I would just like to invite you to consider, as honestly, openly as you can, whether or not there is anything at all happening right now. If the answer is ‘No, there is absolutely nothing happening right now’, then please go wash your brain out. If the answer is ‘Yes, though I couldn’t say exactly what it is, quite clearly something is happening right now’, then I’d like you just to consider how that came to be.

By which I don’t mean why what is happening is happening, nor do I mean why you are here as a part of it. I mean what actually are the mechanics, the dynamics of cause and effect by which what is actually happening right now is actually happening in just that way that it is happening which is exactly the way in which it is happening and no other. How that little, that very little of it which you know about, has come to be happening in just the way that it is.

Consider the matrix of causation coalescing into your hearing these words, my speaking these words, your being able to hear these words. Not just in terms of your being here now, as a result of whatever motive, and by means of whatever form of transport that came to happen: but also by what intricate and prolonged process you came to be born in the first place.

For which both of your parents needed to have been born, for which both of their parents had to have been born, great great great grandparents too. Just consider how far this matrix of causation extends backwards in time. Consider how far this matrix of causation that is supporting, shaping whatever it is that is happening right now happening exactly as it is happening right now, extends both in time and in space. Consider not just the flow of causation through your own personal history, but the coincidence of other personal histories whereby this moment is possible.

Somebody, a few hundred years ago decided that this would be a nice place to build a house. If that decision had not been made, here we would not be. The fact that this house stands today as it stands is the fruit of the work of hundreds of people. All of their parents, grandparents, and great, great grandparents therefore contributed to you being on this platform. Whoever it was who grew whatever it was that they ate, what you are eating: whoever transported it, distributed it, bartered it, sold it, bought it also contributed directly to what is actually happening right now on this platform, to your experience in this moment.

Just consider how deep, how broad the matrix of causality is, not in abstract, but specifically. Just follow a few of the lines a little bit, crossing from one line to another. Feel the immensity of it. Don’t just think it, feel it: the immensity of the momentum bearing down upon this moment, and shaping it into exactly and only this form. Exactly what it is that you are doing, feeling, thinking, hearing; exactly what it is the ant that I am watching is doing, all depending upon that immensity of causation.

Does that immensity feel like a weight pressing you down unable to breathe? Or does that immensity feel as if it’s supporting you, allowing you to breathe? Is the combustibility of oxygen supporting you right now? Is the affinity of oxygen for nitrogen, and for the other chemicals that they mix with in the atmosphere supporting you right now? Are the plants that are exhaling oxygen supporting you right now? Does this immensity feel like oppression? Or does it feel like support? Do you ever feel unsupported? Alone? Threatened? Could it be simply because you are not paying attention to the nature of this immensity that is supporting you?

Why so so many plants when you eat them cooked taste sweet? Is that strange? Why is a grain of rice sweet when it is well cooked and well chewed? Is this a coincidence? Is it a mere fluke that that which is required to support human beings tastes good to human beings. Are we  supported by the flavour of rice, encouraging us eat it day after day, when chocolate is available? The whole of evolution is behind these grains of rice.

There is no end to this immensity by which we are supported. You could call this immensity infinite; as it is beyond perceptible or conceivable limit, end, or beginning: whether that be a spatial limit in any direction, or a temporal limit in any direction. But what does infinite mean, what does bigness, hugeness really mean? Does it mean a heavy weight bearing you down upon the ground so that you can barely breathe? Does it mean that within this immensity that you are more or less irrelevant? Will anyone, or anything, ever recall in one hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred, five thousand, five million years, that one morning Chris was biting his lower lip on a platform in Italy while he listened to a strange man pontificating once again?

It is very easy to feel overawed, even belittled by this immensity; the infinite immensity of space and time; the infinite immensity of causality; the infinite number of factors determining our actions; the infinite numbers of actions, forces, factors, events, situations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings conditioning our responses, shaping our reactions, determining entirely our experiences without us apparently being able to do anything about it except accept or complain. (which options themselves turn out to not have been options at all).

When we see the conditioned nature of all phenomena, the immensity of that can be experienced as a burden. It can be felt as an oppressive weight if it’s not seen clearly, if it’s just seen superficially, if it’s just taken conceptually. But to that extent that it is clearly seen, the weight is released of burden, along many other weights: the weight of guilt; the weight of shame; the weight of regret, resentment, pride, hostility, anxiety, manipulation, greed.

Even of more subtle burden are released: of forgiveness, for example. Who needs to forgive, but he who has blamed? In a world driven by blame, as this social world that human beings have created is, forgiveness becomes incredibly important. Without forgiveness there is just terror, after terror, after terror. But in a world without blame, forgiveness is seen to be the subtle face of blame: ‘I forgive you: I place myself above you and forgive you’.

We need to be forgiven only by he or she who thinks we have done wrong. To think that anybody has done wrong is to prove that you can’t think, or that you have not thought intelligently, effectively enough for your thinking to free you from other people’s thinking. Why should we need to be forgiven when we haven’t done anything wrong?

Saint Paul thought and taught, with commitment, intensity, charisma and effectiveness, that the body is corrupt. That thought of corruption is functioning in you. Until you see clearly for yourself that, and exactly how the body is not and can not be corrupt, that idea will remain in your unconscious driving your actions. It will continue to ensure that you never reveal your genitals to anyone that hasn’t declared that they fancy you, or whatever. Shame on you, that you have genitals, thanks to Saint Paul. As if life could have gone anywhere human without them. If you go to the Vatican, you walk down the corridors; you might notice something strange – the statues don’t have genitals. One of the Popes had them all knocked off.

There is an immensity of thinking functioning in your unconscious. What is a beautiful woman? Whose thinking has influenced your thinking on that matter? Have you been influenced by male, gay designers, as to what a beautiful, sexy woman should look like? A boy perhaps? Do you think that somebody with dark skin and dark hair is more likely to be dangerous than somebody with fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes these days, in the aftermath of September 11th 2001? Do you really like having George Bush in your unconscious? Have you found him there? Have you given him permission to be there? Do you get nervous when there is a dark-skinned person in the airport? Many people do. And if you are a dark-skinned person, you may have had trouble in airports since then. I know many of you have. Have you ever stopped to think for yourself?

It doesn’t take that much honest, clear thinking, to see clearly the immensity of the matrix of causality extending in every direction. George Bush cannot help being paranoid, and nor can Osama Bin Laden. The Universe is coalescing that way, just as the Universe is coalescing this way, here and now on this platform through us. If we see this clearly, if we see clearly that those feelings that we experience, that those decisions that we make, that those thoughts that we have, do not originate in, or belong to, us, but are merely revealed in us, then maybe we’ll stop feeling guilty and ashamed. Then maybe we will stop regretting and resenting, worrying needlessly, taking pride in things we have not done.

Have you ever considered yourself to be above average intelligence, and taken pride in that which was given to you? How on earth can you take pride in something that was given to you, unless you are completely confused? How on earth can you be ashamed by something that has been given to you, unless you are completely confused?

We all have many talents: we are human beings after all. Every one of them has been given. No matter how much effort we may have associated with that talent, our ability to make that effort, our interest to motivate us to make that effort, was given. And the power to exercise that effort was given, moment by moment by the food that you eat, the quality of the sleep that you have, the amount of nourishment you have from those that love you, or the opposite. What is it that drives you into the light; shadow? It’s not just your friends that are supporting you, your enemies also - those you take to be your enemies - inspiring you, perhaps, to rise above, to go beyond, to enquire again.

I met a Japanese man  called Oki, OkiSensei, who developed a yoga system named Oki Yoga, sometimes known as Zen Yoga. He was a very impressive man, there were lots of myths about him, very similar myths to the ones of Ueshiba Sensei (the guy who started Aikido). There was this rumour about them, that in the war against china they developed this capacity to not be hit by bullets, to be able to feel them and move out of the way. Whether its precisely true doesn’t really matter, it just expresses a sensitivity that they both had. He told us this story about flying the first time to America from Japan with $5000 in an envelope in his jacket, which he put in the stowing compartment above him. And when he put his jacket on to leave the aeroplane it wasn’t there. And when he got to Immigration he said to the immigration officer: ’I’ve had $5000 stolen from my jacket’, and the officer said: ‘Don’t talk nonsense, of course you haven’t’. And he said: ‘Why haven’t I?’ And he said: ‘You’re too relaxed to have just lost $5,000’. So he said:‘Well if you see a gentleman wearing such and such, and such and such, look inside their pocket and you’ll find $5,000 inside a brown envelope’. And there it was.

What he said was: 'if you want to be free, the easiest way is, to every single time you make a choice, choose the one you don’t want”. In other words, go with your enemies, and not your friends, and you will be forced into freedom: it will be the only way you can survive. The only way you can cope with constantly doing things you don’t want to do, constantly being with people that you don’t want to be with, is to go beyond like, dislike, preference and prejudice.

There is an easier way than that, a far easier way than trying to make things better for yourself by subtle means. There is another option, which is truly to go beyond the self without having to do battle with your preferences. Just see clearly. Look deeply enough to see clearly what is actually happening. Feel the immensity: that perhaps, in the beginning is the weight, the pressure, the shock, the nausea of realising that you are in control of nothing at all. You are not in control of you husband, your wife, your girlfriend, your lover, you children, your parents, your employees, or your employer. You are not in control of your beliefs, ideas, thoughts, feelings or desires. Realising that can come as a bit of a shock. You are not in control of your locomotion. You are not in control of your breathing. You are not in control of your mind. You can tell yourself you are: you can tell yourself you are Napoleon, it doesn’t make you a great general. Other people can tell you you are. It still doesn’t make you that, just being named that.

If you keep looking at that which is revealed to you, that you are not in control of anything at all - not even the slightest, tiniest, weeniest, little thing, not even your little finger - the weight, the nausea, the oppression, will start to  dissolve. Then you start to feel the freedom that that immensity is offering you. And the significance that that bestows upon you. Instead of feeling irrelevant, you begin to realise how important you actually are. How important your every action actually is. How very important that you left undone everything that you left undone. How vitally important that you left unsaid everything that you left unsaid.

If you see clearly the indivisibility of the wholeness of the matrix of causality, you must see the inextricability of all component phenomena, however small. You cannot take anything out and still sustain that wholeness. When you see this clearly, you see that everyone and everything participates in that equally: that, from the perspective of wholeness, there is actually no single situation, action, thought, feeling or word, that is more important than any other, because take one away and you loose them all. Of course, you cannot take one away, you cannot loose them all.

This means that you are one of the infinite centres of the infinite matrix of causality, because an infinity has, by the nature of infinity, an infinite number of centres. You can only centre something to which the ends are locatable. Now this is not just a vague abstract thought: Leibniz proved it mathematically. You are the centre of the Universe. Not only are you the centre of the Universe, this very thought you are having is the very centre of the Universe. And so is this one.

This is a universe with only centres. Everything is of equal importance. Everything is absolutely necessary. Every event, every action is equally necessary to the whole. Your every action, thought, feeling, word, deed, and even those you have left undone and unsaid, are not only of equal importance to all of those, of all other beings, but absolutely necessary. They are each one required of the indivisible totality functioning through us, functioning as us. It is actually required of the future of the human race (whatever that may be); it is actually required of the future of this planet that we be here today doing this.

This is not an option. It can feel like an option because of the potential of the cerebral cortex to anticipate and imagine. Nevertheless, it is actually not an option. And this lack of option is not just going back into the past. It is going forward in to the future. Whatever that future may be requires us to be here, me to be saying this, you to be hearing, and, in the particular way that you are, misunderstanding it.

This is what happens to human speech, it is normally misunderstood. This is not a mistake. Whatever it is that you are understanding, you are required to understand. Is it going to shape some of your actions? Nope, it’s going to shape all of them, one way or another. Everything influences everything equally, not just the intense things, not just the obvious things, not just the consciously recognised things, but all things.

This is what wholeness means. This is what yoga means. This is what unity means; this is what indivisibility, inextricability and imperfectability all mean. You are perfect exactly as you are. Tomorrow, having become much wiser, ‘flexibler’, stronger, kinder, ‘compassionater’, etc., you will be no more perfect that you are now. No more necessary than you are now. No more important to the exact form, shape, of the totality of existence than you are now.  Than you always have been, than you always will be: than you still will be when you are dead, and you were before you were born.

Now, if you were to walk up to somebody in the street and say: ‘Hey. Do you know, you are absolutely perfect just the way you are?’, the last thing that they would say would be: ‘And absolutely totally necessary to the functioning of the entire universe’! Why would they not say this? Because they believe in free will. Because somebody else’s thinking is coming out of his or her unconscious. Calvin, Thomas Aquinas, Saint Augustine, Abraham, Moses, Isaac: many are those who have blown the trumpet of free will.

Google Rabbi Tatz, go to his talks and find one entitled ‘Free Will’. He admits that free will is his favourite subject. Listen to the trumpet of free will being blown in the face of common sense, reason, and the man’s own intelligence.  Simply because he believes that 5,000 years ago God appeared on Mount Sinai and said to the Jewish people: ‘I give you Free Will’. He wasn’t even there!

Many scientists and philosophers are acknowledging, admitting, that they can find no evidence for free will. Moreover that there cannot be any evidence for free will. Yet they still insist that there must be free will, because otherwise people would just do whatever they wanted, and nobody would be able to be accountable for anything.

What a load of nonsense, to let anxiety about a speculative hypothesis overrule the results of you own scientific research. And we’re not talking about people like you and me, who just think half-heartedly. These are people, who are paid to think, paid to research, paid to be meticulous. And they find that there cannot be such a thing as free will.  Then they refuse to accept the evidence, because of the thinking in the back of their mind that it is only free will that allows people to behave kindly to each other.

After all human beings are viscous, nasty creatures, and if they haven’t been inoculated with the doctrine of free will and its leverage of guilt and shame, then they will just decimate each other, rip each other off, rape each other, pillage each other’s villages: forever. Yet this kind of thing has been going on amongst believers in free will for as long as we can remember. Wherever it is going on, you can find in the unconscious of the people involved, free will, belief in free will. Free will is the dominant belief of civilisation. A deeply destructive, diabolical dogma that it is.

You are what you are: privileged Europeans. You are not an ant; you are not a Masai tribesman. You are conditioned the way that you are conditioned. You are conditioned by your personal life experiences. You are conditioned by your parents’ beliefs. You are conditioned by the beliefs of the broadcasters that have edited the news for you. You are conditioned by the beliefs of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Jean Paul Sartre, Herman Hess, whoever you were impressed by, whoever you enjoyed reading. Enid Blyton, Arthur Ransome or J.K. Rowling perhaps, have been shaping your thoughts. God forbid. Madonna, for God’s sake, has been shaping your thoughts, about what it means to be ‘sexy’. Be a bit more butch shall we? Get the biceps a little bit harder, the abs a little more rock hard? But will we become more sexy? No: we will be come even more ridiculous.

But it’s in there. Isn’t it? Conditioned by the totality of the unfolding of the universe as you are. Conditioned uniquely because you are located uniquely within that universe. Nevertheless conditioned by exactly the same forces and factors as everything else: Forces and factors arriving in you differently, because you have always been in a different location from everything else.

You are what you are. You like what you like. You are afraid of what you are afraid of. You lust after who and what you lust after. Because you are built that way. If you are built to be nasty, you don’t need the excuse of no free will to be nasty. And if you’re designed to be compassionate, you don’t need the notion of free will to be compassionate. You will just be compassionate, because you are compassionately configured. You will be nasty because you are nastily configured.

You are neither compassionate, nor nasty, by nature or design. You act that way out of conditioned, circumstantial responsiveness. Stalin was perhaps the nastiest man in human history, responsible for the deaths of millions and millions of human beings. His daughter thought he was the most amazingly warm, humorous, kind, and considerate man in the world.

He was not nasty by nature. Imagine, if you can, what would you be like in that position? What would that bring out in you? Isn’t it terrible what the Ukrainian SS guards did at Auschwitz? The lower ranks weren’t German.  Isn’t it terrible? What would you have done? You think you know, don’t you? But you don’t know what you would do under those circumstances. When death is pouring itself all over the world, the last think you want is to be caught by it.

You are not what you do. You are not what you think. You are not what you feel. What you do, what you think, what you feel is just passing throug you.  The Sanskrit for this is Karmavayu. Winds of action are blowing though us. If we take them personally in any way, if we identify any instrument with its actions, then we are falling the slippery slope  to war: then we are in the tenacious grip of  suffering.

When you live closely with people strange things start to happen. Women living together start to menstruate together.  This is not a psychosomatic event: menstruation is a biological process. Sometimes here everybody wakes up feeling gloomy one morning, , more or less everybody. Then a few mornings later everyone wakes up felling cool. While everybody is privately thinking ‘Shit! I’m feeling gloomy today’. Gloominess is feeling you, and all of those around you.

You know Leonard Cohen is famous, respected and loved for being a fantastic artist, but he is also famous for being a lover. He is famous for having had so many women, and not one of them caught him. Not one of them managed to get that little proprietary ring on his finger: for this he is famous. I remember listening to Leonard Cohen when I was young, with my Uncle, who loved him. Leonard Cohen was singing about his amorous exploits, and my uncle shook his head and said: ‘Ah, Leonard Cohen. What a life!’

So what does he say, Leonard Cohen? He says this: ‘I am not the one who loves: it is love that seizes me’. I am not the one who hates: it is hatred that seizes me. I am not the one who fears. It is fear that seizes me. I am not the one who is confused: the wind of confusion is moving through me. This is what Leonard Cohen meant when he said ‘I am not the one who loves, it is love that seizes me’

This is a very far cry from the conventional perspective where everyone is expected to take responsibility for everything they feel and everything they want. You cannot help wanting what you want. You cannot help thinking what you think. You can’t! You are conditioned to react that way; you are designed to react that way.

This doesn’t mean it can’t change. Yes, the way you think can change. The way you react can change. The more alive you are, the more you will change. But you have no control over the nature of the changes that you experience. It really is not you that makes the changes. Things are being changed through you, that’s all. If you look closely enough you will quite clearly see that it is not really you that is changing anything: even though you have the desire, the impulse, the commitment, the intention, whatever. These forces and factors also originate beyond you.

How many desires, commitments, intentions have you had that have led nowhere? How many times have you said that you are going to give up A, B, or C, and it led nowhere? Where is the control in that? Yet sometimes things just stop, don’t they? Wayne Lickerman was an alcoholic drug addict for years and years, and one day, it just stopped. He didn’t make it to stop. It just stopped.

Now apparently he is enlightened. Cool. The best way to become enlightened is to take lots of drugs, become an alcoholic, and not want it to stop. Now this is the kind of thinking that people have who believe in methodologies based on free will; based on intention; based on commitment, based on skill; based on accomplishment: find somebody who has gone there, do what they did even if they didn’t mean to.

They did not do it! The universe is doing it. God is doing it, if you like, if you’re not afraid of that term. God. What does God mean? When I use the word ‘God’ it just means the infinite, indivisible totality of all that is and is not. A totality that is conscious, and you know it’s conscious because you’re conscious. So you don’t have to have any doubt as to whether or not life, the universe, existence is conscious: its consciousness is manifesting in you.

Within that consciousness there is motive too, conscious motive: desire, intention, commitment. Mental forces that arise in the unique location of a specific mind, but that do not originate in or being to those locations, those so-called minds. Forces that arise by necessity of all other forces and factors. Forces that arise by the force of necessity itself. Forces that in being necessary have to be exactly the way that they are. Commitments, intentions, desires, fears, thoughts, actions arising just as they arise by virtue of a necessity that equally makes them perfect.

You are perfect, just the way that you are. This is not an abstract, human reference. This is a universal criterion of existence itself. To exist is to be perfect. Anything that ever existed existed out of perfect necessity. There is no other way of being. Being is perfect necessity. Existence is perfect necessity.

You don’t have to take my word for it. It is perfectly obvious that water is wet: that snow is cold. You just have to get close enough to know. Same with your thoughts, feelings, desires, actions. Look more deeply and you will see what will eventually become so blindingly obvious you will never again blame, resent, regret, feel guilty or ashamed: for you will be seeing, with eyes wide open, perfect necessity everywhere. Even when you don’t like it. Even when you want it to change.