Because it's too fundamental to give it a title.
 I'm going to talk about what there is.
 Now the first thing though that we have to do is to get our perspectives with some background
 about the basic ideas which as Westerners living today in the United States influence
 our everyday common sense, our fundamental notions about what life is about.
 And there are historical origins for this which influence us more strongly than most
 people realize.
 Ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use and of
 our ideas of logic and of what makes sense altogether.
 And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue,
 but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense.
 A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
 Now for example, a myth in a way is a metaphor.
 If you want to explain electricity to someone who doesn't know anything about electricity,
 you say, well, you talk about an electric current.
 Now the word current is borrowed from rivers, it's borrowed from hydraulics.
 And so you explain electricity in terms of water.
 Now electricity is not water, it behaves actually in a different way, but there are some ways
 in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricity, and so you explain
 it in terms of water.
 Or if you're an astronomer and you want to explain to people what you mean by an expanding
 universe and curved space, you say, well, it's as if you had a black balloon and there
 are white dots on the black balloon and those dots represent galaxies.
 And as you blow the balloon up uniformly, all of them grow and grow farther apart.
 But you're using an analogy, the actual universe is not a balloon with white dots on it.
 So in the same way, we use these sort of images to try and make sense of the world, and we
 at present are living under the influence of two very powerful images, which are, in
 the present state of scientific knowledge, inadequate.
 And one of our major problems today is to find an adequate, satisfying image of the
 world.
 Well, that's what I'm going to talk about.
 And I'm going to go further than that, not only what image of the world to have, but
 how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image
 of the world that we can manage to conceive.
 All right, now, the two images which we have been working under for two thousand years
 and maybe more are what I would call two models of the universe, and the first is called the
 ceramic model and the second, the fully automatic model.
 The ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of Genesis, from which Judaism,
 Islam, and Christianity derive their basic picture of the world.
 And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact.
 It is made as a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it, or as a carpenter takes wood
 and makes tables and chairs out of it.
 Don't forget, Jesus is the son of a carpenter, and also the son of God.
 So the image of God and of the world is based on the idea of God as a technician, potter,
 carpenter, architect, who has in mind a plan and who fashions the universe in accordance
 with that plan.
 So basic to this image of the world is the notion, you see, that the world consists of
 stuff, basically, primordial matter, substance, stuff, as pots are made of clay.
 Now clay by itself has no intelligence.
 Clay does not of itself become a pot, although a good potter may think otherwise, because
 if you were a really good potter, you don't impose your will on the clay, you ask any
 given lump of clay what it wants to become, and you help it to do that.
 And then you become a genius.
 But the ordinary idea I'm talking about is that simply clay is unintelligent, it's just
 stuff, and the potter imposes his will on it, and makes it become whatever he wants.
 And so in the book of Genesis, the Lord God creates Adam out of the dust of the earth.
 In other words, he makes a clay figurine, and then he breathes into it, and it becomes
 alive, because the clay becomes informed.
 By itself it is formless, it has no intelligence, and therefore it requires an external intelligence
 and an external energy to bring it to life, and to put some sense into it.
 And so in this way, we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts, as being
 made, and it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother, "How was I
 made?" or "Who made me?"
 And this is a very, very powerful idea, but for example, it is not shared by the Chinese
 or by the Hindus.
 A Chinese child would not ask its mother, "How was I made?"
 A Chinese child might ask its mother, "How did I grow?"
 Which is an entirely different procedure from making.
 You see, when you make something, you put it together, you arrange parts, or you work
 from the outside to the in, as a sculptor works on a stone, or as the potter works on
 clay.
 But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction.
 It works from the inside to the outside.
 It expands, it burgeons, it blossoms, and it happens all over itself at once.
 In other words, the original simple form, say, of a living cell in the womb, progressively
 complicates itself, and that's the growing process, and it's quite different from the
 making process.
 But we have thought, historically, you see, of the world as something made, and the idea
 being that trees, for example, are constructions, just as tables and houses are constructions.
 And so there is, for that reason, a fundamental difference between the made and the maker.
 And this image, this ceramic model of the universe, originated in cultures where the
 form of government was monarchical, and where, therefore, the maker of the universe was conceived
 also, at the same time, in the image of the king of the universe.
 King of kings, lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who thus from thy throne behold
 all dwellers upon earth.
 I'm quoting the Book of Common Prayer.
 And so, all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way, feel related
 to basic reality as a subject to a king, and so they are on very, very humble terms in
 relation to whatever it is that works all this thing.
 I find it odd, in the United States, that people who are citizens of a republic have
 a monarchical theory of the universe, because we are carrying over from a very ancient Near
 Eastern cultures the notion that the lord of the universe must be respected in a certain
 way.
 People kneel, people bow, people prostrate themselves, because the—and you know what
 the reason for all that is?
 That nobody is more frightened of everybody else than a tyrant.
 He sits with his back to the wall, and his guards on either side of him.
 And he has you face downwards on the ground, because you can't use weapons that way.
 When you come into his presence, you don't stand up and face him, because you might attack.
 And he has reason to fear that you might, because he's ruling you all.
 And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch, because he's the one who
 succeeded in crime.
 The other people are pushed aside, because the criminals, the people we lock up in jail,
 are simply the people who didn't make it.
 So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall, and his henchmen on either
 side of him.
 And so when you design a church, what does it look like?
 Catholic church, with the altar as it used to be.
 It's changing now, because the Catholic religion is changing.
 But the Catholic church has the altar with its back to the wall at the east end of the
 church.
 And there, the altar is the throne, and the priest is the chief vizier of the court, and
 he is making obeisance to the throne in front.
 But there is the throne of God, the altar.
 And all the people are facing it and kneeling down.
 And a great Catholic cathedral is called a basilica, from the Greek "basilis," which
 means "king."
 So a basilica is the house of a king.
 And the ritual of the Catholic church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium.
 A Protestant church is a little different, but basically the same.
 The furniture of a Protestant church is based on a judicial courthouse.
 The pulpit.
 The judge in an American court wears a black robe.
 He wears exactly the same dress as a Protestant minister.
 And everybody sits in these boxes.
 Like there's a jury box, there's a box for the judge, there's a box for this, a box for
 that, and those are the pews in an ordinary kind of colonial-type Protestant church.
 So both these kinds of churches, which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe,
 decorate themselves, are architecturally constructed in accordance with political images of the
 universe.
 One is the king and the other is the judge.
 Your Honor.
 There's a sense in this.
 When in court you have to refer to the judge as "Your Honor," it stops the people engaged
 in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude.
 There's a certain sense to that.
 But when you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life,
 it has limitations.
 For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit.
 This idea doesn't work anymore.
 Long long ago, physicists stopped asking the question, "What is matter?"
 They began that way.
 They wanted to know, "What is the fundamental substance of the world?"
 And the more they asked that question, the more they realized they couldn't answer it.
 Because if you're going to say, "What matter is," you've got to describe it in terms of
 behavior, and that is to say, in terms of form, in terms of pattern.
 You tell what it does.
 You describe the smallest shapes of it that you can see.
 You see what happens?
 You look, say, at a piece of stone, and you want to say, "Well, what is this piece of
 stone made of?"
 Well, you take your microscope, and you look at it, and instead of just this block of stuff,
 you see ever so many tinier shapes, little crystals.
 So you say, "Fine, so far so good.
 Now what are these crystals made of?"
 And you take a more powerful instrument, and you find that they are made of molecules.
 And then you take still more powerful instruments to find out what the molecules are made of,
 and you begin to describe atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear
 particles.
 But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff, because there isn't any.
 What happens is this.
 Stuff is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus, fuzzy.
 Stuff, the idea of stuff is that it's undifferentiated as some kind of a goo.
 And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy.
 When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern.
 But when you want to change the level of magnification and go in closer and closer and closer, you
 get fuzzy again before you get clear.
 So every time you get fuzzy, you go through thinking there's some kind of stuff there.
 But when you get clear, you see a shape.
 And so all that we can talk about is patterns.
 We never, never can talk about the stuff of which these patterns are supposed to be made,
 because you don't really have to suppose that there is any.
 It's enough to talk about the world in terms of pattern.
 It describes anything that can be described.
 And you don't really then have to suppose that there is some stuff which constitutes
 the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the essence of pots.
 And so for this reason, you don't really have to suppose that the world is some kind of
 helpless, passive, unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to inform and make it
 into intelligent shapes.
 So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today is not formed stuff, potted
 clay, but pattern.
 A self-moving, self-designing pattern, a dance.
 And we haven't yet, our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with this.
 Well now, in the course of time, in the evolution of Western thought, the ceramic image of the
 world ran into trouble and changed into what I call the fully automatic model or image
 of the world.
 In other words, Western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature,
 and it got that idea from Judaism and Christianity and Islam.
 That in other words, the potter, the maker of the world, in the beginning of things,
 laid down the laws and the law of God, which is also the law of nature, is called the logos.
 And in Christianity, the logos is the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as Jesus
 Christ, who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine law.
 So we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws, as if in
 other words, the laws of the world were like the rails on which a streetcar or a tram or
 a train runs.
 And these things exist in a certain way, and all events respond to these laws.
 You know that limerick, "There was a young man who said, 'Damn, for it certainly seems
 that I am a creature that moves in determinate grooves.
 I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.'"
 So here's this idea that there's a kind of a plan, and everything responds and obeys
 that plan.
 Well, in the 18th century, Western intellectuals began to suspect this idea.
 And what they suspected is whether there is a lawmaker, whether there is an architect
 of the universe.
 And they found out, or they reasoned, that you don't have to suppose that there is.
 Why?
 Because the hypothesis of God does not help us to make any predictions.
 Nor does it—in other words, let's put it this way.
 If the business of science is to make predictions about what's going to happen, science is essentially
 prophecy.
 What's going to happen?
 By studying the behavior of the past and describing it carefully, we can make predictions about
 what's going to happen in the future.
 That's really the whole of science.
 And to do this, and to make successful predictions, you do not need God as a hypothesis.
 Because it makes no difference to anything.
 If you say everything is controlled by God, everything is governed by God, that doesn't
 make any difference to your prediction of what's going to happen.
 And so what they did was simply drop that hypothesis.
 But they kept the hypothesis of law.
 Because if you can predict, if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved,
 then you've got some regularities in the behavior of the universe, you call that law.
 Although it may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word, it's simply a regularity.
 And so what they did was they got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law.
 And so they conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism.
 Something in other words that is functioning according to regular clock-like mechanical
 principles.
 Newton's whole image of the world is based on billions.
 The atoms are billiard balls.
 And they bang each other around.
 And so your behavior, every individual therefore, is defined as a very, very complex arrangement
 of billiard balls being banged around by everything else.
 And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself
 is, to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind energy.
 In say the metaphysics of Ernst Haeckel and T.H.
 Huxley, the world is basically nothing but energy.
 Blind, unintelligent force.
 And likewise, in parallel to this, in the philosophy of Freud, the basic psychological
 energy is libido, which is blind lust.
 And it is only a fluke.
 It is only as a result of pure chances that, resulting from the exuberance of this energy,
 there are people with values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and with love.
 Just a fluke.
 Like you know, one thousand monkeys typing one thousand typewriters for a million years
 will eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica.
 And of course, the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia Britannica, they will relapse
 into nonsense.
 And so in order that that shall not happen, because you and I are flukes in this cosmos,
 and we like our way of life, we like being human, if we want to keep it, say these people,
 we've got to fight nature, because it will turn us back into nonsense the moment we let
 it.
 And so we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien
 to it, from outside.
 And so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature.
 We talk about the conquest of space, the conquest of Everest, and the great symbols of our culture
 are the rocket and the bulldozer.
 The rocket, you know, compensation for the sexually inadequate male.
 So we're going to conquer space.
 You know, we're in space already, way out.
 If anybody cared to be sensitive and let what's outside space come to you, you can, if your
 eyes are clear enough, aided by telescopes, aided by radio astronomy, aided by all the
 kind of sensitive instruments we can devise, we are as far out in space as we're ever going
 to get.
 But, you know, sensitivity isn't the pitch, especially in the WASP culture of the United
 States.
 We define manliness in terms of aggression.
 You see, because we're a little bit frightened as to whether we are really men.
 And so we put on this great show of being a tough guy.
 It's completely unnecessary.
 You know, if you have what it takes, you don't need to put on that show.
 And you don't need to beat nature into submission.
 Why be hostile to nature?
 Because after all, you are a symptom of nature.
 You as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same
 way that an apple grows off an apple tree.
 So let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using apple as a verb.
 And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples.
 And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in.
 You as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same
 way that an apple grows off an apple tree.
 So let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples, using apple as a verb.
 And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples.
 And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in.
 Just as spots on somebody's skin are symptomatic of chickenpox.
 Just as hair on a head is symptomatic of what's going on in the organism.
 But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths, the ceramic and the fully
 automatic, not to feel that we belong in the world.
 So our popular speech reflects it, we say "I came into this world."
 You didn't, you came out of it.
 We say "face facts."
 We talk about encounters with reality, as if it was a head-on meeting of completely
 alien agencies and the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists
 inside a bag of skin, a center of consciousness, which looks out at this thing and what the
 hell is it going to do to me?
 You see?
 "Oh, I recognize you, you kind of look like me and I've seen myself in a mirror and you
 look like you might be people."
 So maybe you're intelligent, maybe you can love too.
 And perhaps you're alright, some of you are anyway, if you've got the right color of skin
 or you have the right religion or whatever it is, you're okay, but there are all those
 people over in Asia, Africa, and they may not really be people.
 When you want to destroy someone, you always define them as un-people.
 But we have this hostility to the external world because of the superstition, the myth,
 the absolutely unfounded theory that you yourself exist only inside your skin.
 Now I want to propose another idea altogether.
 You know there are astronomers, there's two great theories going on in astronomy about
 the origination of the universe.
 One is called the explosion theory and the other is called the steady-state theory.
 The steady-state people say there never was a time when the world began, it's always expanding,
 yes, but always as a result of free hydrogen in space, where the free hydrogen coagulates
 and makes new galaxies.
 But the other people say there was a primordial explosion, an enormous bang millions of years
 ago, billions of years ago, which flung all the galaxies into space.
 Well let's take that just for the sake of argument and say that was the way it happened.
 It's like you took a bottle of ink and you threw it at a wall, smash, and all that ink
 spreads, and in the middle it's dense, isn't it?
 And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets are finer and finer and make more
 complicated patterns.
 So in the same way there was a big bang in the beginning of things and it spread, and
 you and I sitting here in this room as complicated human beings are way, way out on the fringe
 of that bang.
 We are the complicated little patterns on the end of it.
 Very interesting.
 But so we define ourselves as being only that.
 If you think that you are only inside your skin, you define yourself as one very complicated
 little curlicue, way out on the edge of that explosion, way out in space and way out in
 time.
 Billions of years ago you were a big bang.
 Now you're a complicated human being.
 And then we cut ourselves off like this and don't feel that we're still the big bang.
 But you are.
 Depends how you define yourself.
 You are actually, if this is the way things started, if there was a big bang in the beginning,
 you're not something that is a result of the big bang.
 You're not something that is a sort of puppet on the end of the process.
 You are still the process.
 You are the big bang, the original force of the universe coming on as whoever you are.
 See, when I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as, Mr. So-and-so, Miss
 So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so.
 I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe coming on at me in this particular
 way.
 I know I'm that too.
 But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
 And so, what I would call a kind of a basic problem we've got to go through first is to
 understand that there are no such things as things.
 That is to say, separate things or separate events.
 That that is only a way of talking.
 If you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems.
 I once asked a group of high school children, "What do you mean by a thing?"
 And first of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms.
 They said, "It's an object," which is simply another word for a thing.
 It doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing.
 And finally, a very smart girl from Italy who was in the group said, "A thing is a noun."
 She was quite right.
 A noun isn't a part of nature, it's part of speech.
 There are no nouns in the physical world.
 There are no separate things in the physical world either.
 See, the physical world is wiggly.
 It's something like this.
 Maybe that's a cloud.
 The clouds, mountains, trees, people are all wiggly.
 And only when human beings get working at things, they build buildings in straight lines
 and try and make out that the world isn't really wiggly.
 But here, we're sitting in this room all built on straight lines, but each one of us
 is as wiggly as all get out.
 Now then, when you want to get control of something that wiggles, it's pretty difficult,
 isn't it?
 You try and pick up a fish in your hands, and the fish is wiggly and it slips out.
 What do you do to get hold of a fish?
 You use a net.
 And so the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world.
 So if you want to get hold of this wiggle, you've got to put a net over it.
 You see, now what's going to happen?
 A net is something regular, and I can number the holes in a net.
 So many so holes up, so many holes across.
 And if I can number these holes, I can count exactly where each wiggle is in terms of a
 hole in that net.
 And that's the beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world.
 But in order to do that, I've got to break up the wiggle into bits.
 I've got to call this a specific bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle, and this
 the next bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle.
 And so these bits are things, or events.
 Bits of wiggles, which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle, in order to measure
 it, and therefore in order to control it.
 But in nature, in fact, in the physical world, the wiggle isn't bitted.
 Like you don't get a cut-up fryer out of an egg.
 But you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it.
 You bite it.
 But it doesn't come bitten.
 So the world doesn't come thinged.
 It doesn't come invented.
 You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous
 with the ocean.
 The ocean waves, and the universe peoples.
 And as the wave, I wave at you and say "You!"
 The world is waving at you, at me, with you.
 And saying "Hi, I'm here."
 But we, our consciousness, the way we feel and sense our existence.
 Being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things, our consciousness
 has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that.
 We feel, we have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized, by social convention, into feeling
 and sensing that we exist only inside our skins.
 That we are not the original bang, but just something out on the end of it.
 And therefore we are scared stiff.
 My wave is going to disappear.
 And I'm going to die.
 And that would be awful.
 We've got a mythology going now, which as Father Maskell put it, we are nothing but
 something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium.
 And that's it.
 And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.
 Now, this is what people really believe today.
 You may go to church, you may say you believe in this, that and the other.
 But you don't.
 Even Jehovah's Witnesses, who are the most fundamentalist fundamentalists, they are polite
 when they come round and knock at the door.
 But if you really believed in Christianity, you would be screaming in the streets.
 But nobody does.
 You would be taking full-page ads in the paper every day.
 You would have the most terrifying television programs.
 The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believed what they teach.
 But they don't.
 They hope, they think they ought to believe what they teach.
 They believe they should believe, but they don't believe it.
 Because what we really believe is the fully automatic model.
 And that is our basic plausible common sense.
 You are a fluke.
 You are a separate event.
 And you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it, baby.
 That's it.
 Now why does anybody think that way?
 There's no reason to, because it isn't even scientific.
 It's just a myth.
 And it's invented by people who wanted to feel a certain way.
 They want to play a certain game.
 The game of God got embarrassing.
 The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe, is good.
 It makes you feel that life is after all important.
 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 gets embarrassing.
 You realize that everything you do is being watched by God.
 He knows your tiniest, inmost feelings and thoughts.
 And you say after a while, quit bugging me.
 I don't want you around.
 So you become an atheist.
 Just to get rid of it.
 Then you feel terrible after that, because you got rid of God, but that means you got
 rid of yourself.
 You are just nothing but a machine.
 And your idea that you are a machine is just a machine too.
 So if you are a smart kid, you commit suicide.
 Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or
 not to commit suicide.
 I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions.
 The first one is who started it.
 The second is are we going to make it.
 The third is where are we going to put it.
 The fourth is who is going to clean up.
 And the fifth, is it serious.
 But still, should you or not commit suicide, this is a good question.
 Why go on?
 And you only go on if the game is worth the candle.
 Now the universe has been going on for an incredible long time.
 And so really, a satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that is worth betting
 on.
 That is a very, it seems to me, absolutely elementary common sense.
 If you make a theory of the universe which isn't worth betting on, why bother?
 Just commit suicide.
 But if you want to go on playing the game, you've got to have an optimal theory for playing
 the game.
 Otherwise there's no point in it.
 But the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very
 funny game.
 What they wanted to say was this.
 All you people who believe in religion are old ladies and wishful thinkers.
 You've got a big daddy up there and you want to comfort and thing, but life is rough.
 Life is tough and success goes to the most hard-headed people.
 That was a very convenient theory when the European-American world was colonizing the
 natives everywhere else.
 They said, "We are the end product of evolution and we are tough.
 I'm a big strong guy because I face facts and life is just a bunch of junk and I'm going
 to impose my will on it and turn it into something else.
 And I'm real hard."
 See, that's a way of flattering yourself.
 And so it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world
 works.
 In academic circles, no other theory of the world than the fully automatic model is respectable.
 Because if you're an academic person, you've got to be an intellectually tough person.
 You've got to be prickly.
 There are basically two kinds of philosophy.
 One's called prickles, the other's called goo.
 And prickly people are precise, rigorous, logical.
 They like everything chopped up and clear.
 Goo people like it vague.
 For example, in physics, prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of matter are
 particles.
 Goo people believe it's waves.
 And in philosophy, prickly people are logical positivists and goo people are idealists.
 And they're always arguing with each other.
 And what they don't realize is that neither one can take his position without the other
 person.
 Because you wouldn't know you advocated prickles unless it was somebody else advocating goo.
 You wouldn't know what a prickle was unless you knew what goo was.
 Because life is not either prickles or goo, it's gooey prickles and prickly goo.
 And they go together, like back and front, male and female.
 And that's the answer to philosophy.
 See, I'm a philosopher.
 And I'm not going to argue very much, because if you don't argue with me, I don't know what
 I think.
 So if we argue, I say thank you.
 Because going to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what
 I mean.
 So I can't get rid of you.
 But however, you see, this whole idea that the universe is just nothing at all but an
 unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it, is a put-down theory of
 the world.
 People who had an advantage to make a game to play by putting it down, and making out
 that because they put the world down, they were a superior kind of people.
 So that just won't do.
 We've had it.
 Because if you seriously go along with this idea of the world, you're what is technically
 called alienated.
 You feel hostile to the world.
 You feel that the world is a trap.
 It is a mechanism, it's electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught.
 And you poor thing have to put up with being in a body that's falling apart, and that gets
 cancer, that gets the Great Siberian Itch, and it's just terrible.
 And these mechanics, doctors, are trying to help you out, but they really can't succeed
 in the end.
 And you're just going to fall apart, and it's a grim business, and it's too bad.
 So if you think that that's the way things are, you may as well commit suicide right
 now.
 Unless you say, "Well, I don't."
 Because there really, after all, there might be eternal damnation in the back of the thing
 if I did that.
 Or then I identify with my children or something, and I think of them going on without me and
 nobody to support them.
 But of course, if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them, I shall
 merely teach them to be like I am.
 And they'll go on dragging it out to support their children, and they won't enjoy it, and
 they'll be afraid to commit suicide, and so will their children.
 They all learn the same lesson.
 So you see, all I'm trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of
 the world that is influencing most people in the United States today, the fully automatic
 model, is simply a myth.
 If you want to say that the idea of God the Father with his white beard on the golden
 throne is a myth, in the bad sense of the word "myth," so is this other one.
 It's just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs.
 Why?
 And let's get this clear.
 If there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty, well, you found it in
 other people.
 In other words, it exists in us as human beings.
 And as I said, if it is there in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things.
 We are as symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple
 tree or the rose of the rose bush.
 The earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton
 is bones infested with cells.
 The earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people.
 And our existence on the earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances, as much
 as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy, and our galaxy in its turn is
 a symptom of the whole company of galaxies.
 Goodness only knows what that's in.
 But you see, when as a scientist you describe the behavior of a living organism, you try
 to say what a person does, it's the only way in which you can describe what a person is,
 describe what they do, then you find out that in making this description you cannot confine
 yourself to what happens inside the skin.
 In other words, you can't talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor.
 Because when I walk I don't just dangle my legs in empty space, I move in relationship
 to a room.
 And so in order to describe what I'm doing when I'm walking I have to describe the room,
 I have to describe the territory.
 So in describing my talking at the moment, I can't describe this just as a thing in itself,
 because I'm talking to you.
 And so what I'm doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here
 is described also.
 So if that is necessary, if in other words in order to describe my behavior I have to
 describe your behavior and the behavior of the environment, it means that we've really
 got one system of behavior.
 That what I am involves what you are.
 I don't know who I am unless I know who you are.
 And you don't know who you are unless you know who I am.
 There was a wise rabbi once said, "If I am I because you are you, and you are you because
 I am I, then I am not I and you are not you."
 In other words, we are not separate.
 We define each other, we're all backs and fronts to each other.
 You know, you can't, for example, have two sticks, you lean two sticks against each other
 and they stand up because they support each other.
 Take one away and the other falls.
 Or you know, that Valentine beer trademark, also a symbol of the Holy Trinity, where there
 are three interlocked rings.
 If you pull one out the other two separate.
 They interdepend.
 And so in exactly that way we and our environment and all of us and each other are interdependent
 systems.
 We know who we are in terms of other people.
 We all lock together.
 And this is again and again the serious scientific description of how things happen.
 And to such an extent that any good scientist knows, therefore, that what you call the external
 world is as much you as your own body.
 Your skin doesn't separate you from the world.
 It's a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it.
 Just for example, as a whirlpool in water.
 You could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape, you have a definite
 form.
 All right, here is a flow of water and it suddenly it does a whirlpool.
 And then it goes on.
 The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it.
 The whirlpool is something the stream is doing.
 And exactly the same way the whole universe is doing each one of us.
 And I see you today and I recognize you tomorrow just as I would recognize a whirlpool in a
 stream.
 I'd say, "Oh yes, I've seen that whirlpool before.
 It's just near so-and-so's house on the edge of the river and it's always there."
 So in the same way when I meet you tomorrow I recognize you, you're the same whirlpool
 you were yesterday.
 But you're moving.
 The whole world is moving through you.
 All the cosmic rays, all the food you're eating, the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and
 everything is just flowing right through you.
 When you're wiggling the same way the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you.
 But the problem is, you see, we haven't been taught to feel that way.
 The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel
 identical with the universe.
 But only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it.
 Aliens.
 And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal
 universe, each one of us.
 Otherwise we're going to go out of our heads.
 We're going to commit suicide, collectively, with courtesy of H-bombs.
 And all right, supposing we do, well that will be that and it'll be life making experiments
 on other galaxies.
 Maybe they'll find a better game.
 [LAUGHTER]


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