Either you must take the point of view that, if there is this deplorable suffering, the universe is one hell of a mess, and the only response that you can make to it is to do battle. Or you may say: no, it isn’t really a mess. Somehow, all this suffering amounts to something in the end. It creates energies, it’s a kind of a process like an oyster suffering to mature a pearl.
So-called diseases of plants are the full life of some other kind of organism having a ball. And you see this complexly interrelated world, and you realize that it all hangs together. That everything outside the human world is a system of balances where you couldn’t have, really, any form of life without the others going on, too. There have to be friends and there have to be enemies. Because if there aren’t enemies, the friends get too prosperous and they kill themselves by their excessive exuberance. So they are constantly being pruned by various kinds of enemy species.
Conflict at one level is health at another.
To be liberated is to be able to see human life in the same way as you see all other life. And to do that you have to be able to live, as it were, on two levels: the level of involvement and the level of detachment.
To be able to know that you know, to feel that you feel. And by possessing that faculty—which is self-consciousness; is being able to reflect upon one’s own life—we are able to become, as it were, to go to a level at which our own life is seen in its total context in the universe.
A new form of intelligence, you see, has come into the world which is in certain directions vastly superior to human intelligence. And people are beginning to worry like anything about whether the machines are going to take us over. But we’ve got to realize that machines aren’t… see, “machine” is becoming a dirty word. Just a machine! Mere machinery! You see? But actually, there has grown out of us through these things enormous electronic circuits that are new forms of life. And these are all connected with us. They’re not separate from us. They’re not something like a different order of beings that might come from some other planet and conquer us. The whole development of the electronic minds and brains that we have are new cortexes.
All this machinery that we are making is an extension of our brain and is a new kind of life.
What does a hermit discover? If you try this and get as lonely as you can get, you become vividly aware that you can’t get away from it. Because when you get very lonely and very quiet, you become extremely sensitive. And everything that goes on that’s ordinarily unnoticed comes to your attention. First of all, you will find there’s a community of insects. And they are tremendously interested in you, and not necessarily hostile. I mean, maybe sometimes, but alone in the forest when you get really quiet you will notice little creatures will come and inspect you, look you all over. And they will go away and tell their friends, and they’ll come and look to see what it is. And you become aware of every single sound. And you realize that, alone, you’re in the midst of the vast murmuring crowd. May not be human. But it’s everything else. So that the point of being a hermit, the discipline, leads you to understand that you can’t resign. The lonelier you are, the more you’re joined together with everything else, because you get more sensitive.
Supposing I say everybody is playing the game “me first.” Now, I’m going to play the game “you first”—to use the phrase of Bonhoeffer, who called Jesus the man for others. Now, let’s see if we can play that game. Instead of “me first,” “you first.” “After you, please.” Will you please? You know, what a way this is at putting everybody down! See, I’m the one who’s so generous. I’m the one who’s so loving, so self-effacing. And all you inferior brats can go first. You can play “me first.” I’ll play “you first.” I’ll try and convince you to play “you first.” But the success of convincing you on that is relatively small and therefore the in-group will always be the people playing “you first.” And therefore they will get the honors.
You and the universe which seems to constrain you are not two things.
We, as members of Western culture in the twentieth century, inherit a way of playing this game wherein we pretend that we are—each one of us—an isolated individual who comes into the world as a stranger. We do not know, in the ordinary course of events, that that is not true and that each one of us is a way in which the whole fullness of ultimate reality pretends that it gets lost in an individual life situation, and endures the adventures of pain and death, and endures all the critical efforts and decisions connected with practical and moral problems.
Things and events are the units of experience, and they are those parts of experience that we notice. And when you notice something you apply to it a notation. You notice by making notations. And notations are words, numbers, and such symbols as musical notes, or algebraical signs, or astronomical symbols, or whatever. It is a way of dividing up the world so as to be able to discuss it with each other and so to control our environment. But don’t be deceived by noticing and notation. The world in which we live is not really divided.
Children are given an immense artificial desire for toys. A toy shop seems paradise. But when, on Christmas Day, the beautiful tree and all the tinsel and all the stuff and packages, wonderfully wrapped—you know, the wrappings are better than the contents! More beautiful! They get all these things out and the room is strewn with guns and buses and dolls and all that stuff. By four o’clock in the afternoon they are screaming frantic. Because actually, the whole thing was a terrible letdown. And that happens again and again. But that happens to the adults, you see? The adults are merely repeating for the children what they’re doing. They’re acquiring all this kind of pretentious junk and thinking that’s the answer, and it’s a letdown.
If you push it far enough, if you rebel or oppose the universe with sufficient will and vigor, you eventually reach an impasse which is just like fencing with yourself. You have two knives crossed, see, and you are going to dig one of them—I mean, if you don’t want to do it so dangerously you can do it with knitting pins or even with chopsticks—and have a fencing match with yourself so that one hand tries to hit the other and the other to defend itself. Well, you reach a stick point, because both hands know in advance what the other one’s going to do. And I use that as comparable to the situation which arises when you have opposed whatever it is that you want to oppose sufficiently enough to discover that everything you defined as “other” turns out to be the same as you. Or to put it more exactly: “I” and “not I” turn out to be two poles of the same process. And it’s the process rather than the poles that really constitutes you.
How different it would be to live in a world where everybody realizes that space is the mind, rather than our present superstition that the mind is something inside your head.
Everybody is a whirlpool into which a great stream of milk and beer and beefsteaks and all sorts of things are flowing. And they swirl around like this and shoot out the other end. And that’s just like a whirlpool in water, you see?