Born with the Gift of Laughter, and a Conviction that the World Was Mad

Plato's wine cave.

Perhaps the most important insight religion has, one of the most important bits of wisdom life can offer, is that most people are insane.

Insane in the proper sense: they do not see reality.

Plato makes this argument in his analogy of the cave. But it is also asserted in Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism. Most people live lives of illusion. Few become enlightened. Few are saved.

It is not because people are stupid. And it is not because the universe is designed by some evil genius to be deceptive.

Because dogs are obviously sane, yet we do not think of dogs as terribly smart.

Insanity is a moral issue. Modern psychiatry and psychology will do everything it can to insist otherwise; but psychiatry and psychology are insane. All insanity is what they call denial. We really see the truth, but do not want to see it. We make believe otherwise. And so our heart, our soul, our consciousness, becomes split, warring against itself. And we begin on a downward spiral.

Dogs, on the other hand, are whole-hearted. There are no filters, no internal monologues.

And this is no doubt why Jesus said not just “love God,” but “love God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” To see truth, we must be whole-hearted, as dogs are whole-hearted, as children are whole-hearted.

Dogs, luckily for them, are not moral beings. They are incapable of sin, and so incapable of this schizophrenia.

When the Buddha, sitting under the Bo tree, was on the verge of enlightenment, he was attacked by all the legions of Mara, of illusion. They tempted him; they threatened him. And he stretched down his hand to touch the Earth, and called the Earth as witness to his true merit.

His enlightenment was not a matter of figuring things out; not an intellectual feat. It was an act of moral courage.

Where does that leave those people we currently call “insane”? The bipolars, the schizophrenics?

Perhaps not sane, yet, but less insane than the rest of us. They are at least conscious of the disconnect, and struggling with it. They are dealing with the legions of Mara.

I find it difficult to watch the daily pandemic briefings by Prime Minister Trudeau. Because no answer he gives is ever honest. You see he is not saying what he thinks. Truth is to be avoided at all costs, even when there seems to be no reason to avoid it. Everything must be said to be perfectly okay, no matter what the real situation.

Trump, in the US, I find more reassuring. Or Johnson, in the UK. They might lie now and then, but often you know they are saying what they think. They are at once more honest and more sane.

For it is the same thing.