I think there's a close relationship between creativity and madness in that in order for you to use your brain to think, you have got to go out our mind to think outside the box. This shows the willingness for us to go to unknown place, to visit parts of your brain that are alien which means leaving one's comfort zone to seek out another level of thinking.
To recondition one's thinking, one has to have reflexive responses to stimuli; i.e to go to other realms of the mind where now imagination will be the catalyst of all your wonder and questioning why things are the way they are and how can they be done differently or improved. All technological advances of the human race have all resulted to a few people who appeared to be mad and crazy from the society, but they avoided that and dived into their imagination head first.
Into the unknown there's always a potential of getting hurt but the focus of getting hurt is never there cause curiosity has overtaken all desire in a constantly wondering mind.
Its said that the mystic and the madman are swimming in the same waters but with the mystic is like an artist surfing through the tides and he's bringing back visions from these ecstatic spaces as souvenirs but the artist since he lives in this physical world of ours he becomes depleted at the end of the day since he is sacrificing part of himself to bring back those visions to create a phase change in the consciousness of society. He leaves our cultural operating systems and shows us different reality tunnels that give us a sense of perspective that is new to the world, then they come back and we become there customers for art and we pay money to take us to realms and spaces that we cannot go by ourselves.
Isn't that true? think about it, if we didn't have mad people like Nikola Tesla married a pigeon but gave us most of today's technology ,Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison but came out and forgave everyone and became president of South Africa, Leonardo Da vinci Loved to dissect bodies yet he was a great inventor, Elon musk Wants to establish a colony in Mars!! That is nuts but he is still working towards it, just to mention a few, we couldn't experience all these alien experiences if it were not for this crazy and brilliant human beings.
These are our Heros, our cultural luminaries. they are they mad men that some how could access dream reality world and guided them towards our salvation. So When you hear a guy with all crazy ideas he might be seeing possible realities to build the future brighter or to ruin it, it can go either way :)
Photos courtesy of pixabay.com