1 result for (book:ecs2 AND heading:"esp class session novemb 24 1970" AND stemmed:flower)
[... 1 paragraph ...]
(To Derek.) And I have a comment to the young man in the mirror and it is this. I have lived many lives and I cannot prove, in your terms, my own existence. The fact that you are worrying about proving your own existence, however, proves that you exist. Now, I do not want to deflower your ego. However, a flower has better sense than to ask whether or not it exists. It accepts what comes to it. It takes joy in the vitality that belongs to it.
Now, let us take for argument’s sake, a poor unintelligent flower in the middle of a garden. Now, there the poor thing is, and it cannot move back nor forth. It cannot run up the garden path and it is. Now, when the rain falls it gratefully accepts the droplets. It does not turn its head upward and say, “Yes, but does the rain exist, or does it not? And wherefore does it come, and how, indeed, do these elements reach into my beings and down into my roots? And unless I understand how this occurs, then I will not accept the rain.” And when a sunny day comes, the flower does not lift its idiotic head and say, “Now, this appears to be the sun. How is it that the sun keeps me alive and brings the green to my leaves and branches and makes me flower? I do not understand, and since I do not understand, therefore, I will not accept the sun and I shall stand here and deny that it exists for how do I know that I exist, much less the sun does. Perhaps it is a fancy tale told by other idiots as stupid as myself.” But if it is a fancy tale, it would behoove you to listen, for the moment that the flower says, “I deny, therefore, I deny the sunlight or the rain,” then the flower, indeed, would deny the grace of existence.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Now, in the winter time our poor idiotic flower seems, indeed, to be dead. The seed goes into the earth, however, and in the wintertime in any of your suburban gardens here beneath the snow are all these seeds. They are being nurtured, but do they in this darkness, therefore, look about them and say, “This is a time of death? There is nothing else for me and my existence is meaningless? How is it that I remember a time in which I blossomed? How is it I vaguely remember a summer in a time in which I was strong and spontaneous and free? What has happened to the summertime, and will it never come again for me?” That is what you are doing now. Our seed, however, who does not have this fine intellect that sits so nicely beneath your hair and within your skull, our seed without the intellect, rests joyfully within the earth knowing it is in the midst of creativity and that from within it, again, another flower will spring. And it does not deny the earth that gives it birth. It knows within itself, and it is this knowledge that you can find again. It is within you now.
[... 26 paragraphs ...]
Now this crisis has a meaning and a purpose. It does you no good to avoid this crisis through drugs, through tranquilizers, or through material possessions, for you must face certain facts, and the facts are these. The high and mighty intellect that deals with the world of sense is not all. The validity and the vitality of your existence is far more than this. And when you find your intellect, alone, cannot give you the answers, and that it cannot bring you joy and that it brings you no closer to the fountain of existence, then you begin asking the proper questions. Then you are like the flower who accepts the sunshine, and in accepting the sunshine knows far more about the reality of sun than any scientist who measures the spectrum of light without feeling. Your soul, your inner self, your reality, is experience. It is this upon which you must base your life.
[... 30 paragraphs ...]
Now, you are taking advantage of what you are learning, whether or not you are consciously and egotistically aware of what you are doing. There is nothing wrong with the ego. If there is nothing wrong with a flower, why should ego be a dirty word?
[... 2 paragraphs ...]