So therefore, if you understand perfectly clearly that you can't do anything to find
 that very, very important thing, God, enlightenment, nirvana, whatever, then what? Well, I find,
 you know, it's so stupid because even if I tell myself, "Well, there's nothing I can
 do about it," why did I say that? You see? Why did I say that? Why did I go out of my
 way to tell myself there's nothing I can do about it? Because in the back of my mind there
 was a funny little feeling that if I did tell myself that, something different would happen.
 See? All right. So even that doesn't work. Nothing works. Now when absolutely nothing
 works, where are you? Well, here we are. I mean, there's this feeling of something going
 on. The world doesn't stop dead when there's nothing you can do. There's something happening.
 Now just there, that's what I'm talking about. There's the happening. When you are not doing
 anything about it, you're not not doing anything about it, you just can't help it, it goes
 on despite anything you think or worry about or whatever. Now, there is the point. Right
 there. And remember, although you will think at first that this is a kind of determinism,
 there are two reasons why it isn't. One, there is nobody being determined. Now other people
 think of determinism as the direction of what happens by the past. The causation of what
 happens by the past. Now if you will use your senses you will see that that is a hallucination.
 The present does not come from the past. If you listen, and only listen, close your eyes,
 where do the sounds come from according to your ears? You hear them coming out of silence.
 The sounds come and then they fade off. They go like echoes, or echoes in the labyrinths
 of your brain which we call memories. The sounds don't come from the past, they come
 out of now and trail off. You can do that later with your eyes. You can see, like when
 you're watching television, there's a vibration coming out from the screen to your eyes. And
 it starts from there somehow. Because we see the hands and then they move, we think that
 the movement is caused by the hands, and that the hands were there before and so can move
 later. We don't see that our memory of the hands is an echo of their always being now.
 They never were, they never will be, they're always now. So is the motion. And that is
 recollected as the trailing off echo like the wake of a ship. And so just as the wake
 doesn't move the ship, the past does not move the present, unless you insist that it does.
 And if you say, 'Well, naturally I'm always moved by the past,' that's an alibi. And
 it completely fails to explain how you ever learn anything new. That's why all the psychologists
 who are mostly behaviorists are completely bogged down in trying to find the theory of
 learning. Because according to the theory of learning that we have, everything new that
 you assimilate is really only learned when translated into terms of what you already
 know. So in that sense learning becomes like a library which increases only by the addition
 of books about books already in it. A lot of libraries are indeed like that. So that's
 what we call scholasticism. So then you become aware that this happening isn't happening
 to you, because you are the happening. The only you there is, is what's going on. Feel
 it. And disregard these stupid distinctions that you've been taught. I mean, stupid relatively
 speaking. And feel it genuinely. When you feel it genuinely and you get down to rock
 bottom, all that isn't there. That's a game that's been erected on it. And it isn't
 determined. In other words, you get this odd feeling of a synthesis between doing and happening.
 In which doing is as much happening as happening, and happening is as much doing as doing. And
 if you are not very careful at that point, you'll proclaim yourself God Almighty, in
 the Hebrew Christian sense. Like Freud alleges babies feel that they're omnipotent. And in
 a way they are. I am omnipotent in so far as I'm the universe. But I'm not omnipotent
 in the role of Alan Watts. Only cunning.
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