One of the first things which everybody should understand
is that every creature in the universe
that is in any way sensitive
and in any manner of speaking conscious
regards itself as a human being.
It knows and is aware of
a hierarchy of beings above it
and a hierarchy of beings below it.
That is to say, that wherever you are,
and whoever you are, and whatever you are
you're in the middle.
That's the game.
Your senses, extend a certain direction.
In all directions.
And therefore give you the impression of being in the middle.
Because the definition of a person
is where you look from.
Now everything in the world
feels like that.
And also, it has its own kind
you see, spiders,
and hydras,
and sea urchins, and so on,
don't look very natural to us.
We say, "Well I wouldn't want to look like that!".
But they say when they see us, well
"What kind of an awful thing is that?"
And what a lot of nonsense it does.
Now, we come here, right at the start
to an extremely important principle.
Which is:
the different points of view you get
when you change your level of magnification.
That is to say, you can look at something
with a microscope and see it a certain way.
You can look at it with a naked eye
and see it in a certain way.
You look at it with a telescope
and you see it in another way.
Now which level of magnification is the correct one?
Well obviously, they're all correct.
They're just different points of view.
When we examine our bloodstreams
under a microscope, we see there's one
hell of a fight going on.
All sorts of micro-organisms
are chewing each other up.
And if we got overly fascinated
with our view of our own bloodstreams
in the microscope, we should start taking sides.
Which would be fatal!
Because the health of our organism
depends of the continuance of this battle.
What is, in other words, conflict at
one level of magnification
is harmony at a higher level.
Now could it possibly be, therefore
that we, with all our problems,
conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses,
political outrages, wars, tortures,
and everything that goes on in human life
are a state of conflict
which can be seen in the larger perspective
as a situation of harmony?
Every minute little fruit fly or gnat
or bacterium
I will go so far as to say
is an event upon which this
whole cosmos depends.
This thing goes both ways.
It's not only, that
every little organism which exists
depends on its total environment.
The reverse is also true, that the
total environment depends on each
and every one of those little organisms.
So that you could say,
this universe consists
of a, an arrangement
of patterns
in which every event
is essential to the whole thing.
Now, we screen that idea
out of our consciousness
just as we pay attention
to the figure and ignore the background.
So,
we see one way of looking at things,
mainly, that the organism is very
frail against the environment. It lasts
a long time, the environment
but the organism lasts only a short time.
But actually, the whole thing
is arranged, in a
polar system. Where the
enormous depends on the tiny, and the tiny
depends on the enormous.
When you came into this world
there gradually arose into being the
sensation of 'I'.
And it stays there a while
it goes though a development and then it drops off.
But, all the time, everywhere
there are other 'I's' starting up.
See?
Whether they be human, animal
anything you like.
It could be in other galaxies, et cetera
always, they're starting up.
Now-
we would say, there is no connection between them.
No, in the same way there is no
connection between the molecules in your hand.
And yet you say, it is a hand.
But if you look at it under a powerful enough microscope
the molecules in your hand are miles apart!
What's the connection between this galaxy and other galaxies?
Well we can't see any connection.
And yet, there are gravitational
swings, whereby they respond
to each other and move, in a certain collective order.
See, what we're doing in this, is not
setting down a doctrine.
But it is doing an exercise in perception.
You could see it either way.
You can see yourself, in other words
as existing only now.
That's the only you there is.
The alternative to that
logically, is to see yourself as everything.
So in all this, you see, when you get a game going, of this kind
there comes the point of what you might call 'emotional investment'.
When you feel
that the outcome of this particular
feature in the game is urgent.
See, this matters.
And it's up to you what you think matters.
We teach our children
what matters, what's important for them to learn.
And we teach them basically
that it's important to live.
And in a way, every being in this world
is torn between
going on and goofing off.
We feel - that's the basis of our distinction between work and play.
Play is everybody needs some time to goof off.
But they must go back to work, because you've got to
farm and fish and manufacture and produce
so that you can go on.
But when you see you have this terrifying urgency to go on
and feel you must - this is important, this matters
we screen out of our consciousness the fact that this is our own
volition and our own game.
And the difficulty is that as we become
disturbed and anxious about this
it's more difficult to keep the game going.
In proportion as we are frightfully concerned to survive
we start fighting other people.
We start clobbering our neighbors and whatever it is.
All the old fights start.
And it is these fights which, more than anything else
at the moment, you see
are endangering the entire human project. at the moment, you see
are endangering the entire human project.
But all based fundamentally on the illusion
that it's utterly important that we survive.
But you see, in all this, what underlies
is...
the illusion
that I am going on.
That I constitute
a real continuity
from this moment
to the next moment
to the next moment.
What are you afraid of losing when you die?
Yes, everything that you've acquired as an individual,
stored in your brain,
is dissolved and distributed.
But at the same time, it is equally obvious
that when you die, there won't be following the moment of death
everlasting nothingness.
So...
you can become aware
of this tremendous interconnectedness of everything
just as fronts go with backs and tops with bottoms
insides and outsides
solids with spaces
so everything that there is goes together.
It makes no difference whether it lasts a long time
or whether it lasts a short time.
A galaxy goes together with all the universe
just as much as a mosquito.
You can get a certain vision of life
where everything is seen
to be a complex pattern of rhythm
dances
the human dance
the flower dance
the bee dance
the giraffe dance.
And that's what this all is, it's jazz.
You see?
This is a big jazz, this world.
And what it's trying to do is to see how
jazzed up it can get.
How far out
this play of rhythm can go.