"One of the first things that everyone should understand

Is that everything in the universe, that is in anyway sensitive

And in any manner of consciousness, regards itself as a human being. *"

It knows and is aware of a hierarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it

That is to say that whatever you are and wherever you are and whoever you are, that you're in the middle

Your senses extend a certain direction, In all directions, and therefore give you the impression of being in the middle

Because the definition of a person depends on where you look

Everything in the world feels like that

And also they have their own kind, you see spiders and birds and sea urchins and so on don't look very natural to us

We say when we see them "Well I wouldn't want to look like that,"

But they say when they see us, "What kind of awful thing is it that? And what a lot of nonsense it does". *

Now we come here right at the start to an extremely important principle,

Which is. *

The different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification

That is to say you can look at something through a microscope and see it a certain way or you can look at something with the naked eye and see it a certain way, you look at it through a telescope and you see it another way

Now which level of magnification is the correct one?

Well obviously, they're all correct

They're just different points of view

When we examine our bloodstreams, through a microscope we can see one big fight going on

All sorts of micro organisms chewing each other up, and if we got over fascinated with our own bloodstream in a microscope, we should start taking size

Which would be fatal, because the health of an organism depends on the continuance of this battle. *

What is in other words conflict at one level of magnification, is harmony at a higher level

Now could it possibly therefore be that with all our problems, conflicts, sicknesses, political outrages, tortures, and everything that goes on in human life, are a state of conflict

Which can be seen in a larger perspective, as a situation of harmony

Every fly or gnat, even bacteria

I will go so far as to say, are events upon which this whole cosmos depends upon

This thing goes both ways. It's not only, that every little organism that exists depends on its total environment

The reverse is also true, that every environment depends on each and everyone of those little organisms, so that you could say this universe consists of an arrangement, of patterns

In which every event, is essential to the whole thing, *

Now we screen that idea out of our consciousness, just as we pay attention to the figure and ignore the background, so, we see one way of looking at things

Mainly that the organism is frail against the environment, the environment lasts a long time, and the organism lasts a short time

But actually the whole thing is arranged as a polar system where the enormous depends on the tiny and the tiny depend on the enormous. *

When you came into this world, you gradually developed a sensation of "I"

And it stays there for a while and it goes through a development and drops off

But all the time there are other "I's" starting up, see

Whether they be human, animal, anything you like, they be in other galaxies, etcetera, always they're starting up *

Now

You would say there is no connection between them

No, in the same way you could say there is no connection between the molecules in your hand. *

And yet you say it is a hand

But if you look at it under a powerful enough microscope you can see the molecules in your hand seem like they are miles apart. *

What's the connection between our galaxy and other galaxies? Well we can't really see a connection and yet there are gravitational swings where by they respond to each other and move in a certain collective order.

See what I am with doing with this is not setting down a doctrine, but practicing an exercise of perception,

You can see it either way, you can see yourself in other words, as existing only now, that's the you there is

The alternative to that, logically, is to see yourself as everything

So in all this you see, when you get your life going this time

There comes a time in which you call emotional investment

When you feel, that the outcome of this particular feature in this life is urgent

This matters

And it's up to you what you think matters. *

We teach our children, what matters, what's important for them to learn

And we teach them basically that it's important to live. *

And in a way every being in this world is torn between going on and goofing off

We feel that that it's our basis of our distinction between work and play

Play is, the point where everybody needs some time to goof off but they still must go back to work because they got to farm and fish and manufacture things so that you can go on

But when you see you have this terrifying urgency to go on, you feel that this is a must, this is important, this matters *

We screen out of our consciousness the fact that this is our own declaration and own life. *

And the difficulty is that as we become disturbed and anxious about something, it's more difficult to keep your life going

In proportion as we are frightfully concerned we stop fighting other people

We stop clobbering our neighbors or whatever it is where all the other fights start

Which is why these fights at the moment, you see, are endangering the entire human project

But it's all based upon the fundamental illusion, that it's utterly important we survive

But you see all what all this underlies *

Is

The illusion. *

That I am going on, that I constitute a real continuity from this moment to the next moment to the next moment to the next moment.

What are you afraid of losing when you die. Everything that you've acquired as an individual stored in your brain is dissolved and distributed, but at the same time it is equally obvious that when you die there won't be following the moment of death

Everlasting nothingness. *

So *

You can become aware, of this tremendous interconnectedness,

Just as fronts go with backs and tops go with bottom's, insides with outsides

Solids with spaces

So everything that is something goes together

And it makes no difference whether or not it lasts a long time, or a short time

A galaxy goes with all the universe just as much as they must be

You can get a certain vision by it, where everything is seen, to be a complex pattern or rhythm

Dances, the human dance, the flower dance, the bee dance, the giraffe dance,

And that's what this all is, its jazz

This is a big jazz this world is

And what it's trying to do is to see how jazzed up it can get *

How far out, this play of rhythm can go.