When you opened your eyes on the world for the first time as a child
How brilliant the colors were
What a jewel the sun was
What marvel the stars
How incredibly alive the trees were
And to love again and again
And have people to whom we are deeply attached
Go to sleep and never wake up
And the laughter echoes only in one's mind
But then the echo goes
The memory, the traces are all gone
All your efforts and all your achievements
All your attainments turning into dust, nothingness
What is the feeling?
What happens to you?
The idea of God as the potter
The architect of the universe
It makes you feel that life is, after all, important
That there is someone who cares
It has meaning, it has sense
And you are valuable in the eyes of the Father
But after a while it got embarrassing
The superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded idea
Why does anybody believe that?
So you become an atheist
And then you feel terrible after that because you got rid of God
But that means you got rid of yourself
You're just nothing but a machine
And your idea that you're a machine is just a machine too
A machine in the system
So if you think that that's the way things are
You feel hostile to the world
You feel that the world is a neurological trap
Into which you somehow got caught
Trapped
You run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it
That's it
So if you're a smart kid you commit suicide
Now I want to propose another idea all together
The real you
Is not a puppet which life pushes around
The real you
The real deep down you is the whole universe
You cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin
Your skin doesn't separate you from the world, it's a bridge
But just as a magnet polarizes its-self in north and south but its all one magnet
So experience polarizes itself as "self" and "other" but it's all one
What you call the "external world" is as much you as your own body
Most people think that when they open they're eyes and look around
That what they are seeing is outside
It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes
We haven't realized that life and death, black and white
Good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center.
When you look for your own particularized center of being
Which is separate from everything else, you won't be able to find it
The only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look hard enough, to find out that it isn't there
It isn't there at all, there isn't a separate you
There are, in physical reality, no such things as separate events
People can't be talked out of illusions
If a person believes that the earth is flat
You can't talk him out of that, he knows that it's flat
He'll go down to the window and see that its obvious, it looks flat
So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say: "Well let's go and find the edge"