siblings, people who work for us and everything, I mean it's just impossible to cut ourselves
 off from a social environment and also furthermore from a natural environment.
 We are that.
 There is no clear way of drawing the boundary between this organism and everything that
 surrounds it.
 And yet the image of ourselves that we have does not include all those relationships.
 Our idea of personality of ourselves includes no information whatsoever about the hypothalamus,
 the organ of the brain, the pineal gland, really of the way we breathe, of how our blood
 circulates, of how we manage to form a sentence, how we manage to be conscious, how you open
 and close your hand.
 The information contained in your image of yourself contains nothing about all that and
 therefore obviously is an extremely inadequate image.
 But nonetheless we do think that the image of self refers to something because we have
 the impression, very strongly indeed, that I exist.
 And this isn't just an idea we think, my God, it's a feeling.
 It's really substantially there in the middle of us.
 And what is it?
 What do you actually sense?
 Like you know, when you're sitting on the floor and you feel the floor is there and
 it's real and hard.
 Okay, what are you sitting on the floor?
 What do you have the sensation of, you know, the view here, when you're not hitting yourself?
 What is it?
 Well in what part of your body do you feel yourself, the real I existing?
 We can explore this very deeply, but I'm going to give you a preliminary and superficial
 answer.
 The sensation which corresponds to the image of ourselves is a chronic muscular tension
 which has absolutely no useful function whatsoever.
 It is when you try, say, to concentrate.
 What do you do when you try to pay attention?
 When I was a little boy in school I had sitting next to me another boy who had great difficulty
 in reading, and as he worked over the textbook with its perfectly tittling information, he
 groaned and grunted to try to read to get out the sound as if he were heaving enormous
 weights on his muscles.
 He was heaving enormous weights.
 And you know, the teacher was vaguely impressed that he was trying.
 And that absolutely, all this tying yourself up into a knot has absolutely nothing to do
 with the way your mind works.
 Because look, if you try to see hard, look very intensely, and you make tight muscles
 around here, and maybe you tense your jaws a bit, if anything that will make your vision
 more fuzzy.
 Because if you want to see something clearly you must not make an effort.
 You must simply trust your eyes and your nervous system to do their thing.
 So you just look like that.
 I was writing the other night and I completely forgot somebody's name, but I knew that eventually
 my memory would produce it.
 And I just sat for a while and said to my memory, "You know very well who this person
 is.
 Please give me the answer."
 And so boing, there it was.
 Because that's the way nerves work.
 They don't work by forcing.
 And yet we've all been brought up to try to force our nervous activity, our concentration,
 our memory, our comprehension, and indeed our very love, we've tried to force it with
 muscles.
 Men will understand me if I say, "You cannot force by muscular effort yourself to have
 an erection."
 Women will understand me if I say, "You cannot force yourself with muscles to have an orgasm."
 It has to happen.
 And you must trust it to happen.
 And there is absolutely nothing you can do about it by using your muscles.
 Nothing, nothing, nothing.
 So in precisely the same way, well, let's complete the picture.
 So therefore, the notion that we have of ourselves, of ego, is a compound of an image of ourselves
 which does not fit the facts, and a sensation of muscular straining which is futile.
 So that what you perceive to be yourself is the marriage of an illusion and a futility.
 So well, what are we?
 If that isn't the case.
 Well obviously, if you want to take a scientific point of view by that mythology, then you're
 your organism, about which we know very little.
 And the organism as we've seen is inseparable from its environment.
 And so you are the organism environment.
 In other words, you are no less than the universe.
 Each one of you is the universe expressed in the place which you feel is here and now.
 You're an aperture through which the universe is looking at itself, exploring itself.
 And we're going to go into that much more deeply.
 So when you feel that you are a lonely, put-upon, isolated, little stranger confronting all
 this, see, you have an illusory feeling, because the truth is the reverse.
 You are the whole works that there is, that always was, and always has been, and always
 will be.
 Only, just as my whole body has a little nerve end here, which is exploring and which contributes
 to the sense of touch, you are just such a little nerve end for everything that's going
 on.
 Just as the eyes serve the whole body and help it to find its way around, so you are,
 as it were, serving the whole universe.
 You're a cell in it.
 And it's exploring itself.
 So that you are a function of all that.
 And therefore, if this is so, it just doesn't fit the...
 These facts do not fit the way we feel.
 (wind howling)


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