{ } = word or expression can't be understood
{word} = hard to understand, might be this

[Opening remarks missing]

... the religious level is -- forgive me, gentlemen, the word "duty" and the word "right" finds no echo in a Dartmouth boy. I mean, that's for ethical -- a course in ethics. But I mean if I tell you this is your duty, you make a sad face and say, "It's very boring." Duties are boring, gentlemen. Now I -- also the adjective "religious man" -- we have tried to say that just as man is under government, and you need a police force, and a court of justice when you are wrong, so I tried to suggest to you that religion describes a real experience of men, you see, which we call the religious aspect of every man. There is no non-religious man. Therefore, if you could do without duty, and without the adjective, "religious," I think you would make a greater appeal to yourself. That is, you would know that you have no choice to be religious or not religious, you see. If you don't -- and it is not a duty because something happens to you. You just have another religion, if you don't know what you're doing. If you don't do this, you do something else, because you have to breathe. You have to eat. You have to work. Therefore, you are -- we are overtaken by what we call religion, one way or the other. Gentlemen, people have either a false religion or the true religion. Nobody can afford to say, "I'm not a religious man." If he says this, as many of you try to do, they only say they don't know what they're doing. That's all. Because they all have their don'ts and their dos. And they have their appetites. And they have their ambitions, have they not? So they cannot help being transformed in what they believe in. And if it's the Devil, they become little devils. Or if they are great workers, they will become just monsters of work, like -- and then they'll be lame like Vulcanus and Hephaestus in the old Greek mythology, who worked so hard that he -- of course he got lame. Not a very elegant god. All the people who overwork are of this type. But they have a religion. They are the atheist or the agnostic who says, "I don't care, I just do my work and get overtime, 150 percent more." That -- like the dockworkers in London now, who struck because of this overtime problem. Well, they have a god. It's just a partial god, the god of this power line, of will, of plan, of intent.

So, you understand, gentlemen. As long as -- religion has been killed by the word "duty" and it has been killed by this separation of the religious man and the superior humanist, who has no religion. That doesn't exist. The humanists have a very poor religion, and I think they have played out -- the liberals -- because they denied their own prison. They denied their own captivity under the law of the unknown god. As long as the gods are unknown, gentlemen, you are under their law. Because you just carry it out. As long as -- as soon as you admit that the gods rule, and we are in their hands, you can choose, you can free yourself from

the gods. That's the meaning of false doctrine of the law and of grace. The man who is in grace knows of these five encirclements, and the man who is -- denies them and says, "Oh, I'm a free agent, I do what I please," doesn't know what he pleases -- what this pleasure is, that this pleasure is always one of these five. Do I make myself clear?

[unintelligible]

It is quite important for you to see that yoga has not an arbitrary place, but a branching-off place. The yoga man tries to enlarge on the sleeping phase, where we only breathe, but do not will, when we are not conscious. If you put -- I think these figures do you some good, three, four, five. Now the Hindu has the experience of breathing, of willing, and of loving, as we all have. These three states of humanity: being on fire, being cool and being unconscious. And with yoga, he tries to penetrate into the region of the -- of death, because he's willing, so to speak, to give up all these activities and to penetrate behind this normal life, so to speak.

I've wanted to add, gentlemen, that the whole scale of religious possibilities is contained in this -- on this palette, in this color scheme, as I like to call it, the spectrum of time. You know what a spectrum is, of colors. And as we have a wave spectrum and a color spectrum, you must just begin to learn that there is -- just as much and just as real -- a time spectrum. Time in those various five forms of life takes on a different meaning. You experience time when you are in love as something utterly different than when you are born and do some work, over some hours of work. It's just a different experience. So you can however multiply, or shade off, or diversify these five colors, as you can with any color scheme, into the -- let's say, 99 colors. So there may be 99 religions possible. For example, to give you one instance. Instead of studying, the less breathing -- the less, less, less, still until you really seem to be dead, as in this deep sleep of Hindu, and saying, "Here I touch the mystery of my existence, because at the bottom of all my other vital activities," you see, "that must carry me. That's the supporting bottom of it all." And I really -- we all want to reach rock bottom, as we say. The Greeks did another thing. They said, between the waking up in the morning and the serious business of toiling and sweating and going to war, and even of marriage, there is this wonderful freedom of man, which you all enjoy, that he can play. And they found, as you know, their greatest divinity in the academic, liberal arts college. In Mr. Plato's academy, in your races, be it horse races or football games, and men at play -- I didn't give a special color. It didn't seem to me serious enough. But for you, it's different. If I want to discover the average religion of a Dartmouth boy, I say that he is between sleep and awakening. If he were awake, he would be serious. If he were asleep, he couldn't plan anything, will anything. You are between willing and sleeping, because you are playing.

Your whole life is just play.

Now, as I said, you are this side of religion, because play is not a true color. It's not a full god. Eros is a little boy, as you know, in the description of the Greeks. You are erotic, yes. But you don't know how to love, because love is very dangerous. So you talk of these little gods like sex, and like sports, and like taking examinations, and writing little short stories. And all the ambitions are of such a playful character that you just as well can have them or leave them. As we say, "Take it or leave it." This means you can bargain for frankfurters or for hamburgers, but it makes very little difference whether you order this menu. If you are in a desert, and have nothing to eat, and have to pray to God for manna from Heaven, a little different situation. Then eating becomes a very serious business. For you -- something you buy just at the corner, you can't pray "our daily bread give us today," because usually when you come here for four years, everything is provided. You may still have to earn your living, but you are not really scared, because a college gives you an opportunity of being a waiter, or doing something in the library. And so you are very proud that you make a living there, but the real prayer of the "Our daily bread give us today" you can hardly pray. It isn't serious with you. You are not starving. You are not faced with famine.

So the -- most of the prayers of the real life, gentlemen, are not for a student.

I tell you something that you may misunderstand, but I hope you will not laugh. I don't say this in any cynical mood. It's a very great distinction between you and the 19th century people. And I think I should be very honest with you and confide this to you. You may not know it, but over the student life of the 19th century, there was a cloud of smoke, of sulphur, and of great suffering. And that -- these were the venereal diseases. That was so terrible that the students being closed up years in these non-coeducational institutions at that time -- there were no women in the universities; of course they fell for cheap women -- and not one of them who did not risk his health. So therefore, Venus was a terrible goddess, and took a terrible toll. They say that three-quarters of American men at one time were touched with venereal disease. And it is -- figures in all countries were just appalling. And I think it -- I owe it to you to -- you must understand there is a great change that has come over our social life, because of the fact that, only in your generation, these sicknesses has lost their sting. But if an act, which is perfectly normal to desire for, and to wish for in a young person who grows up, has been loaded and cursed by -- with such tyrannical, I mean, abuses -- abusive consequences as syphilis, and gonorrhea, you can see how even the youngster in this country, and everywhere in the world since 1500 when syphilis came into existence for the white man, have lived always in this ambivalence of which all the great art of the 19th century -- the painters for example, or the poetry -- is full. You take any French poet or any German poet -- Heine, or Ver-

laine, or Baudelaire, or -- then you will find that there is always this tone of misgiving, or perhaps miscarrying, of the whole life being destroyed. The greatest people of the 19th century -- Napoleon, Maupassant, and many more, Frederick the Great -- have -- were cursed with this venereal disease, and also blessed, because -- and they compensated it as you do with polio, perhaps, with heroic efforts. But they were cursed -- their generation. They died out. I mean, they had no offspring. They had even to pray that -- to have no offspring, because you know the son or daughter who inherits syphilis, is just -- that -- it's the end. It's a terrible curse.

I say this to you, gentlemen, so that you perhaps wake up to the fact that we -- there was something terrible about life before this curse was taken from humanity. You have a life, the ease of which you can hardly appreciate. Except for the war, the threat of war, and the bombing of -- in the Third World War of all of this country and the destruction of all our cities, which is very far remote -- which you can speak of, but which you cannot feel -- your own life can, so to speak, entertain the various moods, the various plays without deadly consequences. So you are left in this dawn of your life, in this twilight of Aurora, of the beginning of the day of your own life in a rather strange suspense.

And would you kindly note -- take -- try to penetrate into this deep secret, that to play is a special color of our life. And we -- you call this idealism, playing with ideas, then you always are idealists. If you can paint your ideas, gentlemen, as you please, you can of course have the most wonderful visions of how nice man is or should be, or one day will be. You think idealism is good. I think it's a damnation. I think it preserves -- prevents you from growing up and becoming men. The first experience of man is that he's not up to his own ideals. Now the idealist is to -- that cad, who says, my ideals are better than me, so let's stick to my ideals. The religious man -- to use this expression for a minute, or the real man, I would prefer to say, gentlemen -- looks down to his own actions, and own appetites, his own wishes, his own ambitions, and says, "Let me sink down to my reality." How can a man be an idealist if everything that he does disproves the nonsense of his playful ideal, gentlemen? But you prefer this {Cocous form} in the clouds. and you say you are -- one has to be an idealist. You don't have to be an idealist, gentlemen. Everything your creator asks from you to admit -- how you were created -- it has nothing to do with ideals.

But that's the hardest lesson for you, gentlemen. You can formulate it in this strange formula. The playing human being, the playing human being has as his gods, ideas. Ideas. That is, mental, self-made conceptions. Well, in play, we can build our own puppet-theater. You can have your own football playing -- who has taken Philosophy 9? You remember that in sports and in games we can determine the space in which we play and the time during which we play and

then it's all over. Now, ideas are nothing, gentlemen, but a self-construed playground, diamond-shaped, perhaps, looking wonderful. But it's all of your own making. Is that the real world God created? In this idealistic world, gentlemen, then you get always the superstition which besets most of you, or many of you, that gods are man-made ideas, that we make our own gods. You find this very common today in American literature expressed, that after all, man made God in his own image. The idealist does. The idealist does make man -- God in his own image. The idealist is a man who says, "My ideals show me a wonderful world of wisdom and justice and peace, and everything is smooth-running. So there must be such -- my ideal must be true."

Gentlemen, I think the other way around. God's truth must become your idea. That is, you must penetrate through the curtain of your own ideas about the world -- are they good enough? You cannot say that what you like is true.

I perhaps told you the story of my Communistic student. I once had a young carpenter -- charming man of 25 who was married, and had a family and was very happy -- but he was a Communist, that's 30 years ago -- and so I finally asked him, "My dear man, what do you mean by capitalism?" And he said, very simply, "Capitalism is everything I don't like." You see? And that's by and large your way of formulating your opinions on the world. You have one thing you don't like -- war, for example -- so you say, "I'm a pacifist."

Now, you read the second inaugural of Lincoln, where he speaks of the divine justice which requires that what has been earned in 250 years from the slave will have to be spit out and given back to him, you see. Do you remember the second inaugural? Well, this man, and I tell you, in the process of making the speech, he discovered what God meant by war. And there is no pacifism possible, after all. He discovered the divine justice in the Civil War. That's the end. Nothing more be said.

So compare the second inaugural with your idealism, and you may perhaps wake up to the fact that you have never yet lived a serious minute. You have abused your mind for playthings. You have just said, "This would be nice." God is not nice. You are not nice, specifically. Man is not nice. He must eat. That's not nice. He must shit. That's not nice. He must fight. All this, he must. You don't like it. So you remain, with your whole mind in this self-filled theater -- amphitheater, you may call it, where the whole wings, and the whole sky have been painted by your own mental arrangement. If this were so, gentlemen, then of course God would be an illusion. And as many people say it, He is an illusion, because they think that their mind is God. Their mind is correct; therefore, they say, "We think this up."

Gentlemen, the experience of the five real chapters of a man's being changed in life -- this change overtaking you against your will -- you hate it. And man should hate to have to fall in love. It's terrible. But he can't -- it's just overtaken him. As long as he wills to love, he can't love.

So, very few of you makes this grade -- that they go in for planning examinations and weekend trips -- make this change into falling in love. And out of the window go all the examinations and all the work -- hard work you had planned to do, because this is stronger than you. When Dante met Beatrice, he wrote a book, The New Life, and it begins, "{Venit aliquis fortior te,}" -- "There will come somebody stronger than you yourself." That's the experience of any one new phase of life, gentlemen. Now I think it -- with you, it's a passion perhaps for gambling, or for sports, which will remind you that even play can be terrible vice. If you have to play -- anybody who has to gamble is a man who replaces the serious faith of his five real chapters with this substitution. A Catholic priest of my -- among my friends once said to me, "We must have faith." The people who play cards or gamble at the horse races, have no faith, so they must have this substitute {by} probing, so to speak, the gods, by taking the little risk -- the limited risk of money. The same I would say of drinking, gentlemen. He who has no inspiration must take to spirits. I don't need spirits, because I am in -- under the influence of the Spirit already too often. And if -- you are only under the influence of liquor. That is, spirits is typically a substitution of play for the serious thing of being inspired. And as you know, every prophet has winced under the impact of being inspired. Any poet -- it is terrible to give birth to a work of art. That's not a pleasure. That's not play. That's suffering. Just read how Van Gogh had to live, or Gaugin in the South Sea Islands. Torture! But you take a course in creative writing. It's just too ridiculous for words. Create -- to be creative, gentlemen, is travail. Who would volunteer to be in a class and you take creative writing -- you can learn writing. You can learn plumbing. But you cannot learn creative writing. There's nothing to be learned about it. The hour must come in which you have to give birth to a newborn -- new child. Have to. And where there is such a must, gentlemen, you cannot arrange with the instructor when you learn creation.

But everything is ruined in this country. As you know, the noble word "research." A boy comes to me and says, "I have to write a research paper." He doesn't know one-thousandth of what is known already on the subject. What is research, gentlemen? To know everything that is known on a subject, and then to change its mind and say that it's all wrong. You don't know what research is, but you fool with everything. With love, you call that sex. With drink -- inspiration, you call this drinking, you give a cocktail party. With faith, religion, sacrifice -- you call this gambling. Your sacrifice consists of $10, which you lose by -- on a bet. And so you have made up a life that is absolutely complete. It contains

all the elements of the real life, in cheapening -- in a cheap manner.

Now, gentlemen, as long as you know this is play, I do -- can bet, too. I can play cards. I have played bridge. I have played Skat. In the war, it is so boring, at the front, in the First World War, I think I have spent a thousand hours on playing cards. Why not? But I -- nobody said anything about it, except that it was time-killing. And we had to kill the time in the trenches and I feel everything is forgiven then. Man is in a -- in prison -- is in a certain situation, and how he got -- gets through with this, doesn't matter. So it didn't matter what we did there very much. Others took to drinking. Others took to women. I think the soldiers -- many things are forgiven. They haven't chosen their uniform. They haven't chosen the platform of war. And therefore, they are more tempted than anybody else who can choose his own environment. And as you know, soldiers go -- may go quite wild, but they -- everybody knows they aren't serious about it. They would love to be otherwise. They just are transfixed there with a schedule which they cannot break.

So gentlemen, don't misunderstand me. All these playthings are perfectly okay in their place. But when you try to judge the serious things from them, you go wrong. You cannot say that faith in your mission, gentlemen, is taking a gamble. As you say, "calculated risk." Real life, gentlemen, is never calculated risk. It's just life, and the fullness of failure. And so on. We have built up this tremendous vocabulary. If I hear you talk, gentlemen, every serious effort you yourself are willing to undertake is labeled by you with a word of play, you see. You call a necessity -- to reform the city of New York, or New York State -- you call a good idea. Gentlemen, if it is just a good idea, please don't do it. You can only do it if it is {ultimately} necessary and unavoidable. I mean, it isn't good enough for a man to say it's a good idea. There are so many good ideas. You can -- the Patent Office is full of good ideas. I think we have a million patents since 1829, have we not? Does anybody know the number of patents registered in the United States?

So if ideas were the best in idealism, then certainly we would have just absolute happiness. So, if you investigate your own vocabulary, you will find that you are impenetrable by the religious language of the churches, because you have replaced all the terms of religion by this existence which I would here call -- it is between two and three -- between sleeping and waking. And in this inbetween world -- it would be interesting for you, gentlemen, to find your own lingo. The lingo is one by which every serious thing is talked down to a tentative thing. You live experimentally, gentlemen. And you have the conviction that real life can be lived experimentally. That's perhaps -- sums it all up. If I gamble, I expect to be able to gamble again. If I get drunk, I expect to get sober again. Now, gentlemen, if you are inspired like the prophet Jeremiah, there is nothing

to wake up from. He will never be sober again. This has sealed him with the fiery coal, and so he goes down and dies in exile in -- probably in Egypt, because the prophecy is final, decides over his fate. Inspiration cannot -- you don't wake up. When Dante wrote his divine poem, he was a marked man. And when the Florentines said to him, "Come back," he said, "I, Dante, the author of The Divine Comedy, shall beg your pardon and say that I was wrong in being a Ghibelline. My whole faith in the emperor is at stake." And he wrote the famous letter to the Florentines where he said, "My heart breaks, but I won't go back to Florence." And he died in exile. So he didn't take a gamble. And he had not a passing inspiration. And he wasn't just excited over one poem. This poem is Dante. And the whole man was devoured by this action. He became the man of this poem. And if he had gone back to Florence with the Guelphs, who were serving the pope that time, you see, and -- he would have betrayed all -- everything he had said in this book, and in his book on the monarchy.

So gentlemen, you are on this side-track, where every serious god is replaced by some smaller coin --some smaller character on your coin. You have all this coinage of ready cash. Now life, gentlemen -- of change, has no ready cash because the change changes the coinage, changes the cash register. As long as you can pay for a bottle of rum, that's very simple, gentlemen. But as I said, if you have suddenly to become this poor {Hobbe}, Richard Hobbe, with "Dartmouth Forever," he died over his becoming a poet. I think he ruined himself very quickly. Does anybody know his biography -- of Richard Hobbe? You know how old he was when he died? Do you? You know his song, don't you? You must have sung it quite often. When did he compose it?

[unintelligible]

"Men of Dartmouth." And well, he is in the -- is this his -- his picture there where Wheelock also is depicted? I think they have a portrait in there, in the eating -- in the dining hall, downstairs.

[unintelligible]

Ja. There it is. Would you kindly look up his life dates? You see, he was a poet who tried at least to live down to his poets -- poems, and I think he drank too much. But he was an honest man. He didn't want to write what he didn't experience. He didn't just play in his poems with experiences which he had never made. I think he did go drunk. Does anybody know when he died? I think he was 35 or something like that, when he died. So he just lived half a life. It's very important for you to know this, gentlemen. Strange that nobody should know. Is he not popular on this campus any more? Well, you only know the football coaches.

(Sir, I don't mean to { }. You said that he only lived half a life. And I recall that in one of your lectures before, you said that when a person dies, he's really ready to die. And I just wondered --)

Well, { } there's an old saying, "Whom the gods love they take early." My dear man, a composer like Mozart or Schubert -- they certainly lived a treble -- three-fold life than you and I. And they -- he died -- one died at 28 and the other at 36. Therefore, in such a life, there can be encompassed { } -- what I meant by Hobbe is -- as with Mozart and Schubert, by the way -- that in order to live the 35 years fully, he sacrificed the energies of a whole life and packed them into this treble life. Can you see, this --

You want you -- do you want to have a break? I'll give it to you.

(I take along --)

Let's have a break.

[tape interruption]

... it's the mastery of the hungered life. You don't deny it, but you say it has its definite place. You face it. You face it and you say, "Yes, I am hungry, but since I admit that I'm hungry, I can form it. I can mold it." The man who doesn't admit that he's driven, you see, usually is a slave of his drive. It comes overnight, drive -- drives you awake. Take any drug addict, you see. He doesn't admit that he is a slave -- that he shouldn't be a slave, you see. He just grabs it. Once you can get such a man -- with Alcoholics Anonymous -- to confess the drive, he begins to rise to the occasion and to be able to space the drive, and to --. So it's although -- in the word "drive." I mean, you -- it's just a decision to call it "drive."

(I've been doing a bit of thinking about this idea of creating only when something has to be said, when you feel at this moment you must say it. But -- )

You can prepare yourself for this.

(Yeah. But I was going to ask you, what about someone at an early age who starts to be a writer, like some of the great writers, and say, "I'm going to be a writer." And doesn't this somehow go along with the idea of just creativity for creativity's sake? I mean -- personally just --)

Ja. Ja --

(I mean, how can you say --)

{ }, any great man has not had times where he resisted this temptation and said, "It's a curse that I must be a writer."

(Yeah.)

The talent, you see, is one thing. And genius is another. You must draw the line between talent. Some people have a glibber tongue, and some people can draw easily, design. I cannot design. And Mike Gish, he is my friend who has left the room, he is a born talent. Whether he will be a painter is still questionable, because it isn't enough to have talent.

(But how can you have just a person who is a writer and nothing else, if you're going to have this principle of you can only create something worthwhile if it has to be said? Then how can he be a writer the rest of the time, when he really doesn't have anything practical {to say}?)

Well, because there is under-articulation. A writer is usually -- in my estimation -- a man who feels that his contemporaries live under a cloud. That they stick to old models of life, and that they really live a different life. And he wants to reveal to them how they all together live. That is, a writer is an organ of society, and he is the mouthpiece of many people who already live the new life, but it hasn't yet been transfigured into a work of art. So the creative writer is a man who brings out a part of the new creation, the new type of man who lives on the highway, for example, you see -- on our parkways, in our suburbs -- hasn't yet totally been designed, so to speak, in a work of art. The most books are -- date from the Civil War in this, in their moral setting, in their standards of behavior. They are obsolete, you see. Like old furniture, and so on. So an artist brings people up to their real life, to their life as of now. He teaches them to conquer what they already are living. That's why, to my -- in my estimation, explains the creation is then that he conceives into his womb, into his chest -- heart, into his creative powers, a sperm of the times, a seed of this time, which in other people remain unfertilized, remain undeveloped. And in him it catches fire, and he says, "This has now to be brought out." So you can never treat such an artist -- a real, important artist, as an individual. He is the one in whom the sperm -- that is everywhere, as nature is always very, very wasteful, you know; there are always millions of sperms -- and only one comes to fruition. And the artist is the man -- in him this sperm comes to fruition and he tells you and me what our real feelings, our real behavior already is. But we labeled it still with Victorian concepts. It -- could you begin to see this? He is functioning within a womb of time, in a body of time, of which he is the mouthpiece. That's perhaps the best word I can find, a "mouthpiece." This means that he's the voice for you and me, whose bodies undergo the same experience and so, but our word has not come to redeem it.

(Sir?)

One moment.

Let's begin again.

The decision, which everyone has to make between natural religion and disclosed religion -- we spoke of this before -- is that he makes up his mind in which sequence the five gods enter the scene on which he has -- is made to change. You can say that the god of war has to do with death. Because in the war, we are either eaten or we eat. We kill or we are killed. The god Mars, if he's on your side, kills the Chinese, or the Japanese or the Germans. And if he is not favorably impressed by your prayers, you are killed in battle and you lose the war. But something remains dead on the ground. And you defend your life by expelling into the world of corpses, into this universe in which we are -- which is filled with corpses, dead stars and so on, stones -- the dead corpses are expelled from your and my life. And so the god Mars draws the line between the living and the dead.

The first primitive religions, gentlemen, and I very soon shall come to deal with animism and these so-called religions of primitive man -- they are very beautiful, these religions. But they distinguish themselves from your religion, that we at this moment, as you know, deal with very much dead matter. We dig up uranium. We dig up oil. We dig up stones and quandaries. The primitive man is only able to scratch the surface where there is organic life. And animism, as we shall later see perhaps a little more explicitly, therefore would be a state of affairs, like your children, and the children who play with us, to whom only the organic life -- the world -- of will and of affection -- is real. Dead things -- they do not drill oil holes 2,000, 6,000, 19,000 feet deep. Your and my problem at this moment is, gentlemen, that we are overwhelmed by steel and iron, and all kind of minerals and metals, plastic -- that is, by absolutely dead things. And for the first time I think in the history of mankind, you can forget -- except for your pet dog, or your chicken -- you can forget the organic nature. That's relegated to the zoo, and to Africa. And you live, actually -- if you look around in this room, except for you and me, there's nothing organic. Everything else is on the third -- the first level of mere physics. It's just dead. These walls don't breathe. They don't even sweat, they are so carefully taken care of. In a wooden house, I mean there is still at least some organic influence of the weather.

So gentlemen, we live much more than the primitive man, in the -- with the dead corpses. Think of the stench on our roads, on our streets, of our cities, of the gasoline, {we've heard}. So you become quite immune even to the difference -- the distinction between dead and life. You eat bread that is absolutely dead,

this white bread which you eat. It just is an -- it could be steel. It is absolutely worthless, as you know. But you eat it. You believe in death -- in dead things. Why anybody eats this white bread I shall still have to know. But you can't give an American black bread. He won't eat it. He wants to join up with the dead. By now, you even know that this white bread is nothing but fluff. You still go on eating it. Why don't you eat sterilized cotton right away?

Now why do I say this, gentlemen? The natural man, when -- before he is hit by something that goes beyond his own personal, individual existence, can live by breathing, by willing, and by making love. That is, his organic, affectionate, and working existence is limited to the inner ribbon of the time spectrum. This is ultra-violet and this is infrared, as in a color scheme. And therefore the natural religion tries to be silent, to know nothing about these two ends of life -- and death on the one-hand side, and life-giving processes who create new life -- which create new life on the other hand. Now I said you have the choice, and that is the first religious choice you have to make at one time, is death. That which is past. And is life, and new life, and the famous better world to come, of which you speak, with the "brotherhood of man," and these wonderful pipedreams which you entertain, are they the goal.

To me, this isn't so, gentlemen. My life has been made possible by the sacrifice of my parents. So my life has been created by sacrifice. And it will end by my death. And this, I think, means that my eyes have been opened to reality, and not to pipe-dreams, not to ideals. You say the past is bunk. "History is bunk. Old, that's bygone, museum, dead. The future is life." Gentlemen, your future is your death, and nothing else. But strangely enough, there have been people who, although they knew that they themselves had to die, even spend their life in play or pleasure, but get married and had newborn. That is, the sacrifice of your mother and your father allows you to exist. So sacrifice, the highest form of life, of change, of transformation, is in back of you. And as long as you have not entered the divine life, death -- the most mechanical, analytical, disintegrating force -- waits for you.

So this is the first decision, gentlemen, you have to make. Is in back of you, is the past dead? And is the future alive? To me, it's the other way around, gentlemen. Normally, or naturally to me, my death lies ahead, and will change everything I'm doing, or willing, or eating, or desiring, will just pulverize it. And there will be nothing left but the grave. And that's true of you and of me. You may like it or not. It is all nonsense, what we do. Then I wake up and say to myself, "This isn't the reality." The reality is that while I am on this earth, I am a link on a chain of re-creating life. And I have been called into life by sacrifice and obviously you and I are called to equal these sacrifices. And if we don't do this, we don't reach the level of real living. We only are masters of life if we match the sacrifices that

have brought you into existence by our own sacrifices, so that life shall go on on this planet, and not perish from this earth.

Very strange is -- it seems to me, that this question, "What is first experienced, and what is last?" is generally in this country answered in this childish manner, that behind us are the dead things of the past, and before us is the glorious life which ends with an operation of cancer. That's what you call -- that's your picture of life, because you cheat yourself. You think you can perhaps postpone death. You can stay healthy and have children at the age of 120, like the famous Vermonter. You know the story, where the man goes up the mountain to buy a woodlot, and he meets the Vermonter and it's an old man, my age, and he says to this old man, "Well, I'd like to talk to you about buying this woodlot."

And he says, "You'll have to talk to my father. He's up there haying, a little higher up the hill."

So he goes to the man. He's 90. And he says, "Well, are you ready to talk to me about -- I understand the family wants to part with the woodlot."

He says, "Can't say anything about it. You must ask my father."

And he says, "What do you mean? You have a father?"

"Oh yes. He's 122."

"Well," he said, "Can I see him?"

"No you can't. He's getting ready for his wedding."

"Wedding, you say, at 122?"

"Oh yes," the man of 90 says. "He didn't want to, but he has to."

[laughter]

That's the life urge.

But you all know that you laugh over this. It's a funny story, and a very good, I think, a very good -- very funny story, because in any joke, the reality stands on its head. At 122, the man should prepare himself to die, and not to make love. So that's funny. And everybody knows what is funny. You know it, too.

So, gentlemen, I told you. What is the most real experience decides over its

person's religion. If physics, or the law of contradiction, or your logic, or 2 and 2 equals 4 -- if this is your real experience, then you will have a god of the laws -- the god of nature. Nature will be your goddess, the laws of the universe. If you however really try to prove into your single, personal life, you will say -- and I repeat what I said in other words three times ago -- three meetings ago, and of course in religion, you always have to say the same things only in a different coloring, and a different illustration -- I told you, gentlemen, that if you begin with physics, you can never come up to God. You cannot even come up to love, because then it's just chemical, or sex, or the glands, which produce your affections. Or as one boy of you said, "the hunger drive," or the sex drive. You can judge all your life from the last experience, and the least experience you make, that you fall down on your fanny when you lose suddenly your foothold. This is perfectly true, gentlemen. But it isn't the first experience which you make. The first experience every human being makes is that he exists by sacrifice. And this is only in your individual, small life. The fact that you have parents, or that somebody took the trouble of not having an abortion, but carrying you to your full maturity -- this simple fact, gentlemen, connects you with the whole of the human race. The god has shown his power over somebody else before you wake up. Therefore God has operated in your life much more certainly than the laws of chance, or of gravity or all the other things. If you could only see that you decide what you know most certainly. And I still hold that any sober man who has his five senses together very much knows in his heart of hearts what he knows most certainly. He knows most certainly that people have cared for him, and have done more than they had to do, and therefore there is a miracle in everybody's life. And therefore I begin with the statement, gentlemen, I assure you I'm as cold-blooded about it as a mathematician -- that the first experience everybody knows of with absolute certainty is sacrifice. And sacrifice is a form in which man is deified, because sacrifice closes a gap in the maker's creation, and we cooperate with this creation by doing something He could not do without us. And by becoming co-creators, we therefore actively testify to the existence of God as a creator of the universe. And that's why the Roman Catholic Church has given the honorary title of co-creatrix to Mary, which is only the shortest expression in the one case, to the truth: that your mother in a small way is this too.

This is the decision, gentlemen, between disclosed religion and natural religion. The natural man says, "I leave the darkness of the past; I march forward in the light -- into the light." The man who was woken up to reality and is not a playboy, must say, "I come out of sacrifice and I go into utter darkness, unless -- unless I move beyond this ring of natural existence; unless these things of individual man are broken up, and I face death and new life, as my parts." Anybody who faces his death, frees himself from this death, because he then will invest what we said about the compression of life, you see, into a shorter term, you see. We know that -- that life is so precious that it makes no difference whether we

live 70 or 35, only if the 35 are lived fully, you see, and he had left his own -- his song behind him; Hobbe and -- you see. And therefore, who cares how old he is? Only it's significant that this life was condensed, you see. In this sense, it's very significant to know how much life was allowed him.

But at that moment, the whole measurement of quantitative thinking, that a man becomes 100 years old, is ridiculous.

So this -- and that's why I have put this red square between the line -- the boundary between ourselves dead, and ourselves life-creating. Any real sacrifice, meaningful sacrifice, gentlemen, re-creates the universe. And any death frees the living from a danger. That's the meaning of war. The danger against the institutions of this country is removed when we go to war. The spirit under which we work is liberated to allow us to breathe again, and to work again, and to love again, inside the United States of America. If we don't go to war, there will be no such thing. Then there will be a South, with Louisiana and South Carolina; and there will be a North, and Vermont will secede and go to Canada.

No body of life can exist in which nobody is willing to lay down his life for its existence. You can't have a pacifist society, because no order will ever survive for which nobody is willing to die, physically. Doesn't exist. Doesn't exist, gentlemen. As soon as you go soft and say, "I -- this isn't worth dying for," the thing itself is gone. Absolutely gone. And you know this very well, gentlemen. Your fraternity is nothing to die for. Your hometown is nothing to die for, at this moment. There are very few things in life that deserve to die for. Very few. But they are there. And without your being ready to die for them, you see, it's just nothing that keeps these things going.

It would be interesting to draw a line -- draw up a list of those things deserving your sacrifice. Obviously, they aren't very numerous. The others are -- make no difference. But they don't give life and they don't take life. I mean, therefore they are not of great importance.

Gentlemen, let us look at the worship on these five different concentric circles of our life process, of this inexorably running life. Every day of our life, gentlemen, is a day as long as we have the same "thank you," the same "please," the same "no" and the same "yes" on it. Here in college, this is one epoch of your life, because your "yes" and "no" and your "thank you" and your "please" is by and large identical on the first day and the last. You would agree. I mean, what you are here for doesn't change. Now during these four years, you serve the gods of play, of development, of growth. I don't want to belittle play. Everybody who -- anybody who has taken my 9 knows that I have great respect for this age of play, as long as we know that it is play. Therefore, gentlemen, this god of your day,

here -- the god of education you may call him, Apollo and the Muses -- the liberal arts college is very much under their sanction -- the liberal arts, these are the nine muses: music, you see, and mathematics, and introduction into English and what-not, public speaking. These gods -- you don't call them gods, because you belittle them, you call them just the liberal arts. They are served, as you know, in play by an intellectual mastery. You want knowledge. And your knowledge seems to you power. A student is a man who wants to acquire skills and knowledge. The Muses and Apollo, the plays are mastered by skill. Skill in writing and theme or what-not. That is, you worship. This will be hard for you to digest, but I think I should begin with your own worship. You worship -- the god of your own day here in this college -- by acquiring skills. That's I think not blaspheming this god. You serve him right if you do learn to think, and if you do learn to play football, and if you do learn a language. Isn't that true? And that is how you do justice to this tremendous opportunity. You call a god today an opportunity. Let him call this. There is a modern school of religion who says that all gods originally were the becoming-aware of opportunity. They call them the {kairotic} gods, the men of the hour, the gods of the hour, of the opportunity. The word "opportunity" is a -- quite a religious term, as you know, in this country. You can't miss an opportunity, because it's an invitation of the God, to meet Him, isn't that true? Opportunity is a tremendous term here. If you say, "You can't miss an opportunity," you will say this is a message to you, and you have to say "yes" to it. There is an invitation.

Now gentlemen, your invitation is to acquire skills. That is, on -- in the realm of play, I would say the acquisition of more, more skill and knowledge, of training, is in itself the divine service to this god. The greatest story of such a service to the god of knowledge is the story of Justice Holmes. I may have told it here, have I?

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a chief justice -- not chief justice -- justice of the Supreme Court. And he reached the ripe age of 94. And when he was 94, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected and after his inauguration, his first visit in Washington was to Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had been a professor at the Harvard Law School in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was -- is a Harvard man, of course. And so, he found Oliver Wendell Holmes at the age of 94 reading Plato. And he was a little bit taken aback by this man's intellectual curiosity. And he said, "Why do you read it, judge?"

And he said, "To improve my mind."

Now gentlemen, that's a typical answer of an academic person, of a student of the truth. And wherever you have academic people, it's possible to find a man at 94 who still wants to improve his mind. I however feel a little bit the irony of the

statement. And I don't know if he didn't have his tongue in his cheek in saying, "I, old man, can't improve my mind, but I'll still say so." You see the joke: we improve something that is still to serve. And to improve at the day of your death is a little funny. Isn't that true? Can you see this?

The increase in skill, gentlemen, is meaningful only in preparing yourself for life. The increase in knowledge and skill. That is, a Platonic love of perfectionism. But I must say, at my age, I couldn't have given this answer. And I'm much younger. After all, I'm not 94. But I have stopped to do anything just for improving my mind. Can you understand this? I mean, this is -- it is not absurd to say that -- Wie? You think I should go on improving my mind? I'm sorry. I hope you will do better. Gentlemen --

(Not you, sir, I mean--.)

Wie?

(I'm not telling you what to do. I mean, I { }. Self-improvement in itself is involved, I think.)

Certainly I try to improve your mind.

[laughter]

Don't you see the distinction? That in the process of keeping alive -- anybody who takes Philosophy 10 with me will find out about this more stringently -- that in order to improve my mind, you see, at this age of mine, I must not think of improving my mind. The only way in which I can improve my mind is by teaching. Do you understand?

(Yes.)

So that's a by-product. If I think of improving my mind, you see, I miss my opportunity. My opportunity is now to improve your mind and in the process, I strangely enough keep young, you see, and keep abreast, and keep my mind perhaps improving, too. But I don't know anything about that, you see. My whole bent is in improving really your mind, which of course I shouldn't try.

But this is the difference, you understand? However, if I have this play-religion, you see, that my mind is the ultimate -- the ultimate goal of existence, then I will say at 94, "I improve my mind." As I said, I -- the Justice Holmes was a very witty man and he may have felt that it was a very good joke when he said this.

He was very witty when he died. They came and said, "You must get the oxygen tent over your head -- face." And the nurse added, "But you know, this doesn't mean that you are in any way badly off. I mean -- it's all -- just transient, I mean. It has nothing to say." And do you know what he did? It was the last word with which he died. He didn't say anything. He was too weak for this. But he did this.

[laughter]

At the age of 94, really, that is something. He doesn't want to be fooled. Oxygen tent meant oxygen tent.

Gentlemen, how do we serve the -- I wanted to show you that every stage of our growth, or change, or transformation, has a way of service, a divine service. Worship. We must now discover not in the emblems of the Church, and its ritual, gentlemen, but as a matter of fact, behavior, adapting ourselves to the change, when we volunteer to submit to it fully and recognize its goodness. You, by studying, really recognize the goodness of your being trained here as students. This is your worship, of Apollo and the Muses, that you read Homer and Shakespeare, and go tonight to the players. I hope you -- who goes? One, single? Two? Why, you all go. Do you have a fraternity meeting?

(No, we haven't got any tickets.)

What?

(You can't get any tickets.)

There are a sufficient number of tickets still to be had. We just bought four. No excuses, sir. No excuses.

[unintelligible]

What? You don't want to improve your mind, that's all.

[laughter]

Gentlemen, how do we worship the god of death, of matter? Because -- that is, we are surrounded by these dead things. And you all know that the Americans worship the god of physics, by movement. When a man is unhappy, he travels to the West Coast to find -- get his sweetheart. And he flies. And he moves at rapidity. The god is -- god of matter, and expansion and measurement is worshiped by speed. The speed-religion of this country is very serious, gentlemen. As we

know, half of the gasoline which is spent in this country is spent for nothing, from mere worship of the god of speed. It's utter nonsense what you are using your car for. But you have to move, because otherwise you would have no religion. And since you have no other religion, the only way in which you can keep abreast of your own transformation is move, move, move faster, faster still. And the money spent in this country for telephone calls, long-distance calls, and speed and gasoline is one of the worship of the golden calf. We don't have the golden calf. We have the gasoline calf.

Jump. Always a jump ahead of latest developments. Therefore you have to move, keep moving. Gentlemen, this is worship. You can also call it idolatry. But as long as you do not see that Americans worship here something, you cannot explain the budget of every American family. It has absolutely nothing to do with necessity, with economy, with reason, with usefulness, with beauty. It has only to do with a tremendous bad conscience, that the real god is the god of space, the god of expansion, and that he can only be served by bringing the spaces together. This is very understandable. This vast continent, gentlemen, was such a tremendously hostile god, that every car that runs 100 miles per hour tries to prove that this god has turned favorable -- favorable to us. I told you of Mars. The old Romans had this ambiguous prayer. They said, "Mars, you destroyer of our fields, you giver of all the diseases, you murderer of our children, jump on the wall of our city. Turn around. Slay the enemies. Protect our fields. Heal our diseases." This is the relation of a man to a god. Now in this country, gentlemen, where a neighbor couldn't be seen for a mile apart in the prairies of the West, the space was the enemy. Not only there was a red Indian behind every bush, but there was the flood, and there was the sandstorm, and there was danger. And this god was the Mars of America. And if you want to pray to this god today, you show that he has become your ally, by moving fast through all these prairies, on all these highways, 66, and what-not.

This is very serious, gentlemen, because you must first discover where this nation worships, before we can talk about religion. And this is the American religion. And this is not un-understandable religion. It is not a blamable religion, gentlemen, because the god of space has nearly destroyed this country. Obviously, without the Louisiana Purchase, this country had no boundaries, no meaning. The Mississippi River was the first organizing element in 1803. But imagine. Then it took 1865 the trans-- Union Railroad, that the spikes which were set down by the Chinese and the Irish worker in the midst of nowhere suddenly showed that the gods had turned towards the inhabitants of this country. And instead of life making difficult, now you see, life has become easy. Therefore, we make use of the ease of movement to prove our gratitude. Every American is overjoyed that he can visit his neighbor who was separated from him by distance for so long, in five minutes. And out West, as you know, they don't -- they mind

nothing going two hours for cocktail party; 150, 200 miles for the afternoon and coming back. That's a neighbor, because they have a car. And it was -- you said -- equally long in former days to visit a neighbor, you see, in horse and buggy, or by -- on foot.

So please wake up to your real life, gentlemen, and don't blame it. I don't poke fun at it. I want you to worship, to respect it, to revere the finger of God. The gods are with you, but you have to find them. You deny that this is anything divine.

Gentlemen, man shows his belief in God by his worship. And I can only prove -- hope that you understand that you do worship this strange god who first is hostile and now has become -- plays favor -- gives -- I mean, has become a friend. And in this transformation of space, on the American scene, you have something that no other nation, for example, can understand. It is un-understandable for anybody else why we worship a car, the advertising of which runs that it can develop 200 horsepowers. I mean, the only answer of a Spaniard would be that one bull is better than 200 horsepowers, you see. So he prefers the bullfight, does he not? And what shall he do with 200 horsepowers? It would just mean that he would smash up in Seville or Toledo in the narrow lanes of the city. There's nothing -- nowhere to go. And this has absolutely no value in itself to be able to dispose of 200 HP.

But this -- today, I read the papers, these tremendous ads now before Christmas. I don't know where they have the money for that. It must be the end of the excess-profit tax, or what-not, that -- from the Saturday Evening Post to the cars. They have these -- I think -- don't you think the ads now are more grandiose than ever? And they play on your belief. They are all making use of the religious -- religion which you are presupposed to worship in. And what is the appeal? Numbers, quantity, speed, and those -- these people know you. They know you much better than anybody else. And they know that there is a normal relation on -- for all of us, this gratitude that we are not separated by distance in this country. Wouldn't you agree that there is something to this? Can you see the point?

Therefore, gentlemen, speed in this country, although it seems here to be part of democracy, please is not an article of export. And all the people who have been killed on the European highways were American GIs, are not a recommendation of democracy, you see, although they are outcomes of American religion. But it is a private -- it's a national religion, the American religion, very much connected with an actual experience of the real dangers of life in this country. And that is something religious. And you must get yourself up to this fact that there is real faith in all of us, because you sacrifice money for this. All the treasures of the household go on these installment payments for the new car. And

obviously, if you ask yourself, you could do very well with a Volkswagen, and you could do very well with a much smaller car. It is absolute -- all waste, the cars in which you run around.

The second worship, gentlemen, by which we worship, is dance. Now you all know jazz. The rhythmical life, gentlemen, is not the speed, locomotion, running, racing, canoeing -- in the old days, I mean; just what an Indian did when he went on the river to worship -- find the Great Spirit -- you do by driving in Indiana 500 miles per hour. But let's go to the next stage, gentlemen. You also worship the god of organic life. And the simplest expression is dance, because if you have the rhythm in your bones, you are elated. And a square dance, not so much as jazz today, expresses this desire of being in the image of the total -- of the healthy life, of the total life. Anybody who makes these steps and whirls around is in bliss. Otherwise he shouldn't go there. He gets himself into a state in which he normally otherwise doesn't find himself. And there's something amiss in the young man who doesn't want to dance. This is only an example of the worship of the organic life. It's, I think, underdeveloped. I think our ancestors, who had no cars, impressed on themselves much more of the variety of the dancing art. And a bride had to dance into her bridal -- married life and not stand in a reception line and shake hands, as they do now. That's a very unorganic behavior for a bride on the day of her wedding. I think it's absolutely awful. It should be forbidden. You can treat a guest of honor from a foreign country in the way, but not a bride. I mean, this is the first thing you should forbid at your wedding. But I know you can't get through with it. Your motherin-law will decide otherwise. But it's absolutely awful, gentlemen. It shows the complete death of our ritual of the good life. This should be the most organic movement of all, a wedding. And what is it? Flat feet and corns. And you have to talk to these -- to the in-laws all the time, and this is all. I mean -- I don't understand it. The last thing that is left is the cutting of the cake, as you know. And that reminds me more of Mars than of Venus, or Hermes, or the -- Apollo, the rhythmical arts.

Music is of course the great god of the rhythmical life. Montaigne, the French humanist and thinker, said that his taste and his senses were saved -- you know the story in his youth? -- because his father did not allow him to be awakened up by an alarm clock. But a lackey had to play the violin to wake him up. That is worship, again, because it means we are -- should bask in rhythm, in harmony. And by letting the hymns in the church, the organ play, this is the form of worship which is very strange, in a way. Why should God, our God, love to hear music? Well, perhaps He doesn't love to hear music, but He loves us to be musical, to be in swing, because thereby a part of our -- of the way He created us, responds. By your singing a hymn and by your having the organ play in church, you enter upon His plan. And all worship, gentlemen, is entering upon God's

plan, responding to the way He opened up for us life's mysteries, life's impasses, and avenues, and alleys, and streets, and roads, and bypaths, et cetera. That's worship. Worship is a way of life. The Christians, as you know, didn't call their religion anything but "way." The first word for Christianity was not "Christianity." The original term for Christianity was "Way." The Methodists tried to imitate this -- they are called Methodists, because they stand for a way. Method means "way," "on the way," "with the way."

And so, gentlemen, worship means to enter the roads created by the gods. When you drive the car at full speed from East to West, you worship the same god who once threatened you. You have now finally found the answer to his threats. When you play music, you answer the god of discord, and noise, and dissonance, you see, and say, by our organ, we tone down the peacelessness, the war-like world, and the strife of the world. That is the real god, behind the disturbances and the crisis.

I'm sorry, my time is up. We'll have still then the other ways of worship to find.