The man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch.
You are a symptom of nature. You, as a human being, grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree.
We say “I came into this world.” You didn’t—you came out of it.
It’s like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall. Smash! And all that ink spreads; zzwshh! And in the middle it’s dense, isn’t it? And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets are finer and finer and make more complicated patterns, see? So in the same way, there was a big bang at the beginning of things and it spread. And you and I, sitting here in this room as complicated human beings, are way, way out on the fringe of that bang. We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it. Very interesting. But so we define ourselves as being only that. If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion. Way out in space, and way out in time. Billions of years ago, you were a big bang, but now you’re a complicated human being. And then we cut ourselves off, crrrck!, like this, and don’t feel that we’re still the big bang. But you are. Depends how you define yourself. You are actually—if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning—you’re not something that is a result of the big bang, on the end of the process. You are still the process. You are the big bang, the original force of the universe, coming on as whoever you are.
If there is any such thing at all as intelligence, and love, and beauty—well, you’ve found it in other people. In other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I said, if it is there in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things.
The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people. And our existence on the Earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system, in turn, is a symptom of our galaxy—and our galaxy, in its turn, is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies. Goodness only knows what that’s in.
What you call the “external world” is as much you as your own body. Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world, it’s a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it.
The whole world is moving through you. All the cosmic rays, all the food you’re eating—the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything—is just flowing right through you.
You know that story about all the limbs of the body? The hand said, “We do all our work,” the feet said, “We do our work,” the mouth said, “We do all the chewing, and here’s this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn’t do a thing. He doesn’t do any work, so let’s go on strike.” And the hands refused to carry, the feet refused to walk, the mouth refused to chew, and said “Now we’re on strike against the stomach.” But, after a while, all of them found themselves getting weaker, and weaker, and weaker, and weaker, because they didn’t recognize that the stomach fed them.
