Much of our perceptions of life come from memory, rather than the present moment. Yet we spend our entire lives in the present moment, feeding off both memory and sense. Our senses are filtered through the past as each present moment before actively sculpted the way the future would be seen. Sanity is the comfortable nest of memories we build and spend most of our time being influenced by.
In psychology, there’s something known as context dependent memory. I think this is the key to our feelings of sanity and insanity. The way it works is that everything we experience is a form of context which influences the memories that we access, almost like a filter. If we experience sadness, we remember sadness easier. It’s as if the context of the present moment has proximity to the memories of the past, based on the present moment’s similarity to the past.
Insanity is often the opposite. Rather than the comfortable familiarity, insanity is when we find ourselves in a new alien world. At least, that’s one interpretation. Insanity can be broad. Sadness or fear can be insanity and yet also familiar to those unfortunate. They can drive us mad as expressed through catharsis or acting out in ways that society deems as insane. But that’s not what I’m talking about here.
The kind of insanity we’re talking about is the kind where you think you’ll never be sane again. When you can’t even remember what life is usually like. The mild end of the spectrum often has us wondering if we’re standing correctly or behaving “normally”. The far end is a lot scarier. Imagine not recognizing the world at all. Imagine it all unraveling right before your eyes, as if a gateway to a new world were opening. The kind of thing that people report on DMT or various other magical chemicals.
That feeling of insanity, I believe, comes from a loss of context. But context is everything. It is the fabric of your psychological reality as you know it. When that fabric becomes unwoven, we can finally see reality as it is. Or perhaps not. There is no “is”. Though, you can at least see without the twisting labyrinth you’ve built to convince yourself that you know what this universe is.
When the context shifts outside of the bounds of what you know, you are in a new frame of that context dependent memory. A frame that lacks ties to all of the usual functions of your mind. Without the familiar context, we can drift away and interpret reality in such a variety of ways. It opens our mind to seeing all the different ways that things could be. But it also means we become afraid because we can’t remember what life is like.
That’s the moment where we wonder if we’ll ever return again. Sometimes we still remember that we must return to a functional daily normal. And we sure as hell know that we couldn’t do that like this. We need to be able to see a fork and remember exactly what we’re doing and how to use it. We need to initiate the usual scripts for auto pilot. Otherwise, it’s like the house of cards would fall all around us. The confetti of our mind showers around eventually settling to leave us in the void.
The funny thing is, when we return to normal it’s just as hard to remember what it was like on the other side of the context wall. We fail to remember insanity. The same is true of dreams and waking life. In both states, it’s hard to remember the other.
I don’t think that insanity is inherently wrong. In fact, I think much of ordinary reality is us being trained to see things the wrong way by people who thought they were right. So the term “sanity” is somewhat of a misnomer. But it’s a lot harder to chase the truth when you’re all alone. You’d have to be the most ripped genius of us all. Such a grandiosity is foolish.
Leaving the context is like starting from zero. Whether or not you see the truth varies. Really, you cannot see the truth. No one can. Not even the sane. And that becomes increasingly clear when you leave the socially enforced context that defines your mind. But starting from zero is rather humble. Chances are your hypotheses will be in vain. But you can at least drag them back to sanity and test them if you still think it’s worth it.
Just be careful not to fall to hubris as you begin to see the absurdity of normality and all of its religious followers.
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