There can only be two alternatives and they are that either man is conscious of being immediately dependent on some immaterial being unknown to him and yet undoubtedly existing, and sees the purpose of his life in the fulfilment of the law of this being, or, on the other hand, that he regards himself alone as the origin of everything and does not acknowledge any other law except his own desires. – Tolstoy
I have always been in search of distinctive nature of insanity. The insanity which was so entwined with the idea of existence within the parameters of sensory feel. Like everyone else, I have remained under spell of the ideas of Nietzsche. Perhaps, Nietzschean concerns were most immediate concerns of my life.
When I have talked about these concerns, my husband inquired what were the Nietzschean concerns? How do I embody or visualizes those concerns in my life? Like an inept intellectual, I take a somersault on my indistinctive apprehensions, and envelope myself in Kafkaesque of concerns.
My father was a primary school teacher. He was a religious person, an ardent supporter of Tablighi Jamaat. But he was an enthusiastic music lover too. I have seen him whirling around like a Dervish on the tunes of Pathanay Khan. The feel was always like a familiar union with the higher level of consciousness.
When I remember Baba, a famous saying of Nietzsche props up before me. He said,
”And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
Many of us don’t know that the body of human had centrality in Vedic scriptures. The cognitive centers, however, were the devas, demi-gods. These gods were a kind of luminous locirepresenting the enlightening presence of wisdom and prudence. These locales were shining examples of higher consciousness and experiential deepities. Since these spiritual deepities were profound in meaning, yet evaded any logical evidence. Scholars of pre-historic spirituality or religions call it an elemental period of time and space. Apparently falsified, but would have an earth-shattering underpinning, if proven true.
R.D. Laing, one of the major names in modern psychology, tried to investigate the deepities in an unusual way, that even phenomenal manifestations of parental love was seen as a kind of violence. He wrote, ‘From the moment of birth, the baby is subjected to the forces of violence, called love’. He not only called it a kind of violence, but also a major cause of destruction of human potentialities.
What Laing was trying to substantiate was an effort to theorise the insanityas a reactive impulse to puzzling questions of a divisive being.Those beings who (used to hear the music and) were wrestling with binaries of existence. In Nietzschean terms, they were enlightened insane. In Laing’s studies, we can refer to it as hypersanity.
‘Hypersanity’ is yet to gain a currency as critical term. However, R D Laing explains the craze for experiences or ‘madness’ as a voyage of discovery. He had seen such a descent into madness as a reckoning experience and awakening into a higher level of consciousness.
To be, or not to be, that is the question. This existential question has bothered the geniuses across the divide. It has hardly appreciated the differences of East and West. The question of existence is a paradoxical and intriguing question about dubiousness of life. Prominent progressive poet Ahmed Nadim Qasmi says,
(It is no less atrocity to bear with your patent indifference/ Interesting that I still take you as my beloved).
The psychological deepities break the self apart. Deep-down the human consciousness, the emerging experiences have shades. They make us accustomed to our realities. It is a knowing effect. Our acquaintance with our own realities begets a kind of devastation within us.
Our poet of love Mast Taukali had a social hypersanity. On one hand, he knew the mammoth pain of loss of lives. The accumulated feel of helplessness, which a grievingsoul experienced, jolted his notion of bravery, which otherwise was a cultural merit of Baloch tribalism.
The language of war bears no good.
[Mast Taukali]
On other hand, Mast gleefully acknowledges the drop in deadening pain. Mast Taukali says,
Your union has brought pleasure to my heart
Lethal pain has disappeared
All blurriness in my eyes has withered away.
[Mast Taukali]
It is said that once Diogenes was requested to name the most beautiful of all things. He replied Parrhesia. The Parrhesia was an idyllic feel of free, uninhibited speech. And he was indifferent to his bodily decay. It is said that he advised to throw his mortal remains outside the city walls so that wild animals may feast upon it.
Hypersane people are super sane proponent of the society. They are kind, considerate and have space for life. Unlike normal people, they are humane. The Hypersane like Nietzsche tended to prefer control over human nature. Nietzsche never liked anyone succumb to pleasure or pain. He also never liked a person succumb to love or hatred. He had always liked a balance. It wasn’t a stream of absurd consciousness. It was a super-sane feelguiding human kind to stay within the observation. The idea of ignoring the world around us in either sense of indulging in pleasure or adopting pain as a redemption from sins, errors or misdemeaning acts in life, is meaningless.
Laing had an interesting view of normal people. Lang criticizes normal people as a problem. He calls them alienated. Severed with the human tragedies. Their acceptance or refusal of the tragedies around as problematic. We often found Laing denouncing the society, wherein the normality has been placed upon those who have butchered millions of their fellow normal men, highly valuing its normal man. Our hatred for the ‘different other’ is a new normal.
Laing’s thesis of normalcy in his work entitled as ‘Politics of experience’ has a shocking revelation. He says that society robs its children of the hyper-sanity in order to be a normal. If I can nearly reproduce his assertion is that we force our children to lose themselves and to become absurd. The disconcerting attitude tends to take pogroms, genocides, muffling of voices and disciplining nature of state and society as ‘normal’. They take things for granted. They are the people who have no clear consideration for the gnawing absence of empathy for people. They follow the world from a prism of an unease caused by constrained view of world around us. It appallingly lacks the munificence of wisdom that travels above and lasts for a long. They are anxious, deceptive, dangerous, fanatic and destructive to the core.
Unlike them, the hyper-sane people are cool, calm and composed and deeply beneficial to the human society. They have range of angles to look at things, situations and events. They are neither inaccessible in their fine subjectivity nor grossly confined in obliterating objectivity.
There is a problem with hypersane people. They tend to stay inactive. The preference for lying hidden in a garden at the backyard is a consequential. It is debatable whether to view their excessive obscurity or shyness as timidity or something close to a fear of being pointed out as a protagonist in sanity. However, we had people, like Madiba, Gandhi andRussel who rose to lime light for their clarity of views and wisdom, trampling down the hatred, insanity and new normalcy as unbefitting human trait.
The society has always been battling with an imaginary enemy. The battle is against darker sides of human society. This battle often takes an inhuman form. The inability to understand humans’ nature in its primacy, the undesired contestation of the problemata from a disciplining or deviant prism, is a malleable tendency. You tend to use hammer. Things get a better shape by beatings of a hammer. This behaviour is apparent in normal people. It is a responsive psychology. People tend to change views or lay hidden or tend to accept the gnawing absence of sanity as normal.
This normalcy has many faces. It is anything, it is everything, but it is not based upon human prudence. This generates an unusual habit – the habits which are demandingly destructive. We know that consequences of malleability or disciplining emphasis of the society produces a mind or behaviour which are tuned to regularity. In between disciplinarian regime, we lose our own originality. Our thoughts and process get shaped. We become inclined to a normal majority. Our vulnerability for a purported greater good increase. Peer pressure decimates our distinctive human nature.
The crowd mentality seeks justification. It wracks the saner course of life. Hypersane people, like, Nietzsche relied upon incompatibility of the views.
To sum up the views of Laing, it is our general observation that normal people are naïve. The naivety impedes proper comprehension of life in its totality. It is not necessary for a hyper-sane person to deny or attest the things which are essential for life-affirmation. It is the job of normal people thriving upon a limited view of life. In comparison, hyper-sane people are opinionated, but tend to live an inactive life.
(Disclaimer: The above write-up has drawn heavily drawn from R D Laing’s Ideas and a pitch essay on it by Neel Burton, a psychiatrist and philosopher and fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford).