The Nobel prize-winning mathematician John Nash who has a long history of schizophrenia, a mental condition in which the afflicted person creates a delusion of alternative reality.
Schizophrenics do this to make so-called normal life bearable for themselves. Very often, those suffering from schizophrenia are creative geniuses. Apart from Nash the long list includes musician Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent Van Gogh, ballet dancer Vaclav Nijinsky and many others.
The life and works of gifted artists and creative geniuses show that their expanded consciousness is completely unconfined, giving rise to extraordinary potential beyond the reach of the average person. There is a tendency in the human psyche to reach for higher forms of consciousness.
Access to this state is evident though temporary in both schizophrenics and individuals who get inspired by sudden insight. Psychiatry has found no cure so far for schizophrenia and perhaps there is no cure.
For, on a deeper level, it could be said of all of us that we are indeed schizophrenics in that the 'normal' lives we lead and believe in, including getting a job, earning a livelihood, raising a family is, when seen from the plane of the spiritually enlightened, nothing but a carefully fabricated illusion very much like what the schizophrenics construct for themselves.
So how do we break out of our delusions? Not necessarily by renouncing the world and all its illusory joys and sorrows, its fictive triumphs and tragedies, but by recognizing the delusional nature of this world.
When we lose ourselves in meditation or in the exaltation that great music or art can create, the delusional world with its myriad anxieties and grief's seems to fall away from us and we feel a sense of untrammeled freedom. Nijinsky wrote in his diaries that he was God. This scandalized the pious Christian establishment of his time that considered such utterances as blasphemous.