You say, “I realize I’m always doing that. Tell me: how do I not do that?” I say, “Why do you want to know?” “Well, I’ll be better that way.” “Yeah, but why do you want to be better?” You see, the reason you want to be better is the reason why you aren’t—shall I put it like that?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because all the do-gooders in the world—whether they’re doing good for others or doing it for themselves—are troublemakers, on the basis of: “Kindly let me help you or you’ll drown,” said the monkey, putting the fish safely up a tree. We white Anglo-Saxon protestants—British, German, American—have been on a rampage for the past hundred or more years to improve the world. We have given the benefits of our culture, our religion, our technology to everybody (except perhaps the Australian aborigines), and we have insisted that they receive the benefits of our culture—even our political styles, our democracy: “You better be democratic or we’ll shoot you!” And, having conferred these blessings all over the place, we wonder why everybody hates us. See? Because sometimes, doing good to others, and even doing good to one’s self, is amazingly destructive. Because it’s full of conceit: how do you know what’s good for other people? How do you know what’s good for you? If you say you want to improve, then you ought to know what’s good for you. But obviously you don’t, because if you did you would be improved. So we don’t know.
I’m afraid very much that our selection of virtues may not work. It may be like, for example, this new kind of high-yield grain which is made and which is becoming ecologically destructive. When we interfere with the processes of nature and breed efficient plants and efficient animals, there’s always some way in which we have to pay for it. And I can well see that eugenically-produced human beings might be dreadful. We could have a plague of virtuous people. You realize that? Any animal, considered in itself, is virtuous. It does its thing. But in crowds they’re awful—like a crowd of ants or locusts on the rampage. They’re all perfectly good animals, but it’s just too much. I could imagine a perfectly pestiferous mass of a million saints.
More diabolical things are done in the name of righteousness. And be assured that everybody—of whatever nationality, or political frame of mind, or religion—always goes to war with a sense of complete rightness. The other side is the devil.
It’s like when I hear a lot said about love; the big love thing on the way. Everybody’s gotta love everybody! Everybody sings songs about love. Do you know what I do? I buy a gun and bar my door! Because I know there’s a storm of hypocrisy brewing.
Let’s take jogging, that deplorable practice: it’s a very nice thing to run, and to go dancing across the hills at a fast speed. But these joggers are jog jog jog jog jog jog jog jog, shaking their bones, and rattling their brains, running on their heels. Because there’s a grimness about it. It’s determinately good for you! See? Why do you go to school? No, now look, look—now, wait a minute, you may not clap when I’m through! There’s only one reason for going to school, and that is that somebody’s got something here—whether it’s a professor or a library—that you want to find out; that you are incredibly interested in how to write Chinese characters, or how to understand botany, and you would like to know. You are just interested in flowers and you would like to find out everything there is to be known about them. That’s the point of coming here. Or you might like to know how to practice yoga. There are courses now being offered at UCLA on Kundalini Yoga—for credit! Pretty funny, when I think back ten years. But the whole point of coming to school is that you’re interested in something. You don’t come to improve yourself.
I could conceive that it would be extremely enjoyable, something one could be very proud of: to make good clothes. Of course you need to sell them, because you need to eat. But to make clothes to make money raises another question, because then your interest is not in making clothes, it’s in making money—and then you are going to cheat on the clothes. And then you get an awful lot of money and you don’t know what to do with it. You can’t eat ten roasts of beef in one day. Can’t live in six houses at once. Can’t drive three Rolls-Royces at the same time. What’re you to do? Well, you just go make more money. You put your money back. Invest it in something else and it’ll make more. And you don’t give a damn how it’s made so long as they make it. You don’t care if they foul the rivers, put oil fumes throughout the air everywhere, kill off all the fish. So what? So long as you see these figures happening. You’re not aware of anything else.
How can you judge whether a guru is himself spiritually wise or merely a good chatterbox? Well, of course, you ask your friends, you ask his other students or patients—and they’re all, of course, enthusiastic. You have to be enthusiastic when you’ve bought something expensive. If you bought an automobile which turned out to be a lemon, it’s very difficult to admit that it was a lemon and that you were fooled. And it’s the same when you buy a religion or an expensive operation.