The objective of Buddhism in all its forms is to bring about a fundamental change in a human being’s everyday state of consciousness. If I make it yet more specific, it’s to bring about a change in your sense of personal identity—that is to say, in your sensation of who and what you are.
When the scientist starts paying attention to behavior of people and things carefully, he discovers that they go together; that the behavior of the organism is inseparable from the behavior of its environment. So, you see, if I’m to describe what I am doing—what am I doing? Am I just waving my legs back and forth? No. I’m walking. And in order to speak about walking you have to speak about the space in which I am walking: about the floor, about the direction, left or right, in relation to what kind of room, what kind of stage, what kind of situation. Because if—obviously—if there isn’t a ground underneath me, I can’t very well walk. So the description of what I am doing involves the description of the world. And so the biologist comes to say that what he is describing is no longer merely the organism and its behavior, he is describing a field which he now calls the organism-environment. And that field is what the individual actually is.
The average individual—and indeed, the average scientist—does not feel in a way that corresponds to his theory. He still feels as if he were a center of sensitivity locked up inside a bag of skin. The object of Buddhist discipline (or methods of psychological training) is, as it were, to turn that feeling inside out; to bring about a state of affairs in which the individual feels himself to be everything that there is. The whole cosmos, focused, expressing itself, here, and you as the whole cosmos expressing itself there, and there, and there, and there, and there, and so on. That what, in other words, the reality of myself fundamentally is not something inside my skin, but everything—and I mean everything—outside my skin, but doing what is my skin and inside it. I mean, imagine that every one of us—look, in the same way that the sea, when the ocean has a wave on it, the wave is not separate from the ocean, is it? Every wave on the ocean is the whole ocean waving. The ocean waves, and it says, “Yoo-hoo! I’m here.” See? But I can wave all over the place. I can wave in many different ways. I can wave this way or make my wave that way. So the ocean of being waves every one of us, and we are its waves. But the wave is fundamentally the ocean.
It’s like I would say to you, “Now, look, if you come here tonight at exactly midnight and put your hands on this stage, you can wish and have granted any wish you want to—provided you don’t think of a green elephant.” And so everybody will come, they’ll put their hands here, and they will be very careful not to think about a green elephant. Well, now, do you see the point? That everybody—if we transfer this to the dimension of spirituality where the highest ideal is to be unselfish, to let go of one’s self—when you are trying to be unselfish, you’re doing it for a selfish reason. You can’t be unselfish by a decision of the will any more than you can decide not to think of a green elephant!
When the student finds that there is absolutely no way of being his true self—not only is there no way of doing it, there is also no way of doing it by not doing it; you can’t do it by doing something, you can’t do it by not doing something. Let me, to make this clearer, put it into Christian terms: thou shalt love the Lord thy God. Now what are you going to do about that? If you try very hard to love God and you ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” you find out you’re doing it because you want to be on the side of the big battalions. You want to be right! After all, the Lord is the master of the universe, isn’t he? And if you don’t love him, you’re going to be in a pretty sad state. So you realize: “I’m loving him just because I’m afraid of what’ll happen to me if I don’t.” And then you think, “That’s pretty lousy love, isn’t it?” And you think, “That’s a bad motivation! I wish I could change that. I wish I could love the Lord out of a genuine heart.” Well, why do you want to change? Nu-uh. See? I realize that the reason I want to have a different kind of motive is that I’ve got the same motive. So I say, “Oh, heaven’s sakes! God, I’m a mess! Will you help me out?” And then he reminds you: “Why are you doing that? Now you’re just giving up, aren’t you? You’re asking someone else to take over your problem.” So you suddenly find, you see: you’re stuck.
When this kind of experience happens, you discover that what you are is no longer this sort of isolated center of action and experience locked up in your skin. The teacher has asked you to produce that thing, to show it to him genuine and naked, and you couldn’t find it. So it isn’t there! And when you see clearly that it isn’t there, you have a new sense of identity. And you realize that what you are is, as I said, the whole world of nature doing this.
When your own inner sense of identity changes from being “the separate individual” to being “what the entire cosmos is doing at this place,” you become not a puppet, but more truly and more expressively an individual than ever.
I think that this is something of very great importance to the Western world today, because we have developed an immensely powerful technology. We have stronger means of changing the physical universe than has ever existed before. How are we going to use it? There is a Chinese proverb: “If the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.” Let us assume that our technological knowledge is the right means. What kind of people are going to use this knowledge? Are they going to be people who hate nature and feel alienated from it, or people who love the physical world and feel that the physical world is their own personal body? An extension: the whole physical universe, right out to the galaxies, is simply one’s extended body.
Technology and its powers must be handled by true materialists, and true materialists are people who love material; who cherish wood and stone and wheat and eggs and animals, and above all the Earth, and treat it with a reverence that is due to one’s own body.