We want to disentangle the mind using the mind – this is the mistake! The mind is an entanglement, hence the mind cannot unknot itself. And trying to undo the knot of the mind through the mind is like trying to grab one’s own hand with the same hand, trying to hold a pair of tongs with those same tongs, searching for one’s spectacles with those very spectacles on one’s nose. Some people do that – it is not unusual – and we are all doing the same as far as the mind is concerned.
Have you ever seen a dog chasing his own tail? A dog is sitting in the street; the morning sun is rising, he is sitting idly with his tail lying close to him – his own tail – and the dog pounces on it to try to catch this tail. The tail moves away. Naturally, the dog gets angry – it becomes a challenge – there is a limit! It is only a little tail and yet it escapes him. The dog jumps with more strength and the tail moves more quickly. A deep enmity emerges. The tail is his own, and the dog himself is the catcher; it will never be caught and the dog will get tired. He does not know that his jump is also a jump for the tail – that they are not two different things.
The mind which you are using to undo the knot is itself the mechanism that creates it – so whatever you do with the mind, it goes on becoming more and more knotted.
Hence you should be aware that as the human mind develops the number of insane people will also increase; the more undeveloped the mind is, the less insanity there is. Primitive societies produce very few insane people. Sociologists say that in prehistoric times the society rarely produced a single insane person, and that this person was not called insane, he was revered because he was rare, he was special. So in a primitive society someone who was insane could become a messiah, he was revered because he had a quality which no one else had.
Today mad people are in trouble: now no one is ready to accept them as messiahs and instead many are ready to consider a messiah to be mad. The situation has totally changed. Slowly slowly insanity is becoming such a usual thing that just as very rich people in India say with pride that such and such a renowned physician is their private physician, a rich American says, “Such and such a great psychiatrist is my private psychiatrist.” Only poor people remain wretched; they can’t say that they have their own private psychiatrist. They have to visit hospitals where they need to wait in line with other ordinary people to see the psychiatrist.
Once it was inconceivable that the time would come when people would tell each other such a thing with pride. Now the situation in the West is such that people ask each other whether they have or have not gone through psychoanalysis. Whosoever hasn’t feels miserable because it means he cannot afford it. Psychoanalysis is an expensive business – it can take two, three or even five years, and involves spending thousands of dollars. So the super-rich announce that they have gone through psychoanalysis not only once but twice, three times. The extremely rich people go regularly. They have regular appointments twice a week to visit the psychiatrist for psychoanalysis.