The best kind of future we can envisage is one in which we get rid of the idea of the future as an area of experience which solves problems. It doesn’t.
A person who is converted to an unselfish style of life by preaching is always a hypocrite—because he’s not really been changed. He’s trying to change. He knows he ought to change. He feels guilty because of the style of life which he has lived in the past, and out of the energy of that sense of guilt tries to reform. But because he still experiences himself fundamentally as a separate ego, all his new style of life is attempted love of other people. His morality is a fake. And that’s why it is so true that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. That is why do-gooders create so much trouble. That is why, eventually, the do-gooder resorts to violence, and employs the police to do for you what is good for you. He’ll shoot you for your own best interests. That’s where it ends up.
The thing is, we don’t know what it is, and we are scared stiff to admit that we don’t know—that we are in the grip of a fantastic miracle, and that the biggest miracle in the whole thing is what we call “yourself.” That’s the thing you should be scared to death of: you!
The point is not simply that you are getting rid of an idea and doing without, as if it were an impoverishment. Getting rid of the idea of God is an enrichment, because it opens you up to experience the reality instead of the idea. I call it spiritual window cleaning.
The law written in the heart, you see, is entirely different from the law imposed from above.
If you obey out of the fear of divine power, your actions are not significantly moral. Your actions are significantly moral only if they are done out of love. And love would not be motivated by fear.
Why can’t you love—really, genuinely, completely? The answer is: you’re hung up on the idea that you are a separate ego: cut off, alone. You really believe you’re that. So let’s test this ego out by trying to get it to do this, and trying to get it to do that—all those things it’s supposed to be capable of doing. You discover that you’re not capable of doing them. And the reason you’re not capable of doing them is that you, as a separate individual, don’t exist. You’re a hallucination in that sense. And that’s what has to be discovered. And you can’t find that out by just telling people that it’s so; they won’t believe it. You can only dissolve an illusion by getting people to act on it as if it were true, and act on it consistently, persistently, and thoroughly. Then it all falls apart. It doesn’t work.
There is a Latin saying from the poet Lucretius: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum—“too much religion is apt to encourage evil.” And so, somehow, always, I’m suspicious of religious people. When somebody comes on with a great spiel about idealism and what you ought to do and this and that, I know he’s a rascal. But when I meet somebody who from the very beginning of our association admits that he’s a rascal, I feel safer.
The only way to change human behavior is to woo instead of preach, to make love instead of threatening disaster, to point out how glorious something could be, and in some way to live it.
The only possibly harmonious religion for mankind could be one which has in it no ideology. It would have no doctrines, so there would be nothing to argue about.
There is absolutely no occasion upon which anyone and everyone—as people who live on this geographical expression called the United States—there is no occasion on which we get together for a kind of ritual of mutual agreement and love and so on. It doesn’t exist. That’s what the rites of a religion were supposed to be.
When I was a minister, I used to tell the students at Northwestern University, “So there’s going to be a celebration of the Holy Communion 7 o’clock next Sunday. 11 o’clock.” And I said, “Now look: I said celebration. And if you come here because you think you ought to come, we don’t want you. Better stay in bed, go for a swim, or something else. But if you want to join with us in this act of celestial whoopee, you’re very welcome.” I came right out and said that, you see—so I had to leave the church. This is the essential thing that we lack. We just don’t have this social institution.
The secret of life is that there is no secret.
So long as you talk about the class of people who know how to suspend thinking, how to relate to the world directly, how therefore to transcend the division between I and thou, ego and universe—so long as you’re talking about it, you always make those people a special class and, as it were, project upon them that they’re playing the special game “I am holier than you are.” And that’s religion.