The trouble is that most people in the West have been brought up to believe that they’re in this universe as strangers on probation, or as flukes in a system which is fundamentally mindless and mechanical.
We say as a matter of ordinary speech, “I came into this world.” Well, you did nothing of the kind. You came out of it. You’re a symptom of the galaxy. And just as an apple tree apples, so this galaxy peoples. And the people—if they are intelligent as they claim to be—must therefore be symptoms of an intelligent galaxy.
We are not lonely, isolated egos inside bags of skin, but we are actually functions of the total universe. We are the universe, each one of us, observing itself.
In Hinduism, for example, god is considered the Self: the self of the individual and also the self of the universe. And if Jesus had lived in India and had announced that he was god, everybody would have said, “Of course. Congratulations! You found out.” You know? But in Palestine, where they had this monarchical conception of god, he was regarded as a subversive revolutionary and had to be crucified.
Cosmic consciousness is a thing that can happen to anyone—like falling in love, or getting measles, or…. It’s an experience of being one with the whole scheme of things; where suddenly you wake up and see that, for always and always and always, you are one with this universe, and that the whole system of the universe—despite all its troubles—is fundamentally harmonious.
There’s this sensation of being “Aaaaah.” It’s called ineffable—that is to say, unspeakable. And the task of a poet and a philosopher such as myself is to eff the ineffable: to say what can’t be said—which is what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to express what it’s like to have cosmic consciousness because I believe that if human beings understand this kind of experience, they will be much more secure in themselves, and much less insane in their behavior.
We behave insanely because we feel lost, because we feel alienated from the universe. And therefore we’re attacking the universe: we feel that we have to indulge in the conquest of nature, the conquest of space, that we have to beat everything into submission. And this is because we don’t realize that we are sons of god, or (if you want to say) true children of nature.
There’s the individual organism—the whole, total body. And this—if we knew we were this, if we really felt our whole body—we would feel what our whole body actually feels, which is that it’s one with the universe. The body does not exist without its environment. It goes with it, just in the same way as a front goes with a back. We cannot possibly exist without the sun, and the sun cannot exist without the galaxy, and the galaxy cannot exist without the other galaxies. It all goes together. And therefore one might say the sun is as much one’s own internal organ as one’s heart. We are inseparable from all that—just as I said the front is inseparable from a back, or the head side of a coin is inseparable from the tail side. We go with all this. The universe that is said to be outside us is our own extended body.
We have been taught to feel that this universe outside us is a mindless mechanism, and that we can only survive and maintain human values an human reason by fighting it and by beating it into submission. But we are its fruits, just as the apple tree brings forth the apple. The apple is symptomatic of the nature of the tree, and so in the same way we, as intelligent organisms, are symptomatic of the universe in which we live.
One of the problems is that, through mass communications—television and radio and newspapers—everybody is deluged with information about problems where they can produce no immediate effective action. Their ire is aroused, their adrenals are aroused, their sense of injustice is aroused, and they can’t do anything about it right then and there. And this is utterly frustrating to everyone.
If you know that, and you’re grounded on that sensation that it’s really all alright, then you can go into the work of correcting and doing things that need to be done right now without losing your temper.
You cannot achieve any creative result by forcing it. When you force the growth of tomatoes, they come out enormous but taste of nothing.
When you force the growth of the Third World, what happens? “Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree. The foreign aid program is a disaster, because we’re trying to impose our way of life on the Third World when they may not even want it! And what we have to do (and what we have not sufficiently done) is ask the Third World: “What kind of civilization do you want to have? Do you really want freeways, hot dog stands, Cadillacs? Do you want your definition of sanity to be fitness to drive a car?” Do they really want the kind of civilization we have? You know? We’ve got it. We’ve had it. And we’re pretty much through with it.
We live in an eternal now—but yet, most people are under the delusion that they live for a future. And so they dementedly rush around living for the future, and they’re making all sorts of plans for everything to be alright later on, and when these plans mature they’re unable to enjoy them because they’re still working for some other future beyond that. Insane!
You know, we all think we must survive. Because if we don’t go on, we may not get there—wherever “there” is. We’re there already! We’re there now! But we say: “Oh, we must survive,” in order to get “there’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away.” Do you remember that song? Theeeere’s a good time coming, be it ever so far away. They think that’s one far-off divine event to which all creation moves, and we’re going to get there. Well, that’s a hoax. The far-off divine event is now.
