The Voyage of Insanity - Full

The voyage of insanity

Madness feeds on chaos. As such, it is only natural that it starts to form in environments of high stress. This is compared to dying, which it might as well be.

Anthropologists are wrong in assuming that the dream-time is time in the past. Eliade says that it’s another kind of time going on right now, which the bushmen break through and into, the age of the heroes and their deeds. Wait; I’ll read you the part. … the way they prepare for it is to undergo dreadful pain; it’s their ritual of initiation. You were in a lot of pain when you had your experience … you thought they were after you and you were so scared you fucking couldn’t sleep at night, night after night. And you underwent sensory deprivation. … You started seeing colors. Floating colors. … That’s described in the Tibetan book of the dead; that’s the trip across to the next world. You were mentally dying! From stress and fear! That’s how it’s done - reaching into the next reality! The dream-time!

This is further fueled by the chaotic nature of the individual - unstable and insecure. The seed of doubt has been planted. It is an evil spiral - doubt that is.

Let it be said that one of the first symptoms of psychosis is that the person feels perhaps he is becoming psychotic. It is another Chinese fingertrap. You cannot think about it without becoming part of it. By thinking about madness, Horselover Fat slipped by degrees into madness.

This is basically the structure of the process: the evil spiral is such that when you are caught in it flight and panic will only make you perpetuate the process, hastening it.

God can be good and terrible - not in succession - but at the same time. This is why we seek a mediator between us and him; we approach him through the mediating priest and attenuate and enclose him through the sacraments. It is for our own safety: to trap him with confines which render him safe. But now, as Fat had seen, God had escaped the confines and was transubstantiating the world; God had become free. The gentle sounds of the choir singing “Amen, amen” are not to calm the congregation but to pacify the god. When you know this you have penetrated to the innermost core of religion. And the worst part is that the god can thrust himself outward and into the congregation until he becomes them. You worship a god and then he pays you back by taking you over. This is called “enthousiasmos” in Greek, literally, “to be possessed by the god.” Of all the Greek gods the one most likely to do this was Dionysos. And unfortunately, Dionysos was insane. Put another way - stated backward - if your god takes you over, it is likely that no matter what name he goes by he is actually a form of the mad god Dionysos. He was also the god of intoxication, which may mean, literally, to take in toxins; that is to say, to take a poison. The danger is there. If you sense this, you try to run. But if you run he has you anyhow, for the demigod Pan was the basis of panic which is the uncontrollable urge to flee, and Pan is a subform of Dionysos. So in trying to flee from Dionysos you are over anyhow. … You must be taken over by the mad god to understand this, that once it happens there is no way out, because the mad god is everywhere.

Whether this is known consciously or not, the nature of masochism sets in as put forth by Theodor Reik.

In his study of the form that masochism takes in modern man, Theodor Reik puts forth an interesting view. Masochism is more widespread than we realize because it takes an attenuated form. The basic dynamism is as follows: a human being sees something bad which is coming as inevitable. There is no way he can halt the process; he is helpless. This sense of helplessness genereates a need to gain some control over the impending pain - any kind of control will do. This makes sense; the subjective feeling of helplessness is more painful than the impending misery. So the person seizes control over the situation in the only way open to him: he connives to bring on the impending misery; he hastens it.This activity on his part promotes the false impression that he enjoys pain. Not so. It is simply that he cannot any longer endure the helplessness.

The natural rejection of surrender, of helplessness, only feeds the original disease. Ironically there is no rational way out as the irrational takes over - the one place you would want to return to is no longer the safe haven it once was.

The paradox of it all is that chaos is required, not only at the onset but as fuel in the process time and time again. Chaos breeds chaos, and so it is easily dismissed as a superfluous detail - but it is in fact where redemption is found. The savior is the condemned self himself - as such he is naturally just as much the saved.

The fact that in the discharge of his task the eternal messenger must himself assume the lot of incarnation and cosmic exile, and the further fact that, at least in the Iranian variety of the myth, he is in a sense identical with those he calls - the once lost parts of the divine self - give rise to the moving idea of the “saved savior”. (salvator salvandus).

This is the leap, the paradox. The insane man must, in order to escape madness, trust himself. He must complete the journey. Although by his very nature distrusting, not least lacking trust in himself, this is what’s required. Because how does a broken machine fix itself? Not by any rational means - irrationality is the only saviour left. Faith.

The distinction between sanity and insanity is narrower than a razor’s edge, sharper than a hound’s tooth, more agile than a mule deer. It is more elusive than the merest phantom. Perhaps it does not even exist; perhapts it is a phantom