The art of living in the eternal now is not taught in our educational system. And it’s not taught because it’s thought of as being feckless, irresponsible. It isn’t irresponsible at all. It is everybody’s duty—I can put it that way—to enjoy themselves. Because if you don’t do that, you become a nuisance. You become aggressive, you become a robber, you become a thief, you become somebody who’s trying to organize the rest of the world—that is to say, a power maniac—simply because you haven’t learned the very simple, inexpensive art of living in the present moment.
Money is bookkeeping—nothing but bookkeeping!—and therefore the whole idea of taxation, for example, is a complete anachronism. The thing that is stopping the flow of the actual wealth of the world is this fixation on money. What you need to do is actually reverse taxation and, instead of charging taxes, issue credit. But you have to keep the credit balanced to the gross national product in some form of figuring, and then everybody can circulate what they’re making. Otherwise you’re in this ridiculous situation where people are starving in India, and we are hoarding food supplies and burning them and try and dumping them in the ocean, which is sheer insanity. But it’s all based on a psychological block about money.
It’s the same kind of illusion as that of the future; of the idea that the future is when we are really going to live. And if that’s the way you operate when you get there, you’re never going to be able to handle it because you still want a future ahead of you.
I was taught by my mother that I was Alan Watts, and I’ve never been able to recover from it completely!
Every sane society allows a certain number of people to deviate—monks, some sort of outsiders—and says: “You don’t have to join. You don’t have to play the game.” A society which is insane and unsure of itself cannot allow that to happen. It says: “Everybody must join. Everybody must work. Everybody must belong.” And then freedom disappears.
A person who is in a beginning state of evolution is just as marvelous as a person in a high state of evolution; just as much a manifestation of the divine dance.
There have to be people who stand outside the gate and do not identify themselves with a class, with a name, with an ego, with a persona, with a role. And a society which cannot tolerate that is weak and in grave danger of dissolution. A society which can tolerate it is sure of itself inside. It doesn’t have to insist on everybody agreeing with the way you see things. That’s the nature of democracy: to say you have a right to differ.
In not taking our civic political life too seriously, we can live it at a decent pace and stop from the idea that it is our sacred duty to impose our wonderful way of life on everybody else.
Life is an organization that will not work under dominance. It will only work by cooperation.
Everybody regards the nation as an entity that exists in its own right distinct from every individual in it, and therefore shifts responsibility to that—as if the nation existed; as if, in other words, the government were something different from you.
Being king, being in charge, is an operation that doesn’t work.
A highly organized system (where a lot of detail is going on) has to be a system of mutual trust. There is no way of bossing it. If you want to have it at all, you have to have it by letting go.
Every organic complexity works by the delegation of authority. Every organic unity is a system of love—that is to say: of mutual trust. It says: “Thank god I’ve got you around!” I often think about this when somebody does something that’s marvelous, and I think: “Whew! What a relief that you could do that and I didn’t have to!”
Supposing you’ve achieved something great, and you say, “No, it wasn’t my ego that did it. It was all these myriad little molecules and cells, each one of whom contributed to this extraordinary thing that I did.” See? You could go in that way towards infinite diversity, and say of everything that you did: “No, it wasn’t me. It was my people. It was all these little fellows who, each one of them, did it.” But to the degree that you go towards the infinitude of the little ones, to that extent you have a true sense of unity. Whereas if you don’t give any credit to the little ones, and you say, “Well, I just push them around, and so on and so forth,” you don’t realize how things are put together.
When the outcome of a game is known, the game is cancelled—because the whole point of playing the game is that we don’t know the outcome. Because the known future is already past, and the higher the degree of certainty of knowledge as to the future, to that extent it has happened. You’ve had it. And we don’t want to put the future in that situation—not really.
If you think of the cosmos as basically a game of hide-and-seek—where the lord god is creating the universe by forgetting that he’s god and imagining that he’s you—then this is the fundamental way of getting rid of the eternal boredom of knowing all about it, and of there being no surprises. The whole vitality of being alive is that it is always surprising. To be enlightened is to be surprised at everything; that it is a wonder, that everything is a miracle, that it is highly improbable and really shouldn’t’ve happened at all—but there it is, you see? If there isn’t that sense, there is no vitality in anything.
If we’re going to stop people from being dishonest, there’s only one way to do it, and that’s for people not to be dishonest. No other way that has ever been invented will prevent it. And if you think you can go on living by preventing people from being dishonest with you by rules and regulations and laws and policemen and all this kind of thing, you succeed in the short run, but, once again, in the long run you run into a total tangle.
People say, “Oh well, the law will take care of it”—the law won’t take care of it. You have to take care of it. And you can only be a law-abiding citizen by trusting your fellow men. And if you don’t do that, no one will trust you. And therefore, a system of mutual mistrust will exist, which of its very nature must fall apart. It cannot operate.
Biology is a system of transformation. Just as the waves here, you see, are a series of transformations in the surface of the water, so every kind of living species is a series of transformations of form.
This thing is so throbbing, it’s so enthusiastic in the way that it abandons itself and offers itself for my consumption, that one wants to say to it: “Thank you.” But this thank you is a loving thing. It’s a gesture of stroking it and calming it. Cut down the suffering. Always let compassion prevail out of a feeling of immense gratitude to this energy that turns itself into you all the time through pain. So that you—every individual is a murderer. The only thing in you that isn’t stolen from other beings through murder is water. Everything else in your body is borrowed; stolen from some other form of life by killing it.