We could conceive (and perhaps there are) some forms of life that don’t know they’re there. I don’t know whether my particular cells—constituting my body—I don’t know whether they know they’re there. Maybe they do. Maybe they have some wonderful system of resonance that I know nothing about, and they’re all worried about what I’m going to do with them, and having conferences and meetings and their policy-decisions, and so on and so forth, because there’s this person in charge. You know, it might well be that—when I die, or when we all die—all our cells suddenly say, “God is dead.” And they have their big theological conferences and say, “Well, we just have to fend for ourselves from now on.” And that’s called corruption: where they all go off on their own.
The thing is this: it’s just like riding a bicycle. It’s a balance trick. You suddenly find yourself falling over one way—well, you balance that: you turn into that direction and you stay up. And so, in the same way, when you find yourself becoming too attached to life, you correct that with the realization that there is nothing except the eternal now. Then, when you feel it’s alright now—you see, you’re safe again because there’s only the eternal now—once more, you go and get attached. Or you get involved, you get concerned about some enterprise—social, political, amorous, familial, scholarly, artistic; whatever it is, you get involved.
You may say this is pretty monotonous. And that is one of the basic feelings underlying Buddhism: “Must we go ’round again?” You see? So, indeed, you say, “Oh, enough of this! Let’s go to sleep. Let’s stop. Time must have a stop.” And so you stop. Well, when you do that, you forget that it ever happened, you see? This is a marvelous arrangement, because then it can start all over again without your knowing that it happened before. So you’re never bored! And this is a cure for being tired of it. Because if you didn’t know—I mean, that’s where the memory goes, you see? And so, when you come back, there’s no problem. At least, no problem of boredom, of remembering the past. There are going to be all sorts of new problems. But you won’t know you’ve had any problems before, so that won’t worry you. Until you begin to accumulate memories again, and you’ve had these problems, and it’s becoming a bore dealing with problems, and then you get rid of yourself. It’s called death. It’s a beautiful arrangement for keeping everything young and new, and for keeping the universe running without getting tired of itself.