What is madness and how may we deal with it from a Spiritual perspective?

Question: Could you say a little about madness and how one deals with it from a spiritual perspective?

 Serge. It depends on what kind of madness you are referring to. In my books, there are three distinct kinds. The first  kind is what  we ordinarily think of as madness,  that is, people who have great difficulty functioning effectively in society and  who may need to spend large chunks of their lives in special institutions . These people  are  the psychotics. They  often feel persecuted and paranoid. They may pick up messages  from the cosmos signalling that  dark forces are out to get them or  they may  hear voices telling them to do awful things.

This kind of madness does not  generally respond well to subtle energy. Trying to focuss loving energy on such people or suggesting they meditate or visit a guru  is generally counter productive. In most instances, what they need  is   help from someone trained to  understand them and generally to be fed strong medication to  help calm them. When they are in a calmed state, they may then be more  open to  a spiritual imput.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have 'divine madness', the madness afflicting people who are  drunk with ecstasy,  who are filled with  God's joy and love, and who are regarded as mad because they often feel  little need to conform to the orthodox rules of our society.  (They are in touch with 'higher law'!)In this bracket I would inlude teachers of the 'Crazy Wisdom' tradition such as Adi Da ( whose method of awakening is  often to trick people), the late Osho with his fleet of rolls royces, or 'rascal sages' such as Gurdjieff ,who would often teach by shocking his students. Sri Ramana Maharshi, the great Indian saint, was  a true divine drunkard! He was  once found in such a  rapturous state , that ants were beginning to eat up his leg and he never noticed!

 Of course this is not madness at all. These people are 'super sane' and live  from their hearts . They are connected  to divine law; they are  wise, open channels or conduits for divine qualities to flow through them and so 'come from' a very different place than from where you and I come from ( or certainly from where I come from!) Indeed, so linked up  are they to the will of God, that they care little for social niceties or with cultivating pleasing personalities. If you encounter such a  'mad person', you will only come face to face with truth, and if your usual way of relating, is via your artificial, 'socialised' self, you  will probably feel very awkward in their company !

The sad thing is that  these remarkable and awake  human beings, are, as I said,  generally regarded as  being bonkers by those people whom I see as being  the true members of the  real stark-raving-bonkers brigade -  i.e., the  normals!  And here I refer to the vast majority of us who see ourselves as 'normal' and  nice and who  live our lives primarily by  adhering to the rules of convention. Normal, nice man, R.D. Laing reminded us, has been responsible for killing millions and millions  of his fellow,  normal, nice men over the last century, and  has delighted in spending billions  a year on this enterprise, with the result that there is never enough to help the billions on our planet who are starving. Yesterday, on the television, I saw Tony Blair answering questions on the Iraq war and  putting on his normal ' Tony acting sincere  show' and I thought to myself:  'That man is a good example of someone truly stark raving bonkers!'

You see, what normal man does, is that he lives his life in a small narrow box where anything and everything that he does not understand or that does not fit into it,  is either  said not to exist or is labelled 'insane'. Everybody else is   wrong and he is always right! Anything that he doesn't like to face about himself, he projects onto other people. The great visionary Psychologist Abraham Maslow was only too well of the craziness of 'normal man', and described him as 'Living in a state of chronic psychopathology and crippling immaturity'!

Your question was : how do we deal with madness from a spiritual perspective? Well, my answer is that  the madness that  truly needs focussing on, is this madness. And how we deal with it , is  that we recognise it for what it is and  what it results in, and from this place,  we seek to see how and where we too, might be any part of it, and if so, what we can do to  change our ways.   What is also very important is   that we try to expose ourselves as much as possible to those afflicted with divine madness, in the hopes that something of the vision. beauty and wisdom of these great adepts may enter us and pull the scales off our eyes - rub off on us in some way, as this will speed things up for us.

Perhaps this is not the answer you were expecting to your question, but it is the one I am giving you.