The shaman and I continued to chat while Chris underwent his treatment. I learned all kinds of interesting things. Many of her clients and course trainees live in and around Amsterdam, where there is a high number of young people who have misaligned assemblage points due to drug use.

She has treated a number of epilepsy patients and cited one patient, a male in his late fifties, who had been an epileptic most of his life. He had many seizures during a typical day and, each time, his assemblage point would be jerked out of its central position and drop into the stomach area. He needed many treatments to his assemblage point before it gradually settled. With no change to his medication, he has been free from seizures for two years and was able to drive again.

We chatted further about the healing properties of stones and then Chris’s treatment was finished and it was time to go. “What changes can we expect in the next few weeks?” I asked.

“You may begin to notice that Chris becomes more emotionally expressive,” she suggested. “You may begin to notice that he walks taller and has a better complexion.”

Her last remark was immediately prophetic. As Chris walked along the garden path back to the car, he walked in a way I hadn’t seem him do for years. Taller and with confidence. His face, which was always rather pale and yet much improved with the niacinamide, began to flood with color. I was amazed.

Back at home, I got to thinking about assemblage points splitting around the age of ten. I recalled a recent spooky experience of finding Chris alone and hallucinating in our darkened apartment and I began to reflect on an incident that happened to Chris in the park ten years earlier, when he was eleven. I was at home on a Saturday morning when Chris came running in from the park, clearly panicked. He hardly ever ran, so this itself was unusual. He locked all the doors on the ground floor of the house and pulled all the shades shut. He kept peering out, as if someone was coming to get him. I asked him what was the matter and he replied “some bullies are after me.” I chalked it up at the time to just one of those things that happens to children his age, and let it go at that.

Now, something about Chris being in a darkened apartment and looking spooked, prompted me to ask him about the park incident all those years ago.

Signs of schizophrenia back then? I hadn’t recognized them. Was it significant that it might have started that long ago? Now when I questioned Chris about what had happened in the park with the “bullies” all those years ago, he finally leveled with me.

“Mom, I don’t want to say much about it except that I saw a spaceship land in the park and I saw extraterrestrials get out and they were chasing me!”

The prophet Ezekiel had a similar experience to what we could refer to as an extraterrestrial encounter. He described it instead as “the word of the Lord” coming directly into him. He saw a whirlwind and fire, and four creatures with wings and a wheeled vehicle thundering down from the sky. “The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel . . . This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one that spake.”

I could worry about Chris’s revelation, or I could deconstruct my fear, as was beginning to become a habit with me. Did it mean he was sicker than I imagined since this had been going on so long? So he had signs of schizophrenia when he was eleven. It would be odd to think that schizophrenia just pops up all of a sudden at seventeen or eighteen. Did it mean he couldn’t get well? I doubted it. Maybe a more reassuring explanation is that he had experienced God.

Quantum physicists have another explanation, one which I believe is complementary to the knowledge of the existence of God. They believe that extraterrestrial experiences are hallucinations, or altered states of awareness that are “parallel universes” to our everyday reality. Parallel universes are almost identical to our own but weirdly different in some way, like the comic book planet of Bizarro World. Science fiction writers have relied on this quirky theme for years. Peter K. Chadwick, in a paper delivered to the Scientific and Medical Network, stated that schizophrenia might be understood if you considered that “genuine spiritual and paranormal forces operate on the person at least during and perhaps before and after their schizophrenic illness and that the realization and acceptance of this should form an important part of the treatment and rehabilitation process for such patients.” What many people call “paranormal,” a quantum physicist might say is simply the limits of the current knowledge of the universe.

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Peter K. Chadwick, “Is there an ‘X Factor’ in Schizophrenic Illness?” http://www.scimednet.org/Articles/MHchadwick.htm