A Wild and Crazy Wisdom Kinda Guy

There are many explanations as to why profits throughout the ages behave in mysterious ways, not least among them is the idea they have been divinely inspired and are attempting to convey a truth that resides outside our normal paradigm of understanding.

In some traditions, this unusual behavior is called “crazy wisdom.”  One Buddhist master, Chogyam Trungpa,  tried to describe crazy wisdom this way: “So that nonhesitating light reflects choicelessly all the time; it shines brilliantly and constantly on things. Craziness means not discriminating and being without cowardice and paranoia. "Should I shine on this object, even though this other object is facing towards me?"—not at all.”

The description by author Tom Robbins  is a little easier to follow. He described crazy wisdom as the “deliberate opposite of conventional wisdom.” Robbins, a student of Zen Buddhism, went on to say, “[C]razy wisdom is a philosophical worldview that recommends swimming against the tide, cheerfully seizing the short end of the stick, embracing insecurity, honoring paradox, courting the unexpected, celebrating the unfamiliar, shunning each and every orthodoxy, volunteering for those tasks nobody else wants or dares to do, and perhaps above all else, breaking taboos in order to destroy their power.” (ShamBhala Sun, 2008).

We learn that Ezekiel ate the scroll upon which the words of God were written, he slept on his side for many moons, went about naked, refused to mourn is dead wife, remained silent until God spoke to him, gave himself a bad haircut, and on and on. Some of these acts are told in chapters 3, 4 and 5.

As with many messengers, Ezekiel’s words from God may have been adjusted for his audience. As such, he may have been employing his own form of crazy wisdom in an attempt to impart more vociferously the points he was trying to make.

Ezekiel 23 is particularly full of salacious language that both shocks and stirs the conscience. I particularly like this passage from 39:17-20: “As for you, mortal, thus says the Lord God: Speak to the birds of every kind and to all the wild animals: Assemble and come, gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel, and you shall eat flesh and drink blood. You shall eat the flesh of the mighty, and drink the blood of the princes of the earth--of rams, of lambs, and of goats, of bulls, all of them fatlings of Bashan. You shall eat fat until you are filled, and drink blood until you are drunk, at the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you. And you shall be filled at my table with horses and charioteers,g with warriors and all kinds of soldiers, says the Lord God.”

The overall goal of crazy wisdom is transformation and transcendence -- to break the spirit free and enlarge the soul so that it may contain a greater truth. Crazy wisdom teachers try to shock people into spontaneous enlightenment. In the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, crazy wisdom is another way of saying “skillful means.”

Some examples drawn from Tibetan siddhas include eating dung, drinking from skulls, sleeping naked in the snow, and engaging in lewd public sex. Tibetan Buddhist hero Milarapa famously lived many years without clothes. One of the most famous examples is the Zen Master who hits his meditating student with a stick, thereby triggering instant enlightenment.

One story from Sufism holds that a teacher told a long-suffering student that God was a carrot, then laughed. When the man returned many years later for clarification, the teacher said God was not a carrot but a raddish, then laughed again. One day it occurred to the student what the teacher was trying to say: God cannot be defined.  The beauty of this teaching strategy is that enlightened thinking radiates from within rather than being imposed from the outside.

So, as unstable as some of the profits, most notably Ezekiel, appear to be, they belong to a long tradition of crazy wisdom that is both reveared and misunderstood worldwide.