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.
 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.
 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, and 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 billiards. 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 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'll 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. And 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. 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. Just as spots on somebody's skin
 are symptomatic of chickenpox. 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? 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
 all right, 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. Not really human. Monkeys may be, idiots may be, machines
 may be, but not 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.
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