well now really when we go back then to falling in love and say it's crazy

falling you see we don't say rising into love

there is in it the idea of the fall and uh it is goes back as a matter of
fact to extremely fundamental things that there is always a curious
tie at some point between the fall
and the creation taking this ghastly risk
uh is the condition of there being life
you see for all life is an act of faith and an act of gamble
the moment you take a step you do so on an act of faith because you don't really know that
the floor is not
going to give under your feet the moment you take a journey what an act of faith
the moment you enter into any kind of human undertaking in relationship what an act of
faith
see you've given yourself up but this is the most powerful thing that
can be done surrender see and love is an act of surrender to another person
total abandonment i give myself to you
take me do anything you like with me see
so that's quite mad because you see it's letting things get out of control
all sensible people keep things in control watch it watch it watch it
security vigilance watch it
police watch it guards watch it who's going to watch the gods
so uh actually therefore the the course of wisdom
what is really sensible uh is to let go uh is to commit oneself to give oneself
up and that's quite mad so we come to the strange conclusion that in madness lies sanity
we know that from time to time there arise among human beings
people who seem to exude love as naturally as the sun
gives out heat we would like to be like that
and by and large man's religions are attempts to cultivate
that same power in ordinary people
but unfortunately they normally go about this task as one would attempt
to make the tail wag the dog i remember when i was a small boy in
school i was enormously interested in being able to do my school work properly
and everybody told me that i didn't work hard enough and that i ought to work
i had an intense desire to do this but when i asked how do you work
everybody shut up like a clam so i was extremely puzzled
but there were teachers who apparently knew how to work and detained considerable
heights of
scholarship and i admired them very much for their attainments and so i thought that
maybe i could
learn the secret by copying their mannerisms i would imitate the style of handwriting
that they used i would use the same kind of pen i would affect the same mannerisms of
speech and gesture and insofar as i could get around the school uniform even of clothing i
must assure you this of
course was a private school in england not a public school in america
but none of this revealed the secret because i was as it were copying the outward symptoms
and knew nothing of the inner fountain of being able to work
and exactly the same thing is true in the case of people who love
when we study the behavior of people who have the power of love within them
we can catalogue how they behave in various situations and out of this catalog formulate
some
rules one of the peculiar things we notice
about people who have this astonishing universal love is that
they are apt but not always so but they are apt very often to play it rather cool on sexual
love
the reason for this is generally speaking unknown to preachers but
it is because an erotic relationship with the external world
operates so far as they're concerned between that world and every single nerve ending
their whole organism uh in all its aspects physical psychological and spiritual
is an erogenous zone and therefore their flow of love is not
specialized or canalized so exclusively in the genital system as it
is with most other people especially in a culture such as ours
where for so many centuries that particular expression of erotic
love has been so marvelously repressed as to make it seem the most desirable kind of
love that there is and so uh we have as a result of 2000 years of christianity
uh sex on the brain
which isn't always the right place for it [Music]
of course also people who exude love are apt to give things away
uh they are in every way like rivers they stream and so when they collect possessions and
things that they like they are apt to give them to other people because uh when you if you
ever notice
that when you start giving things away you keep getting more the same way as you empty
uh out you
create a vacuum nature abhors a vacuum and more flows in so
noticing this the codifiers of loving behavior write down
that you should give so much money to uh tax deductible
institutions and uh to the poor and uh
that you should uh be nice to people that you should act uh towards your relatives and your
friends and indeed even your enemies as if you love them even if you don't
and of course for christians and jews and believers in god there is a peculiarly difficult task
enjoined upon
us namely that thou shalt love the lord thy god and not only here going through the
motions of it externally but with all your heart with all your soul and with all your mind
and that is of course very demanding indeed but you see what is happening
it is as if for example we admired the music of a certain composer
and having studied his style very thoroughly we draw up rules of musical composition
based on the behavior of this composer we then go to send our children to music
school where they learn these rules in the hope that if they apply them they also will turn
into first-class
musicians which they usually fail to do because
what might be called the technique of music as well as the technique of morals as
well as say the technique of speech of language is very valuable because it gives you
something to express if and i repeat if you have anything to express
but if you don't if you don't have anything to say not even the greatest mastery of english
will uh stand you in
good stead unless you can manage to fool your listeners uh by talking beautiful nonsense
and
make it sound profound now
so the question and the puzzle remains you cannot imitate this thing there is
no way of getting it and yet it is absolutely essential that we have it
because obviously the human race is not going to flourish harmoniously
unless we are unable to love each other but uh the question is how do you get it
is it something you simply have to contract like measles uh or is as theologians say is it a gift
of divine grace which somehow is dished out to some but not to others
and if there is no way of getting divine grace by anything you do as the calvinists of earth
then uh we better just sit around and wait until something happens although calvinists
never did that
they were almost depressingly energetic but surely we can't be left in that kind
of a hopeless situation there must be some way of getting the grace or getting divine charity
or love
some sort of angle some sort of way in which we can as it were open ourselves
so as to become conduit pipes for the flow
and so the more subtle creatures try to see if we can open ourselves and
teach methods of meditation and spiritual discipline in the hope that we can contact this
power the less subtle
preachers simply say uh you don't have enough faith you don't
have enough guts you don't have enough willpower if you only put your wheel uh i mean
your shoulder to the wheel and
shoved you would be of course uh an exemplar and a saint actually you will only be an
extremely clever hypocrite uh the whole history of religion
is a history of the failure of preaching preaching
is uh moral violence [Music]
if you you know uh when you deal with the so-called practical world
and people don't behave as you would wish they would you get out the army or the police
force or the big stick
and if or those strike you were somewhat crude uh you resort to giving lectures
and i mean lectures in the sense of a pie jaw a solemn adjuration and exhortation to
behave better next time
now let us look at some of the practical consequences of jurying people and commanding
people to love
many a parent says to the child nice children love their mothers
and uh of course i'm sure you're a nice child you ought to love your mother but not because
i your mother say so but
because you really want to do so because one of the difficulties is none of us in our heart of
hearts respect
love which is not freely given if for example you are an ailing parent
and you need to be looked after and you have a son or daughter who feels dutifully that
they should
look after you because after all you've done so much for them but this somehow you're
living with your
father or mother prevents you from having a home and a life of your own naturally you
resent this duty
and your parent is well aware that you resent it even if they pretend to ignore it they
therefore feel guilty
that they have imposed upon your loyalty and you in turn can't really disclose
from yourself the fact that you hate them for getting sick even though they couldn't help it
and therefore nobody enjoys the relationship it is a painful duty carried out
and the same thing would naturally happen if after a number of years uh having at the altar
made a solomon
terrible promise that you would love your wife and husband come what may forever and
ever till death do you part
and then suddenly you find you really haven't the heart in you to do it anymore then uh you
feel guilty
and that you ought to love your wife uh family or whatever and naturally uh
this is a sort of fiasco as would be obvious if you were to ask your wife do you
really love me and she were to reply i'm trying very hard to do so
you see the difficulty of it is this you cannot teach
a selfish person to be unselfish by any means
that is to say whatever a selfish person does whether it be
giving his body to be burned or giving all that he possesses to the poor he will still do it in a
selfish way of
feeling and uh he will be able to do this with extreme cunning a marvelous self
deception and deception of others besides but the consequences of
fake love are almost invariably destructive because they build up resentment
on the part of the person who does the fake loving as well as on the part of those who are
its recipients this is why
foreign a the foreign aid program has been such a dismal failure
now of course uh you may say that i'm talking in a very impractical way because you you
would say well do we
just have to sit around and wait until uh we become inwardly converted and
learn through the grace of god on some sort of magic how to love and in the meantime do
nothing about it and conduct
ourselves as selfishly as we feel there is as a matter of fact something to be said for that
because that the first problem in the whole of this is honesty
and the reason why the lord god says at the beginning of things thou shalt love the lord thy
god with all thy heart and
with all thy soul with all thy mind is not because the lord god is stupid but because he's very
clever
that which appears to be a commandment is actually a challenge or what in zen
buddhism would be called a koan a a spiritual problem
because if you exercise yourself resolutely in trying to love god
and or your neighbor you will find that you get more and more tangled up you will realize
increasingly
that the reason why you are attempting to obey this as a commandment
is that you want to be uh the right kind of person and obviously you want to be the right
kind of person for your own reasons and so if you do in the first place feel
selfish and come to the conclusion as a result of trying various experiments with love that
you love yourself more
than anybody else the proper thing to do is to investigate your self-love
to find out why you love yourself and what you mean by yourself when you say you love
yourself
for the reason is this love is not something that is a sort of rare commodity
everybody has it existence is love
but uh it's like water flowing through a hose it depends in which direction you point
it uh so everybody has the the force running
and maybe uh the for the way in which you find the force of love operating in you is that
you have a passionate like of booze or ice cream or uh
automobiles or good looking members of the opposite sex or even the same sex
but there is love operating and uh people of course tend to
distinguish between the various kinds of love there are good kinds such as divine
charity and allegedly bad kinds such as in quotes animal lust
but it should be understood i think that they are all forms of the same thing but they differ
in rather the same way that the colors of light of white light divide
into the spectrum when passed through a prism so we might say that the red end of the
spectrum of love is dr freud's libido and the violet end of the spectrum of
love is agape the uh what is called divine love or divine
charity and that in the middle the various yellows blues and greens our friendship
uh human endearment consideration uh and all that sort of fellow feeling
but it's all the same thing and so
the thing is first of all to get it moving to
follow whatever kind of love you have in the first place because you cannot control love
until
you have some to control until you have it running you've got to get your car running before
you could
learn how to drive it you will not become a skillful driver by sitting at a still car in a garage
anymore then you will become a skilled dancer if you simply never move your arms and legs
and so the first thing then is to discover what indeed you do love
if anything and you will find there is something and then
go into the nature of that now it said that selfish people love
themselves i would say that that is really a misunderstanding of the whole thing
because yourself is something that is really impossible to love there are
various reasons for this but one obvious reason is
that loving oneself is as difficult
as kissing your own lips oneself when you try to focus on it to
love it or to know it is oddly elusive it always slips away like uh the pursued
tale of a dog who is trying to get hold of his own tail so to pursue your own end has some
difficulties above it [Music]
if you explore what you love when you say you love yourself
you will make the startling discovery that everything you love is something which you
thought was other
than yourself even if it be very ordinary things such
as ice cream or uh booze uh
in the conventional sense booze is not you nor is ice cream it certainly it turns
into you in a manner of speaking when you consume it but then you don't have it anymore
and so you look around for more in order to love it once again but so long as you love it you
see it's
never you when you love people even however selfishly you love them
because of the pleasant sensations they give to you still it is somebody else that you love
and as you inquire into this as you follow honestly your own selfishness
many interesting transformations begin to come about in you one of the most interesting
transformations of being
directly and honestly selfish in the same way that for example cats are is that you stop
deceiving people
a great deal of damage is done in practical human relations by saying that you love people
when what you mean is that you ought to and you don't really you give the wrong
impression and people begin to expect
things of you which you're never going to come through with we have been taught for
example that we
ought to love our enemies now we don't really understand what it means
to love our enemies we think it means to be charitable towards them in the hope
that we will convert them and so that they will sense uh the the real reason for loving
enemies is that one needs enemies they're terribly important to you
for example i think that some of you here feel that you belong to a
nice set of people uh it may be an ordinary kind of bourgeois
uh coterie of pleasant squares or it may be a church group of some kind
a club uh or a special cult or uh just a group of uh friendly drinkers
but at any rate you feel that by virtue of membership in this society
you belong to a special in group of nice or saved people
now when you consider what nice people talk about when they sit around the dinner table
and have an opportunity to nurture their collective ego you will find that the most
fascinating
topic of conversation is the nasty people
how awful they are what dreadful things they do and what is it all coming to
and uh this very very satisfactory condemnatory conversation
nurtures your ego but people who do that don't seem to realize that they thereby depend
on the nasty
people in order to know that they're nice they are as a matter of fact highly indebted to
them
[Music] on the other side of the picture the nasty people
uh it may be say beatniks opposite the squares or uh some kind of repressed group uh it
might be a group of negroes or of jews or of uh irish catholics or italian catholics or anybody
who generally gets
regarded as being not quite nice they on their side consider that they
really are the best people and uh to nurture their collective ego by
blasting the bourgeoisie the squares the wasps no nothings or whoever they may be
and so for the collective ego of the non-squares the squares are extremely necessary
if they were to disappear tomorrow many of us would lose a cause
now the minute you begin to become aware of this uh it's rather embarrassing
it's of course humorous and i'm glad that you see this
uh because at once you begin to realize how much you depend on an enemy or an
outsider or a group of damned people is distinct from your own group of saved people
and so you begin to realize that if your collective ego or yourself
depends on your being on the in but you can only be on the in with relation to something
that is out
and since the in and the out are inseparable if there is to be any in or any out
you suddenly discover that yourself is bigger than you thought it was
[Applause] it uh includes the other
and you can't do without it you this brings about a fundamental
change in the understanding of the meaning and nature of self [Applause]
and thereupon there become
a change of attitude to other people even if
you continue with some formal opposition to them and disapproval of them
when then you are honestly clear with yourself what you like and what you dislike
and then at the salute things that were hitherto defined as being not yourself
your love which is what you are begins to express itself
quite naturally and uneffectively in a wider way
now to trust oneself to be capable of love to bring up love in other words to uh
function in a sociable way and in a creative way
is to take a risk it's a gamble because you may not come through with it
and in the same way when you fall in love with somebody else or you form an association
with somebody else
and you trust them they may as a matter of fact not fulfill your expectations
but that risk has to be taken the alternative to taking that risk
is much worse than trusting and being deceived
when you say i will not trust other people and i will not trust myself
what do you have to do you have to
resort to force you have to employ stacks of policemen
to protect you and god only knows what makes you think you can trust them
and uh you have to hold a club over yourself
all the time and say no no uh
my nature is wayward animal perverse fallen
grounded in sin so that as a matter of fact what happens
when you refuse to take the gamble of trusting yourself to be capable of love
you become like a person if you will excuse this extremely graphic but nevertheless relevant
simile
who cannot trust themselves to have bowel movements
many children learn this from parents who do not trust them and think that they ought to
have
these movements in rhythm with the clock which is a different kind of rhythm than
the rhythm of the organism so people who cannot trust themselves to do this endlessly take
laxatives
as a result of which their whole elimination system gets fouled up needing more laxatives
and so on and so
forth so exactly the same thing happens with people who can't trust themselves to go to
sleep have to take all kinds of
pills and so also with people who can't trust themselves to love and have to take all sorts of
uh
artificial and surgical measures to produce the effect of love uh
for saving face they get more progressively incapable of
loving it all and they create turmoil and misunderstanding and chaos in human
society in other words to live together
you have to take risks there will be disappointments and failures and
disasters as a result of taking these risks but in the long run it will work out
my point is that if you don't take them the results will be so much worse than
any kind of wild anarchy that could be conceived
you see here we are now as a highly disciplined human race
with all kinds of rules and religions and uh what are we about to do
blow ourselves completely to pieces uh
is this really was this all a good gamble because you see in
tying up love in knots and becoming capable incapable of it you can't destroy this energy
you turn it uh when
you when you won't love and you won't let it out the thing comes out in the form of self-
destruction
the alternative to self-love in other words is self-destruction because you won't take the risk
of loving yourself properly you will be compelled instead to destroy yourself
so which would you rather have would you rather have a human race
which isn't always very well controlled and sometimes uh runs amok a little bit
but on the whole continues to exist with a good deal of honesty and delight
when delight is available or would you rather have the whole human race blown to pieces
and cleaned off the planet reducing the whole thing to a nice scoured rock with
no dirty disease on it called life