersonalities that emerge, whatever their origin might actually be. My impression is that the present day personality has gaps, holes, vacancies etc in certain areas. These seem to be filled by "not-self" fragments that state their intention as forcing the actor to live a good life, or otherwise, to self-destruct. They tend to be very limited in function, not well shaped personalities, as if they were called up from lifetimes long past when things were much more brutal.

Most schizophrenics have normally developed logical capability, but they seem to lack emotional stability. There is no way to "reason with them" or to "talk them out of it". The logic is generally clear that they are unhappy and need assistance, but everything is frightening, and that fear overrides the logic. The result is a generalized panic state that is called up by almost anything. Catatonics, as an example, appear to be so terrified that they are in "possum mode", their bodies frozen into immobility and abandoned to whatever degree is possible. When someone intrudes the usual response is a superhuman strength attack.

The closest I can suggest as an example is to imagine going through life while dreaming, unable to tell what is real, what is projected, and unable to organize thoughts, but being acutely fearful of existential destruction by unknown factors. Clusters of inappropriate random "clang associations" occur simply because they have some common factor, giving a world without boundaries or definitions. Just degrees of chaos. Being caught in a waking nightmare while in a delirium that prevents thought is a good analogy. The most competent can handle a shoping cart filled with tin cans etc, as well as a host of imaginary tormentors, and the rest simply can't cope.

There are two basic modalities of menta deviency. What we usualy think of is hysterical function, which amounts to brooding over something to excess, and then projecting a distorted world because the distortions feel better. We all do this to some extent - false pride is an example. And when the false pride is shown to be false, we go through a "breakdown", which means that we have to abandon our distortions and accept unpleasant reality. The same mechanism is used in meditation, but in that case we turn it so that the regeneration leads deeper into meditation, greater inner silence, and better definition and awareness of reality.

Bipolar types seem to be on the fringes of the same kind of delusional thought as schiz at times, but are grounded in a reality that is often hysterically depressed, or at the other extreme, might be manic, and feeling like God - and ready to "fix the world" even if it means killing off a lot of people. (The resemblance to certain politicians in the modern world is obvious. - We need a mental health screen for Presidential candidates. One example - overcoming a substance addiction is a good sign of potentially good character, but it is not a sign of resolution of the underlying mental factors causing the addiction. Bush's actions in office would have been pretty easily predictable if anyone had thought of matters in this maner.)

dave

:) Thank you very much for that Dave. I'm sorry guys if I've taken us down a more technical route than is interesting for most but i couldn't help flying the kite in the hope of gathering information on a topic that is to me very interesting...