Quietly Going Bonkers
Finding the Right Chaos
for a Healthy Inner Life
The Right Chaos
The right chaos, and the right vagueness, are jointly required for any effective harmony...Thus chaos is not to be identified with evil; for harmony requires the due coordination of chaos, vagueness, narrowness, and width.
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
The Quiet Bonker
A Quiet Bonker is someone who goes bonkers inwardly, in his or her own way—through imagination, curiosity, play, unusual connections, or hidden adventures of thought—even while appearing outwardly steady, predictable, and ordinary.
Quiet Bonker Collective
The Quiet Bonker
People would probably describe me as predictable. I wake up at about the same time each morning. I take walks. I answer emails. I show up where I'm supposed to show up. I probably don't strike anyone as especially wild. But in my mind I go bonkers all the time.
Sometimes while sitting quietly with a cup of coffee, I imagine conversations between Whitehead and Zen monks, dogs discussing metaphysics, galaxies improvising jazz, or God laughing at the seriousness of human beings. Sometimes I wander mentally into worlds that don't exist and perhaps never will. I follow strange connections and ideas for no obvious reason. I can become completely absorbed by a single thought, turning it around and around until it opens into ten other thoughts. Outwardly I may be sitting still. Inwardly there may be fireworks.
And I do not mean this in a destructive sense. I do not feel lost in it. I feel alive in it. I suspect many people live this way. There are quiet ways of going bonkers that never announce themselves. A person may appear ordinary while inwardly participating in an ongoing carnival of imagination, memory, curiosity, and play.
Perhaps healthy bonkerdom does not always overturn tables or dance wildly in the streets. Sometimes it sits quietly in a chair, smiles to itself, and explores worlds no one else can see.
Going Bonkers
A Theology
The holy fool traditions of Christianity, ecstatic dancing, Sufi poetry, Zen paradoxes, the laughing mystics, shamanic practices, visionary experiences—these often deliberately disrupt ordinary patterns of thought. They go bonkers.
For some people, going bonkers has negative connotations. It means losing it, cracking up, flipping out, coming unglued, going off the rails —a movement toward disorder and instability. But the phrase can also carry more positive connotations: as in "she's gone bonkers over gardening" or "he's gone bonkers over his new grandchild" or "they've gone bonkers over singing in the local choir."
It can also be intellectual, artistic, and ethical, as in "He's gone bonkers over these new ideas" or "She's gone bonkers with creativity" or "They've gone bonkers with helping build the community center." It can mean getting carried away, going all in, getting swept up in something larger than oneself, running with an idea. It is excessive in a good way.
Both forms of going bonkers involve a certain degree of chaos. Both involve a loosening of ordinary boundaries and a departure from settled patterns. But they differ in the kind of chaos at work. The first is a form of destructive chaos—a chaos that fragments, disorients, overwhelms, or dissolves meaning. The second is a form of constructive chaos—a chaos that opens possibilities, releases creativity, disrupts stale habits, and allows new forms of life to emerge. One tends toward breakdown; the other toward breakthrough.
The need in life is not to avoid getting lost in a passion, running with an idea, or getting swept up in finding something larger than oneself. It is to find the right chaos and, along the way, to become a little lightheaded, a little wacky.
I say "light headed" purposefully According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term bonkers originally emerged as British naval slang meaning light in the head or mildly drunk. Today it is used colloquially with two primary meanings, neither typically positive:
While contemporary usage often carries a playful or affectionate tone ("That idea is bonkers!" or "She's gone bonkers over gardening"), the word still retains associations with irrationality, loss of control, and deviation from what is considered normal. The phrase going bonkers is happily riddled with ambiguity, such that its meaning depends on its use.
Going Bonkers over Gardening
Consider someone who has indeed gone bonkers over gardening. There is a sense in which she is being irrational, has lost a measure of control, and might be considered abnormal by her friends. She talks endlessly about seeds and soil, rearranges her schedule around planting seasons, notices tiny changes in leaves that others would never see, and becomes strangely excited over compost. Something has taken hold of her. She has become delightfully unbalanced. She's a little out of whack.
And yet there is something beautiful in it. Her bonkerness (to coin a phrase) is not destructive but life-giving. It enlarges her world rather than shrinking it. She becomes more responsive to weather, seasons, insects, textures, and colors. She begins to participate more fully in the life around her. There is a kind of excess here, a going beyond ordinary practicality, but not all excess is a defect. Some forms of going bonkers are forms of enchantment. They represent not a loss of life but a heightened appetite for it.
- "Of a person: mad, crazy, insane."
- "Of a thing, situation, etc.: mad, crazy; ludicrous, ridiculous; wacky."
While contemporary usage often carries a playful or affectionate tone ("That idea is bonkers!" or "She's gone bonkers over gardening"), the word still retains associations with irrationality, loss of control, and deviation from what is considered normal. The phrase going bonkers is happily riddled with ambiguity, such that its meaning depends on its use.
Going Bonkers over Gardening
Consider someone who has indeed gone bonkers over gardening. There is a sense in which she is being irrational, has lost a measure of control, and might be considered abnormal by her friends. She talks endlessly about seeds and soil, rearranges her schedule around planting seasons, notices tiny changes in leaves that others would never see, and becomes strangely excited over compost. Something has taken hold of her. She has become delightfully unbalanced. She's a little out of whack.
And yet there is something beautiful in it. Her bonkerness (to coin a phrase) is not destructive but life-giving. It enlarges her world rather than shrinking it. She becomes more responsive to weather, seasons, insects, textures, and colors. She begins to participate more fully in the life around her. There is a kind of excess here, a going beyond ordinary practicality, but not all excess is a defect. Some forms of going bonkers are forms of enchantment. They represent not a loss of life but a heightened appetite for it.
When Going Bonkers Goes Astray
And yet, there are also forms of going bonkers that are destructive, forms that make us narrower rather than wider. In the current cultural climate in the United States, for example, some people have gone bonkers—in the sense of becoming consumed by loyalty to a political leader whom many see as authoritarian, hateful, morally corrupt, narcissistic, and destructive. Others, witnessing what they experience as cruelty, corruption, or profound moral decline, find themselves quietly going bonkers in a different way: through despair, exhaustion, anxiety, or a sense of helplessness before forces that seem larger than themselves. Going Bonkers has many expressions.
Going Bonkers as a Pure Potentiality in the Mind of God
From a Whiteheadian perspective, going bonkers can be understood as a pure potentiality or, better, as a pattern of pure potentialities involving excess, surprise, incongruity, unpredictability, absurdity, playfulness, disjunction, and intensity. These are what Whitehead calls 'eternal objects of the subjective species,' They pertain to the emotional side of life.
There is, for process philosophers, a theological side to this. The potentialities for chaos exist as potentials in the primordial nature of God, neutral in themselves and available for realization in countless forms, both positive and negative. The potentiality itself is neither good nor bad. Much depends on how it is actualized.
Always the actualization of this potentiality involves a bit of chaos, positive or negative. It can be the positive chaos of a child disappearing into imaginative play, a jazz musician improvising beyond expectation, a comedian delighting in absurdity, a prophet disrupting stale conventions, an artist refusing ordinary boundaries, a mystic stepping beyond habitual patterns of perception. an activist refusing an oppressive social order, It can be the negative chaos of delusion severed from reality, violence and frenzy, cruelty untethered from empathy, compulsions that overrun judgment, fanaticism hardened into certainty, despair collapsing into paralysis, and ideological possession that silences self-critique.
Jesus Going Bonkers
Process philosophers believe that the divine lure in the human heart is to find the right chaos relative to the situation at hand. One example might be Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. If we assume that, in turning over the tables, he was finding the right chaos, then he was responding to the lure of God within him.
Recall the situation. According to the Gospel accounts, Jesus was not acting out of random fury or mere impulsiveness. He was responding to what he saw as a corruption of the temple's purpose—a place intended for prayer and encounter with the sacred becoming entangled with economic exploitation and exclusion. His action was disruptive, dramatic, and perhaps even shocking. It was a kind of prophetic going bonkers. The tables had to be unsettled because the social and spiritual order they represented had itself become disordered.
Einstein Going Bonkers
One might say that Albert Einstein went bonkers in a constructive sense in his journey toward the General Relativity. From the standpoint of established common sense, he entertained ideas that bordered on absurdity. Imagine riding alongside a beam of light. Imagine that gravity is not a force pulling objects but the curvature of space and time itself. Imagine that clocks run differently depending on motion and gravity. These were not small modifications of accepted ideas. They involved stepping outside the inherited framework by which people had understood reality for centuries. Einstein was willing to loosen ordinary assumptions and remain with strange possibilities long enough for a new vision to emerge. There was a kind of disciplined bonkerdom at work: not random chaos, but imaginative daring guided by mathematical beauty and coherence.
In this respect, Einstein’s bonkerness offers an interesting complement to Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. Jesus disrupted a social and spiritual order he believed had become distorted; Einstein disrupted an intellectual order whose assumptions had become too narrow to explain the world as it actually was. Jesus overturned tables; Einstein overturned conceptual furniture. Both involved a refusal to accept inherited patterns simply because they were inherited. Both risked appearing unreasonable in service of a deeper truth. And both suggest that sometimes the lure toward novelty does not call us merely to preserve an existing order, but to unsettle it so that a larger reality can come into view.
From a process perspective, the issue is never chaos versus order in the abstract. The question is: What kind of chaos? In service of what kind of life?
Practical Guidelines and Practices
Practically speaking, finding the right chaos is a spiritual practice in its own right. The challenge is neither rigid control nor reckless disorder, but discovering forms of disruption, surprise, and improvisation that contribute to the richness of life. Here are some practical guidelines and practices:
1. Cultivate Small Experiments
Allow room for departures from routine. Take a different path on a walk, listen to unfamiliar music, read outside your usual interests, learn a new skill, rearrange a room, or begin a conversation you would not normally have. Novelty need not be dramatic. Sometimes a little opening is enough for new possibilities to enter.
2. Make Space for Play
Play is one of the healthiest forms of constructive bonkerdom. Playfulness loosens rigid habits and creates room for surprise, laughter, and fresh possibilities. The point is not productivity or achievement. The point is participation in the joy of experimentation.
3. Allow Periods of Not-Knowing
Many people rush toward certainty and closure. But life often unfolds in situations where clarity comes slowly. Permit yourself moments of uncertainty. Sit with questions. Resist the impulse to force answers too quickly. Not knowing can itself become a form of wisdom.
4. Practice Holy Foolishness
Permit yourself occasional harmless absurdity. Sing loudly, dance awkwardly, tell ridiculous stories, laugh at yourself, wear something unexpected, or act in ways that gently interrupt your own self-seriousness. Many spiritual traditions have understood that a little foolishness can free the soul.
5. Listen for the Lure
From a process perspective, the aim is not chaos for its own sake. It is attentiveness to possibilities that call toward richer forms of life. Sometimes the lure leads toward stillness and peace; sometimes toward boldness and disruption; and sometimes toward a little healthy bonkerness.
Finding the right chaos is less like constructing a machine and more like learning a dance: improvisational, relational, and always unfinished.
And yet, there are also forms of going bonkers that are destructive, forms that make us narrower rather than wider. In the current cultural climate in the United States, for example, some people have gone bonkers—in the sense of becoming consumed by loyalty to a political leader whom many see as authoritarian, hateful, morally corrupt, narcissistic, and destructive. Others, witnessing what they experience as cruelty, corruption, or profound moral decline, find themselves quietly going bonkers in a different way: through despair, exhaustion, anxiety, or a sense of helplessness before forces that seem larger than themselves. Going Bonkers has many expressions.
Going Bonkers as a Pure Potentiality in the Mind of God
From a Whiteheadian perspective, going bonkers can be understood as a pure potentiality or, better, as a pattern of pure potentialities involving excess, surprise, incongruity, unpredictability, absurdity, playfulness, disjunction, and intensity. These are what Whitehead calls 'eternal objects of the subjective species,' They pertain to the emotional side of life.
There is, for process philosophers, a theological side to this. The potentialities for chaos exist as potentials in the primordial nature of God, neutral in themselves and available for realization in countless forms, both positive and negative. The potentiality itself is neither good nor bad. Much depends on how it is actualized.
Always the actualization of this potentiality involves a bit of chaos, positive or negative. It can be the positive chaos of a child disappearing into imaginative play, a jazz musician improvising beyond expectation, a comedian delighting in absurdity, a prophet disrupting stale conventions, an artist refusing ordinary boundaries, a mystic stepping beyond habitual patterns of perception. an activist refusing an oppressive social order, It can be the negative chaos of delusion severed from reality, violence and frenzy, cruelty untethered from empathy, compulsions that overrun judgment, fanaticism hardened into certainty, despair collapsing into paralysis, and ideological possession that silences self-critique.
Jesus Going Bonkers
Process philosophers believe that the divine lure in the human heart is to find the right chaos relative to the situation at hand. One example might be Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. If we assume that, in turning over the tables, he was finding the right chaos, then he was responding to the lure of God within him.
Recall the situation. According to the Gospel accounts, Jesus was not acting out of random fury or mere impulsiveness. He was responding to what he saw as a corruption of the temple's purpose—a place intended for prayer and encounter with the sacred becoming entangled with economic exploitation and exclusion. His action was disruptive, dramatic, and perhaps even shocking. It was a kind of prophetic going bonkers. The tables had to be unsettled because the social and spiritual order they represented had itself become disordered.
Einstein Going Bonkers
One might say that Albert Einstein went bonkers in a constructive sense in his journey toward the General Relativity. From the standpoint of established common sense, he entertained ideas that bordered on absurdity. Imagine riding alongside a beam of light. Imagine that gravity is not a force pulling objects but the curvature of space and time itself. Imagine that clocks run differently depending on motion and gravity. These were not small modifications of accepted ideas. They involved stepping outside the inherited framework by which people had understood reality for centuries. Einstein was willing to loosen ordinary assumptions and remain with strange possibilities long enough for a new vision to emerge. There was a kind of disciplined bonkerdom at work: not random chaos, but imaginative daring guided by mathematical beauty and coherence.
In this respect, Einstein’s bonkerness offers an interesting complement to Jesus turning over the tables in the temple. Jesus disrupted a social and spiritual order he believed had become distorted; Einstein disrupted an intellectual order whose assumptions had become too narrow to explain the world as it actually was. Jesus overturned tables; Einstein overturned conceptual furniture. Both involved a refusal to accept inherited patterns simply because they were inherited. Both risked appearing unreasonable in service of a deeper truth. And both suggest that sometimes the lure toward novelty does not call us merely to preserve an existing order, but to unsettle it so that a larger reality can come into view.
From a process perspective, the issue is never chaos versus order in the abstract. The question is: What kind of chaos? In service of what kind of life?
Practical Guidelines and Practices
Practically speaking, finding the right chaos is a spiritual practice in its own right. The challenge is neither rigid control nor reckless disorder, but discovering forms of disruption, surprise, and improvisation that contribute to the richness of life. Here are some practical guidelines and practices:
1. Cultivate Small Experiments
Allow room for departures from routine. Take a different path on a walk, listen to unfamiliar music, read outside your usual interests, learn a new skill, rearrange a room, or begin a conversation you would not normally have. Novelty need not be dramatic. Sometimes a little opening is enough for new possibilities to enter.
2. Make Space for Play
Play is one of the healthiest forms of constructive bonkerdom. Playfulness loosens rigid habits and creates room for surprise, laughter, and fresh possibilities. The point is not productivity or achievement. The point is participation in the joy of experimentation.
3. Allow Periods of Not-Knowing
Many people rush toward certainty and closure. But life often unfolds in situations where clarity comes slowly. Permit yourself moments of uncertainty. Sit with questions. Resist the impulse to force answers too quickly. Not knowing can itself become a form of wisdom.
4. Practice Holy Foolishness
Permit yourself occasional harmless absurdity. Sing loudly, dance awkwardly, tell ridiculous stories, laugh at yourself, wear something unexpected, or act in ways that gently interrupt your own self-seriousness. Many spiritual traditions have understood that a little foolishness can free the soul.
5. Listen for the Lure
From a process perspective, the aim is not chaos for its own sake. It is attentiveness to possibilities that call toward richer forms of life. Sometimes the lure leads toward stillness and peace; sometimes toward boldness and disruption; and sometimes toward a little healthy bonkerness.
Finding the right chaos is less like constructing a machine and more like learning a dance: improvisational, relational, and always unfinished.