Biological existence is such that you have to kill to live. And vegetarians have no way out because plants also are forms of life—to the degree that they are aware (and they are aware to a certain degree) they think they’re human. And when you chew up plants, you are making a very painful experience for cabbages and carrots and things like that, and you can’t get out of it. And the only possible solution of the dilemma that we are in ethically—that we have to eat in order to to live; that being is killing—the only possible solution to this dilemma is to reverence food, and to cook it as well as possible, and enjoy it to the full. There is no other ethical response that is in any way possible to this situation. And also: you must, as a human being, remember that you aren’t the only pebble on the beach. That you belong—just as much as the fish and the cows and the apples—you belong to a mutual eating society, and something (in the end) is going to eat you.
The morticians are a very vicious group of people, because they are trying to deprive all those microorganisms of the proper human food when they bury them in formaldehyde and encase them in concrete things with complicated bronze caskets where—instead of giving the worms a ball—they just do nothing; they just rot there, you know, and become, slowly, more and more sort of attenuated and parchment-like, instead of continuing into the flow of the course of life—which is the proper thing to do: to make an act of respect to the Earth from which you have gained all this life, and give yourself back to it when you die. After all, it’s only courteous, and this keeps the thing running.
Very slowly, the human beings on the surface of the planet are realizing themselves into a total planetary organism with an electronic nervous system.
We have been brought up to feel separate, we have been brought up to feel actually disjoined from the external world—although that is pure mythology and doesn’t exist at all. You are as much part of the external world as a whirlpool is part of a stream. But we are brought up not to notice that.
What everybody wants is something to happen on its own. And everybody wants that.
Difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.
If you feel your body, your skin, and the solidity of you, and regard what marvelous eyes you have, which are the power which generate light and color out of all these electrical quanta in the external world. And these ears! These beautiful shells that you wear on the side of your head, with their little spiral bones, the cochlea inside—you know, all that? It’s marvelous! But you don’t feel responsible for this. You don’t know how it’s made (if it is made). But it’s you! That’s what you are: that extraordinary pattern—beautiful, gorgeous, wonderful arabesque of tubes and bones and cartilage, and myriads of interconnecting electronics and nervous systems, and everything wonderful. See? But the point is: most people don’t own this. They don’t say, “This is me.” They say, “Well, it’s some kind of very clever machine which the lord God made out of his infinite wisdom and put me in it.” And this is a very limited view.
If all those the bones and subtleties inside you feel other than your conscious ego, but nevertheless are one with it, the same argument will go for all the other things going on around you. The sun shining, the stars twinkling, the wind blowing, and the great ocean restlessly pounding against these cliffs—that’s you, too. You don’t control it, of course, because there has to be something about you you don’t control, or you wouldn’t be you.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse—ran away. And all the neighbors came around that evening and said, “That’s too bad.” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day, the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it. And all the neighbors came around and said, “Why, that’s great, isn’t it?” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day his son was attempting to tame one of these horses, and was riding it, and was thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbors came ’round in the evening and said, “Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it?” And the farmer said, “Maybe.” And the next day the conscription officers came around looking for people for the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors came ’round that evening and said, “Isn’t that wonderful!” And he said, “Maybe.”
The whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequences of a misfortune, or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
You have within you the most amazing logical analyzer that exists in the known world. And the point is to get it to work for you.
Regard yourself as a cloud in the flesh. Because, you see, clouds never make mistakes. Did you ever see a cloud that was misshapen? Did you ever see a badly designed wave? No. They always do the right thing. So, as a matter of fact, do we. Because we are natural beings just like clouds and waves. Only, we have complicated games which cause us to doubt ourselves. But if you will treat yourself for a while as a cloud or wave, and realize that you can’t make a mistake whatever you do—because even if you do something that seems to be totally disastrous, it’ll all come out in the wash somehow or other—then, through this capacity, you will develop a kind of confidence. And through confidence you will be able to trust your own intuition.
There was (according to certain cosmological theories today) a primordial explosion which blew up and created the universe. And you know how it is when you take a bottle of ink and you throw it at a white wash wall, smash, like that, and it goes splat all over the place? There’s a big blob in the center. And then, as it goes out, it gets all sorts of little curlicues and wiggles. So, you see, the cosmic explosion is still happening. It takes a long time from that big essential bang for the whole thing to go whoosh. Takes billions of years for it to happen, and it’s still happening. And we’re the little curlicues out on the edge, see? And we are connected. We are part of the central explosion that originally happened. That, in a certain sense, is in you. You are still manifesting it.