Ted, I've been wanting to tell you about this for months but never took the time. After this article, I have to !
In 2001, a french musician by the name of Corinne Sombrun was send to Mongalia by the BBC to record sounds for a documentary. To do so she attended a shamanic ceremony so she could record and immediately got into a trance. The shaman told her she was a shaman and herself she had to learn the "craft". She went back to France confused and wanting to know more about what happened to her. She contacted scientists to be studied. One accepted and did exams on her... and immediately advised her to stop to get into trances because her brains looked like a schizophrenic brains.. yes !
She did not. Instead she learned the craft with the Mongolian shaman and spent the last 20 years studying this with scientists.
I'm sparing you the details: she wrote books and there are a lot of conferences on YouTube.. But after 20 years, she devised a way for everyone to get into a shamanic trance (now called "cognitive trance" because it's separated from the shamanic culture) with the help of (wait for it...) sound loops !
The effects of and many uses of trance are still being studied, but it's already proven that it's a capacity of the human brain. They are teaching cognitive trance to psycho-therapists and you can even learn it at the Paris university.
The vision you describe in the article are trances. The description of what it's like to be into a trance that you'll hear about in the videos on YT totally match what you say in the article.
Amazon’s animated series "Undone" by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy explores that connection in a very creative way, and is inspired by Purdy's personal experience with mental illness and spiritual practices.
Wow, referring to art as a dissonance to confront brings back dictatorial echoes while übermenschen are underpayed cabdrivers now, .... No offence to yr person but rather unsettling, seeing survival is arguably the ultimate artform, not in conflict but through confluence
Survival was more rudimentary in antiquity. Now, at best, it is measured in consumption, conspicuous at that.
Art is how we strive to be God, a creator.
I did not say art is dissonance. Art is the tool we use to corral the dissonance between our chaotic energy and the immutable constraints of physical reality.
Something quite diffrent from yr original phrasing, n as for survival, what planet are you referring to? Any creative process has creation at heart, from building a shelter/house over baking bread to the art of communication, yet claiming anything as an aspiration to be god does take on another echo of male chauvinism, nothing to do with practicing arts as I do
I recall walking into a class on astronavigation n being explained the root meaning of the word "normal", which is a leadline connecting the centre of the earth with the cosmos straight through your position on the earth's crust, yr vertical axis, so practically speaking, unless you 're standing on my head, my normal will be diffrent than your normal, & that is "normal". It started to refer to localised habit, as crazy as habits got, when maritime officers took charge of settlements same way they were in charge aboard, incl their "peculiarities & wishes".... So yeah, why try, just keep navigating mindspace...
Right. It's an old geometry term meaning 'sticking straight up from the ground'. The normal line is perpendicular to the tangent line, which is the line that intersects your ground or curve at a point--and it's kind of the opposite metaphorically too, since we talk about getting distracted as 'going off on a tangent'.
But how do we describe people who aren't normal? Bent, twisted, kinky, deviant--all terms that can also describe a line that isn't straight or have some idea of moving away from a path.
Great article Ted. I'd recommend reading 'The Flip' by Jeffrey J Kripal. Kripal is a highly regarded professor of philosophy and religion “The Flip” is his term for the moment when - through mystical, hallucinogens or near death events that many people have experienced first hand the true reality of the universe. Individuality is just an illusion and the entire universe itself comprises a single vast mind. Its not just creative small visions (athough he gives some great examples) it's also Nobel winning scientists who have experienced profound, life changing visions. Quantum physics is begining to support the 'out there' Ideas this great little book
Thanks for recommending this book. I got my hands on a copy of The Flip yesterday, and started reading it immediately. This book is very relevant to my current pursuits—I appreciate you pointing me to it.
The Flip happened to me in 2019 and I can only say it was just the beginning of my journey to understanding another Realm humans mostly have no clue exists around us at all times
I loved that book. Gifted it to a couple of people who were enormously resistant, sadly. This rationalist paradigm we live within is a vividly partial truth.
It's definitely not for everyone but it really resonated with me. Only the humanities and Science together, will lead to better answers about our place in the universe. We just need to keep or minds open.
Individuality and a single vast mind are not mutually exclusive concepts. I'd argue that the well-being of each of us is integral to the well-being of the whole, though the individual can die whereas the will live on with each new birth. If individuality is an illusion, so is the single vast mind.
It's frustrating to see the link between genius and madness dismissed as a romantic myth these days, especially since it goes as far back as Plato - “he who without the Muse’s madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen“.
The English Age of Enlightenment really shows it. Beside Blake, the three 18th century poets who came closest to breaking out of the corseted, collared Augustan style - William Cowper, William Collins, and Christopher Smart - all ended up in lunatic asylums.
From Ted: "Above all, I don’t mock or dismiss artists who have these visions, or assume that in every instance they are suffering from mental illness. Some of them might be a lot wiser or healthier than the rest of us."
Yes, you didn't mention "shining," as we call it down South. My Aunt May, an artist did it, and so have I. It's not really a hallucination, or voices in my experience, just a realization that you absolutely know what's going to happen, or realize exactly what is going on with human interactions. You "see through" things . . .
Cynics ask "why not go to the track if you can see the future?" Doesn't work that way, it can't be turned on and off. But I started to have the courage to tell others my intimations, things that were wildly "unpredicatable" that did actually happen as I described. Eventually my associates starting calling me "guru."
Wow, I wish I did know how it works. I really would go to the track!
When I was 19, and having to do about six hours of drawing from life (both people and objects) each day in art school, and had been thinking about the way even minor acts can affect larger occurrences later on (maybe what time my great grandfather brushed his teeth one day affected the fact that my father met my mother and not some other woman), I went out for a long walk at night. When I got home, in the dark, I sat on the front porch and started contemplating an enormous elm across the street, I studied the positive and negative space, contemplated similarities to the human circulatory system, and then POP! I got this mystical vision of the interconnectedness of everything in the world, whether the things are near each other or touching or not. It changed my life and view of the world. EVERY TIME I have told someone about this experience, I've had to answer "no" to the inevitable question as to whether I'd taken LSD, so now I only bring it up to close, trusted friends. I was not hallucinating, but seeing reality in an expansive way, so to speak.
The other thing is that I have received "prior notification", so to speak, of events happening to loved ones, and I have sometimes located people in places where they could not have been expected to be, or walk in on them at the very second they have decided they need my help. This is not something I do, but something that happens to me. I believe what a priest I know and what some of the Church Fathers have said about this, which is that this is not due to any ability of mine but occurs "for reasons known only to God".
I've had an "everything is connected" moment myself. I wasn't "on" anything - just taking a walk. It was a beautiful day, with really clear light, also shifting shadow patterns made by leaves. (I was facing west, toward the sun, so it shone through the leaves.) And I had this insight - it wasn't a vision or hallucination. It simply *was,* and it was accompanied by great joy, which was also unexpected. (I hadn't been drawing or doing anything visual arts-related, but I'm also a percussionist, and istm, there's a relationship of some kind per light/shadow patterns and many non-Western rhythms-which-are-also-melodies. The math eludes me completely; could have something to do with fractals, I suppose.)
That was over 15 years ago. It did *something* to me, though mostly not at a conscious level. That said, it was a particularly difficult time in my life, and having that flash of insight helped immensely. I won't class it as "enlightenment" (a la Gautama Buddha), b/c it wasn't. It *was* completely outside the norm, though, and just a couple of seconds long.
Also, I don't think of this experience as a "mystical vision." It wasn't like that at all - if anything, it was like seeing more of what's actually there. Hard to explain in words; I guess a kind of expanded perception was occurring, for just that moment.
Yet again, you provide an educated view of things I know. My opinion means nothing to anybody. I'm uneducated and (apart from my own Substack) unpublished. People think I'm crazy for my experiences and you've here stated that maybe I'm not. Your musings are always a pleasure.
Wow -- this post is entirely too cavalier. Of course we humans have, unfortunately, always been critical of those who are in some ways different -- too quick to label them as ill, but when you speak of mental illness, please be more careful. I have heard priests speak from the pulpit about prophets who would be considered mentally ill today, suggesting the mentally ill may be more gifted than the rest of us or have a direct pipeline to higher knowledge. Believe me many mentally ill people believe exactly that about themselves and consequently make life hell for those around them. Serious mental illness is tragic, and to even suggest it might be a gift is irresponsible. I would suggest those who think otherwise read THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen. And to the commenter The Radical Individualist, if you think normalcy and conformity are mental illness, then you haven't confronted the kind of mental illness that can ruin -- and sometimes take--lives.
Perhaps your essay segues too easily between pathological illness, dreams, induced trance states, culturally situated mystical traditions, one-off visions, systematically skewed perception, and so forth. I also drew conclusions like Ms. Fuller's, and it may be good to reexamine whether the essay was framed in a way that invited this type of reading.
Brains have neuronal circuitry and chemistry that is subject to variation in magnitudes too great to conceptualize except in a formal sense, and there are ranges that lead to experiences outside the bell-curve norm on many different scales. If the argument is that the extremes on some of these scales can produce experiences that are artistically productive that seems true enough; so can non-eccentric combinations of rational immersion and autotelic skill mastery. "Magic" and "math," I think, can both produce dull music and great music: I don't think music from magic is intrinsically more likely to be "magical" to listeners. Of course the listener can be listening from magic and math too, but I'm not sure there's any lack of magic in what the "math-trained" listener hears in math-immersed music. (And I really don't have any certainty that these categories have any stable meaningfulness.)
I do enjoy lots of the essays you write and recommend them to others.
What both Elizabeth Fuller and Robert Eno said. Casual linkage of "genius" and "madness" is a dangerous thing. I have found Rudolf and Margot Wittkower's book Born Under Saturn to be very helpful in looking at this topic in the visual arts - and their book ends while Renaissance art was giving way to the Mannerist style, so they weren't dealing with anything remotely modern or contemporary per the accounts they read and used in their work.
Myself, I think there will always be "inexplicable" things, yet if I had a choice to make per treatment of depression and anxiety in my own life, I wouldn't trade the peace of mind I now have for the misery that preceeded it. Balance is crucial - it allows creativity to thrive. Mental illness can destroy people, as many of us realize. (Ted, I'm not discounting what you say upthread per schizophrenia, either.)
I'm glad that there are medicines today that weren't available 40-50 years ago. Because the kinds of suffering many of us experienced prior to (as an example) the advent of SSRIs and some of the newer antipsychotics (used for a lot of "off-label" conditions) aren't afflicting us like they did before.
I think many people - not just those in the arts - are highly intuitive. And the dreams we have can inform waking life and creative proects. That said, Robert Frost was a fine craftsman. And that isn't something that comes from dreams. It's a learned skill, one every writer needs.
I concur. Ted Gioia's one of the few writers I read on Internet (mostly I do email and log off), but whenever I read something about creative genius and mental illness from a non-scientific POV I wish the writer would acknowledge that some schizophrenias are too horrible to consider in any way as "gifted" or whatever. I suspect Ted knows this, but didn't state it outright. Perhaps the closest he came here was:
>I knew about schizophrenia, and had even seen it up close. I didn’t romanticize it in the least<
He then cites RD Laing, Deleuze and Guattari, M. Foucault. Okay...
Einstein was a visionary genius. So was James Joyce. Any one of us could go on from here. But here's the thing: they had just enough madness, not too much. Latest research shows significant heritability. Einstein's son; Joyce's daughter: really dark stories. The literature on genius and madness and genetics is substantial, as most of you know...
In twin studies: if one twin has schizophrenia, the other is 80% likely to have it too. Why not 100%? Answer: environmental risk factors, stochastic effects, de novo mutations. The genes for it are all over the chromosome, which makes it really daunting to study.
I have two brothers. All three of us are rock guitarists. One of them - the best, most gifted , most popular, happiest and goofiest of us - started hearing voices around age 24. It just got worse from there. He ended up dying of an asthma attack a few days before he would've turned 40: couldn't think straight about when to request a new rescue inhaler. I spent a lot of time with him over his last 10 years, and let me just say: it was nothing less than horrifying. It was one long nightmare. There was nothing I could do. I had already read Laing, Foucault, Blake, Szasz before that day - prior to me knowing about his symptoms - when he called me up and asked me what I did when people on the other side of town won't turn their radio down so I could sleep.
I can't think of ONE damned thing that was a "gift" about what he experienced. Our conversations would often be interrupted by the voices he heard. No medications helped; they just caused another suite of problems.
I think everything Ted wrote about here is fascinating and vital and it's my favorite way to think about extreme creativity in human cultural history. But I suspect my experience with my brother should ring a bell with some of you. Because you read Ted Gioia you're probably creative. And I wonder why more of you aren't talking about those in your immediate genetic family who...didn't flourish with their extreme, florid, "voices" or "visions."
I only add this as a sort of necessary corrective to "Why can't we let schizophrenics alone to be creative?" There is a very VERY dark side to this. I ironically intend to add some sobriety here and merely want my comment to function as a sort of "footnote" to Ted's wonderful article here. Let us all be "mad"...with a limit. Let your freak flags fly!
We need to speak more and learn more about the ways that a society handles these experiences. Eg, exorcism or adorcism are two globally common strategies for handling what's named as "spirit possession". Neither of those options are considered suitable responses in contemporary western settings. A wide range of common human phenomena have been medicalised that may not be best handled via a medicalised worldview.
I agree, Caroline. Geel, Belgium is widely known for taking people in who have these kinds of..."issues"? And they're called "boarders." The city is experienced with handling this thing, and they're Western, too. St. Dymphna, 7th c., born in Ireland, is the Catholic patron saint of the mentally ill and she died in Geel and inspired this compassionate care of the mentally ill who need it. In Geel, you sleep at the hospital, but during the day you interact with "strangers" in Geel. It's thought that living with strangers helps avoid the emotional over-involvement and judgements of the family.
Neither Cuckoo's Nest institutionalism nor dumping them homeless onto the streets (in the name of their "freedom") has worked for us here in the US. Clearly you're right: we need a culture-wide re-framing of mental illness. We're on a continuum. It's not Us or Them. I suspect "normal" is also a BS idea: who the eff is "normal"? What does that really mean?
Hey: I'm weird as hell myself! But I'm lucky enough to be able to get along even thrive. It's all a matter of degree, and the very common interpretation of the raving unwashed man on a corner in one of our large cities - he brought it on himself with drugs; he made bad choices - is for the most part wrong: mentally ill people will use anything to stop the voices. They self-medicate at very high levels. The mental illness came first.
I will leave the topic of culture-wide insanity for some other time. Suffice as an exemplar: the Q-Anon cultists think only THEY are sane. Etc. Etc. Etc.
this. i practice daoism and it's all about the management of relationships on all scales. every "thing" is technically a "spirit entity" etc and humans are "compounds of spirits" etc etc
Einstein's first WIFE was the visionary genius. Einstein was a sexual predator who committed Intellectual Theft,and used the then power of Shame and Stigma to silence and "dissapear" his first wife and then used his con artist showboating talents to claim World no.1 physicist spot. And used his gene ethnicity contacts to get the USA nuclear program established for mass murder and to hold the world to threat for the next 70+ years. Considering current events one has to say,the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Anthropologist here (who has witnessed and lived in spaces where it's routine to experience trance, spirit possession, clairvoyance and so on). Can we think a bit more carefully about how much of the distress is socially caused by our society's absolute failure to understand, handle and work in positive and meaningful ways with such experiences?
Thank you for this comment. My brother has severe bipolar, which manifests (in manic phase) as grandiose creative ambition. In depression, he’s too risk-averse to create, so he’s stuck in a kind of limbo, immersed in a culture that seems always to encourage the following of dreams, responsibilities be damned. I am a practising artist myself, but I’ve come to be extremely skeptical of the message I feel is endemic to Western culture that human worth is proportional to creative output (although it’s never put so starkly as that).
Although I don't know your brother (and am not bipolar), I do know that in my own life, depression stifled creativity b/c I felt so bleak. It had nothing to do with being "risk-averse."
As it turned out, I have SAD (it took decades for me to realize that). I bought a high-quality lightbox and that changed so many things for the better. I've even used it in the summer from time to time, as I used to live in a wooded area, and the leaves blocked out a lot of sunlight.
The song is summoned from the strum immediately following emergence from the dream state! It’s either there, or it isn’t, it’s a gift that goes where it will.
Fascinating! We definitely seem to fear what we can't explain. Maybe it’s not so much that the artist has to “stay quiet and stay in the world,” as Daniel Handler puts it, but that we need to make space for the possibility that there is more to reality than what can be quantified and categorised
There's a wonderful recent article in the Guardian on Paul Simon where he talks about "songs which seemed to come from some place that I didn't inhabit." Explaining phenomenal creativity is an oxymoron.
Thank you for this lovely lovely write. For a highly-sensitive person, the world feels sick and they absorb it. It’s hard to ignore it. Anger about it becomes apathy. It’s hard to build boundaries in the same places that let the magic in.
I have the most beautifully mysterious recurring dream with a beached humpback whale at Lake Michigan beach—twilight in Chicago. Her eyes are as large as dinner plates. Staring into my soul—telling me my environment is all wrong! Go sing your whale song🎶🎶
Prof, you’d enjoy DOPS at UVA. They are trying to apply science to “mystical” and “magical” human experiences that will continue to unfold as our consciousness is better understood. Our intuition and curiosities should always be followed—whether it is academic in nature or not. We will learn a lot about ourselves and others. 💖
This is an excellent article, Ted, touching a topic near and dear to my heart. I have worked with highly creative people for decades, and needed a name for these people for the very reason that their brilliant strengths are increasingly diagnosed and medicated starting in school, mostly because they don’t fit with the program. I termed them “deep souls” and there is definitely a visionary, intuitive, sensitive dimension that would lead to the originality you describe.
Fabulous post. Nothing here surprises me. I come from a creative family and I ended up as a corporate lawyer, so now I'm a middle-aged lawyer who reads a lot and writes a lot of poetry. I don't think I've ever had a vision, my painting and drawing relatives might have, but I have the voice all the time. If I'm stuck on a poem and I can get to a museum, or a nature trail, or a place with plants and interesting things, often the voice eventually shows up. It likes to show up when I'm preparing dinner too. It delivers fresh images or wordplay in iambic pentameter most of the time. But it also sounds a lot like my inner voice, the one that will tell me at certain places " we're done here, there's nothing left for us" or " this is the place you need to keep coming back to, this is life-giving." So is it my subconscious or my soul or my poetic familiar? I think it best to not ask these questions lest I scare it off. I know he's not very popular, for having a messy personal life and not being a good husband to Sylvia Plath, but at his best Ted Hughes got fresh and vigorous imagery and was definitely pro-shamanic.
Well yes, there were trees in the Garden of Eden; one, the Tree of Life so important that the banished Adam and Eve could not get back from the gates guarded by powerful angels. And then there was a mighty big tree in the region of Germania where the English St. Boniface chopped down the sacred tree they had been worshiping—but he didn’t die of it, so they all converted to his Christian faith.
And of course a favorite is Hildegard of Bingen who was a mere nun who managed to uphold orthodoxy against the Cathars, be a poet who had mystical visions since age 3 (helped by migraines), as well as being a knowledgeable botanist/herbalist who also happened to compose hundreds of liturgical and sacred pieces of music (only recently discovered and performed), including a musical drama/mystery play. She died in 1179.
The Catholic Church has been discerning, honoring, and canonizing thousands of people for 2,000 years who might otherwise have been considered mentally unwell. The writings of Spanish Carmelite priest, Doctor of the Church, Counter-Reformation hero, and divine mystic John of the Cross were profound, diverse, and still required for priest seminary training. And he was spiritual mentor to the discalced Carmelite Teresa of Avila. Her books are prominent works on Christian mysticism and meditation practice. In her autobiography she describes the fourth stage of prayer as Devotion of Ecstasy. She also managed to be the first recognized female Church Doctor.
And let us not forget St Juan of Capistrano who levitated; and certainly Padre Pio who bilocated!
But these are only six. So never let it be said that one needs to worship trees, smoke tobacco or other illicits, or abandon the Church to be a mystic (and eventually a saint).
Ted, I've been wanting to tell you about this for months but never took the time. After this article, I have to !
In 2001, a french musician by the name of Corinne Sombrun was send to Mongalia by the BBC to record sounds for a documentary. To do so she attended a shamanic ceremony so she could record and immediately got into a trance. The shaman told her she was a shaman and herself she had to learn the "craft". She went back to France confused and wanting to know more about what happened to her. She contacted scientists to be studied. One accepted and did exams on her... and immediately advised her to stop to get into trances because her brains looked like a schizophrenic brains.. yes !
She did not. Instead she learned the craft with the Mongolian shaman and spent the last 20 years studying this with scientists.
I'm sparing you the details: she wrote books and there are a lot of conferences on YouTube.. But after 20 years, she devised a way for everyone to get into a shamanic trance (now called "cognitive trance" because it's separated from the shamanic culture) with the help of (wait for it...) sound loops !
The effects of and many uses of trance are still being studied, but it's already proven that it's a capacity of the human brain. They are teaching cognitive trance to psycho-therapists and you can even learn it at the Paris university.
The vision you describe in the article are trances. The description of what it's like to be into a trance that you'll hear about in the videos on YT totally match what you say in the article.
Amazon’s animated series "Undone" by Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy explores that connection in a very creative way, and is inspired by Purdy's personal experience with mental illness and spiritual practices.
I will check this out: Thanks !
brilliant series and rings true to my own experiences
I found a conference in English by Corinne at Google: https://youtu.be/Syy4MTHAfF4
The institute that was created for the researches is a good place to start too: https://trancescience.org/
As far as I can see, normalcy and conformity are mental illness.
Yes. Gabor Mate has a great book on it called "The Myth of Normal."
Hearing voices, seeing visions, etc., is not the same as illness.
Yeah, how about that?
The physical laws of the world are conformity but human behavior is chaos.
This is the eternal battle to address that disonance that we call creativity and art.
Wow, referring to art as a dissonance to confront brings back dictatorial echoes while übermenschen are underpayed cabdrivers now, .... No offence to yr person but rather unsettling, seeing survival is arguably the ultimate artform, not in conflict but through confluence
Survival was more rudimentary in antiquity. Now, at best, it is measured in consumption, conspicuous at that.
Art is how we strive to be God, a creator.
I did not say art is dissonance. Art is the tool we use to corral the dissonance between our chaotic energy and the immutable constraints of physical reality.
Something quite diffrent from yr original phrasing, n as for survival, what planet are you referring to? Any creative process has creation at heart, from building a shelter/house over baking bread to the art of communication, yet claiming anything as an aspiration to be god does take on another echo of male chauvinism, nothing to do with practicing arts as I do
"male chauvanism"
??
OK then, I see the tired path this is headed.
<incidentally> I'm an atheist.
Good for you, doesn't mitigate the risk of a godcomplex though, in good jest, art creates artists, if you're lucky ya get to become one
Yes!
I recall walking into a class on astronavigation n being explained the root meaning of the word "normal", which is a leadline connecting the centre of the earth with the cosmos straight through your position on the earth's crust, yr vertical axis, so practically speaking, unless you 're standing on my head, my normal will be diffrent than your normal, & that is "normal". It started to refer to localised habit, as crazy as habits got, when maritime officers took charge of settlements same way they were in charge aboard, incl their "peculiarities & wishes".... So yeah, why try, just keep navigating mindspace...
Right. It's an old geometry term meaning 'sticking straight up from the ground'. The normal line is perpendicular to the tangent line, which is the line that intersects your ground or curve at a point--and it's kind of the opposite metaphorically too, since we talk about getting distracted as 'going off on a tangent'.
But how do we describe people who aren't normal? Bent, twisted, kinky, deviant--all terms that can also describe a line that isn't straight or have some idea of moving away from a path.
Great article Ted. I'd recommend reading 'The Flip' by Jeffrey J Kripal. Kripal is a highly regarded professor of philosophy and religion “The Flip” is his term for the moment when - through mystical, hallucinogens or near death events that many people have experienced first hand the true reality of the universe. Individuality is just an illusion and the entire universe itself comprises a single vast mind. Its not just creative small visions (athough he gives some great examples) it's also Nobel winning scientists who have experienced profound, life changing visions. Quantum physics is begining to support the 'out there' Ideas this great little book
presents which makes it all
The moe fascinating.
Thanks for recommending this book. I got my hands on a copy of The Flip yesterday, and started reading it immediately. This book is very relevant to my current pursuits—I appreciate you pointing me to it.
My pleasure Ted, hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
The Flip happened to me in 2019 and I can only say it was just the beginning of my journey to understanding another Realm humans mostly have no clue exists around us at all times
I loved that book. Gifted it to a couple of people who were enormously resistant, sadly. This rationalist paradigm we live within is a vividly partial truth.
It's definitely not for everyone but it really resonated with me. Only the humanities and Science together, will lead to better answers about our place in the universe. We just need to keep or minds open.
Individuality and a single vast mind are not mutually exclusive concepts. I'd argue that the well-being of each of us is integral to the well-being of the whole, though the individual can die whereas the will live on with each new birth. If individuality is an illusion, so is the single vast mind.
It's frustrating to see the link between genius and madness dismissed as a romantic myth these days, especially since it goes as far back as Plato - “he who without the Muse’s madness in his soul comes knocking at the door of poesy and thinks that art will make him anything fit to be called a poet, finds that the poetry which he indites in his sober senses is beaten hollow by the poetry of madmen“.
The English Age of Enlightenment really shows it. Beside Blake, the three 18th century poets who came closest to breaking out of the corseted, collared Augustan style - William Cowper, William Collins, and Christopher Smart - all ended up in lunatic asylums.
From Ted: "Above all, I don’t mock or dismiss artists who have these visions, or assume that in every instance they are suffering from mental illness. Some of them might be a lot wiser or healthier than the rest of us."
Yes, you didn't mention "shining," as we call it down South. My Aunt May, an artist did it, and so have I. It's not really a hallucination, or voices in my experience, just a realization that you absolutely know what's going to happen, or realize exactly what is going on with human interactions. You "see through" things . . .
Cynics ask "why not go to the track if you can see the future?" Doesn't work that way, it can't be turned on and off. But I started to have the courage to tell others my intimations, things that were wildly "unpredicatable" that did actually happen as I described. Eventually my associates starting calling me "guru."
Wow, I wish I did know how it works. I really would go to the track!
When I was 19, and having to do about six hours of drawing from life (both people and objects) each day in art school, and had been thinking about the way even minor acts can affect larger occurrences later on (maybe what time my great grandfather brushed his teeth one day affected the fact that my father met my mother and not some other woman), I went out for a long walk at night. When I got home, in the dark, I sat on the front porch and started contemplating an enormous elm across the street, I studied the positive and negative space, contemplated similarities to the human circulatory system, and then POP! I got this mystical vision of the interconnectedness of everything in the world, whether the things are near each other or touching or not. It changed my life and view of the world. EVERY TIME I have told someone about this experience, I've had to answer "no" to the inevitable question as to whether I'd taken LSD, so now I only bring it up to close, trusted friends. I was not hallucinating, but seeing reality in an expansive way, so to speak.
The other thing is that I have received "prior notification", so to speak, of events happening to loved ones, and I have sometimes located people in places where they could not have been expected to be, or walk in on them at the very second they have decided they need my help. This is not something I do, but something that happens to me. I believe what a priest I know and what some of the Church Fathers have said about this, which is that this is not due to any ability of mine but occurs "for reasons known only to God".
I've had an "everything is connected" moment myself. I wasn't "on" anything - just taking a walk. It was a beautiful day, with really clear light, also shifting shadow patterns made by leaves. (I was facing west, toward the sun, so it shone through the leaves.) And I had this insight - it wasn't a vision or hallucination. It simply *was,* and it was accompanied by great joy, which was also unexpected. (I hadn't been drawing or doing anything visual arts-related, but I'm also a percussionist, and istm, there's a relationship of some kind per light/shadow patterns and many non-Western rhythms-which-are-also-melodies. The math eludes me completely; could have something to do with fractals, I suppose.)
That was over 15 years ago. It did *something* to me, though mostly not at a conscious level. That said, it was a particularly difficult time in my life, and having that flash of insight helped immensely. I won't class it as "enlightenment" (a la Gautama Buddha), b/c it wasn't. It *was* completely outside the norm, though, and just a couple of seconds long.
Also, I don't think of this experience as a "mystical vision." It wasn't like that at all - if anything, it was like seeing more of what's actually there. Hard to explain in words; I guess a kind of expanded perception was occurring, for just that moment.
Thank you for sharing! It figures it was an elm. They have such majesty.
Yet again, you provide an educated view of things I know. My opinion means nothing to anybody. I'm uneducated and (apart from my own Substack) unpublished. People think I'm crazy for my experiences and you've here stated that maybe I'm not. Your musings are always a pleasure.
I don’t doubt them.
Wow -- this post is entirely too cavalier. Of course we humans have, unfortunately, always been critical of those who are in some ways different -- too quick to label them as ill, but when you speak of mental illness, please be more careful. I have heard priests speak from the pulpit about prophets who would be considered mentally ill today, suggesting the mentally ill may be more gifted than the rest of us or have a direct pipeline to higher knowledge. Believe me many mentally ill people believe exactly that about themselves and consequently make life hell for those around them. Serious mental illness is tragic, and to even suggest it might be a gift is irresponsible. I would suggest those who think otherwise read THE BEST MINDS: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions by Jonathan Rosen. And to the commenter The Radical Individualist, if you think normalcy and conformity are mental illness, then you haven't confronted the kind of mental illness that can ruin -- and sometimes take--lives.
Let me repeat what I said in my essay—because your comment may mislead people:
(1) I don’t romanticize mental illness;
(2) I’ve seen firsthand the ravages of schizophrenia;
(3) I disagree with authors who have tried to “explain away” schizophrenia; but
(4) Not every artist who has a vision is mentally ill; and
(5) This may sometimes be part of a “gift” in a way medical science fails to understand.
By all means, feel free to disagree with this. But please don’t assign views to me that I do not hold.
Perhaps your essay segues too easily between pathological illness, dreams, induced trance states, culturally situated mystical traditions, one-off visions, systematically skewed perception, and so forth. I also drew conclusions like Ms. Fuller's, and it may be good to reexamine whether the essay was framed in a way that invited this type of reading.
Brains have neuronal circuitry and chemistry that is subject to variation in magnitudes too great to conceptualize except in a formal sense, and there are ranges that lead to experiences outside the bell-curve norm on many different scales. If the argument is that the extremes on some of these scales can produce experiences that are artistically productive that seems true enough; so can non-eccentric combinations of rational immersion and autotelic skill mastery. "Magic" and "math," I think, can both produce dull music and great music: I don't think music from magic is intrinsically more likely to be "magical" to listeners. Of course the listener can be listening from magic and math too, but I'm not sure there's any lack of magic in what the "math-trained" listener hears in math-immersed music. (And I really don't have any certainty that these categories have any stable meaningfulness.)
I do enjoy lots of the essays you write and recommend them to others.
What both Elizabeth Fuller and Robert Eno said. Casual linkage of "genius" and "madness" is a dangerous thing. I have found Rudolf and Margot Wittkower's book Born Under Saturn to be very helpful in looking at this topic in the visual arts - and their book ends while Renaissance art was giving way to the Mannerist style, so they weren't dealing with anything remotely modern or contemporary per the accounts they read and used in their work.
Myself, I think there will always be "inexplicable" things, yet if I had a choice to make per treatment of depression and anxiety in my own life, I wouldn't trade the peace of mind I now have for the misery that preceeded it. Balance is crucial - it allows creativity to thrive. Mental illness can destroy people, as many of us realize. (Ted, I'm not discounting what you say upthread per schizophrenia, either.)
I'm glad that there are medicines today that weren't available 40-50 years ago. Because the kinds of suffering many of us experienced prior to (as an example) the advent of SSRIs and some of the newer antipsychotics (used for a lot of "off-label" conditions) aren't afflicting us like they did before.
I think many people - not just those in the arts - are highly intuitive. And the dreams we have can inform waking life and creative proects. That said, Robert Frost was a fine craftsman. And that isn't something that comes from dreams. It's a learned skill, one every writer needs.
I concur. Ted Gioia's one of the few writers I read on Internet (mostly I do email and log off), but whenever I read something about creative genius and mental illness from a non-scientific POV I wish the writer would acknowledge that some schizophrenias are too horrible to consider in any way as "gifted" or whatever. I suspect Ted knows this, but didn't state it outright. Perhaps the closest he came here was:
>I knew about schizophrenia, and had even seen it up close. I didn’t romanticize it in the least<
He then cites RD Laing, Deleuze and Guattari, M. Foucault. Okay...
Einstein was a visionary genius. So was James Joyce. Any one of us could go on from here. But here's the thing: they had just enough madness, not too much. Latest research shows significant heritability. Einstein's son; Joyce's daughter: really dark stories. The literature on genius and madness and genetics is substantial, as most of you know...
In twin studies: if one twin has schizophrenia, the other is 80% likely to have it too. Why not 100%? Answer: environmental risk factors, stochastic effects, de novo mutations. The genes for it are all over the chromosome, which makes it really daunting to study.
I have two brothers. All three of us are rock guitarists. One of them - the best, most gifted , most popular, happiest and goofiest of us - started hearing voices around age 24. It just got worse from there. He ended up dying of an asthma attack a few days before he would've turned 40: couldn't think straight about when to request a new rescue inhaler. I spent a lot of time with him over his last 10 years, and let me just say: it was nothing less than horrifying. It was one long nightmare. There was nothing I could do. I had already read Laing, Foucault, Blake, Szasz before that day - prior to me knowing about his symptoms - when he called me up and asked me what I did when people on the other side of town won't turn their radio down so I could sleep.
I can't think of ONE damned thing that was a "gift" about what he experienced. Our conversations would often be interrupted by the voices he heard. No medications helped; they just caused another suite of problems.
I think everything Ted wrote about here is fascinating and vital and it's my favorite way to think about extreme creativity in human cultural history. But I suspect my experience with my brother should ring a bell with some of you. Because you read Ted Gioia you're probably creative. And I wonder why more of you aren't talking about those in your immediate genetic family who...didn't flourish with their extreme, florid, "voices" or "visions."
I only add this as a sort of necessary corrective to "Why can't we let schizophrenics alone to be creative?" There is a very VERY dark side to this. I ironically intend to add some sobriety here and merely want my comment to function as a sort of "footnote" to Ted's wonderful article here. Let us all be "mad"...with a limit. Let your freak flags fly!
LOVE!
We need to speak more and learn more about the ways that a society handles these experiences. Eg, exorcism or adorcism are two globally common strategies for handling what's named as "spirit possession". Neither of those options are considered suitable responses in contemporary western settings. A wide range of common human phenomena have been medicalised that may not be best handled via a medicalised worldview.
I agree, Caroline. Geel, Belgium is widely known for taking people in who have these kinds of..."issues"? And they're called "boarders." The city is experienced with handling this thing, and they're Western, too. St. Dymphna, 7th c., born in Ireland, is the Catholic patron saint of the mentally ill and she died in Geel and inspired this compassionate care of the mentally ill who need it. In Geel, you sleep at the hospital, but during the day you interact with "strangers" in Geel. It's thought that living with strangers helps avoid the emotional over-involvement and judgements of the family.
Neither Cuckoo's Nest institutionalism nor dumping them homeless onto the streets (in the name of their "freedom") has worked for us here in the US. Clearly you're right: we need a culture-wide re-framing of mental illness. We're on a continuum. It's not Us or Them. I suspect "normal" is also a BS idea: who the eff is "normal"? What does that really mean?
Hey: I'm weird as hell myself! But I'm lucky enough to be able to get along even thrive. It's all a matter of degree, and the very common interpretation of the raving unwashed man on a corner in one of our large cities - he brought it on himself with drugs; he made bad choices - is for the most part wrong: mentally ill people will use anything to stop the voices. They self-medicate at very high levels. The mental illness came first.
I will leave the topic of culture-wide insanity for some other time. Suffice as an exemplar: the Q-Anon cultists think only THEY are sane. Etc. Etc. Etc.
Yes, all that. I hadn't known about Belgium -will dig in. Thanks for that.
this. i practice daoism and it's all about the management of relationships on all scales. every "thing" is technically a "spirit entity" etc and humans are "compounds of spirits" etc etc
Einstein's first WIFE was the visionary genius. Einstein was a sexual predator who committed Intellectual Theft,and used the then power of Shame and Stigma to silence and "dissapear" his first wife and then used his con artist showboating talents to claim World no.1 physicist spot. And used his gene ethnicity contacts to get the USA nuclear program established for mass murder and to hold the world to threat for the next 70+ years. Considering current events one has to say,the apple does not fall far from the tree.
Anthropologist here (who has witnessed and lived in spaces where it's routine to experience trance, spirit possession, clairvoyance and so on). Can we think a bit more carefully about how much of the distress is socially caused by our society's absolute failure to understand, handle and work in positive and meaningful ways with such experiences?
Thank you for this comment. My brother has severe bipolar, which manifests (in manic phase) as grandiose creative ambition. In depression, he’s too risk-averse to create, so he’s stuck in a kind of limbo, immersed in a culture that seems always to encourage the following of dreams, responsibilities be damned. I am a practising artist myself, but I’ve come to be extremely skeptical of the message I feel is endemic to Western culture that human worth is proportional to creative output (although it’s never put so starkly as that).
Although I don't know your brother (and am not bipolar), I do know that in my own life, depression stifled creativity b/c I felt so bleak. It had nothing to do with being "risk-averse."
As it turned out, I have SAD (it took decades for me to realize that). I bought a high-quality lightbox and that changed so many things for the better. I've even used it in the summer from time to time, as I used to live in a wooded area, and the leaves blocked out a lot of sunlight.
I want to stay un- sane if disbelieving in having glimpsed the un-seen renders me normal.
The song is summoned from the strum immediately following emergence from the dream state! It’s either there, or it isn’t, it’s a gift that goes where it will.
Fascinating! We definitely seem to fear what we can't explain. Maybe it’s not so much that the artist has to “stay quiet and stay in the world,” as Daniel Handler puts it, but that we need to make space for the possibility that there is more to reality than what can be quantified and categorised
Beautifully written with your characteristic sensitivity Ted; music has always been my medicine of choice and sometimes I’ve seen those trees ✌️
There's a wonderful recent article in the Guardian on Paul Simon where he talks about "songs which seemed to come from some place that I didn't inhabit." Explaining phenomenal creativity is an oxymoron.
Bob Dylan has also expressed wonder at his early songs and how they came about.
Thank you for this lovely lovely write. For a highly-sensitive person, the world feels sick and they absorb it. It’s hard to ignore it. Anger about it becomes apathy. It’s hard to build boundaries in the same places that let the magic in.
I have the most beautifully mysterious recurring dream with a beached humpback whale at Lake Michigan beach—twilight in Chicago. Her eyes are as large as dinner plates. Staring into my soul—telling me my environment is all wrong! Go sing your whale song🎶🎶
Prof, you’d enjoy DOPS at UVA. They are trying to apply science to “mystical” and “magical” human experiences that will continue to unfold as our consciousness is better understood. Our intuition and curiosities should always be followed—whether it is academic in nature or not. We will learn a lot about ourselves and others. 💖
This is an excellent article, Ted, touching a topic near and dear to my heart. I have worked with highly creative people for decades, and needed a name for these people for the very reason that their brilliant strengths are increasingly diagnosed and medicated starting in school, mostly because they don’t fit with the program. I termed them “deep souls” and there is definitely a visionary, intuitive, sensitive dimension that would lead to the originality you describe.
https://open.substack.com/pub/deepsoulstrengths/p/7-strengths-of-deep-souls?r=1sd4gz&utm_medium=ios
Lovely. Deep souls.
Fabulous post. Nothing here surprises me. I come from a creative family and I ended up as a corporate lawyer, so now I'm a middle-aged lawyer who reads a lot and writes a lot of poetry. I don't think I've ever had a vision, my painting and drawing relatives might have, but I have the voice all the time. If I'm stuck on a poem and I can get to a museum, or a nature trail, or a place with plants and interesting things, often the voice eventually shows up. It likes to show up when I'm preparing dinner too. It delivers fresh images or wordplay in iambic pentameter most of the time. But it also sounds a lot like my inner voice, the one that will tell me at certain places " we're done here, there's nothing left for us" or " this is the place you need to keep coming back to, this is life-giving." So is it my subconscious or my soul or my poetic familiar? I think it best to not ask these questions lest I scare it off. I know he's not very popular, for having a messy personal life and not being a good husband to Sylvia Plath, but at his best Ted Hughes got fresh and vigorous imagery and was definitely pro-shamanic.
Well yes, there were trees in the Garden of Eden; one, the Tree of Life so important that the banished Adam and Eve could not get back from the gates guarded by powerful angels. And then there was a mighty big tree in the region of Germania where the English St. Boniface chopped down the sacred tree they had been worshiping—but he didn’t die of it, so they all converted to his Christian faith.
And of course a favorite is Hildegard of Bingen who was a mere nun who managed to uphold orthodoxy against the Cathars, be a poet who had mystical visions since age 3 (helped by migraines), as well as being a knowledgeable botanist/herbalist who also happened to compose hundreds of liturgical and sacred pieces of music (only recently discovered and performed), including a musical drama/mystery play. She died in 1179.
The Catholic Church has been discerning, honoring, and canonizing thousands of people for 2,000 years who might otherwise have been considered mentally unwell. The writings of Spanish Carmelite priest, Doctor of the Church, Counter-Reformation hero, and divine mystic John of the Cross were profound, diverse, and still required for priest seminary training. And he was spiritual mentor to the discalced Carmelite Teresa of Avila. Her books are prominent works on Christian mysticism and meditation practice. In her autobiography she describes the fourth stage of prayer as Devotion of Ecstasy. She also managed to be the first recognized female Church Doctor.
And let us not forget St Juan of Capistrano who levitated; and certainly Padre Pio who bilocated!
But these are only six. So never let it be said that one needs to worship trees, smoke tobacco or other illicits, or abandon the Church to be a mystic (and eventually a saint).
The Aboreal Mother's Secret
She called out to me. I heard her clear whisper from afar.
In my inner ear she soft did speak where no sound comes to jar...
I looked up and saw the bird. The black crow found my eye.
Follow me, she thought. Follow me when I fly....
On dark wings she led me to a lonely path into the forest of long ago -
An ancient arboreal reality that remains quite so.
Here was a black adder sunning herself on the trail - a shimmering snake!
This serpent must be bridged on the journey I make ...
On crossing I heard her voice again - Deep between the trees it came ...
Come. Come to me. I knew nothing would ever be the same!
Over mushroomed trunks & under clivia laden boughs I did scramble.
On mossy logs I crossed the streams.
I was the dreamer dreaming this dream ...
She lived deep, deep in the dampness of the shivering silver forest mists
Where moist droplets met not much light on the long creeping twists.
There ahead of me in the swirling gloom
Was an arboreal crone who had a womb. Encircling her a chromleh of offspring
Did her lingering love consume ...
My eyes set on this "Wonderboom" -
One whose life was a total mystery.
I smiled with respect at this tree.
I knelt humbly with her before me.
I heard her voice: Greetings dear child!
There's a gift for you, if you sit a while.
Stay a moment to hear what I know
Then on to a good mission you'll go.
She spoke of the olden ones of the past
The ones whose lives had now been lost
The network of balm the biggest held
Is dying fast as they're cruely felled!
They used to ring dear Gaia's sphere -
Mighty trees that neutralised fear
Disease they continuously kept at bay.
They protected all life come what may.
Humanity will suffer from this plight
Demise will come if they don't fight
To protect the ones who've the might
The tall trees who know what's right!
There was silence. Quietly she did sigh.
My heart ached and I began to cry.
I knew that there was little I could try.
The time was coming when we would die.
I felt the ancient ones energy change.
She then said something strange:
Go look there next to the shady pond
You will find a present in that range.
I clambered beneath the low branch
And lo! A shape emerged as by chance
I lifted it out of the dark brown mud
A twisted rope or sash perchance?
I knew to wash it off in dappled pool.
It was a belt of wound coloured wool!
I wrung it out and held it out with a pull
Red, blue and white entwined to full!
Interconnections, I reminded myself
She beckoned me back unto herself:
Remember this till the time is nigh
Tell the story of the great trees self!
The salvation of your kind lies herein
Spread the news to both kith and kin:
Please reconnect to the trees, dear one,
This is the only way to again begin...
A partnership must be rekindled
As kindred spirits you are remingled
In strength let's grow together again
In synergy renewing what's dwindled!
Indiana - 13th July 2020.
(This was a real experience I had years ago in the Magoeboeskloof Arboreal Forest.)