When you try to describe completely the behavior of any living organism, you find that you cannot describe the organism without at the same time describing its environment. And that led to a very interesting thought: that the idea of a separate organism is false.
If you are interested in survival—and not mere survival, but an elegant survival—it’s necessary to be very wide awake to the ecological problem.
How do you know how to breathe? Do you think how to breathe? Did you teach yourself how to breathe? Did you have to go to school to learn how to breathe out of a textbook? No. You breathed as soon as the doctor who delivered you spanked you on the bottom. Nobody had to teach you. But breathing—from the point of view of physiology—is a very complex process. How did you learn? How did you learn how to grow your hair, how to color your eyes, how to shape your bones, how to make your glands give out their proper secretions? You never did learn it.
Is your heart not you? Is it just something you have? Is your brain—which we know less about than any other organ in the body—is that not you? Is it just something you have? If so, I ask again: who is “you”?
The objective of technology is to control everything—to know the future so completely that it can be predicted, you see, and so controlled. We have the ambition to be god.
What would you do if you were god in that sense? Everything is known to you. Everything is under your control. You know all futures, all pasts, and all presents. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.” What would you do? Well, I think you’d say to yourself: “Man, get lost!” Because you would be incapable of ever having a surprise, and that would be like making love to a plastic woman.
So suppose, then, it was a different thing altogether. That god—and I’m talking in a kind of symbolic language—instead of making an artifact universe, manifested himself or itself or herself as the universe? Instead of being always lording it over everything, became totally involved, and in a certain way forgot infinite wisdom, power, and knowledge?
The crisis we are in is the complete blowing up, the complete debunking (or self-contradiction is the best word to use) of the notion that success comes through force. Look at the war in Vietnam: shooting mosquitoes with machine guns, and we think, you know, we’re gonna just kick the shit out of ’em. You know? That sort of attitude; that sort of nasty, over-specialized male attitude, which is exemplified in so much of our population. Come off it! You’re not going to move anything that way. Real power is not force. Real power is falling, is using your weight. “All comes to him who waits.”
We can conceive a kind of stelliform universe, where the center of the whole thing is also the center of each one of us; where we don’t force creative action, but allow it to happen through us.
Any place in space can be considered as the middle of all space, because it’s curved like the surface of a sphere. Any point on it is the middle of it. Everybody’s in the middle. The tiniest little amoeba thinks it’s human. So don’t lose center, see? You’re it.
You’re in the middle. And the middle isn’t just ego, it’s the whole energy of the universe—and the most important thing we can do is to realize that.