We are playing a game, and the game runs like this. The only thing you really know is what you can put into words. Let's suppose I love some girl, rapturously, and somebody says to me, "Would you really love her?" Well, how am I going to prove this? Well, say, write poetry. Tell us all how much you love her, then we'll believe you. So if I'm an artist and I can put this into words and convince everybody that I've written the most ecstatic love letters ever written, they say, "All right, okay, we'll admit it. You really do love her." But supposing you're not very articulate. Are we going to tell you you don't love her? Surely not. You don't have to be Heloise and Abelard to be in love. So the whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless it's in the newspaper. So when we're at a party, and there's a great party, somebody said, "It's too bad there wasn't a tape recorder." And so our children begin to feel that they don't exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers. And the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime. Then you'll be photographed, then you'll appear in court, then everybody will notice you. It really happened if it was recorded. In other words, if you shout and there doesn't come back an echo, it didn't happen. Well, that's a real hang-up. It's true, there's fun with echoes. We all like singing in the bathtub, because there's more resonance there. And when we play a musical instrument like a violin or a cello, it has a sounding box, because that gives resonance to the sound. And in the same way, the cortex of the human brain enables us, when we are happy, to know that we are happy. And that gives a certain resonance to it. If you are happy and you don't know you are happy, there's nobody home. But this is the whole problem for us. Several thousand years ago, human beings evolved the system of self-consciousness. And they knew, they knew. There was a young man who said, "Though it seems that I know that I know, what I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that I know." You see? And this is the human problem. We know that we know. And so there came a point in our evolution when we didn't guide life by just trusting our instincts, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange and discipline and push our lives around in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation, and so on. And then we worry. Once you start thinking about things, you worry as to whether you've thought enough. Did you really take all the details into consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And by Jove, the more you think about it, the more you realize that you really couldn't take everything into consideration, because all the variables in any human decision are incalculable. So you get anxiety. And this, though, also, this is the price you pay for knowing that you know. For being able to think about thinking, to feel about feeling. And so you're in this funny position. Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage? What has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness, a certain kind of reflexive consciousness, being aware of being aware, being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols, such as words, such as numbers, you put, as it were, two lives together at once, one representing the other. The symbols representing the reality. The money representing the wealth. And if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary, it doesn't have the same value. You know, people go to the supermarket and they get a whole cartload of goodies and they drive it through and then the clerk fixes up the counter and this long tape comes out and you say, "Thirty dollars, please." And everybody feels depressed. They give away thirty dollars worth of paper, but they've got a cartload of goodies. They don't think about that. They think they just lost thirty dollars. But you've got the real wealth in the cart. All you partied with was the paper. Because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth. It represents power, potentiality, whereas the wealth, you think, "Oh, well, that's just necessary. You've got to eat." I mean, that's to be really mixed up. [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 1.33 sec Decoding : 0.32 sec Transcribe: 491.18 sec Total Time: 492.83 sec