(Page Update 1/29/26)
You can't convince me that anyone wakes to thoughts about human potential rolling around their brain. The more likely scenario is that one awakens to thoughts of an immediate and practical nature: I'm already behind. I can't afford another mistake. If one more thing goes wrong, I might lose it. By the time pressure shows up, in traffic, in meetings, at home, or late in league night after missing another tenth-frame spare, the thought becomes blunt and familiar: This is crazy.
The phrase persists because it names something real, even if imprecisely. It points to moments when life feels unworkable. Expectations pile up. Effort increases. Results do not. And a sense grows that something important is not lining up, though it is difficult to say exactly what.
In the Optima Bowling World, this experience is not dismissed or medicated. Feeling crazy is treated neither as a diagnosis nor as an insult, but as a signal. It is one of the clearest signs the human system has reached the limits of its current functioning. Something is being asked of you, by complexity, pressure, or circumstance, that cannot be resolved using the same habits, assumptions, or levels of attention that have worked before.
The signal itself offers no instructions. It only announces a gap: between intention and reality, between demand and capacity. That gap is uncomfortable precisely because it is unresolved. It has not yet found a form it can take. The gap is where human potential enters the picture, not as optimism or aspiration, but as unused capacity. Human potential refers to abilities already present within the human system that have not yet been activated in a workable way. Feeling crazy often marks the edge of those unused capacities. It is what it feels like to be stuck on the potential side of development, aware that something more is required, but unclear how to proceed.
Most people respond to this signal by turning away from it, through distraction, increased effort, blame, or resignation. These reactions are understandable. They also leave the underlying issue untouched. The feeling returns, often louder than before.
In the Optima Bowling World, the move is different. Instead of asking, What is wrong with me? The question becomes: What is this experience trying to show me about how I am currently functioning? Approached this way, feeling crazy becomes an entry point into observation, learning, and a more conscious relationship with performance under pressure.
Craziness is not treated here as a clinical label or a throwaway phrase. It refers to the felt intensity that arises when the human system encounters a situation it cannot resolve using its current operating assumptions.
Human beings continually act to keep important perceptions aligned with their intentions. When perception and intention remain close enough, life feels workable. When the gap grows too wide, the system registers conflict. That conflict is experienced as tension, irritation, confusion, anxiety, or numbness. In everyday language, it is called "crazy."
Conflict does not indicate that the system is failing. It confirms it is functioning as designed. The signal is loud because the discrepancy is significant. What makes this difficult is that the signal does not specify the location of the conflict. Without a way to interpret it, people often turn it inward as self-criticism or outward as blame. Neither resolves the underlying issue.
The Craziness Scale exists to make this signal usable. It does not measure severity, worth, or pathology. It helps locate where unresolved conflict is loudest. Human experience unfolds across several inseparable dimensions. When alignment breaks down, the signal tends to appear most strongly in one or more of the following areas:
At each tier, the felt magnitude of unresolved conflict is the same phenomenon. The difference lies in where attention is being requested. When you name what feels crazy, identify where it is showing up most clearly, and sketch even a small response aligned with integrity, you begin shifting from being driven by perceptual loops to working on them. The signal does not vanish immediately, but it becomes intelligible. Naming what feels crazy is the first move in the transition from unconscious reaction toward conscious performance.
See More: Craziness Scale and Personality Development
Feeling crazy often marks the point at which a situation can no longer be resolved at the level of thinking currently in use; it is not a personal failure (per se), but it is a developmental boundary. Human intelligence expresses itself through distinct levels of thinking, each capable of resolving different kinds of problems:
Beyond these four levels lies causal-intuitive intelligence, where coherence is apprehended directly rather than constructed piece by piece. Note: Higher levels do not replace lower ones; they govern them.
Craziness comes into play here. When one is in a situation that demands a level of integration beyond the thinking level the individual has developed, the person must compensate by increasing effort or by working on something else. It is the reason why people often try harder when the situation actually calls for a different level of understanding.
Seen this way, I can say that feeling crazy is most often the experience of overperforming at an insufficient level of intelligence. The unused levels remain present as human potential, but they have not yet been activated as lived capacity. The question shifts accordingly: What level of understanding is this situation calling for? And is it possible for me to learn how to think at the level required for the tasks I want to perform?
See More: Four Steps of Conscious Performance
The experience of feeling overwhelmed can also be understood through the breakdown of Performance as the Way of PIE (Purpose, Integrity, and Experience). When the circulation between these three falls out of sync, the system reports it quickly:
In each case, performance continues, but it becomes mechanical. Effort increases. Coherence erodes. The signal intensifies. Feeling crazy marks places where this circulation has broken down. It is not a verdict on character. It is information about how performance is currently organized.
Pressure does not cause feeling crazy. It reveals it. Under pressure, the Cycle of Conscious Performance becomes visible:
Feeling crazy is most often registered in Experience, where discrepancies cannot be ignored. When Purpose is vague, Shared Learning is thin, or Ownership is unstable, Experience becomes loud. Pressure shortens feedback loops and exposes what cannot be carried forward mechanically. At this point, the corrective move is not force but a return to a clearer purpose and shared perspective. Understanding stabilizes gradually. The same pressures are encountered differently over time.
Some discrepancies cannot be resolved on your own; this is not a weakness. It is structural. When effort increases without resolution, the signal often intensifies. To mark the threshold at which Shared Learning becomes essential. A genuine community of practice distributes perception. It allows people to say, "This feels crazy," without being dismissed. The question becomes: What level of thinking are we bringing to this? This shift allows conflicting loops to be seen, questioned, and refined rather than acted out unconsciously.
This essay does not ask you to stop using the word crazy. It invites you to hear it differently. When the thought arises, "this is crazy," it is not an accusation. It is a report. It tells you that references and conditions are out of alignment, or that the current level of understanding is insufficient for the task. None of this is a character flaw. It is a developmental signal.
Human potential lies in unused levels of intelligence, unclarified purpose, integrity not yet stabilized across physical, emotional, and mental-causal dimensions, and experience not yet treated as research. Feeling crazy marks the edge of your current way of functioning. It is where unconscious performance begins to give way to conscious performance, if the signal is listened to rather than avoided. In the Optima Bowling World, that edge is not a failure. It is a doorway.
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