was. Why didn't I see? Why was I such a fool as I overlooked this idiotically simple trick?
 And the best tricks are the simplest and don't involve complicated apparatus at all. The
 best stage magicians are the ones who will stand in the middle of a crowd of people,
 you know, with no stage hocus-pocus or wires or trapdoors or anything like that, and right
 under your nose will use a pack of cards or a few coins to do things that flabbergast
 people totally. And all those things are extremely simple, once you know. And so that's very
 much like being enlightened, having satori. When you get it, you think, "Oh, for heaven's
 sakes, why didn't I see that?" I mean, how obvious. But the difficulty in communication
 here is that satori, or enlightenment, is very much like seeing a joke. And then you
 laugh. You laugh genuinely from here. But if somebody explains it to you, you don't
 get the same laugh as if you saw it right off. You get a throat laugh instead of a belly
 laugh. So that's why people are reluctant to explain too much about it, and rather use
 the method whereby you will see it for yourself and then laugh. Or what is the cosmic equivalent?
 So therefore, we are, most of us, in a state of hypnosis, induced by the incantation of
 language, the enchantment, the spellbinding. And when one speaks of awakening, as say in
 Buddhism, one speaks of the Buddha as the awakened one, it means, therefore, de-hypnotization,
 coming to your senses. But of course, to do that, you have to go out of your mind. Well,
 what that involves, among other things, is an awakening to the true structure of your
 common sense. I once was invited to give an address before the American Psychiatric Association.
 It was a very funny situation, because Aldous Huxley had been supposed to give the talk,
 and he was sick. And so they invited me to come and give it instead. And it was on a
 very dangerous subject, on the use of LSD. This was many years ago. This was in 1958,
 when LSD was just discovered. And what was I going to say? Oh, they were horrified. Would
 I please meet with the committee? Because they didn't want anything to be said that
 would somehow damage their scientific integrity. So here they were, anxious as all get out.
 Well, I said, you invited me here to talk, and to tell you the truth, I don't know what
 I'm going to say, because I never prepare anything in advance. I'm going to listen to
 what you have to say first, and I'll make up my mind. So I attended the morning conference.
 And one interminably dull paper after another was read, you know, and most of them by psychoanalytically
 oriented people who were discussing mysticism in terms of regression. Regression to the
 womb. Regression to the oceanic feeling of the as yet undifferentiated infant.
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.63 sec
Decoding  : 0.44 sec
Transcribe: 482.17 sec
Total Time: 483.24 sec