The whole universe emerges from the present right now. It’s all beginning now. We are present at this moment at the beginning of creation, and the past is echoes going back; echoes in the corridors of your mind. And the past is, in fact, present.
If you can’t have self without other, or yang without yin, or front without back, or the knowledge of voluntary action without the experience of what involuntarily happens, then it indicates that there’s a conspiracy going on. In other words, these two are different, but esoterically and secretly the same.
Being enlightened—in the Buddhist sense of the word—is a sort of calamity, because you found out the ruse which you were playing on yourself: you found out that the universe is a system which creeps up on itself and says BOO! and then laughs at itself for jumping. In other words, it is a self-surprising arrangement so as to avoid the monotony and boredom of knowing everything in advance. So you and I have all conspired with ourselves to pretend that we’re not really God—but of course we are! That’s perfectly obvious! We’re all apertures through which the universe is looking at itself.
Nobody knows and cannot possibly say why a mountain is beautiful. In art school, where they try to teach one to do beautiful things, they all eventually find it’s perfectly unteachable.
They always saw man in the context of nature. They did not see man as the ruler of nature, or as something independent of nature. They didn’t see the organism except in relation to its environment.
Once, when a G. I. was visiting Picasso during the liberation of France, he said he could not understand his paintings. “Why did you paint a person looking from the side and from the front at the same time?” And Picasso said, “Do you have a girlfriend?” He said, “Yes.” “Have you got a picture with you?” He said, “Yes.” He pulled out his wallet and showed a photograph of his girlfriend. And Picasso looked at it in astonishment and said, “Is she so small?”
It is the element of surprise somewhere, somehow—of not knowing how it’s done—that is essential to beauty.
There is no past and there is no future, and there is no difference between yourself and the sound you’re hearing. It’s all one. So there is a process going on, but nobody is being processed. There is just a process. That’s you.
In that state of pure listening without naming, you cannot tell the difference between the universe and your action upon it. That’s kinda scary.
When we experience the world simply as a happening, we’re apt to say, “Well, hell, who’s in charge around here?” Because we always think somebody has to be in charge. I mean, doesn’t somebody have to be in charge to make things go the right way, or to make anything happen at all? I mean, don’t you need a bit of a shove? Mustn’t there be some primordial source of energy to goose the whole thing into being? No, there doesn’t. All that is a military image of nature where somebody’s in command.
Another thing about the freeway is that you must be going somewhere. You can’t be purposeless on a freeway. You can’t wander. You can’t even wander in the suburbs. Because if you go out on foot and start wandering, a police car will come and say, “Where are you going?” And if you’re not going anywhere, well, you’re obviously suspicious. So you have to be walking a dog, or jogging, or doing something important. Otherwise you’re a deeply suspicious character!
The passion to control everything, to predict everything, to square everything off, is destructive of life.