The trouble with the human being is like the trouble with certain animals, like the dinosaur,
 who evolved to the point where he was so big that he had to have two brains, a higher self
 in the head and a lower self in the rump.
 And the difficulty was to get these two brains coordinated.
 But we have exactly the same trouble, and we are suffering from a kind of jitters that
 comes from being two-brained.
 Now you see, I'm not saying that that jitters is bad, it's a potential step in evolution
 and an opportunity of growth.
 But remember, in the process of growth, the oak is not better than the acorn.
 Because what does it do?
 It produces acorns.
 Or you could say, just like I sometimes love to say, that a chicken is one egg's way of
 becoming others.
 So an oak is an acorn's way of becoming other acorns.
 Where is the point of superiority?
 The first verse of that poem I just quoted, "The flowering branches grow naturally, some
 short, some long," the first verse is, "In the landscape of spring, there is nothing
 superior and nothing inferior."
 The flowering branches are naturally some short, some long.
 So that's the point of view of being an outcast, in the sense of being outside the taking seriously,
 of being involved in the social game, and therefore being threatened by making mistakes,
 of doing the wrong thing, that is to say, of carrying into adult life one's childhood
 conditioning where somebody is constantly yammering at you to play the game.
 So therefore, the preachers and the teachers take the same attitude towards their adult
 congregations that parents take to children and lecture them and tell them what they should
 do, and judges in courts feel also entitled to give people lectures because they say those
 criminal types haven't grown up, but neither have the judges.
 It takes two to make a quarrel.
 So one can begin to think in a new way, in the polarity thinking, instead of being stuck
 with the competitive thinking of the good guys and the bad guys, the cops and the robbers,
 the capitalists and the communists, all these things which are simply childishness.
 Now of course, you recognize that the moment I say that, it's like talking in English in
 order to show that the English language has limitations.
 And I am talking in a language that seems competitive to show that the competitive game
 has limitations.
 As if I were saying to all you cats here, look, I have something to tell you that is,
 and if you get this, you'll be in a better position than you were before you heard it.
 But I cannot speak to this group or this society or this language-speaking culture without
 using the language, the gestures, the customs, etc., that you have.
 The Zen masters try to get around this by doing things suddenly that people just don't
 get.
 What is this?
 Therefore, that is the reason why, this is the real reason why Zen cannot be explained.
 You have to make, as it were, a jump from the valuation game of better people and worse
 people in groups and out groups, and you can only make it by seeing that they all are mutually
 interdependent.
 So if we take this situation, let's say I would be talking to you and saying, look,
 I have some very special thing that you've got to take notice of, therefore I am the
 in group and I am the teacher and you are the out group.
 I know perfectly well that I cannot be the teacher unless you come here.
 And so that my status and my position is totally dependent on you.
 It isn't something you see, therefore I have first and then you get.
 These things arise mutually.
 So if you wouldn't come, I wouldn't talk.
 I wouldn't know what to say, because I've borrowed your language.
 So that is the insight, that things go together.
 Then when you see that and aren't in competition, then you don't make a mistake, because you
 don't dither.
 When I first learned the piano and played these wretched scales, the teacher beside
 me had a pencil in her hand and she hit my fingers every time I made a wrong note.
 Consequent was I never learned to read music, because I hesitated too long to play the note
 on time, because I was always, is this pencil going to land?
 See, that gets built into your psyche.
 And so people are always, although they're adults and nobody is clubbing them around
 and screaming at them any longer, they hear the echoes of that screaming mama or that
 bombinating papa in the back of their heads all their life long.
 And so they adopt the same attitudes to their own children and the farce continues, because
 there is no, I mean I don't say that you shouldn't lay down the law to children if you want them
 to play the social game, but if you lay down the law to your children, you must make provision
 later in life for them to be liberated, to go through a process of curing them from the
 bad effects of education.
 But you can't do that unless you too grow up, you see, unless we grow up, this is I
 including myself.
 So that is the thing.
 Now therefore, in the Zen scene, you would think that the master as we know him and as
 we read about him is an extremely authoritarian figure.
 That's the way he deliberately comes on at the beginning.
 He puts up a terrific show of being an awful dragon, and this screens out all sorts of
 people who don't have somehow the nerve to get into the work.
 But once you are in, a very strange change takes place.
 The master becomes the brother, he becomes the affectionate helper of all those students,
 and they love him as they would a brother, rather than respect him as they would a father.
 And therefore the students and masters, they make jokes about each other, they have a very
 curious kind of social relationship, which has all the outward trappings of the authoritarian,
 but everybody knows on the inside that that's a joke.
 Liberated people have to be very cool.
 Otherwise, in a society which doesn't believe in equality and cannot possibly practice it,
 they would be considered extremely subversive.
 And therefore great Zen masters wear purple and gold and carry scepters and sit in thrones,
 and all this is carried on to cool it.
 The outside world knows that they're all right.
 They have discipline, they have order, they're perfectly fine.
 Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture from the World as Just So lecture
 series.
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