So then, here is a conception of nature as something you must trust.
 Outside nature, the birds, the bees, the flowers, the mountains, the clouds, and inside nature,
 human nature.
 Now nature isn't trustworthy completely.
 It'll sometimes let you down with a wallop.
 But that's the risk you take.
 That's the risk of life.
 What's the alternative?
 I do not trust nature at all.
 It's got to be watched.
 You know what that leads to?
 It leads to 1984 and Big Brother.
 It leads to the totalitarian state where everybody is his brother's policeman, and where everybody
 is watching everybody else to report them to the authorities, where you can't trust
 your own motivations, where you have to have a psychoanalyst in charge of you all the time
 to be sure that you don't think dangerous thoughts or peculiar thoughts, and you report
 all peculiar thoughts to your analyst, and your analyst keeps a record of them and reports
 them to the government.
 And everybody is busy keeping records of everything.
 It's much more important to record what happens than what happens.
 This is already eating us up.
 It's much more important that you have your books right than that you conduct your business
 in a good way.
 In universities, it's much more important that the registrar's records be in order than
 that the library be well-stocked.
 After all, do you know your grades are all locked up in safes, and they're protected
 from thievery and pilfering, and they're the most valuable property that the university
 has?
 The library can go hang.
 Then furthermore, the main function of a university is, as any sensible person would imagine,
 to teach students and to do research.
 So the faculty should be the most important thing in the university.
 On the contrary, the administration is the most important thing.
 The people who keep the records, who make the game rules up.
 And so the faculty are always being obstructed by the administration and being forced to
 attend irrelevant meetings and to do everything but scholarship.
 Do you know what scholarship means?
 What a school means, the original meaning of a scholar?
 Leisure.
 We talked of a scholar and a gentleman, because a gentleman was a person who had a private
 income, and he could afford to be a scholar.
 He didn't have to earn a living, therefore he could study the classics and poetry and
 things like that.
 Today, nothing is more busy than a school.
 They make you work, work, work, work, work, because you've got through on schedule.
 They have expedited courses, and you go to school so as to get a union card, a PhD or
 something, so that you can earn a living.
 So that's a whole contradiction of scholarship.
 Scholarship is to study everything that's unimportant.
 Not necessary for survival.
 All the charming irrelevances of life.
 But you see, the thing is this, if you don't have a room in your life for the playful,
 life's not worth living.
 All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
 But if the only reason for which Jack plays is that he can work better afterwards, he's
 not really playing.
 He's playing because it's good for him.
 He's not playing at all.
 You have to be able to be a true scholar.
 You have to cultivate an attitude to life where you're not trying to get anything out
 of it.
 You pick up a pebble on the beach, look at it, it's beautiful.
 Don't try and get a sermon out of it.
 Sermons in stones and God in everything be damned.
 Just enjoy it.
 Don't feel that you've got to salve your conscience by saying that this is for the advancement
 of your aesthetic understanding.
 Enjoy the pebble.
 If you do that, you become healthy.
 You become able to be a loving, helpful human being.
 But if you can't do that, if you can only do things because they are somehow you're
 going to get something out of it, you're a vulture.
 So we have to learn, we don't have to, you know, you don't have to do anything, you don't
 have to go on living, but it's a great idea, it's a great thing if you can learn what the
 Chinese call purposelessness.
 They think nature is purposeless.
 When we say something's purposeless, that's put down.
 There's no future in it.
 It's a washout.
 But when they hear the word purposeless, they think that's just great.
 It's like the waves washing against the shore, going on and on and on forever with no meaning.
 The great Zen master said as his death poem, just before he died, "From the bathtub to
 the bathtub, I have uttered stuff and nonsense."
 The bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth, the bathtub in which the corpse is
 washed before burial, all this time I have said many nonsenses.
 Like the birds in the trees go, "Twee, twee, twee, twee, twee, what's it all about?"
 Everybody tries to say, "Ah, it's a mating call, it's purposeful, trying to get their
 mate, you know, attract them with a song, that's why they have colors, butterflies,
 have eyes on them, self-protection, engineering view of the universe."
 Why do that?
 They say, "Well, it's because they need to survive."
 Well, why survive?
 What's that for?
 Well, to survive.
 See, human beings, really a lot of tubes, and all living creatures, just tubes.
 And the tubes have to put things in at one end and let it out at the other.
 Then they get clever about it and they develop nerve ganglia on one end of the tube, the
 eating end, called a head.
 And that's got eyes in it, it's got ears in it, it's got little organs, antenna and things
 like this, and that helps you to find things to put in one end so that you can let them
 out the other.
 Well, while you're doing this, you see, the stuff going through wears the tube out.
 And so, that the show can go on, the tubes have complicated ways of making other tubes
 who go on doing the same thing, in at one end, out the other.
 And they say, "Well, that's terribly serious.
 That's awfully important, we've got to keep on doing this."
 But when Chinese say nature is purposeless, this is a compliment.
 It's like the idea of the Japanese have a word, "Yugen," and they describe Yugen as
 watching wild geese fly and be hidden in the clouds, as watching a ship vanish behind a
 distant island, as wandering on and on in a great forest with no thought of return.
 Haven't you done this?
 Haven't you gone on a walk with no particular purpose in mind?
 Carry a stick with you and you occasionally hit at old stumps and wander along and sometimes
 twiddle your thumbs.
 It's at that moment that you are a perfectly rational human being.
 You've learned purposelessness.
 All music is purposeless.
 Is music getting somewhere?
 If it were, I mean, if the aim of music, of a symphony, were to get to the final bar,
 the best conductor would be the one who got there fastest.
 See, dancing, when you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor?
 Is that the idea of dancing?
 The aim of dancing is to dance, is the present.
 Well, it's exactly the same with our life.
 We think life has a purpose.
 I remember the preachers used to say, when I was a small boy I'd always hear it, "We
 must follow God's purpose, his purpose for you and his purpose for me."
 When I asked these cats what the purpose was, they never knew.
 They didn't know what it was.
 They had a hymn, "God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year.
 God is working his purpose out and the time is drawing near.
 The time when the earth shall be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea."
 What's the glory of God?
 Well, they weren't quite sure.
 I'll tell you what it is.
 In heaven, all those angels are gathered round the glory of God.
 That is to say, the witch than which there is no witcher.
 Catholics call it the beatific vision, the Jews call it the Shekinah.
 They're all those angels.
 And they're standing around it and they're saying, "Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah,
 hallelujah."
 But they're doing nothing.
 They're just having a ball.
 See, that's what happened in the beginning.
 When God created the universe, it was created like all stars, all planets, all galaxies,
 they're vaguely spherical.
 He created this and he said, "Have a ball."
 But before he said that, he said, "You must draw the line somewhere."
 That was the real thing he said first.
 "Before let there be light."
 That came later.
 First thing was, "You must draw the line somewhere.
 Otherwise nothing will happen."
 You know, you've got to have the good guys, the bad guys, you've got to have this, you've
 got to have that, black and white, light and darkness.
 Must draw the line somewhere.
 Now here's the choice.
 Are you going to trust it or not?
 If you do trust it, you may get let down.
 And this "it" is yourself, your own nature, and all nature around you.
 There are going to be mistakes.
 But if you don't trust it at all, you're going to strangle yourself.
 You're going to fence yourself around with rules and regulations and laws and prescriptions
 and policemen and guards, and who's going to guard the guards, and who's going to look
 after Big Brother to be sure that he doesn't do something stupid?
 No go.
 Supposing I get annoyed with somebody in the audience, and I'm going to throw this ashtray
 at them.
 But I don't want to hit my friend sitting next to that person.
 I want to be absolutely sure this ashtray hits that individual.
 And so I don't trust myself to throw it.
 I have to carry it along and be sure I hit that person on the head.
 See I don't throw it, because I can't let go of it.
 To throw it, I must let go of it.
 To live, I must have faith.
 I must trust myself to the totally unknown.
 I must trust myself to a nature which doesn't have a boss, because a boss is a system of
 mistrust.
 That is why Lao Tzu's Tao loves and nourishes all things, but does not lord it over them.
 over them.


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