Cities that look like rubbish heaps scattered all over the most beautiful mountain country in the plains.
 What a gorgeous country, speaking of the territory. How hideous, speaking of the map.
 Because material is not reverent, is not respected. Everything is being turned into plastic.
 Poison gas, smog, fake surface sort of life, see?
 Now this is because when you look at the world as a piece of machinery,
 you know perfectly well that all machinery is stupid.
 If we are nothing but a product of blind energy, in other words, if human reason, intelligence, love, is nothing but fluke,
 it is a result of a gyration of energy as if a million monkeys had been typing for a million years on a million typewriters,
 the chances are that maybe at some point of time they would type out the Encyclopedia Britannica.
 And so we have been brought up to feel that that is the sort of result we are.
 We are the Encyclopedia Britannica typed out by the monkeys.
 Now that's what you really believe. There are religious people here.
 And I'm talking of religious people in the sense of those who are faithful attendants of the standard brand religions.
 You know, Episcopalian, Roman Catholic, Southern Baptist, Reformed Jewish, whatever.
 You don't believe in your religions. You think you ought to believe in them.
 And you feel guilty because you don't. But you don't. If you did, you'd be screaming in the streets.
 So the clergymen get up every Sunday and they say, "Dear people, you really ought to have faith. We all ought to have faith.
 We don't have strong enough faith. If we really had faith, we'd be able to move mountains."
 You don't hear that kind of sermon when people have faith.
 So the thing has become implausible in those terms.
 And therefore we are left with a mechanism because we inherit the idea of the mechanism
 through the notion that the world has been made as something is put together from separate parts and constructed.
 So we look upon everything that exists as an object.
 Say, well, you know, it's like you put this podium together, for example.
 You do this and you do this and this and slap it all together.
 And there are, let's stand aside from it and measure it properly in all directions and we can take an objective view.
 Of course, we are civilized. We don't regard the podium as a living being.
 You know, who would dream of addressing the podium and saying, "How do you do?"
 I trust that this evening your spirit will be congenial with mine and that we won't get in each other's way.
 So that's mere animistic superstition.
 So it's an object and we can stand aside from it and examine it and measure it and look at it
 and we take that attitude in our sciences to everything until we get to quantum mechanics.
 That's another story.
 But the ordinary common sense attitude of people is that the world consists of objects.
 And furthermore, when you turn that back on you, take an objective attitude to yourself, as in behavioristic psychology.
 And then you start talking about unconscious mental mechanisms.
 You get Freud's psycho-hydraulics and everything becomes mechanism.
 Now obviously, everything that is an object is objectionable.
 And therefore, when we see the world as not life, as not having subjectivity, but merely being objectivity,
 we are going to destroy it.
 We are going to commit suicide on a grand scale because we don't want to be nothing but machines,
 something completely explainable.
 Why not?
 And this again goes back to the great deep roots of religion.
 You see, the objective of technology is to control everything.
 To know the future so completely that it can be predicted, you see, and so controlled.
 We have the ambition to be God.
 And in the Genesis myth, where the Lord God tells Adam that he must not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge,
 knowledge of good and evil, the Hebrew words for good and evil are related to the art of metallurgy.
 In other words, they are rather more technical terms than moral terms.
 What is advantageous and disadvantageous rather than what is loving or unloving.
 So the fall of man is connected in this myth with the development of technology and of man's attempt to acquire power over the world.
 And so let us suppose then that you really could be God in the old-fashioned sense of Jehovah.
 We are not going to talk about any sophisticated ideas of Brahma or the Tao or anything like that for the moment.
 But just good old-fashioned Jehovah, like the kid who took too much acid in Los Angeles and turned himself into the police
 with a little note that said "Please help me" signed Jehovah.
 What would you do if you were God in that sense?
 Everything is known to you. Everything is under your control.
 You know all futures, all pasts and all presents. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
 What would you do?
 Well, I think you would say to yourself, "Man, get lost."
 Because you would be incapable of ever having a surprise.
 And that would be like making love to a plastic woman.
 So it says, I mean, in the Christian tradition that God then created man and also the angels with freedom of will.
 So that they would surprise him. You know, do your own show.
 But it never really came off.
 Because it was said, you see, you've got freedom of will but you'd better obey me or else.
 It's like saying to your child, "Now you're my child of course, but you must love me."
 All nice children love their mothers.
 And of course, naturally I want you to love me because you really want to and not just because I say so.
 And that is a trick known as the double bind.
 Which is damned if you do and damned if you don't.
 Because if you do, then you're a goody-goody.
 And if you don't, you're disobedient.
 And if you do it the way you're told to do it, then you're just a replica of your parent.
 And they wanted something different.
 Now there comes the plastic woman again, you see.
 Very difficult.
 So suppose then it was a different thing altogether.
 That God, and we're talking, I'm talking in a kind of symbolic language.
 Instead of making an artifact universe, manifested himself or itself or herself as the universe.
 Instead of being always lording it over everything, became totally involved.
 And in a certain way forgot infinite wisdom, power and knowledge.
 There's a hint about this in St. Paul, who always is so remarkably quotable out of context.
 But where he says in the epistle to the Philippians, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus."
 Who being in the form of God, did not think identity with God something to be grasped.
 But humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, was found in fashion as a man and became obedient to death.
 What an adventure.
 That's called the "Kenotic Theory". K-E-N-O-T-I-C from the Greek "kenosis" which means self-emptying.
 But there's also, that's the "Kenotic Theory" of the incarnation of God becoming Jesus.
 But there's also a "Kenotic Theory" of creation.
 See that God not simply became only Jesus, but you all.
 That's if anybody individually gets up and suddenly says, "I've realized I'm God."
 Everybody says, "Either you're blasphemous or crazy."
 And we'll give you the benefit of the doubt and send you to the lunatic asylum.
 But that's because you see, in our society we cannot accept someone realizing that he is God.
 Because we have a political idea of God.
 God as the boss man, based on the Cyrus's of Persia and the Pharaoh's of Egypt.
 That's where the imagery comes from. That's where even the titles of God come from.
 The King of Kings and Lord of Lords is the Jan Khan. That's the Cyrus of Persia, borrowed.
 And if you're going to look at God in the image of the Cyrus of Persia, that's idolatry.
 Every time you sing Kyrie Eleison, it means Cyrus have mercy on us.
 How can you as members of the Republic of the United States believe that the universe is a monarchy,
 if you think that a republic is the best form of government?
 If the universe is a monarchy, then a monarchy is the best form of government.
 See, that's how we're all mixed up.
 That's how, like, in the problem of getting exemption from the draft, because you're a conscientious objector.
 Or to claim that you smoke marijuana because it's your religious sacrament.
 Or the courts always say, well, do you believe in a supreme being?
 They want to say to you, is it in your conscience that you are receiving orders
 from a higher echelon of command than the President of the United States?
 And therefore it's always been terribly difficult for Buddhists and Taoists and people like that
 to register as conscientious objectors.
 They say you don't believe in a supreme being, you don't believe in a boss.
 But you see, therefore, the whole idea of the universe as being governed,
 and when you think of man as made in the image of God,
 in the sense of man being made in the image of the governor,
 you get fundamentally an aggressive attitude to the world,
 because the Cyrus of Persia ruled by force.
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