Lunatic Watching

2025, July, Issue 156

Sanity,

though illusive

and quite rare,

rare beyond all measure,

a mind that is untroubled, by

worldly affairs, beyond suffering,

Saneness can be obtained somehow,

though,

at the moment,

I cannot recall

I have no way to remember just how this is done

within these walls,

within this box, these confines

within this lunatic asylum, where I watch,

where I watch lunatics passing by, engaged

in all the things that keep them here, I

watch as these lunatics shuffle about

on their endless pursuit of delusions,

figments of demented aspirations

which only lead to ruin, lunatics

seeking answers to questions, mysteries,

nonsense, absurdity

which cannot be validated,

Which soup is this sky?

How many toddles in a mind-twerp?

Why did we just fall short in the buglump?

Who was that painted madhouse?

Questions abound that lead nowhere,

starting with delusion,

ending with farce,

Seekers, seeking eternal life,

Only to discover we’ve already

lived forever, lunatics grasping

As they die a miserable death,

only to be recycled once more,

Seekers, seeking more of the same,

Seeking fame, finding irrelevancy,

losing both, lunatics

Seeking fortune, only to lose it all

Seeking praise and

reason to be happy,

Seeking answers

where none can be true,

Finding suffering,

blame,

loss,

futility;

In the days before death arrives

I watch these lunatics

who seem to know everything,

screaming at the top of their lungs

as they look for something,

anything real in this endless stream,

this cycle of folly and despair,

avoiding enlightenment above all else,

Placing their own awakening below

all these insignificant endeavors;

When will it be time to shine?

A poem by Robert Aho © 2025

When we discover the Nature of Mind, when we recognize who we have been for all eternity, when it finally makes sense in a way that cannot be described, the entire world, everywhere you look, everyone looks absolutely stark raving mad. To say it is a lunatic asylum is to underrepresent the way it really looks. At least in a lunatic asylum there is some sort of supervision. In the world around us, the lunatics rule. These are lunatics, and they don’t want sanity.

I pray that all beings find sanity. I wish that all beings aspire to awaken. We need this at this crucial hour. What we don’t need is to remain embroiled in battles that yield only suffering.

I remember visiting my uncle in a nursing home when the news suddenly broke out about war. Mountains were being obliterated. He and another war veteran were watching with tears in their eyes. I asked why they we so sad. They both explained that war never solves anything. The people who were being killed by those bombardments were innocent civilians. They explained how war is just an evil sickness, that those were children being killed. There’s never honor in any kind of war, it’s just madness.

This surprised me, because I had thought that they were quite the opposite, ready to cheer whenever a bomb was dropped or a military action came to fruition. They had experienced war, they felt it personally, and they called it madness. The truth of this madness had become apparent through life experience.

When we look at the world around us, it is not so difficult to see that there is no end to this madness, whether it is war or trying to take the accumulations of a lifetime with us when we die. As we begin to see how beings place madness above all else, we can see why the world remains in turmoil. Every little thing that we do spins off into eternity. Since we are not really inclined to discover reality, madness finds us and we remain perpetually in that condition.

A lunatic is someone who thinks something is real that is not real. It’s pretty easy to see that. When we look at appearances of mind; however, we can easily discover that none of it is real. A lunatic convinces themselves that the illusion is real. A person who aspires to awaken will, on the other hand, rather quickly cut through such delusion. This is when we unleash a power within ourselves that goes beyond any sort of limitation. This bright condition is our own potentiality, enlightenment mind itself, which is beyond what can be adequately described.

Unfortunately, it is extremely unpopular among lunatics to awaken, or to even create the aspiration to awaken. We can observe that beings avoid awakening, as it is quite apparent. Our own lack of aspiration keeps us bound to our eternal suffering. When things are going well, we have no reason to change what we are doing, when things are going poorly, we have no way to settle the mind. Lunatics go on in this way.

If we wish to awaken, we need to pay attention. Don’t just people watch, lunatic watch. See how battles lead nowhere except sorrow, how fortunes come and go, how we live for a short time, then die, becoming utterly forgotten. This world gives us nothing of value, certainly nothing that we can take with us. Even self disappears into this bright condition beyond belief, beyond what we might reify.

When I died, my only reason to return was a simple message: AWAKEN.

Blessings in Light,

Robert Aho