The question that is absolutely basic for all human beings is, “What have you left out?”
Gee, I’ll never forget—there was a great Zen master I knew once, in New York. He was giving a lecture one evening, and he was dressed in his gold ceremonial robes, and he was sitting in front of an altar like this sort of thing—but he had a table in front of him with very formal candles on it and a sūtra scripture on a little desk—and he was lecturing on the sūtra. And he said, “Fundamental principle in Buddhism is: no purpose. Purposelessness. When you drop fart, you don’t say, ‘At nine o’clock, I drop fart.’ It happen of itself.” You know? And all these pious Western devotees, you know, kind of put their handkerchiefs in their mouths and tried not to laugh.
Every one of us is an aperture through which the whole cosmos looks out.
Every one of us is, actually, a pinhole through which the fundamental light—that is, existence itself—looks out. Only, the game we’re playing is not to know this. To be only that little hole, which we call “me,” “my ego,” my specific “John Jones,” or whatever.
You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath.
The total intelligence of this whole universe crystallizes in human brains.
