413—Mad Love: When Madness Becomes Sanity

Mad Love the only way we can respond to this moment of meta-crisis

Elena Maslova-Levin. The birth of Venus.

Summary: What does it mean to love madly? 

In this episode, we talk about three interrelated qualities of mad love. First, a mad lover doesn’t confine their love to the narrow bounds of a particular human relationship (however cherished and exclusive); they know that their mad love participates in the whole; it is not mere human sentiment, but the heart of existence itself. 

Secondly, a mad lover realizes their mad love is wildly powerful; it has the capacity to impact the whole. 

And finally — and here is the rub — it actually is mad; this very knowing of one’s own capacity to impact the whole is madness in today’s world. 

This idea of madness can be better understood through the prism of three levels. Level one is the ordinary sanity and insanity; our capacity to be in the world as it is, to recognize and respect appropriate boundaries. At level two, we begin to recognize that, in the insane world, sanity itself is insanity; an excuse for corruption. Madness becomes my protest against the insanity of the world. Greater is wisdom that comes from madness; that’s what happens at level three, when we realize that the only true sanity is mad love – not merely as a futile existentialist gesture, but because mad love is our true nature.  

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What does it mean to love madly?

There is so much we want to touch, and do, and feel today. 

We are at this incredible moment, filled with portent and with possibility, with promise and with peril. We want to find our way and potentiate this moment. 

We want to find our own potency, which will allow us to potentiate the moment — to love the moment open, and to allow the moment to love us open.

In this path that diverges in the woods, we can take the path less traveled, and we can make the difference that desperately needs to be made. The last six weeks were a time of enormous beauty on so many levels, and enormous heartbreak on so many levels. Part of the heartbreak was cataclysmic, and apocalyptic, and horrific.

For example, the execution of the six Israelis in Gaza was horrific. It was a terrible, and tragic, and senseless insanity — apocalyptic death that stands against a culture of life — against Eros. 

There were also beautiful turnings of the wheel — death which is part of life, death which is a kiss, death which is a night between two days, which opens us up into the new world, and the next possibility, and the next stage of the journey. Our beloved Becca passed. She passed onto the next stage of her journey, and we miss her dearly and deeply. 

What does it mean to be a mad lover? 

That’s what we want to talk about today. We want to talk about the experience of mad love — 

• mad love in politics and economics, 

• mad love in the way we wake up in the morning,

• mad love in relationship, 

• mad love in art, 

• mad love even in war; even in war there is mad love. 

What does it mean to love madly?

I began talking about Outrageous Love somewhere back in 2011. And then, when I started studying with Kristina Kincaid, my partner, she sent me a song, which became our song — about this quality of Outrageous Love, which Rumi called mad love. She evoked the term mad love as one of the ways to talk about this quality I was trying to share — this quality of Outrageous Love, which is core to existence itself.

What does it mean to love madly? 

What does that speak to? 

• We don’t want to be mad. Don’t we want to be sane? Why would we want to be mad? Who would want to be mad? 

• What is this quality of Divine madness, of human madness? The place where the human being and God meet is in this madness… 

• Why is this quality of mad love the only way we can respond to this moment of meta-crisis, which is itself a moment of madness? 

It is, as one author called it, a Molochian moment. In many circles today, the ancient Canaanite deity of Moloch is invoked to describe the systemic underpinnings of the meta-crisis. It’s not one person. It’s not one event. It’s a Molochian system.

The response to Moloch — who is madness in its shadow form, madness in its anti-value form — is 

• madness as an ultimate value, 

• madness as a penultimate achievement, 

• madness as the summit of our spirituality, the summit of our depth.

Rumi wrote a lot about mad love, and my lineage master in the Solomon lineage, Leiner, also talks about madness. There is a beautiful text, which says greater is light than darkness. It is a Solomon text, from the book of Ecclesiastes. 

• Greater is light than darkness. 

• Greater is wisdom than madness.

That is a binary split: light — dark, wisdom — madness. 

Then the Zohar, the Book of Radiance comes along in the 12^th or 13^th century and says, not greater is light than darkness, but greater is light that comes from the darkness. 

Greater is wisdom that comes from the madness. 

There is wisdom that emerges from the madness, and Solomon says, that’s the moon in her fullness. By the moon, he means Eros, She, the full possibility of a new form of governance, and a new form of economics, and a new form of relationship between nations, and new forms of religion — all of what Solomon was looking for. That’s called the Wisdom of Solomon, and it’s a hidden crosscurrent of world history.

There is a wisdom of Solomon’s strata, a quality of that wisdom. You could also call it a tantric quality, but tantra not as a particularly Eastern tradition, not as a particularly Hebrew tradition, but as a particular way of thinking, a quality of consciousness, a phenomenology, a way of being. It is a new way of being — because our current way of being generates the meta-crisis. Our current way of being is the Molochian systemic rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics that generates fragile systems that optimize for efficiency and short-term profit instead of depth, and holding, and love, and resiliency, which is the core source of the meta-crisis.

At its very core, we saw a very tiny, tiny, tiny, minuscule dress rehearsal in COVID, when the entire world shut down because the world had optimized for efficiency and short-term profit — not resiliency.

The response to the madness of meta-crisis — to the madness of Moloch — is the madness of a mad love, of Outrageous Love.  

We are going to talk about what that means. I want to make that real. 

Are we ready to participate as mad lovers in the evolution of love in a way that is  

• so grounded, so responsible, so rigorous that it avoids all ruptures, 

• but also so rapturous, so filled with celebration, so filled with joy that every step we take, we tremble with joy, and we tremble with potency, and we tremble with possibility, and we tremble with potentiation, and we tremble with poignancy? 

That’s the quality of mad love.

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
The single best recapitulation of the interior sciences and the 
contemporary exterior sciences is: 
- Reality is constituted by mad love. 
Mad love is the true real, and the true real is mad love.
Mad love is Outrageous Love.
~Dr. Marc Gafni

Run from what is comfortable. Forget safety.

Rumi writes:

Your life has been a mad gamble. 

Make it more so. 

You have lost now a hundred times running. 

Roll the dice a hundred and one. 

It’s a beautiful text. The one who is in mad devotion to the whole — to the Divine — is in devotion a hundred and one times. The one who is in devotion a hundred times — that’s someone trying to be sane; it doesn’t work. 

You can’t actually serve, you can’t be a devotee, you can’t be an artist at a hundred times. Anyone who serves in devotion at the level of a hundred does not serve, and is not devoted, and does not create art. The move between a hundred and a hundred and one is not one extra. It’s the place of madness. 

“Your life has been a mad gamble,” says Rumi, “make it more so. You have lost now a hundred times running. Roll the dice a hundred and one.” 

“I am so mad with love,” says this mad Sufi love prophet, “that mad men say to me, be still.” 

The reason I’m sharing Rumi is not because he’s a good poet, although he is, but because Rumi was a profound realizer of the interior sciences. He headed one of the most important formal schools of Sufism. Sufism is under attack today by Islamic fundamentalism world over: the Shiite attack on Sufism within Iran tries to undo the deep ground of Sufism in Iran; but even within Sunni Islam, which is in part Sufism, there is a deep attack on Sufism. Sufism is hated by Hamas, hated by ISIS, hated by Hezbollah.

Sufism’s spirit is alive and well in the world, and Rumi is not one person. Rumi was part of a school that has existed for several hundred years. Hafiz was also in that group of thousands of Sufi realizers that spoke, breathed and felt this mad love. Run from what’s comfortable, writes Rumi. Forget safety. When we say forget safety, we don’t mean be unsafe in some absurd way — but today, we have created an idolatry of comfort. 

We never get to mad love, because you have to reach an optimum point of discomfort to experience mad love.

Mad love is maddening. It is not comfortable. People say, the opposite of pain is pleasure, and we always say, no, the opposite of pain is comfort. 

Comfort is comfortably numb (Pink Floyd). There is no place for mad love. 

We have this idolatry: to get as safe as you can possibly be, to be completely safe, no risk of any kind, to live as long as you can live, as comfortably as you can live. Safety, longevity, and comfort are the new holy trinity — but of course, in the end, you die. Because life is unsafe; no one gets out of life alive.

It’s not the end of the story. Life as we know it here is but one dimension of Reality, that’s true, but it ends. When I am not willing to recognize death as my close friend, then I become corrupt, as in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. 

That’s what Rumi is writing. He is talking about this idolatry of safety. Of course, there were ways that we weren’t safe before. In previous generations, we needed to create safety on multiple levels. Of course, that’s sacred and good. But within that construct of safety — of protecting your family, and the stable structures of your life in all the ways they should be protected — “Run from what’s comfortable,” says Rumi, “forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious. I have tried prudent planning long enough. From now on, I will be mad.” 

Finally, last piece — Rumi again: 

The intellectual is always showing off;
the lover is always getting lost.
The intellectual runs away, afraid of drowning;
the whole business of love is to drown in the sea.
Intellectuals plan their repose;
lovers are ashamed to rest.
The lover is always alone,
even surrounded with people;
like water and oil, he remains apart.
The man who goes to the trouble
of giving advice to a lover
get’s nothing. He’s mocked by passion.

What Rumi is pointing to is this sense of living life out loud and in love, madly. 

Our love lists are too short

Couples often have a song. KK and I have a song, Truly Madly Deeply 1997, Savage Garden song. This is our song. It’s a mad love song. We are going to do something with the song. We are going to turn it on its head in the most mad possible way. 

It’s a gorgeous song that we love. And — in all of its stunning beauty — the song itself is making a mistake. 

What’s the mistake of the song? It’s about just the two of them. 

It’s gorgeous. It’s beautiful. It’s stunning. 

But our love lists are too short. That’s the first quality of mad love: Our love lists are too short. The song personifies the contemporary move in culture. That song should live between beloveds. That’s beautiful. We include that stunning, unimaginable beauty. 

But mad love is not mere human sentiment, as gorgeous as human sentiment is. It participates in the Field of ErosValue. It participates in the Field of Existence.

Mad love is not something that emerges at a particular poetic moment in human culture — 

• whether that’s in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the wild love scene there at the very beginning, 

• or whether that’s in the Arthurian tales of the medieval period,

• or whether that/s Jacob madly in love with Rachel in the canonical text,

• or whether that’s Magdalene and Jesus. 

No, no, no, no. Mad love doesn’t appear as industrialization sweeps through Europe, and individuation appears, and social mobility becomes a possibility, so being in love becomes a new commodity. 

No, no, no, mad love is not mere human sentiment. 

Mad love is the heart of existence itself.

What that song is describing is not that couple, but Reality itself. 

Reality itself is about the quality of allurement of mad love that demarcates and animates Cosmos, all the way up and all the way down. 

We’ve talked so many times about the love dance of Cosmos that incepts Cosmos and plays in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang, when — if you do your physics well — you see that there is autonomy and communion, coming close and holding my individuation, which is what love is. 

Love is not merging, and love is not fusion. Love is the dance of union. Love is: 

• We come close, and we step apart; and we come close again, and we step apart. 

• We come close and we step apart, but we never look away. 

That’s the Song of Songs of Solomon.

That gorgeous and beautiful song, Truly Madly Deeply, is a Song of Songs. The lovers are looking for each other, it literally plays with the same movement that the Song of Solomon — but the lovers can’t quite find each other. Just like as the author of the song, Canticles, tells the story, there is a duo, these two gorgeous men in this little band of two called Savage Garden. The garden is the garden of Eden, and savage is: it’s hard, it’s complicated, it’s paradox, it rips your heart apart. They are the bards, they are the minstrels of the song, and they are looking for each other, and they find each other at the end, but then they are going to lose each other again, and then they find each other — but they never look away. 

But that’s not just them, that’s the story of Cosmos itself.

The mitochondrial dance of Eros in our cells

Science has dogmatically overreached its bounds, and moved to hide that story. 

For example, has anyone here ever heard of mitochondria? 

Mitochondria are constantly converting energy; they are essentially the activating force of all cells, whether it’s nerve cells, or bone cells, or skin cells. What mitochondria are doing is, essentially, they are accessing the flow of Eros — the flow of love between electrons and protons and neutrons. They are accessing that proton flow. They are actually accessing the currents of Eros and allurement which emerge from particular configurations of Eros, of union, of intimacy. They access that movement, that yearning, that energy of allurement, that energy of radical aliveness, that energy of Eros, and, through a very complex process, they distribute it.

Essentially, science has lied to us. 

Here is how science describes mitochondria: 

“The machinery that the mitochondria use to convert energy is called the electron transport chain.” 

Do you get what a lie that is? 

First off, it’s called machinery. It’s an electron transport chain, meaning it’s this mechanical device, like a forklift in the Amazon warehouse or something like that.  

“Mitochondria convert chemical energy in the form of a chemical called adenosine triphosphate (ATP for short). ATP is an energy currency that every cell in our body can use. The electron transport chain is made up of four complexes, which are groups of proteins.” 

Do you get what’s going on here?

A protein is a configuration of Eros. It’s a particular, gorgeous configuration, a stunning allurement, a new erotic whole. And then, there are five different patterns of protein groups. There are these different configurations of intimacy, and five broad groups that are dancing with each other in this unimaginably sophisticated, dazzling dance of Eros and allurement. 

They are madly at play. They are madly in love, and they are filled with value. There is a value, and the value is life. 

And the value is depth. 
And the value is feeling. 
And the value is, ultimately, cognition. 
And the value is uniqueness. 
And the value is transformation. 

In other words, the movement of mitochondria is to support all of the First Principles and First Values that we have outlined in CosmoErotic Humanism.

In the book, First Principles and First Values, we talk about the value structures of Cosmos. Those are ErosValue structures. Mitochondria access the flow of Eros that takes place in the electron chain and then actually draw that Eros, absorb that Eros and distribute it through a very complex dance of Eros, which has nothing to do with machinery. 

This is not machinery, this is music. It’s not an electron transport chain — it’s literally a mad love dance, which is unimaginably precise and unimaginably passionate. All of the universe is constituted by that play of Eros — the play of Eros that happens in the world of matter. That which happens in the world of matter is driven by value; it is driven by what matters.

Matter itself is driven by value — by what matters. This entire subatomic world is driven to create more value, more of what matters — which is more depth, and more uniqueness, and more possibility, and, ultimately, more care, and more cognition — all the way up the evolutionary chain. There is obviously discontinuity (there are not a lot of therapeutic issues in the electron community); that’s absolutely true. There are new emergences of love and Eros all the way up the evolutionary chain; that’s absolutely true. 

But it is not just discontinuity. It is not just new emergencies.

The flow of allurement, Eros, and love in the world of subatomic particles (the physiosphere), and in the world of living organisms (the biosphere), and then in the world of humanity (the noosphere) are inter-included. You and I are now in the middle of this mitochondrial dance of wild mad LoveEros — in this very second, every single one of us. 

That is not mysticism. That’s the reality of our lives.

That mitochondrial structure is participating in the subatomic structure. The flow of Eros love that lives in the world of matter is accessed, and then intensified in its participation in the mitochondrial unfolding. The jump from matter to life is an intensification of intimacies. Stuart Kauffman got this, in a couple of little passages (I thought I had made it up in my own meditative dreaming, and then I saw a bunch of very, very important scientific footnotes, both in Levin and in Kauffman, which validated this reading).

We, human beings, are constituted by all of the subatomic world and its flows of Eros and mad love, and all of the biological world. Just one small dimension of the biological world, but a crucial one, is the mitochondrial dance of Eros in every one of our cells. That’s what we are. 

That’s literally our very identity; and then Eros intensifies; intimacies deepen. There is an evolution of love. We participate in the evolution of love, and then it emerges in us. We can become — if we actually grow up, if we actually wake up and we begin to show up in our lives — we actually become mad love, awake, alive in person. 

The weakness of the song is that it suggests that that quality of searching, that quality of yearning, that quality of longing exists only in that couple. But they are actually mad love awake and alive, and their mad love itself can’t survive if they’re only looking deeply in each other’s eyes, because mad love is the quality of Cosmos itself. 

Mad love is the heart of existence.

If I hijack mad love, and I make that a quality that’s only mine, that’s only between the two of us — but I don’t madly love the cab driver, and I don’t madly love the people across the world or down the street who have nothing to eat, and I don’t madly love the gardener, and I don’t madly love the clerk at the bank who is harried and busy and tired — I am not a mad lover

My mad love participates in the whole

The first quality of a mad lover is: 

• I have an experience of my mad love being part of the whole. My mad love is not separate from the whole. 

The beginning of mad love is that I have a direct and clear experience that my experience of mad love is an experience which is the quality of all of Reality, all the way up and all the way down. 

I am participating in this field of mad love. The field of mad love is awake and alive in me. 

Therefore, even when I am having a bad day, even when I am feeling depressed, and sad, and devastated, and hurt, and harmed, or irritated, it’s okay. I’ll work on that, and I’ll stay safe; I’ll do the best I can to take care of myself, but that’s not who I am. 

• Who I am is mad love come awake. 

• Who I am is mad love in person. 

Homo amor — the word that we’ve used in CosmoErotic Humanism to describe the New Human and the New Humanity — is a mad lover. 

The first characteristic of mad love is: I am in relationship to the whole. 

I don’t exile mad love to a white-picket-fence particular relationship that looks a particular way, and is socially acceptable in a particular way, and is conventionally appropriate in a particular way. We love who we love, and we want to love wide, and we want to love deep, and we want to love big. 

We want to be radically committed to our closest relationships, gorgeously — so, we love that couple. KK and I love that song, and we love each other. We have our exclusive mad love. 

And then, we open up, and we open up, and I can actually say to my friend, oh my God, I love you madly. I love you madly doesn’t mean romantic love. It means something else. It means this quality of aliveness, this quality of depth, this quality of care, this quality of commitment. It’s so deep.

The exile of love is threefold:

One, we claim that love is purely human. That’s the first exile. 

Two is, it’s only between particular groups of humans. It’s only particular configurations of humans. Heterosexual married couples — that’s where mad love lives. 

But then, since it doesn’t work there all too often, we say, oh it works, but between heterosexual married couples at the very beginning of a relationship, when they meet and fall in love. That’s mad love. That’s the third exile.

We exile mad love —

• into the human world, 

• then into a very narrow sector of the human world, 

• and then to the very beginning of the relational structure and cycle in that particular vector in the human world. 

It’s a triple exile. 

No, no, no. Mad love is everywhere. It’s always there. It’s ever always already present. It’s actually my true nature. I am a mad lover. And my mad love participates in the whole; it’s the quality of the whole. 

That’s the first characteristic.

My mad love is wildly powerful

The second quality of mad love is: I have a quality, a capacity, a feeling that I want to influence the whole, that I want to impact the whole, that I want to gift to the whole. I want to have a direct realization —  

• that my loving, my aliveness, my being, my mad love loves the whole; 

• my mad love impacts the whole; 

• that my mad love changes the trajectory of the whole; 

• that my mad love is wildly powerful. 

The second quality of mad love is that it’s unimaginably powerful and has a power to transform the whole, to lift the whole, to create this Field of Radiance and this Field of Possibility. 

When I am madly in love with the whole, then the whole opens up to me.

In the mystery schools that animated the Renaissance of Italy in the 16^th century, there was a strong set of sources drawn from a great thinker named Isaac Luria. At the core of those sources was the second quality of being a mad lover. It is articulated by Luria as the invocation that one makes in every movement of one’s life, often dozens of times during the day, LeShem Yichud ‘for the sake of intimate communion’: I do this action for the sake of intimate communion.

I do this action — 

• whether it’s to say hello to my cab driver, 

• whether it’s to edit an episode, 

• whether it’s to turn to my child and put them to bed in the most beautiful way, 

• whether it’s to help my sister get to a critical meeting or through a pregnancy class, 

• whether it’s to help my sister find her way in transforming her life, 

• whether it’s my brother, whether it’s my friend, whether it’s my dear, dear, dear beloved, whether it’s some new person I just met and I realize that I need to help this person, I need to stand forth and be there, 

• whether it’s the way I distribute my funds, 

• whether it’s my willingness to take my resources and pour them where they should be in a way that’s mad — 

for the sake of the whole. 

I step out of the exile of the song, where I speak the language of mad love, but really it’s about me and my family; I am really egocentric. I say this because it makes me feel better, but the way I spend my resources, my time, my energy, my funds, is about me and my small group of people. No, be a mad lover for the sake of the whole!

Luria says that in every action I do, I can pour the resource of my energy into the fabric of the whole. I do it for the sake of the whole. And I say, LeShem Yichud ’for the sake of intimate communion’. 

The intimate communion of what? 

Of all the broken people, of all the broken parts, of all the split-off parts, of all the broken hearts, of all the shattered minds, of all the twisted scripts, of all the distorted yearnings, of all the sadnesses, of all the breakings. It’s all holy and broken. When I say Hallelujah, when I say, LeShem Yichud, then  — 

• something becomes more coherent in Reality, 

• something becomes more whole, 

• something becomes more alive, 

• something becomes more filled with joy. 

I have unimaginable power.

The second quality of mad love is that it’s powerful. I have the capacity well beyond the capacity of any of the presidential candidates in the United States and any of the high office candidates anywhere in the world. I don’t need to be a senator or a prime minister or a king or a queen or a president or a vice president. I am royalty. I am king or queen.

My madness is my protest

But here is the thing: I need to be actually (not figuratively) mad. 

To be mad means I have a capacity to see beneath the surface. 

• I can access depth. 

• I have the capacity to be mad. 

• I have to be mad in some sense in order to realize that my action truly affects the whole, my transformation actually is the transformation of the whole. 

The small action that I do as I paint is transforming the whole. 
The small action I do as I create a blog post in order to open up space.
The small action that I do as I collect clips and I edit them.

The small action that I do as I buy a couch so me and my wife (or me and my partner, or me and my guests who I entertain at my house) have a nicer place to sit, so we can actually find each other’s eyes — if I do that for the sake of the whole, then something actually changes in the whole.

For a mad lover, their relationship to Reality changes. A mad love has omni-pathos, they are omni-considerate, they are omni-feeling with the whole. That very experience, to know that that’s true — it is madness, but it’s divine madness. 

In other words, if I am very normal, if I am a reductive materialist rationalist, it’s insane to know that what I do affects the whole. Yes, that’s insane. That’s the point. Mad love means to be out of your mind, but ‘out of your mind’ means out of your materialist mind. 

That’s this third quality of mad love — the madness part. That’s the third quality. 

Let’s get this madness. 

Level one, you have classical sanity and insanity. That’s good. We should be sane. There is developmental psychology. There are stages of development. There is knowing that this is my arm and it’s not your arm, that there are appropriate boundaries between people. We want to be sane, right? And if I feel like I have some condition, I might want to work with that condition. I need to be sane.

Sanity means the right proportion. I don’t make myself bigger or smaller than I am. I take responsibility, I show up, my word is good. I’m reliable. I’m steady. I don’t get hijacked. 

There is a way that mad love can have shadows. I can lose proportion. Murders, crimes of passion happen when mad love gets dissociated from ordinary grounded-ness, from ordinary sanity. I need to be sane, not mad — of course. Insanity is not an excuse; pleas of insanity are overplayed these days. I am responsible for being sane. I’ve got to take responsibility for my sanity. That’s beautiful. That’s level one.

But then there is level two. At level two, we realize that we’ve been confusing appropriate sanity for resignation for the status quo, and often for corruption. What we’re calling sane was actually corrupt. There was a fabulous movie, I think in the mid-sixties, called King of Hearts, where everyone was involved in slaughters and wars. There was one person, the King of Hearts, who was insane. It was clear that he was insane. But of course his insanity was a protest against the slaughtering sanity, the cruelty of the sanity, the senselessness of the sanity, the barbarity of the sanity, the brutality of the sanity. 

• Is it sane to have factory farms in which we torture animals for three months in order to eat them, to have our lamb chop be a little more succulent? Is that sane?

• Is it sane to have ten million dollars in the bank, and make sure to distribute it well, when that money would be much better spent in other places in the world, where I could save 200 lives or change the course of the evolution of the source code? Is that sane? 

• Is it sane to spend my entire life trying to be safe and comfortable, and live as long as I can when, in the end, I’m going to die? 

• Is it sane to be lost in my narcissistic bubble? 

Sanity can become an excuse for corruption, an excuse for betrayal of my deepest self, an excuse for an abandonment of my true nature, for an abandonment of mad love.

What I need is a level two of protest. 

The sacred text of the Solomon lineage says that in our day today, prophecy is with the madmen and the fools. That’s what Rumi was talking about. I need to be responsible and safe in all the appropriate ways, but then, I need to protest, and my madness is my protest. My level two insanity protests against this level-one dichotomy between sanity and insanity, this very respectable conventional appropriate dichotomy.

Why did we betray ourselves?

One of my closest friends died two years ago, and I actually didn’t know. We didn’t talk often. When we did, we went deep in all the way and we both had intense lives, and he wrote a book called, The Tyranny of Malice. His name was Joseph Berke, and he was the key student of R. D. Laing. R. D. Laing wrote a book called, The Divided Self in 1960, and another book called Wisdom, Madness and Folly (1985). It’s beautiful.

What he basically said was, we can’t make that easy split between the sane ones and the insane ones; some of those who are insane are actually mad lovers. They are actually protesting. They are the king of hearts in that sixties movie; they are saying, it’s not okay. They are saying the status quo which claims to be sane is actually insanity. 

• A status quo in the 20^th century which allowed for 100 million non-combatants to be killed is insanity. 

• A status quo in which the entire world doesn’t rush to the aid of Ukraine today is insanity. 

• A status quo which cannot distinguish between a culture of death and a pluralistic democracy with all of its flaws is insanity. 

• A world in which two billion people don’t have drinking water. 

Why is that sane? 

R. D. Laing said that there is a continuum between sanity and insanity; there is no sharp divide. Sometimes we move into insanity for a moment, as in a shamanic journey. There is a dissent, but it’s a dissent for the sake of assent. 

There is a moment of protest. I need to let myself go mad. 

Now, I don’t mean to go mad in a clinical way. I don’t mean if you’re taking appropriate balancing medication, you should stop because we said to go mad. That’s not what I mean, obviously. That needs to be checked individually in every case, to see where you are. This is not about that. 

It’s about something deeper: we can’t use sanity as our defense plea when we are held at the bar of cosmic joy and justice, and we are asked why we didn’t live our lives. 

We have this huge life of unlived love, and unlived life, and unlived commitment, and unlived integrity. 

Why did we betray ourselves? We were being sane.

R. D. Laing points out that there is a mad lover inside of us that’s protesting. 

• The mad lover understands that yes, I do affect the whole world. 

• The mad lover says, oh my God, I’m the king of the world. 

And we say, oh my God, you are mad, you are not the king of the world. Why are you saying you’re the king? You’re crazy mad. 

And of course, he or she might be mad. That might be an actual state of madness that needs to be engaged, but in many cases, they are seeing something. They are understanding this quality of Luria’s, LeShem Yichud: 

• I am actually powerful. 

• I actually am royalty. 

• I actually can affect the whole thing.

A gesture, a flutter of my eye, a caress of my heart, an opening of my deepest interior, a flutter of my soul, a moment of my purity, the moving of my lips in sincerity, the opening of a space that I was never able to open before, the digging deeper, the unearthing, which creates an authenticity that I thought could never happen — when I offer that, and pour that into the source code, I am affecting — quite literally, ontologically, for real — I’m changing the whole. 

The truth of Reality is that Reality is my canvas. I have a relationship to the whole.

True sanity is mad love

The mad man, the mad woman, understands that for a second. We call them mad, but actually they are on a shamanic journey, and they are trying to bring us back an important message: 

This is level three,

Enlightenment at its core is sanity, but what sanity means is knowing my true nature. 

My true nature is not a desiccated separate self who uses love as a social convention in order to get sufficient comfort and sufficient status to get by, to live as comfortably and as long and as safe as possible. No, that’s not sanity. Sanity is to know my true identity, and my true identity is —

Who am I? I am a mad lover. I am an Outrageous Lover. 

That’s actually who I am. That’s actually my true nature.

Enlightenment means that I am intimate with everything. Enlightenment is intimacy with all things, wrote Master Dōgen — but I am not just intimate, I am uniquely intimate, and my intimacy, and the quality of my intimacy, and the quality of my gifting, and the quality of my laughter, and the nature of my poetry, and the movement of my sincere and pure and devoted heart changes the whole. 

I am royalty. 

My mood changes the mood of Cosmos. 

It matters to find my deepest mood, and to pour that expanded gorgeous deep profound self into the source code of Reality — because I do change the whole thing. That is actually sanity. 

The ultimate sanity is when the knowing of madness is disclosed to be true. That’s the ultimate sanity — where we go mad, we think, oh my God, I am superman, I can save the whole thing. 

Yeah, actually yes, you can. Yes, you can.

And then, I become sane for real, not sane as a disguise — a thin veneer for a desiccated separate self for the hollow men and the stuffed men; sane as a mad lover. 

That’s the third quality. The third quality is:

I’ve broken the boundaries of the narrow separate self. 

I am deeply grounded, I am sane in all the good ways, then I go insane as a protest, I go mad as a shamanic journey. 

Why does a person do a medicine journey? 

A medicine journey is a descent into madness, but it’s not a descent into clinical insanity. It’s a descent into a world in which I can see more clearly. In which I realize that that stunning and beautiful song, Truly Madly Deeply, is about the whole world. Mitochondria are truly madly deeply. “I’ll be your dream. I’ll be your wish. I’ll be your fantasy. I’ll be your hope, I’ll be your love. I’ll be everything that you need.” 

That’s what we are all saying to each other.

We are a band of Outrageous Lovers. We are unique incarnations and discretions of the field. That’s what we mean when we say we live in a world of outrageous pain, and the only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love. The only response is to love madly.

Let’s reach for a world beyond betrayal

The opposite of loving madly is betrayal. Judas loves Jesus madly, and then he can’t hold the mad love, and the mad love becomes sane and ordinary. The only sane thing to do is to be with Rome, betray Jesus. 

Betrayal is a violation of mad love. 

There are a thousand ways we get to be committed to each other. 
There are a thousand ways we get to be madly devoted to each other. 

We forgive the betrayals that have happened, but let us commit. 

Let us commit — not to the cynical notion that betrayal is just part and parcel of human life — let’s reach for a world beyond betrayal! Let’s reach for a world in which we are madly loyal to each other. There is a loyalty in mad love. There is a seeing. 

We see each other. 
We know what matters. 

It’s not what appears to matter. It’s something so much deeper.

You know the story of the mad king? It’s Nachman’s story of the mad king that Kafka loved so much. His country is starving, and they eat the grain, and when they eat the grain, the grain makes them mad. 

We are starving. We need some sort of nourishment, but we are fed a fare that is not nourishing. We are fed a fare of insanity, which makes us mad and not in a good way. They eat the grain, and they go mad — not a holy madness, a level-one madness, when they don’t remember who they are. 

• There is a madness which causes us to remember our true nature. That’s holy madness. 

• And then, there is a fallen madness, which causes us to forget our true nature, but not only to forget our true nature, but to forget that we’ve forgotten. 

There is a madness which invokes a memory of who we really are, and there’s a madness that causes us to forget.

The grain that they ate in this story made them mad in the bad way, it was a fallen madness. The people were starving, and so they became consumers, and they consumed and consumed the grain, until they were all mad, just the king and his advisor were left. And the king says to his advisor:

• What do I do? All of my people are mad, and I love them madly, and I want to be with them, but they are mad. How can I be mad? 

• Well, you can’t be their king if you’re sane and they’re mad. You’ve gotta eat the grain, but you can’t be a mad king, unless it’s holy madness, says the advisor.

• Well, how am I going to find my way to holy madness? 

• You know what? I’m going to eat the grain with you. But before we eat the grain, let’s make a mark on each other’s forehead. And after we eat the grain, we are going to be mad, but then if we look at each other, we are going to see the mark on our forehead, and we’re going to remember. It’s going to become holy madness. We are going to remember who we really are.

Beloveds, we have marks on our forehead. 

• It’s the spark in us, which is un-betrayed and unbowed. 

• It’s the love in us that flames and refuses to be quenched. 

• It’s the hope that refuses to be extinguished. 

• It’s the possibility of possibility. 

It’s the feeling that actually I matter so immensely that the whole world was worth creating just for me — not as a narcissistic predicament, but as the truest indication of my true nature. I am mad with love — and the whole world is mad with me, but it becomes a holy madness.

I want to drink with you. 
L’chaim! 
Let’s become holy mad drunkards, what Hafiz calls the rogues, and the drunkards, and the madmen. 

We don’t want our place around just the civilized. 

We want to be so civilized, and yet we want to be rogues, and madmen, and holy thieves, and holy beggars. 

We are committed to Outrageous Love. 

There are three kinds of drunkards. There are drunkards who just feel the pain of their own lives, so they just drink a little bit. But if you feel the pain of all of your people, you can’t just drink a little, you’ve got to drink a few good glasses. But now, in the mystical realm in the palace of imagination, let’s drink bottles and bottles — for all the people in the world that ever were, that ever will be. 

Let’s be holy drunkards, holy madmen for the whole thing, because that’s the only sanity. 

Mad love, everyone, mad love, mad love.

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