MIGHT YOU BE A CRAZY GENIUS?
If your goal in life is to blend into the world without leaving a mark then this isn’t for you.
If you have even the faintest inkling that each of us was born with a unique perspective which, when shared, is a gift that can move us all forward, then this was written for you.
…as if your place in the world mattered
and the world could
neither speak nor hear the fullness of
its own bitter and beautiful cry
without the deep well
of your body resonating in the echo.
Knowing that it takes only
that one, terrible
word to make the circle complete,
revelation must be terrible
knowing you can
never hide your voice again.
- David Whyte
When people ask me about my favorite music or book I find myself mentioning one song and one book together often.
Crazy - by Gnarls Barkley
&
When We Cease to Understand the World - by Benjamin Labatut
Some ideas shuffle the consensus reality deck, some add new cards. Barkley and Labatut were writing about the latter, the rare insight which has the potential to fundamentally alter how we perceive reality as a species. Both illuminate the disruptive nature of creativity, the treacherous territory that is shared by genius and insanity, where innovation wrestles with delusion and reality is stretched.
I remember when
I remember, I remember when I lost my mind
There was something so pleasant about that place
Even your emotions have an echo in so much space
To bring humanity something truly novel we must flirt with disaster. Whether exploring Art, Science, Math, Spirituality, or Shamanism doesn’t matter. To be radically free from the confines of consensus reality one must inhabit states of mind that FEEL crazy and make it back to tell the tale.
Great art is, by definition, ‘weird’. If it is not outside of the dominant conversation then it isn’t moving culture forward. The climb back down the mountain with gifts to share is part of the hero’s journey. It is the translation of the transfiguration, the transmission of a transcendent experience, that is the gift to the rest of humanity.
How does one know if they have lost their mind or found a piece of the universal mind that we have all been searching for?
And when you're out there without care
Yeah, I was out of touch
But it wasn't because I didn't know enough
I just knew too much, hm
Does that make me crazy?
All states of consciousness are a form of hypnosis, a trance. Some are just more common than others. What we call ‘altered states’ are deviations from the norm. We all experience them, but some turn back while others obsess, organize their life around FLOW, and chase the muse down rabbit holes towards destinations unknowable.
Labatut’s book starts out adhering to the rules of nonfiction. He tells true stories of scientists making breakthroughs. With each chapter a little bit more fiction is inserted. Through his imagination we are granted a window into the thoughts of Heisenberg and Schroedenger as they allow themselves to venture beyond the consensus view of reality we know as Newtonian or Classical Physics and break new ground in Quantum Physics. Doing so created a schism, a break in our collective understanding of reality, that persists to this day. Using artistic license to imagine the inner workings of their minds we glimpse a reality that ‘facts’ could never illuminate. We are taken on a wild ride through visions induced by fever, drugs, dreams, and other liminal states, experiences most of us dismiss as delusional; states innovators learn to harvest for insights humanity values immensely.
How did these intrepid explorers know when to trust their minds and how did they know when to pull back and head in a different direction?
Who invented cottage cheese? And how did they know when they were done? - Carol Siskind
Some sort of intuition seems to be at play.
Think about how much of your life and schooling have been about developing your intellect.
How much time have you spent developing your intuition?
WHAT DON’T YOU ALLOW YOURSELF TO EXPLORE?
The fact that physics lacks a Grand Unified Theory does not ever have to interrupt your day. This is something we are all comfortable ignoring most of the time, but if you dwell on it long enough the ground beneath you becomes porous. At the most fundamental level it becomes impossible to find a stable foundation upon which to build a coherent belief about how the world works or how to operate in it. What we are left with is a piecemeal hodgepodge of incomplete theories that fail the MECE test (Mutually Exclusive, Comprehensively Exhaustive - i.e. when you stick them together you get contradictions and/or holes).
It’s fine! We seem to say.
We don’t need 100% accuracy to function. Godel performed a rug pull on the entire edifice that is Math in 1931. Everything we call science is built upon an airtight faith in math and yet we ignore Godel and move on with 99.9% relative truth. Buddhists demand absolutes. We can still launch rockets and find our way to the grocery store. Collectively we sign an implicit pact to value certain data points (red light means stop) and ignore others (that still small voice in the back of my mind telling me to quit my career and go on a walkabout). Objectivity reigns supreme in our material reductionist paradigm.
But what of self expression?
What of the experiences that aren’t ‘necessary’ for survival, or success, but seem to pop up when we look away from the screen, cultivate stillness, look inwards, and turn our attention towards subtler sensations? Science and math are not only full of holes in their own domain, but impersonal and objective by design. They leave out ‘subjective’ domains entirely. How are we to decide how to spend this one precious life? Who or what do we trust?
Should I follow my brain?
My gut?
My heart?
Is manifestation real?
Are dreams?
Did I really know you were going to call before you did?
What the hell is intuition anyways?
These questions point us towards a much maligned territory called Metaphysics.
Meta = after or beyond.
Physics = physical properties
Metaphysics = beyond the known physical properties.
Arrogant intellectuals use a different definition: ‘an abstract theory with no basis in reality’.
Reality here refers to what Classical Physics, the world of big objects we can see with our eyes, tells us is real. Invisible things like chakras and angels and souls are labeled ‘impossible’ and dismissed, but so are quantum entanglement, non-locality, and the observer effect, things we know to be real. Humility demands that we hold space for that which physics can not yet explain and that which it may never be able to explain. Physics is just a man made theory after all.
Forget “real”, what is your experience, does manifestation work?
THE WOOVERTON WINDOW
Woo: short for woo-woo. dubiously or outlandishly mystical, supernatural, or unscientific.
This is the catch-all term for the metaphysics that people know they aren’t ‘supposed’ to believe in...but might…and know other people do.
The Overton Window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time; basically, what you are ‘allowed’ to say in polite conversation.
Shove the two of these things together and The Wooverton Window asks questions such as, how much of your inner world do you share? And How crazy are you willing to look in public?
Increasingly, it also asks how much of our tax dollars are spent on things that we are strongly discouraged from asking our politicians about? This results in a schism between what we think and discuss in private and what we claim to believe in public. Many scientists are secretly quite ‘woo’, but academic credibility demands that they toe the party line.
The really insidious part of The Wooverton Window is the way it is internalized and alters what we allow ourselves to think about and what we learn to disregard as ‘crazy’ even in the privacy of our own minds.
The Danger of Separation of Church and State
We threw the spiritual baby out with the religious bathwater. The result is a separation of Wisdom and Power. Two of The Big Three: The Good, The True, and The Beautiful have been relegated to lesser roles as the True, specifically the Left Brain, hyper reductionistic, overly Rational form of Logic, reigns supreme. Trusting logic alone is leading us towards a cliff of our own technological making.
This unbalanced left brained approach generates a Wooverton Window that excludes the mystical and the metaphysical. Other than the few lines of Christianity smuggled into our political rituals, wisdom traditions have no place in the halls of power.
Government officials are about to be forced to admit how much ‘woo’ they have been secretly smuggling into the budget. You can’t have secret military programs that study remote viewing, test LSD for warfare, and maybe even attempt to reverse engineer UAP without gaslighting the rest of us into thinking that our interest in said topics is not only politically toxic, but crazy.
The Overton Window is a VR headset we have all been wearing so long we forgot about the outside world. What happens when you take a peek beyond the blinders?
Does that make me crazy?
Possibly
FUSION → DIFFERENTIATION → INTEGRATION
Complex systems, like our minds, evolve through a 3 step process that moves from Fusion to Differentiation to Integration. If you want to solve a thorny problem, like figuring out what is real, it can help to break it down into smaller parts, but only as long as you are able to put them back together at the end.
Taking a computer apart to find and replace the bad RAM is great if you can keep track of all the little screws and reassemble EVERYTHING. Babies begin life fused with everything, then realize they are a separate self (ego!), then spend life attempting to figure out how they fit in. If we master the task we are called enlightened. The rest of us are, to varying degrees, stuck in the differentiation phase searching for lost parts and trying to put things back together so we can feel as One. With technology this leads to a state commonly referred to as ‘broken’. In humans this leads to what we lovingly refer to as ‘crazy’.
Going crazy seems dangerous, but what if we are ALL already there? Now the danger is denying it.
Who decides what is sane? The gaslighting deep state? The metaphysics denying halls of academia?
Shouldn’t we at least have a few spiritual masters at the table when we make policy and write the DSM-V?
It appears to me that we are all doing the best we can to assemble a shared reality based on the part of the elephant we can blindly grasp. But what if you try to describe something that everyone else leaves out?
Are you instantly recognized as a genius?
Burned at the stake? Nailed to a cross? Mocked on Twitter? Shushed by Mom at the dinner table? Labeled a wackadoo? (seems to belong in an article with ‘woo’)
Might it feel a hell of a lot more comfortable to just ignore certain sense data, insights, and direct experiences of nonphysical reality than to hold them up in the light for all to judge?
I think you're crazy
Just like me
OPENING THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION
Aldous Huxley popularized William Blake’s term Doors of Perception after tripping on mescaline saying:
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.
Psychonaut Timothy Leary, coined the term Reality Tunnel, which Robert Anton Wilson later expanded upon saying,
The easiest way to get brainwashed is to be born. All of the above principles then immediately go into action, a process which social psychologists euphemistically call socialization.
And
Your reality tunnel is not something you are stuck with; it is a flexible construct that can be altered by changing your perceptions and thought patterns.
Recently, Donald Hoffman took this theory to its logical, mathematical conclusion, claiming that not only are our sense experiences partially inaccurate, they have precisely 0% correlation with reality. He uses the metaphor of a computer desktop and icons to illustrate his theory that we perceive a simplified interface of reality, not reality itself. The reality inside of a computer includes layers of code and 0’s & 1’s before we land on the physical transistors which are made up of quarks or strings depending on your theology, none of which resemble the blinking cursor or apps on the screen. Could our mind's eye be as random an abstraction as the ‘trash’ icon on your desktop? I doubt it, but I find his metaphors liberating. We are all at least a little delusional. How much mystery and awe can you open up to?
How much uncertainty can you handle?
Can you see what is solid as being mostly empty space?
Can you experience your mind as reaching beyond your body?
How far down in your reality stack can you go without getting clingy?
Ontological Shock
Ontological shock is a state of disorientation or anxiety that occurs when a person's worldview is challenged by an experience. It can also be described as a crisis that happens when a person's model of reality changes.
‘Reality’ as we know it is but a window (or tunnel) through which we view the world. As a coach, especially one who specializes in working with exceptionally intelligent executives going through an existential crises and/or exploring psychedelics, I am often working with a client when things fall apart. I aim to help them open the aperture, to blow the doors open and widen the tunnel that is their ‘Worldview’.
Forget about aliens and psychics for a moment.
What if your goal is to be happy?
What if you were raised to believe that happiness is on the other side of a college degree, a prestigious career in a half dozen ‘respectable’ professions, a nuclear family, stability, and trust in institutions?
What if you achieve success, but it doesn’t feel like your own?
What if you climb the corporate ladder but never seem to arrive or earn enough to relax?
What if you do everything ‘right’ but something still feels off?
What if you feel called away from the status quo?
What if you lose faith in the entire project that you have been calling your ‘life’?
What is it that guides you?
Do you let your inner wisdom trump external validation?
What if you decide to question everything?
Do you stare into the abyss?
If you keep pushing beyond the familiar you must ask…
Is it a BREAKDOWN or a BREAKTHROUGH?
When we reach the limits of our current reality tunnel we have two options. We can reject the thoughts that don’t fit our current story, or we can seek a new story. The way you respond determines whether you can continue to grow or if you will be forced to slow down and manage the same problems over and over again.
One option is to cling to your old identity, another is to forge a new one.
Between the two there is a gap, a void, a cloud of unknowing.
It is in the space between stories where things get weird and scary.
Do you heed the call to adventure? Do you let go of the old, or do you have another beer, try to get a raise, and maybe go ‘sanctioned crazy’ and have an affair?
My heroes had the heart to lose their lives out on the limb
And all I remember is thinking "I want to be like them"
Your reality tunnel is your entire world. Imagine your sense of the world or universe as being like a big circle being filled up with smaller shapes. Everything that is real and possible fits within the larger circle. Unicorns go outside. Your career, relationships, thoughts, beliefs, behaviors, experiences, all go inside. Seeking new information, new experiences and responsibilities is easy and comfortable at first. Life feels empty without them.
For a while, novelty is fun, like going to a new playground as a kid. We know we are ignorant. We don’t pretend to have it all figured out. We let all kinds of experiences in. We try things. We explore. We meet new people. We ask WHY? a lot. Sometimes we get confused, but with a bit of guidance everything seems to play nicely within one framing. Science is real. If you are raised in the church you may include angels and demons, but unicorns only exist in fantasy. If you encountered one in the wild it would be ontological shock. You would either have to doubt your mind and feel crazy or adjust your worldview, which would put you out of sync with everyone else. Want to tell your friends you saw a unicorn while alone in the woods? You’d better have a picture!
Some of these experiences we decide to keep to ourselves. Things we thought we saw, energy we sensed, ideas that seem to be downloaded, psychic premonitions, memories of past lives, conversations with spirits…intuitions that we can’t explain become quieter.
The brain wires towards the senses we reify.
As we become socially conditioned we learn to disregard some experiences and amplify others. Certain thoughts aren’t ‘polite’ to share. Inappropriate behaviors are shamed. We learn to respect cultural norms as ‘real’. With a bit of luck our lives become ‘rich’, full in a very normal way.
But is it enough?
Do you wake up excited for the day?
Are you playing at the edges of your understanding?
Meditating?
Taking psychedelics?
Talking to psychics?
Conformity may produce success, but much is sacrificed along the way.
Weren’t we all artists as kids?
How often do you dance or sing?
Ever feel like you are floating outside your body?
Ever believe you could read your best friend’s mind? Or like your dog can read yours?
Ever stare at the night sky and experience a sense of wonder and connection so vast you forgot to feel separate?
Anomalies are experiences that don’t fit inside the reality matrix.
If you cultivate the anomalies, if you play like an artist or quantum physicist, things get weird.
Reality springs a leak.
Can you let your thoughts feel crazy?
Are you afraid it might bleed into the ways you act?
If you aren’t careful you might dance in public, sing on the subway, write a blog post about a mystical experience, meditate for hours a day, take psychedelics in the jungle, tell your coworkers how much you love them, attempt to ask a dead relative for advice, summon aliens with your mind, or just quit your career with no idea what comes next.
This is where Upper Limit Behaviors appear. In order to avoid this situation many stop doing what is working and numb out with addictive behaviors.
If you keep going you are going to have to navigate the experience described in my favorite song and book. What to do with those thoughts that violate our sense of what is real and possible?
(Meanwhile, those annoying spiritual people keep telling us to “surrender”)
At this point you have two options:
#1 Call it a breakdown: Try to patch the holes. Do anything and everything to restore your former sense of self. This will mean acting smaller, moving away from exciting/challenging impulses, avoiding things that cause anxiety, drinking more, sleeping more, reading less, skipping meditation, repairing old relationships that drain you, going back to an old way of working etc. You can identify the thoughts, sensations, and impulses that don't fit and jettison or ignore them. Trade plant medicine in for psychiatric meds! Yay, more space and everything is inside the lines…
And I hope that you are having the time of your life
But think twice, that's my only advice, mm
Come on now, who do you, who do you, who do you
Who do you think you are?
Ha-ha-ha, bless your soul
You really think you're in control, well
I think you're crazy
This can quickly become a life of quiet desperation.
There is another way…
#2 Call it a breakthrough: Don't try to maintain the old boundary, let it dissolve; realize it was never there in the first place. YOU MADE IT UP (with a lot of help). Admit you have no idea what is real. Drop the reality tunnel all together. Go into free fall. Surrender.
It can be scary having no container.
It can also be liberating to touch the infinite.
If you simply focus on the felt sense of your body you might call it bliss.
The big secret?
It rarely lasts long. It is a temporary state shift that, in the best circumstances, with Daily Practice, results in an incremental stage shift. The loss of one boundary, one system, pushes you to find a bigger, more robust system/ sense of self.
Zoom out and….
When you let go of one “reality” or, go even further and let go of one "self", you realize that it was an illusion all along. Reality was never so small, so limited, there was always a more inclusive, more powerful, more all encompassing You waiting to catch all of the pieces should your little ego fall apart.
Letting go means taking the next step even though you can't be sure where it leads, it is a Leap of Faith,
As far as your ego, the one that “needs” a stable worldview is concerned, it is surrender indeed, but part of you knew you were more all along.
Why do I care if you embark on such a wild, potentially ego dissolving quest?
I believe that the fate of humanity relies upon it.
The next buddha will be a sangha is another way of saying that the path to salvation lies not in profits, but in prophets with the emphasis on the plural.
If we are going to figure out how to be stewards of this beautiful rock flying through space we are going to need a chorus of people singing crazy in the loudest voices they can find until we find the harmony that only the collective, including all of the little bits that don’t make sense in isolation, can find. The crazy genius needs to become a lot less rare. We need to recognize that we are all already crazy and celebrate the weirdness.
Maybe this is an evolutionary step forward.
Maybe it is an archaic revival, reclaiming something we have lost.
Perhaps we can become indigenous again?
Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.- Martin Luther King
But maybe I'm crazy
Maybe you're crazy
Maybe we're crazy
Probably
