All the Madmen

"Cause I'd rather stay here
With all the madmen
Than perish with the sadmen
Roaming free
And I'd rather play here
With all the madmen
For I'm quite content
They're all as sane as me"

David Bowie, All The Madmen



i spent this day reading biographies of poets and artists trying to figure out why so many people with the same outlook on reality as me ended up in asylums and coffins. so i wrote this.

how does one ever get involved in the mess of questioning reality?

why does anyone choose to voluntarily take a step back from life and try to see the hidden forces at work beneath the threshold of our awareness?

is it possible to explain why some people seem to detach from the ordinary experience of being a human-being and start to drift off in strange directions claiming to see mystical apparitions in the distance?

is there a reason for why so many philosophers, prophets, mystics, saints, gurus and holy men have gradually excluded themselves from society and begun to talk of distant and alien realms of existence?

how can it be that for thousands of years certain individuals in all cultures have taken a u-turn in regards to their worldly aspirations and charged head-on into the riddle of eternity only to be seen at a later time to be rambling on about magic visions and cosmic illusions?

throughout civilized history countless individuals have designated their minds to the task of piercing through the outer layer of illusion and falsehood that so pervades all we have come to know.  it is a consistent trait of humanity that a small portion of human-beings approach existence with great doubt and skepticism, as if they required a higher sense of validation than was provided.  so i ask you; why do humans display this behavior? and what happens to those that do?

well, to tell you the truth i dont know and i am one of these people. im asking these questions because i am stuck in this completely insane and manic attempt to make sense of these matters and it seems the only way forward in this riddle is to probe the works of those who have made the journey before. it becomes apparent once one decides to delve into the twilight-zones of human knowledge known as philosophy, religion and mysticism that for thousands of years humanity has been working on a collective project, a cooperation stretching across time and space, where the shared goal has been the liberation and evolution of the human soul. the soul was not something latently waiting all the while to appear eventually on the scene of humanity. the soul is a end-result of countless sane minds banging their heads against the wall of being trying to squeeze from it a single drop of significance. it is the fruit of thousands of madhatters pondering the abyss in the long hours attempting to convey the things they saw there. it is the riches of Zarathustras solitary life on the mountain. but neither the wall of being, the abyss or the mountain is a forgiving place. it cares not for the living. it cares not for the ways of the living. those so inclined to seek these places don't come back in any ordinary sense of the word. they return changed. what they learned isolates them. what they see when when they peek over the edge leaves them empty, unappeased with the activities of the world. in a sense, what they peer between the cracks is beyond the world and makes the world seems false, illusory, game-like. Zarathustra grows weary of wisdom and comes down from the mountain but the people in the village are not ready to listen to his words. they are still caught in the web of life, still too complacent in their blanket of illusion.

i guess what im trying to say between these lines is that the search is a lonely and unrewarding process. the further you progress, the more you distance yourself from others.  whatever is to be found "out there", whatever mystery is there to see, it rather puts our whole enterprise on earth in a new light. conveying this vision becomes problematic as less and less people share the understanding and experience of your message. the more you find out, the less you can say about it. what has driven so many painters, poets, philosophers and prophets mad over the years is not the content of the mystic vision itself but the lack of reception upon the return to the ordinary world.  upon returning having gained the new insight the world is a worn-out theme-park. the rides have have all been tested, the shops checked and the food tasted. the wiseperson brings promises of new and better rides but the people are all content with the old ones. they see no reason to change the ride. it still brings amusement to their hearts. so the wiseperson either starts shouting or he lowers his voice and disappears into the background. he may choose to join the despairing crowds of people roaming the surface of the earth as ghosts in time living in a sort of limbo between the world and the abyss. i call these the nobodies. the nobodies are a strange kind; wherever they go, they are not. they exist in the twilight-zone between insanity and sanity. they are the weird, the off-beat, the loners and outcasts. these marginal characters living a marginal existence in a different dimension than ours are invisible to most people. they walk among the living but in reality they are not related to the living by any conventional means. they depend on the living, they subsist off their scraps and the crumbs from their labor, they sometimes stop to have brief conversations, but their relations and affections are with their own. the people of the world, the sane crowds whose existence is governed by rules and commandments, are a different species. they do not exist by the same principle of non-participation.

 non-participants are strange characters in the world-drama. they float through the cities like drifters. they observe the activities of society with detached amusement. no longer tied to the ideal of well-adjustment and held in place by the opinions of the Others, the nobodies view the establishment from a vantage point way outside of the establishment itself, from a self-created no-land, a self-elected valueless no-space. they are not of the world nor in they world; they confront the world, they observe and perceive the world but want no part in creating or shaping it. they are only traveling through. to them it's all a passing show. they are not amused by the games played by the living. they either find new games to play or find ways to avoid game playing all together. some nobodies find pleasure in playing the world-game now that they know its really a game but they are quick to disappear when some real commitment to the game is required. they must stay uncommitted to the game because they must live alone. they can not by their nature be understood. each vision of Heaven is unique and cannot be put into words, so their vision is their own and they must tend to it as long as they live, privately. it is an ever-occurring realization that is muted by the utter inability to put it into words. and because it doesn't stop one is doomed to an eternal silence. to put it this way; truth is an experience lasting indefinitely which can never be referred to or explained. thus it can never be shared unless two people have actually gone through the steps, been to all the places and reached the same level of understanding. realizing truth isn't even hard its just that so many people are frightened of it. the old ride is still the safe ride. it will be safe tomorrow to. but the future belongs to those courageous enough to believe in their visions and dreams.

people say dreamers are escapists.
we're not escapists.
we're trailblazers.