Some people will use a symbolism of the relationship of God to the universe wherein God is a brilliant
 light only somehow veiled, hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around
 you. So far so good. But the truth is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right
 at the brilliant light now, that the experience you are having, which you call ordinary everyday
 consciousness, pretending you're not it, that experience is exactly the same thing as it.
 There's no difference at all. And when you find that out, you laugh yourself silly. That's
 the great discovery. In other words, when you really start to see things, and you look
 at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is, or what
 smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant
 light of the cosmos. Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only
 they're hidden in the sense that all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you
 see them in the cup. They don't blow your eyes out. But it is actually, see, the source
 of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be
 light. You evoke light out of the universe. In the same way, you, by virtue of having
 a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It's
 your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into
 being the whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything,
 you see? But in the mythology that we've sold ourselves on during the end of the 19th
 century, when people discovered how big the universe was, and that we live on a little
 planet in a solar system on the edge of a galaxy, which is a minor galaxy, everybody
 thought "Ugh, we're really unimportant after all. God isn't there and doesn't love us,
 and nature doesn't give a damn." And we put ourselves down, you see? But actually, it's
 this little funny microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet that's way out somewhere,
 who has the ingenuity, by nature of this magnificent organic structure, to evoke the whole universe
 out of what would otherwise be mere quanta. There's jazz going on. But you see, this little
 ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism on this little
 planet is what the whole show is growing there, and so realizing its own presence.
 Well, now here's the problem. If this is the state of affairs which is so, and if the consciousness
 state you're in at this moment is the same thing as what we might call the divine state,
 if you do anything to make it different, it shows you don't understand that it's so. So
 the moment you start practicing yoga, or praying, or meditating, or indulging in some sort of
 spiritual cultivation, you are getting in your own way. The Buddha said, "We suffer
 because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won't suffer." But he didn't say that
 as the last word. He said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that
 to someone, they're going to come back after a while and say, "Yes, but I'm now desiring
 not to desire." And so the Buddha will answer, "Well, at last you're beginning to understand
 the point." Because you can't give up desire, why would you try to do that? It's already
 there. So in the same way, you say, "You ought to be unselfish, or to give up your ego. Let
 go, relax." Why do you want to do that? Just because it's another way of beating the game,
 isn't it? The moment you see you hypothesize that you are different from the universe,
 you want to get one up on it. But if you try to get one up on the universe, and you're
 in competition with it, it means you don't understand you are it. You think there's a
 real difference between self and other. But self, what you call yourself, and what you
 call other, are mutually necessary to each other, like back and front. They're really
 one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself in north and south, but it's all one magnet,
 so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it's all one. So if you try to
 make the North Pole get the mastery of it, or the South Pole get the mastery of the North
 Pole, you show you don't know what's going on. A guru or teacher who wants to get this
 across to somebody, because he knows it himself, and when you know it, you know you'd like
 others to see it too. So what he does is, he gets you into being ridiculous harder and
 more assiduously than usual. In other words, if you are in a contest with the universe,
 he's going to stir up that contest until it becomes ridiculous. And so he sets you such
 tasks as saying, now of course, in order to be a true person, you must give up yourself.
 Be unselfish. So the Lord steps down out of heaven and says, the first and great commandment
 is, thou shalt love the Lord thy God. You must love me. Well, that's a double bind.
 You can't love on purpose. You can't be sincere purposely. It's like trying not to think of
 a green elephant while taking medicine. But if a person really tries to do it, so you
 know, this is where Christianity is rigged, you should be very sorry for your sins. And
 though everybody knows they're not, but they think they ought to be, and so they go around
 trying to be penitent, or trying to be humble. And they know the more assiduously they practice
 it, the phonier and phonier the whole thing gets. And so in this way, it's what's called
 the technique of reductio ad absurdum. If you think you have a problem, you see, and
 that you're an ego, and that you're in difficulty, the answer that the Zen master makes to you
 is show me your ego. I want to see this thing that has a problem. When Bodhidharma, the
 legendary founder of Zen, came to China, a disciple came to him and said, I have no peace
 of mind, please pacify my mind. And Bodhidharma said, bring out your mind here before me and
 I'll pacify it. Well, he said, when I look for it, I can't find it. So Bodhidharma said,
 there, it's pacified. See, because when you look for your own mind, that is to say, your
 own particularized center of being, which is separate from everything else, you won't
 be able to find it. But the only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look for it
 hard enough to find out that it isn't there. And so everybody says, all right, know yourself,
 look within, find out who you are. Because the harder you look, you won't be able to
 find it. And then you'll realize that it isn't there at all. There isn't a separate you.
 Your mind is what there is. Everything. But the only way to find that out is to persist
 in the state of delusion as hard as possible. That's one way. I don't say the only way,
 but it is one way. And so almost all spiritual disciplines, meditations, prayers, etc., etc.,
 are ways of persisting in folly, doing resolutely and consistently what you're doing already.
 So if a person believes that the earth is flat, you can't talk him out of that. He knows
 it's flat. Look out of the window and see it. Obviously it looks flat. So the only way
 to convince him that it isn't is to say, well, let's go and find the edge. And in order to
 find the edge, you've got to be very careful not to walk in circles, and you'll never find
 it that way. So we've got to go consistently in a straight line, due west, along the same
 line of latitude. And eventually, when we get back to where we started from, you've
 convinced the guy that the earth is round. But that's the only way that'll teach him,
 because people can't be talked out of illusions.
 Well, now, there is another possibility, however. But this is more difficult to describe.
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