It is very difficult to be powerful. It’s like being in charge of a runaway truck—which, if you stop it suddenly, it will simply disintegrate, and mustn’t be stopped gradually because it’s carrying urgent supplies to a disaster area. And anybody who gets in charge of one of these things isn’t really in charge, he’s simply at the wheel of a completely runaway concern.
When you get to be made president of anything, you find out that the show is actually run by your underlings. And although you can give them orders to behave differently, it’s another thing to see that they’re obeyed. If they’re to be obeyed, you have to have one policeman per individual. Where do you get the policemen from? And when you’ve got the policemen, who polices the policemen? Who, in fact, guards the guards?
The reason why you want to be unselfish is that you are selfish, and would have a better opinion of yourself if you were that way than some other way. But you don’t really want to be that way, because if you did, you would be.
What do we mean by “self,” anyway? That which operates freely and which isn’t pushed around by anything else. Well, in that case, the only real self that isn’t being pushed around by anything else is the universe—that is to say: everything. The which than which there is no whicher. And when it comes down to it, that’s you.
Although you can detach your ego, you can’t detach your body from everything else. Your body goes with an environment the same way as a flower goes with a field. You never saw a flower growing all by itself in mid-air. And so, likewise, you—as a psycho-physical being—are not divided from the rest of the world by a skin envelope. You’re joined to it by that envelope, which is full of tubes and nerve endings—all kinds of things that connect you to what goes on outside.
We may regard the individual as an aperture through which the entire cosmos is aware of itself.
Each one of us is a production of the whole universe—physically considered. I mean, we don’t need to invoke any occult special spiritual knowledge. It’s perfectly obvious from a physical point of view that we grow out of and in this galaxy. We are symptoms of it. And so, when you look down into the real middle of a being, you look into the middle of the galaxy.