The Fire Sermon is an accessible pocket introduction to my work, but with plenty of new insights for longtime readers. You can get a copy through my shop or at the usual online booksellers.
Here is a brief extract…
Right and Wrong
From the paralysing anxiety of everyday worry to the agony of life-or-death decisions, sooner or later you have to face the most terrible question on earth, what is the right thing to do?
There are three answers to this painful question. The first answer is: What you feel like doing. The second answer is: What your society tells you to do. And the third answer is: The right thing to do.
The right thing to do is the most difficult of the three, because sooner or later it conflicts with the other two and demands that you do something that you don’t feel like doing, or that society tells you is wrong. Then you find yourself in the position that will be familiar to you from watching great films or reading great books, in which the hero has to behave in a way that is completely crazy to himself or to the whole world.
The world of course wants you to make decisions that benefit the world, which means making selfish emotional decisions or selfish rational decisions; what you feel like doing or what society tells you to do. The world doesn’t want you to make selfless decisions and so it makes sure that you can’t access what you need to make them. PASSION.
Have you ever had to make a decision and gone round and round in your head and got nowhere, and then, suddenly, just acted? What made you act? It was either what you felt like doing, or it was what you thought you should do. In both cases you’ll have done something you later regretted.
There is a third option though. Passion made you act. Perhaps not a great deal of passion, but an inner movement, beyond thought and emotion, compelled you to do something.
What does that mean? What is ‘beyond thought and emotion’? I’ll tell you; the moment. If you reach beyond your self you can hear the moment telling you what to do; to act or to do nothing, to help people or to help your self, to stay in the room or to leave it. And if you listen to the moment, your consciousness passionately rises up to meet it, freeing you from the hell of indecision.
You have a word for this passionate voice of the moment. You call it CONSCIENCE.
The ‘speech’ of conscience is actually pain. Pain is intelligent, remember?1 Well, its intelligence begins with a tiny twinge of conscience, or ‘what you must do’. If you ignore this twinge it will get louder and louder (far louder than thoughts and emotions) until you’re sick, crippled or dead.
Without conscience, without passion, it’s impossible to ever know what to do, because you only have your self as a guide, and your self, by itself, is selfish, and that makes it COWARDLY.
Cowardice is the root of all your problems. Cowardice is why you hide in yourself, like a mental worm, attached to the mud of pleasure. Cowardice is the cause of all addiction, boredom and emotional madness. Cowardice is why nobody can leave a room they hate to be in, or knock on a door they long to enter. Cowardice locks you forever into the world as it seems to be.
And again, the world wants you to be a coward. It doesn’t want you to listen to your conscience and it definitely doesn’t want you to be courageous.
The world wants you to be selfish, fearful and fake and to stick with what seems safe and secure. The world only wants you to do what your emotions feel like doing or what society tells you to do, which means it never wants you to be passionate.
This is why the world teaches you to ignore pain, to tranquillise it and to run from it. The world is supposed to be extremely boring. It is unconsciously designed to suppress pain, to hide danger and risk, to keep strange and unpleasant ideas away from you, to make your life easy, comfortable, convenient and passionless. If you feel pain you are supposed to take drugs to make it go away, or blame someone else for it, or run from the pain into pleasure and comfort.
But there is no way on earth you can escape pain. You can run, but you can’t hide!
And in truth, the more you do hide, the worse the pain will get. Your life will get more and more difficult, more and more unpleasant, more and more unfair, more and more stupid and wrong, until you cannot hide from the pain any more and you have to face it. Face your self.
This, my little monkey, is the JUSTICE of life.
The Fire Sermon
Order a copy of The Fire Sermon here.
A reference to an earlier section, on the intelligence of pain…
