A person who is under illusion, māyā, thinks of himself basically as a victim—someone caught in a trap, somebody subject to fate, the will of God, or whatever you want to call it—who got involved in life passively. That’s why I use the word “victim.” And he has, therefore, the sensation of his consciousness as being a kind of passive, but nevertheless very delicate and tender, receptor or percipient of everything that goes on. So that life in general occurs to you, it happens to you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. And you say, “Well, it’s awful! I can’t get myself out of this trap.”
Buddhists argue: there is only this moment. And actually, you, who come in at the door, are not the same people who are now sitting here. Just as, in the whirlpool in water, there is no constant water, there is only going on a continuous behavior: whirling in the water. But no water stays in it. So, in exactly the same way, you who came in through the door a few minutes ago and are now sitting here are entirely different—only: you are clinging to the idea of your continuity.
The Christian has put everything into chronology: that there is going to be a thing called the last day, and the trumpet of the angels is going to awaken the dead. The trumpet’s sounding now, you see, for the Buddhists. Wake up! There is this moment, and this is eternity—only: you are stringing the moments together, and you are creating time out of eternity. You’re wondering. You’re identifying yourself, in other words, with all the things that have happened to me, and you’re worrying about all the things that will. But actually, you are never anywhere but now.
That was the point of trying to make you do this thing: to get you to realize that there is no past and there is no future. There is only now, and you can’t get out of it. So relax. You’re in eternity in the moment.
All our senses are really diversifications of a single sense, which you could call a certain kind of touch.
I actually create everything that seems to be outside. In other words, from a perfectly hard-boiled, scientific, neurological point of view, my nervous system actually evokes the external world by translating, let’s call it—what would you say? X, the particles, the whatever there is out there, quanta. We have to use some kind of terminology for something we don’t know, you see. The whole idea of physics, the physical description of the world in Western science, is completely abstract. It’s just algebra. That some sort of algebra out there gets translated by our nervous system into light, into weight, into color, into pleasure or pain, hard, soft, sharp, smooth, and so on. So that if it were not for our little nervous tree here—you know, that grows out of the spinal column and blossoms out in the brain, and has all these little edges that go tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki-tiki—if it were not for this thing, you see, there wouldn’t be any light in the sun. There wouldn’t be any sound in the air. There wouldn’t be any hardness of the wood or softness of the petals of a flower. It is the tree of the nervous system growing out like this, you see, that brings all this into existence.
Every seventh day you should go crazy. And at least once a day, in every 24 hours, you know, there should be a crazy time for complete limbering up of the mind.
I remember when I was a priest—I still have this attitude, because it’s been with me for many, many years—and we used to have a great, gorgeous service in the Episcopal Church at Northwestern, where, of course, because the thing is essentially joyous, we had candles and vestments and incense and the works, you know. And I remember I had a special student who was called “the sorcerer’s apprentice,” and he always carried the incense, see? And I remember, one day, we arrived at the altar—you know, the service was beginning, the organ was going full blast, the choir was singing. And in this very solemn way we arrived at the altar and made the profound bow which you make because you’re in the presence of God, and we both started laughing. Because it was just delightful. You see? The thing was swinging. HOO! And, you see, this really is the religious attitude. People who are not initiates think it’s irreverent. You’re not laughing at the deity and saying, “Oh, you old so-and-so”—well, you might be just a little bit, but the deity appreciates this. What you’re doing is: you are limbering your mind, letting it all go. YOO-DEE-DOO-DEE-DOO-DEE-DOO! You see? WHAMMO! Because if you do that, then you’ve got something to work with later. But you mustn’t do it with later in mind. You see? Then you’re not doing it.
This is the meaning in a meditation exercise, in a religious exercise: “take no thought for the morrow.” You see? Because then, so long as you have got the notion in mind that this religious exercise is going to be useful, is going to come out practical—that is to say, help you to survive—you haven’t let go. And therefore, just so long as you don’t let go, your survival chances go down. Care killed the cat.
What is practical is defined in terms of what promotes survival. Earning your living, getting enough to eat, providing for your children, et cetera, et cetera. That’s practical by definition. Fine. But there is no point in surviving, in bringing up children, in producing human beings and enabling them to go on living—there’s no point whatsoever in doing that unless you can show these individuals who are surviving that survival and existence itself is play.
All religion, incidentally, is an attempt to find a shortcut. Think that through!
The private, the personal, the individual, is the same thing as the cosmic. The more private, the more public it is, because the more it draws attention to itself. The more public it is—that is to say, it doesn’t draw any attention at all—the more private it is. And so it goes. And he who understands that private equals public, public equals private, one equals many, many equals one, play equals work, work equals play, is a happy man. Because he’s not fighting the universe.