Spirituality & Mental Illness

By Leo Gura - September 17, 2026

Why are there more mentally ill people in the spiritual field than the general population? Atheists and rationalists like to believe that it’s because religion is a mental illness. No! That’s wrong. It’s because people with mental illness have looser minds, which makes it easier for them to be conscious of the mystical aspects of Consciousness/Reality. Mental illness really means that there is no material Reality at all, but the rationalist mind is so rigid and dogmatic that it needs to deny this to maintain its solidity and sanity. The scientific, rationalist mind is terrified of discovering that its own sanity is just a hallucination. That’s why it dismisses mystical insight as mental illness. Mentally ill people have less scientific and rationalist minds, the scientists and rationalists take this a bug, but it’s actually a feature of Consciousness. This is not to say that mental illness is a good thing, it isn’t, but mental illness exists because Consciousness is much broader than scientific rationality. Mental illness has access to more of Reality can science does because science artificially limits itself out of fear of delusion. This is ironic, since science’s fear of delusion causes science to end up deluded. But then again, that’s exactly how fear works. Excessive fear causes the realization of the thing feared.

There is also more mental illness in artists than the general population — why? Because art requires connection to creativity and spirit, which requires more loose states of mind than science or academia. The kind of looseness of mind that’s required to create the best art would get your career killed in professional academic circles. But the problem for academia is, that kind of creativity is also required to do ground-breaking, revolutionary science. Which is why most science is so stale and lame. In theory, scientists and academics love ground-breaking new science, but in practice they are bigoted towards the states of mind required to generate such breakthroughs in understanding. Breakthroughs in science require breakthroughs in Consciousness, in perspective, not just more measurement, more math, more data, and more technological gadgetry.

Mental looseness vs mental rigidity is in a trade-off relationship. The looser the mind the easier it is to have crazy new ideas, but the easier it is to just become crazy and deluded. But the rigid mind has locked itself in cage and thrown away the key. It’s really a question of, How adventurous and risky is your mind? The more adventurous your mind is, the more advanced things you can discover about MIND, but the more likely you are to become crazy in the process. Exploring MIND is a dangerous game. You can explore MIND so deeply that you stop even taking death seriously, which is more likely to get you killed. Ultimately, the reason scientists are so closedminded is because they are terrified of death and insanity. Ironically, the attachment to rationalism is fear-based, not logic-based. Logic does not tell you that you should cling to logic, the ego’s fear and insecurity does. Logic itself does not regard itself as king, the scientific ego does. “Everything should be logical”, is not a logical statement, it is an egoic statement.

Note: No, I am not mentally ill, in case you thought I was rationalizing my own mental illness. I wish my mind was more loose than it is. I suffer from mental rigidity, not looseness. I am too rational. I have to work hard to make myself less scientific. I spent decades undoing science in myself, which is why I can outsmart scientists.

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