The man said, “No, I am not mad.” He removed his coat and gave his right hand – which was just an artificial hand. He said, “You can send this hand to the jail ten years or a hundred years or as long as you want.”

It is possible if your parts are artificial to separate them, but your body is not artificial. All your parts are intrinsically necessary for you; nothing is artificial in you. So if one thing remains behind, everything else remains behind. You can go on pretending that you have become a grown-up person, but you are not a grown-up person, and you can watch yourself and others. Just scratch the person a little and you will find the childishness coming up. You may be a father of half a dozen children, and when you are fighting with your wife you start throwing pillows. You may be a mother of a half a dozen children and when you are in a fight you go in a tantrum, very childish.

“Oy, doctor, have I got tsuris with my son,” wept the lady. “All day long he is doing nothing but blowing bubbles. From soapsuds he is making the bubbles and he is blowing them out from a clay pipe.”

“Really, madam, there is no reason for you to be concerned,” said the psychiatrist, smiling indulgently. “Lots of sons blow bubbles.”

“Well, I think it looks funny,” insisted the woman, “and so does his wife.”

It is one thing to do something when you are a child – you can blow soapbubbles – but when you are physiologically grown-up, at least you look a grown-up person, the same thing looks stupid.

Watch people’s lives – their lives are doublebinds. Their lives are not singular; they are living many lives, in fact. They have to live many lives because their many parts have remained hanging at different places and they have to live all those parts; they can’t live as a totality.

Many times people ask me, “Why we can’t be total?” You can’t be total for the simple reason because your one hand may be only seven years old, your other hand may be twenty years old, your head may be just thirteen years old, your heart may be just born or not born yet, maybe in the womb, your head may have become eighty years old. Now how can you live a total life? You are bound to live like a crowd, sometimes at one stage, sometimes at another stage.

During the day, Signor Giovanni was a business tycoon, working hard and seriously married, but at night he would become a playboy, going around to all the nightclubs of Rome.

One day his wife decided that it was time they spent an evening together and asked him to take her out to a nightclub. Unable to dissuade his wife, they went out together.

When they arrived at the nightclub, the doorman greeted him warmly.

“Do you know him?” asked the wife.