One of the first things which everybody should understand is that every creature in the universe that is in any way sensitive and in any manner of speaking conscious regards itself as a human being. It knows and is aware of a hierarchy of beings above it and a hierarchy of beings below it. That is to say, that wherever you are and whoever you are and whatever you are, you're in the middle. That's the game. Your senses extend a certain direction, in all directions and, therefore, give you the impression of being in the middle. Because the definition of a person is where you look from. Now, everything in the world feels like that. And also it has it's own kind. You see spiders and hydras and sea urchins and so on don't look very natural to us. We say, "Well, I won't want to look like that." But they say when they see us, "Well, what kind of an awful thing is that? And what a lot of nonsense it does." Now, we come here right at the start to an extremely important principal, which is the different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification. That is to say, you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way; you can look at it with a naked eye and see it in a certain way; and you can look at it with a telescope and you see it another way. Now, which level of magnification is the correct one? Well, obviously, they're all correct. They're just different points of view. When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope we see there's one hell of a fight going on. All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got it overly fascinated with our view of our bloodstreams in the microscope, we should start taking sides which would be fatal because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle. What is in other words conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level. Now, could it possibly be, therefore, that we with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures, and everything that goes on in human life are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony. Every minute little fruit fly or gnat or bacterium I will go so far as to say is an event upon which this whole cosmos depends. This thing goes both ways. It's not only that every little organism which exists depends on it's total environment. The reverse is also true, that the total environment depends on each and every one of those little organisms so that you could say this universe consists of an arrangement of pattern in which every event is essential to the whole thing. Now, we screen that idea out of our consciousness just as we pay attention to the figure and ignore the background. So we see one way of looking at things. Mainly, that the organism is very frail against the environment. It lasts a long time, the environment, but the organism only lasts a short time. But actually the whole thing is arranged in a polar system where the enormous depends on the tiny, and the tiny depends on the enormous. When you came into this world, there gradually arose into being the sensation of I. And it stays there awhile, it goes through a development, and then it drops off. But all the time everywhere there are other I's starting up. See? Whether they be human, animal anything you like, they could be in other galaxies, et cetera, always they're starting up. Now, you would say there is no connection between them. No.In the same way there is no connection between the molecules in your hand. And yet you say it is a hand. But if you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, the molecules in your hand are miles apart. What's the connection between this galaxy and other galaxies? Well, we can't see any connection, and yet there are gravitational swings whereby they respond to each other and move in a certain collective order. See, what we're doing in this is not setting down a doctrine, but it is doing an exercise in perception. You can see it either way. You can see yourself, in other words as existing only now. That's the only you there is. The alternative to that, logically, is to see yourself as everything. So in all this, you see, when you get a game going of this kind, there comes the point of what you might call "emotional investment," when you feel that the outcome of this particular feature in the game is urgent. See, this matters. And it's up to you what you think matters. We teach our children what matters, what's important for them to learn. And we teach them basically that it's important to live. And in a way every being in this world is torn between going on and goofing off. We feel that's the basis of our distinction between work and play. Play is everybody needs some time to goof off. But they must go back to work because you've got to farm and fish and manufacture and produce so that you could go on. But when you see you have this terrifying urgency to go on and feel you must, this is important, this matters, we screen out of our consciousness the fact that this is our own volition and our own game. And the difficulty is that as we become disturbed and anxious about this, it's more difficult to keep the game going. In proportion, as we are frightfully concerned to survive, we start fighting other people. We start clobbering our neighbors and whatever it is, all the old fights start. And it is these fights which more than anything else, at the moment you see, are endangering the entire human project but all based fundamentally on the illusion that it's utterly important that we survive. But you see in all this, what underlies, is the illusion that "I" am going on. That "I" constitute a real continuity from this moment to the next moment, to the next moment, to the next moment. What are you afraid of losing when you die? Yes, everything that you have acquired as an individual and stored in your brain is dissolved and distributed. But at the same time it is equally obvious that when you die, there won't be, following the moment of death, everlasting nothingness. So you can become aware of this tremendous interconnectedness of everything. Just as fronts go with backs and tops with bottoms, insides with outsides, solids with spaces, so everything that there is goes together. It makes no difference whether it lasts a long time or whether it lasts a short time. A galaxy goes together with all the universe just as much as a mosquito. You can get a certain vision of life, where everything is seen to be a complex pattern of rhythm, dances. The human dance, the flower dance, the bee dance, the giraffe dance. And that's what this all is. It's jazz. You see? This is a big jazz, this world. And what it's trying to do is to see how jazzed up it can get. How far out this play of rhythm can go.