The old man said, “I can’t help it, because when I am asleep what can I do about snoring? If I am awake I can stop it, but when I am awake it doesn’t happen – it happens only when I am asleep. But you can’t expect an asleep man to do something about snoring. I am helpless. So please continue as we have continued before.”
I am also helpless. I know perfectly well that many things are being left out, but there is no other way. This is the problem of language. Language is linear, and existence is multidimensional. If I were only a thinker I would not be drifting at all because thinking is linear, just like language. Thinking is in language, in words. So the words move in a row – it can be miles long but it is linear.
But existence is multidimensional. From each point…as if it is a sun with millions of rays moving towards infinity. Each ray can lead you to infinity, but if you choose one, of course you have to leave others; and you can choose only one. You cannot even ride on two horses, what to say about two dimensions? You cannot ride on two boats, what to say about two dimensions? – because they are going to diverge more and more, more and more; as you go further, there will be an infinite unbridgeable gap between them. At the source they are one. From there you can choose any one, but once you have chosen a line then others are dropped.
I have been drifting my whole life. You have to be alert. And if you can remind me that somewhere I have drifted, I can catch hold of a dimension that has been left behind. But you should not expect that I will stop drifting, because in catching hold of the other dimension, again I will be leaving many more.
On each step there is a problem of choosing, because I am an existential person, I am not a thinker. It is not a logical syllogism that I am propounding to you. It is my experience that I am trying to share with you – and experience is so vast that I can only show you a little part of it. But you are always welcome to remind me. Yes, I remember I had drifted on many points; perhaps a few I can manage to catch back again.
One was religion – religion at the lowest level of mankind, the instinctive level. All primitive tribes, aboriginals, are still living under that first kind of religion, which theologians call “magic.”
It believes that if you sacrifice to a god, if you do a certain ritual, a certain dance, a certain prayer, then the god is satisfied with you and rewards will be coming. For example, when it is not raining – these are the problems of primitive people – when it is not raining, what will the primitive tribe do? It will arrange a ritual, perhaps a sacrifice of a living human being – their god is very bloodthirsty. Or, if the tribe has evolved a little, then instead of a man it will choose an animal. If the tribe has evolved a little more then it will choose not even an animal, not even a man, but something similar.