If I allow you to leave here this evening under the impression that you understand something about Zen, you will have missed the point entirely. Because Zen is a way of life, a state of being, that is not possible to embrace in any concept whatsoever.
When you let go, finally (because there’s nothing to hold on to), you have to be awfully careful not to turn into loose yogurt.
The understanding of Zen, the understanding of awakening, the understanding of—well, we’ll call it mystical experience—is one of the most dangerous things in the world. And for a person who cannot contain it, it’s like putting a million volts through your electric shaver. You blow your mind and it stays blown.
It’s fantastic to look at people and see that they really, deep down, are enlightened. They’re It. They’re faces of the divine. And they look at you and say, “Oh no, but I’m not divine. I’m just ordinary little me.” You look at them in a funny way, and here you see the Buddha nature looking out of their eyes, straight at you, and saying it’s not—and saying it quite sincerely.
And that’s why, when you get up against a great guru (the Zen master, or whatever), he has a funny look in his eyes. When you say, “I have a problem, guru. I’m really mixed up, and I don’t understand,” he looks at you in this queer way. And you think, “Oh dear me, he’s reading my most secret thoughts. He’s seeing all the awful things I am, all my cowardice, all my shortcomings.” He’s not doing anything of the kind; he isn’t even interested in such things. He’s looking at—if I may use Hindu terminology—he’s looking at Shiva in you, saying, “My god, Shiva, won’t you come off it?”
I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being schoolteacher-ish, and saying if you were nice people, that’s what you would do. For heaven’s sake, don’t be nice people! But the thing is that, unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. It’s too strong a current for the wire.