I asked the Buddhist monk who led the five day meditation retreat I recently attended about my voices during one of the fifteen minute interviews he held for one-on-one questions from retreat participants. Of course, I wanted to know what Buddhism has to say about the origin or cause of my voices. He said the voices are products of my own mind – which is exactly the “party line” of what Western medical professionals such as doctors and psychiatrists say. This morning I’m feeling really frustrated by that response. Does the monk mean the voices are a product of my own mind, in the same way that Buddhist philosophy says the world itself is a product of the mind’s own sense perceptions? That’s not a useful thing to say in the least. I thought perhaps thinking of my voice’s as my own mental phenomenon might free me from feeling victimized by them, that it might help me feel some sense of control over them, some sense that there’s something within my power I can do to quiet them. It has done none of the above, and has left me feeling bitter and resentful towards rational thought systems, such as Western medicine and Buddhism, neither of which have any useful explanations and neither of which understand my voices, what they are or why they’re there or how to stop them, and yet can get away with throwing the whole problem back in my face, and making it, essentially, all my fault. That seems like a cheap, underhanded trick of logic to me: we don’t know, so therefore you must know. It would be fine to say the voices are products of my own mind if I could learn to control or lessen their effect, but to say such a thing when they’re actually beyond my control, which day in and day out for seven years now is what appears to be the case from my experience and singular vantage point on the issue, seems rather cruel.