The Insanity Machine

Hallucinating problems, the life you think you're living, collapsing skyscrapers

‘Are you passing?’ — painted with acrylics, from 2021

Let’s imagine thoughts are not about you (they aren’t). Now, what is it you might notice?

One of the most interesting things I’ve noticed is that 99-and-then-some % of the time, everything’s quite alright — pretty good actually.

You’re sitting at home with nothing to do, but the insanity machine (sometimes called mind) has convinced you that, currently, shit is hitting all kinds of fans. You have a pressing problem, it seems, but there’s nothing to do about it.

In other words, you’re making the problem up — it exists only in thought — and you’re in there, in the thoughts, trying to solve it (which you can’t because it’s imaginary). The longer you’re in it, believing the narrative, the more toxicity builds up until you’re positively poisoned.

You can snap out of it right this moment and see what is actually happening: you’re sitting in your room, hallucinating problems.

Let me clarify what I mean by “hallucinating problems.”

You are single and would like a partner. So far so good; nothing wrong with that. The hallucinated problem comes into play when the mind begins spinning stories, and you believe them: “I need a partner or two, preferably yesterday, otherwise it means I’m unloved and won’t be happy.”

Don’t get me wrong, I understand. I’m not trying to downplay anyone’s problems. I’m intimately familiar with problems. I know they don’t seem like hallucinations. The numbers, the partner, the feelings don’t match my preferences, and that must be a problem.

All these things seem so deeply tied to our sense of security, belonging, and fulfillment that suggesting the problem doesn’t lie in the things themselves sounds like heresy.

But how often are the problems in our minds about right here, right now?

I’d say that’s worth investigating. I won’t tell you what you’ll find, but I will tell you what I found: virtually never. I mean it. The only times when a problem is truly a right-now problem, it’s not really an issue because you’re acting to resolve it. Whatever the outcome, there will be a resolution one way or another.

Imagine a crackhead bites you in the shoulder, and now you’re bleeding. That’s one of those rare now-here problems. You go to the hospital, they stitch you up, and give you an anti-crackhead vaccine. Problem solved.

Now imagine you’re walking down the street and you see a crackhead minding his business — talking to himself, not bothering anyone. Suddenly, you start worrying he might bite you and you’ll become a crackhead through osmosis, and you’re searching for pepper spray, but you still don’t feel safe, so you worry some more — that’s an imaginary problem.

Nothing is actually wrong. You’re imagining how things could go wrong and believing your thoughts are casting accurate predictions. Although we know this from experience, we’re still unable to accept this: thoughts are notorious liars.

Problems usually come in the form of believing you’re missing something. Are you actually missing the thing, as in, you’ll perish if you don’t get it?

Most likely not. And in those rare cases when the answer is yes, you’re probably already doing everything you can to get what you need.

Someone might brush all this off by saying, “Yeah, duh, but part of being human means projecting yourself in time, comparing your situation to other situations, and trying to improve, and well, feeling bad about this is just normal.”

I agree that it’s normal, and I’m not saying it’s wrong or inappropriate or needs to be changed.

But, and I’m saying this playfully, that’s not necessarily part of being human — though it’s certainly part of our regular insanity. Don’t be offended; I’m not calling you insane. I’m calling all of us insane. No one’s part of this without a little insanity.

Calling us insane might sound a little harsh. Let me say it differently, and then you tell me what you’d call it, okay?

We spend a significant chunk of our lives generating psycho-emotional pain by imagining problems and identifying with them (even if we say we’re victims of this whole process). By doing so, we miss the peace that’s already present once we stop believing that sorting problems in our minds will bring it about.

Or, said differently, we believe generating psycho-emotional pain and engaging with it on its own level will somehow lead us out of it.

The only reason we’re not all in a nice soft padded cell comparing straitjackets is that everyone suffers the same affliction. Therefore, it’s normal and not insane.

Remember: most of the time, normal = insane.

The normal insanity has convinced us it will help improve our lives and go places. Like, if you’re not always in there managing your imaginary inventory of personal problems, your life will fall apart, and suck.

Now is a good time to say the following.

Actually, there’s only one problem, ever: the life you think you’re living doesn’t match your preferred version of what life should be like. I said, “…you think you’re living” for two reasons:

1. Many people spend their lives not living it, but thinking it — if your life is primarily a thought-based endeavor, you’ll be claustrophobic AF.

2. Part of the problem is believing that you’re the one living life and not the other way around.

Which means, if we’re identified with the mind and are convinced that our thoughts are telling the truth about us and the world, we’re under the spell of illusion.

Usually, we try to solve this problem by listening to the mind, which translates into trying to make life adhere to our vision of it. We try to wrestle life into submission with effort, struggle, and more control.¹

By doing so, we’re strengthening identification with the mind. We’re clenching harder around the identity structure, rather than letting it collapse.

The reason we’re doing that is that the part that’s trying to figure all of this (life) out is a vital component of the structure, and therefore has a vested interest in keeping the structure alive. And in its effort of self-preservation, it will claim it’s working to collapse the structure, while secretly fortifying it.

Our identities are collapsing skyscrapers — they’re always in the process of collapsing, no matter how solid they seem. The solidity around identity is the practiced movement of keeping it together. The existential exhaustion everyone’s bound to face in life eventually is the result of trying to keep the skyscraper from collapsing.

There comes a moment when all the managing and controlling of your internal space is clearly seen as a tiring and fruitless endeavor. And even the spiritual work you’ve been doing, despite being useful at some point, might reveal itself as a more subtle attempt at managing something that works best when left alone.

You can’t force this; otherwise, ceasing management becomes a new management strategy. Management strategies are interference. The unstated goal of many practices is to dissolve interference. But, in the end, everything we’re doing to “dissolve interference”² is just more interference — classic double-bind.

The end of interference is a leap out of the psychological “me” and “my life” into now-here. That might sound abstract to you. But I trust you intuitively understand what this is pointing at — the possibility of no longer LARPing as life’s overseer.

You’re invited into that leap now, now, now…

The irony is that you’re leaping from here to here. So at every moment, you can see that you’re here, not as “me,” but as the here itself. The leap isn’t the magical ending to a spiritual odyssey. It’s not a fancy mystical experience. It doesn’t fix everything or turn you into a perfect human being.

You only stop pretending you’re not already here.

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1. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t build a life you like, but that our usual approach of fighting against reality and ourselves is based on a misunderstanding and, therefore, doomed to fail to deliver the goods we’re hoping it’ll deliver.

2. Or “fix ourselves.”