I wonder what you
mean when you use the word "I."
I've been very interested in this problem for a long, long time.
And I've come to the conclusion that what most civilized people
mean by that word is a hallucination - that is to say a false
sense of personal identity that is at complete variance with the
facts of nature.
And as a result of having a false sense of identity, we act in a
way that is inappropriate to our natural environment.
And when
that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful
technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound
discord between man and nature.
As is well known, we are now in the process of destroying our
environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master
it. And we have not realized therefore that our environment is
not something other than ourselves.
In assuming that it is, we have made a great mistake and are now
paying the price for it.
But most people would agree with the lines of the poet who said,
"I, a stranger and afraid. In a world I never made",
...because we
have the strong sensation that our own being inside our skin is
extremely different from the world outside our skin, that while
there may be intelligence inside human skins, and while there
may be values and loving feelings, outside the skin is a world
of mechanical process which does not give a damn about any
individual and which is basically unintelligent, being gyrations
of blind force, and so far as the merely biological world is
concerned, gyrations of libido, which is Freud's word for "blind
lust."
It should be obvious that the human being goes with the rest of
the universe even though we say in popular speech "I came into
this world."
Now, it is not true that you came into this world.
You came out
of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a
fruit comes out of a tree. And as an apple tree apples, the
solar system in which we live, and therefore the galaxy in which
we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live,
that system peoples.
And therefore, people are an expression of
its energy and of its nature.
If people are intelligent - and I suppose we have to grant that
'if' - then the energy which people express must also be
intelligent because one does not gather figs from thistles and
grapes from thorns.
But it does not occur, you see, to the
ordinary civilized person to regard himself or herself as an
expression of the whole universe.
It should be obvious that we
cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and
solar temperature, that all these things go with us and are as
important to us, albeit outside our skins, as our internal
organs, heart, stomach, brain, and so forth.
Now, if then we cannot describe the behavior of organisms
without at the same time describing the behavior of their
environments, we should realize that we have a new entity of
description - not the individual organism alone, but what would
now be called a field of behavior, which we must call rather
clumsily the "organism environment."
You go with your
environment in the same way as your head goes with the rest of
your body. You do not find in nature faces arriving in the world
sui generis; they go with a body.
But also, bodies do not arrive in a world which would be, for
example, a plane, ball of scrubbed rock floating without an
atmosphere far away from a star. That will not grow bodies.
There is no soil for bodies. There is no complexity of
environment which is body-producing.
So, bodies go with a very complicated natural environment. And
if the head goes with the body, and the body goes with the
environment, the body is as much an integral part of the
environment as the head is part of the body.
It is deceptive of course because the human being is not rooted
to the ground like a tree. A human being moves about and
therefore can shift from one environment to another. But these
shifts are superficial. The basic environment of the planet
remains a constant.
And if the human being leaves the planet, he
has to take with him a canned version of the planetary
environment.
Now, we are not really aware of this. Upon taking thought and
due consideration, it does occur to us, yes, indeed, we do need
that environment.
But in the ordinary way, we don't feel it,
that is to say we don't have a vivid sensation of belonging to
our environment in the same way that we have a vivid sensation
of being an ego inside a bag of skin located mostly in the skull
about halfway between the ears and a little way behind the eyes.
And it issues in these disastrous results of the ego which,
according to 19th century common sense, feels that it is a fluke
in nature, and that if it does not fight nature, it will not be
able to maintain its status as intelligent fluke.
So, the geneticists are now saying, and many others are now
saying, that man must take the course of his evolution into his
own hands.
He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, and
unintelligible processes of nature to develop him any further,
but he must interfere with his own intelligence, and through
genetic alterations, breed the kind of people who will be viable
for human society and that sort of thing.
Now, this I submit is a ghastly error because human intelligence
has a very serious limitation. That limitation is that it is a
scanning system of conscious attention which is linear - that is
to say it examines the world in lines rather as he would pass
the beam of a flashlight across a room (or a spotlight).
That's why our education takes so long. It takes so long because
we have to scan miles of lines of print. And we regard that, you
see, as basic information.
Now, the universe does not come at us in lines. It comes at us
in a multi-dimensional continuum in which everything is
happening all together everywhere at once.
And it comes at us
much too quickly to be translated into lines of print or of
other information however fast they may be scanned. And that is
our limitation so far as the intellectual life and the
scientific life is concerned.
The computer will greatly speed up linear scanning, but it's
still linear scanning. And so long as we are stuck with that
form of wisdom, we cannot deal with more than a few variables at
once.
Now, what do I mean by that? What is a variable?
A variable is
any one linear process. Let's take music. When you play a Bach
fugue, and there are four parts to it, you have four variables.
You have four moving lines, and you can take care of that with
two hands. An organist using two feet can put in two more
variables and have six going.
And you may realize, if you've
ever tried to play the organ, that it's quite difficult to make
six independent motions go at once.
The average person cannot do
that without training. The average person cannot deal with more
than three variables at once without using a pencil.
Now, when we study physics, we are dealing with processes in
which there are millions of variables. This, however, we handle
by statistics in the same way as insurance companies use
actuarial tables to predict when most people will die.
If the
average age of death is 65, however, this prediction does not
apply to any given individual. Any given individual will live
through plus or minus 65 years.
And the range of difference may
be very wide indeed of course. But this is alright. The 65 guess
is alright when you're doing large-scale gambling. And that's
the way the physicists works in predicting the behavior of
nuclear wavicles.
But the practical problems of human life deal with variables in
the hundreds of thousands. Here, statistical methods are very
poor. And thinking it out by linear consideration is impossible.
With that equipment then we are proposing to interfere with our
genes. And with that equipment also, be it said, we are trying
to solve our political, economic, and social problems. And
naturally, everybody has the sense of total frustration.
And the
individual fears "Well, what on earth can I do?"
We do not seem to know a way of calling upon our brains because
our brains can handle an enormous number of variables that are
not accessible to the process of conscious attention. Your brain
is now handling your total nervous system, to be more accurate,
your blood chemistry, the secretions from your glands, the
behavior of millions of cells.
It is doing all that without
thinking about it - that is to say without translating the
processes it is handling into consciously reviewed words,
symbols, or numbers.
Now, when I use the word "thinking," I mean precisely that
process, translating what is going on in nature into words,
symbols or numbers - of course, both words and numbers are kinds
of symbols.
Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money
bears to wealth. You cannot quench anybody's thirst with the
word "water," just as you cannot eat a dollar bill and derive
nutrition from it.
But using symbols and using conscious intelligence - scanning -
has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as
we have.
But at the same time, it has proved too much of a good thing. At
the same time, we've become so fascinated with it that we
confuse the world as it is with the world as it is thought
about, talked about, and figured about - that is to say with the
world as it is described. And the difference between these two
is vast.
And when we are not aware of ourselves except in a symbolic way,
we are not related to ourselves at all. We are like people
eating menus instead of dinners. And that's why we all feel
psychologically frustrated.
So then we get back to the question of what do we mean by I?
Well, first of all, obviously, we mean our symbol of ourselves.
Now, our ourselves in this case is the whole psychophysical
organism, conscious and unconscious, plus its environment.
That's your real self.
Your real self, in other words, is the universe as centered on
your organism. That's you.
Let me just clarify that a little for one reason. What you do is
also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its behavior
as much as its behavior is your behavior; it's mutual. We could
say it is transactional. You are not a puppet which your
environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet which
you push around.
They go together, they act together.
In the same way, for example, if I have a wheel, one side of it
going down is the same as the other side of it going up. When
you handle the steering wheel of a car, are you pulling it or
are you pushing it? No, you're doing both, aren't you? When you
pull it down this side, you are pushing it up that side. It's
all one.
So, there's a push-pull between organism and environment.
We are
only rarely aware of this as when in curious alterations of
consciousness, which we call "mystical experience," "cosmic
consciousness," an individual gets the feeling that everything
that is happening is his own doing, or the opposite of that
feeling that he isn't doing anything, but that all his doings,
his decisions, and so forth, are happenings of nature.
You can feel it either way. You can describe it in these two
completely opposite ways, but you're talking about the same
experience. You're talking about experiencing your own activity
and the activity of nature as one single process. And you can
describe it as if you were omnipotent like God or as if it were
completely deterministic and you hardly existed at all.
But remember, both points of view are right. And we'll see where
that gets us.
But we don't feel that, do we, ordinarily? What we feel instead
is an identification of ourselves with our idea of ourselves, or
I would rather say, with our "image" of ourselves. And that's
the person or the ego.
You play a role, you identify with that role. I play a role.
It's called Alan Watts. And I know very well that that's a big
act. I can play some other roles besides Alan Watts if
necessary. But I find this one is better for making a living.
But I assure you, it's a mask, and I don't take it seriously.
The idea of my being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the
world just breaks me up because I know me. It's very difficult
to be holy in the ordinary sense.
So, I know I'm not that...
But most of us are taught to think that
we are whom we are called. And when you're a little child, and
you begin to learn a role, and your parents and your peers
approve of your being that, they know who you are. You're
predictable, so you can be controlled.
But when you act out of role, and you imitate some other child's
behavior, everybody points the finger and says,
"You're not
being true to yourself." "Johnny, that's not you. That's Peter."
And so you learn to stay Peter or to stay Johnny.
But of course, you're not either… because this is just the image
of you. It's as much of you as you can get into your conscious
attention which is precious little.
Your image of yourself contains no information about how you
structure your nervous system. It contains no information about
your blood chemistry. It contains almost no information about
the subtle influences of society upon your behavior.
It does not
include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all
taken for granted and unconscious. You can't find them out
unless you study other cultures to see how their basic
assumptions differ.
It includes all kinds of illusions that you're completely
unaware of as, for example, that time is real and that there is
such a thing as a past which is pure hokum.
But nevertheless,
all these things are unconscious in us and they are not included
in our image of ourselves, nor of course included in our image
of ourselves. Is there any information about our inseparable
relationships with the whole natural universe?
So, this is a very impoverished image. When you ask a person,
"What did you do yesterday?" they'll give you a historical
account of a certain number of events in which they participated
and a certain number of things which they saw, used, or were
clobbered by.
But realize at once that this history leaves out
most of what happened.
I, in trying to describe what happens to me this evening, will
never be able to describe it because there are so many people
here that if I were to talk about everyone whom I've seen, what
they were wearing, what color their hair was, what sort of
expressions they had on their faces, I would have to talk
through doomsday.
So, instead of this rich physical experience - which is very
rich indeed - I have to attenuate it in memory in description to
saying,
"Oh, I met a lot of people in Philadelphia. There were
men, and there were women. Lots of them were young, and some of
them were old."
It's a most utterly impoverished account of what
went on.
So, therefore, in thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did
yesterday, what I did the day before, in terms of this stringy,
mangy account, all I have is a caricature of myself.
And you
know the caricaturist doesn't draw you all in; he just put
certain salient features whereby people will recognize you. It's
all a skeleton.
So, we are, as it were, conceiving ourselves as a bunch of
skeletons. And they've got no flesh on them, just a bunch of
bones. And no wonder we all feel inadequate!
We're all looking for something - to the future to bring us the
goodie that we know we ought to have. There's a golden goodie at
the end of the line somewhere. There's a good time coming be it
ever so far away, that one far-off divine event which all
creation moves… we hope.
And therefore, we say of something that's no good, it has no
future. I would say it has no present, but everybody says it has
no future.
Now, here we are, as it were, psychically starved and always
therefore looking - seeking, seeking, seeking. And this confused
seeking is going on everywhere.
We don't know what we want.
Nobody knows what they want. We say, yes, we think of what we
want in vague terms - pleasure, money, wealth, love,
fulfillment, personal development. But we don't know what we
mean by all that.
If a person really sits down to figure out, write a long essay,
20 pages, on your idea of heaven, it'll be a sorry production.
You could see it already in medieval art whether it be
depictions of heaven and hell. Hell is always much better than
heaven - although it's uncomfortable. It's a sadomasochistic
orgy. Wowie...!
Hell is really rip-roaring. Whereas all the saints
in heaven are sitting very, very smug and demure like they were
in church.
And you'll see also the multitudes of the saved. Instead of this
writhing wormy thing, you can see all their heads which the
artist has drawn to abbreviate them, just the tops of their
heads in masses. They look like cobblestone street flattened
out.
So, what has happened then is this, that our eye is an illusion.
It's an image. And it is no more our self than an idol is the
godhead.
But we say,
"It can't be so because I feel I really exist. It
isn't just an idea in my head. It's a feeling. I feel me!"
Well,
what is it that you feel when you feel I?
Well, what is it that you feel when you feel I, I'll tell you.
-
What do you do when somebody says, "Pay attention"?
-
What is the
difference between looking at something and taking a hard look
at it, or between hearing something and listening intently?
-
What's the difference?
-
What's the difference between waiting
while something goes on and enduring it?
Why, the difference is this.
When you pay attention instead of just looking, you screw up
your face. You frown and stare. That is a muscular activity
around here. When you will, you grit your teeth or clench your
fists.
When you endure or control yourself, you pull yourself
together physically, and therefore, you get uptight. You hold
your breath.
You do all kinds of muscular things to control the
functioning of your nervous system. And none of them have the
slightest effect on the proper operation of the nervous system.
If you stare at things, you will rather fuzz the image than see
them clearly. If you listen intently by concentrating on muscles
around the ears, you will be so much attending to muscles here
that you won't hear things properly.
And you may get singing in
the ears. If you tighten up with your body to pull yourself
together, all you do is constrict yourself.
I remember in school, I sat next to a boy who had great
difficulty in learning to read.
And what they always say to
children is,
"Try! If you can't do something, you must try!"
So
the boy tries...
And what has he done? When he's trying to get out
words, he grunts and groans as if he were lifting weights. And
the teacher is impressed. The boy is really trying and gives him
a B for effort.
It has nothing to do with it.
Now, we all make this muscular straining with the thought that
it's achieving psychological results, the sort of psychological
results it's intended to achieve. Now all this amounts to is
this. You're taking off in a jet plane, you're a mile down the
runway. The thing isn't up in the air yet, you get nervous, so
you start pulling at your seatbelt.
That's what it is now...
Now, that is a chronic feeling. We have it in us all the time.
And it corresponds to the word I. That's what you feel when you
say I. You feel that chronic tension. When an organ is working
properly, you don't feel it.
If you see your eye, you've got cataract. If you hear your ears,
you've got singing in your ears. You're getting in the way of
hearing. When you are fully functioning, you are unaware of the
organ.
When you're thinking clearly, your brain isn't getting in your
way. Actually, of course, you are seeing your eyes in the sense
that everything you see out in front of you is a condition in
the optic nerves at the back of the skull. That's where you're
aware of all this. But you're not aware of the eye as the eye.
I'm talking about the optical eye.
So, when we are aware of the ego I, we are aware of this chronic
tension inside ourselves. And that's not us. It's a futile
tension. So when we get the illusion, the image of ourselves,
married to a futile tension, you've got an illusion married to a
futility.
And then, you wonder,
"why I can't do anything, why I
feel, in the face of all the problems of the world, impotent,
and why I somehow cannot manage to transform I."
Now, here we get to the real problem.
We're always telling each
other that we should be different. I'm not going to tell you
that tonight. Why not? Because I know you can't be. I'm not
going to. That may sound depressing, but I'll show you it isn't.
It's very heartening.
Everybody you see who is at all sensitive and awake to their own
problems and human problems is trying to change themselves. We
know we can't change the world unless we change ourselves. If
we're all individually selfish, we're going to be collectively
selfish.
If we don't really love people, and only pretend to,
somehow we've got to find a way to love.
After all, it's said in
the Bible,
"Thou shalt love the
Lord, thy God, and your neighbor
as yourself."
You must love. Yeah, we all agree. Sure! But we
don't.
In fact, one psychologist very smartly asked a patient,
"With
whom are you in love against?"
And this particularly becomes
appalling when we enter into the realm of higher things, by
which I mean spiritual development.
Everybody these days is interested in spiritual development -
and wisely because we want to change our consciousness. Many
people are well aware that this egocentric consciousness is a
hallucination.
And that they presume it's the function of
religion to change it because that's what the Zen Buddhists and
yogis and all these people in the Orient are doing, they are
changing their state of consciousness to get something called satori or mystical experience or nirvana or
moksha or
what-have-you.
And everybody around here is really enthused about that because
you don't get that in church. I mean, there has been Christian
mystics, but the church has been very quiet about them.
In the average church, all you get is talk. There's no
meditation, no spiritual discipline. They tell God what to do
interminably as if He didn't know. And then, they tell the
people what to do as if they could or even wanted to. And then,
they sing religious nursery rhymes.
And then, to cap it all,
the Roman Catholic Church, which did at
least have an unintelligible service, which was real mysterious
and suggested vast magic going on, they wouldn't put the thing
into bad English. They took away incense, and they took away…
they became a bunch of Protestants.
The thing was just terrible...!
So now, all these Catholics are at loose ends.
As Claire Boothe
Luce put it - not to be a pun, but she said,
"It's no longer
possible to practice contemplative prayer at mass" because
you're being advised, exhorted, edified all the time.
That
becomes a bore.
Think of God listening to all those prayers. I
mean, talking about grieving the Holy Spirit. It's just awful!
People have no consideration for God at all.
But in pursuing these spiritual disciplines - yoga and Zen and
so forth, and also psychotherapy - there comes up a big
difficulty.
And the big difficulty is this:
I want to find a
method whereby I can change my consciousness, therefore to
improve myself.
But the self that needs to be improved is the
one that is doing the improving. And so I'm rather stuck.
I find out the reason that I think I believe say in God is that
I sure hope that, somehow, God will rescue me. In other words, I
want to hang on to my own existence.
I feel rather shaky about
doing that for myself, but I just hope there's a god who'll take
care of it. Or if I could be loving, I would have a better
opinion of myself.
I'd feel better about it.
"I could face
myself," as people say, "if I were more loving."
So, the unloving me, somehow, by some gimmickry, has to turn
itself into a loving me.
And this is just like trying to lift
yourself off the ground with your own bootstraps. It can't be
done!
And that's why
religion, in practice, mainly produces hypocrisy
and guilt because of the constant failure of these enterprises.
People go and study Zen.
They come back and say,
"Wow! Getting
rid of your ego is a superhuman task."
I assure you, it's going
to be very, very difficult to get rid of your ego.
You're going
to have to sit for a long time and you're going to get the
sorest legs. It's hard work! All you wretched kids who think
you're getting rid of your ego or something or another, easy
yoga, you don't know what you're in for.
When it really comes down to the nitty-gritty, you know, the
biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego.
And the joke of it all is our ego doesn't exist! There's nothing
to get rid of. It's an illusion as I tried to explain. But you
still want to ask how to stop the illusion.
Well, who's asking...?
In the ordinary sense in which you use the word I, how can I
stop identifying myself with the wrong me? But the answer is
simply you can't.
Now,
the Christians put this in their way when they say that
mystical experience is a gift of divine grace. Man, as such,
cannot achieve this experience. It is a gift of God. And if God
doesn't give it to you, there's no way of getting it.
Now, that
is solidly true. You can't do anything about it because you
don't exist.
Well, you say,
"That's pretty depressing news."
But the whole
point is it isn't depressing news. It is the joyous news.
There's a Zen poem which puts it like this. Talking about it, it
means the mystical experience, Satori, the realization that you
are the eternal energy of the universe like Jesus did.
It like
this:
"You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not
being able to get it, you get it! When you speak, it's silent.
When you're silent, it speaks."
Now, in not being able to get it, you get it, because this whole
feeling, what Krishnamurti is trying to explain to people, for
example, when he says,
"Why do you ask for a method? There is no
method. All methods are simply gimmicks for strengthening your
ego."
So, how do we not do that?
He says,
"You're still asking for a
method."
There is no method. If you really understand what your
I is, you will see there is no method.
Is it just so sad? But it's not. This is the gospel, the good
news, because if you cannot achieve it, if you cannot transform
yourself, that means that the main obstacle to mystical vision
has collapsed. That was you.
What happens? You can't do anything about it. You're at your
wit's end. What would you do? Commit suicide. But supposing you
just put that off for a little while, wait and see what happens.
You can't control your thoughts, you can't control your feelings
because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your
feelings. They're running along, running along, running along.
Just sit and watch them.
There they go...!
You're still breathing, aren't you?
-
Still growing your hair?
-
Still seeing and hearing?
-
Are you doing that?
-
I mean is
breathing something that you do?
-
Do you see, I mean do you
organize the operations of your eyes?
-
You know exactly how to
work those rods and cones in the retina?
-
Do you do that?
It's a
happening. It happens.
So, you couldn't feel all this happening. Your breathing is
happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening
- your hearing, your seeing. The clouds are happening across the
sky. The sky is happening blue. The Sun is happening shining.
There it is, all that's happening. And may I introduce to you…
this is yourself.
This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that's the
way you function. You function by happening, that is to say, by
spontaneous occurrence.
And this is not a state of affairs that you should realize. I
cannot possibly preach it to you because the minute you start
thinking, "I should understand that," this is the stupid notion
again of "I should bring it about" when there is no you to bring
it about.
So that's why I'm not preaching. You can only preach
to egos. All I can do is to talk about what is. It amuses me to
talk about what is because it's wonderful. I love it. And
therefore, I like to talk. If I get paid for it, then I make my
living.
And sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy
doing.
So, you see, the whole approach here is not to convert you, not
to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew
the way you are, things would be sane. But you see, you can't do
that.
You can't make that discovery because you're in your own
way, so long as you think "I'm I," so long as that hallucination
blocks it.
And the hallucination disappears only in the realization of its
own futility, when at last you see you can't do it. You cannot
make yourself over. You cannot really control your own mind.
See, when we try to control the mind, a lot of yoga teachers try
to get you to control your own mind mainly to prove to you that
you can't do it. There's nothing, you know, a fool who persists
in his folly will become wise. So what they do is they speed up
the folly.
And so, you get concentrating. And you can have a certain amount
of superficial and initial success by a process commonly called
self-hypnosis. You can think you're making progress, and a good
teacher will let you go along that way for a while until he
really throws you with one.
Why are you concentrating?
See, Buddhism works this way.
The Buddha said,
"If you suffer,
you suffer because you desire, and your desires are either
unattainable. You're always being disappointed or something. So
cut out desire."
So, those disciples went away, and they stamped
on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw
out desire.
But then they came back and Buddha said,
"But you
are still desiring not to desire."
Now they want to know how to
get rid of that.
So when you see that that's nonsense, there naturally comes over
you a quietness. And seeing that you cannot control your mind,
you realize there is no controller.
-
What you took to be the
thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts.
-
What you took
to be the feeler of the feelings, which was that chronic
muscular strain, was just one of the feelings.
-
What you took to
be the experience of experience is just by the experience.
So, there isn't any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings.
We
get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs
have to have subjects. And the funny thing about that is that
verbs are processes and subjects are nouns which is supposed to
be things. How does a noun start a verb? How does a thing put a
process into action?
Obviously, it can't...
But we always insist that there is this subject called the
"knower." And without a knower, there can't be knowing. Well,
that's just a grammatical rule. It isn't a rule of nature. In
nature, there's just knowing like you're feeling it.
I have to say you are feeling it as if you were somehow
different from the feeling. When I say, "I am feeling," what I
mean is there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling, I
mean there is feeling there. I have to say even "there is
feeling."
What a cumbersome language we have. Chinese is easier.
You don't have to put all that in. And you say things twice as
fast in Chinese as you can in any other language.
Well, anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing, that
the play of thought, of feeling, et cetera, just goes on by
itself as a happening, then you are in a state which we will
call meditation.
And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts
will come to silence - that is to say all the verbal symbolic
chatter going on in the skull.
Don't try and get rid of it because that will again produce the
illusion that there's a controller. It goes on, it goes on, it
goes on. Finally, it gets tired of itself and bored and stops.
And so then there's a silence.
And this is a deeper level of
meditation.
And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it
is. You don't see any past. You don't see any future. You don't
see any difference between yourself and the rest of it.
That's
just an idea.
-
You can't put your hand on the difference between
myself and you.
-
You can't blow it.
-
You can't bounce it.
-
You
can't pull it. It's just an idea.
-
You can't find any material
body because material body is an idea; so is spiritual body.
This is somebody's philosophical notions.
So, reality isn't material. That's an idea. Reality isn't
spiritual. That's an idea. Reality is {claps}...
So, we find, if I've got to put it back into words, that we live
in an eternal now. You've got all the time in the world because
you've got all the time there is which is now.
And you are this universe. You feel the strange feeling when -
ideas don't define the differences.
You feel that other people's
doings are your doings. And that makes it very difficult to
blame other people. If you're not sophisticated theologically,
you may of course run screaming in the streets and say that
you're God.
In a way, that's what happened to Jesus because he wasn't
sophisticated theologically. He only had Old Testament biblical
theology behind him. If he'd had Hindu theology, he could have
put it more subtly.
But it was only that rather primitive
theology of the Old Testament. And that was a conception of God
as a monarchical boss. And you can't go around and say, "I'm the
boss' son." If you're going to say, "I'm God," you must allow it
for everyone else too.
But this was a heretical idea from the point of view of Hebrew
theology. So what they did with Jesus was they pedestalized him.
That means "kicked him upstairs," so that he wouldn't be able to
influence anyone else. And only you may be God. That stopped the
gospel cold right at the beginning. It couldn't spread.
Well, anyway, this is therefore to say that the transformation
of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated. So long
as we think of it in terms of something that I, myself, can
bring about by some kind of wangle, by some sort of gimmick.
Because you see, that leads to endless games of spiritual
one-upmanship and of guru competitions.
"My guru is more
effective than your guru. My yoga is faster than your yoga. I'm
more aware of myself than you are. I'm humbler than you are. I'm
sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more than you love
me."
There is interminable goings-on about which people fight
and wonder whether they are a little bit more evolved than
somebody else and so on. All that can just fall away.
And then, we get this strange feeling that we have never had in
our lives except occasionally by accident.
Some people get a
glimpse that we are no longer this poor little stranger and
afraid in the world it never made, but that you are this
universe and you are creating it at every month.
Because, you see, it starts now. It didn't begin in the past.
There was no past. So if the universe began in the past, when
that happened, it was now, see? But it's still now.
And the universe is still beginning now and it's trailing off
like the wake of a ship from now.
When the wake of the ship
fades out, so does the past. You can look back there to explain
things, but the explanation disappears. You'll never find it
there. Things are not explained by the past.
They're explained
by what happens now that creates the past. It begins here.
That's the birth of responsibility because, otherwise, you can
always look over your shoulder and say,
"Well, I'm the way I am
because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was
neurotic because her mother dropped her",
...and away we go back to
Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something. We'll
never get at it.
But in this way, you're faced with… you're doing all this. And
that's an extraordinary thought.
So, cheer up! You can't blame anyone else for the kind of world
you're in.
And if you know, you'll see that I, in the sense of
the person, the front, the ego, it really doesn't exist, then it
won't go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that
you're God.
