The trouble with the human being is like the trouble with certain animals. Like the dinosaur, who evolved to the point where he was so big that he’d have to have two brains—a higher self in the head and a lower self in the rump. And the difficulty was to get these two brains coordinated. But we have exactly the same trouble, and we are suffering from a kind of ‘jitters’ that comes from being two-brained. Now, you see, I’m not saying that that jitters is bad—it’s a potential step in evolution and an opportunity of growth. But remember, in the process of growth, the oak is not better than the acorn; because what does it do? It produces acorns.

Or you could say—just like I sometimes love to say—that a chicken is one egg’s way of becoming others. So an oak is an acorn’s way of becoming other acorns. Where is the point of superiority? The first verse of the poem I just quoted—The flowering branches grow naturally. Some short, some long—the first verse is,

In the landscape of spring
there is nothing superior
and nothing inferior.
The flowering branches are naturally
some short some long.
So that’s the point of view of being an outcast, in the sense of being outside the ‘taking seriously’ of being involved in the social game, and therefore being threatened by making mistakes, of doing the wrong thing—that is to say, of carrying into adult life one’s childhood conditioning where somebody is constantly yammering at you to play the game.

So therefore, the preachers and the teachers take the same attitude towards their adult congregations that parents take to children, and lecture them and tell them what they should do. And judges in courts feel also entitled to give people lectures because they say those criminal-types haven’t grown up—but neither have the judges. It takes two to make a quarrel. So one can begin to think in a new way—in polarity-thinking. Instead of being stuck with the competitive thinking of the good guys and the bad guys, the cops and robbers, the capitalists and the communists, all these things which are simply childishness.

Now, of course, you recognize that the moment I say that it’s like talking in English in order to show that the English language has limitations. And I am talking in a language that seems competitive to show that the competitive game has limitations. As if I were saying to all you cats here, Look, I have something to tell you. And if you get this, you will be in a better position than you were before you heard it. But I cannot speak to this group—or to society, or this language-speaking culture—without using the language, the gestures, the customs, et cetera, that you have.

The Zen masters try to get around this by doing things—suddenly—that people just don’t get. Well, what is this? Therefore, that is the reason why—this is the real reason why—Zen cannot be explained. You have to make, as it were, a jump from the valuation game of ‘better people’ and ‘worse people,’ ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups,’ and you can only make it by seeing that they all are mutually interdependent. So if we take this situation—let’s say I would be talking to you and saying, Look, I have some very special thing that you've got to take notice of. Therefore I am the in-group, and I’m the teacher and you are the out-group. I know perfectly well that I cannot be the teacher unless you come here, and so that my status and my position is totally dependent on you. It isn’t something, you see, therefore I have first and then you get. These things arise mutually. So if you wouldn’t come, I wouldn’t talk. I wouldn’t know what to say, because I borrowed your language.

So that is the insight: that things go together. Then, when you see that—and aren’t in competition—then you don't make a mistake. Because you don’t dither. When I first learned the piano and played these wretched scales, the teacher beside me had a pencil in her hand and she hit my fingers every time I made a wrong note. The consequence was, I never learned to read music because I hesitated too long to play the note on time. Because I was always, Is this pencil going to land? See? And that gets built into your psyche. And so, people are always—although they are adults, and nobody is clubbing them around and screaming at them any longer—athey hear the echoes of that screaming mama—or that bombinating papa—in the back of their heads all their life long. And so they adopt the same attitudes to their own children, and the farce continues.

Because there is no—I mean, I don’t say that you shouldn’t lay down the law to children if you want them to play the social game. But if you lay down the law to your children, you must make provisions later in life for them to be ‘liberated.’ To go through a process of curing them from the bad effects of education. But you can’t do that unless you, too, grow up, you see? As we grow up. Says I, including myself.

So that is the thing. Now, therefore, in the Zen scene, you would think that the master as we know him and we read about him is an extremely authoritative figure. That’s the way he deliberately comes on at the beginning. He puts up a terrific show of being an awful dragon. And this screens out all sorts of people who don’t have, somehow, the nerve to get into the work. But once you are in, a very strange change takes place: the master becomes the brother; he becomes the affectionate helper of all those students, and they love him as they would a brother, rather than respect him as they would a father. And therefore, the students and masters, they make jokes about each other; they have a very curious kind of social relationship which has all of the outward trappings of authoritarian, but everybody knows on the inside that that’s a joke.

Liberated people have to be very cool. Otherwise, in a society which doesn’t believe in equality and cannot possibly practice it, they would be considered extremely subversive. And therefore, great Zen masters wear purple and gold and carry scepters and sit in thrones, and all this is carried on to cool it. The outside world knows, They’re alright, they have discipline, they have order, they are perfectly fine.