I wonder what you mean when you use the word "I." I've been very interested in this problem
 for a long, long time, and I've come to the conclusion that what most civilized people
 mean by that word is a hallucination. That is to say, a false sense of personal identity
 that is at complete variance with the facts of nature. And as a result of having a false
 sense of identity, we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment.
 And when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology,
 we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature. As is well
 known, we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt
 to conquer it and master it. And we have not realized, therefore, that our environment
 is not something other than ourselves. In assuming that it is, we have made a great
 mistake and are now paying the price for it. But most people would agree with the lines
 of the poet who said, "I, a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made." Because we have
 the strong sensation that our own being inside our skin is extremely different from the world
 outside our skin. That while there may be intelligence inside human skins, and while
 there may be values and loving feelings, outside the skin is a world of mechanical process
 which does not give a damn about any individual, and which is basically unintelligent, being
 gyrations of blind force, and so far as the merely biological world is concerned, gyrations
 of libido, which is Freud's word for blind lust. It should be obvious that the human
 being goes with the rest of the universe, even though we say in popular speech, "I
 came into this world." Now, it is not true that you came into this world. You came out
 of it in the same way as a flower comes out of a plant or a fruit comes out of a tree.
 And as an apple tree apples, the solar system in which we live, and therefore the galaxy
 in which we live, and therefore the system of galaxies in which we live, that system
 peoples. And therefore people are an expression of its energy and of its nature. If people
 are intelligent, and I suppose we have to grant that if, then the energy which people
 express must also be intelligent, because one does not gather figs from thistles and
 grapes from thorns. But it does not occur, you see, to the ordinary civilized person
 to regard himself or herself as an expression of the whole universe. It should be obvious
 that we cannot exist except in an environment of earth, air, water, and solar temperature,
 that all these things go with us and are as important to us, albeit outside our skins
 as our internal organs, heart, stomach, brain, and so forth. Now if, then, we cannot describe
 the behavior of organisms without at the same time describing the behavior of their environments,
 we should realize that we have a new entity of description, not the individual organism
 alone, but what would now be called a field of behavior, which we must call rather clumsily
 the organism environment. You go with your environment in the same way as your head goes
 with the rest of your body. You do not find in nature faces arriving in the world sui
 generis. They go with a body. But also bodies do not arrive in a world which would be, for
 example, a plain ball of scrubbed rock floating without an atmosphere far away from a star.
 That will not grow bodies. There is no soil for bodies. There is no complexity of environment
 which is body producing. So bodies go with a very complicated natural environment. And
 if the head goes with the body and the body goes with the environment, the body is as
 much an integral part of the environment as the head is part of the body. It is deceptive,
 of course, because the human being is not rooted to the ground like a tree. A human
 being moves about and therefore can shift from one environment to another. But these
 shifts are superficial. The basic environment of the planet remains a constant. And if the
 human being leaves the planet, he has to take with him a canned version of the planetary
 environment. Now we are not really aware of this. Upon taking thought and due consideration,
 it does occur to us, yes, indeed, we do need that environment. But in the ordinary way,
 we don't feel it. That is to say, we don't have a vivid sensation of belonging to our
 environment in the same way that we have a vivid sensation of being an ego inside a bag
 of skin located mostly in the skull, about halfway between the ears and a little way
 behind the eyes. And it issues in these disastrous results of the ego, which, according to 19th
 century common sense, feels that it is a fluke in nature and that if it does not fight nature,
 it will not be able to maintain its status as intelligent fluke. So the geneticists are
 now saying, and many others are now saying, that man must take the course of his evolution
 into his own hands. He can no longer trust the wiggly, random, and unintelligible processes
 of nature to develop him any further. But he must interfere with his own intelligence
 and through genetic alterations breed the kind of people who will be viable for human
 society and that sort of thing. Now this, I submit, is a ghastly error because human
 intelligence has a very serious limitation. That limitation is that it is a scanning system
 of conscious attention which is linear. That is to say, it examines the world in lines,
 rather as you would pass the beam of a flashlight across a room or a spotlight. That's why our
 education takes so long. It takes so long because we have to scan miles of lines of
 print and we regard that, you see, as basic information. Now the universe does not come
 at us in lines. It comes at us in a multidimensional continuum in which everything is happening
 altogether everywhere at once. And it comes at us much too quickly to be translated into
 lines of print or of other information, however fast they may be scanned. And that is our
 limitation so far as the intellectual life and the scientific life is concerned. The
 computer will greatly speed up linear scanning, but it's still linear scanning. And so long
 as we are stuck with that form of wisdom, we cannot deal with more than a few variables
 at once. Now what do I mean by that? What is a variable? A variable is any one linear
 process. Let's take music. When you play a Bach fugue and there are four parts to it,
 you have four variables. You have four moving lines and you can take care of that with two
 hands. An organist using two feet can put in two more variables and have six going.
 And you may realize if you've ever tried to play the organ that it's quite difficult to
 make six independent motions go at once. The average person cannot do that without training.
 The average person cannot deal with more than three variables at once without using a pencil.
 Now when we study physics, we are dealing with processes in which there are millions
 of variables. This, however, we handle by statistics in the same way as insurance companies
 use actuarial tables to predict when most people will die. If the average age of death
 is 65, however, this prediction does not apply to any given individual. Any given individual
 will live to plus or minus 65 years. And the range of difference may be very wide indeed,
 of course. But this is all right. The 65 guess is all right when you're doing large-scale
 gambling. And that's the way the physicist works in predicting the behaviour of nuclear
 wavicles. But the practical problems of human life deal with variables in the hundreds of
 thousands. Here statistical methods are very poor. And thinking it out by linear consideration
 is impossible. With that equipment, then, we are proposing to interfere with our genes.
 And with that equipment also, be it said, we are trying to solve our political, economic
 and social problems. And naturally, everybody has the sense of total frustration. And the
 individual feels, "What on earth can I do?" We do not seem to know a way of calling upon
 our brains. Because our brains can handle an enormous number of variables that are not
 accessible to the process of conscious attention. Your brain is now handling your total nervous
 system, to be more accurate, your blood chemistry, the secretions from your glands, the behaviour
 of millions of cells. It is doing all that without thinking about it. That is to say,
 without translating the processes it is handling into consciously reviewed words, symbols or
 numbers. Now when I use the word "thinking", I mean precisely that process. Translating
 what is going on in nature into words, symbols or numbers. Of course, both words and numbers
 are kinds of symbols. Symbols bear the same relation to the real world that money bears
 to wealth. You cannot quench anybody's thirst with the word "water" just as you cannot eat
 a dollar bill and derive nutrition from it. But using symbols and using conscious intelligence,
 scanning, has proved very useful to us. It has given us such technology as we have. But
 at the same time it has proved too much of a good thing. At the same time, we've become
 so fascinated with it that we confuse the world as it is with the world as it is thought
 about, talked about and figured about. That is to say, with the world as it is described.
 And the difference between these two is vast. And when we are not aware of ourselves, except
 in a symbolic way, we are not related to ourselves at all. We are like people eating menus instead
 of dinners. And that's why we all feel psychologically frustrated. So then we get back to the question
 of what do we mean by "I"? Well, first of all, obviously, we mean our symbol of ourselves.
 Now ourselves, in this case, is the whole psychophysical organism, conscious and unconscious,
 plus its environment. That's your real self. Your real self, in other words, is the universe
 as centered on your organism. That's you. You say, let me just clarify that a little
 for one reason. What you do is also a doing of your environment. Your behavior is its
 behavior as much as its behavior is your behavior. It's mutual. We could say it is transactional.
 You are not a puppet which your environment pushes around, nor is the environment a puppet
 which you push around. They go together. They act together. In the same way, for example,
 if I have a wheel, one side of it going down is the same as the other side of it going
 up. When you handle the steering wheel of a car, are you pulling it or are you pushing
 it? No, you're doing both, aren't you? When you pull it down this side, you are pushing
 it up that side. It's all one. So there's a push-pull between organism and environment.
 We are only rarely aware of this, as when in curious alterations of consciousness, which
 we call mystical experience, cosmic consciousness, an individual gets the feeling that everything
 that is happening is his own doing, or the opposite of that feeling, that he isn't doing
 anything but that all his doings, his decisions and so forth, are happenings of nature. You
 can feel it either way. You can describe it in these two completely opposite ways, but
 you're talking about the same experience. You're talking about experiencing your own
 activity and the activity of nature as one single process. And you can describe it as
 if you were omnipotent like God, or as if it were completely deterministic and you hardly
 existed at all. But remember, both points of view are right. And we'll see where that
 gets us. But we don't feel that, do we, ordinarily. What we feel instead is an identification
 of ourselves with our idea of ourselves, or I would rather say with our image of ourselves.
 And that's the person, or the ego. You play a role. You identify with that role. I play
 a role. It's called Alan Watts. And I know very well that that's a big act. I can play
 some other roles besides Alan Watts, if necessary, but I find this one is better for making a
 living. But I assure you, it's a mask and I don't take it seriously. The idea of my
 being a kind of messiah or guru or savior of the world just breaks me up, as I know
 me. So it's very difficult to be holy in the ordinary sense. So I know I'm not that. But
 most of us are taught to think that we are whom we are called. And when you're a little
 child and you begin to learn a role and your parents and your peers approve of your being
 that, they know who you are. You're predictable. So you can be controlled. But when you act
 out of role and you imitate some other child's behavior, everybody points the finger and
 says you're not being true to yourself. Johnny, that's not you, that's Peter. And so you learn
 to stay Peter, or to stay Johnny. But of course, you're not either. Because this is just the
 image of you. It's as much of you as you can get into your conscious attention, which is
 precious little. Your image of yourself contains no information about how you structure your
 nervous system. It contains no information about your blood chemistry. It contains almost
 no information about the subtle influences of society upon your behavior. It does not
 include the basic assumptions of your culture, which are all taken for granted and unconscious.
 You can't find them out unless you study other cultures to see how their basic assumptions
 differ. It includes all kinds of illusions that you're completely unaware of, as for
 example that time is real, and that there is such a thing as a past, which is pure hokum.
 But nevertheless, all these things are unconscious in us, and they are not included in our image
 of ourselves, nor of course included in our image of ourselves. Is there any information
 about our inseparable relationships with the whole natural universe? So this is a very
 impoverished image. When you ask a person, what did you do yesterday? They'll give you
 a historical account of a certain number of events in which they participated, and a certain
 number of things which they saw, used, or were clobbered by. But realize at once that
 this history leaves out most of what happened. I, in trying to describe what happens to me
 this evening, will never be able to describe it, because there are so many people here,
 that if I were to talk about everyone whom I've seen, what they were wearing, what color
 their hair was, what sort of expressions they had on their faces, I would have to talk till
 doomsday. So instead of this rich physical experience, which is very rich indeed, I have
 to attenuate it in memory and description, to saying, oh, I met a lot of people in Philadelphia,
 and there were men and there were women, and lots of them were young and some of them were
 old. You know, it's a most utterly impoverished account of what went on. So therefore, in
 thinking of ourselves in this way, what I did yesterday, what I did the day before,
 in terms of this stringy, mangy account, all I have is a caricature of myself. And you
 know the caricaturist doesn't draw you all in, he just puts certain salient features
 whereby people will recognize you. It's not a skeleton. So we are, as it were, conceiving
 ourselves as a bunch of skeletons, and they've got no flesh on them, just a bunch of bones.
 And no wonder we all feel inadequate. We're all looking for something to the future, to
 bring us a goody, we know we ought to have, there's a golden goody at the end of the line
 somewhere. There's a good time coming, be it ever so far away, that one far-off divine
 event to which all creation moves, we hope. And therefore we say of something that's no
 good, it has no future. I would say it has no present. But everybody says it has no future.
 Now here we are, as it were, psychically starved, and always therefore looking for, looking,
 seeking, seeking, seeking. And this confused seeking is going on everywhere. We don't know
 what we want. Nobody knows what they want. We say yes, we think of what we want in vague
 terms, pleasure, money, wealth, love, fulfillment, personal development. But we don't know what
 we mean by all that. If a person really sits down to figure out, write a long essay, twenty
 pages on your idea of heaven, it'll be a sorry production. You can see it already in medieval
 art, whether it's depictions of heaven and hell. Hell is always much better than heaven.
 Although it's uncomfortable, it's a sadomasochistic orgy. Wowee, you know, hell is really rip-roaring,
 whereas all the saints in heaven are sitting... You know, very, very smug and demure, like
 they were in church. And you see also the multitudes of the saved. Instead of this writhing,
 wormy thing, you can see all their heads, which the artist has drawn to abbreviate them,
 just the tops of their heads in masses. They look like cobblestone street, flattened out.
 So what has happened then is this. That our I is an illusion. It's an image. And it is
 no more our self than an idol is the Godhead. But we say, "It can't be so, because I feel
 I really exist. It isn't just an idea in my head, it's a feeling, I feel me." Well, what
 is it that you feel when you feel I? I'll tell you. What do you do when somebody says,
 "Pay attention"? What is the difference between looking at something and taking a hard look
 at it? Or between hearing something and listening intently? What's the difference? What's the
 difference between waiting while something goes on and enduring it? Why? The difference
 is this. That when you pay attention, instead of just looking, you screw up your face. You
 frown and stare. That is a muscular activity around here. When you will, you grit your
 teeth or clench your fists. When you endure or control yourself, you pull yourself together
 physically, and therefore you get uptight. You hold your breath. You do all kinds of
 muscular things to control the functioning of your nervous system. And none of them have
 the slightest effect on the proper operation of the nervous system. If you stare at things,
 you will rather fuzz the image than see them clearly. If you listen intently by concentrating
 on muscles around the ears, you will be so much attending to muscles here that you won't
 hear things properly. And you may get singing in the ears. If you tighten up with your body
 to pull yourself together, all you do is constrict yourself. I remember in school, I sat next
 to a boy who had great difficulty in learning to read. And what they always say to children
 is try. If you can't do something, you must try. So the boy tries. And what has he done?
 When he's trying to get out words, he grunts and groans as if he were lifting weights.
 And the teacher's impressed. The boy is really trying. Gives him B for effort. He's doing
 it. Has nothing to do with it. Now, we all make this muscular straining with the thought
 that it's achieving psychological results. The sort of psychological results it's intended
 to achieve. And all this amounts to is it's like you're taking off in a jet plane. You've
 got a mile down the runway and the thing isn't up in the air yet and you get nervous. So
 you start pulling at your seatbelt. That's what it is. Now, that is a chronic feeling.
 We have it in us all the time and it corresponds to the word "I". That's what you feel when
 you say "I". You feel that chronic tension. Because when an organ is working properly,
 you don't feel it. If you see your eye, you've got cataract. If you hear your ears, you've
 got singing in your ears, you know, getting in the way of hearing. When you are fully
 functioning, you are unaware of the organ. When you're thinking clearly, your brain isn't
 getting in your way. Actually, of course, you are seeing your eyes in the sense that
 everything you see out in front of you is a condition in the optic nerves at the back
 of the skull. That's where you're aware of all this. But you're not aware of the "I"
 as the "I". I'm talking about the optical "I". So when we are aware of the ego "I",
 we are aware of this chronic tension inside ourselves. And that's not us. It's a futile
 tension. So when we get the illusion, the image of ourselves, married to a futile tension,
 you've got an illusion married to a futility. And then you wonder why "I" can't do anything.
 Why "I" feel in the face of all the problems of the world, impotent. And why "I" somehow
 cannot manage to transform "I". Now here we get to the real problem. Because we're always
 telling each other that we should be different. I'm not going to tell you that tonight. Why
 not? Because I know you can't be. Nor can I. That may sound depressing, but I'll show
 you it isn't. It's very heartening. But everybody, you see, who is at all sensitive and awake
 to their own problems and human problems is trying to change himself. We know we can't
 change the world unless we change ourselves. If we are all individually selfish, we're
 going to be collectively selfish. If we don't really love people and only pretend to, somehow
 we've got to find a way to love. After all, it's said in the Bible, "Thou shalt love the
 Lord thy God and your neighbor as yourself." You must love. Yeah, we all agree. Sure. But
 we don't. In fact, one psychologist very smartly asked a patient, "With whom are you in love
 against?" And this is particularly becomes appalling when we enter into the realm of
 higher things, by which I mean spiritual development. Everybody these days is interested in spiritual
 development. And wisely, because we want to change our consciousness. Many people are
 well aware that this egocentric consciousness is a hallucination. And that they presume
 it's the function of religion to change it. Because that's what the Zen Buddhists and
 yogis and all these people in the Orient are doing. They are changing their state of consciousness
 to get something called Satori, or mystical experience, or Nirvana, or Moksha, or what
 have you. And everybody around here is really enthused about that, because you don't get
 that in church. I mean, there have been Christian mystics, but the church has been very quiet
 about them. In the average church, all you get is talk. There's no meditation, no spiritual
 discipline. They tell God what to do interminably, as if he didn't know. And then they tell the
 people what to do, as if they could or even wanted to. And then they sing religious nursery
 rhymes. And then, to cap it all, the Roman Catholic Church, which did at least have an
 unintelligible service, which was, you know, it was real mysterious and suggestive, vast
 magic going on. They went and put the thing into bad English. And they took away incense,
 and they took away, and they became a bunch of Protestants, and the thing was just terrible.
 So now all these Catholics are at loose ends. As Claire Booth Luce put it, not to be a pun,
 but she said, you know, it's no longer possible to practice contemplative prayer at Mass.
 Because you're being advised, exhorted, edified all the time. And it becomes a bore. Think
 of God listening to all those prayers. I mean, do have, I mean, talking about grieving the
 Holy Spirit. It's just awful. People have no consideration for God at all. So, but in
 pursuing these spiritual disciplines, yoga and Zen and so forth, and also psychotherapy,
 there comes up a big difficulty. And the big difficulty is this. I want to find a method
 whereby I can change my consciousness. But the, therefore, to improve myself. But the
 self that needs to be improved is the one that is doing the improving. And so I'm rather
 stuck. I find out the reason that I think I believe, say, in God, is that I sure hope
 that somehow God will rescue me. In other words, I want to hang on to my own existence.
 And I feel rather shaky about doing that for myself, but I just hope there's a God who'll
 take care of it. Or if I could be loving, I would have a better opinion of myself. I'd
 feel better about it. I could face myself, as people say, if I were more loving. So the
 unloving me, somehow, by some gimmickry, has to turn itself into a loving me, and this
 is just like trying to lift yourself off the ground with your own bootstraps. It can't
 be done. And that's why religion, in practice, mainly produces hypocrisy and guilt. Because
 of the constant failure of these enterprises. Oh, people go and study Zen, and they come
 back and say, "Wow, getting rid of your ego is a superhuman task. I assure you it's going
 to be very, very difficult to get rid of your ego. You're going to have to sit for a long
 time and you're going to get the sorest legs. It's hard work, and all you wretched kids
 who think you're getting rid of your ego on part or something or other, and easy yoga,
 you don't know what you're in for when it really comes down to the nitty-gritty. Well,
 you know, the biggest ego trip going is getting rid of your ego. And the joke of it all is
 your ego doesn't exist. There's nothing to get rid of. It's an illusion, as I tried to
 explain. But you still want to ask how to stop the illusion. Now, who's asking? I mean,
 do you think in the ordinary sense in which you use the word "I," how can I stop identifying
 myself with the wrong me? Well, the answer is simply you can't. Now, the Christians put
 this in their way when they say that mystical experience is a gift of divine grace. Man,
 as such, cannot achieve this experience. It is a gift of God, and if God doesn't give
 it to you, there's no way of getting it. Now, that is solidly true. You can't do anything
 about it because you don't exist. Well, you say, "That's pretty depressing news." But
 the whole point is it isn't depressing news. It is the joyous news. There's a Zen poem
 which puts it like this, talking about it means, the mystical experience, satori, the
 realization that you are the eternal energy of the universe, like Jesus did. It says like
 this, "You cannot catch hold of it, nor can you get rid of it. In not being able to get
 it, you get it. When you speak, it's silent. When you are silent, it speaks." Now, in not
 being able to get it, you get it. Because this whole feeling, what Krishnamurti is trying
 to explain to people, for example, when he says, "Why do you ask for a method? There
 is no method. All methods are simply gimmicks for strengthening your ego. So how do we not
 do that?" He says, "You're still asking for a method. There is no method. If you really
 understand what your I is, you will see there is no method." This is so sad. But it's not.
 This is the gospel, the good news. Because if you cannot achieve it, if you cannot transform
 yourself, that means that the main obstacle to mystical vision has collapsed. That was
 you. What happens? You can't do anything about it. You're at your wit's end. What are you
 going to do, commit suicide? Supposing you just put that off for a little while. Wait
 and see what happens. You can't control your thoughts. You can't control your feelings,
 because there is no controller. You are your thoughts and your feelings. And they're running
 along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. Here they go. You're still
 breathing, aren't you? Still growing your hair? Still seeing and hearing? Are you doing
 that? I mean, is breathing something that you do? Do you see? I mean, do you organize
 the operations of your eyes? Know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina?
 Do you do that? It's a happening. It happens. So you can feel all this happening. Your breathing
 is happening. Your thinking is happening. Your feeling is happening. Your hearing, your
 seeing. The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The sun is
 happening shining. There it is. All this happening. And may I introduce you? This is yourself.
 This begins to be a vision of who you really are. And that's the way you function. You
 function by happening, that is to say, by spontaneous occurrence. And this is not a
 state of affairs that you should realize. I cannot possibly preach it to you, because
 the minute you start thinking, "I should understand that," this is the stupid notion again of
 "I should bring it about," when there is no you to bring it about. See, that's why I'm
 not preaching. You can only preach to egos. All I can do is to talk about what is. It
 amuses me to talk about what is, because it's wonderful. I love it. And therefore I
 like to talk. If I get paid for it, then I make my living. And sensible people get paid
 for doing what they enjoy doing. So this is not on a... You see, this is the whole approach
 here is not to convert you, not to make you over, not to improve you, but for you to discover
 that if you really knew the way you are, things would be sane. But you see, you can't do that.
 You can't make that discovery, because you're in your own way. So long as you think, "I'm
 I." So long as that hallucination blocks it. And the hallucination disappears only in the
 realization of its own futility. When at last you see, you can't do it. You cannot make
 yourself over. You cannot really control your own mind. See, when we try to control the
 mind, a lot of yoga teachers try to get you to control your own mind, mainly to prove
 to you that you can't do it. There's nothing, you know, a fool who persists in his folly
 will become wise. So what they do is they speed up the folly. And so you get concentrating.
 And you can have a certain amount of superficial and initial success by a process commonly
 called self-hypnosis. And you can think you're making progress. And a good teacher will let
 you go along that way for a while, until he really throws you with one. Why are you concentrating?
 See Buddhism works this way. Buddha said, "If you suffer, you suffer because you desire,
 and your desires are either unattainable or always being disappointed or something." So
 cut out desire. So those disciples went away and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire,
 cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire. But then they came back and Buddha said, "But
 you are still desiring not to desire." They wondered how to get rid of that. So when you
 see that that's nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. In seeing that
 you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no controller. What you took to be
 the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts. What you took to be the feeler of
 the feelings, which was that chronic muscular strain, is just one of the feelings. What
 you took to be the experiencer of experience is just part of the experience. So there isn't
 any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings. We get into that bind because we have a grammatical
 rule that verbs have to have subjects. And the funny thing about that is that verbs are
 processes and subjects are nouns, which are supposed to be things. How does a noun start
 a verb? How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously it can't. But we always
 insist that there is this subject called the knower. And without a knower, there can't
 be knowing. Well, that's just a grammatical rule. It isn't a rule of nature. In nature,
 there's just knowing, like you're feeling it. And I have to say you are feeling it,
 as if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say I am feeling, what I mean
 is there is feeling here. When I say you are feeling, I mean there is feeling there. I
 have to say even there is feeling. What a cumbersome language we have. Chinese is easier.
 You don't have to put all that in. You can say things twice as fast in Chinese as you
 can in any other language. Well, anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing, that
 the play of thought, of feeling, etc., just goes on by itself as a happening, then you
 are in a state which we will call meditation. And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts
 will come to silence. That is to say, all the verbal, symbolic chatter going on in the
 skull. Don't try and get rid of it, because that will again produce the illusion that
 there is a controller. It goes on, it goes on, it goes on, and finally it gets tired
 of itself and bored and stops. And so then there is a silence. And this is a deeper level
 of meditation. And in that silence, you suddenly begin to see the world as it is. And you don't
 see any past, and you don't see any future. You don't see any difference between yourself
 and the rest of it. That's just an idea. You can't put your hand on the difference between
 myself and you. You know, you can't blow it, you can't bounce it, you can't pull it, it's
 just an idea. You can't find any material body, because material body is an idea. So
 is spiritual body. This is somebody's philosophical notions. See, reality isn't material. That's
 an idea. Reality isn't spiritual. That's an idea. Reality is... So, we find, if I've got
 to put it back into words, that we live in an eternal now. You've got all the time in
 the world, because you've got all the time there is, which is now. And you are this universe.
 And you feel a strange feeling when ideas don't define the differences. You feel that
 other people's doings are your doings. And that makes it very difficult to blame other
 people. If you're not sophisticated theologically, you may of course run screaming in the streets
 and say that you're God. In a way that's what happened to Jesus, because he wasn't sophisticated
 theologically. He only had Old Testament biblical theology behind him. If he'd had
 Hindu theology, he could have put it more subtly. But it was only that rather primitive
 theology of the Old Testament. And that was a conception of God as a monarchical boss.
 Thanks. And you can't go around and say I'm the boss's son. If you're going to say I'm
 God, you must allow it for everyone else too. But this was a heretical idea from the point
 of view of Hebrew theology. And so what they did with Jesus was they pedestalized him.
 That means kicked him upstairs so that he wouldn't be able to influence anyone else.
 And only you may be God. And that stopped the gospel cold right at the beginning. It
 couldn't spread. Well anyway, this is therefore to say that the transformation of human consciousness
 through meditation is frustrated. So long as we think of it in terms of something that
 I myself can bring about by some kind of wangle, by some sort of gimmick. Because you see that
 leads to endless games of spiritual one-upmanship. And of guru competitions. Of my guru is more
 effective than your guru. My yoga's faster than your yoga. I'm more aware of myself than
 you are. I'm humbler than you are. I'm sorrier for my sins than you are. I love you more
 than you love me. This interminable goings on about which people fight and wonder whether
 they are a little bit more evolved than somebody else and so on. All that can just fall away.
 And then we get this strange feeling that we have never had, you see, in our lives.
 Except occasionally by accident, some people get a glimpse that we are no longer this poor
 little stranger and afraid in a world it never made. But that you are this universe and you
 are creating it at every moment. Because you see it starts now. It didn't begin in the
 past. There was no past. See if the universe began in the past, when that happened it was
 now. See? Well it's still now. And the universe is still beginning now and it's trailing off
 like the wake of a ship from now. In the wake of the ship fades out, so does the past. You
 can look back there to explain things but the explanation disappears. You'll never find
 it there. Things are not explained by the past. They are explained by what happens now.
 That creates the past. And it begins here. That's the birth of responsibility. Because
 otherwise you can always look over your shoulder and say, "Well I'm the way I am because my
 mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic because her mother dropped
 her." And away we go back to Adam and Eve or to a disappearing monkey or something. We
 never get at it. But in this way you are faced with it, you are doing all this. And that's
 an extraordinary shock. So, cheer up. You can't blame anyone else for the kind of world
 you're in. And if you know, you see that I, in the sense of the person, the front, the
 ego really doesn't exist, then it won't go to your head too badly if you wake up and
 discover that you're God.
 You've been listening to Alan Watts from the Spoken Word Library of the Electronic University.
 For copies of this and other Alan Watts programs, please go to AlanWatts.com on the World Wide
 Web or call us toll free at 1-800-WO-WATTS. That's A-L-A-N-W-A-T-T-S dot com or 1-800-W-O-W-A-T-T-S.
 The Watts website features free audio downloads, program lists, and information on Watts life
 and works. Once again, that's AlanWatts.com or 1-800-W-O-WATTS.
 [MUSIC]
 [MUSIC]
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.65 sec
Decoding  : 2.14 sec
Transcribe: 4641.18 sec
Total Time: 4643.96 sec