Insane Monkeys

8/8/2019 Insane Monkeys

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Insane MonkeysMichael G. Robertson

My Dear Fellow Monkeys

We are insane. We've been insane for a long, long time. Maybefor as long as we've had brains and reflective self-awareness. This blogis meant to record my ongoing research into the nature of our insanityand most especially, our efforts to step back, look at ourselves throughthe one-way window, diagnose ourselves, and hopefully prescribeourselves into a new level of being. I'm doing this because I believe

that the more of us that are able to stand back and speak from anotherpoint of view, the better our chances of healing and growing into thenext stage of our evolution: to become true humans.

You may think you're already there. I did. Almost everyone Iknow still thinks so, but increasingly I find myself talking to people,humans, who have already taken that step back, and who havechanged their lives radically. Who have stepped onto a road of recovery and healing.

You are insane. So am I. Together we can begin to find our truehearts. Together we can begin to heal ourselves and each other. I'll domy best to post my observations and the observations of those peopleI find on the path who are healed, or who are far enough along the

path to be able to offer useful advice to the rest of us. I encourage youto read this blog and to hear with an open mind and especially with anopen heart. I encourage you to suspend your judgment as you go, evenif you are convinced you know everything you need to know. Especially if you believe you know the answers.

I will quote my teachers and others who I feel have importanttruths to share. Some things I talk about may seem to contradict otherthings. It's quite impossible, in my current opinion, to avoid paradoxeswhen talking about becoming sane, but I'll make an effort to be awareof those contradictions and to try to explain how I think they areexpressions of some higher truth, some synthesis of the opposites.Paradoxes are fun! They're nothing to be afraid of.

I'll be talking a lot about fear, what it is, where it comes from,why we are so dependent on it and why we actually like it. I'll also talkabout why we can and should move beyond it, and some ways to dothat.

So. That's my introduction for the moment. As for who I am, it'snot terribly important, is it. I am the voice of every man, every woman,in our very real every day struggle to free ourselves from our painfuland limiting origins as insane monkeys.



Of Course We're Not Insane

"The Insanity of Psychological TimeYou will not have any doubt that psychological time is a mental diseaseif you look at its collective manifestations. They occur, for example, in

the form of ideologies such as communism, national socialism or any nationalism, or rigid religious belief systems, which operate under theimplicit assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that therefore the end justifies the means. The end is an idea, a point in themind-projected future, when salvation in whatever form - happiness,fulfillment, equality, liberation, and so on - will be attained. Not infrequently, the means of getting there are the enslavement, torture,and murder of people in the present."-Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now

What is "psychological time" then? From Tolle's perspective, it isan illusion that persistently pulls us away from the truth of our reality -

that "time" consists of one and only one moment: NOW. "The presentmoment is all you ever have," Tolle says. "There is never a time whenyour life is not 'this moment'. Is this not a fact?"

To spend all of our time (as we do) in an imaginary "future" ordwelling on an illusionary "past" when the truth of our lives exists inthis present moment, and only in this moment, with the result the weare chronically incapable of grasping the truth and the beauty and thegrace of the present moment and all that is in it, how can that becalled "sane"?

This is part of what I'm talking about when I say we are insanemonkeys. We don't mean to be. With very few exceptions, we don'trealize we are and most of us vehemently resist the idea, and reject it

as a ridiculous conceit.I'll bet you do too, unless you're one of the few. If you've read

this much, then you may be curious, or interested, you may wonderwhat I could mean. But I'll hazard a guess that you think I'm using thephrase "insane monkey" in a metaphorical sense, or an allegoricalsense, or in some round about way, trying to create an image that'smerely dramatic and over the top so I can get you to think aboutsomething else.

It's not going to fly. I am being terribly, painfully literal here: we,you and I, are monkeys, and we are insane in a classic, medicalsense. What's a definition of insanity? There are probably a lot of definitions, but here's one: a persistent disorder of the mind resultingin mistaking an internal perception of reality for the real thing, oftenresulting in asocial or antisocial behavior, including episodes of unreasoning violence.

Let me ask you to do a very brief exercise: sit down and listen tothe evening news. Any station, take your pick. Radio, TV, doesn'tmatter. What is being reported? If you step back just a hair andimagine you are an alien encountering these reports of humans



mistreating and killing other humans on a massive scale, day after day,what impression do you get?

I'll tell you. Insane monkeys. Monkeys who happen to be good attechnology, and who apply it against ourselves in the most dreadfuland painful and useless ways, day after day.

Of course it's those other monkeys who must be insane, you say.

The ones over there or the ones in the White House or the Kremlin, orthe ones who don't pay you enough, or the ones living on the street, ormaybe even the ones living next door to you. But not you! Not yourfamily, right?

Yes, there are degrees of insanity. But you're not off the hook.You may not be as insane as some others, but you haven't escaped thedisease. Nor have your wife or husband or boy or girl friend or yourchildren. And you probably think you managed to be so much sanerthan your parents, who are or were clearly insane in some way, right?.Got news for you. You are still monkeys. And until you learn to dwell onthe knife-edge of reality called NOW, and live in the joy that surroundsand infuses us when we connect with the power running through us

like high volt electricity, until then, you are also insane.So, just for a moment, accept the possibility. Suppose,

hypothetically, we are really insane. What can we do about it? Is theresome way to step out of insanity and into the clear air of the truth of this moment?

It's Not Just You, It's All Of Us

One of the teachers I've found to help us learn to step back fromour insanity and move beyond it is Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now. I recommend his book or his spoken word version of it. One of

the reasons I can do that is that Tolle's message in no sense suggeststhat he is any kind of authority on the subject of your sanity. You are.You, the Eye inside you watching you, the Ear inside you listening tothe mumblings of your mind, those are the authority. Tolle merelyreminds us to step back from ourselves, to remember that you are notyour mind, and that you are not bound by time.

"The time-bound mode of consciousness is deeply embedded inthe human psyche. But what we are doing here is part of a profound transformation that is taking place in the collective consciousness of the planet and beyond: the awakening of consciousness from thedream of matter, form, and separation. The ending of time. We arebreaking mind patterns that have dominated human life for eons. Mind patterns that have created unimaginable suffering on a vast scale. I'mnot using the word evil. It is more helpful to call it unconsciousness or insanity."

We are experiencing, on personal levels, an evolutionary (andrevolutionary) change in the consciousness of the entire species. Wehave entered a new period in the evolution of our species, one which



requires us to wake up to our possibilities: "... there is no absoluteguarantee that humans will make it. The process isn't inevitable or automatic. Your cooperation is an essential part of it. However you look at it, it is a quantum leap in the evolution of consciousness, as well asour only chance of survival as a race."

What can you do, now, to begin to heal from these illusions and

to regain access to the incredible energy and joy available to you?First, there is no one way. There are many ways, many practices, manysmall and large changes available to you, right now, in your daily life,that will bring you closer to sanity. You are doubtless familiar withsome of them. You may be practicing some of them.

Quietude. Find one place in your life where you can reliably go tofind silence and solitude. It can be a very small place, but it should becomfortable for you, it should be quiet if not silent, and it should befree from interruptions. Begin to make this place a sacred space foryourself. Arrange it so it's open and uncluttered. Eliminate alldistractions from this space. This space is the outward representationof a still, quiet place in the center of your mind. Spend at least ten or

fifteen minutes each day in this space - up to an hour or so if you can.Sit comfortably there. Eyes closed or open, no matter. Breath inthrough your nose and out through your mouth, nice deep breaths, atleast ten of them. You have one and only one role in this space, tolisten to your breath and to the babbling of your mind. Let your mindramble but don't encourage its thoughts. Watch them from a distance,as if you were listening to the thoughts of someone else. Don't judgethe thoughts. Don't dwell on any of them. Let them come, let them go.Be the Observer of your mind. Over time you'll find there are longerand longer spaces between those thoughts. Pay attention to the soundof your breathing, or the sound of your heart, or the single-pointedvision of a candle flame during these moments.

In your daily life, whenever possible, turn off distractions likeradio and television. Especially television. Become mindful that mostmedia (again, especially television) is an invasive tool designed toencourage consumption. Remind yourself whenever you see or hear atelevision that there is a real difference between want and need , andthat marketing executives have dedicated themselves to masking thatdifference and creating false appetites in their viewers. Here'ssomething fun and liberating: give yourself and everyone you love thisgift for birthdays and holidays: the TV B Gone. It's a useful and slightlysubversive tool to liberate the human mind and spirit. Try it out on atelevision in a public space that no one is paying attention to. Relishthe quiet and peace that results. Others around you will appreciate ittoo, possibly without quite knowing why they feel more relaxed and atpeace.

Sometimes I Want To Be The Stone

"We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth." ~~Nietzsche

http://www.tvbgone.com/

http://www.tvbgone.com/



We live in what seems to me to be uniquely disturbing times. Iremember being a youth in the age of the threat of nuclear annihilationand being mildly fearful, but only occasionally, and less fearful thanmerely pensive. I attribute that to my youthful optimism, which forsome reason I have never been able to abandon, as a tot refuses to

release his teddy before entering a place of grownups, and for similarreasons: it's who I am and no one has the right to deny me my identity.

But I wonder how I might have responded if I had been olderthen. Might I have grown cynical and conservative, quite justifiably inmy mind, as a defense against fear? Would I have seen the world fromthat point on as a place of folly and joylessness, and called that"reality"?

And so it seems to me today: a world filled with humansincapable of reason or even the ability to preserve themselves (whichcertainly was the case then too), a world in which we can readily seethe folly of our leaders and even of ourselves ("Supersize that meal! Sowhat if it's making me fat and I'll die young! And all my neighbors drive

SUV's so I must have a right to one too!") and yet we seem unable tochange; a world in which we can see our world leaders careening intoone disaster after another as if blind and stupid (or merely insane), oras if they had accepted disaster and disappointment as not merelynecessary compromise, but our birthright, as who we are.

If all my neighbors are insane monkeys, it must be okay for meto be one too. Right?

If that's who we are, then I'm tired of being a human. I don'twant to be a human anymore. I want to be something else, anythingelse. I want to be an angel, and fuck all if that seems an elitist attitude.I'm not an angel though, except sometimes, just a little, in my mind.Failing that, I just want to be a rock, a stone, turning slowly to sand

over time, content to merely watch and listen and accept as inevitablethe crumbling away of yet another species of insane monkeys, untilquiet returns to this earth.

I'm no longer satisfied to be an insane monkey. Too often I feellike a starving tiger walking circles around a cage inside of which sitsits meal. It can't enter, and if it did, it may well mean giving up itsfreedom, yet it hungers and it cannot leave.

But in moments of clarity, it seems like I'm sitting in the cage,watching the tiger circle me outside, a look of desperate hunger in itseyes. And in a flash and only for an instant, I see that if I open the cagedoor and let the tiger devour me, I will truly find the freedom I crave. Iwill merge with the tiger and neither of us will hunger after that.

I'm not talking about dying ... not in the physical sense. I'mtalking about a release from the limitations of being, of identifyingmyself, with the insane monkey. I'm talking about entering the eye andthe heart of the tiger: a place of fearlessness and of centeredconcentration. I'm talking about the death of fear and the rebirth totruth: a direct experience of reality, free of intermediaries.

But it's a scary prospect, giving up one's fears. No one ever saidbecoming sane would be easy or painless. There's joy along the path ...



such joy! But with joy comes its opposite at times. So I've decided thatalong the way, when the going gets grim and I really need a respite, I'lljust settle into the consciousness of a stone, and sit very very still foras long as it takes to regain my breath and to remember that I am notthe monkey, nor am I the tiger, nor am I the stone.

Turn Off The Bad-News Noise

“I demand that you refuse to be entertained and entranced by bad news--by stories whose plots are driven by violence, abuse,terrorism, bigotry, lawsuits, greed, crashes, alcoholism, disease, and torture.” ~~Rob Breszny

It's hard to keep thinking, much less writing, about this subjectof our search for sanity. Why is it hard? Once you've glimpsed what it'slike to be truly sane, it seems all bad habits and lethargy should just

fall away. Once awakened ....But that's just it. It's a long long road to true awakening. It's as if

it's a long night and we're living in our dreams – unreal ones generatedby our monkey mind, and only once in a rare while do we approach thesurface and think, “I should wake up ... there's so much to do, so muchlife to live ...” But then we drift back into our primitive dream-realityand sleep soundly on.

It's something like a group dream, it seems to me. We share our“daily reality”, or what we take to be reality, with those around us. Ibelieve that upon true awakening we will still share reality with ourfellow humans, but a much higher and finer kind of reality than the onewe cling to in our dreary existence as insane monkeys.

One thing I believe holds us back from glimpsing and embracingthe possibility of true sanity is our ingrained habits, our passivity, ourassumptions that this is all there is or ever can be for us. But for you,you who are reading this, there is a part of you that is far from passive.It's that part of you that has at least one eye half-open as you slumber,the eye that keeps glimpsing something so much more real than thesluggish dream we take to be our daily lives.

So I'm trying right now to talk to that eye, that Eye, that “I” thatis You (and Me) and here's what I want to tell You: Wake Up!!

One thing that I've found that helps keep me aware of thepossibility of sanity is this: the contrast between silence and the noisesof our popular media. I'm not advocating you ignore popular media, bythe way. Personally I am hooked on novels and cinema, but wherepossible, I choose those works that in some way question who we are,who we might be, what we might become. Media (books, magazines,movies, and television) is just a means of communication and is apowerful force, perhaps the most powerful force, in shaping ourperceptions of what's real. Once you open yourself to that idea, thatlike it or not, we're forcefully yanked about by others' expressions of what they think is real, you have opened a huge door for yourself. If



you have the least interest in becoming a sane human rather than aninsane monkey, you must work daily to keep that door open, to standback mentally from the media bombardment and remember that youcan and must shape your own reality, rather than having your realityshaped for you constantly by others.

An important step is to turn off the media flow for yourself, at

least long enough to experience what your own reality might be like.Find silence. Enjoy the contrast. Then, when you feel you can maintainthat stance, when you're confident that you can remember that TV andmagazines and books and movies and the Internet and even gossip aremerely reality-expressions by other insane monkeys, and that youdon't have to believe it or accept it or allow it to shape your opinionsand views and actions – only then should you allow yourself back intothe immersion of popular media all around you.

Another tool to release yourself from the powerful grip of mediaimmersion is to remember – remember! - that your reality can be anddeserves to be positive, even joyful. So anytime you find yourself exposed to ugly and negative expressions about reality, remember –

remember! - that they are expressions of other insane monkeys'realities. You can accept them on their own terms, for what they are,without internalizing them and letting them affect your outlook, yourreality. You can notice them, then let them go. Just as you can, whenquietly meditating in your private sacred space, notice the wildthoughts of your mind, accept them, not allow yourself to be yankedabout by them, and finally let them slide out of sight.

You can remind yourself that you have the power to observe,from your own view of reality, the meanness and anger andfrustrations and violence being expressed by others. Importantly, youalso have the power now to ignore them. Acknowledge, accept andignore the blind and insane attempts by other monkeys to impose their

limitations on you and your reality. You have that power. You have thatchoice. Practicing that choice, maintaining that mental and emotionaldistance can take hard work, especially at first, but believe me, it getseasier. And oh boy is it worth it!

Insane monkeys, awake!

You Too Can Be Your Own Action Hero!

Maybe I've been too hard on us monkeys. After all, maybe ourinsanity, if that's what it is, is there for a good reason. Maybe ourinsanity is a survival mechanism, there to protect us from our enemies!

A new translation of Milton's Paradiso has just been published.One reviewer of the book has pointed out the fundamental problem of trying to tell the story of paradise. The story has no villains andtherefore no tension. We need villains in our stories, it turns out.

That's a hard lesson considering we can consider the reality welive in to be a story, one we tell ourselves, both individually andcollectively as we encounter it. No wonder we can relate to stories toldon a large screen, stories which have internal structure and enough



A good friend of mine, a woman who is rapidly emerging intosanity, subscribes to the "Daily OM". This one feels especially useful tome:

Inner Hierarchy Listening With Your Heart

Most of us were born and raised in cultures that value the head over the heart and, as a result, we place our own hearts below our heads in a sort of inner hierarchy of which we may not be conscious.What this means is that we tend to listen and respond from the neck up, often leaving the rest of our bodies with little or no say in most matters. This is a physical habit, which sometimes feels as ingrained asthe way we breathe or walk. However, with effort and awareness, wecan shift the energy into our hearts, listening and responding from thismuch deeper, more resonant place.

The brain has a masterful way of imposing structure and order on the world, creating divisions and categories, devising plans and

strategies. In many ways, we have our brains to thank for our survivalon this planet. However, as is so clear at this time, we also need thewisdom of our hearts if we wish to continue surviving in a viable way.When we listen from our heart, the logical grid of the brain tends tosoften and melt, which enables us to perceive the interconnectednessbeneath the divisions and categories we use to organize the world. Webegin to understand that just as the heart underlies the brain, thisinterconnectedness underlies everything.

Many agree that this is the most important work we can do at this time in history, and there are many practices at our disposal. For asimple start, try sitting with a friend and asking him to tell you about his life at this moment. For 10 minutes or more, try to listen without

responding verbally, offering suggestions, or brainstorming solutions.Instead, breathe into your heart and your belly, listening and feelinginstead of thinking. When you do this, you may find that it’s muchmore difficult to offer advice and much easier to identify with thefeelings your friend is sharing. You may also find that your friend opensup more, goes deeper, and feels he has really been heard. If you alsofeel great warmth and compassion, almost as if you are seeing your friend for the first time, then you will know that you have begun to tapthe power of listening with your heart.

Change Is The Only Constant

Why the long delay since my last blog here? My goal was towrite a meditation every week on how to begin to emerge frominsanity to sanity. It's been at least a month since my last entry. Why?

I've been thinking a lot about why I've found it hard to continuethis series of reflections, or meditations, or chatty moments of self-indulgence, or whatever they may be. I finally had to admit to myself that one reason is that I've had no indication of having any readers,



and I've allowed that to discourage me. It feels like walking into aseminar to deliver a message and there are no students.

And of course there are no students. For one thing, this isn't aseminar, no one has subscribed to it, and I have no reason to expecteven a single reader. For another, I am no teacher. Quite the opposite.I've believed for many years now that we have one and only one

teacher: the voice of knowledge and wisdom that emerges from within.We may hear it reflected in the voices of others, but we only hear itwhen we find ourselves ready to hear it, and the process of readyingourselves for important realizations is not something that can be doneto us or for us by others. It takes work, internal work, thinking,reflecting, reasoning, absorbing what we can of understanding from asmany sources as possible. You and only you can do that for yourself,and you must be motivated to do that work, because it's not alwayseasy.

It begins to dawn on me that these blogs are my tool forprocessing my lessons. They are truly "reflections" in the sense thatwriting them gives me an opportunity to observe what I have begun to

learn in a more structured way, in a way that my mind, especially myrational mind, can begin to make sense of. In an important sense,these reflections are created for one and possibly only one reader: me.

There are, of course, many others who can similarly read andabsorb and understand and even benefit from these reflections. Andtruly I hope that happens. But when I am able to sufficiently quiet myego to see it, I see that I write these words for myself.

I hope I also write for you, and I hope you also find value in theseattempts to think ourselves out of the monkey trap. But I will no longerlet that be my motive.

About the title of this blog:Yes, it's a truism. All too familiar and obvious on the surface. I,

for one, tend to think things like that very briefly and then dismissthem, unwilling to make the effort to think deeper, to appreciate thevalue being offered by little gems like that.

So this blog isn't about Change, or not just about change, thoughat this moment many changes are going on in my life and in the world.What I'm curious about at the moment is this: how it is that when weare presented with observations which have the potential to help us tointegrate and to grow, we so often ignore them or, like a flat stone overa lake, our thoughts merely skip lightly over the surface of ideas andmiss their potential entirely.

For one thing, it's quite tiring to think seriously about things,isn't it. (Another reason this series isn't for most readers, right? It's justterribly terribly serious, isn't it - quite an exhausting prospect to thinkabout being insane and how or whether to want to change that. I don'tblame you a bit). So we don't, normally. Or only when we're in distressand we need something - anything - that might help us find solutions toproblems. Then we might make the effort to learn something new,entertain thoughts that might open doors for us, make our lives easier.

It's the monkey response. (Here he goes again with the monkeything - when's he going to get over that?). Have you watched monkeys



on TV or in the zoo? They're lazy. Incredibly, irresistibly indolentcreatures. And I don't blame them for that. What's being industriousand hard working gotten us? Industry. Commerce. Merchandise. Andthe need to market that merchandise. It's made us consumers first,and humans second, or worse.

Still, monkeys equals lazy. And thinking beyond the simple and

the obvious takes work. Growing mentally and spiritually takes work(and the opposite of work - the lessons of zen - but that's anotherblog). So is there any good reason for you to worry about learning andgrowing and evolving and emerging as more fully human? I know,phrasing it like that, the question contains its own answer, but it is avalid question. Why deal with the pain and effort and time andfrustrations involved in being more than you are, more than you havebeen?

One answer: joy. Even something much greater than joy,something hard to name because we have little experience with it.Something much deeper and more lasting and more satisfying thanhappiness even. Feelings of deep knowledge, deep understanding, and

deep connectedness. My ability to express it fails; it's what Tollard istrying to express when he says being fully in this moment, in the NOW,produces a lasting sense of ecstatic awareness.

Just the possibility of such existence I find motivating, at leastsome of the time. Those times when I have enough energy, enoughelan, to even think about it.

The rest of the time? Well, I'm a monkey too, aren't I.

Spontaneous Combustion

For 500 years, approximately from the 15th through the 19th

centuries, music experienced a progressive exploration of the circle of fifths: the relationships between tonal centers and those tones mostclosely related to the pedal tones. By the end of that period, formalmusic had expanded in complexity until the concept of tonal centercollapsed and all twelve notes in a scale gained equal value incompositions (Wagner, Mahler). Twentieth century composers whowere still attached to the early concept of tonal center composingliterally found themselves unable to compose music. New stop-gap andsomewhat desperate alternatives were invented, principally amongthem twelve-tone scale compositions. These were short-lived, highlymechanical explorations of non-tonally centered compositions. Turn of the twentieth century composers like Debussy and Ravel chose to usefully chromatic music (no tonal center, or very minimal) to create"impressionistic" music inspired by the work of painters of their period;composers like Stravinsky and Bartok on the other hand, replayed theold tonal-centered model with a strong emphasis on rhythms and folkmelodies. More recently, composers have begun devising retroreinventions of nineteenth century music combined with influencesfrom other cultures; Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams areexamples.



Where does music go from here? Techno could be consideredthe extreme anarchic reaction to all this: music that deliberately andloudly destroys all sentiment for old models and places music firmly inthe realm of physicality and sexuality; "IDM", intelligent dance music,then promptly emerged as a necessary antidote, whispering to us withmodulated beats and subtle suggestions that validate our intellects as

well as our bodies. That's where I believe the heart of music is at themoment. Where will it go next?

All of this is leading me to the conclusion that music, as a humanform of expression, is deathless but constantly evolving; that itsevolution is shaped by and reflects the evolutionary nature of humanconsciousness, especially as it's shaped by the encroachment upon oursensibilities by "civilization". I once thought music was doomed; I'venever thought humanity is doomed, except that our relentlessoverpopulation of the planet must lead to vast reductions in ournumbers, and that the soul of music is spiritual and celebratory (thechapel and the pub are its father and mother, respectively) and that"folk music" will always rebirth itself in every culture, large or small,

springing forth like sudden flames from the earth around us, our ownand best spontaneous combustion.

Insane Monkeys

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