We say normally: “I came into this world”. Why don’t we say much more correctly: “I came out of it”? Because, you see, a human being is a symptom of the universe in exactly the same way that an apple is a symptom of an apple tree.
What we have to realize is that a universe which “peoples” is an intelligent, thinking, organic, living system.
The real you is not just something inside your skin, the real abiding you is all that there is: the works, as it is focused here and now at a particular place and in a particular time. And we call this particular place and time “my body,” “my organism.”
Just as a tornado dips down out of the sky here, then it withdraws, and then here, and then here, so in the same way everything that there is dips down and becomes an individual, and then withdraws—that’s what we call death—and it dips down again (shall I say: incarnates again), and it’s doing it all over the place as all us people, all us rabbits, dogs, cats, trees, mountains, stars, everything.
We’ve been brought up the wrong way. We’ve been brought up to play the game of cops and robbers, good guys and bad guys. That is to say: the game of pretending that each one of us is separate, each one of us behaves on his own. And this gets us into the most amazing messes.
When we’re in the state of mind in which we must go on living, our children—who are the alibis for this; that is to say, we feel we must go on living because we are responsible for bringing up the succeeding generations. But all we do by this is that they catch the same attitude from us. And they’re going to drag on for the sake of their children, who are going to learn to drag on for the sake of their children. Well isn’t that great? This is simply a system of hereditary stupidity.
Your body is not just what is inside your skin, your body includes what you call the external world. The skin doesn’t divide you from nature, it joins you to it. Because the skin is simply a spongy, porous membrane through which you breathe and through which your nerve ends have contact with everything outside it. It’s the bridge between you and the outside. And you on the inside and it on the outside always go together.
Do you know the most fundamental important thing in all metaphysics to understand everything, all mysteries of the universe? You just realize that every inside has an outside and every outside has an inside. They just go together—as do, incidentally, black and white, light and darkness, and life and death. They go together in the same way as the crest and the tough of a wave. Did you ever see a wave with a crest and no trough, or a trough and no crest? Never was there such a wave. Did you ever see an inside without an outside? Could you have light without the contrast of darkness or vice versa? Of course not! This is the simplest thing that everybody should learn before they learn 1-2-3 or A-B-C. But it’s always left out.
It’s a little bit funny, isn’t it, that anything exists at all? Has that ever struck you? I mean, it’d be so much easier for there not to have been anything, because being is a bit of an effort.
Can you change your state of consciousness so that you don’t any longer have to feel that you are an isolated island of sensitivity locked up in a bag of skin? Could you come to feel that you are really, deep down, simply a particular expression of everything that there is?
What we need for our health at this time is human beings who have the sense of belonging, who have the sense that they really do come out of this world. Because people who have that sense are, in a way, better fitted to live in the world than those who don’t have it. They’re better fitted to live because they respect their environment. They respect the Earth as they respect their own skins. And you aren’t fit to interfere with the outside world—and you must interfere with the outside world, there’s no way of getting around that—but you aren’t fit to interfere with it unless you reverence it; unless, when you build a town you do it with love.
We are destroying our planet. And we are destroying it because we don’t realize and have no awareness of the fact that this planet is ourselves. The Earth is not merely our mother, it’s close to our heart, and closer still is the solar system in which the Earth moves, closer still to our heart is the galaxy in which the solar system moves, and the very heart of hearts is the whole system of universes and galaxies in which we exist. That is the middle of you, not something far off.