Nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. It is grotesque.
The very motivation, the drive behind our demand to understand the laws of nature is to use them for the purpose of continuing the human species at the expense of every other form of life on this planet.
Sometimes we are so involved with our activity that we lose ourselves in it, and in that sense we are living in the moment.
The demand to be prepared for all future actions and all situations is the cause of our problems. Every situation is so different; and our attempt to be prepared for all those situations is the one that is responsible for our not being able to deal with situations as they arise.
Those who are marching into the battlefield and are ready to be killed today in the name of democracy, in the name of freedom, in the name of communism, are no different from those who threw themselves to the lions in the arenas. The Romans watched that fun with great joy. How are we different from them? Not a bit. We love it. To kill and to be killed is the foundation of our culture.
The body is not interested in your perceptions. It is not interested in learning anything from you or knowing anything from you. All the intelligence that is necessary for this living organism is already there. Our attempts to teach this body, or make it function differently from the way it is programmed by nature, are what are responsible for the battle that is going on. There is a battle between what is put in by culture and what is inherent there in the body.
You say that I am living in illusion. But poverty, work, war, they are not illusions. Are they? In what sense am I being deluded? What you experience through your separative consciousness is an illusion. You can’t say that falling bombs are an illusion. It is not an illusion, only your experience of it is an illusion. The reality of the world that you are experiencing now is an illusion. That is all I am trying to say. If you say that.
As a human body it is an extraordinary piece of creation. But as a human being he is rotten because of the culture.
I may sound very cynical, but a cynic is really a realist.
Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement.
The framing of what there is by the mind is what you call beauty.
The fear of extinction will probably bring us together, not ‘love’ or feeling of brotherhood.
I still maintain that it is not love, compassion, humanism, or brotherly sentiments that will save mankind. No, not at all. It is the sheer terror of extinction that can save us, if anything can.
Sorrow is there for you as long as you think. There is actually no sorrow there to be free from. Thinking about and struggling against “sorrow” is sorrow. Since you can’t stop thinking, and thinking is sorrow, you will always suffer. There is no way out, no escape.
If that idea of the meaningful is dropped, then you will see meaning in whatever you are doing in daily life.
You will be peaceful when all your ideas about awareness are dropped and you begin to function like a computer. You must be a machine, function automatically in this world, never questioning your actions before, during, or after they occur.
What I am emphasizing is that we are trying to solve our basic human problems through a psychological framework, when actually the problem is neurological. The body is involved. Take desire. As long as there is a living body, there will be desire. It is natural. Thought has interfered and trying to suppress, control, and moralize about desire, to the detriment of mankind. We are trying to solve the ‘problem’ of desire through thought. It is thinking that has created the problem.
The demand for permanence in every area of our existence is the cause of human misery. There’s no such thing as permanence at all.
You don’t actually know anything about that person or that thing, except what you are projecting on that object or the individual. The knowledge you have about it is the experience. It goes on and on. That’s all. What that really is, you have no way of knowing.
Nature’s laws know no reward, only punishment. The reward is only that you are in harmony with nature.
I tell you, when you stop doing things out of hope and the desire for continuity, all you do along with it stops. You will stay afloat.