The Parable Of The Blissful Madman

-Jahanavi Shandilya
The Nobel prize-winning mathe-matician John Nash who was in Delhi recently has a long history of schizophrenia, a mental condition in which the afflicted person creates a delusion of alternative reality.
Schizophrenics do this to make so-called normal life bearable for themselves. Very often, those suffering from schizo-phrenia are creative geniuses. Apart from Nash the long list includes musician Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent Van Gogh, ballet dancer Vaclav Nijinsky and many others.
The life and works of gifted artists and creative geniuses show that their expanded consciousness is completely unconfined, giving rise to extraordinary potential beyond the reach of the average person. There is a tendency in the human psyche to reach for higher forms of consciousness.
Access to this state is evident though temporary in both schizophrenics and individuals who get inspired by sudden insight. Psychiatry has found no cure so far for schizophrenia and perhaps there is no cure.
For, on a deeper level, it could be said of all of us that we are indeed schizophrenics in that the 'normal' lives we lead and believe in, including getting a job, earning a livelihood, raising a family is, when seen from the plane of the spiritually enlightened, nothing but a carefully fabricated illusion very much like what the schizophrenics construct for themselves.
So how do we break out of our delusions? Not necessarily by renouncing the world and all its illusory joys and sorrows, its fictive triumphs and tragedies, but by recognising the delusional nature of this world.
When we lose ourselves in medi-tation or in the exaltation that great music or art can create, the delusional world with its myriad anxieties and griefs seems to fall away from us and we feel a sense of untrammelled freedom. Nijinsky wrote in his diaries that he was God.
This scandalised the pious Christian establishment of his time that considered such utterances as blasphemous.
However, what Nijinsky had really done was to achieve, through the discipline of dance, spiritual liberation that revealed the transcendence within.
Nijinsky's story finds a parallel with that of the sage's response to a person who had come to see him for spiritual guidance pleading that his everyday worries, cares, and daily search for meaning in life was driving him "mad".
The sage heard him out and said: "I do not know if I can cure you of your madness, but right now you are an unhappy madman and I can transform you into a blissful madman".
It should be noted however that such spiritual prescriptions are not like over-the-counter drugs that can be bought and sold at will.
True spiritual sages never offer a panacea for universal happiness as distinct from indi-vidual bliss because they know that such a thing is axiomatically impossible. It is only the individual seeker after enlightenment who can hope to ascend the spiritual escalator to an other-worldly joy.
"Unhappy madness" of which schizophrenia is a severe form is suffered by all of us who feel the constant pressures of the everyday material world. Blissful madness was what Nijinsky evinced or what the devotional Baul singers experience as do the whirling dervishes who lose themselves in a frenzy of spiritual rapture.
Perhaps that is why the form of madness we call schizophrenia or the more general form of madness called mortal existence cannot be 'cured' but it can be transformed into the inspired, ecstatic madness of spiritual awakening. The other side of madness is not so-called normalcy; it is the beatific insanity of bliss.
http://spirituality.indiatimes.com