living on a paradisiacal, and one could add hedonistic, island for many years, aki witnessed many things. one time his dear dear friend eli started talking about being followed, being monitored by authorities, and other out of the ordinary things. sometimes your friends say things like this, so it didn’t seem like a big deal.
then a few days later when aki visited eli at his home to spend some quality boytime together, eli is breathing extremely deeply and heavily, muttering, whilst not really listening to anything aki has to say, and a strange look in his eye; a different face. aki would say something, and eli would be talking about something completely different.
over the next few days, aki and his friends began to talk amongst themselves about eli. they wondered what was up with him. eli got more intense and isolated. there would be sporadic midnight visits by eli, where he would gabber on about messiahs, messages and meanings.
the whole thing seemed to become a vicious self fulfilling prophecy of marching into madness. aki and his crew found the intensifying incidents disturbing and frankly, pretty scary. this in turn made it more difficult for them to objectively deal with the human, the animal, the mechanism, standing in front of them, which made the entity more confused and more obliged to continue on the lone path to the other worlds inside his mind.
they questioned their own sanity.
the question arose viciously and with a sneaky, dark, knowing attitude. this was even more frightening. the question had a point. more on that later.
eli was repatriated and given a serious checkup from the neck up. heavy pills prescribed. aki also coincidentally repatriated and then moved in with eli, who had a nice pad up in central. keep an eye on him too. he noticed eli’s behaviour had calmed almost completely. only because he was dosed to high heaven on hard soma, until there was nothing left of eli to be mad, nothing much left at all. eli stopped dosing one day and all hell broke loose again. aki had to leave; it became overwhelmingly a literal madhouse.
eli slowly whiled away the time working and staring at the legs of the chairs, and then returned to beach paradise. it got worse. eli would jump on bartops announcing the evils of soft drink corporations whilst generously lavishing said drinks upon the ground. and other odd things.
soon there were threats, knife in hand, protesting all others, claiming to be “the one”. darkness of the jungle descends. again incidents led to repatriation. more medicine. after a while stop taking it again. back to tropical island. rinse repeat.
aki and co turned their backs on him, finally. there were conversations to try to help, but mere words could not come close to breaking the barrier of the otherworldness of eli’s new mind.
if this happens to you, know this; your friend will probably never be the same again. maybe they will, but probably not. and so it goes. sometimes it goes like that, life goes that way. often goes that way. the way that you, now, feel like you knew would happen all along but beforehand, would not have occurred to you.
it must also be additionally said: if someone behaves in a way not within the boundaries of acceptable contemporary social norms, is that individual then automatically qualified as insane? who knows, maybe the dude opened some door with some psychedelics (this was almost certainly the case, eli smoking DMT at home by himself in his shack in the jungle daily).
also let it be known the boy was on prozac and marijuana daily since his early twenties. but, this can happen to anyone, in many different ways. but, yes, with psychedelic drugs you are quite taking your chances. but let’s say prozac and heavy skunk are also ‘psychedelics’, no? so. it doesn’t take much. it could be the coffee that does it eventually.
maybe the new place eli inhibited was the real place a human should be. who are you to judge? the fact is however, you can’t be going carrying knives around effing and blinding at your friends and family without recompense eventually. so…
what to do?!
truth is, there isn’t much you can do. well, this narrator for one believes the party affected must claim ownership of the “insanity”. whatever you want to call it. the voice in the head, or the voices. admit that it happens. then he/she can perhaps gain awareness of the “illness”. this is recommended by some professionals.
we however, are not trained in these things so, we don’t have much to add. or maybe we do.
ultimately we can say, breathe, focus and try to be the breath going in your nose to your belly and back again, repeatedly, and your self may realise all is illusion. but from the realm of the mind that is not a place you can see. that’s advice for you or a mentally misaligned human. actually, any individual that believes they are truly that individual, not understanding the true nature of reality, understand the self is illusion, is also mentally challenged. they just don’t seem know it. and almost all the others around them in that society are also challenged, but don’t realise it also.
hence, all (or most - those that act, that conform within the unspoken societal agreed upon way of exisiting) are adjudged sane.
as eckhart tolle says, if someone continually talked out loud to their self in front of everyone else, they would inevitably be labelled crazy. but, that is what almost the whole world does, talk to their selves from morning until night incessantly. without even realising it. who are they all talking to? the second or third them? how many of them are there? isn’t that insanity?
living within the concept of the self is a sketchy place to be. its not a real thing, so for the real thing to operate within the falsehood, means the tool (the human) doesn’t really stand a chance. only by undoing the conditioning can one become sane. the monks do it in the hills. they torture their selves with repetitive tasks, erasing the character. they are not just brushing the leaves away.
we are trying, in this short exploration, trying to draw our attention to the fact that the line between sanity and insanity is non existant. it’s not about eli really, it’s about all of us. unless liberation of the mind is achieved, the insanity will not be noticed. so in short, don’t worry about your mad friend. worry about yourself first. or rather, and now we are more careful with our small words: don’t worry, nothing is under control, all will pass, self is illusion, breathe.
you are not who you think you are.