Mokusen Hiki was living in a temple in the province of Tamba. One of his adherents complained of the stinginess of his wife. Mokusen visited the adherent’s wife and held his clenched fist before her face.
“What do you mean by that?” asked the surprised woman.
“Suppose my hand were always like that, what would you call it?”
“Deformed,” replied the woman.
Then he opened his hand flat in her face and asked,
“Suppose it were always like that – what then?”
“Another kind of deformity,” said the wife.
“If you understand that much,” finished Mokusen,
“you are a good wife.” Then he left.
After his visit this wife helped her husband to distribute as well as to save.

The greatest art is to attain a balance, a balance between all opposites, a balance between all polarities. Imbalance is the disease and balance is health. Imbalance is neurosis, and balance is well-being.

I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin went to his psychiatrist. He rambled upon his miseries, troubles, and finally he concluded, “I am afraid. It seems that I am getting neurotic.”

The psychiatrist smiled and said, “Nasruddin, if that is true, then you must be happy and grateful that you are neurotic.”

Nasruddin was shocked. He said, “What? Happy that I am neurotic? Why?”

Said the psychiatrist, “Because that is the only normal thing about you.”

Neurosis is the only normal thing, not only about Nasruddin but about everybody else also. Mind has to be neurotic. Neurosis is not a disease; neurosis is mind itself, so neurosis cannot be cured. With mind remaining there, neurosis is bound to follow it like a shadow. Hence all psychiatry fails. At the most it can make you normal, but to be normal is nothing but to be normally neurotic – neurotic like everybody else, not in your own way; just following the highway, not an individual path. People who are in madhouses have private neuroses, you have a mass neurosis. That’s why you cannot be detected – you are just like everybody else. And people are in the madhouses who have tried to attain their own style of neurosis. They are individualists. That’s the only difference. And this has to be so, because mind itself, the very functioning of the mind, is neurotic. Try to understand this.

Mind is never in the middle – cannot be. When you are in the middle, the mind simply disappears. Mind is always at the extreme – either this or that. That’s why mind divides the world into white and black, into life and death, into hate and love, into friend and foe. The world is neither white nor black; the world is some sort of grey. One pole is white, another pole is black. Just in the middle, where black and white merge and meet and become one, is the reality. But mind sees in polarities. It says: Either this is true or this is untrue.