..续本文上一页 enlightenment experience, that it was important to drop it. I was wondering why you said that because it seems to me that it”s important to maintain that perspective so that you can act with integrity.

　　JOHN: It”s like if you want to write a poem, you can”t be a poet. That”s something different from writing a poem. If you want to throw a pot--Anything that you”re going to do if it”s going to be any good, you”ve got to throw yourself away. Any great action that you do, you can”t do it from a position that you already have. You must throw everything away. You must just trust that that experience will work in you and lead you. But you can”t go around referring back to some inner model experience that you had. You meet people who do this with drug experiences. I sometimes think that a good drug experience is quite damaging because people would have quite powerful, sort of spiritual experiences often with hallucinogens. You meet people who spend twenty years trying to recreate that experience. I have a real empathy for some of my friends because they did that. You”ve got to throw it away. Whatever”s real you can”t throw away. It”s like tightrope walking. You can”t be up there trying to do a performance, you”ve just got to put one foot after the other.

　　QUESTION: (Cont”d) I wasn”t talking about continuously having the experience, but within the experience there”s an understanding or perspective that”s given.

　　JOHN: Right. But you can”t help having that, you see. That”s just a deeper trust.

　　QUESTION: (Cont”d) So you”re not saying to drop that.

　　JOHN: I”m saying anything if you hang onto something, let it go. If you”re not hanging onto it, don”t pick it up. Enlightenment. I”m not sure it”s any different. You get up in the morning and drink your coffee or your tea or whatever it is. And there”s a beauty in that. You”re still participating and wouldn”t want it to be otherwise. It”s important to be born and to live your life and die and the right way to do it.

　　QUESTION: I wonder if you had a comment on the idea that most psychological problems are clusters of deep trance phenomena and that the therapist”s role should be, in effect, to hypnotise the client and that the end result of that would be a kind of zen mindfulness instead of trance state.

　　JOHN: No I don”t think I have a comment on that. I”m not sure I completely understand your terms and I don”t want to just construct something.

　　9. QUESTION: (Could you say something about responsibility

　　)

　　JOHN: You mean if you have an experience, what is your responsibility to that

　　QUESTION: Yes.

　　JOHN: I”ve been quite interested in the precepts. There are sixteen bodhisattva precepts. Taking refuge is very interesting to me. Then there are ten, essentially, codes of conduct. I take up the way of not lying, or not stealing, whatever, killing. I”ve been very interested in them as this form that contains something, allows it to cook; and on the other hand, as something, a freeing thing, liberating. So I think of responsibility. Responsibility is not something that we take and put on like a cloak. We”re too small for that. I think of it as something that”s just, again, like compassion, it”s a natural consequence of developing that you want to express in certain ways. You want to help people in certain ways. How that responsibility will work itself out in each of us is really such an inpidual thing. Some people need to become political activists; some people need to sit on a mountain. I can never make up my mind which one I need to do. Yes, there is a responsibility for wisdom. Wisdom comes with its own rather fierce demands.

　　QUESTION: (Cont”d) (Other teachers and their realization and their responsibility towards that. How they conduct their own lives.)

　　JOHN: I don”t want it to be thought that …

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