QUESTION (resumed) :
How does one distinguish between a satori experience and mental delusions ?
QUESTION (original) :
How does one distinguish between a satori experience and mental delusions ?
I often feel as if I am experiencing intergalactic oneness in the land of a million Buddhas. Unfortunately, as a psychology major, I learned that such mental states are synonymous with schizophrenia and hallucinations and psychotropic drug use. How does one weed out the real from the delusion?
ANSWER :
It is difficult to accept, and even more to understand, that reality and illusion are not of a different nature. A wiseman is a schizophrenic who knew how to harmonize his madness to the socially recognized madness and thus how not to be locked up. To know how to control one's madness and to know how to take the madness of the others into account, that is what is rightly called wisdom.
Take the example of two musicians as a metaphor : The first one plays his part, but he is not able neither to listen to the orchestra nor to get harmonized to the main rythm. He will very soon loose his job as a musician and will at the most, with some luck, become a policeman at a crossroad, and play the whistler and the billy. Maybe then, with the prestige that uniform gives him, he will manage to be listened to.
The second one is a genious. His name is Yehudi, Chet or Louis Armstrong. The band goes on and takes the rythm written on the music score. Good. The audience who is patiently waiting for the star begins to get bored.
But suddenly, he arrives and we can hear his tones that cannot be imitated.
He turns the rythm upside down and seems to be playing in complete freedom, not even bothering about any rule. The band seems to be spurred on and gets harmonized to the artist as one man. The genious, just as the madman, doesn't listen to the others but he has a secret who makes the
difference between them : he hears.
Then, why does not the genious like the cops ? This is a problem that would
demand more time to be answered.
KOSEN!