What the world is, our commonsense assumptions about the external world, has quite obviously—and no one can argue about this—a great deal to do with the kind of sense organs we have. In other words, what the world is to the human eye is something quite different from the world as it is in relation to a fly’s eye, or even in relationship to a bee’s eye. Bees’ eyes are polarized, and they can tell the direction of the sun even on a cloudy day. So what reality basically is is not something that is there, outside, but it’s a relationship between whatever there is outside our skins and the kind of structure that is inside our skins.
When you consider this tiny little thing called Man in this way out situation—first of all, from whose point of view is this way out? You define the center any way you want to go. Because any point in the relative universe can be defined as the center of it. You make your center. And then, furthermore, what’s size got to do with it? Inside this minute little head here—and every little head round here—there is the most fantastic brain which is able to relate to this whole works. And that’s nothing to sneeze about. The very fact that this minute little center suddenly discovers itself to be like a crystal ball or a dewdrop which reflects all other crystal balls and dewdrops that there are inside it is pretty great.
Supposing there was at the beginning of this universe a great explosion that blew all these galaxies into space: that is continuous with our existence in this room at this moment. You know when you see an explosion go off—take a good bottle of ink and throw it at a white wall, and splash, you know? And then you watch as it goes out on the edge: all kinds of little wiggles occur, see? Way out on the extremity. Well, that’s all part of the same explosion. And we, sitting in this room, are complicated little things going on like the spray of a big bang that went off in the beginning. So we are still the big bang. It’s happening now, you see? It’s still going out, you see? There wasn’t a big bang that happened and then stopped, and then all this was left out here. It’s going on now, and we’re all part of it. And each organism, as it is defined in space, is not separable from the whole bang except for purposes of discussion. So we can’t say there was originally a big stupid bang that just couldn’t help itself, which later got all these intelligent things going. The production of these intelligences here is all part of the big bang. The big bang is, in other words, intelligent. And so you see how it is true: that whatever the big bang does, whatever little curlicues come on the end of it, these are all symptomatic of what it is. And that there are people around is symptomatic of the kind of universe that we live in.
I can voluntarily open and close my hand, but how the devil do I do that? I don’t know. But I do it, see? I’ve no idea how this happens, but I do it.
Here, then, you see, is the view of the individual no longer separated from everything that happens by being defined as an individual event.
You are responsible. You are a separate, independent source of actions. And if we like what you do we’ll give you goodies, and if we don’t like what you do we’ll bang you about. Now, just examine this situation for a moment. The people say to the child: you are free, you are an independent source of action—but the implication is: and by God, you’d better be!
When you’ve established deterministic connections between events in such a way that you are totally not responsible for what you do, the implication of this connection is that the events you’ve described are not disconnected—that is to say, they are all one event. And so you are the event. So you’re once again responsible.
You see, you have split events apart and you’ve forgotten that you had done that in the first place. Then you want to find out how they’re connected, and you invent a ghost called “causality” to be responsible for the connection of one event with another. Well, you don’t need the ghost. All you have to realize is that the split between the events was arbitrary. They were the same event—only, an event has varying features in it, just as a tree (which is a thing) has trunk and branches and leaves. But they all go together. You never saw a leaf growing in midair in no relation to a trunk.
We exist in our physical environment. And just as, when you watch the behavior of water you can see pulses in it, you can see forms in it, you can see patterns in it, so, in a very similar way, we are patterns of the universal energy. And just as a whirlpool is a constant pattern in water, but no water stays put in it, so in much the same way we are a constant pattern of physical energy in which nothing stays put. In the same way that a given golf club is “So-and-So Country Club” and remains such for years, but all the membership changes, all the buildings change, so we do. Because what the club consists in is a pattern of behavior. And so, too, we are patterns of behavior. But we are indissolubly connected with the entire universe, and when we die you might simply say the universe has stopped waving in this particular way that we called John Doe.
So if you look upon beings and everything as doings, as events, it becomes very simple to realize that if anything can be said to be doing us, it is everything there is; it is the whole total energy of the cosmos. And this is ourself if we have any self at all.
What sort of a gamble is worth making? Is life, is existence, a gamble where we should say: well, you’ve got to be kind of careful about this. Don’t get too involved, you see? Don’t put your shirt on it. Play it cool and cautious. Well, I’m going to ask: what are you going to win on the basis of that game? All you’ll win, you see, is anxiety. That’s all you’ll get. You’ll get enough goodies to make you go on being anxious.
What makes a game worthwhile? What makes a game interesting? And the answer is, of course, gambling is what makes it interesting. And you can figure that, at Las Vegas, some table there where there is one of those great Greek gamblers, and he’s been winning solidly and steadily all evening. And then, as a great show at the end of the evening, he suddenly decides that he will gamble all his winnings on whether the ball lands on red or black. Well, you see, everybody’s going to gather from the whole casino and come and watch that one. And if he loses—well, it was great. Because actually, supposing he wins: what does he have? Something to play further games with.
What you call your existence is at every moment a state of being given up. You are being disposed of. You are running away like a river. You are evaporating like alcohol. And what you call your existence is simply the process of evaporation, of transience, of passing away, and there isn’t anything to hold on to, and there is nobody to hold on to it.