Compare a physical globe and a political globe. The physical globe is a pretty thing with all kinds of green and brown wiggly patterns on it. The political globe, on the other hand, has still got the wiggly outlines of the land, but they’re all crossed over with colored patches, many of which have completely straight edges. A lot of the boundary between the United States and Canada, once you get west of the Great Lakes, is simply a straight line. What has that got to do with anything with any difference between Canadians on one side of the line, or Americans on the other side of the line, or what have you? It is absolutely a violation of the surface of the territory. And look at the fair city of San Francisco. It’s a lovely place, but they planted on the hills of San Francisco a city pattern that was appropriate for the plains of Kansas: a gridiron. And so you get streets that go straight up, and that are extremely dangerous, where they should have followed the contours of the hills.

Now, however, I think we should begin by talking a little bit about, when we use the word “physical reality” as distinct from “abstraction,” what are we talking about? Because, you see, there’s going to be a fight about this, philosophically. If I say that the final reality that we are living in is the physical world, a lot of people will say that I’m a materialist, that I’m un-spiritual, and that I think too much of an identification of the man with the body. Any book that you open on yoga or Hindu philosophy will have in it a declaration that you start a meditation practice by saying to yourself, “I am not the body. I am not my feelings. I am not my thoughts. I am the witness who watches all this, and is not really any of it.” And so, if I were to say, then, that the physical world is the basic reality, I would seem to be contradicting what is said in these Hindu texts. But it all depends on what you mean by the “physical world”? What is it?

First of all, it must be pointed out that the idea of the material world is itself philosophical. We confuse physical events, the whole class and category of physical events, with matter. But matter, you see, is an idea. It’s a concept. It’s the concept of stuff: of something solid and permanent that you can catch hold of. Now, you just can’t catch hold of the physical world. The physical world is the most evasive, elusive process that there is. It will not be pinned down, and therefore it fulfills all the requirements of spirit. So what I’m saying, then, is that the non-abstract world—which Korzybski called unspeakable, which was really a rather good word—is the spiritual world. And the spiritual world isn’t something kind of gaseous, abstract, formless, in that sense of shapeless. It’s formless in another sense. The formless world is the wiggly world.

You see, when we say something is shapeless, like a cloud, what shape has this cloud? You say: well, it’s so vague, it’s shapeless. That’s the real formless world. The formal world is the one that human beings try to construct all the time. See, wherever human beings have been around, you see rectangles and straight lines, because we’re always trying to straighten things out. And so that’s the very mark of our presence. I don’t know why we do it. It’s always been a puzzle to me why architects are always using rectangles. But the thing is that they make us feel very uncomfortable if they don’t. I have an architect friend who built somebody a house like a snail shell, and it spiraled in and in and in and in, and the john was right at the center of the spiral. Everybody rebels against this house. They just feel very uncomfortable. You see, the furniture doesn’t fit, because all furniture is made to fit in a rectilinear scene. And we’re always putting things in boxes. See, all thoughts, all words are labels on boxes, therefore we feel we’ve got to get everything boxed. And so we put ourselves in boxes. Everything is put in boxes.

But actually, everything else in nature doesn’t go that way. As, for example, the snail doesn’t put itself in a box. The crab doesn’t put itself in a box. It has these fascinating, gorgeous objects. What is, for example, more beautiful than a conch shell? Or a lovely scallop shell? These are gorgeous things. We could make the most delicious shells out of concrete or plastics. They could be very beautiful. And we could distribute ourselves over the landscape like shellfish along the seashore. But instead, we have to live in boxes. There’s nothing—you can’t fight it, it’s the system. So, you know, then you begin to build your furniture and chairs, everything, accordingly to these shapes, because they’re easy to store away in a place that is a box in the first place.

But you see, then, that is this rectilinear world. This is unspiritual. This is the world of what we all call the artificial as distinct from the natural. And when we live in a world like that, we begin to have ourselves bamboozled by it. You begin to think that reality is this sort of straightened out situation that we all have to live in, and you don’t remember that reality is precisely the wiggly world, you see? We don’t realize that we are all wiggly. The problem is that we wiggle in rather the same way. We have a head, two arms, two legs, et cetera, but notice how we do all sorts of things to ourselves to sort of evade our wiggliness: the way we dress—especially men. But this world, this physical world, is wiggly. And this is the most important thing to realize about it.

As I’ve sometimes said: we’re living in the middle of a Rorschach blot, and there really is no way that the physical world is. In other words, the nature of truth—I said in the beginning, somebody had said that thoughts were made to conceal truth. This is the fact. Because there is no such thing as the truth that can be stated. In other words, ask the question, “What is the true position of the stars in the Big Dipper?” Well, it depends where you’re looking at them from, and there is no absolute position. So, in the same way, accountants, a good accountant, will tell you that any balance sheet is simply a matter of opinion. There’s no such thing as the true state of affairs of a business. But we’re all hooked on the idea that there is, you see, an external objective world, which is a certain way, and that it really is that way.

History, for example, is a matter of opinion. History is an art, not a science. It’s something constructed, which is accepted as a more or less satisfactory explanation of events, which, as a matter of fact, don’t have an explanation at all. Most of what happens in history is completely irrational. But people always have to feel that they’ve got to find a meaning. For example, you get sick, and you’ve lived a very good life, and you’ve been helpful to other people and done all sorts of nice things. And you get cancer. And you say to the clergyman, “Why did this have to happen to me?” And you’re looking for an explanation, and there isn’t one. It just happened that way. But people feel, if they can’t find an explanation, they feel very, very insecure. Why? Because they haven’t been able to straighten things out. The world is not that way.

So the truth—in other words, what is going on—is, of course, a lot of wiggles. But the way it is is always in relation to the way you are. In other words, however hard I hit a skinless drum, it will make no noise. Because noise is a relationship between a fist and a skin. So, in exactly the same way, light is a relationship between electrical energy and eyeballs. It is you, in other words, who evoke the world. And you evoke the world in accordance with what kind of a you you are; what kind of an organism. One organism evokes one world, another organism evokes another world. And so reality is a kind of relationship.

So once one gets rid of the idea of the truth as some way the world is in a fixed sense—say “It is that way, see?—then you get to another idea of the truth altogether: the idea of the truth that cannot be stated, the truth that cannot be pinned down.

I might say that I’m interested in Japanese materialism. Because, contrary to popular belief, Americans are not materialists. We are not people who love material. But our culture is, by and large, devoted to the transformation of material into junk as rapidly as possible. God’s own junkyard.

In science, we really work in two different ends of the spectrum of reality. We can deal with problems in which there are very few variables, or we can deal with problems in which there are almost infinitely many variables. But in between we’re pretty helpless. In other words, the average person cannot think through a problem involving more than three variables without a pencil in his hand. That’s why, for example, it’s difficult to learn complex music. Think of an organist who has two keyboards or three keyboards for work with his hands, and each hand is doing a different rhythm. And then his feet on the pedals: he could be doing a different rhythm with each foot. Now, that’s a difficult thing for people to learn to do, just like to rub your stomach in a circle and pat your head at the same time takes a little skill.

Now, most problems with which we deal in everyday life involve far more than three variables. And we are really incapable of thinking about them. Actually, the way we think about most of our problems is simply going through the motions of thinking. We don’t really think about them. We do most of our decision-making by hunch. You can collect data about a decision that you have to make, but the data that you collect has the same sort of relation to the actual processes involved in this decision as a skeleton to a living body. It’s just the bones. And there are all sorts of entirely unpredictable possibilities involved in every decision, and you don’t really think about it at all.

The truth of the matter is that we are as successful as we are—which is surprising, the degree to which we are successful in conducting our everyday practical lives—because our brains do the thinking for us in an entirely unconscious way. The brain is far more complex than any computer. The brain is, in fact, the most complex known object in the universe, because our neurologists don’t understand it. They have a very primitive conception of the brain and admit it. And therefore, if we do not understand our own brains, that simply shows that our brains are a great deal more intelligent than we are. Meaning, by “we,” the thing that we have identified ourselves with. Instead of being sensible and identifying ourselves with our brains, we identify ourselves with a very small operation of the brain, which is the faculty of conscious attention, which is a sort of radar that we have that scans the environment for unusual features. And we think we are that, and we are nothing of the kind. That’s just a little trick we do. So, actually, our brain is analyzing all sensory input all the time; analyzing all the things you don’t notice, don’t think about, don’t have even names for. And so it is this marvelous complex goings-on which is responsible for our being able to adapt ourselves intelligently to the rest of the physical world. The brain is furthermore an operation of the physical world.

But now you see, though, we get back to this question. “Physical world”—this is a concept. This is simply an idea. And if you want to ask me to differentiate between the physical and the spiritual, I will not put the spiritual in the same class as the abstract. But most people do. They think that “1 + 2 = 3” is a proposition of a more spiritual nature than, say, for example, a tomato. But I think a tomato is a lot more spiritual than “1 + 2 = 3.”

This is where we really get to the point. That’s why, in Zen Buddhism, when people ask, “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” you could very well answer: “A tomato.” Because look how, when you examine the material world, how diaphanous it is. It really isn’t very solid. A tomato doesn’t last very long. Nor, for that matter, do the things that we consider most exemplary of physical reality, such as mountains. The poet says, “The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands.” Because the physical world is diaphanous. It’s like music. When you play music, it simply disappears. There’s nothing left. And for that very reason, it is one of the highest and most spiritual of the arts: because it is the most transient. And so, in a way, you might say that transiency is a mark of spirituality. A lot of people think the opposite: that the spiritual things are the everlasting things. But, you see, the more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.

So then, the physical world, we can’t even find any stuff out of which it’s made. We can only recognize each other. And I say, “Well, I realize that I met you before, and that I see you again.” But the thing that I recognize is not anything, really, except a consistent pattern. Let’s suppose I have a rope, and this rope begins by being manila rope. Then it goes on by being cotton rope. Then it goes on with being nylon. Then it goes on with being silk. So I tie a knot in the rope, and I move the knot down along the rope. Now, is it, as it moves along, the same knot, or a different knot? We would say it was the same, because you recognize the pattern of the knot. But at one point it’s manila, at another point it’s cotton, at another point it’s nylon, and at another it’s silk. And that’s just like us.

We are recognized by the fact that one day you face the same way as you did the day before. And people recognize your facing. So they say, “That’s John Doe” or “Mary Smith.” But actually, the contents of your face—whatever they may be; the water, the carbons, the chemicals—are changing all the time. You are like a whirlpool in a stream. The stream is doing this consistent whirlpooling, and we always recognize—like at the Niagara: the whirlpool is one of the sights—but the water is always moving on.

And this is why it’s so spiritual. To be non-spiritual is not to see that. In other words, it is to impose upon the physical world the idea of thingness, of substantiality—that is, to be involved in matter, to identify with the body. To believe, in other words, that the body is something constant, something tangible. So therefore, if you cling to the body, you will be frustrated. So the whole point is that the material world, the world of nature, is marvelous so long as you don’t try to lean on it.

I was in this morning’s seminar making a rather outrageous suggestion. Instead of the attitude that we are either objects of fate which are puppets manipulated by natural forces, and instead, also, of the attitude, “If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em”—that is to say, as it were, pretend that everything that happens is just the way you really intended it to happen—there is still something else which is intuited in all forms of mystical experience, which is not that you have to pretend anything, but that, in exactly the same way as your own organism keeps functioning without your apparently having anything to do with doing it, that that process is continuous with, is one process with, all the behavior going on around you—of other people, of nature, and of the entire universe.

And as you contemplate this possibility, you—shall I say—begin to get the feel of it. And there is a curious point where a concept—which, after all, this is a kind of concept—slips over into getting a knack of actually feeling that’s the way it goes. It’s exactly the same sort of thing as getting, say, the feel of the wind in sailing, where you need to keep a certain tautness, shall I say, in the sail; keep up a kind of even pressure. It’s the same as in many, many other skills, where there comes a point of getting a knack. And at every moment of getting the knack, you have the curious sensation that this which you are doing is doing itself. You get, when you first remember riding a bicycle, when you first actually swam, don’t you remember the feeling of somehow “it is doing it,” rather than “I am doing it” in the ordinary way? It happened. You know: “Look, Mama! No hands!”

And so, in respect to what I’m talking about, there is a point at which it becomes perfectly clear to you that you are not something struggling against everything else or being victimized by everything else, but that what is going on—insofar as you can experience it—is your own doing. And the flip from one state to the other is just like getting the knack in swimming, riding a bicycle, or any other athletic or artistic activity.

But then, at that point, you see, you become (from the world’s point of view) crazy. You become a divine madman, and at that point you are able to practice what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount: “Be not anxious for the morrow. What you shall eat, what you shall drink, and wherewithal you shall be clothed.” You know, that passage is the most subversive passage in the New Testament, and I have never yet heard a sermon in which any preacher seriously advocated it. They say, “Well, that’s a very high ideal. It might have been all very well for Jesus, who was God.” And, yeah… but people like that, you see, are regarded as completely irresponsible by the clergy in general, see? And somebody actually goes out because they say those hippies aren’t really doing it, because they are relying on money from home, which is earned by their square father, or from scrounging. And there’s still not quite the attitude of “let it all go.” But, you see, if you are a really genuine divine madman, you are not necessarily at the same time an irresponsible being.

Perhaps one of the best examples of a divine madman was a Japanese Zen monk by the name of Ryōkan. He was a poet and a kind of a solitary who lived in a little cottage on a hill, and would appear to be completely naïve. Now, I want to give you a story about Ryōkan which shows how a divine madman relates to the practical world.

One day he was invited to a house—I suppose a fairly wealthy home, because he was much prized as a guest—and he went into the reception room, and sat down, was served tea. And then, when he thought he was alone, he was looking around, and he saw a hanging scroll where there was a painting of a tiger. And he looked at it; was delighted. It was great. And he said, “Arrgh!” You know? And had a great time playing tiger. And suddenly he noticed that there was still present in the room, sitting very quietly, a servant maid. He looked at her and said, “Shh! Don’t you tell anybody about that. They’ll think I’m crazy.”

At another time he was sitting outside his little hut, and he’d finished dinner, and he had put his rice bowl on top of one chopstick and was spinning it, like this. And suddenly a messenger came from a local daimyō—that is to say, noble dignitary—and asked him some important question as to whether he could possibly attend—I don’t know what it was; a special tea ceremony or something like that. And all he could answer was, “The bowl keeps spinning.” And the messenger went back and said, “The master says the bowl keeps spinning.”

On another occasion—he did very interesting calligraphy, although nobody can read it except very great experts, because it looks as if an inky spider had crawled down the page. But it’s highly prized, and today specimens of Ryōkan’s writing sell for thousands of dollars. And people were always therefore asking him if he would do a specimen. He was kind of cagey about it and reluctant. So one day a very cunning nobleman invited him to his house and laid out on the mats some absolutely gorgeous writing paper—great long strips of it—with inkstone already full of ink, brushes and everything just sitting there. And Ryōkan went into the room and sat waiting for the host to arrive, and he walked over and looked at this gorgeous paper and at the brushes, and sniffed around, and then absolutely couldn’t resist the temptation to write a poem down the scroll. Then suddenly he realized he’d done something awful. Because after all, this was the most expensive paper you could get. And he didn’t realize that it was laid out for him to do something. He just thought, you know, it was there somehow. And then, at that moment, the host walked in. And Ryōkan said, “Oh, I’m horrified! I’m so sorry! I just couldn’t resist the temptation.” The host said, “That’s perfectly all right. Don’t worry about it at all. Please”—he removed the sheet—“try another one.”

Ryōkan also loved to play with children. All crazy people do, because you can get away with things with children that you can’t with other people. Now, while I just want to put a sort of interspersed remark here, I don’t approve, really, of baby talk, because I think that’s insulting to children. It somehow makes them into dolls. But absolutely different from baby talk is play talk. What I mean, not play talk as distinct from work talk, but dancing talk. You can do things. You can make faces at children. You can let yourself go in the company of children in a way that you can’t with other people. And that’s why there is a certain point in life, as children grow up—somewhere around five, six, seven—where they become spoiled, and they become embarrassed by your really hassling with them anymore in that way.

So Ryōkan loved to play with children, and he used to play all sorts of games of hide and seek with them. And one day he was it, and he had to go off and stay in a certain place while all the children went to hide, and then they’d say “yoo-hoo” and he’d start to find them. So he went off to hide—and no “yoo-hoo.” So he waited, waited, waited. Stayed there all night, waiting for this. And the children just made a joke on him and ran off, you see?

Well, one says, you see, that’s not a very practical man. But he was adored by everybody. He was a kind of cherished village idiot who was yet very much respected, because everybody knew that, in truth, he was the only person in the village who was without basic fear, and who was therefore living life as a Zen monk who is called an unsui. This is the two words: un (“cloud”), sui (“water”). And he’s given this name. Every monk is called an unsui, because he’s supposed to drift like a cloud and flow like water. And this is exactly, you see, the same spirit as not being anxious for the morrow, and going along with the grass of the field and the fowls of the air.

One day Confucius was out for a walk with his disciples, and he saw an old man fall into a big mountain stream, and thought, “Alas, he is sick and old and tired of life, and he’s making off with himself.” For below the point where he fell in there was an enormous cataract, and then rocks and rapids underneath. But suddenly the old man appeared way down below the rapids, crawled out of the stream, and went strolling along the banks. Confucius was amazed, and he immediately sent a disciple to run after the old man so that he could talk to him. He said, “Sir, I thought you were about to make away with yourself, but I see now that you must be a spirit.” And he said, “No, I’m not a spirit, I’m just a perfectly human being.” “Well then, how did you survive the cataract?” He said, “In no special way. I just went in with a swirl and came out with a whirl. I did nothing. I simply adapted myself to the nature of the water.”

And so, in the same way, we have connected with the Taoist and early Zen traditions many instances of famous monks who were quite mad. On the Esalen announcement for this series of workshops and seminars there is a drawing of Hanshan. And he and his companion, Shide—or the Japanese say Hanzan and Jitoku—they were two mountain hermits who are favorite subjects of Zen artists, because they are shown wandering about together in the woods, laughing at falling leaves. And Sengai used to like to draw them with the sutras open, chanting away, with their hair all frazzled, and laughing, chanting the sutras, and really not paying any attention to what they mean at all, but just having a ball making these noises. But, as a matter of fact, Hanshan was an extraordinarily competent poet, in perfect control of the language when he needed to be. But all that control, mastery, was somehow based on the attitude of what we will call fundamental nonsense: fundamental goofing off, because you really don’t need to make life work.

But the point is, you see, these two ways of being are not incompatible. They appear to be incompatible when you think that the foundation of everything is the tough discipline, that that’s basic. It is not basic. It’s secondary, and it’s an important secondary. But you can’t really make it work unless you build it on top of the primary, which is the goofing off attitude of the child. To learn an excellent discipline, and to learn it well, you’ve got to goof your way into it. In other words, you have to learn, say, in drawing, how to make very fine lines by getting absorbed in doodling them. See? Do it not because there’s anything special to be accomplished, but just because it’s such a gas to make the brush go zhhwwwt, in a certain way, like that. When you practice calligraphy, for example—Western calligraphy or Chinese calligraphy—you begin to dig the amazing shapes that a brush can make, and you play with your hands just as it just goes so. You’re not trying to please anybody, the master, or make an impression. You’re just digging that brush.

The Chinese are very clever about this, because they make writing such a delight. For example, they perfume the ink, and it has very subtle perfume. It is extremely great. And then they rub the ink on a stone in water, and it makes a beautiful blue-black mixture. And the feeling of sliding this stick back and forth on the inkstone is just as groovy as can be. Especially when the ink begins to get thick and smooth, and the feeling of rubbing that, and you get the satisfactory sense. Then, when you feel it’s just right, you pick up the brush, and for a while you play with the brush with the point, getting it just to the right quality that you want. And then, to write, you learn to dance with the brush on the paper. And here again is the thing of knack: that when you write correctly, you feel it is doing it. Now do you see the spirit in which, underneath the accomplishment, is playfulness; that it doesn’t matter?

And I found—in studying the bringing up of children, education, and so on—that a child gets completely discouraged when you tell that child that it is absolutely important that success be attained in a certain task. “Well, it just has to be done. I mean, there is no alternative. You’ve got to do it,” see? You’ve got to be able to do this, to learn it, to achieve this distinction, or whatever it is. And that’s like pushing the child and knocking him down. It’s totally discouraging. Because if you must do it, the feeling is: “I don’t think I shall ever be able to.” So instead, every good teacher stirs up interest, takes it that goofing off is basic—but subtly, by a kind of judo, arranges the goofing off to go in this way.

So then, the world may be taken, then, to be fundamentally mad, crazy. All basic life is crazy life—because it’s nonsense! The death poem of a great Zen master was: “I have uttered nonsense from the bathtub to the bathtub.” The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before cremation—that’s the two terms of life. And so all his Zen teaching, all his carryings-on, were just, he said, just stuff and nonsense.

Because here we are, you know: we think we make sense. I’m talking English to you, and you understand the meaning of my words. But let’s just drop this situation into another context. What is the meaning of your understanding what I’m saying? See? We’re all sitting around here, and you are listening to these signals, and you are interpreting them into signals of your own. But look at the situation from above: what a crazy assembly! Because what we are doing, gathering here, making noises (and very complicated noises), is essentially no different from what this tree is doing out here, spreading out its branches with all these little twigs and things sticking out—and by Jove, what is it doing? Well, you say, “If we look at it from a practical point of view, those leaves have a purpose. And they are to absorb moisture and sunlight, and to sort of go down into the tree, and help the sap to come up, zooosh. And then the real object of this is that it grows some kind of flower or cone, and that gets fertilized, and there are little seeds inside. And they come out and fall on the ground, and get blown about, and some get picked up by birds and distributed, and they make other trees, you see. That’s the thing. That’s what it’s all about. That’s a very, very important function.” Now, actually, it’s sheer nonsense. This tree is going, patootie-doo, patootie-doo, patootie-doo, patootie-doo, and they say, “Wowee! Isn’t that great!” You know? Let’s spread this around and get everybody else going patootie-doo, patootie-doo, patootie-doo. Well, we’re doing exactly the same thing.

And the trouble with us, as civilized people, is we don’t know it. We think we’re being serious. And we, you know, we have tremendously important schemes going on, and that it’s desperately vital that, for example, the human race survive, and that we go on with this great thing called civilization—the United States of America, the USSR, whatever it is. We think that’s the great thing we have to do. But that’s what’s destroying us. Because nobody is going to blow up the world with an atom bomb for the sake of patootie-doo, patootie-doo.

Now, life is this fundamentally directionless wandering, cloud-like, river-drifting play. And yet I occasionally use the word “we should understand.” And just as I pointed out earlier on: there’s the problem that, when you see that the world is like this, and that you’re all one with it, and that it’s your doing, then you get it absolutely clear in your mind—it is very clear indeed. Then you suddenly want to explain it to somebody, and you find there are no words for it. Well so, in just the same way, when one is trying to say, “This is what we should do,” there seems to be a complete contradiction. And there’s a verbal and logical hang-up here that it’s difficult to get across if you keep on using words. It’s only words that are making the difficulty. There is no difficulty in practice.

So I’m saying in words: you should do something that you really can’t help doing anyhow. Because you’re thinking about it in words, you don’t realize it. You don’t realize that you are doing it anyhow because you’re thinking about it in words. And therefore the problem arises: why am I saying you should do it when you can’t help doing it anyway? So the words I’m using are getting in the way of the message, or of the meaning. So that understanding this to be so—that we should be madmen in the sense of abandoning this whole project of the survival of the race, civilization, and so on—this is the only way in which we can restructure human life, and unplug various purely abstract and political engines that are totally destructive.

But you see, you can’t unplug them if you’re still afraid of them; if you’re still fundamentally worrying about what is going to happen to civilization. It’s only when you see in your own inner experience that it simply doesn’t matter—that what is important is what is unimportant, which is the jazz. And that is important, not that it should go on, but in the doing thereof. So this creates what some people might call a new political strategy, which we will call the politics of diversion. That is to say: living a style of life which everybody sees that we’re enjoying and is so great, they’ll say, “Oh, I wish we could be like that.” “No, but we’ve got to be earnest,” and all that kind of thing, you see? But that doesn’t really achieve much except trouble. It is through application and study and earnestness that we have the atom bomb. We say, “Well now, look at all the things we civilized people have achieved!” Uh… yeah, but you’re about to blow up the planet, which seems to be the price of it.

But here, again, let me underline the fact that I’m not trying to talk down technical skill. I’m only trying—and let me repeat the point—that you cannot employ non-hostile, non-destructive technical skill unless you realize basically that you yourself are this whole domain of nature. That’s the real you. You are not in a fight against nature. You’re not here to conquer nature—because there’s nothing to conquer! It’s all you. And so when you use technology to bulldoze everything into submission, you’re fighting yourself. You’re all tied up, clutched up, like the person trying to lift himself off the floor by his own bootstraps. And in that process you’re dissipating all your energy on something that can’t be done, and therefore you’re just getting tired out, and you’re going to drop dead.

So I know, you see, that there are paradoxical elements in this. But I repeat: the paradoxes appear because of the nature of the language. When we try to explain these things we run into contradictions for the simple reason that we are trying to explain it; to put it into a language with either/or categories in it, where you say either you try or you don’t try. Either you let things go as they will, or you do something about it. Either there is something you can do, and therefore you should do it, or there’s nothing you can do, and therefore no one should say should. “No one should say should”—see‽ Look how messed up you get!

But that’s the way these difficulties arrive at the linguistic level. These difficulties are not arising at what I will call for the moment the material or the real level. Because there, at that domain, you will find yourself acting in a way that is in many ways more intelligent than you act when you make up your mind. But that, you see, that simply living in complete natural spontaneity, that’s the way of the child. That may be the way of the animals—we don’t know. But certainly, as a child is irresponsible in that sense, and begins to learn responsibility and so on, we must be terribly careful to realize that irresponsibility is the basis of responsibility. That, if we destroy the basic irresponsibility, the consequent style of responsibility that we learn is useless, because it’s all for nothing. It’s all to a process of continuing with anxiety and guilt and uptightness, and making more and more and more of it by a kind of Parkinson’s law.

You see what’s happening? If we succeed in business in the ordinary way, what does that lead to? More business. So I say we get rid of this business and hand it over to the computers, so they will do all the accounting. Then what? Oh, we’ll think up some new kind of business, see? And then we’ll have to hand that over to computers because it’s so boring. And that means new, more investments, bigger things, going chickity-chick, chickity-chick, but it’s all machinery. You think this is a great erection—yeah, but it never comes off!