Man’s relationship to his physical environment is one that is now crucial in the middle of the twentieth century, because our technology gives us the capacity to destroy the planet—and not necessarily by atomic fission, but by improper ways of attempting to control the natural environment (both animal, vegetable, and mineral)—so that, more than ever, it seems to me of a practical import to go beyond the hallucination that we are separate from the total natural environment.
In both high school and college, what you might call practical courses are looked upon—unless they’re in medicine or physics or chemistry or something like that—they are looked upon as something for dropouts. If you’re in high school and it looks as if you’re not going to be very good at computation or verbalization, they suggest: “Well, maybe you should prepare for a trade and, alas, rather regrettably, you’d better go into the workshop.” Now, that’s a very curious thing, because what we’re doing (by having a form and style of education that is exclusively literate), we are training our children to be bureaucrats, bankers, and maybe a few professional people, or even teachers, where the system just turns in on itself: you’re training teachers to teach teachers to teach teachers. And, as a result of this, our civilization is very seriously impoverished in certain quite fundamental things.
When you can go almost immediately and instantaneously from one part of the Earth to the other, the two places become the same place. So when you wake up in Tokyo nowadays, you’re not quite sure where you are. You’re in a strange mixture of Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Paris. And therefore tourists—thinking about going, say, to Hawaiʻi or Japan—they invariably ask their friends who’ve been there, “Is it spoiled yet?” Now, what does that mean? It means: is it just like where we start out from? And if it is, there’s no point making the trip. Because once you obliterate the material dimension (the distance between two places, as I say), they become the same place.
A serious study of the psychology of religions and of their symbolisms must involve both a literary approach and an experimental approach. It is precisely for lack, you see, of an experimental approach that a great deal of religion (and also of philosophy and traditional metaphysics) has become of so little interest to young people in particular. They want to go further. And this is why young people are to such a great extent interested in expanding or altering their consciousness.
They said, “Oh, we’re just a little germ of life on a small rock that revolves around an unimportant star on the outer fringes of one of the minor galaxies. What do we matter?” What a put down that was, you see? They didn’t stop to think that the remarkable thing about this little germ was that, not only could it look at the entire cosmos and think about it, but that, by virtue of its nervous system, it was evoking this cosmos out of something which would otherwise be quanta, which have about the same order of reality as the sound of a hand playing on a skinless drum.
It is the complexity of the human organism, and especially its neurological aspects, which is in fact evoking the universe.
Every academic community requires the presence of a small minority of oddballs. If not, it’s sterile. See, we never really know who is crazy and who is a genius. Time tells. But at the time it’s very difficult to decide.
Everybody needs to spend a certain amount of time out of every 24 hours—or at least out of every seven days—out of his mind. If you are sane all the time, you’re unreliable. You’re like a bridge that has no give in it, and it doesn’t sway at all in the wind. It’s a rigid bridge, it stands like that—fixed, always. And that’s a very brittle bridge.
A political community that does not tolerate criticism is very insecure. I always remember, on Hyde Park Corner in London, you could get up on a soapbox and you could criticize God the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, His Majesty the King, the Prime Minister; say anything you like. The police would stand by and rub their chins and laugh. But nowadays, in our rather insecure political climate, you have to be increasingly careful what you say—especially in corporations and universities, where you might lose your job for being “controversial,” of all things.
Part of love is giving those you love the freedom of their own lives. If you were so possessive that you would feel yourself utterly crushed if an accident should happen to your child, it means you’re not really loving your child at all. You’re merely clutching your child as something that satisfies some need in you, which isn’t necessarily love at all.
Do you realize Buddhism—in its initial form, as far as one can tell—is a critique of the notion that survival is the supreme good? It’s never been proved that it’s good to survive.