Well now, I was discussing two of the great myths or models of the universe which lie
 in the intellectual and psychological background of all of us.
 The myth of the world as a political, monarchical state in which we are all here on sufferance
 the subjects of God, in which we are made artifacts who do not exist in our own right.
 God alone in the first myth exists in his own right.
 And you exist as a favor.
 And you ought to be grateful.
 Like your parents come on and say to you maybe, "Look at all the things we've done for you,
 all the money we spent to send you to college, and you turn out to be a beatnik.
 You're a wretched, ungrateful child."
 And you're supposed to say, "Sorry, but I really am."
 But you're definitely in the position of being on probation.
 So that idea of the royal God, the King of kings and the Lord of lords, which we inherit
 from the political structures of the Tigris-Euphrates cultures and from Egypt.
 The pharaoh Amenhotep IV is probably, as Freud suggested, the original author of Moses' monotheism.
 And certainly the Jewish law code comes from Hammurabi in Chaldea.
 And these men lived in a culture where the pyramid and the ziggurat-- the ziggurat is
 a Chaldean version of the pyramid, indicating somehow a hierarchy of power from the boss
 all the way down.
 And God in this first myth that we've been discussing, the ceramic myth, is the boss.
 And the idea of God is that the universe is governed from above.
 And you see, this parallels and goes hand in hand with the idea that you govern your
 own body.
 That the ego, which lies somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes in the brain,
 is the governor of the body.
 And so we can't understand a system of order, a system of life in which there isn't a governor.
 "Oh Lord, our governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world."
 But supposing, on the contrary, there could be a system which doesn't have a governor.
 That's what we are supposed to have in this society.
 We are supposed to be a democracy and a republic, and we are supposed to govern ourselves.
 And yet, as I said, it's so funny that Americans can be politically republican-- I don't mean
 republican in the party sense-- and yet religiously monarchical.
 It's a real strange contradiction.
 So what is this universe?
 Is it a monarchy?
 Is it a republic?
 Is it a mechanism or an organism?
 Because you see, if it's a mechanism, either it's a mere mechanism, as in the fully automatic
 model, or else it's the mechanism under the control of a driver, a mechanic.
 If it's not that, it's an organism.
 And an organism is a thing that governs itself.
 In your body there is no boss.
 You can say, you can argue, for example, that the brain is a gadget evolved by the stomach
 in order to serve the stomach for the purposes of getting food.
 Or you can argue that the stomach is a gadget evolved by the brain to feed it and keep it
 alive.
 Whose game is this?
 Is it the brain's game or the stomach's game?
 It doesn't make-- actually, they are mutual.
 The brain implies the stomach, the stomach implies the brain, and neither of them is
 the boss.
 You know that story about all the limbs of the body?
 The hands said, we do all our work, the feet said, we do our work, the mouth said, we do
 all the chewing, and here's this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn't do a thing.
 He doesn't do any work.
 So let's go on strike.
 And the hands refused to carry, the feet refused to walk, the mouth refused to chew, and said,
 now, we're on strike against the stomach.
 But after a while, all of them found themselves getting weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker
 because they didn't recognize that the stomach fed them.
 So there is the possibility, then, that we are not in the kind of system that these two
 myths delineate, that we are not living in a world where we ourselves, in the deepest
 sense of self, are outside reality and somehow in a position that we have to bow down to
 it and say, as a great favor, please preserve us in existence.
 Nor are we in a system which is merely mechanical and in which we are nothing but flukes trapped
 in the electrical wiring of a nervous system, which is fundamentally rather inefficiently
 arranged.
 What's the alternative?


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