Crazy Wisdom

Crazy Wisdom

To remain whole, be twisted.
To become straight, let yourself be bent.
To become full, be hollow.

—Tao Te Ching

A special kind of wisdom is loose in the world. This wisdom is difficult to codify or categorize and it refuses to be institutionalized. It is called crazy widom. And so it is, both crazy, and wisdom.

Crazy wisdom is the wisdom of the saint, the Zen master, the poet, the mad scientist, and the fool. Crazy wisdom sees that we live in a world of many illusions, that the Emperor has no clothes, and that much of human belief and behavior is ritualized nonsense. Crazy wisdom understands antimatter and old Sufi poetry; loves paradox and puns and pie fights and laughing at politicians. Crazy wisdom flips the world upside down and backward until everything becomes perfectly clear.

You will find crazy wisdom flowing through all of human history, bubbling up here and there, now and then, pointing out different ways of looking at things, reminding people to take it easy, and providing a necessary counterpoint to self-righteousness. From the Taoists to the Dadaists; from the Book of Ecclesiastes to Mark Twain's Letters to the Earth; in the parables of Chung Tzu and the Baal Shem Tov; out of the cyclonic whirl of Rumi's dervish poetry and the profound nonsense of Samuel Beckett's confused characters; lurking beneath the unruly hair of Albert Einstein and between the busy eyebrows of Groucho Marx, inside the howly voice of Allen Ginsburg and from behind the rags of Lilly Tomlin's bag lady: Whatever tone it speaks in and whatever disguise it wears, crazy wisdom arises again and again to expose us to ourselves and to remind us of the strange impossible nature of our enterprise here on earth: life.

—Wes "Scoop" Nisker, Crazy Wisdom