If he is to be believed, I talked last Sunday to the most important man in the world.

He boarded the free bus at Wal-Mart, lugging two backpacks and bike wheels. As we approached campus, I heard him asking a Chinese person for the Mandarin word for rain. “Here’s the interesting person I’ve been looking for,” I thought, and I asked him if I could interview him for my journalism assignment.

“I’m actually a very interesting person, although entirely by accident,” he said.

In the Coffee House, I asked him about his family and childhood, but he interrupted my line of questioning because these questions had nothing to do with the real reason he was interesting — he was a conduit from God and for all he knew, the only one.

He told me he’d been having “earth-shaking” visions since he was a child that gave him insight into religion and the “modern condition.” After leaving graduate school, he started getting messages that he was “not at liberty to talk about, because they involve life and death issues for a lot of people and some politics.”

“It’s dangerous in a revolutionary sense . . . [because people] can blow up whole cities and we wouldn’t know who did it. You can come in with a backpack and blow up Chicago,” he said.

Other than fearing small bombs, he also worried about the government monitoring his e-mails, which he saved as drafts rather than sending.

“Right now, I’m a visionary. That’s my main job.”

Doctors probably would have diagnosed him with paranoid schizophrenia. But from a viewpoint outside the human race (say, from an extraterrestrial or a god), would he seem any crazier than the rest of us?

Many of our species’ behaviors seem like symptoms of mental disease.

Denial: not thinking about how we are destroying our environment.

Self-destructive behavior: wreaking havoc on our sole life-support system, the biosphere.

Addiction: using technology in an attempt to correct problems other technologies created, like an alcoholic using alcohol to alleviate a hangover.

Dependence: relying on various technologies so heavily that we lose the ability to do things on our own.

Grandiosity: telling ourselves we are the most important species and that all other life exists for our benefit.

Delusions: thinking that we indefinitely can continue our unsustainable use of natural resources.

As the interview ended, I asked the man about his lifestyle, and whether he often had a chance to talk with people. He said that no, he didn’t, and the more he was alone, the more trouble he had making sense to people.

There’s a definite norming effect to being connected to people, but I sometimes have to wonder whether society banishes delusions or creates them.

I like to walk around the Dish or go for walks outside when I can’t sleep. I watch the red-winged blackbirds, the ground squirrels, and at night, the owls. Sometimes I see moles. After a while, I start to lose the hype I’ve picked up from other people. Making myself famous starts to seem a lot less important than living. The double-think I ask people to help me believe disintegrates when I’m away from their influence. Ostensibly, I’m losing touch with reality, but it sure feels like I’m gaining it.

The man said he was grateful I hadn’t been judgmental, since he knew many people think his ideas are crazy. I could empathize: people think my ideas are crazy, too. There are plenty of things I’ve learned not to say, because our culture considers them heresy. I wish more people would trust their personal experience and speak up about what makes sense based on it, even if that means reporting visions from God. Given what people have done to the world in the past few thousand years, trusting the majority might be as illogical as trusting someone with schizophrenia.

And speaking up for what we believe could make any of us, in some sense, the “most important person in the world.”

Andrea Runyan is a junior majoring in mathetical and computational science. E-mail her at arunyan@stanford.edu.