When you move from the Middle West and come and live in California, at first when you get here you think, “Well this is a fantastic place!” See? It is so beautiful and so lush and so on. And you stay here; after a while, in a few years, you start taking the place for granted—because it’s a constant stimulation of consciousness. Also, for example, when you’re listening to recorded music, there is always a kind of electronic hum. But we screen that out and ignore it. And so it becomes unconscious. Well so, in a similar way, there is what you might call a continuum, a something or other, in which all physical phenomena exist. And you ignore it unless, in some way or other, you can make it hum.
While it’s perfectly true that a statement about the ground of being is (from the standpoint of formal logic) quite meaningless, it makes an enormous difference to the way a person actually feels and behaves—whether he’s aware of the ground of being or not. The ground of being isn’t a logical proposition, it enters into human life as an extremely vivid experience. And the difference between a person who sees that and a person who doesn’t is quite startling. They behave differently—it may not be the way you want them to behave, but it’s sure different.
It’s important, then, to understand that to some extent this is a hoax: that we believe that the future is what we’re responsible for and what we’re supposed to live for, and that we say of a thing which we don’t think is any good “it has no future.” Now, when you contrast that—which is absolute common sense to most people living in the Western world; it’s the future we’ve got to work for—contrast that with the Indian Hindu/Buddhist idea of time, wherein which they feel that in the course of time everything falls apart, and that therefore there is nothing to be hoped for from the future.
It’s all based on the real relationship to the material, especially to the material moment, and working in such a way that you never strain yourself because you never rush. You don’t have in mind the goal, and wanting to get there in the greatest possible hurry. You have in mind simply that every phase of doing the work (which will eventually arrive at that goal) is as much worth doing as when you’re playing music: you are involved completely in the production of the sounds as they go along without hurrying them to reach the end.
That brings me, then, to this point that I will call the great diversion: the future is something you cannot work for for exactly the same reason that you cannot work to be happy. Happiness, it’s always said, is a byproduct, and it will accrue to you through becoming absorbed in something else altogether and some other quest altogether—the quest for vision, the quest for doing something, anything, may bring happiness. And so, in exactly the same way, the good future, the great society, the grand tomorrow, is never going to be attained by working for it directly. When you’ve got that idea—which is embodied just as much in the five-year plan as it is in the great society—of working for that thing, you will never make it. The only way you can get the good future is by a diversion from time altogether at right angles to the course of history. So what is important now, today, is to create a diversion of such splendor that people will forget about the things they think are important—all their squabbles, all their ridiculous projects for destroying the planet in the name of progress—and give it up, because they see something else is going on which is a great deal more fun.
This is the only way in which we can do anything about the future at all: is to create a diversion of doing things and living in a way that is non-hysterical, and that is—instead of preparing to live the great life as a result of all sorts of preparations—use what capacities you now already have for living the great life to do it. Don’t wait. And this will create a fantastic diversion from history. Then, you see, Man can attain sanity once again by becoming non-historical.
When I see a man getting ready to put the world in order, I know there will be great trouble.
When the outcome of a game is known, the game is cancelled—because the whole point of playing the game is that we don’t know the outcome. Because the known future is already past, and the higher the degree of certainty of knowledge as to the future, to that extent it has happened. You’ve had it. And we don’t want to put the future in that situation—not really.
If you think of the cosmos as basically a game of hide-and-seek, where the lord god is creating the universe by forgetting that he’s god and imagining that he’s you, then this is the fundamental way of getting rid of the eternal boredom of knowing all about it, and of there being no surprises. The whole vitality of being alive is that it is always surprising. To be enlightened is to be surprised at everything, that it is a wonder, that everything is a miracle, that it is highly improbable and really shouldn’t’ve happened at all—but there it is, you see? If there isn’t that sense, there is no vitality in anything.
People say, “Oh well, the law will take care of it”—the law won’t take care of it. You have to take care of it. And you can only be a law-abiding citizen by trusting your fellow men. And if you don’t do that, no one will trust you. And therefore, a system of mutual mistrust will exist, which of its very nature must fall apart. It cannot operate.
What you call time is not something into which you have been dropped, as if somebody had dropped you onto an escalator, and you suddenly found yourself carried by it. What you call the experience of time is you. It’s not something else altogether, you see, which is a trap for you. You are time.
If you live a life in which you feel you must survive, then your life is a drag.