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And so, if you call someone a son of God you mean divine, of the nature of God. As the Nicene Creed subsequently defined it: “He is of one substance with the Father.” But what happened was that—this being blasphemy for the Jews—it became blasphemy for the Christians for anyone else than Jesus to say it. They said, “Okay, baby!
It was so with you. But there it stops! No more of this business!” And as a result of that, Jesus was made irrelevant by pedestalization; by being kicked upstairs.
In spite of the fact that he said, “greater works than these that I do shall you do,” oh no! Upstairs with you, baby! Because we just can’t have that sort of thing going on in a monarchical universe.
We’re not gonna have democracy in the kingdom of heaven! So this is why the gospel is impossible: because we’re supposed to follow the example of Christ. When he says, for example, “Be not anxious for the morrow.
Do not worry about what you shall eat, what you shall drink, and what you shall wear.” God’ll take care of you. Doesn’t he take care of the birds? Don’t the flowers grow?
And they are wonderful. They’re crazy. They’re great.
What are you worrying about? I’ve never heard a sermon preached on that. Never.
Because it’s totally subversive; the economy would crash! So they say, “Oh yes, that’s all very well, but he was the boss’s son.” See, he had that colossal advantage. Take up your cross and follow him.
Hey—but wait a minute! I don’t know I’m going to be resurrected three days later. I can’t do all those miracles.
He had an unfair advantage, so how can you ask us to follow the example of Christ? But supposing he didn’t have an unfair advantage? Supposing that what was true about Jesus as a son of God is true of us?
Only: only a few of us know it, and we are pretty careful to be quiet about it lest the same thing happen to us as happened to Jesus. And indeed, it often does. And, you know, you get these people—from Arkansas, or Texas, or anywhere in the Bible Belt—who never heard of the Upanishads, and they have this cosmic consciousness experience, and they realize that that’s what happened to Jesus and they say, “I’m Jesus come back!” Well, everybody says to them, “You aren’t Jesus.
It’s pretty obvious you’re not Jesus. You’re just Joe Dokes.” Well, he says, “That’s what they said about Jesus!” He has a perfect argument, except they say, “You’re not much of a Jesus.” They say, “Alright, if you’re Jesus, command that these stones be made bread.” And he says, “A wicked and deceitful generation seeketh for a sign, and there shall no sign be given.” Now, why talk about this? Is it interesting?
Is it important for the human being to realize that—in some sense of the word, whatever it means—he is God or one with God? As is plainly taught by the Hindus, hinted at by the Buddhists—only, they don’t like to put it out as a concept in case people will use the concept as an idol to hang on to; they want you to find out for yourself and not believe in it—and certainly the Taoists understand it, the Sufis understand it. A lot of people understand it.
So what? Well, the importance of it is this: that to know that you are God is another way of saying that you feel completely with this universe. You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it.
You feel, in other words, that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies is intimate. It is not something to which you are a stranger, but it is that with which you (whatever that is) are intimately bound up. That—in your seeing, your hearing, your talking, your thinking, your moving—you express that which it is which moves the sun and other stars.
And if you don’t know that, if you don’t feel that—well, naturally, you feel alien, you feel a stranger in the world. And if you feel a stranger, you feel hostile. And therefore you start to bulldoze things about, to beat it up, and to try and make the world submit to your will, and you become a real troublemaker.
So I feel, also, one reason why you become hostile is that feeling that you were just brought into this place, that your father and mother went up to some monkey business that they probably shouldn’t’ve done, or it was bad rubber goods and, as a result of this, here you are and you didn’t ask to be here! Well, you always feel you can turn around and blame them. You can blame somebody.
You can blame the government, you can blame the rascals, you can blame the cheaters. Always supposing you, yourself, aren’t a rascal—which is a long odds. You always can blame someone and say, “I didn’t ask for it!
Take it away!” And yet, and yet, and yet… very few people are all too ready to take it away. Camus said that the only serious philosophical problem is whether or not to commit suicide. And if you don’t—if you don’t say, “take it away,” what are you going to do?
You’ve really got to assume responsibility for it. You’ve got to say yes to what happens. It’s my karma.
And that doesn’t mean merely—there are many misinterpretations of the doctrine of karma. It’s usually and popularly understood that what happens to you, either fortunate or unfortunate, is the result of good or bad deeds in a previous life. Well, that’s popular superstition.
The real meaning of karma—the word, in Sanskrit, means simply ‘doing.’ And if I say of an event “it is your karma,” it is saying: it is your doing. So the Exposition—a book which would expound karma—would be not so much a whodunit as a youdunit. But that seems fantastic.
Now, therefore, what I propose we do is that we—instead of just ideologizing—we have a clinical experience. You know, in psychiatric school and medical school it’s very usual for a doctor to bring a patient out in front of the students and talk with the patient as a kind of demonstration. He says, “I want you to recognize the difference between a psychopath, a manic-depressive, or a schizophrenic,” or something; they don’t know what all these things mean—especially the schizophrenia.
And so he has a dialogue with the patient right there. So let us suppose that I’m the patient and you are the students and the doctors, and I suffer from what you would call the delusion that I’m God. And therefore, you might want to do something about me, or with me, or humor me, or ask me questions.
And so I’m perfectly willing to submit to your examination and your treatment, and invite you to help yourselves. Now. No.
Yes? Sleeping is like politics: one sleeps on the right side, and then, when you’re tired of that, you sleep on the left. When you’re tired of that you sleep on your back, and when you’re tired of that you sleep on your stomach.
And it it thus that the world goes ’round. Now. You don’t become God.
Yes. No. Remember: three persons but one God.
Could I tell you a little bit about Satan? Yes. Although the matter is a little esoteric, but I told you all about it in the Book of Job where you will see that, in the court of heaven, Satan is the district attorney.
He is not, as Christians imagine, the enemy of heaven and the enemy of mankind, he’s merely the person who sees the bad side of things and carries out the dirty work. And therefore, he saw Job and wondered whether Job really was as great a guy as he seemed to be, and suggested that God should appoint a committee of investigation to find out. And the committee did its work very thoroughly, but the case went against Satan because it was proved in the end that Job was an honorable man.
Now, you notice that, although we pay the salary of the district attorney, whenever there’s a great criminal case before the public eye, people begin to take the side of the underdog. And the prosecutor always has less public sympathy than the defense, except in political trials. On the right hand of God—and, you know, the defense is always on the right hand of the judge in court—is our only mediator and advocate, which is the phrase referring to Jesus Christ, our Lord.
So there is the defense, and there is the prosecution. And it is the function of Satan to be the prosecutor. There’s a good deal more to it than that, because before all this started—as in a stage play—there was an arrangement in the green room before coming on stage in which certain things were understood, but that are only to be revealed when the curtain goes down at the end of the play.
Yes, but he doesn’t know it. Why do you hide? It’s for the same reason you’re hiding.
Yes. Who else? Man has free will to the extent that he knows who he is.
Not otherwise. Where I got it from. Yes—to the extent that she knows who she is, yes.
That is correct. I’m no more God than any of you. Well, that is saying quite a bit; yes.
What is not God? There is nothing that is not God. It’s like… waking up from a dream.
After a while, one’s experience begins to have—what I would call—a haven’t-we-been-here-before feeling. Going ’round and ’round and ’round. And then you begin wondering: where am I going?
And to answer that question you have to try and find out what you want. And so I went into that very thoroughly: what do I want to happen? And, of course, as soon as you ask yourself that, you begin to fantasize.
And our amazing technology is, of course, an expression of human desire; desire for power, for what we want to achieve. So I simply set myself to thinking through how far we could go. And so I soon found myself at a great push-button place where I had a fantastic mechanism with buttons available for every conceivable thing I could wish.
So I spent quite a bit of time playing with this. And science fiction wasn’t in it! You know?
You go GOINNG, like that, and here is Cleopatra. And so on, you know? And then press this button—symphonic music in four-channel sound.
Sixteen-channel sound. Anything, you know? All possible pleasures are available.
And when, you know, you’re like—everybody’s dream of the Sultan in the palace—you suddenly notice there’s a button labeled “Surprise!” You push that—and here we are. Yes, boredom is, of course, the problem. Boredom is the other side of creativity.
And the energy of creation has as its—that is, the yang—the yin side of that energy is called boredom. Everything of course, is fundamentally yang and yin. If you understand that, you really don’t need to understand anything else.
As God, what responsibility do I feel to ameliorate evil in the world? I begin with the point that I am responsible for the way the world is. If I couldn’t feel that, I’d have to blame somebody else.
I’m not willing to do that because I know that, under various changing circumstances, it might be appropriate for me to be as big a rascal as rascals have been. Now, as to improving the world: the world is always improving. It may look—to some people—slow, but it’s improving even when it is declining.
Because the world works in an undulatory process like a wave. It goes up and it goes down, it goes up and it goes down. And it couldn’t go up all the time, because if it did we wouldn’t know that that was up.
So it goes down some of the time so that we can know when it goes up, because if we didn’t know when it went up it would be like being in a space where everything was light. There’d be nothing to write home about. There would be no black marks on the space, and so it would be like a piece of perfectly empty paper.
Similarly, to be in a completely black space would also be a kind of unconsciousness with nothing to write home about, because nothing would make any difference. So, therefore, if you’re going to have black, you won’t know that it’s black unless you have some white. And if you’re going to have white you won’t know that it’s white unless you have some black.
Correct, but that’s not a teaching, it’s a kōan. A kōan. A kōan is a Japanese word for a spiritual problem used in Zen Buddhism, such as: “What is the sound of one hand?” And these problems are given to those who ask questions concerning their spiritual development.
And sometimes, as St. Paul pointed out, commandments are given not in the expectation that they will be obeyed, but in the expectation that they will reveal something to those who hear them. That was St. Paul’s comment on the whole Mosaic law. Yes, sir?
What? Yes. The hereafter is, of course, now.
Because if you will examine it closely, there is nowhen else than now. And if you want to make hell of it, you can make hell of it. If you want to make heaven of it, you can make heaven of it.
Purgatory, purgatory. It’s all here. Always was, always will be.
What is death? Death is an undulation in consciousness. How would you know you were alive unless you’d once been dead?
Yes? It wasn’t unnecessary for him to have material possessions. They said of St. John the Baptist that he was an ascetic.
But of Jesus: this man consorts with gluttoners and wine-bibbers, and comes eating and drinking. And when the lady Mary poured precious ointment on his feet and anointed him, they said the same thing that the members of the vestry say to the minister today: why this great expense? Couldn’t it all have been sold for much money and given to the poor?
It is a problem, sure. But, you see, in many ways, when you get down to these very deep ethical problems where there sure is no easy decision one way or the other, you must look at the problem from the point of view of an artist. Which way of doing this is, in some sense, greater?
It may be better to go off with a bang than with a whimper. Let me see. Ye— There is no time, my dear.
It’s always now. Oh, of—yes, if you put it that way, of course. Wait a moment.
Consciously? Not necessarily, because that would spoil the fun. If you press button “Surprise!” you’ll press the button so that you forget who you are.
Yes, that’s perfectly true. This is called in the Bible kenosis. In St. Paul’s epistle to the Philippians he says, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, sought not equality with God a thing to be grasped, but humbled himself and made himself of no reputation, and was found in fashion as a man, and became obedient to death.” And so you get from this the kenotic theory of creation—held by some of the Greek fathers—that the creation of the universe is the self-emptying, or self-forgetting, of the Godhead.
Yes, I think it’s your turn now. It’s really rather like it. Because the universe is fundamentally a system which creeps up on itself and then says, “Boo!” And then it laughs at itself for jumping.
And, you see, every time it does it, it forgets that it did it before, so it never becomes a bore. Yes, the lady in red. Yes, but it isn’t necessary to travel.
The question is: can I make myself into a point of consciousness and travel around the cosmos, and see things from all sorts of places? I say: yes, but it isn’t necessary to travel. One is already there.
In other words, I’m using your eyes where you are like you’re using mine. Just in the same way, my head is not my feet, it uses my feet. The head is very different from the feet.
You couldn’t possibly say the head and the feet are the same, but they are one organism. Two. What do I do about boredom?
Press button “Surprise!” Yes, always. Yes, the lady in purple here. Well, there are two sort of answers, one of which you’ve already indicated, which is to do with less and do what you want.
Which— I think the objection “if everyone did that” is rather like asking what would happen if everybody wanted to catch the four o’clock train from Grand Central to Westport, or if all the molecules of air in this room were suddenly to congregate over in that corner. There is a bare chance that it might happen, but very low. Yes?
Yes. We are going ’round in circles. But, you see, going ’round in circles—as you may have observed by looking at the sky—is what the universe is doing.
You see, before… Yes. Yes, that’s the thing: it’s a dance. And when you dance you don’t dance to get somewhere.
Yes, alright. But you turn—when you wake up—you turn the confusion into a dance. And so I go back to your question: what is the alternative to clearing out of the job you’re doing and, say, doing with less but having more fun?
Well, there are ways of making almost any activity into a dance. Supposing you had to drive a bus in New York—which is a very harrowing job in the ordinary way—you must not take seriously anything about it. This is the first rule: that it doesn’t matter a damn if you don’t get there on time, but it would be fun to go as fast as is consistent with safety.
And therefore, you swing that bus, and you play things through the horn; you take the whole thing lightly as if it is not serious. Because—and this is the nature, say, in ritual, when you have a procession. Now, people who don’t understand religion don’t know how to make the right kind of processions.
There are those who go in military march, and they don’t understand it because their objective is to get there. There are those who dawdle like ducks, and they don’t understand because they are trying to be dignified. On the other hand, there are those who walk as if they had already arrived, and this is the way kings walk.
Because a king is the center, and he is always where it’s at. Where it’s at is where the king is, by definition. So if you work in this way, even—I mean—people who are practicing meditation take up monotonous things for fun.
And meditation is supposed to be fun—I hope John Lilly told you that this morning—where you say you’re going to do Auṃ maṇi padme hūṃ. Auṃ maṇi padme hūṃ! Auṃ maṇi padme hūṃ!
Auṃ maṇi padme hūṃ! You know, you can really have a gas doing that. And so anything monotonous can be treated in the same way.
This is the way—one of the ways—of overcoming boredom. Because boredom’s the great problem for energy. See, energy’s always on the go.
Yes, sir? Yes, the gentleman in the white shirt, here. Mythic?
No! Mythic is a great word. The question is: does it bother me to be called mythic?
No! Myth is very powerful. Myth is fun!
Myth is stories told to children. Everybody loves them. Yes, sir?
Is God omniscient? Well, it depends what you mean by the word. A lot of people think that omniscience is like knowing everything that’s in the Encyclopædia Britannica.
That’s not omniscience, that’s intellectual elephantiasis. Now, you see, let me explain this question, because it’s always important. And when anybody announces that he or she is God, people say at once, “Well, will you tell us, in millimeters, the height of Mont Blanc?” And I say, “Look it up in the encyclopedia, it’s there.” The thing is this: what we ordinarily call knowledge is the translation of life into words.
And that is a very cumbersome process because, if we had to translate the process into words every time we took a breath, we’d never get around to it. It takes so long to describe and think through the whole physiology of breath. Therefore, we do it without thinking about it.
And I find that I’m shining the stars in just the same way. I mean, if you want it in words it’s going to take us a long time to get through them, because words are strung out in a line. How do you—if you are God—how do you find such difficulty in finding peace and tranquility in yourself?
That’s because you’re looking for it away from the place in which you are. You are seeking it apart from the experience which you have at this moment, and you are regarding that experience and saying, “That’s pretty lousy, I’d like something better than that.” But the trouble with that is that it splits you in two pieces, and once you’re split in two pieces you’re lost. Because you made a difference between the experience you are now having, on the one hand, and yourself, who is having it, on the other.
And you wish you could get away from that experience. Now, the truth of the matter is: you can’t, because you are what you experience. It’s a myth, purely, that there is some sort of experiencer who has the experience.
You are what you know because it is not “I know something,” there is simply a process called “the knowing.” You could say that knowing, like the world, has two poles: north and south. And so the knowing-ball has the knower and the known, but only in that sense. Now, knowing changes; it changes itself.
But if you try to stand outside it and change it, it’ll be like standing outside your hand and trying to move your hand from outside. And so comes the difficulty. In other words, this would be the difficulty for God in the press-button “Surprise!” situation, where you think you want something different from what you have.
But if you do think that, you’ve got to ask yourself the question what it is that you really want. This is the most fundamentally important question. And you will find, if you go into it very, very deeply, that you have it.
Now, you may change your mind about it, but you do have what you want. Well, one of the ways of not being bored is to scare yourself. Don’t we all go to the—we go to the movies just to be scared.
We put certain limits on it; indeed, before we go and say, “Well, this isn’t really going to happen. It’s only a play or a movie.” And therefore, while we see the safe outline of the proscenium arch, back in the back of our minds is a sort of Hintergedanke—we know it’s only a play. How do you know it isn’t?
If—you see, after all, the task of the actor on the stage is to come on so well that the audience thinks it’s real: so that he has them crying, so that he has them shaking with fear, so that he has them sitting on the edges of their chairs. Well, that’s just one ordinary Joe Dokes actor. But supposing the actor of the play is the real big actor—wow!
That play would seem real. And so that’s what happens when the house catches on fire. Yes?
Lady in red. Yes, you’re looking behind yourself. What is sleep?
The seventh day. When is the seventh day? When you sleep!
Yes? Yes… Oh yes, that also would answer it. Yes.