Discussion Group Report

"I prefer the madness of Don Quixote de la Mancha to the sanity of most other men," says Sheldon B. Kopp, author of the book discussed at our March meeting.

Cervantes' Knight of the Rueful Countenance was alleged to have become deluded by the brain-addling effects of his continued immersion in the reading of chivalric tales. Ignoring the dissuasions of family and friends, this country-village gentleman sallied forth as a knight-errant on an adventurous quest to set right whatever wrongs he might encounter; all in the name of social justice and for the attainment of personal glory. The world which he was to encounter was really, like our own, unjust. Perhaps it demands such a holy fool as he was to take the evil of the world seriously enough and to imagine himself as willing to dedicate his life to improving the suffering of others.

Don Quixote's family and community were upset to learn that he had chosen to believe in himself. His madness and loss of contact with reality are played off against the down-to-earth sanity of his squire Sancho Panza. Sancho goes along with Quixote's mad sallies into the illusion of adventure because he is driven by greed. He wants worldly power, to become governor of an island that Quixote promises as a reward for Sancho's service. Time after time Sancho is unnerved by Quixote's impulsive challenging and attacking of swineherds, mule drivers, innkeepers, and windmills, whom he mistakes for enchanters, evil knights, lords of the manor, and lawless giants.

"...in a world in which true madness masquerades as sanity, creative struggles against the ongoing myths seem eccentric and will be labeled as 'crazy' by the challenged establishment in power."

After his zany misadventures, Don Quixote also achieved sanity. On his death-bed, he endured the admonishments of his deadly sane housekeeper: "Stay at home, attend to your affairs, go often to confession, be charitable to the poor."

And so, safe from further threat of madness, he died "having gained his reason and lost his reasons for living."

In many cases psychotherapy patients are seeking some hidden order to be discovered that will provide the key to happiness, to perfection, to a problem-free life. If we are to live our own lives, we must trade the illusion of certainty for the holy insecurity of never knowing for sure what it is all about. As we gain a deeper sense of our own identity, a sense of self based upon knowing our own wishes and trusting our own feelings, we may develop a framework of situational ethics. Rules will come to serve as tentative guidelines.

The Zen Master warns: "If you meet Buddha on the road, kill him!" This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside of ourselves can be our master. We must each give up the master without giving up the search. The importance of things lies in the way we have learned to think about them. How often we make circumstances our prison and other people our jailers! At our best we take full responsibility for what we do and what we choose not to do. The most important struggles take place within the self.

"Once, in the Orient, I talked of suicide with a sage whose clear and gentle eyes seemed forever to be gazing at a never-ending sunset. 'Dying is no solution,' he affirmed. 'And living?' I asked. 'Nor living either,' he conceded. 'But who tells you there is a solution?'"

Some of the 927 Eternal Truths:

1. This is it!

10. The world is not necessarily just. Being good often does not pay off and there is no compensation for misfortune.

11. You have a responsibility to do your best none-the-less.

18. If you have a hero, look again: you have diminished yourself in some way.

28. The most important things each man must do for himself.

29. Love is not enough, but it sure helps.

31. How strange, that so often, it all seems worth it.