Let's say we take as the basic supposition, which is the thing that one sees in the experience
 of satori or awakening or whatever you want to call it, that this now moment in which
 I'm talking and you're listening is eternity.
 That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather
 ordinary and that we may not feel very well and that we're sort of vaguely frustrated
 and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed.
 This is it.
 So you don't need to do anything at all.
 But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn't try not to do anything, because
 that's doing something.
 And how to explain that?
 Because there's nothing to explain.
 It is the way it is now, you see.
 And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up.
 That's why Zen teachers use shock treatment, to sometimes while they hit people or shout
 at them or create a sudden surprise, because it is that jolt that suddenly brings you here.
 See, there's no road to here, because you're already there.
 And if you ask me, "How am I going to get here?"
 It'll be like the famous story of the American tourist in England who asked some yokel the
 way to Upper Tudnam, a little village.
 The yokel scratched his head and he said, "Well, sir, I do know where it is, but if
 I were you I wouldn't start from here."
 So you see, when you ask, "How do I attain the knowledge of God?
 How do I attain nirvana, liberation?"
 All I can say is it's the wrong question.
 Why do you want to attain it?
 Because the very fact that you're wanting to attain it is the only thing that prevents
 you from getting there.
 You already have it.
 But of course, it's up to you, it's your privilege to pretend that you don't.
 That's your game, that's your life game, that's what makes you think you're an ego.
 And when you want to wake up, you will.
 Just like that.
 If you're not awake, it shows you don't want to.
 You're still playing the hide part of the game.
 You're still, as it were, the self, pretending it's not the self.
 That's what you want to do.
 So you see, in that way too, you're already there.
 When you understand this, a funny thing happens, and some people misinterpret it.
 You will discover, as this happens, that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary
 behavior disappears.
 You will realize that what you describe as things under your own will feel exactly the
 same as things going on outside you.
 You watch other people moving, and you know you're doing that.
 Just like you're breathing, or circulating your blood.
 If you don't understand what's going on, you're liable to get crazy at this point, and to
 feel that you are God in the Jehovah sense.
 Say that you actually have power over other people, so that you could alter what they're
 doing.
 And that you are omnipotent in a very crude, literal kind of Bible sense, you see?
 And a lot of people feel that, and they go crazy.
 They have to put them away.
 They think they're Jesus Christ, and that everybody ought to fall down and worship.
 That's only they got their wires crossed.
 They haven't been able to-- this experience happened to them, but they don't know how
 to interpret it.
 So be careful of that.
 Some calls it inflation.
 People who get the holy man syndrome, that I've suddenly discovered that I'm the Lord,
 and that I'm above good and evil, and so on, and that therefore I start giving myself airs
 and graces.
 But the point is, everybody else is too.
 If you discover that you're that, then you ought to know that everybody else is.
 Well for example, let's see how in other ways you might realize this.
 Most people think when they open their eyes and look around, that what they are seeing
 is outside.
 It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes.
 And that behind the eyes there is a blank.
 If you can't see at all, turn around, you'll see something else in front of you.
 But behind the eyes there seems to be something that has no color.
 It isn't dark, it isn't light, it's just-- it's there from a tactile standpoint.
 You can feel it with your fingers, although you don't get inside it.
 But what is that behind your eyes, you see?
 Well actually, when you look out there and see all these people and things sitting around,
 that's how it feels inside your head.
 The color of this room is back here in the nervous system, where the optical nerves are
 at the back of the head.
 It's in there.
 It's what you're experiencing.
 What you see out here is a neurological experience.
 Now if that hits you, and you feel sensuously that that's so, you may think that then therefore
 the external world is all inside my skull.
 But you've got to correct that with the thought that your skull is also in the external world.
 So you suddenly begin to feel, well, wow, what a kind of a situation is this?
 It's inside me, and I'm inside it, and it's inside me, and I'm inside it.
 But that's the way it is.
 This is the-- what you could call transaction, rather than interaction, between the individual
 and the world.
 Just like, for example, in buying and selling.
 There cannot be an act of buying unless there's simultaneously an act of selling, and vice
 versa.
 So the relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional.
 The environment grows the organism, and in turn the organism creates the environment.
 The organism turns the sun into light, but it requires there to be an environment containing
 a sun for there to be an organism at all.
 And the answer to it is simply, they're all one process.
 And it isn't that organisms by chance came into this world.
 Put it rather that this world is the sort of environment which grows organisms.
 It was that way from the beginning.
 Just in the same way for-- I mean, the organisms may, in time, have arrived in the scene, or
 out of the scene, later than the beginning of the scene.
 But from the moment it went bang in the beginning, if that's the way it started, organisms like
 us, us sitting here, were involved in it.
 You see, look here, let's take the propagation of an electric current.
 I can have an electric current running through a wire that goes all the way around the earth.
 And here we have our power source, and here we have a switch.
 All right.
 Here's the positive pole, here's the negative pole.
 Now, before that switch closes, the current doesn't exactly behave like water in a pipe.
 There isn't current here waiting to jump the gap as soon as the switch is closed.
 The current doesn't even start until the switch is closed from the positive pole.
 It never starts unless the point of arrival is there.
 Now it'll take an interval for that current to get going, and a circuit, if it's going
 all the way around the earth, it's a long run.
 But the finishing point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning.
 In a similar way, although in the development of any physical system, there may be billions
 of years between the creation of the most primitive form of energy and then the arrival
 of intelligent life.
 That billions of years is just the same thing as the trip of the current around the wire.
 Takes a little time.
 But it's already implied.
 It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the
 acorn.
 And so in any lump of rock floating about in space, there is implicit human intelligence.
 Sometime, somehow, somewhere.
 They all go together.
 So don't differentiate yourself and stand off against this and say, "I am a living organism
 in a world made of a lot of dead junk, rocks and stuff.
 It all goes together.
 Those rocks are just as much you as your fingernails.
 You need rocks.
 What are you going to stand on?
 (crunching)
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