The original sin is not (as some people suppose) sexual intercourse, it is pride. It is taking the control of the world into one’s own hands instead of being spontaneous.
There’s always this little worm at the center of things where you know and become conscious of a certain element of irreducible rascality in you that lies at the very core of the will. And the question is: how do you will to abandon your will? You see? That’s the problem: you must try not to try. You must freely give up your freedom.
Do you see that the preachers don’t get it across? Because they don’t swing! They don’t realize that this word, “Alleluia,” is a kind of dance word. It’s almost like scat singing, where all the meaning goes out of the language and it’s just rhythm. It’s just sheer exuberance. And Dante makes this by saying that these angels surrounding God have found It, they found the point, and there’s no need for anything else, and the point has no point beyond being the point. It doesn’t serve any end beyond itself. It’s It! You’re there! You’ve arrived! And they just go out of their minds. And so that is really what even the most orthodox Christianity is after if you will press the preacher and get him to follow the logic of his own belief.
As our communication system has spread beyond the Mediterranean, it is perfectly inevitable that our culture and our religions have to exist in the context of others. And the very fact that this happens automatically changes their meaning whether you like it or not, just as the contexts of words changes the meaning of the individual words.
The more you realize this, the more you realize that you cannot escape responsibility—for all the horrors that are going on in the world. After all, you don’t live except by eating dead creatures, even if you’re a vegetarian. The soft, luscious vegetables: the lettuce suffers in its own particular way when you crunch it. And so the grapes when you squeeze them to make your wine and the wheat grains when you grind them up to make your bread: they suffer. You bet they suffer! Certainly the pigs and the cows and the sheep do when we slay them for our entrée. And so you can’t live at all without crucifying something; without sticking nails into it and spikes.
The beginning of the creation is dismembering, the fulfillment of it is remembering: finding out again who you are, ceasing to be lost.
But you see what’s happened: the thing has become radial instead of addressed to a throne. The picture is: the deity—in other words, the divine point—is moving into the center. Where is that? “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” You see? Instead of being something “out there.”
What does it mean that I am at this predicament? What does it mean? What it means is that your conception and sense of yourself as a separate ego is phony. That this self that you have imagined yourself to be is a māyā, an illusion, and you found out that it is because you found out that it’s impotent. It can’t do something. There’s really something that has to be done, but you can’t do it. Also, you can’t help by not doing it. The ego is incapable of either because it is a hoax. It’s a very interesting hoax, and it’s been worthwhile having this drama, but drama it was.
What about your fingers? Are they puppets? To whom? Are you your fingers? Are you not your fingers? Surely your fingers are integrally you. They’re not parts of you, they are as much you as your head is. It’s true, you can survive with your fingers or your arm chopped off, but human beings ordinarily don’t come that way. Having fingers is just as much part of being human as having a head. So they’re not puppets. They move by themselves, see? It’s one of the most interesting things about human fingers. And yet, they’re you—just as we move around by ourselves, and yet we’re something a lot more than that.
Take the famous Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus says, “Be not anxious for your life; what you shall eat, what you shall drink, and what you shall put on. For is not living more than meat? Is not the body more than clothes?” And then he says, “Look at the wild birds who do not sow”—or they practice no agriculture, they don’t gather things into barns—“and yet your father in heaven feeds them.” All that. Everybody always says: “Of course, nobody can practice the Sermon on the Mount. No sensible, provident person would dream of following this advice.” Then why is it offered? It’s saying, you see: you ought to go back to the life of spontaneity, of not making plans for the future; the life of impulse. The implication is: why can’t you? Figure that one out.