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{word} = hard to understand, might be this

[Opening remarks missing]

... hope by now that you have seen that I am giving you a yardstick by which to measure all the phenomena which I have been called in various times and countries "religious." This is as precise as any yardstick. I mean, if you can measure 18 inches, and when I give you to understand that Hindu, and Greek, and Jewish, and Christian religion can be measured on this time spectrum, I offer you something very precise. And these reports destroy my precision work. And I have tried to be so sober that you can see there is possible something which the Greeks would have called "mathematics." You think of mathematics only to be expressed in figures, or graphs, or numbers. But the Greek word "mathematics" meant exact knowledge which can be taught. Now the terrible thing is that you believe that nobody knows anything about religion.

I -- here -- yesterday I received a letter from an old friend of mine, a professor at Harvard, in which he again posed -- as all these humanists do -- with this benighted, or enlightened ignorance after all on all these subjects -- matter -- nobody can know anything. It is this stupid humility which I detest. If this were so, there would be no human society in existence. Certainly President Eisenhower couldn't have joined the Presbyterian Church. It isn't true that when a man like Eisenhower has a Cabinet meeting with { } that he says, "I'm not sure that this is a good thing." He says, "I'm sure." Everybody -- every one of you knows exactly that he's right.

The other day I got a letter -- got a message from a -- here -- our clerk in the church, and she wrote -- said, she wrote, "Oh, these people have left the church -- they think they know the truth." So I sat down and wrote, "And you think you know the truth, too."

But this is -- she is a fa‡on de parler -- a polite society said, "Of course, we don't know anything. We don't know anything." Always with the reservation on you, little children, that you know everything. I don't believe anybody who tells me with this -- with his tongue in his cheek that of course on the important issues, we know nothing. We only know something on dieting, or on digestion, or on toilet paper -- which the best toilet paper is. You know very well which is the best religion and which is nonsense. All lie -- I -- the mendacity of this good society is just terrible. Any Jehovah's Witness is better. They are the only intelligent people at this moment in this country. They say, "We want to know the truth, and we believe it and we act upon it." All the rest is just hypocrites. The greatest hypocrisy of all of you is to say that you know nothing about these

things.

So, my -- what I want to emphasize, gentlemen, I have tried to force you to admit that this is better known than mathematics. In society, for example, two and two is never four. In a -- you have a society and you have a pie, it isn't true that the mother and the father and the two children get each one piece of equal { } -- it is obviously that in any good family and any human group, for example, mathematics are not valid. You don't cut the pie in four equal parts, because you love each other. All mathematics break down in human society. However, the good religion does not break down, at all. Quite the contrary. And I have tried -- and this was completely lacking { } in your report. I have -- we have set out for a certain, very reason -- rational, very sober assessment of the different forms of worship by which we express our belief. And the whole time of the last class, if I remember rightly, was given to study the first forms of this worship. And we had said that it is perfectly possible to enlarge our spectrum so that we would have here the mere dead things, the things of Mars, the physical world. We would here have the organic matter. We would here have the playful behavior. And we would here have the serious, the purposive, work. We'll see that we can split also 5 -- and the -- I mean, that what was 4 in your former picture. We have here, that was 1 before. Here I have laid it out. In -- you remember, we also said that we could lay out, by the way, 2 and A and B. I told you that the Hindus made out of B 2-B the yoga situation of deep -- of deep sleep, so that you would have distinctive -- to distinguish 2. Perhaps it is better to enlarge it really to the full range of all these numbers, because we shall see that every one of these steps can be -- create a variety of worship. And tentatively make it 10. We'll see that these five go together, these five go together, and these, these, and these.

So, we would here on the left-hand side still have the unity: Mars, dead things -- death and dead things. We would have here Hermes, Mercury. We would have here Jupiter. We would have here -- or in Athene, by the way, we would have here Venus, Diana. And we would have here Saturnus and Jahweh. Now, it is perfectly -- or perhaps here I should leave the one on the -- on the pagan side, just Saturnus or Kronos. I -- we have already tried to give you a -- see -- two various forms of worship: the golden calf and the speed, or locomotion.

Here I warned you that the Hindus made out of rhythmical life, rhythmical sleep -- they made this depth of sleep. And we'll go on now and see that equally all the others -- these can be changed, or varied.

But all this is done. As we go along, I have of course to give examples, which -- some will strike you as not quite unheard, at least. In order to build up this yardstick. But what I want to offer you is to make you able to look all three -- these dead slogans of Christianity, Judaism, Moslem -- where nobody knows what

you're really talking about, just buildings -- St. Peter and Rome -- it's of no interest, gentlemen. The question is always, "Who does live what?" In decisive moments, what do you do, gentlemen? Do you spend three times as much for a fast car than you have to spend? Is a car, in your rubrum of economics or is a car in your rubrum of worship? Wherever we waste money, we worship. If you buy a necklace or purse for your wife, you adore her. And by the -- you show it by the necklace. It's not necessary to spend $40,000 on a pearl necklace. And you could buy false pearls, as you know. All education is casting false pearls before real swines. And false pearls are just a thing of the world. But where you worship, you want to have a real education, something very precious, which you cannot buy elsewhere. And the same with pearls for your wife. That's worship. And you have lost this, you see. You really think worship is to go to a church and pay 50 cents for the poor there at the collection. That's of course not worship, because this copper coin or this dollar which you put there is a farce, and you just scorn God by the money you give there in church. It's just a formality. Superstition. If I see this collections, I always shudder. Because it is nothing. It is not even a ceremony or a symbol. You would just be ashamed not to give something. That's the only reason why you put something on the platter. But you think you are worshiping God by this collection. Of course, you are scorning God. But if you would go into your pocket without anybody seeing it and send $10 for the boys at { } league, or something, you are worshiping, because you do it for Him, for the majesty of your creator, who is His -- and the boys' and your own father.

I mean to say, what I try to -- is to break through your constant prejudices, to look for worship, for example, at the wrong place. You do -- we all worship -- every one of us, gentlemen, where he does something for nothing, you see. And we serve the Devil where we want to get something for nothing, which most of you try to get all the time. When you try to get something for nothing, you don't worship. Because you are God Almighty, and you try to cheat the rest of the world to serve you. Anywhere where you try to get something for nothing -- Gold Rush to Alaska, or Klondike, you see -- you are the Devil, because you want the people to give -- let you have something which you don't deserve. But wherever you do the opposite, you feel there is some deserving cause, as you call it, which you have to serve. What is a deserving cause? Some cause that's -- forces us down on our knees, so that we have to do more, you see, than is rationally explicable. Gentlemen, when the band plays, and we march, and the tambour-- the majorette dances, that is, of course, part of the religion of the United States people. And you can't say that's not religion. Of course it is religion, the way you behave at a football game. But you don't -- can't find religion where it is, so you always look in the wrong direction.

These are religions, gentlemen, when an army marches into war. That's reli-

gion. And Julia Howe knew it when she wrote the famous camp song, you know: "I see the glory of the coming of the Lord." Who knows this? That's a very important song, because she captured the reality of religion, you see, outside the building. Can you see this? There is in lay -- in secular life is as much religion, of course, in peacetime. And my -- difficulty is only to make you see where it moves. Now wherever we buy such a racing car, gentlemen, against our real economic interest, you hear the people say, "We need a car." But they never say what a car they really would need, you see, if they only -- clung to needs. They don't need that car. They need a car, all right, but they spend three times as much for the car, and it's really a religion, what car they will buy, and what make, and how to compete with the Joneses.

So, however, let us now look at the difference between the religion of the ancients, with their golden calf, and the religion of steel and iron and rubber in our times. Then you see what has happened -- or what does happen whenever a religion of speed, or of the dead things is a part of a living whole of a larger religion which comprises the other spheres, and what is the distinction of the Egyptian golden calf and our -- your religion and mine? We want speed. We want to be able to drive to the neighbor for a cocktail party like that, over 30 miles. We want to then conquer space. And we want to exult in the feeling that we have broken down the isolation of the individual neighbor, that we are all good neighbors. This is part of our worship. And for this we buy then, an infinite amount of steel, and iron, and metal, and dead machinery, and we overdo it. That is, we do not have just a minimum of transportation, but we have an infinitely better, bigger car, you see, than we would practically need. This amount of bigger and better is our worship part in this act. Can you see this? The blank necessity is one thing, the bare necessity -- and the surplus, you see, is the exultation. We exalt with action.

You compare the Egyptians to us and this much is easy for you to understand. These Egyptians built pyramids and worshiped gold and introduced the gold standard into reality. They were the first to introduce gold as coinage. Now what does it mean? Gold is imperishable. And the pyramids were made imperishable. And therefore, it is the worship of the undying, dead. And you see the real paradox of the old pagans is they worshiped that which could not die, but they paid the penalty, which is the penalty of worshiping dead things. They cannot die. They have this -- gold is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. But it has one lack. Well, it doesn't live. And has never lived. You see, you -- if you turn to dead things, you can say they never die. But why can't they die? Because they're dead. You and I can die, but we have the great privilege of being alive. So a mortal man, gentlemen, is better than gold, although he is perishable. The whole pagan error of the first class of the object of worship then is, gentlemen, that from fear of death, from fear that you shall worship something so frail and

temporal, like you and me, like mere life -- like a flower, you see, that withers on the stem at noon -- that they took to these imperishables, which isn't stupid in itself, you see. Man looks for the imperishable, even the New Testament speaks of it. And many people in this country, as you know, at least pretend that they believe in immortality, as though men didn't die. We talked about the Stoics, these Greek philosophers, who said, you see, that man cannot die -- has an immortal soul. Well, gentlemen, that's, of course -- is nonsense. We are not steel and iron. We are so alive that we can die. The test of life is death.

A biologist has defined biology as the science of the bodies who produce corpses. That's a very good definition, gentlemen. Life is not understandable without the limiting concept of death. A living being is somebody who can die. A living body is somebody who can die. A dead body is somebody who cannot die. Can you see the paradox?

Now our biologists, as you know, are all machine biologists. And in America, this definition of biology has not been accepted. The official -- definition of biology is the golden-calf definition. It's a pagan science in this country, because biology is reduced there to physics -- and it runs: biology is the science of factories which can produce other factories. Just utter nonsense. A factory is something dead and how can it then produce other factories, you see? It is an avoidance of the life process itself. Because, as it is with venereal disease, gentlemen, I told you, and as it is with life, war and peace. You have no peace without war, and you have no love without danger. And in the same sense, you have not life without death. Therefore, we touch here on a very remarkable paganism in America. The American biologists are absolute pagans, because they try to get away with the philosophy of life as something preferably imperishable. They have the machine theory of life, and say, if only you could repair the machine, then it could work forever. You know this "old as Methuselah" business. Whereas a great biologist in Europe, as I said, has written a book to say that everybody has its -- has his appointed time, which everybody by the way feels and knows, you see -- that an oak tree lives so long, and an elephant lives so long, and a human being lives so long, and nothing will stop the end, because it is a course that is run, you see, a meaningful whole. It is a structure which has to be fulfilled, life. And everybody knows that -- from a baby born to an old man there is just the fulfillment, and then it's there, over. You can't even hope to -- to prolong it. It's a mechanical, gentlemen, and a mechanical conception of the Egyptian type which today says, "Well, we want to prolong life, so that it is practically not dying." You can do this, when you suspend man's animation, and suspended animation leads to a prolonged life. But it isn't life. It's the opposite from life.

This is very essential, because we are here at the point where our speed religion becomes superstition. The American religion of the great reconciliation of

the human race through speed, through locomotion, I think is something glorious. If you go -- who has been out West, beyond the Rockies? You know how people help each other, how hospitable they are, how they really commute over hundreds of miles with each other. You can be invited a hundred miles' distance just for the afternoon.

And I once have been pushed over a mountain pass in British Columbia for five hours, by another car, because we had run out of gas, and it -- were hairpin curves. And these people, a woman and her chauffeur who had to make a train, just the same felt they had to miss the train and pushed us up and down these hairpin passes, because we were out of gas. And you couldn't let us down, and we had to move -- keep -- be kept moving with them. Never seen a more generous action than this highway -- we were 150 miles from the next filling station. So they had to take us for 150 miles. As a matter of fact, they took us 116 miles, then he went alone and got the barrel of gasoline for us.

Only I mean you to say, this is worship. This is religious. Can't you see it, you see. We didn't know these people. And this is part of American folkways in the deepest sense and the most glorious sense. However, if you come to the inroads which this partial religion of locomotion has made on the brain of American scientists, it is horrifying, because they think that a machine is better than an organism. And therefore, they take the pride to declare that biology is the science of a mechanism which can produce other mechanisms, because they want to avoid the unseeming fact that we die and produce corpses. That's in organic life necessary. Mechanic -- you see, mechanism doesn't produce a corpse. See the difference? Because -- doesn't produce anything. So a factory that produces a factory is just a joke. And that's to be read in the official textbook used here at the Mary Hitchcock Clinic in biology. It's just nonsense and it's Egyptian darkness. And I can tell you that what is called American science is a laughing stock among the educated people in other continents, for this reason, for this blind belief in mechanics. It's just funny to call you an me a factory that can produce other factories. If you don't laugh, gentlemen, at such an expression, no -- nobody can help you, you see. You are not, fortunately, a factory. You are going to get married. And that's the only way in which you can produce another factory.

It is unbelievable. You see, the condition of life is that we give up our own structure in order to produce life. The orgasm of two people who are in -- love each other means that withdrawal of your own -- their own self-contained structure, their jettisoning -- jeopardizing -- no, "jettisoning" is the right word -- they are abandoning their own armament, their own armor, and the disarmament of their own body in order to give way to the life of the species. That's not a factory that produces other factories, you see. But that's a being that can dissolve in the

melting pot of love in order to produce the next generation. Now a factory that can melt is not a factory any more, you see. Melting under love is just one form of death. And here we come again to your pleasant -- this pleasant society in America, where everything is mechanized, but everything is lied away. Gentlemen, love is the first form of death. Love is the first form of death. That you can see clearly, when you understand that in love, the individual gives up his private structure and disarms. And without this, the woman remains frigid. And because the women in this country don't want to disarm, they remain frigid. Frigidity is simply the lack of disarmament, of -- lack of melting, lack of giving up your own will, your own structure, your own energy in favor of the next -- as the biologists here say, factory, but it isn't a factory, -- it's a new life. The only definition of biology is that -- obviously that life that is able to sacrifice itself for new life.

So you see, we have now reached the point where we can distinguish between the worship of dead things, which is innocuous; and the worship of dead things, which undertakes to repress, processes that belong to other phases of change, to other energies of change. If you say that you are a factory that produces other factories, you are sinning. This biology has to be erased from the books of mankind, which is preached in this country at this moment. It is a wicked, anti-Christian and anti-religious force. However, the hospitality which is given by the speed motive in this country is a wonderful force. That's all to be, I think, affirmed. And you can see why. The region of the dead -- this vast space of mere space, of the space continuum, as they call it now -- that has to be conquered. We would be otherwise swallowed up by isolation and death and -- in the vacuum, if we could not unite mankind, despite of space. So that's a positive challenge. And you can see now, gentlemen, remember my sentence -- "The corruption of the best is always the worst" -- that because we must worship speed, we are always in danger, you see, of going that -- one too far, and of being corrupted. But you can't have the good without the danger of corruption. And therefore you must affirm that element by which we have replaced the goldencalf philosophy. The Egyptians worshiped the imperishable: the stones, the marbles, the jaspers, the sardonyx, the opal -- topaz, the -- all the stones which you read in St. John's Revelation. Have you ever looked into it, where all these wonderful gems are mentioned -- the pearls, the eternal Jerusalem is copied after the worship of the Egyptians. It's -- symbolically meant to out-do Egypt. The Revelation is written against the gods of Egypt. Very clearly, I mean. The woman there is Isis, replace -- Mary replacing Isis and so on.

And so if you look up -- who has ever looked into Revelation? Well, it still has the seven seals on it, I see. You never have looked at it? Who has really? Be honest with me. That's quite a situation.

Well, if you want to know the superstitions of the ancients, read Revelation. It

is written against them and therefore it takes up those symbols and outdoes them. And whatever the ancients believed is in this way known to you still if you read St. John's Apocalypse, or Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. The -- that is the eternal value of the Bible, gentlemen, that the superstitions of the Gentiles -- of all these many peoples -- Mexicans, and Romans, and Chinese -- are known to you, if you can read the Bible, because there they are superseded. And -- but in this sense, they -- you don't have to relapse into them when you read it. That's -- when the American people gave up reading the Bible, they now then will -- began to establish this funny -- what they call science of biology, which is mere superstition, or psychology, for that matter. That's even worse. If you read the Letter to the Corinthians of Paul, and he announces Mr. Freud and all the psychology department of -- on this college as being the coming idiots, and feeble-minded, and says these are the psychists, who wants to -- want to explain everything from the psyche. But as soon as you don't read the New Testament, all these irreligions come up again, because the Bible isn't written as a luxury of sentiment. It is written as the inventory of the stupidities of the human race.

But to come back, gentlemen. We now go into this first phase. The imperishable, the realm of death, has this tremendous repulsion and attraction for you and me. That we must move on this earth, but on the other hand, we must not become dead ourselves. This is very difficult to avoid. And as I have tried to show you, when our -- worship gold, as many people in this country seems to me still do -- this {dollarica} -- if you worship money, if you worship space, if you worship stratosphere, if you let these boys subscribe to these idiotic journals -- "Stratospheric" -- I have spent some money just in keeping up, trying to keep up, what -- to know what's put into the brains of these children, it is really horrid. It is absolute death. It is deadly. It is nothing worth thinking, or dreaming. And it's only the hatred of true religion which then can put up with this -- produce this literature, gentlemen. Your brother -- who has a brother who is younger than 14 or 15? Gentlemen, don't you pity him? To dull his senses with this stuff, when he should dream up -- of great heroes. He can read The Last of the Mohicans, he can read Leatherstockings, I don't care. But he must still have filled his heart and mind with heroes and saints to imitate. That's the time to learn languages and to dream up heroes. And then "Stratosphere." Some captain shouting -- and the only thing they can say that he shouts with a very loud voice, or that he whispers, because the space is as dead as a dodo. You can establish a police station there, or a fire department. Or any such mechanic things. The whole stratospheric literature is I think the greatest test of the total lack of love, imagination, and future, and spirit that this country now has. It's just desperate. You must treat your children -- your brothers and sisters better. They deserve better. It's just as bad as for us reading the funnies. But the funnies -- at least they -- I mean, this is a little life. It's bad enough. But these stratospheric books, I think they are abso-

lutely -- cannot be redeemed. If you have -- who has read Jules Verne? Oh, what a story, compared to this! That's genius. A great man, Jules Verne, you see. He knew how to ennoble these things, by people who did something, suffered something, you see, went some places. Jules Verne is just a Frenchman, is just the very opposite from this stratospheric literature.

And you are responsible. Gentlemen, what you do to your brother is much more important than that you go to church on Sunday. Of no interest to God that you go to church on Sunday. But of great interest to Him what you allow your brother not to know, or not to live. That -- for this you are responsible. For this stodgy churchgoing, you are not responsible at all. That's just a habit. But your brother has the right to ask you 10 years from now, "Why did you allow me never to grow up and never to become a soul?" And who -- which child can get a soul? It is exposed to television, to Bob Hope, and all these people? It's the best thing he can become is -- hope -- become is an orange.

But we are in the midst of a very real discussion, gentlemen. If you take the trouble to stay for a while with this one -- I hope your mind is at rest, that I shall not forget all the other possibilities. I hope my yardstick begins to work on you that you may be at rest. We {will} have the power to deal with Venus, and Jupiter, and all the great historical events of the human race. But one moment let us still stop here at this simple problem of gold, and of space, and of dead matter, and of physics, and of the atom bomb. Gentlemen, for the last nine years, this country has offered to the rest of the world this strange spectacle of a war dance around the atom bomb. War dances are usually frenzied. I have a friend, Lewis Mumford, who usually comes here to lecture once a year. You -- who has heard his name? Well, Mr. Mumford was absolutely insane with perplexities over the atom bomb for two years, from '47 to '49. He devoted all his time to improving human relations with regard to the atom bomb. Gentlemen, if I know that we need dead things to support us, I never can forget that it is like the golden calf, a means to an end. And obviously, gentlemen, if I have deadly poison in my pharmacy, and I have a hammer in my -- among my tools, that doesn't mean that I have to take the hammer and smash your brain. And if I have poison, I don't have to poison my wife. I'm perfectly -- that for rats, I have poison in my house. But it's written, with bones and skull, you see, and top, "Poison -- careful." And my wife and my -- son don't resent that I have poison in the house. But Mr. Mumford thought that because we had an atom bomb in the house, we would have to go crazy and throw it. Therefore you had to fetter everybody in the house and say, "You must never throw this atom bomb," instead of just saying, "There is an atom bomb. Watch out."

The only way you can treat an instrument is to put it on a very low level of value and say it is just a means to an end. It is nothing more. But in this country,

it has been preached up to be an obsession. What is an obsession, gentlemen? An obsession is when you make the gold, or when you make the atom bomb, or when you make physics, or when you make the physicists into gods almighty, whom you cannot resist. "We have the atom bomb, therefore the Third World War is inevitable." Well, what is this? That's an obsession, because this -- what belongs to the outer world of death, over which living men have to conquer all the time -- and do conquer, by the way -- by breathing, by shitting, by working, by marrying, by going to war, by creating great pieces of art, this whole world against which we are pitted, the world of death -- suddenly we were told -- was all-dominant. There was no way of opposing the great constructions of Mr. Oppenheimer, or Mr. Einstein, Mr. Teller and Mr. {Bela.} I don't see this. I -- it is just because you have forgotten every form of polytheistic instruction in your Sunday school, that God of course was composed of many elements, of many elohim. I mean, the poor instruction which you have received on Christianity, or on Judaism, or whatever it is, must be at fault, that suddenly you forgot all about your religious upbringing, because you had been -- grown up in a liberal society which pooh-poohed death, which said, "We are going to abolish death." Gentlemen, any Christian and any Jew, since Adam and Eve faced death, has known that life is lived dangerously on top of a dead world which all the time tries to draw us in. Death is around us. You just withhold oxygen from a person, he's dead. Now why should a bomb, which spreads this death a little more carefully, a little more deliberately, be anything more important than the death that expects you tomorrow, when you are 70? You can't escape that. The atom bomb is no -- nothing but concentrated death. But death is around you, gentlemen. Gold is dead. Marble is dead. The stones are dead. You can't live from stone. You can't live from gold. You use the gold to buy food. Don't you -- did you -- you know -- you take the marble to have warm in your houses, and your insides.

So we have long ago learned to use death to promote life. That's the only problem. We live in a dead universe. And as I said, how do you call what an animal has the -- F„nge in German. I don't know the -- I mean, the fauces in Latin -- the jawbones, you may say -- the jaws of death are all the time open. They try to draw us in every minute. Only a childish, playful society, living on ice cream and drugstore can believe that the atom bomb is anything but the -- making the tool visible which does -- has always been to finish us, to limit us, to say you only have a limited life. After a short while, you go.

The absolute errancy of this civilization, I think, appears to me in the insanity with which we have treated the atom bomb. Hysteria, arrogance and infamy. That we threw the second bomb over Japan was infamy. It wasn't necessary. We had the demand for the armistice in our pocket. And we threw the bomb just for curiosity. Typical American intellectual curiosity. What would happen the second time, just to have it stated. That's infamous. and that's on our blot, on our

escutcheon, gentlemen. Nobody will wash it off. The Russians haven't thrown the atom bomb. We have thrown the atom bomb. Why are they so wicked? The wicked ones are we. Did they go to war? Germany invaded them. What have the Russians done you, that I still can read letters to the Globe or to The New York Times that the worst mistake Mr. Roosevelt has made, to recognize the existence of the Russian government in 1933. To such feeble-mindedness this country has come. Who has done the mischief? What have these Russians done you? They haven't done you any wrong. Ever. But it's just a bad conscience. We threw the atom bomb, so we have always to cry that somebody else is more wicked than we. Did they throw the atom bomb? Very strange religion in this country has developed. It's dancing around its own devil, because this country believes only in dead matter. That's why you worship physicists. So you are now very disappointed that Mr. Oppenheimer after all is just a physicist and otherwise a very poor politician.

Physicists are physicists. They are condemned, like the latrine worker, to keep our latrines clean. Because the physic -- world of physics is the world of dead matter, which has to be carried and cast away out of the way in order that you may live. You can't live on the physical world, as { } against the physical world. Otherwise it will get us. Physics deals with the dead parts, but you have worshiped these dead parts, and there you see the intimate connection, gentlemen, of perfection and corruption. As I said, the tremendous victory of Mr. Ford in our own lives, that we can go across the Rockies, and can go out to California. Today you can -- in six hours you can cross the continent. That is just all positive. But what is this to conquer space, gentlemen? Is it to rise above it and to say it doesn't matter? It is strange, gentlemen. The only purpose of matter is to be told that it doesn't matter. Isn't that interesting? You can never say of a woman, you see, that she is a matter that doesn't matter. The very opposite. You adore her, because she want to have -- be a present. What do you want of space? To disappear. The only thing of death is that you tell death, "Go. Go away." So you sail off through space, get yourself out of the way. You are a hindrance. That's why you worship speed. You say to dead things, "Don't be." And you say to living beings, "Stay." And this is, really, what we do, gentlemen, when we divide the world. We condemn everybody who is not welcome to go to Hell, to the -- to Hades, to the dead things. When you say of the Russians that they -- "To Hell with them," you mean to say that the world would be better off if they would belong to the world of mere things, of dead things, wouldn't it? And if you say to your wife, "Please stay with me -- marry me," you just say that she is more alive than you are.

So gentlemen, to conquer space is the right way of worshiping space, because it is worshiped as the negation of life, as that which threatens life. Mere distance is horrid, is estrangement, is cold. Can you see this, that the right treatment of the dead things outside this inner ring of life, these three stages of which we spoke,

this dead matter must not matter. And in the way you see our popular folkways of language, are much more philosophical than all the philosophy majors here in this college, I assure you, because who can make such a pun in a serious philosophy that matter shouldn't matter? But the language does it. And that's the profoundest religion you can have about matter. The essence of matter is that it shouldn't matter. Mere matter should not matter. You have no money. It shouldn't matter. You should find a friend who loans you the money, isn't that true? I mean, what of it? No man in his reason weeps because he has no gold. If he befriends somebody, the other man will help him or the authorities will help him. He will work through college. Gentlemen, how many people do you know in this college who are just as happy because they have no money than the ones who have the money? Isn't that true? It's a very minor point, as soon as you see that gold is a means. Matter is a means. So the world is in good shape when matter doesn't matter. It must not matter whether you are rich or poor. Isn't that obvious?

So you learn from this one point. If assiduously followed through, you learn practically all the secrets of religion in this one point, there gathers our whole relation as living beings toward the non-living matter. The Egyptians thought, and the Babylonians, and Chinese -- not the Chinese, quite so much -- but the original great settlers of the countries of the inundations did think -- the Incas, too -- that gold was the sun that gave life to everything. These people also of course thought that the stars were not dead bodies, but were living beings. The sun and the moon. They were gods and goddesses. So the first natural religion on the -- of the world of the sky tried to find the imperishable.

The word "imperishable," by the way, is found in the oldest Egyptian text, said about the Polar Star. The polar star never sets, as you know. It's always -- never circles, nor never -- so they called this star the Imperishable, and worshiped him, and made him the center of the adoration. They wanted to have one fixed point which -- on which they could rely, which would be still there after every pharaoh and every queen died. It's a very wonderful word. The word "imperishable" is an invention of the Egyptian religion. And it shows you what these people were after when they clothed their mummies in gold, totally in gold. As you -- if you dug -- dig up the -- one of these new -- newly found tombs, there is -- the great desire is to find the gold unstolen, and unviolated, because the mummy is wrapped totally in gold as the imperishable metal.

Or to give you a last example. The way in which the soul of man tried to enter the imperishable existence of these marbles, and metals, and minerals was to have a statue made of yourself, and then to take some golden instrument, open the mouth of this statue and breathe your breath into their statue -- into the statue -- and open her mouth. And by this ceremony, the old monumental art of

antiquity is justified. These monuments which you see dug out from the earth, gentlemen, these statues -- they were not meaningless, as you think, adornments -- decor-- they never were thought as decorative art. They were the eternal life which the material of the dead -- world of the dead things, you see, married to the lifestream of the living -- you can say that -- of an Egyptian statue was a marriage between the imperishable matter of the outer world, you see, and the beating heart of the king of Egypt, the living substance that entered him and gave him breath. So the -- so to speak -- the living were sacrificed for the -- for the dead. And that you see in all -- in all Aztec, Mexican cult, too.

You have seen this terrible picture in the Orozco fresco, when the heart of the living being is cut out and sacrificed to the gods. Gentlemen, that wasn't just a superstition. You can have it in this country, too, in a similar way, when you sacrifice your trail -- test pilots to the dangers of an atomic explosion in a jet plane or what not.

The heart of the prisoner of war, perhaps there was sacrifice, was used to give life to some such mechanic, marble, or golden, you see, mummy or statue. It wasn't meaningless. They thought that the gods wanted to be reconciled in such a way that some part of our life would be made serviceable to impart life to the corpses. Now, this isn't so stupid, gentlemen. You all try -- have heard of these attempts to have a robot made, a machine that would serve all practical purposes. That's an idea in a reasonable way of imparting some of our life to a mechanical brain. And everybody boasts in this country even of the mechanical brain, overrating its capacity very greatly, I think. It has nothing to do with brain. It's just a mechanism. You shouldn't call it a mechanical brain. You should fight this expression. It has nothing to do with brain whatsoever. It solves certain arithmetical examples, which no human being in the insurance companies should have solved in the first place, ever. They are so stupid. But because they are so stupid, they can be solved by a machine. I mean, because I can black my boots or can do all kind of mechanical things, it doesn't mean that they are worth a human being. If I can find a tool to do it better, obviously I shall do this, you see. But if I invent a machine to -- which blackens my shoes, I shall not say that this is a black brain, or a blackening brain. And it seems to me that you do an injustice to yourself when you call these new machines -- how do you call -- they call them? -- Mechanical brains, don't they? Is that the official term? This is -- wie?

(Cybernetics?)

Yes, cybernetics. Yes. That's true.

Poor Mr. {Wiener.} He was a child prodigy. He went to Harvard when he was 14. So much may be forgiven him. He's the terrible result of a society which

doesn't know anything of organic growth. His father sent him to school -- I knew his father -- sent him to school when he was 14. So he never was allowed to be a normal human being. I mean, he went to Harvard when he was 14. It's a minor tragedy. And it's no wonder that this man knows no better. He calls this cybernetics.

But you must outgrow this, gentlemen. The man who construes such machines in his great love of his work may of course -- can say anything about it. No harm done. Anybody in love of what he's doing, will exaggerate its importance. But if you think that the invention of the mechanical brain changes the relation of mechanics to life, you're quite mistaken. That's unforgivable for you. Life is life. And dead things are dead things. And that's all there is to it.

However, we now have learned that death is challenging us. Dead matter, gentlemen, must be made less dangerous. We can't make it un-dangerous, you see. But less dangerous, all the time. That's the problem, gentlemen, of dealing with dead matter. Matter is all the time intruding on our sphere of life. The desert is growing. The sandstorms are increasing. The prairies are not watered. Gentlemen, nature under its own weight is running towards death. What you call nature is not a self-supporting economy. But nature is on its way to selfdestruction. To cold, to getting colder all the time. You have heard of the second thermodynamic law, which means there is a constant loss of energy. So under its own entropism, nature would go -- disintegrate. And this is the first thing again, like social disease, gentlemen. You have made of nature something pleasant. Therefore, you think that you should associate with the mechanism that -- should call your own life a mechanism. I have heard people call Dartmouth an "educational mechanism." Well, it may well be one, but then it just cease to educate you. You cannot be educated, gentlemen, by a mechanism. But if you don't -- aren't inclined to call something a mechanical brain, you obviously are not trying to call me a mechanism. I'm not an educational mechanism. And if I am not, how can hundred professors be an educational mechanism? I never to belong to a mechanism in any {grade}. If you take 250 professors and the whole administration, and you call this the mechanism of a college, then you have abolished all the units out of which it is composed. You have disintegrated us into matter. And then we obviously don't matter. And that's generally the treatment allotted us by the alumni, that the teachers of this college don't matter. The Nugget matters, and the football team matters. We don't matter. You have abolished us. I have been told by serious alumni that they demand from a teacher in Dartmouth College that he mustn't influence his students. { }. It's a racket, education. Dealing with dead matter and being dead itself.

That's the state of affairs, gentlemen, about education in this country. It's cracking in all the seams. It's a great lie. There is no education going on. It's a

racket. Because everybody says, "Don't change anything." The Nugget has still to be there after 50 years. And it's the same with your green sweaters. And that's all that matters. If you wear a green sweater, the rest doesn't matter. You don't have to learn anything, no language, nothing.

That comes when you worship mechanisms. As I said, my -- one of my dearest colleagues here in this college is shot through with this -- so I delivered a whole cannonade against him and asked him to come here, and assist it -- and he laughed heartily and he saw my point and he's going to improve. He said always "Dartmouth was a mechanism, an educational mechanism." I said, "I can't stand this anymore! I'm -- have not been hired, and appointed to be part of a mechanism." But to you, all this means nothing to you, gentlemen. You don't shudder under the impact of the word "mechanism." You think it's good. I would say, gentlemen, this is your superstition, or your irreligion. As far as an American -- because he loves cars -- thinks that cars are so good that their construction can be applied to living processes, he is superstitious. He is a pagan. He has fallen from grace. He has made, out of a part of life, which is perfectly sane and healthy, an idol, an obsession. And in every -- now, the greatness which -- why am I talking, gentlemen? I want to show you that neither I nor you are quite safe any minute. These things cannot be decided by a logical insight one day that this is an idol. They get us down, after we have escaped from their influence yesterday. Perhaps they get us down tomorrow. That is, you see, it is possible to know all these things here in your brain, and yet to be ruined by -- by this temptation of dealing, for example, with education as a mechanism, which can be decided by questionnaires or studies of a mechanical character, by statistics. Nobody is safe against these superstitions. I'm included. Every one of us is apt to -- in practical application, you see, to glide from one step of the mountain to the next. Can you see this constant danger?

So nobody is safe. Nobody. And you can't go to college and say this is a safe place here. No superstitions are learned. You have to find out whether or not to -- yesterday that the worst superstition happened. The safest is always pronest to the -- to taking the risk unnoticed -- how do you say? -- unconsciously, without even noticing it. You just say to a woman that she's perfect, and watch out what will happen.

We are still all in the first grade of religion. The -- only the dealing with dead matter, but dead matter is serious. It's three-quarters in quantity, or nine-tenths in quantity of the universe. And gentlemen, when you count together -- for example the 3,000 students of Dartmouth -- and judge education, you are { } this superstition that 2,700 students here remain dead. But in your scale, they weigh as heavily as the hundred ones who got a living education. Is that right? Obviously, gentlemen, in any living process, anything that does not come to life

cannot be counted in. You have to be satisfied -- I have to be satisfied if in this class of unjust sinners, one saint is found. One mem-- person who comes to life. In the relation, gentlemen, of dead and living beings, one -- how do -- helm of grass counts more than 100,000 dead stones. The relation of the first grade of existence, gentlemen -- the mechanical -- to the first grade of organical existence, is one of one against a million. One helm of grass in the whole desert is -- Mojave Desert -- is obviously more important to life than the non-life. This is very hard for you to understand, gentlemen. Wherever I look into the papers, there is always classified today the dead and the living together. It makes absolute -- no sense to me. You have majority vote in democracy. But there the assumption was that all the voters were spirited people, with convictions. Free citizens of the United States. They were not on the dole. They were not on the government payroll. They were Jeffersonian Democrats. They had an independent farm, and were moved by the spirit for good government. Now gentlemen, watch out. If today it can be said, as it has been officially said by the Secretary of Education in Washington, that a citizen is a man who is profitably employed, you can't have political democracy. Because a man who is profitably employed means a man who can be bribed -- if this is his definition as a human being. A man who is profitably employed, you see, must then go for his profit. Now a man who goes for his profit is not a voter. He's not a citizen. He's just a mechanical ass. He goes -- gives in to pressures. He's just materially minded. With him, matter matters. We have just seen that the only belief -- religious belief for -- of living beings must be that matter shall not matter.

So gentlemen, we are in a dangerous position today, because you have lost sight of the fact that once you drop the dividing line between dead and living beings, you have no way anymore of protecting life against death. Because the one helm of -- helmet of grass -- how do you say it? Helm? Wie?

(Blade.)

Blade. Blade of grass. The one blade of grass is -- belongs to the living -- so to speak, closer to us, you see -- against all the rubble that's around it. And if you say -- "I take a vote: that's a hundred thousand pebbles in the desert vote against this poor grass, out it goes" -- that's no excuse for you and me. You have to protect this one blade of grass.

That is, life is always in the minority. Only on the basis -- this is meant when we say democracy is a Christian concept, that is, a religious concept. Democracy presupposes that you can distinguish between life and death -- dead things. A democracy which falls for mechanical brains and for atom bombs, gentlemen, cannot exist, because it has lost its -- or says that a college is a mechanism. As soon as you take from the democrats, from the people in government, from the

voters, from you and me, the distinction that life stands -- is to be defended and matter must not matter, you have no criterion for government. And you can -- do not know that minority must be protected against majority. Then the majority, which can be -- can consist of purely dead-matter men, of obsessed men, who only fall for speed, or fall for atom bombs, or for energy, or for water power, or for dollars -- or I don't care for what quantity they fall, but who are impressed by quantity -- these people will then always govern quality. Now once they are allowed to get away with this declaration and say, "Of course, quantity governs," your quality goes and thereby goes the scale of values of life.

Now, because the secret which I have already revealed to you without your noticing it is that these five elements or these 10 elements give you a hierarchy, a scale of more delicate, more frail, more perishable, more endangered, more imperiled life. The dead matter is the least imperiled of life.

[tape interruption]

Now you come to the purposive man who's this desert of panthers, and rattlesnakes, and scorpions, and insects, and so on and sand dunes and you see man who is able to build a dam against the sandstorm and a tent against the scorpion is even less normal in this world of ours. He's the exception to { }. He's wiped out by all these animals very easily.

You come then to free association, to love, affection, art, to the next -- the realm of Venus. And you see how difficult that is. One-half of the males in the animal kingdom only reaches their destination. The others are killed off as rivals. And on it goes, gentlemen. Now it comes finally to the pure-hearted savior of mankind, to the prophets, and the seers and the artists, who have no skin around, and who are so disarmed like Mr. Van Gogh, who went into the mines first to preach to the miners, and then painted his heart away and his whole health. And then you get the most frail. He's a minority even among the human minority. And the human minority is a minority in the animal kingdom. And the animal kingdom is a minority in the stone and metal age. And don't you see that all democracy is only meaningful as long as you know what a minority is. The majority vote is death, as long as it doesn't defend the minority rights. This is very profound -- has nothing to do with organized minorities, or lobbies, or Poles, or Italians or Jews in New York. Minority is always the higher quality of life. And this is the meaning that, without a religious derivation, there is no democracy possible, because religion means to reveal to you and me this increase of minority existence. As to your best, you are always in the minority. And you can only hope that with your worst part, your fannies, your posterior, you can support your best. And the soles of your feet. If that part in you which is just a donkey, which is just a body, which is just flesh, can support your highest aspi-

rations, then your majority, which is 140 pounds of your 145 pounds all told, you see, will support the five pounds which matter. But inside yourself, gentlemen, you are in the majority dead matter. And then in a certain extent organic matter. And to a certain extent you are purposive, and brain { }. And to a certain extent you are associative, and affectionate, and artistic. And to a certain extent, you are even inclined to sacrifice. Now, if this little element of you, which is inclined to sacrifice, is -- constitutes inside yourself this very tiny minority once in your life, you may be able to jump into the river and save a drowning child. This is the one act for which all your stomach, muscles, knees, bones, have been created. The meaning of your life, that you become the man who deserves the lifesaving -- how do you call this compliment which is bade you? The medal for lifesaving? Or what is it? Wie?

{ }.

{ }. Our own minority act is the only justification for all our majority existence. For the purpose that you eat and shit, gentlemen, we only need a donkey. I -- you are needed, because you can perform the one action a donkey can never perform. But in this country at this moment, that's all out of the window. This country worships majority without seeing the opposite scale of values which comes from the minority having to claim the support of the majority all the time. I'm very serious about this, gentlemen. Your whole life is at stake in this decision. Every minute. As long as you do not recognize that inside yourself, your majority instincts must support your minority potentialities, possibilities, your noblest; but at one time in your life comes the hour to decide. And at that time, the majority elements in your makeup must support this freedom of decision. You cannot act like this doctor -- friend of mine, who wanted to become a doctor, and said he couldn't become a doctor, because he had to take physical exercise every morning from 6 to 7. And as a doctor, he might be called out at night for the daily practice, and then he wouldn't have his regular life. This man just shows you, however, the implications of our modern trend. This boy was -- well, he wasn't worse than anybody else. But he was so asinine that he thought his doctor profession, you see, which is a minority situation, obviously, in the human race and in nature, should support his majority bend, you see, of having a good digestion, or having his skin showered over with cold water and hot water every morning. But there are many of you, gentlemen, who reverse this, that you really chose your profession in order to have -- keep body and soul together, instead of your keeping body and soul together so that you may have the profession which is needed. You cannot have a job to keeping body and soul together. You must hope -- why do you go to college? -- that you belong to this wonderful race of human beings who can hold body and soul together, to be able to fulfill the demands of a high-standard profession. It's all the other way around from what you have been brought up, gentlemen.

This country, for the last 50 years, has dismissed all the -- everything which has been known about the human's place in nature, in the -- it's very strange. And they call this the era of natural science. And it has totally dismissed the real relations between a scientist and his nature. A physicist is a free agent of discovery. And for this little, minute, minority power of Mr. Oppenheimer, or Mr. Einstein that they once in their life can make a new discovery, all the regularities of their physical existence have to be sacrificed. Obviously. Because we count on them for making one new discovery, for example, called the atom bomb, or nuclear physics. For this one act of freedom, we take up with their short breath, their {obstipation,} their hemorrhoids and all their ulcers. That is, with all their material shortcomings, in -- organically. Everything that is below the element of discovery and creation, you see. By this -- by far the majority of the hours of these people's lives. They have to eat. They have to sleep. They have to make love. They go through all the motions as everybody else, don't they? But their infinite value is that they use all these majority apparitions, you see, and phenomena for creating something that is decidedly minority. Can you see the connection? Is -- do I make myself clear?

Gentlemen, everything is at stake that you can see this. The religious issue is always the anti-mathematical, arithmetical issue, because it says the minority of things found in reality, of processes found in reality, are always mattering more than the majority processes. And everybody acts on this assumption, by the way. But you are -- have filled your upper brain, I'm afraid, with this gigantic superstition that this isn't so. Your superstition is that what is prevailing in nature therefore must prevail. That I have objected to my friend, Lewis Mumford, when he got so obsessed with the atom bomb, because it meant -- simply because there was something in nature, it had to become the majority. Well, as I told him, well -- the more something is common, the less it is important. The rare is important, and that which is everywhere must be made unimportant. If you can get a majority to vote in a minority -- one man, like Mr. Eisenhower -- you get true democracy at work. Mr. Eisenhower is one man. He was the commander-of-chief of our armies in Europe. We have elected him for this reason, because there was only one man who did it. So now the majority vote is meaningful, because they elected a man for some single record. That's perfectly all right. The majority bent to the singleness, to the rarity.

If you get the same people clowning for Mr. McCarthy, or for Mr. -- what was the old man, this -- Father Coughlin -- these people would have fallen for the laziest behavior. Hatred is always easier than affection. And Mr. Coughlin or Mr. Huey Long, they didn't preach affection. And that's easy. It's always easy to preach that you hate your neighbor. And your -- the men of the other race or the other creed. If you elect such a man, democracy cannot work. Democracy is bent on the assumption that -- the Bible says it very simply, gentlemen, that the crea-

tures are moaning and groaning for their redemption. And what is redemption, then? This is the thing we -- you can learn simply by contemplating what you have to do with dead matter. Redemption is nothing mystical or released by the blood of our savior and all these wonderful slogans which nobody today understands. To buy back man from his falling into the worship of deader things, compared to more living processes, this is redemption. To bring back the scale of values, by which one blade of grass is recognized. To can -- to be allowed to demand the sacrifice of hundred thousand ounces of sand in the desert.

It's very simple, gentlemen. All the time, this step has to be taken by you and me. You have to recognize where something is dead and then you have to say the dead have to serve the living.

But without recognizing what is dead, your whole -- the whole majority is tainted by death itself. You can -- when you are agreed with everybody, you must always know that you are conforming.

Now gentlemen, religion is the power not to conform to the majority. Otherwise, you can just worship the powers that be. Religion is an addition, after all, to politics. And if you have a Caesar or a Mr. Stalin or Hitler, the simplest thing is: obey his orders. Worship him and you will be perfectly safe on the mechanical level of being shoveled or shoved around as his mass, you see. You're just one of his mass media. Religion is the power not to conform with the majority.

You know Mrs. Eisenhower, Sr., the mother of the president, was a Jehovah's Witness. And they are the only group in this country -- except perhaps the Mennonites, and the Amishmen -- have still the power to say that they have to remain separate from the world. The Biblical expression, from not becoming majority is -- means "Don't conform." Don't conform. It's a Biblical term. I mean, in this country, as you know, today it is the -- is considered a virtue to conform. It is the abolition of religion, if this is a virtue, because conformity is in order if it serves uniqueness, or rarity, or minority. I've tried to show you the interaction of majority on minority. Dig into your own self, gentlemen, and see that the more you have -- can have respect for yourself, the more this is connected with the minority inside yourself. You are a minority compared to the demands of the millions of cells in your body, which you share with everybody else. Once you see this problem of minority and majority at work inside yourself, you see suddenly how exciting this whole problem of Church and State, of politics and religion is. You can't have pure politics. It's impossible. Because in politics, you would construe simply the machinery -- literally the machinery of getting the majority to vote. But you can't tell the majority for what to vote. And the only thing you have to tell the majority to vote for is the rare thing, the minority thing, the thing that is difficult to achieve, you see. This is the whole problem of

interaction of the physical world of dead things, or less-living things, to organize them what we call into a cosmic order.

Gentlemen, the Greeks knew this. The cosmos, to the Greeks, was not the universe, or what you call the world -- a whirlwind of disorder. To them, the cosmic order, the cosmos, as I said, was a woman, beautifully dressed, finely even with the locks curled -- I mean, with the permanent. And very difficult to achieve. The last achievement, you see, even going beyond her just native beauty and her native qualities. A question of constant cosmetics. Now this word "cosmetics" means to adorn, to decorate. And the word "cosmos" and "cosmetics" is the same word. Isn't that strange? And it meant always to make out of mere matter a beautiful, living order; and to subdue the less living to the leadership or guidance by the living. And in -- among the living, to again subdue the less living to the more living, so that the highest life should rule the lower, less life. And the lower life at least should not be submerged by mechanics.

I'm sorry. I've kept you too long.