“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.”
Well, here’s the problem: if this is the state of affairs which is so, and if the conscious state you’re in this moment is the same thing as what we might call the Divine State. If you do anything to make it different, it shows that you don’t understand that it’s so. So the moment you start practicing yoga, or praying or meditating, or indulging in some sort of spiritual cultivation, you are getting in your own way.
Now this is the Buddhist trick: the buddha said ‘We suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won’t suffer.’ But he didn’t say that as the last word; he said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that to someone, they’re going to come back after a while and say ‘Yes, but now I’m desiring not to desire.’ And so the buddha will answer, ‘Well at last you’re beginning to understand the point.’ Because you can’t give up desire. Why would you try to do that? It’s already desire. So in the same way you say ‘You ought to be unselfish’ or to give up you ego. Let go, relax. Why do you want to do that? Just because it’s another way of beating the game, isn’t it? The moment you hypothesize that you are different from the universe, you want to get one up on it. But if you try to get one up on the universe, and you’re in competition with it, that means you don’t understand you ARE it. You think there’s a real difference between ’self’ and ‘other.’ But ’self,’ what you call yourself, and what you call ‘other’ are mutually necessary to each other like back and front. They’re really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself at north and south, but it’s all one magnet, so experience polarizes itself as self and other, but it’s all one. If you try to make the south pole defeat the north pole, or get the mastery of it, you show you don’t know what’s going on.
And so in this way–it’s called the technique of reductio ad absurdum. If you think you have a problem, and you’re an ego and you’re in difficulty, the answer the Zen master makes to you is ‘Show me your ego. I want to see this thing that has a problem.’ When Bodidharma, the legendary founder of Zen, came to China, a disciple came to him and said ‘I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.’ And Bodhidharma said ‘Bring out your mind here before me and I’ll pacify it.’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘when I look for it, I can’t find it.’ So Bodhidharma said ‘There, it’s pacified.’ See? Becuase when you look for your own mind, that is to say, your own particularized center of being which is separate from everything else, you won’t be able to find it. But the only way you’ll know it isn’t there is if you look for it hard enough, to find out that it isn’t there. And so everybody says ‘All right, know yourself, look within, find out who you are.’ Because the harder you look, you won’t be able to find it, and then you’ll realize it isn’t there at all. There isn’t a separate you. You’re mind is what there is. Everything. But the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as possible. That’s one way. I haven’t said the only way, but it is one way.
So almost all spiritual disciplines, meditations, prayers, etc, etc, are ways of persisting in folly. Doing resolutely and consistently what you’re doing already. So if a person believes that the Earth is flat, you can’t talk him out of that. He knows it’s flat. Look out the window and see; it’s obvious, it looks flat. So the only way to convince him it isn’t is to say ‘Well let’s go and find the edge.’ And in order to find the edge, you’ve got to be very careful not to walk in circles, you’ll never find it that way. So we’ve got to go consistently in a straight line due west along the same line of latitude, and eventually when we get back to where we started from, you’ve convinced the guy that the world is round. That’s the only way that will teach him. Because people can’t be talked out of illusions.
There is another possibility, however. But this is more difficult to describe. Let’s say we take as the basic supposition- -which is the thing that one sees in the experience of satori or awakening, or whatever you want to call it–that this now moment in which I’m talking and you’re listening, is eternity. That although we have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is ordinary, and that we may not feel very well, we’re sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on, and that it ought to be changed. This is it. So you don’t need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining that is that you mustn’t try and not do anything, because that’s doing something. It’s just the way it is. In other words, what’s required is a sort of act of super relaxation; it’s not ordinary relaxation. It’s not just letting go, as when you lie down on the floor and imagine that you’re heavy so you get into a state of muscular relaxation. It’s not like that. It’s being with yourself as you are without altering anything. And how to explain that? Because there’s nothing to explain. It is the way it is now. See? And if you understand that, it will automatically wake you up.
So you see, when you ask ‘How to I obtain the knowledge of God, how do I obtain the knowledge of liberation?’ all I can say is it’s the wrong question. Why do you want to obtain it? Because the very fact that you’re wanting to obtain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there. You already have it. But of course, it’s up to you. It’s your privilege to pretend that you don’t. That’s your game; that’s your life game; that’s what makes you think your an ego. And when you want to wake up, you will, just like that. If you’re not awake, it shows you don’t want to. You’re still playing the hide part of the game. You’re still, as it were, the self pretending it’s not the self. And that’s what you want to do. So you see, in that way, too, you’re already there.
