Thought, Being & Madness

The tragic & somewhat sad story of an earnest young man who was deeply affected by his encounter with the holy intellectual avenues of Western philosophy. To cut to the heart of the matter, the downfall of this deeply sensitive fellow was his very sensitivity to the ideas which he, like a lamb to the slaughter, fell prey; his naive honesty of spirit meaning he was not blessed with the defences to his soul such as those that protect a less honest man.
The idea in particular that proved fatal to his soundness of mind was the famous "Cogito ergo sum" of Rene Descartes(a Frenchman)-I think, therefore I am. Our youth was stunned by this idea; prior to this he did not question his own existence- the question simply hadn't arisen. Now, however, it appeared that his existence was bound up in his own thought processes. He became convinced, naturally enough, that were this statement to be true, the continued existence of his own self depended on a continuous process of thought; should this thought cease, then oblivion. He became terrified at the prospect of his instantaneous demise should thinking stop, and this very terror produced the most profound paranoia which unwittingly did produce the incessant stream of inner thought upon which he believed his very existence to depend.

Here I have a confession to make; for the sake of tension I intimated that this was a story of the tragic kind. Therefore it is to be expected that the reader took this in good faith to mean that this tale would have a unhappy, even if cathartic, conclusion. And up to the latest recounted point of the tale this expectation would appear to have been justified. However, I may have, in the interests of provoking a state of tension meritricious to a full artistic experience, been a little disingenuous as to the conclusion to the tale. We left our young man in a state of paranoia. Noone will argue with that. The inference, given the words uttered earlier by our author(me), was that the future of this unfortunate would continue indefinitely in like paranoid manner. There is a twist in the tale, though, which the psychologically acute may indeed have anticipated. This twist is that the very incessant stream of inner thought upon which he believed his very existence to depend, and which indeed did seem to produce the desired result- ie his continuous existence-, produced in time a state of satisfied complacency at his continued existence and the keeping at bay of the dreaded oblivion of non-existence. He congratulated himself on the success of his life or death mental endeavours. And naturally, this relaxation of his mental state caused the dissipating of the paranoia which produced the unending train of thought; and in sinking into this relaxed state of momentary linguistic cessation he was astonished to discover that in the interim between the last & next moments of thinking, rather than the terrible void of absolute nothingness, he had indeed continued to exist, and this very existence was of an intrinsically deeper & more satisfying essence than that which he had inhabited when he had been doing all the much feted thinking. It also seemed that his subsequent thoughts, after dipping into the well of inner silence, were of a much higher order than the incessant chatter which he had mistaken for true thinking in his earlier fight for survival.