The Book of Walls: Madness
Madness is actually a misnomer. Madness is not what keeps us imprisoned; sanity is.
Sanity is a term for the mindset that humans of a given period within the Illusion find acceptable. Today and in the Western civilization sanity expresses itself through logic and reason, but that was not always so. Before the Cataclysm of Science (see the chapter on Dimensions for more on that) mythology took the place of logic and reason.
The majority of people are 'sane' - sanity is actually defined by the majority. If almost everyone was a serial killer then this behaviour would be sane. Sanity tells us that causes have effects; that the world follows a strict set of laws and rules which we can decipher; that there are no voices in our heads apart from our own thoughts, and that our thoughts are, in fact, our own; now add everything you know to be true to this list. In the end you will have a very exhaustive list of features of the Illusion; but you will not have anything which even remotely resembles Reality.
In earlier days mythology provided the basis of sanity. Gods and fairies existed, they had created the world and humanity, they had a plan for them, and humans were but minor pieces in a game of celestial chess. Lictors may have had different features back then, but they were our jailers all along.
From mythology came religion. With religion our jailers hoped to influence humanity more directly. Death Angels, Archons, lictors, envoys, incarnations all established cults to follow them; with the rise of monotheism even the Demiurge himself entered this game. But too much was revealed as time passed within the Illusion. Combining teachings from different systems of faith (unearthing the occasional gem in a mound of propagandistic rubbish) men and women began to formulate systems of thought which came close to deciphering parts of the Illusion; the Illusion had to be accommodated.
With the Cataclysm of Science the gods and mythic creatures left the world. It was as if they never had existed. Yesterday's religious truth quickly became today's mild insanity. The world no longer followed a plan, instead it began to follow laws and rules. While the human self-appreciation rose and man crowned himself the epitome of existence the human world was moved to the outskirts of one of millions of galaxies and the sheer extent of the universe utterly dwarved humanity and the individual human at the same time.
But ultimately mythology, religion, science, reason all serve the same purpose: enforcement of the Illusion. It does not matter what you believe to be true about the Illusion - it is sufficient that you believe the Illusion to be true. There is room even for some sort of madness within the Illusion: even if you follow outdated or unique personal mindsets to explain the reality of the Illusion, even if you believe in a vast spiritual conspiracy which governs the world, you are still trying to make sense of the Illusion. And sense is what the Illusion lacks. Real madness, therefore, is Real sanity: seeing that there is no sense within the Illusion and transcending into a Reality where philosophies, religions and science have no more meaning.
The world is what the Awakened being makes of it. All of Reality is defined by the entirety of Awakened or Wakeful beings. In theory every such being, and that includes every human soul free of the bondage of the Illusion, is capable of omnipotence; yet as far as we know no being, not even the Demiurge, fully realizes this potential. The reason for that is that each Wakeful being makes its own rules of existence, often even without consciously thinking of them; or it has such rules made for it. Death makes rules; the Demiurge made rules for the Archons who in turn made rules for the lictors and so on. The entirety of Wakeful beings makes the rules of Reality. Maybe the subjugation of human souls is an attempt to reduce the number of influences on Reality; maybe the Illusion is even geared towards strengthening a reality the Demiurge wishes to accomplish.
Yet in the end every Wakeful being is responsible for its own Reality as far as it creates it. The Demiurge has created the Archons and is responsible for them; each Archon is responsible not for the fact of its existence but for all the decisions it makes, the influences it chooses to extend or withdraw and so on. A human soul which Awakens to Reality begins to perceive it and simultaneously begins to influence it. Madness, as we would term it within the Illusion, has the power to manifest itself and imprint its will on Reality - and even more so on the Illusion. Madness is nothing but the realization of one's own insane Reality.