We feel that we are almost strangers in the Earth, even though we are just as symptomatic of the Earth as a tree, or a cloud, or the oceans, or a mountain.
Every individual is exactly in that situation. We have identified ourselves with a particular organism, and we’re interested in it. We’ve been very carefully brought up to take that point of view; to take one’s own side. And it’s taken many, many millennia to produce that point of view in us, and therefore it isn’t going to be easy to take another point of view altogether. We are myopically, in other words, fixated on what we call our own body.
We’ve got a marvelous contraption going inside us, whereby most of the things that go on inside our bodies don’t even have to be thought about. And so it goes very well. The only time we have to think about anything is when it goes wrong. We have this homeostatic process going on inside us, which takes care of temperature and all that sort of stuff; digests our food for us without having to think about that. And that’s just great. And another word for that system is democracy. Because we’ve delegated the authority for regulating our bodies to all the organs and cells and so on, and they manage pretty well. Another name for it is anarchy.
What do you want to do? Well, some people say they just want to paint or write poetry. Others say they’d like to ride horses. Others say they want to make money. And they laugh at the people who want to paint and ride horses, because they say you never make any money that way. But I always said in this kind of counseling: do what you really want to do, and to hell with the money. Because you will find out that, if you think that what you want is money, that that’s not what you want at all—unless you are merely fascinated in the mathematics of making money, which of course has a certain interest to it, because it’s like playing poker. But if you think you want money and that will make you happy, it won’t do anything of the kind. Because all the extraordinarily rich people I know are, for the most part, miserable. They have no idea how to enjoy themselves. They are either so absorbed in making and keeping the money, and defending it against other people and against the government, that they worry about it day and night. Or, if they don’t worry about it, they worry instead about their health, or their family relationships. There’s always something to worry about. It doesn’t matter how secure you are, how well off you are, there’s always something to keep you awake at night if you’re the worrying type.
If you want to control everything, all you will have will be a doll. But we want it to bounce back in an unpredictable way—but not too unpredictable. But there’s something else we want, you see? We want a relationship with a real living being. And that means you’ve got to let things get out of control so that you can be surprised.
Wouldn’t you really enjoy your life much more if you could see that there was, behind it all, the possibility that it wasn’t tragic, and that it was a tremendous celebration? Only that, on the way to realizing that it is, there are all kinds of things that go bang, and those nasty shocks and horrible surprises and difficult problems, because you would be bored if there weren’t. You have to wiggle yourself through all these mazes because that’s what there is. That’s the way we do it. Otherwise we get bored.
Sure, it’s full of differentiations. Look at it! But actually, these differentiations are all the dancing of a single energy, and you are that energy. And the thing that you don’t realize in the ordinary way is that all energy goes on and off. It’s pulsing things. So: now you see it, now you don’t. Now you’re alive, and now you’re dead. You see? And we, because of our limited vision, don’t see that that doesn’t matter in the least.
Begin to realize, you see, that you’re on a spaceship. It’s a big spaceship—beautifully equipped—and you’re going on a long, long journey. Because it’s not just the orbit of the Earth around the sun, the sun’s moving and carrying you along—and at a pretty good clip, quite fast enough for anyone.
Cosmic consciousness involves the recognition that everything is right or harmonious the way it is, that the universe is a terrific play of energy—this energy is you—but part of the game is that this energy myopicizes itself (if I may invent a word) and becomes identified with particular individual expressions of the pattern, individual bits of the pattern. And once that has happened, there is, as it were, a taking of sides. And you become identified with one particular wiggle, and therefore concerned with that one particular wiggle, and therefore eventually anxious about the destiny of that one particular wiggle. And that’s a result of your not seeing the whole thing.
This is what the mystic has seen, has become aware of, in some way. And the difference that it makes is this: having discovered that that’s what there is and that’s what you are, you then see that there is really no need to cling to life. That you are just what there is, what there will be, what there always was: this energy, this continuum, that’s at the basis of consciousness. And, having seen that, you get an enormous access of psychic energy. Because, in the ordinary way, you waste a colossal amount of energy defending yourself, worrying, fighting this and pushing that. When you see you don’t need to do that anymore, all that energy is available for something else—we could say for creative work, for just wonderful life, and goofing off, and everything. See? It’s all there.
Wouldn’t the best teaching be to say to people: why do you have any kind of religious, therapeutic, meditative practice at all? Why not just be as you are? “Eat when hungry, sleep when tired,” et cetera. Why something special? After all, we’ve never seen cats go to church with each other. I’ve never seen dogs practicing zazen. They don’t have this special thing they do. Why couldn’t human beings be just natural like that? Why all this hocus-pocus?
You can’t schedule your own enlightenment. You can’t say you must be enlightened every day at six o’clock—or when I want it. You do have to wait.
He was describing the tremendous liberative effect of trusting your own organism to do its own thing.
When you’ve got the hot water faucet on and cold water is coming out, and you leave it alone, and it keeps coming cold water, cold water, you may, with your fingers on the tap, be impatient and say, “Oh, it’s never going to come!” Sometimes it comes quickly. But this is the idea, you see: that meditation is putting your fingers under the cosmic hot water tap, and then you have to wait for it to happen.
When people do this and they get fascinated with what I would call the byproducts of LSD, they may get on a very wrong track. That’s what leads people to take LSD over and over again, so that they can have a marvelous time listening to Bach turned on, and seeing the way the music evokes color. Because, you see, as this process works, you get to the point where you experience the unity of the senses. But, you see, to do that is, in a way, to get lost in all the ramifications of the psychic world. So if you use things of this kind, you must be very careful indeed, because they are really nothing more than starters: to get a person who absolutely cannot understand what all this is about to take a peek into paradise, as it were, and see that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.
The real insight doesn’t consist in some exotic experience, it consists in the realization that ordinary everyday consciousness is it. That, in other words (if I may put it in the crudest possible terms), that you see quite plainly that what is going on now is what God is doing—and you are that. And just so simple a matter as picking up the pipe and chewing it is a completely divine act.