Evil Mind

There are a million thoughts that go through our minds every minute of the day. How am I going to pay the bills, why is my best friend not calling me, what am I going to do about that paper that is due tomorrow, when am I going to find a real job, etc. The thoughts that constantly occupy our mind have a dramatic effect on our spiritual health and balance. They destroy our inner peace, make us feel miserable and prevent us from being in the present moment. As Buddha once said: “It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.” When we have a lot of things on our mind we lose ourselves and become the slaves of the unreal world that only exists in our head. Only when we liberate our mind from all the problems, from all the never ending thoughts, are we able to achieve internal harmony and become happy. When your mind is clear, the world of serenity and peace will come to your heart and bring you inner balance and harmony. The great Osho is right when he says: “Mind is a mechanism: you feed it with knowledge, it repeats the same knowledge, it goes on chewing the same knowledge again and again. No-mind is clarity, purity, innocence. No-mind is the real way to live, the real way to know, the real way to be.” When you turn off your busy mind you are able to really live and be in the moment.

But how can you turn off your mind when you are a great genius and all you want to do is read books on chemistry, study physics and invent numerous scientific theories. It is quite a difficult task and unfortunately many intelligent people simply over clutter their minds with ideas and formulas, lose control over themselves and failing to find the way out say goodbye to their lives. A bright example of this is the main character of Salman Rushdie’s short story “The Harmony of the Spheres” Eliot Crane, who dedicated his whole life to studying science and unable to clear his mind of all the knowledge and ideas stocked in his mind suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and eventually committed suicide.

Eliot Crane, a Cambridge graduate, the author of a “scholarly two-volume study of overt and covert occultist groups in 19^th and 20^th century Europe” and the husband of a young photo-journalist who has been studying different scientific theories and working on various academic projects of his own suddenly began to experience symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia (130). One night he claimed that he saw a demon that started to follow him everywhere. Right when Eliot was finishing his book “The Harmony of the Spheres” he sensed the “presence of something absolutely evil” in the house and when he descended downstairs all the “lights went crazy, switching themselves on and off” (135). He made the sign of the cross with his Swiss army knives and screamed “Apage me, Satanas” (135). After that he claimed everything went back to normal, but he persuaded his wife to sell the haunted house quickly and move to another place. But nothing went back to normal in Eliot’s mind after that strange encounter with the demon. It was just the beginning of Eliot’s losing the sense of balance in his mind and the sense of harmony in his heart. All the knowledge that he had acquired during so many years became displaced and disordered in his mind disabling Eliot to think clearly and rationally. His numerous ideas and theories simply devoured his mind, forcing Eliot to fall down into the imaginary world of his own full of Martians and demons.

All the things Eliot was doing after that mysterious demon’s visit to his house are beyond common sense understanding and is vivid evidence of his failure to find that subtle balance between his mind and his thoughts. He refused to see his friends because he was convinced that they were the “agents of hostile power,” he didn’t want to visit his good friend – the narrator of the story for more than a year as he thought he was a Martian, who was sent to Britain with a certain evil mission (127). He avoided talking in the house too much as he was confident that his wife was listening in on him with the use of microphones that she was hiding in the butter. He was caught driving blindfolded going ninety miles per hour on the highway the “wrong way” (127). But it was not Eliot that was going the “wrong way,” it was his brilliant yet sick mind that got disorientated, got lost in a thousand of different ideas and couldn’t find its way out.  All the information and knowledge that was stored in Eliot’s head about “the secrets of the Great Pyramid, the mysteries of the Golden Section, the intricacies of the Spiral,” “Mesmer’s theory of Animal Magnetism, Four Trances of Japanese spiritualism” were making his mind bleed and suffer, were creating an imaginary unreal world in Eliot’s head that became so powerful and immense that eventually demolished not only Eliot’s mind, but Eliot himself (137). He couldn’t live in the real world as it didn’t exist in his brain, he couldn’t communicate with people as he simply lost the sense of reality. He lost himself. His mind was left defeated in the struggle with his enormous amount of knowledge. As the narrator puts it: “In the end his demons came for him, his Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and his Crowley and Blavatsky, his Dunsany and his Lovecraft long ago. They crowded out the sheep on his Welsh hillside, and closed in on his mind” (141-142).