Insanity and the Source of Truth
Speaking to his meditation group in Highgate, London, 7 October 1981. Edited from a transcript. The story of Barry Long’s encounters with the Blessed John are told in 'My Life of Love and Truth’ - Barry’s spiritual autobiography.
If you find a source of truth, go and say teach me, or ask your question. The truth is the truth, the one teacher. It is the askers, the seekers, who are numerous and infinite in variety. The teacher is One, so you can ask any source of truth, ‘Am I right? What can be done. Teach me. I will do as I am taught.’ But those who think they know all the answers won’t do that.
If you really want to find the truth there are two ways open to you. If you want to play the game in-between, as most people do, then you have many choices. Then you’ll find the mediocrity that comes from darting between this and that alternative. How many people have you met in this world who know the truth? It is a precious thing to find the truth in any man or woman. When you find a source of truth, never let it go until you are given everything you want.
The two ways of finding the truth are the way I teach, which will keep you in the world, and the way of madness, a retreat into insanity. There is also the way of life - crushing you, taking everything you love, breaking your heart, making you want to die, being unable to die, and keeping you there until you are totally broken. Man has to be destroyed to find God. If in the evolutionary process you are worthy of being destroyed, you have to be brought to the edge of physical death in pain or suffering, or to the edge of suicide and madness in emotional suffering. Then a teacher will come to save you from madness. Or the teacher is madness itself.
The reasonable world is truly an insane world, never satisfying anyone. Everyone wants to be free of it, to get rid of the structures the world imposes. But I will not let you go mad. I do not follow the insane way. I have to protect you people. You are babes. You don’t understand what evolution is about. You don’t have a clue about the vastness of the evolutionary scheme where there are forces endeavouring to drive the world mad and forces endeavouring to keep the sanity of the world in man. There is the way of sanity or holding on, and the way of insanity or letting go. These two forces work to the same end but in different ways.
We look through a structured consciousness. Spiritual insanity attempts to break the structured condition of human consciousness, to give up all references to the past. Thought is structure. When you are mad the world exonerates you from your thoughts. You are irresponsible. You can do what you want. It is accepted that you have broken with the consciousness of humanity. You have freed yourself from the world and that is why insanity can bring about a tremendous perception of the truth. Even if you are not 'free’, because the western world will lock you up, you will at least understand what freedom is - if you are true and truly spiritual.
I teach at the opposite pole. I teach you to hold the structures of containment and self-sufficiency and at the same time I take away your memory of the world, the structure of the past. I drive you to the insane point where there is no structure - but without you losing your sanity. The way is to stop all thoughts, to be broken, crushed and smashed, until you are never the same again. So you can remain still - without any thought, unless you want it.
The way of the Blessed John, who was my teacher, was this: If you don’t want any structures, walk straight out of the door, have no thought for tomorrow, have not one thought in your head but only do what you do every moment, and wait for life to feed and clothe you. Then you are truly free of structures. (But examine very closely anyone who thinks they have thrown all structures away, to see if they really have.) With me you know where you stand. I am the truth and I know what it’s like to work for a living and pay the tax, and what a drag it is to live in this world. And where I come from, that is the way to freedom.
Insanity is the world’s judgment that someone cannot cope with the pressure of living. Someone else has to be responsible for you. But I cannot be accused of being insane. I came into this world to teach the rational western intellect. I bring reality into the world through the intellect. I want to rid the mind of the terrible pressure of living in this world, as it goes mad trying to hold it all together. I just want you to find God, to find yourself, to die before you die and experience for yourself the truth and the beauty. That is my function since time began.
The opposite pole to my teaching will play on your weakness - to divert you from me. When you are involved in the spirit, you are part of the manipulation of forces that test your weakness. You have to be strong to spread the truth. You are part of a wonderful scheme and there is only one thing worthwhile on this earth and that is the teaching of our fellow man to love, to know the truth, to know God. What else is there to do? Run from death?
There are only two states of consciousness: you are either sane or insane. Between the two are many stages of consciousness. But the one thing anyone who has ever realised the truth will tell you, if you ask the right question, is that they had to go through such dreadful suffering that it was the equivalent of dying. The one way to the truth is into death, almost to death, perhaps through death, and back again.
Spiritual Or Divine?