However terribly I suffer, and—what is still more difficult—however terribly the people I love suffer, there might be a theory of the world which would make it all more than worthwhile. There might be some sort of understanding to which I could come, and then in retrospect look back on all the things I had gone through, all the terrors and all the horrors, and say: I’m very happy about the whole thing. It all worked out. It is worthwhile, it is wonderful. What would such an explanation have to be?
If you could switch on any dream you liked every night when you went to sleep, and you could control it, and you could exploit all the possibilities of fantasy and imagination in thinking what you would like to dream, you would eventually get bored with being so well-controlled and with being so happy. And you would eventually have to—you would want to—have some dreams which you didn’t control, where you’d be surprised, where you would have adventures, where you didn’t know the outcome.
Supposing, for example, you find yourself (or you imagine yourself) in a situation where you can control everything, and you know always, therefore, exactly what is going to happen next. This would not—would it?—be a pleasurable situation for very long. It would be boring. And after a while you would want to get into a situation also where you were not in control, where things would occur to surprise you.
There occurs to people from time to time a kind of experience that we call cosmic consciousness, or whatever it may be, in which they suddenly see that this is so. They suddenly see that this entire problematic world with its horrors and evils and tortures is a play. That it is simply, as it were, life playing hide and seek with itself, frightening itself, scaring itself, screaming at itself, accusing itself, making itself feel guilty for a great cosmic joke.
Is there somebody observing what’s happening in your nervous system? Is there somebody watching what you see with your eyes? No. What you’re looking at is you. As your eyes are open now, resting upon this scene, you are observing the flesh and blood of yourself. That’s it. And there’s no “you” observing it. This pattern of lights and colors and shapes is the middle of your brain. That’s how the middle of your brain feels; how you feel—and not only through the sense of sight, but through all your fingertips, the drums of your ears, the taste buds in your mouth and your nose. All they’re conveying to you of the external world is you.
What we discover is that the world we know and the world we say we suffer is ourselves anyway. There actually isn’t a situation in which the hard facts of life impinge on and hit a person who is separate from them. We think of life as an encounter between a subject and an object, as if these two creatures—the subject and the object—came from opposite ends of God only knows where and met each other, and BANG! they have an encounter. Whereas if we describe human life in the simplest possible way without calling in any souls and spooks and supernatural beliefs, what we find out is quite the contrary: that experience is not an encounter. It is not an “I” meeting with an “it” or a “thou.” Because when I look at you I’m also looking at myself. These are inseparable. Yes, you exist in your own right. But when you look at me and I look at you, what we’re seeing is ourselves. We’re seeing our own nervous system. The more we know of others, the more we know of ourselves. There isn’t any gap.
This is the spirit which our present day world needs more than anything else: to see that what is truly important in life is what is frivolous. To see that it doesn’t matter two hoots that we achieve a certain success, that we win a certain game, that we live longer than we might live otherwise. What matters more than anything else is that “the king be cutting capers and the priest be picking flowers.”
When we look into another person’s eyes, and feel—you know how we turn away? You look, in the subway, at the person sitting opposite you, and you meet their eyes for a moment and then turn off—why? What are we afraid of? The thing that you’re afraid of in the other is you. Isn’t it possible? Isn’t it really possible that this stop? That the fear of looking at the other, touching the other, of recognizing yourself in the other be overcome?
What I mean by the joyous cosmology is seeing that all contests are faked; that it’s a “let’s pretend” battle because there really is no self and no other.