| When you opened your eyes on the world for the first time as a child;
|
| how brilliant the colors were; |
| what a jewel the sun was; |
| what marvel the stars;
|
| how incredibly alive the trees were… And to love again and again,
|
| and have people to whom we are deeply attached go to sleep and never wake up…
|
| and the laughter echoes only in one’s mind… but then the echo goes…
|
| the memory, the traces are all gone
|
| All your efforts, all your acheivements, all your attainments turning into dust,
|
| nothingness… what is the feeling? |
| what happens to you?
|
| The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe, it makes you feel
|
| that life is, after all, important, that there is someone who cares.
|
| It has meaning, it has sense, and you are valuable in the eyes of the father.
|
| But after a while it got embarrassing, the superstition, the myth,
|
| the absolutely unfounded idea… why does anybody believe that?
|
| So you become an atheist, and then you feel terrible after that because you got
|
| rid of God… but that means you got rid of yourself, you’re just nothing but a
|
| machine… And your idea that you’re a machine is just a machine too…
|
| (a machine in the system)…
|
| So if you think that that’s the way things are, you feel hostile to the world.
|
| You feel that the world is a neurological trap into which you somehow got
|
| caught… trapped… You run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and
|
| that’s it… that’s it… So if you’re a smart kid you commit suicide
|
| Now I want to propose another idea all together… The real you,
|
| is not a puppet which life pushes around. |
| The real you, the real deep down you,
|
| is the whole universe. |
| You cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the
|
| skin. |
| Your skin doesn’t separate you from the world, it’s a bridge.
|
| But just as a magnet polarizes its-self in north and south but its all one
|
| magnet, so experience polarizes itself as «Self» and «Other», but it’s all one
|
| What you call the «External world» is as much YOU as your own body.
|
| Most people think that when they open they’re eyes and look around that what
|
| they are seeing is outside… it seems, doesn’t it, that you are behind your
|
| eyes. |
| We haven’t realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil,
|
| being and non-being, come from the same center
|
| When you look for your own particularized center of being which is separate
|
| from everything else, you won’t be able to find it. |
| The only way you’ll know it
|
| isn’t there is if you look hard enough, to find out that it isn’t there.
|
| It isn’t there at all, there isn’t a separate you. |
| There are, in physical
|
| reality, no such things as separate events
|
| People can’t be talked out of illusions. |
| If a person believes that the earth is
|
| flat, you can’t talk him out of that, he knows that it’s flat. |
| He’ll go down to
|
| the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat. |
| So the only way to convince
|
| him that it isn’t is to say, «Well let’s go and find the edge» |