It's a Barnum and Bailey World

On Madness

“You say it's only a paper moon Sailing over a cardboard sea But it wouldn't be make believe if you believed in me...” Yip Harburg

A Paper Moon

A friend of mine recently asked me to write on madness. In this Barnum and Bailey world of canvas skies and cardboard seas, its hard to keep your sanity sometimes. It’s a mad, mad, mad mad world.

Madness and sanity are questions for philosophy. Who's crazy? It depends on the difference between what's real and what's absurd, what has meaning and what is meaningless. Knowing the difference is sanity. Philosophy helps us understand the difference between what's meaningful and what's irrational. If you can't tell the difference, why then, you're crazy.

The basic problem of philosophy is meaning. We search for meaning in the universe. French existentialist writer Albert Camus explored this question in his novels, plays, and essays and came to the conclusion that there is no meaning. Life is absurd. It’s a mad and random world, and whoever tries to find meaning is irrational. So, according to Camus, we're all crazy.

Albert Camus: Life is absurd.

It sounds crazy, but Camus and his followers thought that life had no meaning, and that the search for meaning itself is absurd: “There is only one really serious philosophical problem," Camus said, "and that is suicide.” Camus reached rather dark conclusions. He felt that a true philosopher must realize that life is absurd. If life is meaningless and has no value, the only rational response would be suicide. Camus explores this thesis in The Myth of Sisyphus, where he argues that a philosopher ought to have the courage to practice what he preaches.  So, according to Camus, if you decide that it's all crazy, you should say "goodbye cruel world." Pretty harsh.

 The confession that life is worthless can only lead to suicide, said this Nobel Prize winner. Now, while this philosophy got him a lot of girls, it's really pretty dark. Camus has always been popular with gothic teens. They love it when he says "life is crazy and whoever looks for meaning is also crazy." Students use this to tease their teachers into a fury. I know. I've heard it from generations of newly enlightened teens.  Every two or three years a new student walks into the classroom with a dog-eared copy of "The Stranger," and challenges me to debate the absurdity of my life. Sometimes they have a pretty good argument. Strangely, while the Nobel-prize winning author once commented, “"I know nothing more absurd than to die in an automobile accident," his life ended by car accident. God, according to Camus, is dead. But while He may have been an absurdity to Camus, I seriously doubt that God died in a car accident.

Camus felt that God would have to be either a psychopath or an imbecile to tolerate the cruelty of the universe. While humans can undoubtedly be cruel, I don’t see how cruelty is an aspect of universal law. To assign cruelty to the universe is a literary fault. The universe has no personality and can neither be cruel nor kind. To say that the universe is “cruel” is absurd and irrational.

Since God’s behavior is irrational according to the standard of Camus, he must not exist. I don’t see why irrationality negates existence. There is nothing rational about the teenage girls who read Camus’ books and smoke french cigarettes. But somehow, their irrationality makes them more charming. And while they seem irrational, no one would deny their existence.

Modern Irrationalist Follower of Camus

There is a bit of a paradox here. Camus says the universe is irrational and then critiques God for being irrational. If everything is absurd, shouldn’t God also reserve the right to be absurd?

My favorite work by Tennessee Williams is a play called “The Night of the Iguana.” A defrocked Episcopal clergyman leads a bus-load of middle-aged Baptist women on a tour of the Mexican coast and comes to terms with the failure haunting his life. John Huston filmed the movie in Mexico with Ava Gardner and Richard Burton. When Elizabeth Taylor joined Burton in the sleepy fishing village where the film was made, it put Puerto Vallarta on the map. Years later my mother brought us to Puerto Vallarta and now I live in Mexico. Life is absurd.

Richard Burton with "senile delinquent" John Huston on set of Night of the Iguana in Puerto Vallarta

There’s a great line from the movie. Richard Burton as the defrocked clergyman is drunk. They ask him why he left the church and he says, “God is a senile delinquent. All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.” 

God as Senile Delinquent

Western philosophers hate the idea of God as a senile delinquent, since He does not conform to the logic they learned from Kant and Wittgenstein. 

But what if God were a juvenile delinquent?

The Krishna conception of divinity acknowledges just such an idea. There’s nothing attractive about a senile delinquent. Senility is another form of madness. Who wants to see a toothless grandpa with a beard raging in the heavens? But a juvenile delinquent is always attractive. Think of James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, or Marlon Brando in The Wild One. The juvenile delinquent is the model of a movie star. Misunderstood and charismatic. Who is more misunderstood than Krishna?

Nietzsche said that if God exists, he must be dancing. The Krishna conception of Godhead satisfies the criterion not only of Tennessee Williams and Camus, but even Nietzsche. Krishna moves in a crooked way. We cannot understand his movements. But the absurdity is ours. We live in the world of misconception.

God lives in the sublime world of Goloka where all movement is dance, all speech is song. He dances on the heads of Kaliya. As a juvenile delinquent, Krishna steals yoghurt, and even worse, he dances with the gopis. But as the mad prince Hamlet once told his old schoolmate, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,  Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

But if even the mundane world is absurd, why should God’s behavior conform to mundane logic of the absurd world? Who’s crazy? God or the cigarette-smoking existentialist followers of Camus ? And again if God is all-powerful by definition, if he is “By Himself” and “For Himself,” then shouldn’t he reserve the right to be as absurd as we are? Who are we to question the ways of God? We must be crazy. The followers of Krishna have often been called crazy, especially by Western followers of the senile delinquent persuasion. 

"Who is Crazy?"

Srila Prabhupada once wrote an essay on madness, called Who is Crazy? I reproduce it in full below.

WHO IS CRAZY?

By His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda

Founder-Ācārya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness

[Reproduced from

Back to Godhead magazine

Issue #66]

The whole world is divided into factions, and each accuses the others of being crazy. But if there are no criteria by which to judge sanity, then who can decide?

man-manā bhava mad-bhakto mad-yājī māṁ namaskuru
mām evaiṣyasi yuktvaivam ātmānaṁ mat-parāyaṇaḥ

“Engage your mind always in thinking of Me, engage your body in My service and surrender unto Me. Completely absorbed in Me, surely you will come to Me.” (Bg. 9.34)

Here Krsna says that one should always think of Him, be His devotee and worship Him. This is the process of devotional service; it is not very difficult, and anyone can execute it by thinking of God, offering obeisances and rendering some service unto Him. Generally people identify with some party, either socially, politically, economically or religiously. In America there are the Republican and Democratic parties, and on the international scale there are the capitalists and the communists. Religiously, people identify with a party as Christian, Moslem, Hindu and so on. In India there are social parties also, like the brāhmaṇas and kṣatriyas. In short, to avoid belonging to some party or other is not possible. Spiritualism, however, means that we should identify ourselves with God’s party.

On this platform also there is “party-ism” in that the spiritualists call the materialists crazy, and the materialists call the spiritualists crazy. We have formed a Society for Krishna Consciousness, and those who do not like it say that we are “crazy.” Similarly, a person in Kṛṣṇa consciousness sees a person who is acting in material consciousness as a crazy person. Who, then, is actually crazy? Who decides? How are the parties involved capable of deciding? Indeed, the whole world is divided into parties, each accusing the others of being crazy, but if there are no criteria by which to judge sanity, then who can decide? If we ask any man, any common man on the street, what he is, he will reply, “I am this body.” He may give some further explanation by saying that he is Christian, or Hindu, or Jewish, or that he is Mr. So-and-So, or whatever, but all these are simply designations he attaches to the body. In other words, they all arise from the body. When a person says that he is an American, he is referring to the body because by some accident or reason he is born into the land of America and so takes the title of an American. But that is also artificial because the land is neither American nor French, nor Chinese, nor Russian, nor anything—land is land. We have simply artificially created some boundaries and said, “This is America, this is Canada, this is Mexico, Europe, Asia, India.” These are our concoctions, for we do not find that these lands were originally divided in this way. Three or four hundred years ago this land was not even known as America, nor was it even inhabited by white men from Europe. Even a thousand years ago Europe was inhabited by different peoples and called different names. These are all designations that are constantly changing. From the Vedic literatures we can understand that this whole planet was known as Ilāvṛta-varṣa, and one king, MahārājaBharata, who ruled the entire planet, changed the name of the planet to Bhārata-varṣa. Gradually, however, the planet became divided again, and different continents and sectors became known by different names. Even recently India has been divided into a number of countries, whereas earlier in the century India had included Burma, Ceylon and East and West Pakistan. In actuality the land is neither Bhārata-varṣa, India, Europe, Asia or whatever—we simply give it these designations in accordance with time and influence.

Just as we give the land designations, we also give our bodies designations, but no one can say what his designations were before birth. Who can say that he was American, Chinese, European or whatever? We are thinking that after leaving this body we will continue as American or Indian or Russian. But although we may live in America during this life, we may be in China in the next, for we are constantly changing our bodies. Who can say that he is not changing bodies? When we are born from the womb of our mother, our body is very small. Now, where is that body? Where is the body we had as a boy? We may have photographs that remind us what the body was like in past years, but we cannot say where that body has gone. The body may change, yet we have the feeling that we do not change. “I am the same man,” we think, “and in my childhood I looked like this or like that.” Where have those years gone? They have vanished along with the body and everything that came in contact with it. But although everything is changing at every moment, we are still sticking to our bodily identification so that when we are asked what we are, we give an answer that is somehow or other related to this body. Is this not crazy? If a person identifies with something he is not, he is considered crazy. The conclusion is that one who identifies with the body cannot really be considered sane. This, then, is a challenge to the world: Whoever claims God’s property or earth as belonging to his body, which is constantly changing, can only be considered a crazy man. Who can actually establish that this is his property or that this is his body? By the chances of nature a person is placed in a body and is dictated to by the laws of material nature. Yet in illusion we think we are controlling that nature. Therefore Kṛṣṇa says in Bhagavad-gītā:

prakṛteḥ kriyamāṇāni
guṇaiḥ karmāṇi sarvaśaḥ
ahaṅkāra-vimūḍhātmā
kartāham iti manyate

“The bewildered spirit soul, under the influence of the three modes of material nature, thinks himself the doer of activities that are in actuality carried out by nature.” (Bg. 3.27)

Prakṛteḥ kriyamāṇāni: Material nature is pulling everyone by the ear, just as a stern teacher pulls a student. Every individual is under the dictations of material nature and is being put sometimes in this body and sometimes in that. We are now fortunate to have acquired a human body, but we can easily see that there are many other types of bodies (8,400,000 according to Padma Purāṇa) and by the laws of nature we can be put into any type of body according to our work. Thus we are completely in the grip of material nature. Although this lifetime we may be fortunate in acquiring a human body, there is no guarantee that the next time we will not have the body of a dog or some other animal. All this depends on our work. No one can say, “After my death, I will take my birth again in America.” Material nature will force us into this body or that. Since we are not authorities, Bhagavad-gītā informs us that everything is being conducted by the supreme laws of nature, and it is the foolish man who thinks, “I am something. I am independent.” Ahaṅkāra-vimūḍhātmā: this is false reason. Although the living entity is different from the body, he thinks, “I am this body.” Therefore Śaṅkarācārya basically preached the same message over and over: ahaṁ brahmāsmi, “I am not this body; I am Brahman, spirit soul.”

Nonetheless, even when we have resolved to take to the path of self-realization, māyā or illusion persists. By self-realization a person may come to realize that he is not the body but a spiritual soul. What then is his position? Void? Impersonal? People think that after the demise of this body there is nothing but nirvāṇa or void. The impersonalists similarly say that as soon as the body is finished, one’s personal identity is finished also. In actuality, however, the body can never be identified with the living entity any more than a car can be identified with its driver. A person may direct a car wherever he wishes, but when he gets out of the car he does not think that his personality is gone. In Bhagavad-gītā Kṛṣṇa speaks of the living entity in this way:

īśvaraḥ sarva-bhūtānāṁ
hṛd-deśe ’rjuna tiṣṭhati
bhrāmayan sarva-bhūtāni
yantrārūḍhāni māyayā

“The Supreme Lord is situated in everyone’s heart, O Arjuna, and is directing the wanderings of all living entities, who are seated as on a machine, made of the material energy.” (Bg. 18.61)

These various bodies are like cars, and they are all moving. One person may have an expensive kind of car, and another person may have an inexpensive one; one person may have a new car, and another person may have an old one. Should we then think that when we are out of the car of the body the personality no longer exists? This is another kind of craziness. The void philosophy, which maintains that after death we become nothing, is also a craziness that has been contradicted. We are not void but spirit. When one attains spiritual realization, knowing himself as spirit outside the body, he can advance further by inquiring about his duty as spirit. “What is my spiritual work?” he should ask. Realizing one’s spiritual identity and asking about one’s spiritual duty is actual sanity. So much individuality and discrimination are displayed by the living entity even in the body. Should we think that at death one’s intelligence, discrimination and individuality no longer exist? Although we may make such great plans and work so hard within the body, are we to assume that when we leave the body we become void? There is no basis for this nonsense, and it is directly refuted by Kṛṣṇa at the very beginning of Bhagavad-gītā:

na tv evāhaṁ jātu nāsaṁ
na tvaṁ neme janādhipāḥ
na caiva na bhaviṣyāmaḥ
sarve vayam ataḥ param

dehino ’smin yathā dehe
kaumāraṁ yauvanaṁ jarā
tathā dehāntara-prāptir
dhīras tatra na muhyati

“Never was there a time when I did not exist, nor you, nor all these kings; nor in the future shall any of us cease to be. As the embodied soul continually passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. The self-realized soul is not bewildered by such a change.” (Bg. 2.12–13)

Thus the spiritual identity of the individual soul continues after death, for Lord Kṛṣṇa assures Arjuna of the eternality of all the individual souls assembled on the battlefield. The spiritual spark or self is within the body from the moment the body begins to form within the womb of the mother, and it continues existing in the body as the body undergoes all of its changes through infancy, childhood, youth and old age. This means that the person who is within the body is present from the moment of conception. The measurement of this individual soul is so small that the Vedic scriptures approximate it to be no larger than one ten-thousandth part of the tip of a hair—in other words, as far as human vision is concerned, it is invisible. One cannot see the soul with material eyes, but the soul is there nonetheless, and the fact that the body grows from the shape of a pea to full-grown manhood is proof of its presence. There are six symptoms of the soul’s presence, and growth is one of them. If there is growth, or change, one should know that the soul is present within the body. When the body becomes useless, the soul leaves it, and the body simply decays. One cannot directly perceive the soul’s leaving the body, but one can perceive it symptomatically when the body loses consciousness and dies. In the Second Chapter of Bhagavad-gītā Lord Kṛṣṇa gives the following simile to illustrate this process:

vāsāṁsi jīrṇāni yathā vihāya
navāni gṛhṇāti naro ’parāṇi
tathā śarīrāṇi vihāya jīrṇāny
anyāni saṁyāti navāni dehī

“As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, similarly, the soul accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones.” (Bg. 2.22)

Although the soul takes on new bodies, the soul does not select the bodies himself, the selection is made by the law of nature. However, the mentality of the soul does affect the selection, as indicated by Kṛṣṇa in the following verse:

yaṁ yaṁ vāpi smaran bhāvaṁ
tyajaty ante kalevaram
taṁ tam evaiti kaunteya
sadā tad-bhāva-bhāvitaḥ

“In whatever condition one quits his present body, in his next life he will attain to that state of being without fail.” (Bg. 8.6)

As one’s thoughts develop, his future body also develops. The sane man understands that he is not the body, and he also understands what his duty is: to fix his mind on Kṛṣṇa so that at death he can attain Kṛṣṇa’s nature. This is the advice of Kṛṣṇa in the last verse of the Ninth Chapter:

man-manā bhava mad-bhakto
mad-yājī māṁ namaskuru
mām evaiṣyasi yuktvaivam
ātmānaṁ mat-parāyaṇaḥ

“Engage your mind always in thinking of Me, engage your body in My service and surrender unto Me. Completely absorbed in Me, surely will you come to Me.” (Bg. 9.34)

Every embodied soul is in the constant act of thinking. To refrain from thinking something is not possible for a moment. The duty of the individual, therefore, is to think of Kṛṣṇa. There should be no difficulty in this, nor any harm; Kṛṣṇa has pastimes and activities, He comes to earth and leaves His message in the form of Bhagavad-gītā, and there are so many literatures about Kṛṣṇa that thinking of Him is neither a difficult nor costly task. There are enough literatures on Kṛṣṇa to last one a lifetime, so there is no shortage of material. Thinking of Kṛṣṇa, however, should be favorable. If a man is employed, he may always be thinking of his employer: “I must get there on time. If he sees me late, he may deduct from my paycheck.” This kind of thinking will not do. It is necessary to think of Kṛṣṇa with love (bhava mad-bhaktaḥ). In the material world when the servant thinks of the master, there is no love; he is thinking only of pounds, shillings and pence. Because that kind of thinking will not save us, Kṛṣṇa requests that one just be His devotee.

Thinking of Kṛṣṇa with love, or devotion to Kṛṣṇa, actually means service. The spiritual master prescribes various duties to enable the neophyte devotee to think of Kṛṣṇa. In the Society for Krishna Consciousness, for instance, there are so many duties assigned: printing, writing, typing, dispatching, cooking, and so on. In so many ways the students are thinking of Krsna because they are engaged in the service of Krsna.

What is the duty indicated by Kṛṣṇa? Mad-yājī māṁ namaskuru. Even if we are not inclined to obedience, we must obey and offer respects (namaskuru). Bhakti, or devotion, minus respect is not bhakti. One should engage in Kṛṣṇa consciousness with love and respect and should thus fulfill his designated duties. Then life will be successful. One can never be happy by identifying himself with the material body and engaging in all kinds of nonsensical activities. For happiness, there must be consciousness of Kṛṣṇa; that is the difference between spiritualism and materialism. The same typewriter, dictation machine, tape recorder, mimeograph machine, paper, ink, the same hand—on the surface, everything is the same, but everything becomes spiritualized when it is used in the service of Kṛṣṇa. This, then, is spiritual. We should not think that something has to be uncommon to be spiritual. The entire material world can be transformed into spirit if we simply become Kṛṣṇa conscious. By ardently following the instructions of Kṛṣṇa in Bhagavad-gītā and following in the footsteps of the great ācāryas, teachers of Bhagavad-gītā in the line of disciplic succession, we can spiritualize the earth and restore its inhabitants to sanity.