The course of time is really very much like the course of a ship in the ocean—
cause here's the ship, you see, and it leaves behind it a wake.
The wake fades out and that tells us where the ship has been in just the same way as the past
and our memory of the past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the
past and we go back and back to prehistory and we use all kinds of
instruments and scientific methods for detecting what happened, we eventually
reach a point where all record of the past fades away in just the same way as
the wake of the ship. Now the important thing to remember in this illustration
is that the wake doesn't drive the ship any more than the tail wags the dog.
Supposing there's a neurotic, difficult child—one school of thought used to say
well bang him about! Beat him up and maybe he'll change! But then they said oh
no that's not fair to the child to beat him up because it was his parents. They
didn't bring him up properly. And so then they say well punish the parents. Well
the parents say excuse me but our parents were neurotic too and they
brought us up badly so we couldn't help what we did. And so, since the
grandparents are dead we can't get at them and in any case supposing we could,
we would pass the whole blame back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and
they say it's they started all this mess. But then Eve would say, "No, the serpent
tempted me and I did eat and it was the serpents fault!"
So you see, if you insist on being moved—being determined by the past—that's your
game but the fact of the matter is it all starts right now. But we like to
establish a connectivity with the past because that gives other people the
impression that we're sane. If you ask me, then—why am I talking? Well I
could say I'm making a living this way or I have a message that I want to get
across to you, but that's not the reason! I'm talking for the same reason that birds
sing and for the same reason that the stars shine—is I dig it!
Why do you dig it? Well, I could go on answering all sorts of questions about
human motivation and psychology but they wouldn't explain a thing because
explaining things by the past is really a refusal to explain them at all!
All you're doing is postponing the explanation. You're putting it back and
back and back and back, and that explains nothing.
What does explain things is the present. Why do you do it now? Now this is a
slight cheat because that doesn't explain it either because what happens
now, just as the sound comes out of silence, all this comes out of nowhere.
All life suddenly emerges out of space. Bang. Right now. And to ask again, why does
it happen, is an unprofitable question because the interesting thing is not "why"
but "what." What happens? Not why does it happen. I can say, well, I am doing this
now because I did that then, and so I am producing for you a continuous line of
thought. But actually, I'm doing it backwards. I'm doing it always from now
and connecting up what I do now with what I did
so that you could see a consistent story. If I define myself as the whole
field of events, we'll say the organism environment field, which is the real me,
then all the things that happen to me may be called my doing, and that is the
real sense of karma. But when we speak about freedom from karma, freedom from
being the puppet of the past, that simply involves a change in your thinking. It
involves, in other words, you are getting rid of the habit of thought whereby you
define yourself as the result of what has gone before, and instead, get into the
more plausible and more reasonable habit of thought, in terms of which, you don't
define yourself in terms of what you've done before but in terms of what you're
doing now. And that is liberation from the ridiculous situation of being a dog
wagged by its tail.