A Thought for the Muslim Sabbath

Vincent Van Gogh’s brother Theo once wrote of him: “He is one of those people who have had a close look at the world, and have withdrawn from it.”

This is necessary for a great artist, an innovator of any sort, and also for anyone who is sincerely religious. Indian scientist G. Padmanabhan, on accepting the G.M. Modi Award, thanked his wife for making it possible for him: he boasted that he had not been into a bank or a shop for thirty years.

The ideal, for anyone spiritual, is to be “in the world, but not of it.” However, this is intrinsically, for psychiatry and psychology, a mental illness: “withdrawal” is not allowed. One must “be in touch with [everyday] ‘reality’.” Retiring to your own thoughts is “dissociation.” This makes psychology fundamentally insupportable.

Psychiatry, in its defense, will argue that this becomes a problem if a person is suffering: then and only then does psychiatry step in and help.

But such a decision to withdraw from the world does not come all at once, is not easy to put into practice, and is not without continuing temptations. At least for a time, more likely forever if you have family connections, you are going to be pulled both ways. And there are difficult, almost insurmountable practical issues: how are you going to manage your sustenance outside the system? All artists, in fact, seem to suffer quite a bit.

And ultimately, the problem is that the world really is a crock. And psychiatry, once it enters the picture, always seeks to push you back into it. So that, if one is mentally ill, that is, conflicted between remaining part of the world or walking away from it, psychiatry will always work against any cure. Because the cure is always walking away from the world, always withdrawal.

God himself has decreed this with the institution of death.