Book Review:
The Essential Crazy Wisdom, by Wes Nisker
Ten Speed Press, 2001 256 pp

Lisa Commager

How to write a critical analysis of a book that is about crazy wisdom?  Maybe if I start at the end and work backwards I can come up with something.  In the last chapter, “The End is also the Middle,” Nisker says, “If there is a central message in The Essential Crazy Wisdom it is that we need not take ourselves quite so seriously…perhaps the best way to live is not by holding on, but by letting go with all our might.” This hits the mark; letting go is scary.

Chapters one through eight confront the reader on a personal level.  They are filled with quotations from wise fools of all times, all places and all sorts, from clowns and jesters and writers and artists to holy men.  Some hold up a mirror, such as “Only the shallow know themselves” [Oscar Wilde], or “Seriousness is the only refuge of the shallow.” [Oscar Wilde]; “Everything is going to become unimaginably worse, and never get better again.  If I lied to you about that, you would sense that I’d lied to you, and that would be another cause for gloom.” [Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.].  Many more confront us with unnerving truths that aren’t funny.  “If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego.  You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.” [John Cage] “Hope and fear are both phantoms that arise from thinking of the self.  When we don’t see the self as self, what do we have to fear?” [Lao-Tzu] and “My opinion is that you never find happiness until you stop looking for it.”[Chuang-tzu].  Tall orders!  Occasionally I came to one and thought, “I get that!” only to be flattened by the fact that really I could only imagine getting it—"Simply trust —/ Do not petals flutter down,/ Just like that?”

With the ninth chapter, “Crazy Wisdom on the Road,” there is a major shift in tone and content.  It is as though we have been listening to a series of remarkable, sometimes transcendent solos played by all different instruments, some of which we’ve never even heard before.  Here, Nisker strides in and takes the baton, to conduct a symphony, a sound and light show, where the sound is light and the light is full of thunder.  He takes us on a journey from the Big Bang to the present, with a bunch of crazy wise guys as quarreling guides.  He directs our attention to the fact that “We are, ultimately, the product of primeval forces mediated by the X and Y bosons” [Anthony Zee].  He mordantly shows us the many reasons why “self knowledge is usually bad news.” “Travel broadens,” he says cryptically.  We are destroying our planet and all the creatures who inhabit it and all that grows upon it out of willfully blind mass selfishness—we are like lemmings bearing little knives and other instruments of torture.

This chapter is even more sobering because it is desperately funny:  “A few members of our group have begun telling each other what they want to be in their next lives.  The Jester, half serious, asks a Zen master, “Is it possible I could be reincarnated in a place with no government?  The Zen master smiles and replies, “With your karma you will probably be reborn as a vice president.” “Be here now!” the Zen master tries this again, but of course everybody misses it again except for one clown, who claims to have seized the moment and now offers to show it to anyone who wants to see.”

The last three chapters bleakly and bravely encourage us to understand ourselves, to question our beliefs, to accept death, and finally to “learn what Alan Watts called ‘the wisdom of insecurity’ and...be comfortable with unfamiliarity.  We are then free to leap into the ‘boundless’ and make it our home.... We might also show more tolerance for those who appear to be fools and for those who speak truths we don’t wish to hear.” To me, these chapters form kind of a coda after the wildness of the ninth, letting us down softly.

Wes Nisker will be performing CRAZY WISDOM SAVES THE WORLD, AGAIN!, A comic monologue with original songs, the evening of Saturday, May 19 and will present a daylong workshop entitled “Be Here Wow!: Mindfulness Meditation and Modern Science: A Path of Awe and Liberation” at New York Insight on May 20, 2012.