You’re only making a mess by trying to put things straight. You’re trying to straighten out a wiggly world and no wonder you’re in trouble.

In not taking our civic political life too seriously, we can live it at a decent pace and stop from the idea that it is our sacred duty to impose our wonderful way of life on everybody else. And that, you see, is a quality of humor. When you don’t take yourself too seriously, then you can laugh at yourself. And this is a most essential ingredient for a politically healthy people: is to be able to laugh at themselves. That’s why one of the difficulties about churches and law courts—I was in a law court some time ago giving evidence, and the two accused people were smiling. And the judge hit the gavel. They said, “You two young gentlemen should realize that you’re on trial for a very serious crime, and that this attitude of laughter is disrespectful to the court.” And the attorney got up and said, “Your honor, this is the first time these two men have ever been in court, and they don’t understand what the rules are.” “Well,” he said, “it’s high time they did.” Now, every great court where a supreme king, chakravartin, presides, always provides for a jester to be present. Because the moment the king in charge, or the justice, becomes too serious and takes himself too seriously, there is tyranny abroad. And so a proper king has sitting right down there, on his left, a character in cap and bells—the fool. And in ancient days the fools were very powerful people. Very important people. One of the fools of the court of England, Rahere, founded St. Bartholomew’s Hospital out of his wealth. Because the fool, as Shakespeare puts it: “…within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of the king Keeps Death his court and there the antic—” —the antic is an old word for the fool— “…and there the antic sits, Scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp, Allowing him a little time To monarchize, be fear’d and kill with looks. Then at last comes death, and with a little pin Bores through his castle walls, and farewell king!” Because the fool is the one who reminds you all the time that you’re mortal, you’re fallible, you’re human. Tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch. Don’t take yourself too seriously, see? So at the Congress of the United States, at the sessions of the Supreme Court, there ought always to be a fool who says to the judges: Tch-tch! But, you know, the trouble with republics is that they are a little insecure, and they don’t allow fools around. Very secure kings only can allow fools. Dictators can’t allow fools, because they rest upon the will of the majority. They get into power through referendums. They sure can’t tolerate fools around. It’s only an aristocrat—a person who has come from a long, long line of rulers and isn’t insecure about the situation—he can allow the fool. So if a people is to be mature, a democracy is to be mature, it must allow the fool. It must allow the joker—and not merely as a cartoonist in the daily press to point fun at the goings-on of the presidency, but somebody actually present at cabinet meetings who is appointed to be the maverick, to be the funny man of the whole session. In the same way, a university faculty must have in its membership a small percentage of complete screwballs who are not respectable scholars, who have weird ideas, because they will keep the rest of the faculty alive. Not too many of them, always a little balanced—like the salt in the stew: a little bit, but not too much, you know. That is always the element of the people who say to the whole system that’s going on, to the whole reality of life: ha-ha!

However hard we may fight to retain the past or to hurry on into the future, we cannot get out of the present moment. The more we try to hold it, the more we fail to perceive that it holds us.

When we play at games, and we—say, in chess, or in bridge, or whatever game you’re playing—the outcome of the game becomes certain, we at that point cancel the game and begin a new one. Because the whole zest of the thing is that you don’t know what the next order coming up is. But one thing you can be sure of: it will be an order, and it will comprehend you.

The reward for regarding one’s self as a responsible agent and acting accordingly is a promise of something good coming in the future—whether it be in this life or whether it be in some other life—so that we are constantly attracted and kept at this game by living for a good thing coming in the future. And this, as it were, conceals from us what our own proverb tells us in saying “tomorrow never comes.” We are only really ever alive now, and we get distracted from living fully now by having our eye on the future.

We need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it.

Religions are always involved in some kind of sales pitch. They say: if you would do what I tell you or what we preach, it will be good for you, it will make something better. And endlessly, endlessly, it doesn’t.

When you’ve got the hot water faucet on and cold water is coming out, and you leave it alone, and it keeps coming cold water, cold water, you may, with your fingers on the tap, be impatient and say, “Oh, it’s never going to come!” Sometimes it comes quickly. But this is the idea, you see: that meditation is putting your fingers under the cosmic hot water tap, and then you have to wait for it to happen.

Total courage arises out of seeing that there is really nothing that can be done. Holding things together for as long as you can hold them together is a sort of illusion, because you know time’s going to run out, and within a hundred years nothing will matter. You’ll be dead anyway. One reaction to that is, of course: why bother? But the other reaction is: good Lord, if that’s the truth, what fun we can have now!

You know, do I really need to exist? To be here as an organism? I mean, good lord, I am here, you know? And, well, I can’t help it! It has nothing to do with my ego that I have feet and that I exist and that I’m here. Do I really mean it or don’t I? Well, I guess I do. I mean, my physical existence here is perfectly sincere. It’s about as real as anything can be, but I didn’t intend it. I don’t have to say UGH! you know?

The transformation of consciousness undertaken in Taoism and Zen is more like the correction of faulty perception or the curing of a disease. It is not an acquisitive process of learning more and more facts or greater and greater skills, but rather an unlearning of wrong habits and opinions. As Lao-Tzu said, “The scholar gains every day, but the Taoist loses every day.”

In practical affairs we are many, and we all have conflicting interests. What formula are we going to find so that we can agree and act together? See, this is always the most difficult task. And it requires great brains, or great insight, or great something or other, to find the point on which we can all agree, and so work together. So there is always an apparent fight going on between the principle of unity and the principle of diversity.

We need to become vividly aware of our ecology, of our interdependence and virtual identity with all other forms of life which the divisive and emboxing methods of our current way of thought prevent us from experiencing. The so-called physical world and the so-called human body are a single process, differentiated only as the heart from the lungs or the head from the feet.

To the extent that you completely accept the dissolution of everything into dust—that, by doing that, you let go of that clinging (to permanence, to yourself, to security) which releases all the energies of life. The formula, then, is: to the degree that you are willing to become dust, to that degree you are alive.

You—now, at this minute, you see—are the whole system of inning and outing. In other words, you often think, perhaps, “Maybe a long, long time ahead I shall reach the point where I wake up from manifestation and overcome the world-illusion, and discover that I am the supreme reality behind all this diversification.” My friends, there is no diversification! In other words, what you call diversification is your game in the same way as you chop the thing and then you say it is made of pieces. But you forget that you’ve cut it.

Seeking’s alright; I mean, it’s a free country—but it invariably takes you away from what you’re looking for because every search supposes I will find it later, not now. In the next moment. That somehow, by some gimmick, by some exercise, by some process of transformation, I will later discover what I want. This is postponement.

All talk about selfishness—all talk about success in becoming virtuous, or enlightened, or integrated, or non-neurotic, or self-actualized; all the terms that are being used, all this talk—attests to the fact that it hasn’t happened, and will, in fact, get in the way of its happening.

When the outcome of a game is known, the game is cancelled—because the whole point of playing the game is that we don’t know the outcome. Because the known future is already past, and the higher the degree of certainty of knowledge as to the future, to that extent it has happened. You’ve had it. And we don’t want to put the future in that situation—not really. Because, you see, if you think of the cosmos as basically a game of hide-and-seek—where the lord god is creating the universe by forgetting that he’s god and imagining that he’s you—then this is the fundamental way of getting rid of the eternal boredom of knowing all about it, and of there being no surprises. The whole vitality of being alive is that it is always surprising. To be enlightened is to be surprised at everything; that it is a wonder, that everything is a miracle, that it is highly improbable and really shouldn’t’ve happened at all—but there it is, you see? If there isn’t that sense, there is no vitality in anything.

Unaccepted, the universe has no meaning; it is senseless fate and chaos, but acceptance is a way of discovering meaning, not of manufacturing it.

If you get with yourself, get with gravity, get with energy (following its line of least resistance), you will discover that all the vibrations of nature are ecstatic, erotic, or blissful. Existence is orgasm.

The past is a memory, the future an expectation. Neither past nor future actually exist. There is simply eternal now.