In nature, in the real physical world, there aren’t any separate things. The idea of separate things is no more than an idea. It is a way of talking about life.
Everything implies everything else. Take any detail, any possible feature of the universe which you can in any way identify as a thing, and if you really go into it, you will have to see it as capable of existing only in the context of everything else.
The whole faith of science is that the universe is explainable this way—that we can, in other words, make out a super-pattern in terms of which all sub-patterns make sense.
Just as the flower may be considered as a unity with all those veins and things moving out from the center, so, in exactly the same way, we, sitting here, are doing something just like that—only, we’re doing it with such a tremendous free-floating jazz to it.
In practical affairs we are many, and we all have conflicting interests. What formula are we going to find so that we can agree and act together? See, this is always the most difficult task. And it requires great brains, or great insight, or great something or other, to find the point on which we can all agree, and so work together. So there is always an apparent fight going on between the principle of unity and the principle of diversity.
What we’ve got to do, then, is to find the formula where there is the maximum of individual liberty, but all of it going on together harmoniously. And that’s what we, as a political, historical community, have as our theoretical foundation. Isn’t that fascinating? You see, we’ve been trying to work out this impossible problem.
If you could imagine where everybody is considered equally superior, this is the foundation of what we call courtesy, good manners: where you salute people, and you reverence their right to a certain privacy, a certain separateness, you see. And you have to learn this art in a state of affairs where people start crowding in on each other. Now, you see, in a country like Japan, space is the most expensive thing there is. And it’s becoming so here. Space used not to be expensive at all here. There was just oodles of it, and everybody could afford to be equally rude. And now we can’t. We’re getting crowded in on each other. And to create space, you have to create it by manners. That is, then, respect to everybody.
There is a possibility of a cultural form that will stress and get away with the proposition that everybody is equally divine as distinct from the proposition that everybody is equally inferior. And that feeling, and the manners that go with it, is essential in any community where we start to crowd, when we get a population explosion. So this is one thing we have to do to solve this huge question of the swarming population—especially in the United States, which is not used to the idea of courtesy; not really. That we’ve got to make a propaganda for great respect to everybody. Otherwise, we won’t be able to accommodate the crush at all.
You cannot have the really civilized society until you first realize that the harmony already exists. In other words, if you think you have to create the harmony socially by some sort of moral violence, and impose it upon the world as it exists now, you will only succeed in stirring up more trouble. That’s why reformers tend to be extremely destructive people; people with a fanatical mission. It is necessary first to see that absolutely nothing needs to be done to improve the world. Then it can indeed be improved.
You cannot give up yourself, let go of your own self-interests, and suddenly say, “Well, from today I’m no longer going to press my own advantage against everybody else.” You can’t do that by a voluntary decision, because you will merely be using a new gimmick to boost yourself: “Look at me! I’m the most unselfish person! How saintly I am!”
There’s no way of being unselfish (or of renouncing clinging) on purpose. It can be done only in the realization—when you actually come down to it, you see—that you cannot cling to anything at all. There is nothing to cling to, and there is no one to cling.
Total courage arises out of seeing that there is really nothing that can be done. Holding things together for as long as you can hold them together is a sort of illusion, because you know time’s going to run out, and within a hundred years nothing will matter. You’ll be dead anyway. One reaction to that is, of course: why bother? But the other reaction is: good Lord, if that’s the truth, what fun we can have now!
There is absolutely no possibility of anybody in this room being able to stop dissolution.
That’s why they say Buddhists are atheists: because when you really become one with God, obviously you don’t go around worshiping God or asking God for things and making prayers. There’s no point in that anymore. Should God pray to himself?
Is there any way of advocating a certain style of practical politics in everyday life which persuades without preaching? See, one thing that is quite evident from the whole history of religion is that preaching doesn’t work.
Any doctrine of this kind is not preaching. It is not moralistic. It is simply pointing out the nature of the facts. Not that you ought to be unselfish, and you ought not to cling to possessions, to identity, to role, to status. The point is: you can’t. And as you realize you can’t, you don’t. Well, so with other matters of practical politics: when you realize what can’t be done, you won’t do it—or try to do it. It’s only so long as you’re under illusions and think that certain things can be done which can’t be done, that then these conflicts arise.
What Zen tries to do ideally is to be completely cool; to create the religion of no religion so that you don’t notice it’s around unless you’re in the know.
What happens, then, when we get to the state I was talking about this morning, where you abandon completely all belief, you abandon every sort of way of hanging on to life, you accept your complete impermanence, the prospect of your death, of vanishing into nothing whatsoever, you see, and of not being able to control anything, of being at the mercy of what is completely other than you, and you let go to that, you see? This means that you even get rid of any God whatsoever, to do this fully. You don’t have a thing left to cling to. So this complete let-go flips, and you discover—having made it—a new way of experiencing altogether in which you don’t need any God, because you’re it. But also, you don’t cling to the idea that you’re it.
All belief in God is lack of faith. Has that ever struck you? You’re still clinging. And so long as you’re still clinging, you don’t have faith, because faith is the state of total let-go. So when, through some marvelous desperation, we get to the state of total let-go, and then, you see, fantastically, religion—anything like religion—simply disappears. There’s no need for it any longer. Like, you’ve crossed to the other shore, you don’t need the raft. Get off! Leave the raft behind.
I have been years seeking the ideal place, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way I can possibly find it is to be it. If you can find it in you, then anywhere you go is the ideal place to live.
People who have the mystical vision—whether through practicing yoga, or Zen Buddhism, or Hesychast Christian prayers, or by taking LSD—become a serious menace to society. And society gets really worried about them, because they are not taking the world and its concerns seriously any longer. They know it’s an illusion. And if you really know it’s an illusion, if you really know I’m an illusion, I don’t know what you’re going to do with me. I don’t know whether I trust you. I don’t know whether you’re going to keep the rules. I just don’t know about you. You’ve seen through it, and goodness only knows—you may do anything! And if you’re not sure of yourself, and you suddenly see that all this is an illusion, there’s nothing you can cling to, it’s all relative, you may get bugged, and you may go nuts. That’s the great danger in all of this.