This sermon delves into the contrasting mindsets of materialism, communism, and mysticism, exploring the loss of individuality in a materialistic worldview, the flaws of communism in erasing personal identity and promoting control through conditioning, and the leap of faith into mysticism as a means to find meaning beyond rationality. It emphasizes the importance of biblical absolutes in providing true purpose for both society and the individual, highlighting the dangers of abandoning rational thought and the significance of faith in God's plan for each person.

We bless you again for your love for us and your wisdom, again we ask for that wisdom from above. He told us to ask the Father who gives to all men freely and we come asking again knowing you will provide that which is necessary for our own challenge and inspiration and change in Jesus' name, amen. We have been looking at a major division of thought under materialism and we have looked in a very simple way at communism or Marxism or Maoism or philosophy of the dialectic applied to history and sociology and economics and we have looked at a few of the great challenges that communism attempted to meet and we want to now look at a few of the weaknesses. We've looked at one, the loss of an incentive, a means that you've got to have something that will encourage people to share and in this case Lenin realized it would not come about by just information, it would have to be by force and promoted revolution, violence in particular and as a consequence of that communism began to grow very, very fast, had both an ideology and a motivation. Now we want to pull out a couple of extra things here and the first one would be some of the tools that are used in this. Remember in Marxism man is an animal, he is nothing but matter in motion, there is no spirit there, there is nothing. So basically that organic line from man through to the chemicals is a continuous line. Now in the early days of Marxism a man by the name of Pavlov was asked to do some research to find out what things the soldiers on the front would need to avoid if they were going to be good soldiers. In other words he was asked to conduct some studies to prevent stress and psychological fatigue and stuff and so he began to study, using animals, conditioning processes both mental and physical and other things. In the process of this he did some things with dogs that he conditioned various responses into them and then one time when he was gone there was a flood in his lab and the dogs were all in cages and the waters rose higher and higher and higher and nearly drowned the dogs. The dogs were frantic, they couldn't get out, they realized they were going to drown and he came in in time to rescue the dogs, get them out of the cages, but he found an interesting thing. Under the extreme stress everything that he had conditioned into the dogs was erased. There was a complete loss of all of the conditioning under that extreme stress, everything had been wiped clean and he passed this on to his superiors as things that must be avoided and they realized that they had come up with a whole new weapon and that was a way to clean out previous ideas and conditioned thought processes and leave the mind like a blank slate and that became what was called now brainwash and it uses, they become very very good at it with the use of drugs. As a matter of fact there's a whole division of this called psychopolitics, the use of various psychological pressures to change the politics of a person. First time I think Western world became seriously aware of this was in the Korean War when Korean prisoners of war came and suddenly were embracing Marxism and thinking it was a wonderful thing and that everything they'd had before was absolutely wrong and false and they couldn't understand how good true blue Americans had flipped overnight and the pressures on this and it's a very very sophisticated thing. It uses drugs, prolonged discomfort, fear, exhaustion and mental confusion and all of those have been refined to very very high levels of sophistication. For instance a person may be arrested, he may be given a drug which disorientates the mind then he'll be put in a room with either no bed or a bed too small for him or sitting in a chair that's far too small or a bed that's, maybe the temperature is changed so it's too hot in the cell for 20 hours and then it's freezing cold for the next, see and that's continuous. And then fear, a person will come in and say you're going to be shot in the next two hours and you hear bang bang bang outside and other people being shot apparently and you're getting closer and closer and the person will come back and say you have one hour left to live you know and so you're getting all primed up for that and then nothing and then say your execution has been postponed another 24 hours and this kind of thing and then exhaustion, person's kept awake continuously, schedules are changed, the lights go on, they say it's morning, two hours later they say it's night time, 30 minutes later it's morning again, meals are brought in, breakfast and then supper and then nothing for three days and the total disorientation of every familiar stable thing and then mental confusion, constant words, statements, you said that before, that's a lie. So this is an exceptionally powerful process, it's the development of the dogs in the cage and it's taken out until finally, but it is not necessarily irresistible and the only people who really seem to be able to hold up to this are those who have some kind of sets of standards or orientation that is not dependent on their outside circumstances which was found by some Christians in the Korean War that the only thing that kept them going was their faith in God and that they used and has been found many many times since then by Christians in iron curtain countries who have been put in prison, sometimes five or six years under this. Other examples would be men who have come out since then like Richard Wurmbrand and others have shared the incredible pressures that the gospel has enabled them to survive in but you see any person whose whole life was dependent on their surroundings, any person whose soft clothes was the way it is, would not be able to handle that for very long at all because everything familiar and understood is just wiped away and with it all of the patterns of behavior and then re-education process, constant, again using the same things and it's a long time, it doesn't happen overnight but they've developed each one of these to very, very high levels of refinement. People who are too sick to be healed, this process is called healing, people who are too sick to be healed are often eliminated because they're just hopeless, you can't heal them and that's, they only do it anyway, there's no soul, so there's no big thing, killing a person, torture, there's nothing, it's just, they're only just processes with machines. What do you do with a machine that no longer works? What do you do with a machine that is no longer carrying out its appointed function? We used to have an old car that every Sunday we had to push down the hill to get started and I never cried at all when we bought a new one, I hope they ripped the radio out of it, burned all the tires, it was a rotten old car. So under that basis if people are just machines and they no longer are able to fulfill their appointed function the way you think so, why was Hitler wrong in taking a whole group of people that he thought were no longer functioning as they ought to and boiling the fat of their bones down to their bodies to make soap and making lampshades out of their skin and beating the gold out of their teeth to make relays for his missiles, see that's called recycling in a technological world, it's a very sensible thing, you can't waste these resources. The danger of this, it looks so beautiful, we'll create a world in which all this God stuff is not necessary, it's brought nothing but fear and superstition and torture to people down through the ages, let's get rid of all this God stuff and we'll bring in a brave new world that doesn't have any of this and you wind up with a 1984 nightmare. Some of this was explored by Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange where this young violent, it was said here in England again, young violent Alex and his group of, I forgot what they called them, droids or something, go out raping, murdering and totally violent 15 year old type kid and he is captured in a society and reprogrammed by this conditioning process, he's given drugs to get him off his immorality, his raping, they show him pornographic films and shock him at the same time and then what makes it worse for him is that his favorite music I think was Beethoven and they play this music while they're doing it so it reprograms even his things he enjoys most in his music until he can't see anything, then later on they bring on some woman to seduce him and he gets these violent sicknesses and headaches even getting close to it, so what they try and do is reprogram his whole thing, well in the end of it he's kidnapped by this underground group and deprogrammed almost overnight, now he's back to normal, raping, killing. So it was really, though it was a very weird novel, it was really a Christian statement in a strong sense, you cannot by this change the morality of people, you can reprogram their ideas, you can do all of those things, just like you could hold a person's hand and make him shoot somebody, it's not going to change their heart, they looked for a means of salvation outside of the gospel. One very important thing, biblical absolutes are replaced by careful redefinitions that give the Marxist a completely artificial morality, now understand there's no absolutes in this thing so you make up your absolutes and what is the absolute of Marxism? What is the one truth? The one truth is the dialectic, that's it, you call it the party line, the party line is that propaganda which extends that process, so we could say this, there is no right, that's it, young American communists, communism is my mistress, my wife, my sweetheart, my bread, that's it, that is God, so history's process becomes God, see a communist really makes the process of history that he believes he's contributing to God, it is history that changes things, it is that diamond that is actually going to bring salvation to the world. And now, just as you could not tell a lie in upholding the gospel, see that, a person who is thoroughly committed to biblical absolutes could not lie, a communist who is thoroughly committed to Marxist absolutes cannot lie by definition, what is right is what advances this historical process. So, by definition, there is no way you can lie or do wrong in the interest of the cause. And so, a western person or a person with some moral memories or with some kind of absolute structure in their mind, if a communist tells you, oh we will do this, we will do it, he is not lying, not in his structure, if he is promoting the cause, he can tell you anything, it is true by definition, as a matter of fact, you could give a zealous and dedicated Marxist a lie detector test and he would pass, because it is not a lie, you have to do a lot of reprogramming of your morals to come up with that, but once you believe that, it is impossible to tell a lie in the interest of the cause, that is why you can't simply take at face value a statement made by a true Marxist, you can't, if he says, oh we would never do that, we would never do that, he is not lying, even if he intends to do it, whatever helps the cause is true. So you can see, for instance, peace, what is peace to a Marxist, peace, see that word all the time, people march for world peace, what is peace to a Marxist, well what would be peace to a British or an American soldier in a war, it wouldn't be surrender would it, if you were captured by the enemy and put in a concentration camp, would that be peace, now you know what peace is, when the enemy surrenders and it is the end of the war, when you win, that is what peace is, so what is peace to a Marxist, peace is when the world becomes Marxist, that is peace, they believe in peace, they wholeheartedly believe in peace, they preach peace, they practice peace, peace means the world becomes communist, that is peace. And you see by the very nature of the philosophy, it cannot rest until the whole world is Marxist, it will not stop at we have enough land now, there is no such thing as enough land, there is only enough land when the entire world is brought under the domination of the philosophy, and that is why you can't simply say well you know they probably got enough people now, it's not like that, it is a world changing, it's got a global vision, it's got a missionary strategy. Do you think Christians would rest because a lot of the world would be evangelized, do you think Christians would say hey you know we got quite a few now, it looks like we're the hottest thing going, so why don't we quit, no way, we're not content until every language has got the gospel, until every person and every tribe and every tongue is brought under the lordship of Jesus, if there is still somebody out there, not, then we're after them, it's just like that, communism is a Christian heresy, it has a missionary vision, it believes implicitly in world missionary evangelism, it's called domination, and that's peace to them. So you can see in the interest of peace in Marxism you could put a peaceful bullet and a peaceful gun and peacefully kill somebody, as long as it helped the cause. So if you said well the guy, you know, shoot man, he told me a lie and he said he believed in peace, you're not a victim of, you know, you've become a victim of your failure to understand a philosophy of your ignorance. Great number of nations, I see this especially in British nations where socialism has had a dominant effect, I see it in my country in New Zealand, we see the world much more through a Marxist mindset than the United States for instance does, which has always taken a strong line against that whole thought form, and it's interesting to watch the media in both nations and see how various overseas things are viewed and treated, then you really become aware of the glasses through which a culture views other things happening in nations. All right, to understand those things then, Marxism looks like a terribly contradictory, internally quarrelling thing, but it has a consistency, it has a logical consistency, it's perfectly consistent within its premises, and it works in a very, very powerful way. So it has a great ring of truth to many people in a fallen world. The breakdown comes in the long term when you see the actual results, we're actually seeing this sharing going on, are people becoming more unselfish, and the answer is no. So that final test, though it's logically consistent within its premises, it does not match the reality of the world, it is not true. Now, what happens to people as individuals in this thing? Well, existentialism, the next set of philosophy looks at, gives great meaning to the individual. Communism gives meaning to history and society, but none to the individual. The individual is not important, you need to know that, you're not a unique, absolutely important person, you are absolutely replaceable, even if you're the head of the party, of the premier or anything, you are not important as an individual at all. The only thing that is important is the party and the system, there's no uniquely important individuals, everyone is replaceable, everyone is part of the machine, you see, if the machine breaks down, replace it, you don't, you just put something else in its place. You're only important for what you can do in the group, that's your importance. Now, we, in the western world, because people, we believe that too, don't we? Don't we do that in the western world? Aren't you judged or evaluated on what you can do? People ask you first, what do you do? And if you go, well, you know, I'm a housewife. Oh, really? You're not a doctor, you're not a spaceman, you know what? See, don't we evaluate people by what they do? We give people value by their contribution to society. God doesn't like that. He says, if you have a meeting and you take all the hot legs people and you put them in the front seat and say, this is your special thing, see, you don't understand the gospel at all. The greatest discovery I made is that I was not important to God for what I could do. I was important just because I was. Created in His image. See, when I became a Christian, I told you, my whole God, my whole career, my whole importance in life, my dad was a professional athlete. He was an incredible athlete. He was a cyclist. Not a, but the organic type that you pedal and cycling like running. There's two kinds. There's long distance and there's sprinting. My dad simultaneously held national championships and records in both of them at the same time. And he was equally good and never got to go overseas, but took the Olympic gold medalist. And they did a one-on-one with him in the track meet. He beat him three times out of three. And George Bernard Shaw, in the latter years of his life, watched my dad race one time and said he was one of the three greatest natural athletes he felt that he had ever seen. And an incredible guy. My mother was a professional businessman. My sister used to do some challenging dance out of clamshells when she was four and stuff like this. And I only could do one thing and that was chemistry. And I loved it and I gave myself to it 18 hours a day. And when I got saved, the thing God put his finger on was my career. It's not a bad thing I had to give up to be a Christian, but a good thing. And I thought, well, if you take this, I get nothing left. I haven't got anything that makes me important or valuable. And it was precisely that that he wanted. I mean, I would have given him anything. I would have been a Christian chemist. I would have been a lecturer in chemistry that was incidentally a Christian. I would have worked for Moody Institute of Science and done fact and faith films. I would have done any of those things. Not give up chemistry. And that's why the genius of God, the day I gave up my career to him, and I still got a lab with $10,500 worth of equipment sitting there, I'm not a chemist anymore. The day I gave my career to God, it's the day I realized I was loved and valuable. Not for what I did. And the things I'm doing now are things I never dreamed I would ever be doing. I told you, I only want to do three things. Never travel, never meet anybody, and be a chemist. I made the mistake of getting saved. Now, in the system then, in the Western world as well as in the communist world, you're important for what you do for the group. A perfect society, however, already exists on earth, based on similar principles, that has no problems with the following three things. First, they have no problems with crime. They have no problems with civil disobedience at all. They have no problems with the sick or the old. As a matter of fact, this society is really perfect. It works within exactly those same principles, and I kid you not, they still have fights with other people, but within the society itself, no crime, no problems with the sick, no problems with the old. It is called a beehive. There was a Moody Institute, a science film done that took seven years to put together called City of the Bees. Tremendously powerful thing. But if you think of a beehive, bees have no problems. By the age, by the disabled, by the retarded, they don't have problems with retarded bees or disabled bees. They have a simple solution. If any bee doesn't cut it, you cut him. Any bee that does not conform, that can't contribute its weight, is just shut off to die. Simple. It's a problem-free society. No bee ever thinks of doing anything different from what its program is. Worker bees work. That's what they do. You don't see artist bees that are out there saying, this particular form, I'd rather do a form like this. That doesn't happen. If that happened, you'd get eliminated. You don't have philosopher bees, and you don't have poet bees, and you don't have George Lucas bees, and you don't have any of those bees. They're all... No problems, why? No free choice. You just program like machines under a force law, which we call instinct. That's a force law. Bees have no choice. All bees literally work to death. Have you ever seen a bee out sort of crawling along the ground? They've taken just enough energy to get out there and check out where they're supposed to, and if they get blown off course or hit a car or something, and they can't get back, they're just left to die. No bees all come out and bring honey to help them. They're just left to die. Too bad. Grow another one. Do you see that? It's a simple thing. No bee is important. Bees don't go around wearing little caps and, Hi, I'm John Bee and stuff. A bee is a bee. That's it. Queen's great purpose is to start the hive. That's it. She's kept alive for that reason. And so on. The survival of the fittest. Rules. No bee is individually important. Each bee's worth measured only by its contribution to the total hive on its own. It means absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, the society does not produce poets, artists, inventors or lovers. So who wants to live in a beehive? And the point is, Marxism in its ultimate form already has an illustration in the world. It was on that basis that men like George Orwell wrote 1984. To think, what would it be a world where even your thoughts have to be policed and there is constant control. And remember Animal Farm. All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. So, having said all of that, though communism copies of counterfeits many Christian methods, the structures, the concepts of Christianity, it preaches an absolutely opposing message at its heart. Think differently in a communist system is the worst possible crime. To think outside of the party line, to dare to challenge an accepted statement is just heresy. Men and women must suspend all independent thinking and obey fixed rules of thought and leadership. Now the great power then of the Christian message is it does give you meaning for society and history in a tremendous sense. But unlike communism, it gives meaning also for the individual. The two great competing systems, the next one we're going to look at in a second, existentialism, meaning for the individual, none for history or society. Communism, meaning for history and society, none for the individual. But in the Christian gospel, God never saves you for yourself. You were never saved for yourself. You're always saved for your world. You're always saved for history. And that is why every real Christian must get a sense of destiny from God. I'm here for a purpose. God has something for me to do in this world. That's why you're actually here. Why should you take time and money and a bunch of other things to spend your time doing something like this? You do not believe that your life was worthwhile, that God had a purpose for you and that this was part of that training for that purpose. All right. We've touched probably enough on communism now to give you the simple version of that. But I want to now finish this chunk with the third one. Can we look briefly at the third one? That third mindset that Jesus asked the crowd. We had two so far. What were they? The reed and the materialist or the man in soft clothes. Now we've got the third one. The prophet. And I gave you another name for this. You see, there is another whole section of society and they are prophet hunters. Not P-R-O-F-I-T, that belonged to the one before. But this, P-R-O-P-H-E-T. Prophet hunters. They believe that the real answer to society is not going to come from this earth. It's going to come from another world. And I call this group the mystics. And again, Francis Schaeffer in some of his early works tried to point out what it was that precipitated this in our time. And we're going to draw a line here. He calls this the line of despair. And underneath it I want you to put this phrase. Thinkers. If you want to be cool, you can put rationalists. You can put materialists. You can put thinking materialists under there, if we can call it that. Let's just put them thinkers. Will that do? Thinkers. Now what is the fundamental philosophy of the rationalist, of the person, of the materialist? What is that baseline philosophy? What do they believe about man and the universe? How did it get here? Give me that. An equation. Time plus chance plus matter, blind purposeless matter, equals man and the universe. Alright? That's their equation. Now, if this be true, time plus chance plus matter equals man and the universe, and time is impersonal, chance is impersonal, matter is impersonal, like we pointed out in the previous study, then what is man? He is an impersonal. He's not a person. So if he's not a person, what is he? We're back to the... yeah, he's not just an animal, because remember that biological line goes all the way down to the dirt now. It doesn't go man and then the animals. Man is not even an animal. He is a machine. He is a programmed bunch of chemicals reacting to his environment. And that's Skinner's thought. Skinner believed, B.F. Skinner, the one I mentioned to you before, the one who brought his daughter up in a glass bubble and introduced all her friends and toys through that to study the effects of environment. Very interesting man, B.F. Skinner, believes that you are nothing more than a bag of chemicals reacting to your environment. Not just economic environment, any kind of environment. The reason why you're here is because of a chemical imbalance. And there is no such thing as truth, morals, love, beauty, dignity. They are all chemical reactions. There is no things called truth. It's a very interesting philosophy because if it is true, it isn't. I had a friend came to me in a camp we were doing one time. He said, I'm a third year student in Auckland University and back home in New Zealand. He said, we've got a professor who is deeply into Skinner and everything he teaches is Skinner. And he said, I realized that, you know, how opposed to the heart of the gospel Skinner's philosophy is. He said, you know, a lot of what he says makes sense. I mean, that's a very pragmatic thing, you know. Skinner's got all kinds of experiments that he's done, teaching pigeons to peck on screens so they can guide missiles. And he's, you know, he's done a lot of heavy stuff, an old Skinner. He said, I don't know what to say. He said, I'm a third year student, but how do I challenge this? I said to him, why don't you ask him at the end of the lecture, what is the purpose and meaning of us studying here? And what is the value of us attending this course? And so he waited until the end of the thing. He said, excuse me, sir. He said, what is the value and purpose of us taking this course? Why should we do it? And the guy said, well, the verse. And then he caught himself, see. There's no such thing as value, purpose, meaning. And he said, well, you can't be too pragmatic. I have a friend that had a little, this lady had this little boy or little girl that got in an elevator with Professor Skinner in the university. You know, an elevator, everybody sort of, you either look at each other or you sort of look at the wall. But anyway, Professor Skinner got in and here was this mother, this mother and this little girl. Professor Skinner looked down at the little girl and said to the mother, and what is the subject's name? He said that. But I have in my science fiction novel that I'm working on a doctor called Dr. Belfrys, as in Batson. And he is eating dog biscuits while he's talking. And he keeps offering them to this boy who's the hero of the story. And the kid keeps turning them down. And he's chewing on these dog biscuits. And they have a discussion on truth and stuff like that. And at the end, he's still eating these dog biscuits. And as the boy goes out the door, he sticks his head back and he says, oh, Dr. Belfrys, was it hard to get used to the taste of those dog biscuits? And he goes, rough. Now, if time and chance and matter equals man and the whole universe, then man is a machine, okay? He is a machine. I mentioned earlier the IBM card thing, you know, the kids begin to march. Matter of fact, Timothy Leary and others said, society has programmed you to run like a rat in a maze. And he offered a famous formula which became almost the battle cry of the hip movement in the 1960s in Europe and the U.S. and other countries. And it went something like this. And here's what Schaeffer sums it up. Using the thought of Soren Kierkegaard and others who said that true faith doesn't lie in this area at all. Faith is a fragile flower crushed by reason. If you think at all, that's what you're going to wind up like. So they did what the man did who read somewhere that cigarette smoking causes cancer. And he was shocked by it because he was a smoker and so he decided he must do something about it. And he gave up reading. What society did, kids said, wait a minute, if I think, I'll become a machine, but I don't feel like a machine. There are non-machine things. See, you might believe that you're a machine. Here you are, you're a scientist. I'm a bag of chemicals reacting to my environment. Then your girlfriend walks in. She kisses you. You have to say, this is a chemical reaction. See, it's very hard to live like that. When you hang your coat up and you leave your lab and you go back home to your girlfriend, how do you live like that? Stephen Turner, the Christian who writes for a lot of magazines like Rolling Stone and others, he has this neat poem. My love, she said to me, when you get right down to it, we are nothing more than a machine. So I chained her to my bedroom wall for future use. And she cried. People might think that they're machines. Here's another one. Another one of Stephen Turner's poems. It's not an exact quote, but it's a clip from a British, like a Times or something report of a group of young thugs that just totally beat to death some old people. And the title is called Animals. And it just picks up this little clip from this Times report. Animals. They were just like animals. And then he's got this little line and it says, my biology teacher taught me that. See, the consequences of that are really devastating. Man has been put into the machine. He's not man anymore. The things that make him human, that make him feel like his life's worthwhile, are all under the line. He can't think about it. Now, why is he pushed like that? Because he's departed from biblical absolutes. He's pulled out from a biblical view of the universe, which has a created God behind this thing. And we'll look at the creation and evolution thing as a separate distinctive thing when we come back to answering these areas. But you can see that if you're a thinker and you buy that as your glasses, your mindset, your paradigm, your way you view the world, and you think at all, you get pushed out into this in one form or another. A whole bunch of kids who were thinkers. These kids were Harvard and Oxford and Cambridge type people. They dropped out. And they said there's something wrong with thinking. That was the electric Kool-Aid acid trip. That was one flew over the cuckoo's nest. And they said basically this. True meaning. See, if you think, you come up to this. So maybe true meaning, true humanity, lies in not thinking. Maybe true meaning lies in abandonment of all reason. So I'll call this thing up here the theelist. And if you want to, you can put a fancy name on it. The existentialist. Now don't ask me to define this because an existentialist can't, so why should I? Existentialism in all its various forms of philosophy is basically based on experience and not on content. There's all kinds of, you know, some of them angst. But a simple way of telling you that, it just goes like this. In the early, in the late 60s, the Beatles did some songs. And there was a whole album. And here's what one of the songs sounded like. Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye. Crab a lock of fishwife, pornographic priestess. Boy, you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down. I am the Eggman, they are the Eggman. I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob. Now, some parent, turning between the two classical stations they normally listen to, who came across this, I am the Eggman, they are the Eggman. I am the walrus, goo goo goo joob. What in the fat is that? You see, if you try to handle that song on the basis of this, your brains will blow. What in the fat are they talking about? What does it mean, crab a lock of fishwife? What does... You see, this song is not to be handled like this. It is to be handled like this. For instance, if I say to you, yellow matter. What do you feel? Yellow matter custard. Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye. It's a series of words that create an image that you... Of course, you may be able to draw this one, but what about the next one? Crab a lock of fishwife. Pornographic priestess. They have no necessary connection with fact, but they create another image. What about this one? Here come old flat top. He come grooving up slowly. He got juju eyeballs. He want holy rolly. He got hair down to his knees. Got to be a jokey. Just do what he please. Come together. Beatles song. See, the Beatles were philosophers. They were not just musicians and songwriters. They were people who interpreted the runaway thought forms of their time into simple things. Here's another one, much more well known. Neil Diamond sang this. I am, I said. I am, said I. You know, LA's fine, but I don't know how New York's done, but it ain't mine, see. And then, no one was there to hear, not even a chair. Why would a chair listen anyway? Now, you may not understand that on this level, on the thinking level, but you can feel it, that loneliness, that sense of foreboding, of there's nobody there in the universe. Nobody listens. See, you can get this when you're nine years old. You can sing the song and like it. When you get to be in college, you know, X years later, and you studied the philosophy, you go, I've always believed that. Now, you picked it up on that basis when you're a little kid. See, this thing, and if I played you, music is one of these areas, you don't have to even have logical lyrics, you don't even have to have lyrics to experience something. For instance, if this room was dark, and I got on the piano, and I played some chord, and the bottom of everybody's hair would stand on end. And if I, and it'd create a different feeling. You understand that, and if you watched a tv program and turned the sound off, you never know when a guy's going to get killed. You can always tell when you turn the sound off. Normally you just see the guy fall over. You go, what happened to him? You see that the music can create things without the thinking. Here are other things where you don't have to think to experience. Drugs. You don't have to think a lot to put a chemical in your mouth. Or to put your head in a bag with a controlled substance in the bottom of it. Or to scrape a line with the edge of a bill and go pffft. It doesn't take a vast amount of philosophy. Another one would be sex. Sex doesn't require a vast amount of thinking. Maybe you have to be athletic, but not a thinker. Music we've already mentioned. Now we could add to this one Eastern philosophies that we mentioned earlier. Transcendental meditation was one. We could put in other thought forms, other methods of raising your consciousness. But you see the common element here is that the thinking, this bottom world, is being divided off from this top world. You can't think and feel at the same time, at least not without being pushed out to here. Machines don't feel those things. Machines aren't human. There's a great fight on now in the area of computing for the fifth generation computer. What they're trying to do is get machines that think like people. That they can talk to. The fifth generation computer you're supposed to be able to speak to and it speaks back to you and it can actually make decisions like a human being. The whole study is what they call artificial intelligence, AI. They're trying to discover how the human mind works so that they can duplicate that in electronics. It's an incredibly complex thing. They thought it was simple when they started. Matter of fact, they have put out translation computers, which is a fairly elementary and simple thing and I believe that by the end of the 1990s you'll be able to have instant translation systems. You've seen the little things now? You can type a phrase in in English and it will speak in the language that you've programmed into it. You put a Spanish thing in or a German ROM in it or a French ROM in it and you can type out a sentence in English and it will speak in that language of choice. Now by the end of the 1990s, it's only a memory and speed thing. You should be able to speak into a device, put it online in a microphone, it'll come out a microsecond later in French or in Spanish or whatever. The early ones were fun. They had a monstrous big one, an American or English to Russian computer and there were some problems with it. They put in this phrase, the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. But it came out in Russian, the winers are right but the meat is bad. So there are some contextual problems within that thing. But can you see, the key point of this whole thing is that the way you get from here to here is by a jump that leaves behind the mind. Franz Schaefer called this the leap of faith to cross the line of despair. Under this is nothing but despair, you see that? There's no hope under here. Man is a machine, there's nothing in the universe, on top of that we'll probably blow ourselves up. There's all that awfulness under there. So to get out of that despair, you make a jump and that jump is not with the mind. It is not an intelligent leap, it is one that lays aside rationality. Writers like Hermann Hesse and Steppenwolf and others. He not only did a story on the Buddha, he also did one on Siddhartha. He also did Steppenwolf and there was a thing called magic theater, the price of admission is your mind. And you walk into this thing with the doors and each door is a whole bunch of experiences. It's an insanity world. As a matter of fact, the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, the underlying premise of that is that the really sane people are in silence. That's why he went in there, see? Didn't get out. But, can you see this, if it is true that the only way you can really find meaning in humanity is by abandoning rationality, then true meaning lies in madness. And that was one whole division of existentialism. Now we could call this faith in faith, if you like, or faith in whichever way kids chose to make their jump. In the 1960s, slightly earlier in Europe, kids chose to make that deprogramming thing in different ways. Some of them tried all of them. They tried Eastern religions, they tried drugs, they tried sex, they tried music. All of them were ways to say, I'm a human being, I'm important. The dress they wore in those days, see, everybody wore blue jeans, right? That was the mass production thing. But what they did try to do was this. On the streets in those days, you could buy, if hippies made anything, you could buy from them things made of glass, or metal, or ceramic, or bone, or leather, or, you know, all kinds of stuff. The one thing you'd never buy off any self-respecting hippie was anything made of plastic, because to them plastic was a description of a mass production society. And this is how you make a plastic toothbrush. You'd... No R, there's no beauty, there's just... You want a different color? We put purple. Something like that. And that was the society to them. It was just... So plastic was a description of everything under there. So they wore jeans to say, hey, I've conquered, see, they kept the price tag on them. I've conquered this society. And then everybody tried to do something unique. They had their own belts. And the first time I went out witnessing in New York City, I ran into a guy who was dressed in the leopard-skin suit. And I mean with the teeth, and the ears, and the tail, and everything, man, and two earrings on like hula hoops. That was the first guy I met in Greenwich Village. And here I'd just come from New Zealand, where we have a murder once every 10 years. And I'd never even seen a demon-possessed sheep. And I go straight into Greenwich Village to minister. And my eyes get about this big, you know. The second guy I witnessed too was a guy who had just consumed an entire sugar cube full of acid. It was coming out in sugar cubes in those days. And I sat down, and he sat down, you know, and he looked at me. And I, you know, I didn't know, how do you begin a conversation? Have you ever heard of the four spirits of the Lord? What are you going to do? So I started trying to talk to the guy, and he just kept, you know, looking like this. I kept looking behind me in case he saw something, you know. And finally, I said, this is five minutes, I'm trying to, you know, it's kind of weird when people just look at you like this. And I finally said, I was getting a bit ticked off. I didn't know what to say to the guy. I didn't know anything about drugs. So I was from New Zealand. We used to have kids eat aspirin. And I said, do you know anything about God? You interested in God? He said, God? And I thought, wow, communication, you know. And then he said, I am God. I don't think I did very well that night. But I mentioned Timothy Leary earlier. Leary understood this. He actually wrote books, entire volumes of books. Politics of Ecstasy was one of them, in which he believed that drugs, in this case acid, would be the key to finding the meaning of man. And he actually made it into a sacrament in those days. He thought of himself as the high priest of a whole new society and gave out wine and acid as part of a communion service. And he did it in New York, he did it all over the world. His thing was, society's programmed you running like a rat in a maze. The only way you can get out of that maze, and he gave his famous formula, tune in, turn on, drop out. And it was, become aware of what is happening to you. Use chemicals to deprogram yourself and get right out of the culture. And they dropped out by the hundreds of thousands. And that created the hip movement. Now what happened is that kids went out in the streets and they heard little 14-year-old girls, sometimes 12, 11, 10, they heard songs like Again the Beatles, She's Leaving Home. She gets up very early in the morning and then she heads out and her parents come in the morning and she's gone. And there's this little thing parents say, We gave her most of our lives, sacrificed all of our lives. And then it goes, She's leaving home after living alone for so many years. And they heard songs like, If you go to San Francisco, gentle people with flowers in their hair. All across the nation such a strange vibration, people in motion. There's a whole generation with a new explanation, people in motion. And they went thinking, Oh, they'll be beautiful, there'll be flowers and dancing in the sun and all of this stuff. And unfortunately when they got there, a huge chunk of them found that it didn't work there either. Do you remember H.G. Wells' novel The Time Machine? In it the time traveler goes into the future and he finds man has been split into two different kinds of race. The first group he meets he really likes, they're called the Eloi. And they're beautiful childlike innocent people and they dance in the sun but they don't seem to be able to have their act together. He doesn't know how they get clothes or food or anything. They seem to get their food from these wells which they're very scared of. So he goes down the well and he finds the other half of humanity. They're called the Morlocks and they eat Eloi. Underground are the thinkers and they are the ones who run the machines. On the top is what's left of humanity. It's a statement of what has happened to our world. All right, let's quit, time's gone.