On Madness and Spiritual Development

Madness is a funny thing. When you're in the middle of it nothing else exists and the sane version of yourself seems far off and strange.

In fact, your sane self doesn't just seem crazy, they ARE crazy. And your madness leaves you feeling right at home. For a while anyway. In a way we almost become friends with our madness. It can be a comfort to be sad.

For me, these periods come on in waves. It's easy enough now to appear normal and to blend in. It didn't used to be. But on the inside there are still times where I'm screaming.

My song Icarus has come to be the story of my rise and fall as a spiritual seeker. When I was 25 I wanted to ascend spiritually and be with God I "Knew" at that time that I couldn't be happy living the way other people did. Listening to the radio and going for coffee on Sundays wasn't good enough for Sam. Oh no! It was going to isolation and meditation or nothing. Maybe I would eat an orange every now and then or talk to a bird. That was where my life was at. Zoom out the bigger picture and I was living with mom and dad with no job, no ambition, few friends and whole lot of problems I essentially created out of boredom.

In my madness, hearing voices, disassociation, visits to the doctor, extreme indecisiveness and obsession with new age spirituality I was left naive and blind. I fell into the new age lie that spirituality is about feeling good and living a life without pain.

It's not. It's about revealing yourself to yourself. However, in the midst of that process it is very easy to get distracted.

I see a lot of people in my life go through similar things to what I went through. In fact, I'm still going through it.

The borders dissolve and youre kind of left with just yourself but an emptied out version. Like a big empty basin and youre left sitting in the bottom of it.

So, we try to fill the basin of course. No one likes feeling empty.
We fill it with knowledge, spiritual or otherwise. Conspriracy theories. Some of us fill it with pleasure. Drugs. Food. Work. Success. Buying CDs. Thank you, Gabor. Exercise. The latest craze; the newest theory.

We are all trying to accomplish the same thing. To feel that fullness and wholeness that everyone in their heart of hearts wants. To feel needed and accomplished and that their life holds some meaning or significance in the world.

Yet, at the same time, a lot of our choices in life lead us directly away from that. We seek solitude when we are lonely and push away those who wish to comfort us. We revel in our misery like it is a part of our identity.

Love extends it's hand and we sneer and say, "not today." Or, more likely, we turn away in fear because what if the possibility of love is real and that's not what we want? What then? If love isn't enough than what possibly could be? But we do want it. We are simply afraid.

If love can heal us it can also hurt us if we lose it.

But ultimately, it is the answer.

We are all of us united in this search for love, meaning and acceptance.

I myself find that on my own path I am constantly turned back to the simpler things in life. Love. Family. A sunset or the stars. Playing music. Gratitude. They're easy things to see when you just take a second to look at them.

There are so many distractions on the path. I have no candle to light my way beyond the dim perception of my own well meaning but confused heart.

Here I will interject on my own revery to say we do have something else to light our way. We have the light of every other dim and confused heart on this ailing and angry planet.

And that's worth something.