Madness

Within our "civalized" society we have lost our sense of madness. Madness is today just that, madness... anyone who has any experience radically outside the normal is taken for mad, and either ignored, medicated or locked up (or all three).
I think if we look at the past, some of our greatest spiritual thinkers, the greatest experiences of our spiritual history, have come from men (and women) who are "mad", by the standard of today.
We no longer see any value in the visions or experiences of the "mad", no one seems to be able to percieve the foresight and prescience of so much madness. Our respect for it is gone.