Don’t you see we have something here?
Which I will call not philosophy
Except in the most ancient sense
Of basic curiosity
Never remember
Your birthday
Or anything you like
Sorry, so helpless
So help you
Anyway you’d like
Take your medicine. (7x)
The following of them does not depend on believing in anything, in obeying
anything, or on doing any specific rituals
(although rituals are included for certain purposes because it is a purely
experimental approach to life)
Never remember
Your birthday
Or anything you like
Sorry, so helpless
So help you
Anyway you’d like
Take your medicine. (7x)
This is something like a person who has defective eyesight and is seeing
Spots and all sorts of illusions, and goes to an ophthalmologist to correct his
vision
Buddhism is, therefore, a corrective of psychic vision
It is to be dis-enthralled by the game of Maya
It is not, incidentally, to regard the Maya as something evil
But to regard it as a good thing of which one can have too much,
and therefore one gets
Psychic and spiritual indigestion-from which we all suffer
When I was a small boy I used to haunt that section of London
Around the British Museum, and one day I came across a shop
That had a notice over the window which said: «Philosophical Instruments.»
Now even as a boy I knew something about philosophy
But I could not imagine what philosophical instruments might be So I went up to the window and there displayed
Were chronometers, slide rules, scales
And all kinds of what we would now call scientific instruments
Because science used to be called natural philosophy
Because, as Aristotle says
The beginning of philosophy is wonder
Philosophy is man’s expression of curiosity about everything
His attempt to make sense of the world
Primarily through his intellect;
That is to say his faculty for thinking