Quotes

People say that Americans are materialists, but nothing is further from the truth.The entire American enterprise is dedicated to the transformation of material into junk as rapidly as possible. We have no idea of how to enjoy material wealth, and instead destroy it so we can bulldoze it into landfill

You cannot live at all unless you can live fully now

I wonder, I wonder, what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream you wanted to dream. And you would of course be able to alter your time sense, and slip seventy-five years of subjective time into eight hours of sleep. You would I suppose start out by fulfilling all your wishes. You could design for yourself what would be the most ecstatic life: love affairs, banquets, dancing girls, wonderful journeys, gardens, and music beyond belief. And then after a couple of months of this sort of thing at seventy-five years a night, you’d be getting a little taste for something different, and you’d move over to an adventurous dimension, where there were certain dangers involved, and the thrill of dealing with dangers. And you could rescue princesses from dragons, and go on dangerous journeys, and eventually get into contests with enemies. And after you had done that for awhile, you’d think up a new wrinkle, to forget that you were dreaming, and think that is was all for real.

You see, many of the troubles going on in the world right now are being supervised by people with very good intentions whose attempts are to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this, and to prevent that. The more we try to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. Maybe that is the way it has got to be. Maybe I should not say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right but simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.

So the question we come to now, is well, how do you go about knowing the field of forces in which you live? How do you know which way the wind is blowing so you can sail properly, when it isn’t as simple a matter of wetting your finger and holding it up to see which side gets cold first, and that’s where the wind’s coming from. Or is it as simple as that? We know, or think we know, that nature is extraordinarily complicated, and so very difficult to understand. And if you can’t understand an immensely complicated situation it’s very difficult to make decisions about it.

I suppose most of you have heard of Zen, but before going on to explain any details about it I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist. I am not advocating Zen Buddhism, I’m not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer. That is to say in the same sense that when you go to a concert and listen to someone play Mozart he has nothing to sell except for the sound of the music. He doesn’t want to convert you to anything. He doesn’t want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart’s music as opposed to Beethoven’s. And I approach you in the same spirit, as a musician with his piano or violinist with his violin, I just want you to enjoy a point of view which I enjoy.

I believe that if we are honest with ourselves, that the most fascinating problem in the world is, ‘Who am I?’ What do you mean, what do you feel, when you use the word I, because it’s so mysterious, its so elusive. What you are in your inmost being escapes your examination in rather the same way that you can’t look directly into your own eyes without using a mirror. And that is why there is always a profound element of mystery in the problem of who we are.

The inability to accept the mystical experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit---to the "conquest" of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.