I think we are under an illusion with regard to the nature of ourselves. This arises from the superstition that there are really separate things and events. And I pointed out that that is actually a way of thinking rather than a state of affairs in the physical universe.
When this is not perceived—when we are not aware of the total unity of the world, of the fact that one’s actual self is not something in the world, separate from it, but the whole works, and when you’re not aware that self and other go together, inside and outside, in such a way as to constitute one total body—then, because of this feeling of separation, of not really belonging, we feel alienated from our total environment and from other people, and so act towards it in a predominantly hostile way.
One might ask in conventional Christian terms: if there is a god, is god serious? And one would say: I hope not.
When I was (for a while) a minister, I used to tell the students—I was a university chaplain—and I used to tell the students that we were going to have a celebration of the holy communion on Sunday at eleven o’clock. “And I mean celebration!” I said. “Don’t come here out of a sense of duty. If you do, you’re a skeleton at the feast, and you better stay in bed or go for a swim or something. Because here, in celebrating the divine mysteries, we’re going to join the angels in making celestial whoopie.”
If you play in order to do better work, you’re not really playing. Because play is the kind of activity which does not have an ulterior motive. It is the kind of activity that is done for its own sake.
The most important thing in human life for one’s sanity is to be able to be playful or to be able to do things which are sublimely useless. Where, you see, there is no room in our lives for the useless and for the purposeless (in this sense of the word), we are in serious danger of going completely crazy. That was the original idea of Sunday: the useless day, the day that was timeout, the day when you weren’t supposed to do anything serious. It was holiday: holy day.
It would appear that our whole cosmos is a colossal effusion of splendid nonsense.
We are just nothing but a lot of tubes, swallowing food which goes in at one end and out the other, and that wears the tube out. But the whole thing is to keep it going by manufacturing new tubes by reproduction, and they’ll do the same thing, and so on, and so on. But so long, you see, as they’re all thinking that the point of doing this is that sometime, somehow, something’s going to turn up, they’ll always miss the point! They will always be there rather than here.
We look for this optimal point where there is a risk—there must be a risk, there must be chance, it mustn’t all be predetermined—because any game where the result is known is not worth playing.
When you get self-conscious and you watch everything you do because you’re anxious about making a mistake, you find: in that you’re all tied up and you can’t act. So, in exactly the same way, a community of people which is always watching itself through its agents, so that—you know, in a Nazi state there are not only the ordinary policemen on the beat, but there’s a block captain for every area, and there’s some kind of a sneak or traitor who’s going to inform the authorities… everywhere, you see; hidden—so this community is watching itself all the time because it’s a community that doesn’t trust itself. And a community which constantly watches itself is like a person who’s always watching himself and holding a club over his head to go CLUNK the minute he might be in danger of doing something wrong.
When any community of people is founded on mutual mistrust, it sort of loses half of itself. It becomes clutched up; it becomes paralyzed and unable to move.
Love is self-giving. When you love someone—say, you fall in love with a member of your opposite sex, or whatever, and you got mixed up with someone now—you’ve really committed yourself to heaven only knows what! Because love is a letting go of direct control.
Life really is not the avoidance of death. Death is the avoidance of death: the constant terror of death, the constant putting it off, the constant vigilance that one will not die—that is death! What we call life is, fundamentally, willingness to die.
A person who is not frank about selfishness is a big troublemaker.
There will always be the risk that, although you gamble, you may not always win—in fact, you may lose your shirt. But that’s the risk one takes. Life is taking the risk of death. And if you don’t take it, you don’t go anywhere. You don’t even step into your car.