Madness just around the corner

Recently, I was reading “Life is what you make it” by Preeti Shenoy. And its story brought back to my mind one thought that has crossed my mind many times and every time I have brushed it under the carpet in order not to think about it. How close I’ve often come on the verge of madness and how often I’ve survived it…

Reading the novel was horrifying. Horrifying because I was reading what could possibly have been my state(in a hugely altered form obviously), if things would have been different. And its not just about me. I’ve seen enough examples, of both the cases; people on the edge of the precipice, somehow hanging on, and people in free fall, abandoning everything.

Why do humans go crazy? What is it the drives them mad? Is it a gradual attrition of logical reasoning and mental safety nets? Or, one day, something snaps inside you, and you go down the bottomless abyss? I’ve seen both the scenarios, both equally believable. Sometimes a mixture of both.

All kinds of people go mad. The reckless, moody, depressive, hyperactive, strange, weird, aloof, loners. Also, worldly wise, sane, ‘normal’, sociable, friendly, successful(in conventional sense of the word), cautious, outwardly sensible. For the first kind of humans, madness is like a back-alley of the mind. Depending on what kind of a person you are, this back-alley can be dark, shady, filled with unknown dangers, or your own dark side which you’re afraid of, or your silent niche to hide from the world, you inner sanctuary, or a place to let go of your uniqueness which the world is not able to recognize and accept. Remember, I have described it from the point of view of the person herself, what it signifies to the rest of the world depends on the person’s resulting actions towards society and people around him.

For the other kind of humans, the second category, it’s very difficult to say anything. You get lost, in a world of masquerades, lies, hidden fears, conflicting emotions, philosophical dilemmas and inner pandemonium. For those who are sane, and consider themselves sane in their honest eyes, madness is the Satanic nightmare, a ride through hell. They deny the existence of a world beyond sanity, but when the forces out of their control devastate and subjugate their will to believe in themselves, they discover the madness in all its horrifying detail. Seriously, kind of like a ride through hell. This madness can either destroy them completely, if they are unable to break from the rigid walls of their mind, or it can liberate them (could be in all kind of ways). Those who look outwardly sane, but inwardly are tortured by the same whirlpool of thoughts as the first category, are aware of the precipice called madness facing them in some distant vague area of their psyche. Their struggle with themselves define the path which will either take them towards the precipice or away from it.

In any case, no one can entirely control whether or not to go down the precipice. Because nobody has complete control over her own thoughts, has answers to all the questions that life poses in front of us.

At one stage in my life, I was badly thrown up in the same whirlpool, and was in the danger of being destroyed by it. At that time madness was a distinct reality for me, lurking close by, waiting to ambush me lest I take one wrong step. Fortunately, I hung on the precipice, no looking down too much, and still not ambushed. But I know, I’m still in the whirlpool, and I’ll never be completely out of it. The precipice is always there.

Not just me. I’ve seen so many people around me, struggling inside them, struggling with their demons, struggling against themselves. One, whom I left long ago, was rushing headlong into his own precipice. Whether he fell or not, I don’t know, and if he fell, it is yet to be seen whether the precipice was a liberation or a downfall. Seen many things in my college life. People giving up on everything for their addictions. People going schizophrenic by intense and prolonged drug abuse, people giving up on their life, oppressed by the environment, people free-falling through life in a nightmarish euphoria of drugs, people shutting themselves closed inside their shell of fear and ignorance, and hatred.

Life has its own way of teaching people. Sometimes Madness has to step in to teach some important lessons.

Randomness

Randomness is one concept we never pay attention to. Most of the time we are doing things we had no idea we would be doing, or more interestingly, we have no idea we are doing AT the time of doing them. Yet that is not what is randomness. We are doing other things in our mind at those moments, and the inefficacy resulting in our inability to perform those same tasks in reality is making us doing those so called random activities.

That is not what I associate with randomness. What I associate with randomness is a state, in which your mind is completely empty, I mean literally empty on the conscious front, and you are blankly gazing into empty space in front of you. No, not the table or your laptop in front of you, the empty space beyond that. Your mind has gone to sleep and you are existing in a suspended state of consciousness. That is what I call randomness. I get into that mode often, quite inexplicably. Obviously there must be some reasons, whether scientific or simple common sense, that must be behind it, but I didn’t care to think about that that much. Whatever the reason, whenever I go into such a state of suspended consciousness, there’s this sweet emptiness that pervades your mind for that period of time. At that time, you’re not thinking, you’re just floating into a frozen moment in the universe that is your mind.

Often I’ve found out that when I come from such a state of randomness, I feel good about myself. I feel as if I have for an instant touched myself from the inside, and I’m not still not a robot who has everything he has to do already fed in it, and everything is going on according to that. Seriously, when you come to think about it, constantly thinking on a conscious level is also a kind of automated response, a response we have got so used to that we do not notice that it is a degeneration into a lower level of consciousness, a computerized mindset, with all programs, goals, desires, emotions, thought patterns, already fed in, and we are just working endlessly according to that, without looking beyond the our code.

Whenever I come out of that randomness, I feel conscious thinking is not the only level of thinking which exists, which is what all of us are prone to think who are on a constantly ‘ON’ mode. Yes, the ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ mode. We think there are only two modes of mind- the ‘ON’ mode, our conscious thinking, and the ‘OFF’ mode, where we do not think at all, or we think on an obviously wrong path. But we are so used to this pattern that we do not care to find out that the ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ switches are not on your mind, but on a very limited part of your brain- the conscious brain. Your brain is such a vast ocean, much of it still remains untapped.

Randomness. I like this world. Not chaos. But randomness. It shows that the order of this world is not the be-all, end-all thing. It is the mind who made it. And this forced order is not its best creation. It can also work on a higher level, the level which connects it on a deeper level with itself, but it has lost the knowledge of that level in the surfeit of the knowledge that it keeps accumulating, without any worth, in its daily life. And adding more knowledge.

Randomness is your last thread connection with yourself.

What is Natural Blogging?

I was thinking today.

People take their blogs very easily. It comes to them as a natural extension of their mind. Just like speech comes after thought, blog comes after idea. Like a robotic arm, an extension of the human maneuverability.

Unfortunately(or so I am thinking as of now) it is not the case with me. Writing doesn’t comes to me as a natural extension of my brain, my thoughts. It comes to me rather as a ‘weapon’, I can’t describe exactly what does this weapon does, but yeah, that’s the exact word. It comes to me as a weapon. It comes third in the connection, it’s not directly connected. Instead of thought-blog, there’s this double layer of thought, thought-thought-blog. And due to that it no longer remains an extension, something one manipulates using his reflexes. It becomes a weapon, something one manipulates using his mind, with a fixed purpose in mind.

I feel a pang of jealousy when I see blogs which seem effortlessly written. And this is not something related at all to literary merit. If a post is written effortlessly, in a stream-of-consciousness manner, it will show itself. On the other hand, I always intend to control that stream. I don’t know if it’s good or bad or just a matter of style. It does feels a little unpleasant at times. In fact, it’s in this post, that I have tried to remain casual and write in an offhand, stream-of-consciousness manner.

They must have had an easy time blogging away their thoughts. Well, I don’t.