What you think is a good thing, and what you preserve as good,
and what you hold onto and never want to shatter may actually be the thing that
needs to break you apart to an entirely new way of living, to a new dimension,
to a new exposure.
But because we've been conditioned…and you know the tragic thing is we've been
conditioned in such a myopically rigid, stratified way…at least if you were
conditioned that many things were good, like almost everything on earth was good,
no problem, every life experience was good, no problem.
But you know that only five or six things are good, things that stay and last a
long time, things that make us feel good, make us look good, and give us money,
to be concise.
Anything out of that is bad.
So you and I, without realizing, live on the precipice of fear of anything
bad happening outside those four things.
That's why we Botox ourselves, and now we lift our butts and our
boobs up, and we take away all signs of aging, and we never want to be poor.
Your child comes home and says, "Mommy, you always told me you wanted me
to be happy.
I found what makes me happy."
And we're like, "Yeah. What?"
We're thinking corporate corner job, baubles, trinkets, jewelry,
maybe she's going to marry a doctor.
"What, my love?
What would make you happy?"
"I've decided I'm going to give up all my possessions and go and volunteer in a
war-torn country in Somalia… a part of Somalia.
I'm going to go and volunteer and live on alms."
"No, my child.
That's not what I meant when I said, 'Go find your happiness.' Were you not
listening to the other parts of the sentence or the other part of the lecture?
There was a whole other section, that you can't be happy
without being wealthy, and you really can't be happy
without being married, and you can't be happy
without having children.
I mean, this is what gives us all joy.
Don't you see the whole world is doing it?
If the whole world is doing it, surely it means that it's giving us
joy and happiness."
"But, Mommy, you don't look happy."
"Of course, I don't look happy because right now your happiness is my happiness.
So it's only when you're happy I can look happy.
So if I don't look happy, it's your damn fault.
But don't feel guilty.
Nothing to feel guilty about.
It's okay.
When you're happy, I'll be happy.
Just be happy.
But don't be poor.
And when you're happy, and well-settled, and you find your partner,
and you have your children…" And the kid is going, "I was so happy just playing
with my blocks, but now she's told me when I'll be happy, so obviously
I wasn't happy.
So it's something else I have to look for.
It's something so ephemeral, I don't even know what it is,
because I really thought I was happy.
But, okay, because she's my mother, and this is my father,
I'm going to listen.
So it's in the future.
Damn, where is it?
Oh, she's saying…she's telling me.
She's so loving.
She's telling me where it is.
I have to be well-settled, which, to me, I think it means some big-ass house
with some cars in the garage.
And then I have to find a partner and have children.
And if my body doesn't allow me to have children, okay, that's not a good thing.
I'm not going to be happy.
And the person I have to marry has to be very well-qualified,
so probably I have to meet him at a very well-qualified institution.
So I have to study very hard, which brings us to today,
I can't play with blocks anymore, because I have to go work very hard for my
future so I can be very happy.
I was really happy just playing with my blocks."
"No, don't play with your blocks."
So this woman was a simple woman in a village, and one day she noticed a hole
in her coat, but it didn't make her so unhappy.
But then when she went outside and she met her neighbor, the neighbor said,
"Your coat has a hole."
And so the neighbor's judgment made her feel like, "Oh, okay, something bad,
something wrong with me.
Let me go and look for the source."
Sure enough, there was a mouse.
So she sewed up the hole, and she was like, "Okay,
I have to kill this mouse.
Let me go find a cat."
So she found a cat, and the cat was a good cat.
There are good and bad cats, too, by the way.
And this was a good cat.
The cat did what it was supposed to do, and killed the mouse.
But then the cat was not, you know, sturdy and resilient.
It needed food.
So she needed to give it milk.
So then she went to buy a good cow to give some milk for the good cat.
And then the cow…damn, that cow.
It would walk away and, like, do things that animals do.
So she was upset with the cow.
Bad cow.
She had to do something about the cow.
So then she bought a fence, and she corralled it in a
nice contained container.
But that cow was so bad, always found a way to leave.
So now she had to buy a cowhand.
Purchase, get one from the market, a little boy.
So she bought a little boy to come and help, you know.
But then this little boy has an appetite.
What was she thinking?
She just thought that it would work for her in servitude and slavery,
but it had an appetite.
So now she had to go and find a job.
She had to buy new clothes.
And one day she began thinking, "Maybe I was happier with the hole
in my coat."
So this progress that we are creating in the search for ubiquity of happiness,
for the utopia of this place that we will arrive at, this tropical place
called happiness, is the biggest lie of it all.
And you can keep searching in the Corporate Corner office, in husband 5, 6,
in the Bentley.
Keep looking, keep looking.
Six pack.
Keep trying.
And those of the 1% will keep laughing, looking at us in this dimension, going,
"Look at them.
We've got them all fooled, simply because we keep touching the
button of fear.
We keep telling them, 'This is really bad, this is really bad, this is really bad,'
and they keep believing.
And then they go looking for [inaudible] to make it good, good.
And we're so clever.
We've only made four things good.
Everything else is bad.
And all the women who have dark hair and brown skin, we've just marauded
them from inside.
And all the men who are not strong and alpha, we've just killed them.
And everyone who lives below the poverty line, like 80% of the world,
we've just cut them off as inferior people, animal-like.
So the truth of our existence is that there is nothing truly on the outside that
can ever, ever fill us up.
But then, how will capitalism be capitalistic?
Because with that truth, there is no therapist, there is no shrink,
there is no pharmacology.
There's really nothing much.
It's the mouse, and possibly some holes.