Sanity and madness....
(letter to Christine)
ITS MAD TO BE SANE
The world as we have made it is an apology for a temple. Every man and woman, whether they know it or feel it or not, is driven by one unflagging desire: to know and be themselves. This is the force that has such pressure that it encapsulates the vastness of life into sperm and egg fusing. It is the same force again that drives that cellular cluster spinning in the womb to proliferate, differentiate and become, you, me, anyone: a conscious being capable of knowing the truth, expressing the truth, living the truth.
The world as we have made it is nothing but the delirious expression of that compelling force confused, distorted, corrupted by our conditioned ignorance and cultural insanity: the sense of being apart, separate, independent, opposed to it all. This illusion is the root of all existential confusion, all suffering. Yet it is well guarded, by the endless battalions of ghosts that are what remain of the deluded dead, binding us in mirages of momentary ‘realitys'. We, their inheritors, the people of the world, think that those other desires that drive us into bed with another, into the bar for a drink, into the office to increase our wealth, into the pentagon to accumulate power, is real: that it can satisfy us, if only we can get another, a little bit more, a little bit different, maybe tomorrow.
Even those who go to another temple, church, ashram, to accumulate merit, good karma, wisdom, play the same deceptive game. And what they all need, what we all need, to free us from this basic confusion, this corruption of our fundamental desire, of our true longing to be fully ourselves, to be one with it all, to know the breath of God in our own cells, is what there they call madness. We need to break down the armour of our sense of self, we need to tear away the fabric of our credentials, rip out the floorboards we have so neatly constructed to give our feet somewhere to only get stuck.
We must step outside the safety of knowledge and logic's inadequacy. We must be willing to face the pressure of reality's winds directly in the face. This we can only do by dropping the huge database of reference points we have accumulated the more accurately to process, and diminish, the world. We need to learn to look at the world with fresh eyes, to smell it with an open nose, to touch it with virgin fingertips, to hear it with innocent ears, to taste it with an innocent tongue. We need to be able to to forget the past, and the conceptual assumptions with which it has patterned our mind into a grid of psychological security to which we cling at the expense of knowing the world directly. We need to leave the safe, charted, comfortable world we have built up in our memories, and which we project onto the naked blades of reality with our assumptions, anticipations, expectations. We need to leave this common castle of sanity, where everything is in its place, and be ready to face the wilderness outside, the unknown savannah of uncertainty.
We need to totally, unflinchingly let go, again and again, every time we get to the ledge, and jump over into our fear, into our doubt, knowing that in fact it is madness we are jumping out of, and whatever comes can only be a refreshment, even if it does not yet quench our thirst. To go mad in this way, is to become sane, to break down is to heal, to fall apart is to coalesce into our deeper nature. It is not the madness of delusion in which we think we are something we are not. It is the madness of no delusions, no conventions, no agreement to paint reality with this colour or that. It is a seeing through the false notions of ourselves and the world, that though they may have some pragmatic value for human interchange, are nevertheless limited, and thus false, representations of reality.
For that is all a notion, an idea, a concept can be. A representation of reality. Reality is itself. It is something else altogether. The tree roots down into the earth sucking in mineral water regardless of our perception of it. And how many of us have actually known a tree. Have you examined the texture of bark with lips and fingers? Have you smelled its fragrances, admired the subtle curves of its branching, danced your eyes in the changing light of its foliage? Not so often. Yet, we all think we know perfectly well what a tree is. We are too used to the automatic labelling process of identifying and classifying phenomena. This becomes the world we inhabit, rather than that of Nature. We have retreated into a world of ideas, which acts as a screen, a filter between ourselves and the world of Nature, of reality.
Thinking that this is the real world is truly madness. Acting as if we know trees because we can recognise, classify and define them, is our common madness. A madness that has led to the precipitation of a global ecological crisis that may well be irreversible.
This false world that we have made in our minds, our books, our language, prevents us from knowing the real world. It prevents us from being at home in Nature and with its underlying subtleties. It prevents us from knowing the truth, knowing the Wholeness. It prevents us from knowing, from being ourselves. Rather than being at large in the unconstrained splendour of reality, we confine ourselves in the chains of a conceptual world. Rather than enjoying the unlimited freedom of our nature, we confine ourselves into a narrow, precarious definition of ourselves that offers no lasting satisfaction. Yet the pressure that encapsulates spirit in flesh, the call of the Wholeness in our mutating cells is relentless. No matter how organised and well balanced our conceptual world. No matter how much we subjugate the unpredictability of Nature to our will, something is always nagging at our inner selves. Something is missing. We keep looking for something else.
This is what drives us insane. This pressure to break out of the prison we have built for ourselves. When we do not release it in finding a way to face reality directly we are left in a collective madness of destruction, in which our needs and dreams, our planet and its resources are slowly eroded until there is nothing left but carcasses. When we do release it by finding a way past the filters of our mind we find the freedom to live in the heart of the world that invigorates us with a freshness, a vitality, and innocence that others might call madness, but is in fact the only sanity. It is the only way to not turn the very force that brought us here in upon itself in a loop of inescapable self destruction.
To become truly sane, we must go crazy. We must throw aside all attachment to convention. We must learn to enter into the marrow of life, the heart of the world, the majesty of being. This we can only do if we have the courage to let go of the protection, the ‘sanity’ of our minds and their comparative, dualistic logic. If we have the strength, the desire, the need, to meet life: face to face, heart to heart.