As we sat sipping our sweet lime (mausami) juice, I told Neelam, with whom I can speak my heart, “I was at the very edge of sanity yesterday. I had a Prozac and a quarter of a valium and some usually wonderful, all natural, organic herbs. I was so off. I couldn’t cope. Nothing helped. Not prayer, not deep breathing, nothing, so I figured chemicals would do it, but I had a drug reaction. I was edgy, disturbed, and felt a straw would break me.”

Neelam was surprised. She had always thought of me as very together. She also felt it wasn’t right for someone like me, or anyone else, to pop pills. I forget her exact words, but it was something like ‘while you’re writing about all this spiritual stuff in your blog . . .” You know what I mean. It is an old, old feeling that we cannot trust anyone who falls of the tightrope, and that certainly we cannot respect them. Look at what happened to Osho, and Muktananda, the former rumored to have drugs problems and to have committed suicide, the latter fallen for pretty blonde things. How can you trust what they say when they are so plainly human, not some super god men who always stay on? This, and the other argument of great artists who were bigots, racists and misogynists , like Wagner, Ezra Pound, etc — is an old one that nobody has resolved, and I am not about to even attempt it here, though I have my opinions. I just want to clarify my own position here, to myself and to you.

I am first of all a human being. This is at the center of my being from which everything else I am interested in radiate out like spokes in a wheel: spirituality, scatology, psychology, physiology, criminology, philosophy, etc, etc. I know and admit I fall off; I don’t even endeavor to be the perfect tight-rope artist who will never again do so. Who knows what lies in store? Sanity and insanity, as far as I know, are a hair breath apart.

Posted by kamla Oct 4th 2009

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