In every respect, everything that the Buddha ever suggested that his followers should do was by nature of an experiment. Buddhism never uttered its final teaching; what it was actually after. All it describes are various experiments you can make to get on the road to it.
The whole game we play with ourselves is: I am not responsible. A person can turn back to their parents and say, “You got me in this mess! You two, males and females, were having fun in bed together, and as a result of this, you irresponsibly created me. And you didn’t provide for me properly—you were economically unsound or something, and I blame you for all this!” See? What an alibi that is! But all life is based on this game. And nobody will admit, you see, that the evil gleam in your father’s eye, when he was after your mother, was you. That same surge of life was just the same as you are, see? You stated the problem, and you can’t just blame somebody else.
People don’t ordinarily think this through. They say, “I’d like to go on living always. Please, I don’t want to die. Not yet, no.” But they don’t think it through. They say, “I want to go to heaven. I want to be reunited with all my friends and relations, and be happy forever and ever and ever.” You don’t realize what an absolute bore this state would be! You would be horrified if you don’t think it through. The point of the dialogue is that the teacher forces you to think through all your desires. Be careful of what you desire—you may get it!
You can induce hypnosis just with words, and they don’t even know they’re being hypnotized!
In the back of the mind of most Oriental people is a feeling that we don’t have: that life is indestructible. You don’t have it just once. It’s always there, it’s always around. There’s as much time as you need. Only: you don’t carry over a memory of it. Because if you could, if you had to remember, you would be bored. It’s so nice that you don’t have to. If you could think when you were a child, and how wonderful the world was because you had never seen it before. And you remember how your taste buds were so alive, and now they’re perhaps not so good? You’re used to it. Well, just by virtue of forgetting, you see, you can have life renewed again and again and again, and it’ll never be boring.
Do your best to feel yourself in to this point of view: what would you do if you hadn’t a care in the world? What would you do if you had no anxiety? Would you just sit down and do nothing? Would you really? I don’t think you would.
You could say, “Well, I live in a house, and the house is made of wood, and we could knock it around this way and that, but it’s after all only a house, and it has no feelings. Not like skin, flesh, and bone.” It is like skin and flesh and bone! You see, if you really understand the external world, it is your body.