VBT – Meditation 28.3
Man Himself Is The Disease
For tantra, man himself is the disease. It is not that your mind is disturbed – rather, your mind is the disturbance. It is not that you are tense within, but rather, you are the tension. Understand the distinction clearly. If the mind is ill then the illness can be treated, but if the mind itself is the illness, then this illness cannot be treated. It can be transcended, but it cannot be treated. That makes the basic difference between Western psychology, and Eastern tantric and yogic psychology; that is the difference between Eastern tantra and yoga, and Western psychology.
Western psychology thinks that the mind can be healthy, the mind as it is can be treated and helped – because for Western thinking there is no transcendence, as there is nothing beyond mind.
Transcendence is possible only if there is something beyond, so that you can live in your present state and move further. But if there is no beyond and the mind is the end, then transcendence is impossible.
If you think you are just a body, then you cannot transcend your body – because who will transcend and to where will you transcend? If you are simply the body, then you cannot go beyond the body.
If you can go beyond the body, that means you are not simply the body, but something plus. That “plus” becomes the dimension to move into.
Similarly, if you are just the mind and nothing else, then no transcendence is possible. Then we can treat individual diseases… Someone is mentally ill – we can treat the illness. We will not touch the mind, but we will treat the illness and make the mind normal. And no one will think about whether the normal mind itself is healthy or not.
The normal mind is just a sceptical mind. Freud says that as everyone is, we can only bring a diseased mind to normality. But whether everyone is healthy or not, that question cannot be raised.
We take it for granted that the collective mind, the average mind, is okay. So whenever someone goes beyond that average mind, moves somewhere else, he has to be brought back and readjusted.
Thus, the whole of Western psychology has been an effort toward readjustment – readjustment to the ordinary mind, the average mind.
In this sense, there are thinkers, particularly one very intelligent thinker, Geoffrey, who says that genius is a disease because genius is abnormal. If normality is health, then genius is disease. A genius is not normal; he is in a certain way mad. His madness may be useful, so we allow him to live.
An Einstein or a Van Gogh or an Ezra Pound – poets, painters, scientists, mystics – they are mad, but their madness is allowed for two reasons: either their madness is harmless or their madness is utilitarian. Through their madness they contribute something which normal minds cannot contribute.
Because they are mad they have moved to one extreme, and they can see certain things that the normal mind cannot see. So we can allow these madmen – and we even make them Nobel laureates.
But they are ill.
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