The Insanity Of Consciousness

The Insane

They are silent because the division walls Are broken down in the brain, And hours when they might be understood at all Begin and leave again.

Often when they go to the window at night, Suddenly everything seems right: Their hands touch something tangible, The heart is high and can pray, The calmed eyes gaze

Down on this unhoped for, often distorted Garden in this peaceful square at rest, Which in the reflex of this foreign world Grows ever larger, never to be lost.

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great 20th century German poet, wrote that poem in the early 1900’s. Rilke spent his days studying people in the parks, gardens, museums and libraries, and at night he would wander around the boulevards of Paris watching the homeless. He felt the confusion that bubbles to the surface of awareness when a transformation takes place in the self. His behavior was labeled insane by some and he was discounted by others. In his mind, the hopeless needed some kind of help from society, but the system was too distorted and not ready to transform itself.

Rilke finally realized that the mental transformation he was experiencing was a road to the insanity within consciousness. He tried to get the message out through his poetry. He realized there is nothing sane about the cloud of nothing filled with everything that exists within the self. Consciousness wanders within itself and expresses itself in many forms. He believed we are insane dreamers that fill our objective world with sanity in order to know the complexity of it. He watched other forms of consciousness sense their insanity by freely living it without the tangled web of misconceptions that wrap us in a world of fear.

We bring our innate insanity to the surface of our reality when we immerse the self in antics of a butterfly or the strength of a spider weaving a web. We experience the insanity of consciousness in every bloom in nature and in every sliver of our being. But, we tend to focus on the follies of the sane and condemn the insane for experiencing another aspect of our own consciousness.