BELIEF COMES FROM PERCEPTION

It is worthwhile for individuals, even student and teacher, to have
eye-level relationships. There is a Sanskirt term, kalyanamitra,
which means "spiritual friend." It seems most appropriate that we
relate to each other as friends, rather than as student and master as
such. If we relate to one another as equal persons, the world in
which we relate is also an equal situation. The physical living
situation is the only way to relate with our lives as such. I do not
believe in the mystical world, the ethereal world, the world of the
unseen, unknown or whatever. There is no reason to believe in it,
because we don't perceive it. Belief comes from perception. If
there's no perception of something, we don't believe it. Belief does
not come from manufacturing ideas. There may be millions of arguments
and logics set forth, saying that there is an unseen world that
operates on higher levels of consciousness, a world which fulfills
human concerns, punishes those who don't believe, and so forth. But
from the point of view of physics, that is unreal. I'm afraid I'm not
going to say that there is another world. The world that we live in
is the only world.

From "Work, Sex, and Money," Talk One of an unpublished transcript
of a seminar in Burlington, Vermont, April, 1972.