Pick up a flower--a beautiful, living, fresh rose. It smells wonderful. It reveals a lovely rhythm in the swirl of its petals, a rich yet dazzling color, a soft velvety texture. It moves and delights us.

The problem with the rose is that it dies. Its petals fall; it shrivels up; it turns brown and returns to the earth.

One solution to this problem is to ignore the real rose and substitute a plastic one, one that never dies (and never lives). But is a plastic rose what we want? No, of course not. We want the real rose. We want the one that dies. We want it because it dies, because it's fleeting, because it fades. It's this very quality that makes it precious. This is what we want, what each of us is: a living thing that dies.

You are the final authority. Not me. Not the Buddha. Not the Bible. Not the government. Not the president. Not Mom or Dad. You. No community of philosophers, scientists, priests, academicians, politicians, or generals--no school, legislature, or parliament, or court--can bear responsibility for your life, or your words, or your actions. That authority is yours and yours alone. You can neither get rid of it nor escape from it.

Of course, you can pretend to give up this ultimate authority, or ignore it and act as if you haven't got it, or try to give it to someone else. But you haven't really gotten rid of it. You gave your authority to someone else. You chose to deny or ignore that authority. You made the decision to lie to yourself, to pretend that you lack this authority.

Right speech doesn't rely on judgment or discriminative thinking. In judging we weigh everything out. We base our speech on some conceptual frame that we've arranged to accommodate ourselves and process ideas--like, for example, that the Gestapo are inherently bad, and the people upstairs are inherently good. This is precisely the thinking that got us into trouble in the first place. Indeed, it's the very thinking that produces both the Gestapo and the fugitives.

Instead, we have to simply see the situation in all its pain, conflict, difficulty, and contradiction, and see how it is we become so confused. Then, and only then, can we speak and act in a way that's conducive to awakening.

In many ways, we create a bigger problem when we put people on a pedestal in our speech than when we cut them down. Whenever we make anyone--a minister, a teacher, an athlete, a genius, our ancestors, the Buddha--bigger than life, it's easy for both you and your listener to forget that the person you're discussing is a human being. And with the passing of time, the person will only become larger until, like Paul Bunyan, they're sixty ax-handles high.

We tend to bunyanize the people we admire. But this is very dangerous--particularly if your hero is a teacher of the buddha-dharma. You'll forget that you're made of the very same stuff they are. You'll forget that, like them, you're completely equipped to see Truth right here, right now.

If you keep putting an enlightened person (or, more accurately, your concept of "an enlightened person") on a pedestal, you'll miss this critical point, and get lost in confusion. As long as you think enlightenment is something special, you won't wake up.

I remember hearing a fellow talking about the Nazi doctors on the radio. He described these people as monsters, subhuman. It's true, of course, that we human beings have done monstrous things. But none of is anything other than human. Indeed, it's because we're human that we are capable of such monstrous actions. If we don't realize this--that every sadistic murderer is human, like us--then we overlook the fact that we have the capacity to act as they do.

We have to realise what we are. That range of what is human is vast, ranging from the saintly to the monstrous. When we speak of other human beings as if they somehow do not belong to our species, we ignore the reality of our very nature.