We, on the other hand, have devoted to the idea that work and play are quite different, and that you work and get it through as quickly as possible, get done with it, and then get money for it—which is all you wanted out of it—and then go and play; have fun. But, you see, how are you going to have fun? Because in order to have fun, you have to have things to have fun with and ways of having fun.
Realize that people who adopt various theories of the world are actually mythologizing.
The problem which is requiring an answer is, of course: can I defeat the universe? Can I, as ego, escape from suffering? Can I, somehow or other, beat the game and not have to take black along with white and darkness along with light?
You come back to yourself as a living organism, and see that the whole world that you know is inseparable from your particular organic structure.
If you don’t have a philosophy of the ground—as most people today don’t—you tend to disintegrate and you become victim of anxiety.
Your head is inside an enormous network of relationships—social relationships, linguistic communication relationships—and the total complexity of these relationships constitute the mind. They really do. Your individual head is no use whatsoever without all the others, and without all the relations going on between them. There is no communication that is purely inside one’s own head.
The intellectual life, the mental life, of any given organism is simply a node within a huge communication network.
You can’t make a person who knows that he is a separate ego unselfish. All you can do is to turn him into a hypocrite and make him pretend to unselfish actions. A person can only be unselfish when he has thoroughly transcended the egotistic point of view, and then proceeds to do what he feels like. Because then he can act in consonance with the sensation of social and cosmic unity.
People become a prey to anxiety and guilt when they feel no common ground with everything else. They feel cast off, not belonging. And so a certain sanity is imparted to people by a sense of common ground.
It’s happening every moment, you see, in your conscious interaction with the world. When you realize that you evoke the universe, that is the period of realizing the Supreme Self. When suddenly you feel a little passive thing, and that the whole universe is knocking on you, that’s the moment of plunging into manifestation.
The greatest lesson you can learn from ecstasy is that ordinary everyday consciousness is it, too.
If you look at it correctly, the musical instrument is itself an extension of the fingers of the player. It is a single process. The ingenuity of the artist comes and expresses it through the musical instrument, just as he expresses himself through and as his fingers, and as his brain. See, the brain is growing outside us. Did you know that? People used to think that the next step in man’s evolution was that he would get a bigger brain. And so in early science fiction books men of the future were drawn with enormous heads, like this. It’s not going to go that way. It so often doesn’t. We never guess it. What we’ve done is: we are creating a brain outside our heads. We are setting up a vast electronic brain with all sorts of interconnections which will span the whole surface of the Earth.
This thing, in other words, that we call life requires space, air, earth, ground, and all that sort of thing. And so we are joined by the space between us. But this is ordinarily ignored, just in the same way as our interest does not focus upon the inseparability of every conceivable thing.
If you don’t hear the interval between the tones in music, you don’t hear the melody. You hear nothing but a succession of noises. So, in the same way, if you don’t hear the interval—that is to say, that aspect of life which is unconscious, that which is death, and so on—if you don’t see the importance of that, you become deaf and insensitive to the music of the spheres—that is to say, to the sense of life.
This terrible fear that, when the wave enters its descent, that this is the end. Alright, let go! If it’s the end, let go and drop into unconsciousness. Because dropping into unconsciousness is the only way of bouncing back. Letting go completely.