Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching

Now, this morning I was giving you a talk on the fundamental basic attitudes expressed

in Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching. And the title of the book, Tao Te Ching, introduces now the

second word in the title. I've been dwelling this morning on the first word, which is Tao,

and so comes up the second word, De. And this word, again, faces us with some serious problems

of translation. Ordinarily translated, virtue. But virtue, as we understand it today, isn't

at all appropriate. The nearest kind of... When we speak of the healing virtues of a plant,

that's nearer to the meaning of this word, De. The Japanese pronounce it "toku," the Cantonese "duck,"

and the Northern Mandarins approximately "dhe." And in the section of the Lao-Tzu, where this is

really introduced, the text says something like this. "Superior virtue, not virtue, thus it has

virtue. Inferior virtue, can't let go of virtue, thus not virtue." And we more or less paraphrase

that by translating, "Superior virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue, and therefore it

is virtue. But inferior virtue is so hooked up with being virtuous, or hooked on being virtuous,

that it's not virtue." Now, then, therefore, this word is a connection of virtue and magic. It means

the superior... the excellence of things, in the sense that a tree excels at being a tree. And

nobody really knows how it does it. There is no way of imitating a tree, except... the only thing

is to be one. And so, in the same way, when a human being shows extraordinary skill at something,

it seems that it comes natural to him. It seems that he doesn't achieve it by any kind of

artificiality. If there is some discipline in it, it's concealed. So, excelling in something

naturally, and yet it's something that is so difficult to understand that it seems that it

has been done by magic, is the meaning of this word. So, what "da" is, is the state of affairs,

a way of talking about a... particularly a human being, who has learned to live in harmony with the

Tao. Now, of course, everything is fundamentally in harmony with the Tao. In the book called the

Jung-Yung, or the Unwobbling Pivot, it is said, "The Tao is that from which nothing can depart.

That from which things can depart is not the Tao." Fundamentally, you see, you can't get away from it.

It's like a situation in which we are all floating in a tremendous river, and the river carries you

along, anyhow. Now, some of the people in the river are swimming against it, but they're still being

carried along. Others have learned that the art of the thing is to swim with it, and they're carried

along too. But they know it, you see. They know they're carried along, whereas the people who are

swimming against it think they're going in the opposite direction. But they're not really. So,

that was the sort of discussion we were having this morning, when I find invariably, whenever I

talk about these things, Americans raise moral issues, because we are a people incredibly

bamboozled by preachers. And so, this always comes up. Bamboozled. Preachers. Yes. And have

chronic guilty consciences. And so, those questions are always raised. But this, you see, explains part

of the situation. That you have to flow with the river. There is no other way. But that you can

swim against it, and pretend not to be flowing with it, but you still are. So, but a person who is not

making that pretense anymore, who knows that you have to go with the river, and swim with it,

suddenly he acquires behind everything that he does, the power of the river. The person swimming

against the river, you see, does not by his action express the force of the river. The person swimming

with it, he goes along and he has that whole river behind him, but he's subtly directing it. Because

you can change direction in the course of the river. You can go to the left or to the right, as a ship

can use a rudder, and still go along with the current, or more skillful still, as a sailboat can

tack. Because when a sailboat tacks, and goes in a direction contrary to the wind, it still is using

the wind to blow it along. Now, that is the most highly skillful art of all. That is Taoism in

perfection. The art of sailing. Very intelligent. I remember once, I was looking in the open air,

and one of those glorious little fizzle-down things came, and I picked it up, like that,

and brought it down, and it looked as if it was struggling to get away. Just as if you caught

an insect by one leg. Like a daddy longlegs, or something of that kind. It seemed to be struggling

to get away, and I, at first I thought, "Well, it's not doing that. That's just the wind blowing."

Then I thought again, "Really? Only the wind blowing? Surely it is the structure of this

thing, which in cooperation with the existence of wind, enables it to move like an animal. But

using the wind's effort, not its own." It is more intelligent being than an insect, in a way,

because an insect uses effort, like a person who rows a boat uses effort. But the man who puts up

a sail is using magic. He lets nature do it for him, with the intelligence to use a sail. You see?

So in just this way, the meaning of "de" is that kind of intelligence, which, without your using

very much effort, gets everything to cooperate with you. You, for example, never force other

people to agree with you, but you give them the notion that the idea you wanted them to have was

their own. This is a feminine heart, preeminently. A woman who really wants a lover does not pursue

him, because then most men feel that she's aggressive. And if she's aggressive, she obviously

is a woman who has had difficulty in finding lovers, and therefore there must be some undesirably

secret thing about her. But if she, as it were, makes a void, and is slightly difficult to get,

then people get excited. They know she's a highly prized object, and so they pursue. Same way,

when you want to teach a baby to swim, a thing you can do is to put the baby in the water,

and then move backwards in the water and create a vacuum, and this pulls the baby along. It helps

it to learn the feel of the water and how to swim. It's the same principle. So, also, clever,

difficult-to-getness is one of the very best means of acquiring immense publicity. Take the case of

T.E. Lawrence, who published The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a limited edition. And this became an

extraordinarily celebrated book. It cost hundreds of dollars a copy to find one on the market. They

waited and waited and built this up and built this up and built this up, and finally they published

the general edition. And it was a knockout, because the first one had been sort of secret

and difficult to find. If you have patience, you see, you can always do this. So, the whole art of

the ruler, you see, the Tao Te Ching is a book written for several purposes. You may take it as

a guide to mystical understanding of the universe. You may take it as a dissertation on the principles

of nature, almost a naturalistic, a handbook of natural law, we would say. Or you may also

take it as a political book, a book of wisdom for governors. And the principle which it advocates,

basically, is the virtue of governing by not ruling. Look at it in this way. Supposing the

President of the United States were as unknown to you by name as the local sanitary inspector,

the man who looks after the drains and the sewage disposal and all that kind of thing. This is not

a glamorous figure, you see. But for that very reason, he probably does his job more efficiently

than the President, because the President wastes enormous amount of time in interviewing various

groups from the Elks and the Girl Scouts and conferring honors and all this kind of thing.

The poor man's life must be an utter torment, because he's so well known and therefore has

absolutely no time to give to the government of the country. I mean, think of his mail,

and all the people who have to be employed sifting that out and assessing it. So that if he was

someone quite anonymous, and that we didn't have to think about him, he would be a very,

very good ruler. In just the same way, for example, you don't have to attend, unless you're

sick, to the government of your own body. It happens automatically. This is this expression

"Ziran" of itself, and it goes on day after day after day, and the better it is, the less you

have to think about it. When you see well, you do not see your eyes. If there is something wrong

with your eyes, you start seeing spots, and those spots are spots in your eyes. When you hear well,

you'd never hear your ears. But when they start singing, you know, then you're starting to hear

your ears, and your ears are getting in the way of their own hearing. So on the deepest level,

a person as a whole can get in the way of his own existence by becoming too aware of himself,

and then he lacks this quality. Now, the Taoists, then, proposed that there be something to help

people get back to Tao, and to be able to be in a state of "deh," so that they wouldn't get in

their own way. And this is connected with the idea of being empty. Emptiness, being somehow

vacant, was the secret of the thing. The highest kind of knowledge is not "know how," but "know how,"

N-O-hyphen-H-O-W. To be able to do it "know how," without any method. To achieve this, something is

practiced which is called "fasting the heart." The heart, in Chinese, is a word which doesn't mean

"heart" in the physiological sense. You see, it's part of the "deh" character. "Shin." It's usually

located about here. And it means "heart-mind." It's equivalently translated as "mind," and in

all the Zen texts where the word "mind" is used, "no mind," "mushin," it is this character. The

psychic center. Now, the best kind of heart is absence of heart. In English, the word "heartless"

has a very bad connotation, as does the word "mindless." A heartless person is an inconsiderate,

unfeeling person. A mindless person is an idiot. But a person who has "mushin," or "no mind," or

"no heart," in Chinese, is a very high order of person. It means that his psychic center doesn't

get in its own way. It operates as if it wasn't there. Zhuangzi says that the highest form of

man uses his shin like a mirror. It grasps nothing. It refuses nothing. It receives but does not keep.

And the poem says, "When the geese fly over the water, and they are reflected in the water,

that the geese do not intend to cast their reflection, and the water has no mind to retain

their image." So, the whole thing is, you see, to operate in the world as if you were absent. Now,

this is built into us physiologically, fundamentally. Let me ask you simply, what is the color of your

head from the standpoint of your eyes? Your eyes don't see your head, do they? You look all around,

and you see everything else, but your head you don't see. Do you feel that your head is black?

No. Hasn't any color at all. Outside, you see, your field of vision is an oval. Two eyes, and

this creates two centers of an ellipse. So, there's this whole field of vision. Now, experiment. What

is beyond the field of vision? What color is it where you can't see? It isn't black. This is an

important point. It's no color at all beyond there. And in this way, you can get an idea of what is

meant by that character that I discussed this morning, Xuan, which, although it formally has

the meaning of darkness, this one, although it formally has the meaning of darkness and the deep

and the obscure, it actually refers to this kind of no color, which is the color of your head, so far

as your eyes are concerned. Now, so, in this sense, the invisibility of one's head, almost the not

having of any head at all, is the secret of being alive. To be headless, you might say. To have no

head, in just the sense I'm talking about, is our way of talking about the Chinese expression

"mushen," no mind. Now, as a matter of fact, if you want to see the inside of your head, all you have

to do is keep your eyes open. Because everything that you are experiencing in the external visual

field is a state of your brain. All these colors and shapes are the way in which the brain nerves

translate the electrical impulses in the external world, meaning the world outside the envelope of

skin. So, they translate all what is going on outside into impulses which are to us shape and

color. But shape and color are states of the nerves, so what you see when your eyes are open is how it

feels inside your head. You think your head is a blank, but actually, it's being a blank. You don't

see your brain as an external, undulating, corrugated structure. You see your brain as everything

outside. So, in this way, the emptiness of one's head is the condition of seeing. The transparency

of the eye lens is the condition of seeing colors. It has no color itself. Eckhart said this, "Because

my eye has no color, it is able to discern color." This is in Germany in the 13th century. This is

fundamental Taoist idea of being absent as the condition of being present. Being not there. So,

Zhuangzi says, "When your belt is comfortable, you don't feel it. When your shoes are comfortable,

it is as if you weren't wearing any. Likewise, your clothes, you see, the more you are aware of

these things, the less properly they are made, or the less properly they fit." But we raise an

objection to this, a very simple objection. If I don't know I'm there, I seem to be missing everything.

We want to know that we know. If we're happy and we don't know we're happy, we might just as well

not be happy. To be happy and to know that you're happy is really the overflowing of the cup of

life. Of course, the penalty for that is to be miserable and to know that you're miserable. Some

people are miserable without knowing it. But, you know my limerick, "There was a young man who said,

'So, it seems that I know that I know. What I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know

that I know that I know.'" And this is the great human predicament. The development of self-consciousness,

the development of the possibility of reflecting upon one's own knowledge. And this is simultaneously

a blessing and a curse. And Taoism does not escape this problem. I mean, it doesn't avoid this

problem, it deals with it. But it doesn't deal with it obviously. So we get back to this fundamental

verse about the nature of "de." What is highly virtuous is the virtue that is not conscious of

itself as virtue. The moment it's conscious of itself as such, you see, it fails. So in this way,

we love to see a child dancing all by itself, lost in the dance, and not performing for an audience.

We say, "Oh, if only I could dance like that. If only I could become like a child again, innocent."

But then soon we know, when parents notice how beautifully a child dances, and they all approve

of it and say to this child, "Dance for us." The child begins to lose this power. And it puts on airs,

it knows it's noticed. And we don't like that. We say, "That's affectation, that's showing off, that's

phony." What we want you to do is to dance as if you had no audience, not even yourself. Which,

of course, puts the child in a double bind. Because it says to the child, "We require you

to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it as if it wasn't required." We do that

all the time to our children and to each other. "You must love me. After all, you promised to do

so when we got married, didn't you?" And so on. So, this is the difficulty. But somehow, a very

great artist, in the maturity of his life, somehow is able at least to give the impression that he

does what he does without playing to the gallery, without self-consciousness. It seems perfectly

natural. So, how does he get there? There was a Taoist sage later than Lao-tzu. His name was

Lie-tzu. We Romanize that as L-I-E-H, Lie-tzu. And he had a reputation for being able to ride on the

wind. So light. Zhuangzi says in one place, "It's easy enough to stand still. The difficulty is to

walk without touching the ground." Because in the state of being in accord with the Tao, there is a

certain feeling of weightlessness, parallel to the weightlessness that people feel when they get into

outer space or when they go deep into the ocean. This is, of course, connected with the sensation

that you're not carrying your body around. I described this morning the sensation that an

expert driver has when he really is with it in a car, that the hill lifts him up and drops him

down the other side, that he and the road are all one process. And that's equivalent to the sense of

weightlessness. And so this is connected, this is the inner meaning of Lie-tzu riding on the wind.

When Suzuki was asked, "What is it like to have satori?" he said, "It's just like ordinary everyday

experience, except about two inches off the ground." And so we say in our own songs, "Walking

on air, never a care. Something is making me sing. Tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la, like a little bird in

spring." What is this, then, weightlessness? It means, of course, partly, that you're not moving

around in constant opposition to yourself. Most people move in constant opposition to themselves

because they are afraid that if they don't oppose themselves all the time, something awful will

happen. See, it's so easy to bend your arm. No problem at all. But supposing you make a fight

about it, and you take these antagonistic muscles, as they're called, and fight them against each

other so that you have to bend your arm like that. See? How ridiculous. But if you somehow felt that

in bending your arm you might make a mistake, you know, instead of bending it you might hit yourself,

then these two muscles get nervous, and they fight each other to be sure that everything happens

all right. That's anxiety, you see? So, when is the human being developed the power to be aware

of himself, to know that he knows? In other words, when the cortex was formed over the original brain,

he fell from grace. That was the fall of man. Because when he felt, he had the sensation of

being in charge, of being in control of himself, and you can only have that sensation when you are

aware of what you're doing. He got anxious. Am I aware enough of myself? Have I taken enough

factors into consideration? Have I done all that should be done? And then he started trembling.

This was the fall of man, of course. This is what is meant. Lao Tzu says, "When the great

Tao lost, there came duty to man and right conduct." In other words, nobody talks about

how you ought to behave unless things have gone radically wrong. There wouldn't be any

conception of faithful ministers of the state unless there were a lot of lousy politicians

around. No one would talk about filial piety unless there were wayward sons and daughters.

So there is constantly in the tradition of Taoism the idea that all moral preaching is confusion.

There's a marvelous case of this in the Zhuangzi book, where there's an alleged conversation

between Confucius and Lao Tzu, in which Lao Tzu asks Confucius to explain to him what

is charity and duty to one's neighbor. And Confucius gives him a little sermon on giving

up one's self-interest and working for others.

And Lao Tzu says what's stuff. "Sir, regard the universe." He says, "The stars come out

invariably every night. The sun rises and sets. The birds flock and migrate without

exception. All flowers and trees grow upwards without exception. You, by your talk of charity

and duty to one's neighbor, you're just introducing confusion into the empire. Your attempt to

eliminate self is a positive manifestation of selfishness. You are like a person beating

a drum in search of a fugitive." The modern equivalent of that would be the police car

about to raid a bad nightclub and coming with its siren full on. And everybody in the club

gets out. So, all talk about selfishness, all talk about its success in becoming virtuous,

or enlightened, or integrated, or non-neurotic, or self-actualized, let's use all the terms

that are being used, all this talk attests to the fact that it hasn't happened. And we'll

in fact get in the way of its happening. Well, to go back to Lietzer, who succeeded in riding

the wind, what happened? Lietzer found a very great master and went to study with him. And

the master lived in a small hut. And Lietzer sat outside the hut. And the master paid absolutely

no attention to him. This is sort of the way with Taoist masters. Because why would they

want students? They have nothing to teach. So, after a year sitting outside, Lietzer

went away. And he just fed up with waiting so long. Then he sort of got regretful about

this and thought he really should make a try. So, he went back to the master, who said,

"Why this ceaseless coming and going?" So, he sat there and tried to control his mind

in such a way that he would not think of the differences between gain and loss. In other

words, try to live in such a way that nothing is either an advantage or a disadvantage.

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. And all the neighbors

came around to commiserate that evening, "So sorry to hear your horses run away. That's

too bad." And he said, "Maybe." The next day the horse came back, bringing seven wild

horses with it. And everybody came around in the evening and said, "Oh, isn't that

lucky. What a great turn of events. You've now got eight horses." And he said, "Maybe."

The next day his son tried to break one of these horses and ride it and was thrown and

broke his leg. And they all said, "Oh dear, that's too bad." And he said, "Maybe."

The following day the conscription officers came around to recruit, to force people into

the army and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the people came

around and said, "Isn't that great?" And he said, "Maybe." You see, that is the

attitude of not thinking of things in terms of gain or loss, advantage or disadvantage.

Because you don't really know. The fact that you might get a letter from a solicitor, I

mean from a law office tomorrow, saying that some distant relative of yours had left you

a million dollars. It might be something you would feel very, very happy about. But the

disasters that it could lead to are unbelievable. Internal revenue. To mention only one possibility.

So you never really know whether something is fortune or misfortune. We only know the

momentary changes as it alters our sense of hope about things. The Taoist is wise enough

eventually, you see, to understand that there isn't any fixed good or bad. And so his point

of view is what is called non-choosing. Well anyway, Lietzer attempted to keep his mind

in a state of non-choosing. And this was a very difficult thing to do, to overcome one's

habits of feeling and thinking in this respect. And after he had practiced this for a year,

the Master looked at him. And you know, sort of recognized he was there. After another

year's practice, he invited him to come and sit inside his hut. And then, however, something

changed. And Lietzer didn't try anymore to control his mind. What he did was, he put

it in this way. "I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear. I let my eyes see whatever

they wanted to see. I let my feet move wherever they wanted to go. And I let my mind think

of whatever it wanted to think." And then he said, "It was a very strange sensation

because all my bodily existence seemed to melt and become transparent, and to have no

weight. And I didn't know whether I was walking on the wind or the wind was walking on me."

Now that's the fasting of the heart. In the ordinary way, you see, you say, "Well, that

made quite an impression on me, as if you were a slate or a blackboard upon which life

makes an impression, as the chalk does on the slate or the blackboard." So we say, "Well,

here are these events, and I'm the observer of all these events, and I remember them,

and they make an impression on me." But in the psychology of Taoism, there is no difference

between you as observer and whatever it is that you observe. The only thing that is you

is the observation of life from a certain point of view. I said a little while ago,

you think your heads are empty and blank, but the actual inside of your head is felt

in terms of everything you see on the outside. We make an opposition, you see, between the

thinker and the thought, the experiencer and the experienced, the knower and the known,

because we think about knowledge in terms of certain metaphors. The metaphor of the

stylus on the writing sheet, the reflection on the mirror, all those sort of images come

into our idea of knowledge. But in the Taoist theory of knowledge, it's quite different.

There isn't a knower facing the known. It would be more like saying that if there is

any knower at all, it contains the known. Your mind, if you have one, is not in your

head. Your head is in your mind, because your mind, understood from the standpoint of vision,

is space. The Chinese use this word, "hu," which means sky, space, and sometimes emptiness.

And there is a saying that form, or, you know, shape and color, there's one word in Chinese

that means really both shape and color, and this and this are said to be identical. Space

or emptiness is precisely shape-color, and shape-color is precisely emptiness. This is

actually a Buddhist saying from the Tridāya Sūtra. So that all that we call space contains

the myriads of shapes and colors, and bodies and weights and so on. It doesn't reflect

them as a mirror, but it is the absence which guarantees their presence, and it's their

presence which guarantees its absence. So there's this mutual relationship, again, the

mutual arising expression, between voidness and form, between existence and nonexistence,

being and non-being. These are never felt as alternatives or things that are in some

kind of contest. So then, when it is said that there is not any thinker behind thoughts,

not any experiencer who has experiences, this is a way of saying that experiencing, knowing,

is not an encounter between strangers. Western thought concentrates very much on knowledge

as an encounter, and it is thus that we talk about facing facts, facing reality, as if

somehow or other the knower and the known came from two completely different worlds

and met each other like that. Whereas actually the phenomenon of knowledge is almost the

precise opposite of that. Instead of being a collision between the two wandering bodies

in space, knowledge is much more like the expansion of a flower from the stem and the

bud, where the opposite points of the flower are the knower and the known. They are the

terms of something which, as it were, lies between them. Let me repeat, we tend in all

our metaphors and common speech to think of life as an encounter between the knowing human

being, the knowing mind, and the world. They think of it not as an encounter, but as an

expression, not an impression, an expression of a process that has polarized itself, coming

out from a center and expressed itself in terms of opposites. Well, of course, this

is the basis of the whole Yang Yin principle of, you know, this jolly old thing. And where

you've got two interlocked, what are they, fishes, commas? Fascinating emblem. You call

it a monad, yes, but there it is. This is a helix, essentially, this grip. And this

is the formation of spiral nebulae. And it's the position of sexual intercourse. I here,

this is my eye, and you here with your eye. I'm trying to get to the middle of you, you're

trying to get to the middle of me. And neither one of us exists without the other. This is

Yang, Yang the white, and Yin the dark. Yang, the word Yang originally means, or is associated

with the south side of a mountain, which is sunny. Yin, the north side, which is dark.

Yang is the north bank of a river, which gets the sun. Yin is the south bank of a river,

which is in the shade. Now, you see, you don't get a mountain with only one side. The mountain,

if it's a mountain at all, goes up and down. It's like the wave, you don't get a wave which

has a crest with no trough, or a trough with no crest. You can't have half a wave. So,

Yang and Yin are quite different from each other, but just because they are different,

they're identical. This is the important idea of the identical difference. The saying goes,

in both Daoism and Buddhism, "Difference is identity, identity is difference." The Chinese

word for "is" is not quite the same as our word. This word, which is usually used, has

rather the meaning of "that." So, they would say, "Difference, that identity, identity,

that difference." And so, this doesn't mean "quite" is exactly the same as. It means,

rather, "is in relation to, or goes with, necessarily involves." Difference necessarily

involves identity, identity necessarily involves difference. So, Yang and Yin. There is no

Yang without Yin, no Yin without Yang. When I was first studying these things, I was terribly

bothered by how on earth I was going to see this multiple, differentiated world as a unity.

What was going to happen? What would it be like to see that all things are one? The sages

keep saying, "All things are one." And they all look to me so different. Because here

was all this "ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch" going on around one, and it was doing it in different

ways, and all these people came on in different ways, and they had all their houses, and all

their cars, and all their this and that. And the whole world looked full of the most bony,

prickly differences. And I thought, "Well, what's supposed to happen? Is this supposed

to be a kind of, as if your eyesight got blurred, and all these things suddenly went "bleeeah"

and flow together? What is this experience of nirvana, of liberation, etc., supposed

to be?" Because so many of these, especially Hindu sages, write about it as if it was just

this kind of dissolution of everything, so that it all becomes like a slug with a salt

on it. Well, it took me a long time. And suddenly, one day, I realized that the difference that

I saw between things was the same thing as their unity. Because differences, borders,

lines, surfaces, boundaries, don't really divide things from each other at all. They

join them together. Because all boundaries are held in common. Like, let's think of a

territory which has all been divided up into property. There's your property, my property,

etc., etc. There are the fences. But we hold a "If I live next to you, your fence is my

fence." We hold the boundary in common. We may make up silly arrangements as to who is

responsible for the maintenance of this fence. But nevertheless, we hold our boundaries in

common. And we wouldn't know what my plot of land was, or where it was, unless we knew

the definition of your plot of land and your plot of land that is adjoining. So, boundaries

are held in common. And I could see then that it, that my sense of being me was exactly

the same thing as my sensation of being one with the whole cosmos. I didn't need to get

some other weird, a sort of different, odd kind of experience to feel in total connection

with everything. Once you get the clue, you see that the sense of unity is inseparable

from the sense of difference. You wouldn't know yourself, or what you meant by self,

unless at the same time you had the feeling of something other. Now, it's, the secret

is that other eventually turns out to be you. I mean, that's the element of surprise in

life. When suddenly you find the thing most alien, we say, "Now, what is most alien to

us?" Go out at night and look at the stars and realize that they are millions and millions

and billions of miles away. Vast conflagrations out in space. And you can lie back and look

at that and say, "Well, surely I hardly matter. I'm just a tiny, tiny little peekaboo on this

weird spot of dust called Earth and all that going on out there." Billions of years before

I was born, billions of years after I will die, and nothing seems stranger to you than

that. More different from you. But there comes a point, if you watch long enough, when you

will say, "Why that me?" It's the other that is the condition of your being yourself, as

the back is the condition of being the front. And when you know that, you know you never

die. So, let's have an intermission.