The Inevitable Ecstasy, Part 13: A Conspiracy We Play on Ourselves

Now, therefore, one asks the question, That sounds very interesting, but how do I recapture the baby point of view? And I showed that that was the wrong question, because it arises entirely and exclusively out of the adult point of view. Because the adult point of view involves the fiction that ‘I’ exist as an agent independently of everything else that’s going on. And so ask, How can I do this? And the important thing is to realize that the feeling of there being this isolated ‘I’ is part of the game, and it has no fundamental reality—except as a convention. And so long as that isn’t clear, we’re confused.

I reiterated the point that, when we ask, To whom must it become clear? or To whom is it not clear? that this, too, was all part of the illusion of the world that the adult presents to the child. So the only way in which the child’s vision can come again is in the realization that the ‘I’ can’t do anything about it at all, and can’t even do nothing about it. All possibilities of vision for what we call I, myself are out. And this in, of course, is the same meaning—as the Christian or the Islamic mystics would say—that the mystical experience is the gift of God. And there’s nothing you can do to get it. That’s a clumsy way, really, of saying the same thing. Because so long as you are trying—or not trying—you are aggravating the sensation of the separate ego.

Now that, in itself, you see, as I talk about it, presents a certain difficulty. Or one thinks it’s difficult. There would be a second difficulty if we were to go on and say, It isn’t only the illusion of the ego, but the whole valuation system that we put on the complexity of vibrations we call ‘awareness of life’. All the various valuations that are put on this by the social game are māyā! That is to say, they are illusory—basically. Because it is only in play, as it were, that we say this is good and this is bad, this is advantageous, this is disadvantageous. And so we would go on to say, after this, But I cannot imagine anything more difficult than overcoming that hypnosis. I am so enchanted by this system that the idea of treating it as not really very serious seems to me unthinkable. Of course you have to think that. It’s like a hypnotist working on somebody and saying, You are not going to remember any of this conversation after you come to. And so he’s put the suggestion into you that you forget the whole thing. So, in the same way, the suggestion has been put into all of us that these rules that we have learned are sacrosanct. And that we—they don’t say that you will not be able to think otherwise, they say they are true! They are the truth, you see? And that is the same function as the hypnotic suggestion put into us ever since we were receptive children.

So, naturally, it’s all part of the conspiracy which we are playing on ourselves. We can’t blame our parents for this, because their parents played it on them, and they bought it. And don’t forget that time goes backwards. You see? You can’t blame this on the past because now, in the present, you are creating the values of the past, and you are buying them all along, you see? So there is no out on this. You see, in a way, psychoanalytically, one is given an out by saying, Well, the parents didn’t bring up their children properly. And American people are consumed with guilt about the way they bring up their children. So we must abandon, completely, the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in, and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present; that now is the creative point of life.

And so, you see, it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody. You change the meaning of the past by doing that. It’s like, also, when you watch the flow of music: the melody, as it is expressed, is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence—especially, say, take German or Latin, where there’s the convention of placing a verb at the end of a sentence. You wait, in other words, till later to find out what the sentence means. According to our way of feeling it. So it is also, in our language, if I say, I love you, you don’t know when I said I what ‘I’ is doing. I could say, I hate you. So we don’t know until later. So, in other words, the word ‘love’ or the word ‘hate’ changes the function of the word ‘I.’ And then I was going to say, I love flowers. No, but I love you. You see? And so the word later changes the meaning of those that go before. The present is always changing the past.

So when you get the idea in your mind that the point of view that I am talking about is very difficult indeed to acquire—that idea is one you are putting there to stop yourself seeing the other point of view. And above all, you must not take that seriously. It is simply a method of postponing seeing the point now. So you have to see it now or never. Because there is only now. If you say, Well, tomorrow. The next day. Maybe in another dozen lifetimes, I’ll be ready. That means, simply and solely, I don’t want to be bothered with it now, I'm even not interested in it now, so I’ve got an excuse for putting it off. Which is fine; that’s perfectly okay. You can put it off. There is no reason, there is no compulsion, why you should come out of this illusion.

That’s why Oriental people do not tend—in the same way as Westerners—to be missionaries, and saying it’s very urgent that you be saved. It isn’t—unless you say so. I mean, unless you are so disturbed by the suffering, and the problem of suffering, that you’ve go to find some sort of escape. But if you don’t want to, you can stay there. It’s okay, there’s lots of time. And maybe you’ll see through it when you die. At least in the moment of death you’ll see that it was all fake. So don’t be scared about the idea of the difficulty of it. That’s a red-herring. And it’s quite irrelevant, and I don’t think that teachers should talk quite so much about this as they do, and saying, Oh, this is going to take a long, long time, and a lot of practice, and many years. Maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. But that’s beside the point, because it distracts. It’s like telling somebody that, This is a very difficult book to read and it requires immense powers of concentration. Well, that immediately kills your interest in it. Instead, if I were to say, Well now, this is a most extraordinary book. It’s just so fascinating. I’ve been working on it for years! And every time I just get so involved, I can’t drop the thing. You know? I mean, that’s a far more encouraging attitude to a student than Well, this is going to be very difficult. Except to very, very self-hating students who somehow, perversely, enjoy suffering through it. Now, I suppose that is, of course, a way, too.