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madness is a kind of breakthrough. The first madness happens if you become too identified with the mind and the reasoning processes. If you go too much into the mind -- it has a limit -- if you stretch it too much, sooner or later the limit is arrived at; you cannot go beyond it. Then the pressure goes on accumulating and accumulating and it explodes. One falls below mind. That is the ordinary madness.
It happens through the identification with the mind; it is a failure of the nerves. You tried to do something impossible with the mind, something which it is not made to do. You pulled it to its logical end and there was no way to go beyond it. You destroyed it. That's what happened to Friedrich Nietzsche: it was a breakdown. He tried hard. He became utterly one with the mind. His whole approach towards life and existence was of reason and only reason. Reason can take you to a certain point -- beyond that there is no way for reason. If you still insist, it will break down, it will not be able to contain the beyond.
Then there is another kind of madness I call 'the divine madness'. It happened to Gautam the Buddha and to Jesus Christ. It happens when you don't get identified with the mind, when you don't think of yourself as the mind but as a witness, as a watcher. And when one watches the mind, slowly slowly one goes beyond the mind. In the very watching, the transcendence. When you go beyond the mind, that is the breakthrough; that is what I call 'divine madness'. In ordinary madness you go below mind; in divine madness you go beyond mind. From the outside sometimes they can appear similar. That's what psychoanalysts go on suspecting -- that Jesus is a little bit neurotic. He is not: they are!
My whole effort here, my whole work here, consists in leading you towards that breakthrough.
The world is leading you towards a breakdown. The whole process, pressures, the whole modern speed, the whole tension, the anguish of life and the meaningless of it, is driving you towards a breakdown. Only mediocres will survive, only stupid people will survive. Those who have sensitive souls, those who have some intelligence, will all go mad. Only idiots
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