Say you go to the movies, and you go to see some great horror movie, you know? Awful thing. Well, why does one do it? You want a thrill. And the whole of the universe wants a thrill. That’s what it’s all about. Otherwise it would be boring.
You must remember that the secret to all this is not to be afraid of fear. When you can really allow yourself to be afraid and you don’t resist the experience of fear, you are truly beginning to master fear. But when you refuse to be afraid, you are resisting fear, and that simply sets up a vicious circle of being afraid of fear, and being afraid of being afraid of fear, and so on.
The fact that you accepted a guru at all shows that you have endowed another person with much greater wisdom than yourself. That’s your opinion, incidentally.
In the theory of games it is absolutely important to abrogate omnipotence. Because you realize that if your knowledge and power was without limit, there were no obstacle to it whatsoever, there would be no way of realizing it. When we know for certain the outcome of a game, we don’t play it. We call it off and we invent a new game in which we don’t know the outcome. So power—whether partial power or omni power—will always be in a state of abrogating itself.
You are continuous with this environment. And although we have been habituated to looking upon ourselves as separate things, we are no more separate from what’s going on around us than each of these waves, here, are separate from the ocean, or that Mount Tamalpais is separate from the planet Earth. We have great freedom of movement. So do the waves. So do the gulls floating in the air. So do the trees waving in the wind. We have a larger degree of freedom than that because we are more volatile. But we are just as much waves in the total process—it depending upon us, and we in turn depending upon it.
You will find that the present moment, with all its particularity in which you live and are functioning now, is exactly the same thing as anything you could possibly conceive of as eternity.
It is a curious thing that it’s very difficult to get human beings to organize their energies for something pleasant. It’s only under fear, under external threat to their life, that human beings will really get busy and cooperate. So the solidarity of any group of human beings depends to an enormous extent on an external menace. And therefore, that menace is friendly to the solidarity and the cooperative enterprise of the group.
You will realize that the infinite nothingness into which you will disappear when you die was the same infinite nothingness out of which you came when you were born.
You will never be able to escape nonduality, which is what holds dualities together. So cheer up! The whole system is rigged! You’re it!
Nothing has any special value. Life is just a thing that goes nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooooooooouuuuooonngg blibb-blibb-blibb dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee KRRRAAOOWUPP dagga-dee dagga-dee dagga-de HWUPP, see? There’s something just happening. There’s just a play of energy, see? And there’s nothing to say in it that this is the right noise and that’s the wrong noise, this is the right shape and this is the wrong shape. It’s all just shape! It’s jazz with no discrimination as to what ought to happen, what ought not to happen.
Don’t worry about not retaining your personal identity. Because you would get absolutely bored with it if you could. Enough of it would kill you—and indeed does!
The mind that I am talking about is not merely your nervous system—if we will talk about it now in physical terms—it is not merely the nervous system, but it is the entire physical environment in which your nervous system exists and all the relationships operating within it. That’s your mind.
This is what Buckminster Fuller means when he talks about synergy. Synergy means—from the Greek συνεργός—“working together.” And he believes that any organization has more intelligence than any one of its members. And he therefore goes on to believe that the industrial complex of communication systems covering the face of the Earth is developing its own intelligence. And it will be much more intelligent than any one of us. And this may perhaps save the situation—we don’t know.