Notes on Sanity


I began the process of seeking ways to define and communicate about sanity over fourteen years ago. It may be another fourteen before I get it right; but there comes a time when the critical issue is not perfection but communicating something.

The critical issues of this time, of every single life in this moment including thine and mine, including the entire effort of every Muslim, Buddhist, Baptist, Religious Scientist, Methodist, Scientologist and Rastafarian and Christian and pagan on earth now--and of everyone they know-- are these:

1. How can we communicate well, to bring about understanding?

2. How can we bring about futures and good survival for our kind?

3. How can we ensure justice?

4. How can we enhance the affinities we have as individuals for other individuals and come to know them better?

5. How can we build better communities, small and large?

6. How can we live within the physical world without destroying our own spiritual abilities and natures? How can we live up to those natures?

7. How can we live within the physical world without harming other individuals and other species unnecessarily?

Notice that being right about things for its own sake is not among these issues. Nor is dominating or gaining power over people. Nor is any issue which involves looking backwards, carrying forward the past, acting out past harms given or received, dramatizing past confusion, or anything else which calls for the Siren music of shame or blame or regret of things done. Let us roll up our sleeves and proceed.

One access to the question of sanity is whether or not addresses these issues. They almost define the quality of sanity. When we object that one or another action seems crazy to us we are talking about those actions which seem to violate these concerns or ignore them.

Some of the things which we KNOW are crazy include ignoring all these concerns for some degree of self-gratification at the cost of harm to others; for example, driving while stoned. Others include wild dramatizations, striking out to brutalize another human in order to relieve some intense internal pressure of rage or chaotic desperation that is communicating to us within.

This raises an interesting issue of communication and communication channels.

When we are addressing a human being we are not simply addressing the individual but to a large degree we are also addressing his communication lines, his perceived connections of communication. Many of these are lines of communication he currently holds: what will his wife think if he buys this car and brings it home? What will her daughter feel about her staying overtime at the office or shop to complete a task? What will her mom say about her being pregnant? What was it his mother told him to remember when he was in a place like this bar?

Some of these are present concerns. Others are being energized in the present but are actually not present communication channels. They are replicas being generated within the individual's mind. These nets of internally generated communication involve two acts of creation: creating one's impressions of others and creating the communication from those others--often created as though they were directed in to the individual from outside himself, independently. Memory, however, is a choice; it is colored deeply and completely by the intention of the rememberer.

The ghosts of the past are those impressions we choose to haunt ourselves with, whether they are from childhood, from youth, or from five million lives ago. It does not matter whether these elements are true recordings or not. They are actual and the bring to bear in the world of the individual a myriad congress of viewpoints which may be his own, or other viewpoints he had empowered to influence him because he feels it is right, safe, wise or just inevitable that he be the effect of those viewpoints.

Thus, viewpoint processing. Thus too the art of taking blackened communication channels and placing them elsewhere to great relief. Thus the miracle of addressing the child in an intensive way in a series of sessions and finding a change of attitude manifesting on the parent who is hundreds of miles and hours of cold silence away.

This net is the source of much of reality to the individual. It must be explored more fully. There re actual energy components, as far as experiential logic's concerned, which can be measured and can open a field of experiential engineering which can be extremely therapeutic,
.

# # #



Previous Essay / Next Essay / Table of Contents