Think of what your society did to you,
Work,
Fun,
Laughter.
If you wish to understand this,
Think of a little child that is given a taste for drugs.
As the drugs penetrate the body of the child,
It becomes addicted,
And its whole being cries out for the drug.
To be without the drug is so unbearable,
A torment,
That it seems preferable to die.
Think of that image.
The body has got addicted to the drug.
Now,
This is exactly what your society did to you when you were born.
You were not allowed to enjoy the solid,
Nutritious food of life,
Namely work,
Play,
Fun,
Laughter,
The company of people,
The pleasures of the senses and the mind.
You were given a taste for the drug called approval,
Attention.
You know,
To the point where psychologists began to tell us that a child needs attention.
You've got to give him plenty of attention after you've drugged the child,
Yes.
I'll be quoting a great,
Great man,
A man called Neil.
Those of you in education have surely heard of him.
A.
S.
Neil,
The author of Summerhill.
Neil says,
The sign of a sick child is that it is always hovering around its parents.
It is interested in persons.
The healthy child has no interest in persons.
It is interested in things.
You know,
When the child is sure of mother's love,
It forgets mother.
It's going out to explore the world.
It's curious,
Looking for a frog to put into its mouth kind of thing.
When he's hovering around mother,
Bad sign,
He's insecure.
Maybe mother has been trying to suck love out of the child and not giving the child all the freedom and assurance it wanted.
Mother's always been threatening to go away in many subtle ways.
All right,
So we were given a taste for the drug called addiction.
Approval,
Attention.
The drug called success.
You gotta make it to the top.
Prestige,
Get your name in the papers.
Power,
Be the boss.
That's a success story.
People take orders from you.
We were given a taste for this.
Be the captain of the team.
Lead the band.
Having got a taste for these drugs,
You became addicted and began to dread their loss.
So the control.
You felt terror at the prospect of failure,
Of making mistakes,
The prospect of criticism from others.
So you became cravenly dependent on people and you lost your freedom.
Others now have the power to make you happy or miserable.
You're craving for your drug and much as you hate the suffering that this involves,
You find yourself completely helpless.
There is never a minute when consciously or unconsciously you are not aware of,
You're not attuned to the reaction of others marching to the beat of their drum.
A nice definition of an awakened person is that this person no longer marches to the drum of the beat of society.
This person dances to the tune of the music that springs up from within.
When you are ignored or disapproved of,
You experience a loneliness so unbearable that you crawl back to people to beg for the comforting drug called support,
Encouragement,
Reassurance,
In this state involves a never-ending tension.
Have you ever paused to think of that?
Living with people is tension.
Sartre,
Hell is the other.
How true when you are in this state of dependence,
But how true?
You've always got to be on your best behavior.
You can never let your hair down.
You've got to live up to expectations.
You're always tense.
To be with people is to live in tension.
To be without them brings the agony of loneliness.
You miss them.
You have lost your capacity to see them exactly as they are and to respond to them accurately because your perception of them is clouded by the need to get your drug.
You're always looking at people consciously or unconsciously through these eyes.
Will I get what I want from them?
Will I not get what I want from them?
And if they can neither support nor threaten my drug,
I'm not interested in them.
That's a horrible thing to say,
But my dear friends,
I wonder if there's anyone in this room of whom this cannot be said.
Wake up.
Life is a banquet.
And the tragedy is that most people are starving to death.
You need awareness and you need nourishment.
You need good,
Healthy nourishment.
Learn to enjoy the solid food of life.
The one thing you need the most of all is the readiness to learn something new.
The chances that you will wake up are in direct proportion the amount of truth you can take without running away.
If you look,
You lose control of this life that you're so precariously holding together.
How much are you ready to take?
How much of everything you've held dear are you ready to have shattered without running away?
How ready are you to think something unfamiliar?
Ready for the new?
