Going Sane: Maps of Happiness

7:00 pm 20 May 2017

https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/160903888508/going-sane-maps-of-happiness-by-adam-phillips

…Those of us who don’t find madness inspiring are surprisingly short of options; and, at present, there is not much help available.

Being impelled to record notes while reading is always the most promising sign that once again I have stumbled onto a very important book. There is so much good to retain in Going Sane. But the reader should not be so naive as to not expect a bit of disjointed rhetoric when addressing the subject of sanity. Such a wide-ranging topic that would be difficult at best to pin down and keep focussed on. There are diversions to be expected in a concept so insanely complicated to explain.

…Imagining possibilities for ourselves involves telling stories about what we think we are like, what we think we want, and what we think we are capable of…

…The sanity of True Genius, we must assume, is that the True Genius is a fallen creature who can write—who can describe things—from the point of view of the unfallen…The sane genius transforms everything that might disturb us, “the wildest dreams,” into something that is familiar and reassuring…The horrifying, the dispiriting, the bizarre are made utterly convivial by the sane True Genius…Sanity checks the madness…only the sanity of True Genius can manage and bear madness…Madness requires genius to make it viable. Indeed, that may, ultimately, be what genius is, what sanity has to be: a talent for transforming madness into something other than itself, of making terror comforting…Sanity is this talent for not letting whatever frightens us about ourselves destroy our pleasure in life; and this, for Lamb, is essentially a linguistic talent.

Thank goodness for great fiction and the courage it takes to read it. But then to see and understand the truth in fiction and apply it to our lives is where the trouble begins for most of us. Figuring out what makes one tick is key to enjoying a healthy and satisfying life. Exploring all options that come to mind is critical to developing an understanding of what one truly wants. This does not mean to act out every fantasy or dream one holds. It means to investigate the idea, the possibilities, to extend the behavior out by using reasoning in order to consider the consequences. To think we ever have life all figured out is insane at best. To understand and accept that the best we can hope for is a muddling through is infinitely more sane.

The infantile pleasures of being loved, adored, stroked, held, cuddled, infinitely attended to and responded to, and thought about; of only sleeping, eating, and playing, these are the truly satisfying pleasures…It is, in fact, a form of madness to not know, to forget, to attack and trivialize what really makes you happy…The sane adult is aways smuggling his childhood into the future, refashioning his childhood pleasures as legitimate adult interests…It is the madness of modern human wanting not to want to know about its own wanting….

…The deeply sane must not betray their desire; the superficially sane accommodate their desire to the needs of others…The superficially sane tend to convince us that we are the products of our environments; arguing that if you give people the right upbringing and education, you will make them well adjusted. The deeply sane, on the other hand, tell us that there is always more to us than our environments; that there is something within us—call it genius or a life force or instincts or genes—that exceeds the world that we find, and to which we must pay our most serious attention because it is driving us, one way or another, into what we are and will be…

…The sane person’s first acknowledgement is that her life is moved more by luck than by judgment; she sees her relationships as coincidences rather than destinies, her talents as unearned gifts, her bodily life as genetically contingent, her parents as giving her a good or a bad chance, and so on. The only necessities her life has are the ones she ascribes to them. The second acknowledgement of the sane is that they are, peculiarly, animals who are often unconscious of what they want; and that some of the wants they are most conscious of serve to obscure their keener satisfactions. And this is because their third acknowledgment is that what they most want they must not have because it is forbidden them…

…Sanity should not be our word for the alternative to madness; it should refer to whatever resources we have to prevent humiliation.

M Sarki

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Going Sane: Maps of Happiness