Feel. Feel what is going on. You will be amazed to discover that you can feel no future and no past, you can’t feel anyone separate from the feeling that feels the feeling. All that appears to be not there at all. There is just what, for want of a better word, we must call “this.” And when you feel that thoroughly and find out that there is no future—never was and never will be—your anxiety to survive begins to diminish. Why should you go on? What is the point of going on? Everybody feels that it is a great thing to continue to be. Oh? Is that so necessary? Because you’ll eventually die. Everyone now is as good as dead. Because that’s one thing that is certain: that we will die. So we feel this colossal necessity that we must go on through future time. And if we can’t do it ourselves, we’ll produce children, who will produce children, who will produce children, who will always have this frantic necessity to go on and get somewhere. And nobody has any idea where that somewhere is. Fantastic!
I’m beginning to reveal an assumption that underlies our practical everyday conduct that we don’t ordinarily look at: whether it is better to draw out life in what we call a sensible way, make it as long as possible, or whether it wouldn’t be much better to make it as vivid as possible for a short time.
You don’t actually have to think of actions or events or processes as being caused or set into motion by things. That is simply a rule of speech, it is not a law of nature.
The more you probe into it, the more it runs away from you. Because it’s you looking at yourself. It’s like a snake chasing its own tail or a dog running after its tail. The more we explore into the atom, the more we explore into the exterior vastness. We’re really looking for ourselves. We want to know what it is. And it—obviously, it, the universe—is you. But that’s a thing that’s closed to Western knowledge.
Here we’re getting to the root of the matter: the basic hidden belief system that “I came into this world.” You didn’t. You came out of it. You are an expression of it. You are an aperture through which the universe is examining itself. Just as you have ever so many nerve endings in your retina which (by their multiplicity) see an image, so we are all nerve endings of a cosmos which, by the multiplicity, takes a not-too-prejudiced view of what’s going on. Because the cosmos is feeling itself. Don’t you like to feel yourself?
If we don’t know what we’re doing, if we don’t have this sense of the world outside us is the same as the world inside us—in other words, if you don’t realize that what you do and what happens to you are the same process—you get crazy, because you go on a rampage against what you call the objective world, the external world, other people, other things, and so have projects with a conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and so on and so on. There is no longer that fundamental friendly relationship between the subject and the object.
Isn’t it clear that what you call space is yourself? That’s your real mind, your true nature: infinite space. That’s you. Oh yes, maybe focused inside your head somewhere—but really and truly you are space.
Call in question your fundamental assumptions about who you are, what reality is, what is the good life, where you are going, whether it is a good thing to survive. Question them. See what would happen if their opposites were true. That is the task of philosophy. And if you do that, you will find that you have a far richer and more exciting life than if you don’t do it.
I don’t think we can make a successful experiment of that kind until we have a changed sense of our own identity. If you force the Marxist experiment upon people, it will be forcing a communal style of life upon people who are not ready for it, and therefore there will be something strained and false about it.
All society depends on our trusting each other. Now, we’re all untrustworthy. But there is no alternative than trusting each other, even though our trust may be misplaced. We must make that gamble. Because the only alternative to trusting each other is a police state—and who trusts the policemen? Do they have our best interests at heart? All governments become self-serving corporations with their interests at heart. So face it in a hard-boiled realistic way: we’ve got to trust each other. And there is no way of going on unless we do that.
As Jesus says, “Sufficient to the day is the trouble thereof. Be not anxious for tomorrow; what you will eat, what you will drink, or with what you shall be clothed.” And I noticed that ministers never preach on that text, because they say that’s impractical. It was alright for the boss’s son, because he knew he was God anyway and there was nothing to worry about. But don’t you know that? You see, the Gospel of Jesus is that you are all the son of God. That’s the “good news.” As ordinarily interpreted, I don’t see that the Gospel is good news at all. It’s very bad news. Because it’s the institutionalization of the sense of guilt: the guiltier you feel, the better you are in failing to come up to the example of Jesus. But the real Gospel is dynamite! And so it is this realization of the eternal present.
You must realize that institutional psychiatry—as distinct from certain individual psychiatrists, who are rather different—institutional psychiatry is the enforcement and guardianship of standard reality. Now, you know, if you’re in a funny state of consciousness—supposing you’ve taken LSD or something—the attending psychiatrist will ask you such questions as, “what is the sum of nine and seven?” You know? So that you know that. Because they see the world as real in terms of seeing the world on a bleak Monday morning, and also in terms of whether you are functionally able to drive a car.
We have such terrible public transportation that we have to drive our cars to work every day. Now, that’s an insane thing to do. It’s completely mad! I would recommend, first of all, to all of you who do commute to consider whether you might not use the telephone instead and at less cost. It doesn’t solve everybody’s problem, but there are many professions and kinds of work in which you could telephone instead of moving. Consider it. I’ve even got in touch with a telephone company about this so that they could go in competition with General Motors. You know, competition is a good Western custom, and they should play it!
First of all, go to your interstellar space situation, where it does not matter whether you live or die, and realize that state. Having realized that state, you can come back to the other states and live them with more verve.
We’re all present at the creation of the universe. This is it, today. This moment. Don’t look to the past for some big bang. The past will tell you nothing, because the past vanishes like an echo. But now is when it begins, see? Now is the time. Now is the day of our salvation. Heh! See, it begins right now! This is where it’s at!