Madness might be more visible in cities. Maybe it´s the climate, all those souls packed so close together that friction is unavoidable. Maybe it´s just that the amount of people that can be mad are so many more here in the floods of humanity running through the sieve that the city is.
Outside Charing Cross station stands a homeless man crooning and chanting every night. I don´t know when his gig starts, but he seems to be around after 2000 hours every evening. He chants like a preacher, and first you think he might be a Christian trying to convert the earless masses that pass on their way home into Charing Cross station and steps on trains for other places, warm homesteads, small, Kentish towns.
But no. I checked, the other day. He stands there chanting that the fashion designer Alexander McQueen was killed by the Masons. Next to him, on the sidewalk, are signs proclaiming the royal family to be Masons too. Maybe there´s a link, but if there is, I don´t know what it is.
Maybe you need to dwell in Bedlam´s haunted corridors to understand the language of the inmates.
From a bus, I saw the signs and what I guess is the same man´s tent, set up among the protesters at Parliament Square, outside the House of Commons and Westminster Abbey.
Madness. The internal worlds that are shattered mirrors of souls. Be glad if your karma didn´t include it this time around.
You can read about Bethlem Hospital of London here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlem_Royal_Hospital. It is from this psychiatric hospital that the word ”bedlam” comes, spluttered and muttered and mutilated by its inmates and people in the streets. Originally a priory, it later became a dedicated psychiatric hospital, and, according to some chroniclers, a pit of hell.
Chinese medicine has treated disorders of the mind since time immemorial. It is mentioned both in the Neijing (200 BC at least) and in many later texts. The Pericardium channel, which we will look at next, has a big part in this and treating what is called shen disorders – imbalances in the emotions, perception, and mind. One of the great Chinese physicians, Sun Simiao, handed on a specific sequence aimed at treating severe disturbances of the mind. This sequence is called the Ghost Points, and in older days it would have been used for perceived possession of spirits and ghosts as well. In the 21st century, it is used for severe psychiatric disturbances, traumatized minds, and in some cases, epilepsy.
Today, the original old building of Bedlam houses the british Imperial War Museum. Now that is irony on a cosmic scale.
