This is satori: to go into madness and yet not be mad.
- Rajneesh

Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings.... According to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense.
- Plato

Studies of rapid culture change show that the visionary experiences of prophets frequently contain images of the world disintegrating and being reabsorbed into chaos, which then allows a regeneration to occur.... Our fearsome "disorder" is merely nature's way of dismantling what was inadequate in the past, and in so doing allowing a new start. We would do well to let nature and the psyche do their work in their own tumultuous way.
- John Perry

To explore the relationship between spirituality and madness may appear at first to be simply a matter of comparing and contrasting those experiences that supposedly characterize each, with the ones lining up on the side of spirituality being “healthier” than those assembled behind the banner of madness. Such a division, however, is not very useful, since, as is becoming increasingly well-known, spiritual experiences can sometimes be terrifying and deluding, and psychotic experiences sometimes blissful and revelatory.

Roberto Venosa (www.venosa.com)

The experiences associated with each do not just overlap phenomenologically, but appear to be almost freely interchangeable on a multidimensional continuum of nonconventional experiential possibilities. To assign to spirituality the “nicer” or more socially acceptable experiences is to reduce spirituality not only to a particular set of experiences, but also to get mired in being spiritually correct, which itself is a kind of madness, regardless of how well dressed or deodorized it is (consider, for example, the spiritual constipation that arises when we, as serious meditators, think we’re sitting with our anger -- our intention supposedly being to calm and transform it -- when in fact we are actually only sitting on it).

I’ve got a couple of definitions of spirituality. First, the semi-academic one: Spirituality is immersion, however shallow, in teachings, intentions, and practices (which may be far from formal) adopted in order to establish or reestablish some degree of alignment or intimacy with what is taken to be “sacred” or “ultimate.” As such, spirituality may or may not be part of a particular religion; even an atheist may have a spiritual life.

Another, related definition: Spirituality is the cultivation of intimacy with What-Really-Matters. As such, spirituality is sacred detox.

Spirituality is Being in the subjective raw. Spirituality aligns us with That from Which we are already and forever inseparable. That is, spirituality Homes us.

Reality-unlocking breakthroughs -- the crown jewels of spiritual experience -- do not cut through the Mystery of the Real, but rather only affirm and deepen It.

Revelation, infused with a Wonder beyond wonder, outshines all explanation. And once again we reach the extreme edge of inquiry, the far frontier of questioning, and discover that Silence is the answer. A Silence without end, eloquent beyond all possible description.

Lone eagle floating so high across milky lapis sky, drifting like an escaped dream, riding a wave of everlasting morning.

In the sunburnt mahogany of its wingspan throbs a silence that dissolves the mind, a silence that answers all questions, a silence into which we have forever died so that we might truly live.

Spirituality opens us until we are openness itself. That opening, however, is not necessarily easy, for it asks everything of us. It is thus wise to not burden spirituality with the obligation to make us feel better.

Now the sky bled jagged and bulging black, streaked with ghostly wingprints, then began swelling and thunderously ripping, finally expelling an even denser sky, leaden and fumarolic, spread-eagled with escaped lungs and scaly wingflappers and desiccated visions. He, however, only kept up his pace, he of a thousand aliases, his every step tingling with tightly condensed attention and leggy warmth. He had come too far to even consider turning back.

The vermilion butte squatting upon the horizon must surely house the cave he sought -- had he not already seen its broken back, its shadowed rise, its bruised pit of promise and peril, in his dreams? Alone he walked, with both certainty and stubborn resolve, shielding himself from the venomous rain.

This quivering life, this shivering birth, ever delivering death and new breath, feasting upon itself, undressing every ambition and intention, making time out of every slumbering rhyme, walked him toward the foretold entrance. The cave was rumored to have a ceiling of cerulean slate inlaid with creamy quartz. But was it really a cave, a subterranean chamber for the escapee or the brave, a stony womb, a weatherproof tomb, a rough crucible for initiatory possibility?

Did it not, with alpine whisper and lowland mudmoans, hint ever so slightly of a floor of sunburnt marble, moccasined earth, planked strategy, carpeted smoke, unscratchable polyplastic? Did it not offer a starless sky, a muffler of excessive reach, all adrip with spider-wrapped stalactites? Did it not present a crude shelving and curving of cool walls, inviting his leaning and dreaming? More to the point, was it actually empty, or did it contain the fabled adversary he’d been born to face?

From atop the butte burst forth a war whoop, a battle scream, brilliantly aflame, trailing snowy gold tresses, bloody laurel wreaths, and tomorrow’s corpses. Radioactive winged lizards with humanoid craniums fluttered behind his forehead, pressing out the place between and just above his eyebrows, dryly screeching and scratching, digging with featherless blue abandon. It didn’t matter to him whether or not he was dreaming this or imagining it from the vantage point of another time. Now, nothing could be denied its reality.

Something far more real than verisimilitude was calling him. Spheroidal discs of incandescent brevity sliced open the madly pulsating, terribly alive sky, making way for a thickening stampede of not-yet-personalized fleshiness. Scalps, cheekbones, styrofoam organs, legless lusts, bronzed hype, sexy mannequins, dying babies, holy smiles, all descended in front of him, repeatedly appearing in oscillating, overlapping frames, capturing then eluding his attention. Self-authenticating transhuman chaos.

Even the sacred stillpoint was now but circumference to him. Suddenly the butte melted into a billowing upheaval of lava, shockingly red and sensual, its molten fingers slowdancing, welcoming him closer.

His gloried shield was now less than gossamer, a mere shadow of a veil webbing his skull and torso. There was no cave here, but only this boundless chaos, birthing an infinity of him’s and not-him’s with wild precision. This neverending extinction, this staggeringly prolific machinery of endless possibility, shone with -- and was never apart from -- What gave it Life. This was not his to know, but his to be. Its Mystery was his to embrace, his to breathe, his to love and be.

And still the sky bled, dripping with dawn, as he emptied his mind in a circle of blinking stone. Nothing had happened and everything had happened. The only way to even approach communicating this hyperbole-transcending realization was through a poetics that, making more than sense, used him to write, rewrite, and outwrite itself, until there was nothing left of him except what could never be lost.

In spirituality, there is -- sooner or later -- room for all that we are, including those phenomena commonly classified as psychotic or aberrant. As such, spirituality is not an attainment of any particular “I,” but rather is a transcending of every “I” or would-be self, a liberating of attention from the hire of that ego-governed coalition of habits that so insistently refers to itself as us. (Attention thus not only becomes more conscious, but also is not so committed to fixating on apparent objects, having at least some of its focus turned toward the source of attention -- thus activating the nondual sense of awareness being aware of itself.)

However, spirituality is not about premature (or ambition-driven) ego-transcendence, and nor does it necessarily require disengagement from everyday concerns, including those that are unabashedly ego-centered. Spirituality is sacred detox. In its all-pervading crucible are we all, learning slowly but surely to welcome its preparatory fires, which both burn through and illuminate the claiming-to-be-us pretensions of “I,” emptying us of our case of mistaken identity. A radical roast.

Spirituality is not an escape from Life’s difficulties, but rather a deliberate, open-eyed entry into and through them, a journey in which every spurned or dreaded “it” eventually becomes reclaimed us, reclaimed Life, reclaimed God. When at once deeply embodied and sky-like, spirituality can simultaneously ground and render transparent all the dimensions of experience, ever revealing, however partially, the identity of the supposed experiencer. Exposure beyond our wildest dreams.

This brings us to the notion of soul. By soul, I mean one’s personal essence, or that quality of individuality in which egoity is clearly and functionally peripheral to Being. As such, soul is simply the presence of individuated Being. That presence manifests as the personalizing of the “spiritual line” of development (or that line indicating one’s current sense of What-Really-Matters).

Soul is commonly thought of as being within us, but we -- as we commonly conceive of ourselves -- are within soul. Its profound interiority does not condense it, but rather expands the sphere of its reach; what has less depth than it simply becomes peripheral to it. And soul is not an entity, but a process.

Soul is the last frontier of individuality. Soul recognizes and is intimate with what lies beyond it, yet also remains intimate with the personal. Soul is the face, human and otherwise, of spirituality.

Myth the body, sky the mind, undying the love
Cradled and wrapped in neverborn Mystery
Trailing star-clouds of speechless history
Into the room come we
Through the lovers’ dying cries, through endless goodbyes,
Through lagoons of spurting night, through recycled fright
Resting in the blazing black of an unforgetting eye
Making more self
Seeded so dark and so light
Myth the body, sky the mind, undying the love
Soul dating a deeper rhyme
The room outgrowing its every design
Seating us everywhere, positioning us nowhere
And how the passages pulse and gleam
With the long-awaited rendezvous
Seethrough shadows dying for a look
Our need to know moaning blue and gone
Dissolved in our undreaming eyes
Silence has so much to say
Love feasting on us with us
Until we can no longer stand apart

F. Rassouli ( www.rassouli.com )

Madness is also a journey into what underlies consensus reality, but it lacks, at least most of the time, the reassuringly concrete centralization of conventional egoity, and is also largely bereft -- or has too slippery a grasp -- of the stabilizing, self-transcending overview of spirituality. The authors of Synopsis of Psychiatry define psychosis as meaning “grossly impaired in reality testing.” But which reality? Can sanity and insanity be distinguished, and if so, how? And by whom? It is far from a given that those with supposed expertise in making such a distinction can actually do so (see Note 1 at the end of this essay).

Those possessed by madness have left the consensual trance of their culture (which may itself be collectively psychotic), but have only replaced it with another, largely compensatory trance populated by unconventional or bizarre -- yet nonetheless often still historically coherent -- representations of the culture or environment left behind.

As illogical as it may seem to be, madness has its own logic, its own internal consistency, which can be teased out into sufficient coherency, if we will but leave rationality’s playpens for a larger arena, under the skies of which intuition, bare awareness, and transrational logic dance sweet and deep.

In madness, the labyrinth has been entered, but without Ariadne’s thread -- attention wanders, dazed and mostly unconscious (and often quite disembodied), through hallucinatory culs-de-sac, moving in and out of various identities and roles, buffeted by waves of emotion.

Yet is this not, to varying degrees, what is actually going on within almost all of us, much of the time? If we were to observe all of our thoughts and fantasies and intentions for one hour -- a far from easy task -- just how much coherence and sanity would we find? How much automaticity would we notice? How frequently would certain thoughts be enlarged, complicated, argued with,reconstructed, or believed? How often would we act as if a particular role was actually us? And what might we discover in-between our more familiar or everyday thoughts?

The truly bizarre, just like the usual us, is but a thought away. Our own madness is even closer.

When a person goes mad, a profound transposition of his position in relation to all domains of being occurs. His center of experience moves from ego to Self. Mundane time becomes merely anecdotal, only the eternal matters. The madman is, however, confused. He muddles ego with Self, inner with outer, natural and supernatural ... Nevertheless, he often can be to us, even through his profound wretchedness and disintegration, the hierophant of the sacred.
- R. D. Laing

Perhaps, if we can but listen, and listen with more than just our mind and everyday ear, we might meet our crazed shadowselves at least halfway, reaching for them not with straitjackets and psychiatric frames, but with a spirit of genuine caring, interest, discriminative intelligence, and integrative passion.

In the very disintegration of madness, the going-to-pieces fracturing and delusion and disorientation -- which I do not intend to at all romanticize -- there may be unsuspected treasure. Through the rubble and cracks can come intimations of the truly sacred, signals that cut or shine through the deadening security to which so many of us cling. In the sense that madness simply externalizes and dramatizes -- however bizarrely -- what we, the supposedly normal, are tending to internalize and suppress, it provides an excellent mirror for us.

Nevertheless, madness in contemporary culture generally remains in the category of a culturally dysfunctional survival strategy (or outright throwing in of the towel) that features sufficient nonconsensual experiences and behavior to apparently warrant some degree of medical intervention.

Madness could be said to be adaptation to failed adaptation. As such, it is a solution -- aborted yet still alive -- to a problem that has been forgotten, denied, or illegibly rewritten.

And for how many of us has most or much of our adult life been a “solution” to unresolved, misrepresented, or “forgotten” events from long ago? Madness is but an exaggeration, however distorted or toxically redirected, of our everyday intentions and behavior. Where we act -- often pretending that we aren’t pretending -- psychotics tend to overact. In a scene from the film King Of Hearts, a member of the local mental asylum watching “sane” soldiers slaughtering each other turns to another “crazy” and declares, “I think they’re overacting.”

Let no one suppose that we meet ‘true’ madness any more than we are truly sane. The madness we encounter in ‘patients’ is a gross travesty, a mockery, a grotesque caricature of what the natural healing of that estranged integration we call sanity might be.
- R. D. Laing

Is it not madness to be trashing our environment and bombing each other? Is it not madness to be compulsively wasting time using time-saving devices, while acting as if we have no other choice? Is it not madness to not recognize the severe case of mistaken identity from which almost all of us are suffering? Is teaching cannibals culinary etiquette an act of sanity? Who is crazier, the respectable businessman obsessed with leveraging human capital, or the naked avadhut (wandering sage) sitting atop a dung pile in an Indian village?

To the point: Madness is socially unacceptable deviance, generally epitomized by “delusional” activity. Madness is a departure from conventional, ego-corraled reality, with return tickets all-too-easily shredded to confetti in a shapeshifting sky, awareness splintering into many attentional factions. The mad person may identify with what arises -- as in claiming to literally be someone else -- whereas a person immersed in the natural awareness of spirituality may notice the intention to thus identify, but does not concretize it nor get lost in it (at least to any significant extent).

As was described earlier, spiritual openness may allow or even invite psychotic or nonordinary phenomena to surface; if this gets out of control, as in what is termed a “spiritual emergency” (or in spirit-possession situations, as epitomized by Haitian and Balinese cathartic trances), it is not necessarily a problem, but may actually be an entirely fitting process. (The more disruptive, disturbing, or painful difficulties associated with spiritual opening are often misconstrued as psychological disorders.)

Being out of control may be needed at a certain point, to break down unseen or unacknowledged repressive or dysfunctional structures that are not about to surface otherwise. Being out of control may propel one into the obviously spiritual, and also may shatter the subtle ossification that can occur when spirituality gets too “spiritual” for its own good.

The flutecall trembled in the heat, skinnily skiing across the dunes. An albino camel, astonishingly graceful in its ungainly gallop, sped across the road a stone’s throw ahead, bringing an admiring grunt from the driver of the minibus, an old nomad with eyes as blazingly blue as Band-I-Amir on a cloudless December morning, and cheekbones as starkly sculpted as the bare mountains hulking to either side. With silent good humor he passed an enormous, aromatically smoldering chillum to the dust-covered youths grinning in the backseats. Their faces, unlike his, were unlined, and their eyes spoke more of years of comfort against hardship than of confrontation with real difficulty. Their backpacks, bound tightly atop the roof, were little more than the suitcases of pampered non-conformists.

True, they appeared untested, but at least they weren’t tourists, that greedily destructive breed that paraded before the greatest of sights with all the lucidity of drugged camels. Very few tourists had ever come this way. The flutecall grew more strident, its notes straining upward in mid-flight, its echoes laced with ankle-bells and lapis lazuli skies, its outstretched, subtly ricocheting melody demanding more than a casual ear. Naturally, the young Westerners behind him didn’t hear it; they were too busy swaying and giggling under the entrancing influence of the hashish, their faces wildly crisscrossed by stupefying grins and boyish stares. He smiled, thinking of the letters they’d never write, the already-romanticized recountings bouncing about between their ears. Would not his own son spit upon these spoiled children? Only seventeen, he’d been a riflebearer for over two years, patrolling some of the most dangerous places west of the Khyber Pass. The driver coughed, then spat dramatically out his window, knowing the minibus would soon, very soon, be emptied of its freshfaced contents -- the euphoric trio behind him would probably shit their pants when they encountered their fate, as if to empty themselves of their terror.

Suddenly the flute stopped. A knife was under his chin, grazing his throat. A voice, crackling with barely understandable Afghani, ordered him not to stop for the two men on horseback who had just come into view up ahead. The demand came from one of the youths, his face now shockingly wrinkled and craggy, his parched skin reddish-brown, a dirty skyblue turban tightly wrapped around his swaying head, his knife-hand steady as a rock. The van sped past the horsemen, who immediately charged after it, shooting out its rear tires. Now there would be a meeting. Hashish smoke filled the vehicle, in pale correspondence with the dust boiling up outside, all athunder with horsehooves and metallic curses.

The driver lost his mind and found a clarity of recognition deeper than he’d ever known, marvelling at the pinpoint yet spacious choreography of the unfolding encounter. The fact that the three sitting behind him were no longer even remotely human-looking didn’t bother him, but actually flooded him with relief. Whatever they were, they were his, as were the two bloody specters hovering outside, not his in the sense of the merely personal, but his in the sense of an inner crossroad for which he had long yearned. Now explanations shrivelled into nothing, as did the minibus.

Again the albino camel passed in front of him, trotting now, almost floating, its great turquoise eyes reminding him to closely, very closely, observe the five who now coalesced before him, leaving him but a momentarily frozen note in the flutecalling, his fluidity of Being now primary, his shapings of self now secondary, his direction more him than his, his history but pure Mystery, his heartbeat celebrating both desert and oasis, his eternity of goodbyes and hellos now but sacred music.

A moment had exploded into all moments, unveiling the Story that could never be told. This was not the end, nor the beginning, but only the Eternally Aware Real making an appearance as him, an appearance that suddenly was utterly transparent, giving up the ghost. Here, he was not he, and yet never so fully himself.

As much experiential overlap as there is between spirituality and madness, there is nonetheless ample contrast between them. Spirituality is present with -- or consciously relates to rather than from -- whatever is arising; madness usually lacks such clarity, tending to operate in a more reactive manner. Madness redecorates, relocates, or reframes the prison, whereas spirituality reveals and desolidifies the prison until its door is recognized to be already open. Madness may free us from certain demands and restrictions, or may even free us to see with a relatively liberating perspective, but spirituality is freedom.

Spirituality possesses an intrinsically compassionate, Being-centered morality; madness’s usual morality is but a surrogate, however weird or ornately tiered, of conventional morality. Madness is an escape from consensus reality, a negation of it and its status quo hallucinations, and as such is often characterized by isolation, avoidance of relationship, and cultish propensities. On the other hand, spirituality does not flee nor reject consensus reality, but rather infiltrates and illuminates it, until it is recognized to be but one more expression of Being.

In madness, intimacy generally is avoided, entangled with fusion, or limited to a select few. In spirituality, intimacy with everything is cultivated.

Madness is the soul unchained, yet still marooned; spirituality is the soul unchained, anchoring itself to its Source. Madness sees the abyss and falls in; spirituality sees the abyss and swallows it. Madness is an outcast change of stage; spirituality upstages every would-be us.

Madness is a solution that camouflages the problem; spirituality is a solution that nonproblematically turns the problem into an opportunity. Where madness is busy being nobody, everybody, or a nonconventional somebody, spirituality is not suffering a case of mistaken identity.

Nevertheless, the strange forays, sense-bending logic, self-dramatizations, and spelunking misadventures of madness are not necessarily without value. Sometimes they may simply call for pharmaceutical rescue missions or behavioral braking, and sometimes they may, through the very crackings they engender, let sufficient light into the containers of self to awaken us to a depth or dimension of reality that we haven’t yet touched or sighted.

In many cultures, madness has been viewed as a potential harbinger of spiritual development and giftedness. Psychotic crises, for example, may foreshadow the emergence of a genuine shaman or perhaps a so-called “Crazy Wise” spiritual teacher like Adi Da (who is perhaps better known by one of his earlier names, Da Free John).

In his 1992 autobiography, Adi Da describes several incidents of (eventually) spiritually illuminating madness, including his final ingestion of a hallucinogen (mescaline), which he says was the most terrifying experience of his life. During it, he was overwhelmed by violent fear and confusion, not only suffering repeated blackout-inducing seizures, but also an inescapable sense of “passing utterly into madness.” For several hours afterward (he’d had to take tranquilizers) he had no memory and no sense of familiarity with anything, perceiving everything “as an original, blissful, infinite void.” It is an understatement to say that hallucinogenic intoxication is a potentially very perilous undertaking, even for the “prepared.” Nevertheless, the journey, for some, may have to be taken.

Within each of us are many madnesses, many pockets of seedling psychosis, the energies and messages of which need to breathe more freely. Their viewpoint needs not to be adopted, but to be given more than a merely rational ear, so that we might, from toe to crown, be confronted afresh with the imagination-transcending reality of our actual existence.

In leaving the madness that would suppress or ostracize our madness, we ready the vessel for Awakening’s alchemy. In entering our own madness with open eyes and some degree of psychonavigational savvy, we may discover a deeper sanity. Come -- is not the door already slightly ajar

Only if we venture repeatedly through zones of annihilation can our contact with Divine Being, which is beyond annihilation, become firm and stable.
- Karlfried Von Durkheim

Note 1: Can sanity and insanity be distinguished, and if so, how? And by whom? Can those with supposed expertise in making such a distinction actually do so? If sane people (defined for the purposes of this discussion as those who don’t have the symptoms of serious psychiatric disorders) were to fake mental illness so as to be admitted to mental hospitals, would their sanity be detected at some point during their stay? If it indeed was, this would surely count as evidence that sanity and insanity can be distinguished by those who are in the business of supposedly being able to recognize the difference.

Such an experiment did in fact take place. Sane volunteers -- referred to from now on as pseudopatients -- claimed to be hearing voices so as to gain admission to various psychiatric hospitals in the United States, and then, once admitted, dropped all pretense, except for the use of pseudonyms and, in the case of those who were mental health professionals, the claim to be in a profession other than their own. In short, they consistently behaved as they normally would, but were never recognized as being sane by the staff, being stuck with the label they had been given upon admission -- schizophrenic. Upon discharge, each was categorized with a diagnosis of “schizophrenia in remission.” Interestingly, many of the patients in the hospitals detected the sanity of the pseudopatients, because they, unlike the staff, actually paid genuine attention to them.

A psychiatrist may show that a patient is out of contact with him or her, and use that fact as part of the given diagnosis, but when a psychiatrist is out of contact with a patient, the patient is still seen as the only one with a problem. The behavior of the staff with the pseudopatients said it all: They displayed depersonalization, affective blunting, social withdrawal, delusional tendencies, and near-obsessive isolationism. Given this, could not they be given close to the same label that they gave the pseudopatients?

If I treat my patients as though they do not exist, what right do I have to claim that I am sane?

In defence of the staff in the above study, it must be noted that, in many cases, the apparently insane normally have times of apparent sanity; that is, observing some sanity or times of sanity does not automatically mean that sanity has been reestablished. However, if obvious mental health is consistently observed over a sufficient period of time, then is it not insane to continue claiming that mental illness is the case?

Whatever the pseudopatients did tended to be viewed in the context of their alleged condition. With chilling regularity, their symptoms were taken out of context -- even their psychosocial history was explained in terms of their psychiatric diagnosis. Would the staff have shown less aversion to the pseudopatients if they had not been viewed as being schizophrenic? Probably.