In an Insane World, Sanity Makes You Look Like a Madwoman

What if all of your defects and imperfections

Your diagnoses and non-neurotypical tendencies

Were signifiers of your strength, your genius, your wisdom

Your access to information that exists outside of the ordinary?

 

What if what has been deemed a limitation 

Is, in fact, the bolt cutter that can cut off the shackles

And precisely what threatens the Authorities

Those who make a pretty penny off of keeping you small and awaiting their direction

Afraid of this inestimable power that boils within? 

 

What if your inability to color inside the lines lies not in your

Blurred vision but in the 3d glasses that allow you to see the extra dimension 

Where there is no sense of separation?

What if your profound demand for justice lies not in a diagnosis of autism 

But in being yoked to the dharma, the truth that undergirds

And moves all things?

 

What if what looks like gold in the everyday world is fool’s gold in that dimension 

And what looks like pathology is the path out of the merry-go-round

Of a limited world?

 

Would you fight those who would remove your shackles, your limitations?

Would you argue with fury and passion to remain in the doghouse next to the mansion? 

If given the key, would you use it to open the lock?

Would you pass it on to another, even if you had to sneak it to them?

 

In an insane world, sanity makes you look like a madwoman.

Your ability to play all the keys of life makes you look schizophrenic.

And your capacity to swing from the mycelium networks of consciousness to the rarified heights—

well, that is bipolar.

That you can shift your aperture from dispersed throughout time and space,

And draw back into the narrowest focus—the highest state in mystical 

and meditative practices—well, that would make your attention deficit. 

 

That movement, that rhythm that is your insignia

That you were born a pioneer, a revolutionary

Here to break through the curtain that separates us from our birthright of vast, open, empty space

Wherein lies the greatest concentration—more dense than the material in a black hole—of wisdom.

One drop and all solutions appear

Not the least of which is the realization that there is no problem.

You are in on the joke.

 

You jacked into creativity itself, 

The movies play across the screen behind your eyes, 

The soundtrack in the depths of your soul,

This mind wide open 

No blindfold

No impediment to your view

This is what they call crazy, mad, off your rocker.

 

That we would call the junkie, the addict, 

The one with an overdrive that could cross any terrain, 

Ride over land or water, inferior is such a billboard of our ignorance. 

Fear of what we do not understand, more often than not, passes as “expertise.” 

Anything that man cannot control is considered a pathology, dangerous. 

 

Why? 

 

Because control is the tool of the governing class. 

And who are they trying to control? 

You guessed it. You! 

And how do they do it? 

They deem anything extra-ordinary, out of the ordinary, a disorder. 

It is, in fact, highly ordered, but the order is implicate rather than man-made. 

And this scares man. 

Get back in your pin!

 

Here, here is the wisdom of the ancients, the words of the ancestors.

Here is your own terma hidden in the cells and the rocks

Your doctrine, your scroll written tattooed inside each of your cells

“Born perfect, you will die perfect, in a life with no death”

Never flawed, never impure, never broken, never contaminated, never corrupted, never harmed, never damaged.

Incorruptible

To the extent that you choose to enjoy your nature

To the extent that you go out of the doors of perception, that is your mind

 

Saints and whores, mad scientists and yogis, innovators and freaky geniuses, great literary artists and drunken poets, brilliant lovers and epicureans, those with OCD, junkies and the incarcerated, rocket scientists and cosmonauts

All know

The space beyond the imaginary line

The line, drawn by a simple pen, that ants won’t cross as if it were a mountain,

That the masses won’t cross because they are obsessed with their molehills.

 

There is a dimension that cannot be faked or feigned, 

That once you’ve touched, cannot be untouched—

Heroic in nature, generous in demeanor,

Funny and fierce,

Playful as hell, that you would fight for with the conviction of your soul. 

 

What you would fight industry, convention, diagnoses, and easy-outs for; what you would kill delusion for and nip the bud of craving; what you would be an outsider and an outlier for and come out of the closet to proclaim

 

This is my birthright—vast, open space,

Not the confinement that passes for safety under the rule of the authority, with a prescription for all things to keep you numb, checked out, dopamine-jacked scrolling and munching,

Safe within the castle walls of your ego

Well-defended against anything that would call you out 

Into nature herself, your nature that you know better than your own breath 

But forgot to breathe. 

If given the key, would you use it to open the lock?

Would you pass it on to another, even if you had to sneak it to them?

 

Here’s the koan:

What heals to the point that you see that the medicine was poison?

And another:

Where’s the trauma in the mind that does not talk to itself?

 

There’s a famous set of two images

One, a wolf with a sheep in its mouth,

The other, the camera pulled back so you see 

The wolf is pulling the sheep out of the water where it is drowning

“Don’t let another decide your narrative.”

Don’t let those who fear freedom and enlightenment

Diagnose you.

 

For she who uses this key, you are charged to always and ever write your own narrative 

Free from the off-the-rack boilerplates that leave you small, 

Defending your limitations, and reactive

Inscribed on the key is one simple instruction:

Be true to the unwavering dignity of your perfection

Bow always to all

But never to one