Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
thinks that there's a beginning and an end to a relationship, and
one has to really get to know someone before they feel connected
and all that, which doesn't mean that when I first meet someone I
don't… there isn't a social greeting, so to speak, hi, how do you do,
my name is etc. There's a respectful, say like social formalities,
respectful formalities in our game that we live in.
WIZARD: So connection assumes not being connected.
NORIO KUSHI: Yes.
WIZARD: Duality is built into it?
NORIO KUSHI: Yes. Another way of illustrating the phantom self
and its inability to see this or feel this, if one imagines there's a
zebra sitting in the room, okay. Does that make the zebra real?
No, it's an idea in thinking that you're imagining a zebra in the
room. Now can this zebra feel connection, can it feel love? Well,
you know, it's just an idea in the mind, so of course it doesn't exist
in that realm of feeling. So likewise, the phantom self is an idea in
the mind which we think is who we are, and in the same way an
imaginary zebra sitting in the room is not going to exist in the
arena of love, and peace, and relationship, and the phantom self in
the mind cannot experience these things either.
TRIP: We've got a question for you. Courtney says hi to Norio.
And she says, "Does no meaning to anything mean none of us has
a purpose in life?" [Laughs]
NORIO KUSHI: That's a great one. In a sense one can say that
there's no purpose, but that sounds rather dark or whatever. The
answer that I really want to give is once one realizes that the
phantom self is an illusion, one wouldn't have asked that question
[Laughs]. The purpose is…
WIZARD: It's a Mystery.
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