Tao Te Ching
Crazy Wisdom
The main keys to creativity, innovation, and wisdom include out-of-the-box thinking and an openness not bound by external influence, by religious, political, cultural, or philosophical prejudice and constraint. A glue that binds this constraint around us is thick with concern about what others think, positive and negative feedback, praise and blame. Clinically crazy people almost by definition lack this glue. Wise people also lack this glue without the clinically crazy part and this becomes crazy wisdom.
Versions of this understanding and experience dot almost all traditions: Christianity, Hellenism, Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism and Shamanism. Plato talked about it in his book, Phaedrus calling it theia mania. The Christian saint Isadora exemplified this as did 6th-century Saint Simeon, 15th century Zen master Ikkyu, Sufi saints Mulla Nasruddin and Moḥammed ʻAbdulle Hassan, Black ElkBlack Elk, and the Buddhist Mahasiddhas. the tradition. Similar understanding appear in Jewish and Eastern Orthodox schools, the Hindu avadhūta, and the Native American heyoka. William James called it the "abrupt change" religious approach and Eliade described it as an essential element in Shamanism.
Quotes (137)
“I—pig-headed, awkward, different from the rest—am only a glorious infant nursing at the breast.”
“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.”
“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness… To lead an orchestra, you must turn your back on the crowd.”
“The people of this generation revere the dead prophets while rejecting the living ones. It has been so in every generation. The children of those who persecute you will build monuments to your memory.”
“The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”
“When the midstream has become clear light—the indivisibility of appearances and emptiness—free of inhibition, you can wander in the villages as a crazy saint.”
“When questioned with disbelief in his realization by a Zen master, Touzi said 'What point would there be in waiting until you believed it?'”
“In the time of the philosophers, as at every other period, there existed some of these fervent mystics. God does not deprive this world of them, for they are its sustainers.”
“These people are deluded from the first and yet it is such fools that call me mad.”
“Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
“The day is ending, the way is long; my life already begins to stumble on its journey. I shall not keep promises, nor consider decorum. Let anyone who cannot understand my feelings feel free to call me mad… Abuse will not bother me; I shall not listen if praised.”
“What a strange feeling to realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone jotting down at random without order or purpose whatever nonsensical, trifling thoughts have passed through my mind. What a demented and crazy thing to do!”
“There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.”
“Recognizing the irrelevance of mass propaganda, realization becomes a world-shattering experience as we uproot ego, the familiar fades away, and we lose it's comforting normality.”
“My life has been devoted to love-play and I have no regrets...
I am not ashamed to have passed my days as a crazy cloud”
“Folly is the only thing that keeps youth at a stay and old age afar off.”
“The contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.”
“You will say that I am old and mad, but I answer that there is no better way of keeping sane and free from anxiety than being mad.”
“One must be a little foolish if one does not want to be even more stupid.”
“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”
“If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.”
“Oh! how near are genius and madness! Men imprison them and chain them, or raise statues to them.”
“Time is forgotten, the hours fly. People passing by point at me and laugh: 'Why are you acting like such a fool?' Do you want to know what's in my heart? From the beginning of time: just this! just this!”
“Those who danced were thought to be quite insane by those who could not hear the music.”
“If you want to earn the gratitude of your own age, you must keep in step with it. But if you do that, you will never produce anything great. For that, you must focus on posterity. Be like a man who spends his life on a desert island working to erect a memorial so that future seafarers will know he once existed.”
“My great comfort is, that the temporary celebrity I have wrung from the world has been in the very teeth of all opinions and prejudices. I have flattered no ruling powers; I have never concealed a single thought that tempted me.”
“Socrates and Jesus Christ were put to death publicly as blasphemers, and so have been and may be many who dare to oppose the most notorious abuses of the name of God and the mind of man.”
“All but the sacred few who could not tame
Their spirits to the Conqueror, but as soon
As they had touch the world with living flame
Fled back like eagles to their native noon.
”
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
“The man who anticipates his century is always persecuted when living, and is always pilfered when dead.”
“That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often become the height of wisdom in the next.”
“All this worldly wisdom was once the unamiable heresy of some wise man.”
“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
“Man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
“in some cases, it’s more creditable to be carried away by an emotion that springs from a great love, however unreasonable. And this is even more true for youth. An always sensible young man is suspect and of little worth”
“so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things... Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp of loafer can afford an occupation that will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye... which it takes a hardworking conventional man a life time to build up.”
“I myself do not believe that anybody ever looked into the world with a distrust as deep as mine... a constant, subtle, incitement to an overturning of habitual opinions and of approved customs.”
“He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him.”
“All that was great in the past was ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed — only to emerge all the more powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle.”
“It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and, generally to scandalize one's uncles.”
“Anyone who has begun to think, places some portion of the world in jeopardy.”
“Each work has to pass through these stages—ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood.”
“The public will only stand genius in infinitesimal doses, sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature...A ‘fashionable genius’!—doesn't that make you laugh?..what a waste of power!”
“an honest being who does not behave absurdly has no chance at all of becoming famous, or even of being noticed, however kind and sensible he may be.”
“The modern mind is never popular in its own day. People hate being made to think... All things are at odds when God sets a thinker loose on the planet.”
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
“Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. Never will the world know all it owes to them nor all that they have suffered to enrich us.”
“Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.”
“We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.”
“but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness what is more important and conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity... in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit.”
“The step to higher consciousness leads away from all shelter and safety.”
“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else”
“it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who are filled with the highest kind of religious feeling”
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
“If it meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the gypsies.”
“When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, ...then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen”
“Woe to whoever commences his life without lunacy... Happy the youth who believes that his duty is to remake the world and bring it more in accord with virtue and justice, more in accord with his own heart.”
“I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.”
“The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of man to all that is hidden to others.”
“We would go off to bill and coo, to thrill and woo, and all the dogs in Christendom might howl their moralistic protest unhonored and unheard.”
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
“It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems.”
“In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king… He gets lynched.”
“The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar... Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”
“The Siddhas had rediscovered the direct way of spontaneous awareness and realization of the universal depth-consciousness which had been buried under the masses of scholastic learning, abstract philosophical speculation, hair-splitting arguments and monastic rules”
“...they didn’t think there was anything very odd in anyone being a little odd.”
“Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy.”
“If people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter… We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves.”
“We must learn to be different…If Wakan Tanka likes the plants, the animals, even little mice and bugs to do this, how much more will he abhor people being alike, doing the same thing, getting up at the same time, putting on the same kind of store-bought clothes, working in the same office at the same job with their eyes on the same clock and, worst of all, thinking alike all the time.”
“A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint… He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle…You can’t be so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your sould wraped up in a plastic bag all the time.”
“If only I had the utter freedom to wander from one land to another with a madman’s behavior, chasing whatever comes to mind.”
“If it is unattainable, how can we attain it?... Even though it is impossible, we have to do it because our true nature wants us to.”
“I’m more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
”
“All of us who are more or less heretical in our society are forced to live on its margin, grateful that we are able to speak (at the cost of abnormal exertions) to a small audience.”
“Curiosity and irreverence go together, cannot exist without each other.”
“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.”
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds.”
“there is very evidently one rather terrible hallmark common to all persons who look for God, and apparently with enormous success, in the queerest imaginable places—e.g.investigating loaded ashtrays with an index finger—he very frequently behaves like a fool, even an imbecile.”
“Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close… the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the ‘normal people’ as they go about their automatic existences… Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence.”
“I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!”
“We eat reality sandwiches. But allegories are so much lettuce. Don't hide the madness.”
“Some people are born mad, some achieve madness and some have it thrust upon them”
“If you’re always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves… because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.”
“Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody is saying, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.”
“Beings who have wisdom intelligence often become isolated eccentrics because ordinary-minded people cannot accept their Wisdom Mind phenomena... Because wisdom eccentrics see all the connections between the visible and the invisible elements, they want to express what is true according to sublime actual relative truth.”
“Alone in my room, feeling totally cut off from the rest of society…it struck me that I was in the position of so many of my favorite characters in fiction: Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge, the young writer in Hamsun's Hunger. It was not a position I relished . . . Yet an inner compulsion had forced me into this position of isolation.”
“Deviation is antisocial and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.”
“All through history there's been these kind of divine losers that just take a deep breath and go ahead—knowing that society's not going to understand it—and not even caring, because they're having a good time.”
“Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.”
“In the case of primordial craziness of crazy wisdom, we do not permit ourselves to get seduced by passion or aroused by aggression at all... crazy wisdom becomes completely accurate out of the moment of things as they are... if anything comes up in the midst of that complete ordinariness and begins to make itself into a big deal, then we cut it down... Crazy wisdom is just the action of truth.”
“The bandits of hope and fear are subdued and all experiences are transformed into crazy wisdom.”
“crazy wisdom is a certain kind of penetrating intelligence which knows no limit... like a 360 degree mirror seeing itself... it has no allegiance to ego at all... it's straight forward wisdom which knows no limitations.”
“human society has always been propelled by the visionary few... represented by the freaks, the mutants of whatever calling, who deviate and dissent from the prevailing order of consciousness.”
“And if my thought-dreams could be seen... they'd probably put my head in a guillotine.”
“an essential element of vajrayana, the necessity of including every single aspect of life on the path and embracing wholeheartedly even those things that we would rather avoid. This is the principle of crazy wisdom.”
“The siddhas' action is not our ordinary action, although it may appear so on the surface. Quite the contrary is true, for their action is styled 'non-action.' Like the Toist concept of wu-wei, it is unmotivated and objectless... all actions have the same value. It is only the prejudices and limitations of the observer's dualistic mind that see one set of actions as harmonious, self-less and 'divine' and another as unconventional, outrageous, or insane.”
“In the country of the insane, the integrated man doesn’t become king… he gets lynched.”
“Those who make a difference do so because they are different… prepared to… ignore the warnings and rewrite the rules; plush back the barriers of the impossible.”
“There is no escaping the barbarians because they are the life behind what we think of as life.”
“No one ever understood my wild and secret ways... I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.”
“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo... They push the human race forward because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
“Those who do not pursue praise and gain, those who do not shun criticism and loss may be stigmatized as insane because they cannot be lured by material gain, don’t look for thrills, have no face to lose, never do anything to impress people.”
“A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn't too different from most people's model, you're labeled sane. If the model is different, you'r labels a genius, a misfit, a visionary, or a nutcase In extreme cases, you're labeled a schizophrenic and locked up.”
“In weak organizations, without oversight, too many people will break the rules for personal gain. That's what makes the organizations weak. In strong organization, people will break the rules because it is the right thing to do for others.”
“A common metaphor for the entire Buddhist path is swimming against the stream... It can be used to cut through mindless behavioral loops, and for using disruption to wake us up from our sleepwalking habits.”
“Like Jesus, whom he blasphemed, admired, and at times resembled, Shelley would take no thought for the morrow. He stood to lose personally from the social revolution he preached... Unlike the average radical, then, Shelley didn’t just challenge social taboos; he openly violated them, living his personal life in accordance with unpopular principles like equality, women’s rights, and free love. As a result, he became so reviled in England that he had to emigrate”
“The image of James taking a bow to the jeers and catcalls of the audience has become one of the primal scenes of modernism, and James is revered as the Master partly because of his willingness to wager everything—popularity, fortune, happiness, life—on his vision of artistic perfection”
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