Craziness: The History of Mankind (Part Two)

(Page Update 10/5/25)

The Seeker's Craziness

In 1968, I sat on the bleachers as a young athlete, my future unfolding before me, and I asked a question that still echoes today: What the hell is wrong with this crazy world of ours?

In Part One, I told the story of teachers, coaches, and leaders throughout history, about their attempts to preserve sanity, but ultimately explained how their good intentions more often amplified insanity. Now, let’s examine the other side's story by focusing on the seeker's perspective of learning, performing, and respecting.

Anchored in Purpose

What is it like to be a student in the middle of this dichotomy? What is it like to sit under the authority of teachers, the discipline of coaches, the example of leaders, while intuitively feeling that the world remains fragmented, contradictory, and insane? That is what drives the seeker's craziness: the lived confusion of trying to focus on learning the unknown, a specialized practice, and adhering to expectations in a world that seldom makes sense.

Development: Sitting in the Classroom of Contradiction

Today, every life story of a seeker begins in the classroom. From childhood onward, students absorb lessons, stories, and rules. Teachers are supposed to guide development upward: from sensations to categories, principles, and systems. But for the student, the experience is rarely coherent.

The lesson vs. the world. Students learn about justice in civics class while seeing injustice on the streets. They memorize historical triumphs while watching contemporary wars on television. The split itself is maddening.
Double-Edged Authority. A good teacher can open minds, but many narrow them. Some encourage questions; others punish them. A seeker often learns early that curiosity is both the path forward and the source of conflict.
Personal confusion. For me, sitting in Sunnyvale classrooms in the 1960s, the contrast was sharp. While the teachers spoke of order, the nightly news showed assassinations and riots. Including the story that brought the news closest to home, and worried me the most, was becoming another Vietnam War-sacrificial draftee. The seeker's craziness began here: the gulf between the lesson and lived reality.

Development is the seeker's first confrontation with craziness: the realization that authority is fallible, that knowledge is partial, and that teachers themselves may not resolve the world's contradictions.

Performance: Training in Discipline Without Meaning

Beyond the classroom, the seeker enters the realm of coaches. Here, the lessons are not abstract but embodied: drills, practices, repetitions, routines. For the seeker, this can be empowering or disorienting.

Discipline vs. purpose. Coaches teach how to run faster, endure longer, and push harder. The seeker learns resilience, but often without a clear understanding of why. Performance is demanded, but usually, beyond winning, meaning is missing.
The paradox of practice. On the field, the seeker experiences flow as the joy of coordination, strength, and balance. But at the same time, practice can reduce life to performance metrics: speed, strength, toughness. A seeker begins to wonder whether human value is measured only in outcomes.
Broader coaching. Beyond athletics, seekers are coached into industrial rhythms, corporate procedures, or social expectations. Athletic and corporate coaches train performance, but each also risks turning the coachee into a mere part, playing a small role in a larger process or organization.

Performance is the seeker's second confrontation with craziness: the experience of being trained to act, but not always to understand; to achieve growth, but not always how to grow holistically.

Research: Searching for Patterns Behind the Madness

At some point, the seeker steps back and asks, "Why?" Why do teachers contradict themselves? Why do coaches drill without explaining the purpose? Why do leaders say one thing and do another?

What follows the why? The how, so that the seeker reasonably enters the research for development phase, not in a formal laboratory, per se, but through restless reflection, late-night questioning, internet searches, and piecing together fragments.

Ancient seekers. Students of Socrates, the disciples of the Buddha, the apprentices of Confucius; all were seekers confronting a world that did not make sense, drawn to teachers who offered coherence.
Modern seekers. In the 1960s, seekers like me turned to philosophy, psychology, and history, searching for frameworks that could explain a world marked by assassinations, wars, and upheaval. The nightly broadcast was a textbook in craziness; research became the attempt to decode it.
The risk of despair. For many seekers, research reveals an even deeper craziness: the realization that systems themselves may be flawed, that society has embedded irrationality into its institutions.

Research is the seeker's third confrontation with craziness: the discovery that madness is not only in individuals but in the structures of culture itself.

Activation: Following Leaders Into Light or Darkness

The final stage in the LPPC hierarchical, systemic, cyclical framework is activation. When seekers must decide from their present level of development: The why, how, what, where, when, and whom to follow, and then which actions to take. Leaders are supposed to embody activation, guiding collective energy. For the seeker, this is the most confusing stage of all.

Leaders as contradictions. The seeker, while reading history, sees leaders who inspire hope: Lincoln, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Seekers would also encounter others who embody a messianic, almost god-like figure to be worshipped without question, with a mania that inspired hatred: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Both groups claim vision, both demand loyalty, but the outcomes diverge radically.
The disillusionment. Students often begin with idealism, only to watch leaders betray principles. The seeker learns that charisma can mask tyranny, and that authority can serve folly as efficiently as truth.
Personal choice. For me, watching leaders fall: assassinated, corrupted, or exposed, intensified the question of 1968. Who can be trusted? How can leadership activate sanity when so much of history shows the opposite?

Activation is the seeker's fourth confrontation with craziness: the realization that leadership amplifies both wisdom and madness, and the student is caught between them.

The Cycle of the Seeker

The seeker's craziness is not really as random as portrayed above. Craziness exists for anyone who does not yet comprehend and understand why our world is crazy. I had to build the LPPC Model to help me gain at least a comprehension of reality. With daily practice, I will sometime in the future reach the level of understanding. The process follows two phases: one is ascending, which involves Research for Livelihood Development. The other is descending: Lifespan Performance to Activation.

In development, the seeker meets contradiction in teachers.
In performance, the seeker feels dissonance in coaching.
In research, the seeker discovers systemic madness.
In activation, the seeker confronts leaders, some of whom amplify sanity, while others amplify insanity.

The cycle repeats, each turn deepening awareness. Or, for some, intensifying despair. The seeker lives inside the gap between what is taught and what is real, between what is drilled and what is meaningful, between what is promised and what is delivered.

The Student's Eye on History

Seen through the eyes of the seeker, the significant events of history appear in a different light.

The fall of Athens: Not just a clash of city-states, but the betrayal of Socrates: a teacher condemned by his own society.
Rome's legions: Not just disciplined armies, but students drilled to obey, their individuality erased.
The Middle Ages: Not just empires and crusades, but generations of students memorizing catechisms, unable to question authority.
The Enlightenment: Not just philosophers writing treatises, but seekers demanding reason in a world of dogma.
The 20th century: Not just wars and revolutions, but young seekers conscripted, indoctrinated, or inspired by leaders who shaped their fate.

History is not only the story of rulers and systems; it is also the story of ordinary people. It is also the story of students caught in contradictions, struggling to find sanity amid craziness.

The Seeker's Dilemma

The seeker's craziness is the recognition that the world is not coherent, that teachers, coaches, and leaders often contradict themselves, and that the systems they serve may be flawed. However, the dilemma is this: without teachers, there is no knowledge; without coaches, there is no discipline; without leaders, there is no direction. The seeker cannot escape their influence and attempts to inspire through illusions created by an unreasonable emotional imagination. The seeker's only move is: Learn to navigate their contradictions through self-development.

Toward Integration

The seeker's task is not to reject teachers, coaches, and leaders, but to stop ignoring reality and begin to work on integration in synthesis. We have reached a pivotal point in our story, where the seeker must look back to a time in history when a few awakened beings followed single-pointed purposiveness. That which is written in the Hylozoic mental system, the offering of a forgotten solution.

Teachers must transmit knowledge of matter as structure.
Coaches must train the motion of will.
Leaders must activate collective consciousness.
And the seeker must recognize that all three aspects are inseparable.

When any one of these aspects dominates —when teachers indoctrinate, coaches mechanize, or leaders tyrannize —and the seeker is listening to these expectations, they experience a sense of craziness. When balance is restored, sanity becomes possible. Now, with a new set of expectations, the teacher, coach, leader, and seeker, all together, with a single-pointed purposiveness, functioning from integrity, will learn through service to mankind, evolution, and unity; that is our forever job #1.

Closing Note

This page is not the end of the seeker's journey, but a recognition of a past-stream mental system. The seeker's craziness is universal; every student, at every age (biological and historical), has felt it. The question is what comes next. Do we collapse into despair, or do we begin to research for our self-development and apply the frameworks that bring coherence?

For me, that search followed my lifespan, becoming the study of human development, performance, and perceptual control, culminating in a return to Hylozoics —the forgotten solution. For others, it may take different forms. But the truth, written within human history, remains. Until we acknowledge the seeker's craziness, we cannot heal humanity's madness.

Back To: Craziness: The History of Mankind (Part One) Teachers, Coaches, and Leaders