I am a sane person, as far as I can tell. Does a madman know he is mad? Perhaps I am mad, but it feels like sanity.

            Back in the 1960s, I took LSD. On that drug, one quickly abandons any attempt to decide what is sane and what is insane. We enter a different form of consciousness, where such distinctions are irrelevant. Thoughts tumble across the mind of such strangeness and beauty, as if dreams have come to the waking world.  Is the dream world real?  Is the real world really a dream? The place we call “reality” seems awfully real.

            My first year at college was a time when students challenged teachers with vague notions of everything being a dream and therefore we were unable to know if the anything was real. It was an art school, so that kind of thinking was expected, but perhaps you have heard this idea expressed by someone in your experience. A professor of psychology answered this way, “If I pick up a brick and hit you on the head with it, that’s reality!” It was harsh, but we got it.

            The way we live our day-to-day lives is where reality can get a bit fuzzy. As an artist, I am used to being on the outside of society, looking in. That vantage point allows me to see our social structures differently. Our by-laws are actually a million ways for us to get along with each other.  Sending flowers or a card when someone is sick, is a gesture that helps tie us together. Being kind and respectful to each other is part of the agreed-upon rules we have constructed over thousands of years, called civilization.

            I spend my days lost in painting and music. As I paint, I tap into the dream world, but I am also keenly aware of what is happening out there. It isn’t unique to me, of course. Most people who create, enter some form of dream consciousness, where reality is the magic universe, unfolding in a well-worked piece of wood, or silver being formed into an expressive object, or a weaver blending the realm of color, strand by strand. A potter might become mesmerized by the way a lump of clay becomes the center of the earth.

            Sometimes the real world out there has the appearance of being the only world.  Timeliness is expected, as is bowing to authority, paying taxes, consuming more and more stuff. Dealing with banks, hospitals, schools, raising kids, dressing appropriately and obeying the rules, is a complete system, cradle to grave. We know the rules of it, but don’t know where those rules actually came from.

            I remember when a hurricane befell my city of Sarasota. It wasn’t a direct hit, but may trees were downed, electricity was cut off for a week or more and with that, air conditioning, refrigeration and internet were abruptly stopped. Gas couldn’t be pumped and ice was impossible to find. People were in a daze. We still had houses, but they were unlivable because of the heat. It was a different reality.

            This brings up many questions. Is our reality now based on electricity? Can the real world exist without air conditioning or the internet?  More recently, the Pandemic shifted our world-wide reality. Suddenly all the normal social interactions we were so used to, turned into threats. Our own family members had the capability of killing us with the virus. Reality became twisted, as we struggled to be normal in an extremely abnormal world.

            I talk of these things, because the general sense of reality was shattered by these events.  The people in the 18^th century, who never had electricity, phones, air conditioning or the internet, lived a reality that was a very different one from ours. They held many of the same beliefs, of there being guidelines and laws, governing how they behaved.  Any one of them would have assured us that theirs was the true “reality”.

            Even within ourselves, the idea of what reality is changes over time. When we are young, life stretches ahead in vast spans of time, with plenty of it to waste. We bumble through our early years, without the slightest notion of our lives ever ending. At the other extreme, when the decades have piled up and we have become old, the amount of life we can foresee, appears to be awfully short. We see death around us, we know all too clearly it waits for us. Both of these states of reality occur within the same person but at different stages of their lives.

            There are times in our lives that are so filled with joy that reality pauses for a moment and we enter another state of being. Debbie and I were married out on our front porch which was lit up with a thousand tiny lights and a gathering of some of our most beloved people, holding candles in the chilly air.  As the ceremony ended, we kissed. It was not our first kiss, but for me, reality shifted. I lost all sense of time and place and was startled when we finished, to see through teary eyes, our friends and family watching us, and smiling.

            I have concluded that I don’t know what reality is.  It seems a very changeable state, capable of being drastically altered by drugs, events, time or emotion.  It may be that we create our version of it every day. We use routines to help us maintain a form of continuum from one day to the next.  Each day we wake up to a different version of ourselves. Routines remind us who we are, what we spend our time doing, as the cobwebs of dreams dissolve.

            Buddhists believe that everything we think of as real, is in fact an illusion, that behind the curtain is a vast consciousness as infinite as the universe. I am not there yet, nor do I really want to be. I am grateful to have this body to walk the earth in, to enjoy the warmth of friends and family and to love as if there is an infinite supply of it. Because there is.  

 

Advice To Myself    

James Griffin

 

Play with life.

Dance with it.

Run like a two-year-old

Let your heart soar, kite-high.

If you laugh with abandon,

your life is well-lived.

 

We’ve all seen the dark side.

We know where it lives.

We know it and fear it.

And choose not to fear it.

 

Sing with an imperfect voice.

Dance with a clumsy foot.

Bang away at the piano.

To be imperfect is to be alive,

and to aspire higher.