Madness is everything, if I want to be absolutely right, and at the same time be completely unhelpful. We can investigate our own madness and try to dispel it. Collective madness is much too big a problem. I have dedicated my life to dispelling a certain collective madness, and have really only succeeded in making myself more unhealthy. My own madness, now, not in the beginning, is my understanding of Buddhism. The Buddhist point of view is the only view on madness in which I am educated. But still I am not a monk, so it is better to describe what follows as my own madness. After drinking deep from the holy books of Buddhism, it made me less interested in many books I had interest in before. I also lost interest in travel, being worldly, or having ability and learning in the field of mathematics.
My view is that the creator gods, whose existence are not denied, whether they are Hindu or Christian or Reason, Natural Philosophers, any other religion, they created their worlds which we inhabit due to mild insanity. An absence of understanding caused these gods to desire something. Out of their ignorance of a superior pleasure they began to dream up pleasures and then create them. These creations then led to the creation of other beings, with less understanding, who created less pleasurable worlds. This has been going on forever, and has resulted in people becoming so ignorant, the best place for them is Hell, at least until they learn something from being in Hell. There is no theological proof of a beginning, neither is there any inevitability in destroying our world and bending our will towards a final Judgment Day and an epic battle between angels and demons. These things have probably already happened numerous times, from a universal perspective, they are really just tiring. There is no final judgment, no final knowledge. What we think of as knowledge is merely the understanding of this particular creator god’s dream that created the world you are in.
The only cure is knowledge of ignorance, which of course is a mystical statement: a pair of opposites that join. Because there is no beginning, no end, we have all fallen into the world of Hell, as the Buddha attested that he had been there. There is a mathematical proof, in fact, that would help you believe that if there is any possibility at all of ending up in Hell, given an unlimited amount of time, it will happen. If we do not work towards getting out, even if we become angels after death, we will fall again to who knows where. In this meaningless existence of going up and down, chasing the future or carrying the past, we feed on others and on the nutriments in this world. We do this so we can have the power to create new not-so-pleasurable dreams according to our limited understandings. All these creations are labeled Dukkha, even the heavens have Dukkha, which is usually translated as suffering or stress, but it is actually two words put together “bad” and “space.” There are areas of the universe, great cavernous darknesses off the edge of a galaxy, with no light or love. This is “The Problem,” if you were looking for one. “The Solution” is being aware that when creations pass from existence and there is silence, there is also pleasure, if there is also awareness. Experiencing this passage is the process of converting Dukkha into a “good space”: the field of Nirvana– love, understanding, and awareness. If we understand ignorance we find this pleasure-field which we can inhabit. I am not talking about a being, the Buddha said the question of whether there is an eternal being or not was not helpful. It will lead you into a wilderness of thought. It is better to describe this field as just the weather. The universal, unchanging weather that underlies any storm or sun. In that sense, this exalted field of pleasure is ordinary, and exactly where you are now, if you can find it.
Alternatively, we could call God as being the same thing as this underlying positive field. It does have a kind of consciousness, and it allows delusional gods to create things within this consciousness, so my own understanding of Buddhism is not incompatible with other religions.
I am a little reluctant to try to explain what MY problem is, (as people I’ve met have asked in polite associations such as picnics or parties, where I was also trying to be polite: “WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?”) I am not sure it is very interesting or what my audience wants.
I have always had some feeling that something is very wrong here. I did not know for a long time that that is not a very astute observation, but it was a palpable, enormous, domineering feeling when I was a child. I did not go seeking the faults of my every social connection. Still, these connections threatened my way of being. For me, it is just a lot of effort to be aware of THIS world, THESE people, and not the worlds of ideas and beings that I wanted to think about. So now I have this wonderful group of people listening, one of them asks me to write about madness, I suppose because he knows I will write something foolish. I have explained a lot of my own views on being embodied in this world in my book “A Defense of Poetry Against the Mathematicians” A title that recalls the canonical book by Sextus Empiricus on skepticism. Skepticism (ancient skepticism, Pyrrhonism) is my Western view, when I don’t want to sound religious, but I don’t believe there is much difference between Skepticism and Buddhism. Skepticism provides the philosophical framework for the book. Everyone wants to be the answer to ancient skepticism, so scientists (a word that means knowing) say they are skeptics (a philosophy on not knowing almost anything). However, I believe it is the poets who are the experts on not knowing things. They are the ones who have knowledge of ignorance.
I studied mathematics because it came easily to me. I learned the subject of the utmost precision because it is lazy to be too precise, at least for me. It allows you to talk endlessly about very little.
After years of study, mathematics finally interested me too. The few actual words “Completeness” “Continuity” “set” “if” “and” “not” were the focus of my interest, but when I talked to mathematicians about my thoughts on these words, they advised it was best not to interpret the words at all. They needed a word, and the meaning of the word wasn’t the point. I could think very intensely about mathematics, but I later applied this rapid kind of calculated thinking to meanings, dreams, symbols and their shapes, lyrics, legends, sleeping and waking, eating. In the beginning I was not very good at doing this, and I did it too often, and too slowly. I was used to a different kind of concentration about mathematics.
As a result of this transition I ended up being captured and taken against my will into isolation. As I sat there for hours I could feel that these doctors wanted something from me. Somehow I knew what they wanted, and that I wasn’t going to get out of isolation until I gave it to them. I started meditating on solipsism, and successfully adopted the point of view. The next minute a doctor entered the room and informed me I was insane. When I just sat there she said “that was fun.” (And this is a secret I share for those who actually read to the end of my foolery) I asked her incredulously “That was fun?” She looked surprised, I suppose she expected me to think she was a figment of my imagination. I had changed my mind about solipsism rather quickly, call me a liar, but it made me afraid. And it was Bertrand Russell who said the only alternative to believing the physicists was solipsism. I have seen how that view of a very humane, careful thinker, is now being enforced. And now here I am, wondering what my audience wants… and trying to give it to them.
May all beings find true happiness
May all beings be free
May all beings have ease
May they not come to harm