We will begin by refreshing memories as to what went before.
 In discussing the theme of the Joker, I have been talking about a point of view, the Joker's
 point of view, from which not only our social institutions, but also all the formations
 of the natural world are seen as games.
 Be careful of the word "game."
 It doesn't mean as trivialities, because when we say "it's just a game," this often means
 it is just trivial.
 There can be important games, as when we play the piano or musical instruments, we are not
 necessarily doing something frivolous, but we are playing.
 And there is something in the nature of all play that is not serious, but at the same
 time may be sincere.
 And I tried to give you the picture of the multiplicity of natural forms on the one hand,
 and of human social institutions, and all the things that we do and consider important
 and busy ourselves with as human beings.
 I tried to give you the point of view from which these can be seen as games, as things
 being done, as it were, simply for themselves, and not for some ulterior motive.
 And therefore, these games are in a way best played when they are played as games.
 So it's really all right for people to take them seriously, except that they are a little
 bit deprived.
 They are missing something.
 And so when the joker sees a person taking his life seriously and regarding himself as
 extremely important, there is something a little bit funny about it, and he is inclined
 to get the giggles.
 And it's all he knows, that the very intensity of seriousness with which the individuals
 concerned are taking these games will be a kind of foil for the subsequent bursting into
 laughter when he sees that it wasn't serious after all.
 You see that?
 You might say there are these classes of people.
 There are the very far out people and the very far in people.
 Now ordinarily we say someone's very far out when they are oddballs, when they are exceedingly
 unconventional.
 But I want you to turn the picture round and look as a conventional person, look at a square
 as a person who's very far out.
 That is to say, he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost.
 He doesn't know where he started from and he thinks he's there.
 But he's completely lost, because he is actually under the cover of his assurance of his status,
 of his position in society, he's really a very anxious person.
 I said a lot yesterday about the way in which our society shows anxiety because it cannot
 permit the existence of people who don't belong.
 And it cannot really permit the criticism of laughter.
 It cannot permit the presence of the old-fashioned court jester.
 Because these people are so far out.
 They are so involved and from a certain standpoint, you see, from the joker's standpoint, he
 doesn't condemn such people, he rather congratulates them on their heroism for getting so lost
 and involved.
 But to keep the far out people from going quite insane, there have to be far in people.
 And the far in people are those who keep contact with the original goings-on behind the scenes.
 They are like the prompter in the theatre, where there are the actors out on the stage
 relying on their memories, etc., and they're supposed to get completely involved in the
 play.
 But there's a concealed prompter with the script in front of him.
 And he is the connection of the actor on the stage with the green room behind the stage.
 And you see, in this dramatic analogy of the universe, the green room is the central point,
 the still point of the turning world.
 The green room is how God is when he's back home, not involved in all these games, and
 takes off the mask.
 See, on the Hindu theory that everybody is a mask of God, like a wonderful line in one
 of Chesterton's poems, "And now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, where
 move in strange democracy the million masks of God."
 The million masks of the Joker, because the Joker is the player, the trick player, who
 plays ultimately the great trick on himself.
 So really, there can be no resentment about this.
 Nobody to blame, nobody to turn around to in the end and say, "You, you bastard, you
 did this to me!"
 Because it's always you who are ultimately responsible.
 So this prompter, you see, keeps the actor on the stage in touch with the green room.
 And so there are certain people in the world who might be a kind of a priesthood sometimes,
 although priesthoods are apt to become corrupt and square, but a kind of people in the know.
 There always has to be somebody around in the know, so that, as it were, the wheel of
 society and of existence, the wheel of the squirrel cage, the wheel of the rat race,
 can have an axle firmly planted.
 And at the center, then, there have to be the far-in people.
 So this is the domain of Jokers.
 Now, having developed that side of the Joker, the person who sees through the social institutions
 as games, I went on in the second session to discuss another aspect of the Joker as
 the sly man, in comparison with the monk, the fakir, and the yogi, who undertake all
 those three, undertake in certain different ways, disciplines which have the intent of
 releasing them from their karma.
 The individual, in other words, challenges his involvement, his attachments, his limitations,
 his finitude, and endeavors to overcome it.
 But in each of these three cases, the individual involved stirs up an immense opposition, because
 he serves notice upon the devil, or shall we say, upon his karmic creditors, that he
 is about to leave town.
 And so all the creditors come rushing to the door, all his past sins catch up with him,
 and the devil lays his temptations in the way all the more thoroughly, so that the sly
 man is the one who, when he is going to leave town, does so instantaneously, without any
 prior announcement.
 And so in this way there is, shall we say, a cunning manner of becoming a Buddha, and
 that is to become one instantly, without any preparation or warning whatsoever.
 This is why Zen is called the sudden school, and why Satori is a sudden awakening, because
 it has to be done without the slightest warning.
 Now, but then I pointed out that the moment you have any idea about doing this, you've
 already ceased to be sudden.
 That is to say, the moment you seek for some spiritual attainment, which is becoming a
 Buddha, becoming awakened, becoming released, getting in there, you've already served notice
 upon your creditors.
 So that somehow or other you find that you have to do it without intending to do it.
 And that is a double bind, which you impose upon yourself when you say, "I must find a
 way of doing this spontaneously."
 That's the old, old basic double bind.
 You must be spontaneous.
 You are commanded, or you command yourself to do something which is acceptable only if
 it happens spontaneously.
 Then you think about that and say, "Well, well, well, what a fix that is.
 Where am I saying, 'I must be surprised, and I'm going to lay plans to surprise myself.'"
 So by going through this, you discover naturally that that can't be done.
 You can't surprise yourself on purpose, yet that's what you have to do.
 So what about it?
 You come to a state of total paralysis.
 You're stuck.
 The one thing that is terribly important to be done can't be done.
 It has to happen, it really does, if you're earnest about this.
 You want to get out of the trap.
 But you can't do anything about it, either actively or passively.
 But then as you begin to see what you are doing all the time, you notice a very odd
 fact, which is that you can't help being spontaneous.
 If I say to you, "Good morning," and you say, "Good morning," what is that?
 Did you plan this answer?
 Did you make preparations to grow your hair?
 Do you make decisions about having blue eyes?
 You see, about breathing, is this all planned, about beating your heart?
 And what about your thinking?
 Even if it's very blocked thinking, even if you feel from a certain point of view that
 you're all mixed up, what is going on anyway?
 You see, you can't stop it.
 It's like trying to, we were discussing the Gurjev thing yesterday, the self-remembering
 exercise, the attempt to live completely in the present.
 Well, that's not only a Gurjev idea, that's a very ancient yoga and Buddhist discipline,
 to be completely here and now.
 But of course, as you pursue this, you discover you can't do it, because you couldn't even,
 you know, know when to go shopping unless you made plans and started thinking about
 the future.
 So you couldn't move.
 But then you discover, you see, that in the long run, there's nothing to think about except
 the here and now.
 There really isn't anything else.
 Because even when you make plans for the future, and you remember the past, you're doing it
 all in the present, your memory is a present activity, there's no way of not being self-remembering
 and having presence of mind.
 So when you discover that, there's nothing left to you but to have a good laugh.
 Well now, I want to develop, to a greater extent, something I only touched on yesterday
 afternoon when we were discussing anxiety and laughter and the relationship between
 the two.
 I suggested that anxiety and laughter are really the same phenomenon, but seen from
 different points of view.
 As we all know, we can have shadows of horror and shadows of delight, tears of grief and
 tears of joy.
 And it's the same shadows and the same tears in either case, but they have a completely
 different meaning.
 Now life is a matter of oscillation.
 Light is vibration.
 It's "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the whole time and all the
 way through."
 The question is, "How are you going to interpret that?"
 Is it "Tremble, tremble, tremble" or is it "laugh, laugh, laugh?"
 That's the great thing.
 And sometimes it's one, sometimes it's the other.
 So the whole thing of the Joker is that he comes into being, as it were, at the point
 when the anxiety interpretation of the trembling becomes the laughing interpretation.
 We were talking about monks who had skulls in their cells to remind them of mortality.
 And we think a grim thing, the skull is a grim thing.
 But Chesterton had the poem about the skull, "Chattering finch and water-fly are not merrier
 than I.
 Here among the flowers I lie, laughing everlastingly.
 No, I may not tell the best.
 Surely, friends, I might have guessed, death was but the good king's jest, it was hid so
 carefully."
 So you can see the skull, not as a grim thing, but as a laughing thing.
 It's all that's left of a human being.
 And all the surface is peeled off, and nothing but this beautiful bone remains.
 It laughs.
 Now why?
 What is it about death being a jest?
 We discussed the problem of the zebra.
 You remember?
 Whether a zebra is a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes.
 And of course, you can see it either way.
 And you can argue till all is blue about which side is right.
 And let's suppose that a black horse is a horse of ill omen, even though striped with
 yellow.
 And a yellow horse, a horse of joy and good omen, even though striped with black.
 This is our eternal problem.
 We are in the state of egocentric consciousness, firmly convinced that death is a threat.
 We are so convinced of this, even though individuals may say, "Well, I'm not really afraid of death.
 What I'm afraid of is dying in an unpleasant way."
 Nevertheless, since almost all moralists and people concerned with ethics seem to agree,
 whatever their differences of opinion, that survival is a good thing, in some sense, if
 not survival in this body, even the people who would rather be dead than red, firmly
 believe that that is true because they believe there is a hereafter where they can go and
 where they can be rewarded for the courageous stand against evil which they have taken.
 You see?
 There is still some kind of insistence on the value of survival.
 And we all cling to this idea of survival with tremendous passion.
 But we have been fooled because survival is an important ideal only so long as you have
 bothering you the bugbear of death, that the world might stop altogether and that your
 death, so far as you are concerned, is curtains forever.
 And that is really the bogey.
 You see, that's all very well to rationalize and say, "No, it's not death I'm afraid of.
 It's the pains of death."
 But if you think about it deeply, there are several stages in thinking about it deeply,
 the first stage is the real horrors of endless night, of the futility of the whole conception
 that one's own life, or indeed the whole life of the cosmos, might be nothing but a flash
 and beyond that, nothing.
 Nothing, nothing in all directions.
 When for example we think of the physicist's idea that the universe is running down, that
 all energy is seeking a stable state, supposing for example, to give an illustration of what
 they mean, I have a jar of black pepper and a jar of salt and I pour them together into
 another jar and I can see the white salt and the black pepper fairly well delineated.
 Then I start shaking the jar and slowly, slowly, slowly the black and the white disappear into
 a grey.
 That can never be sorted out again into black and white.
 In this sort of way, as things go on, the universe, they say, tends to attain a stable
 state to run down, run down, run down until that's the end.
 And nobody knows how it could possibly start all over again.
 But I always say, and I feel it's in a sort of funny, intuitive way, that what happened
 once can happen again.
 If this world started at some time, supposing there was a colossal explosion which set all
 these galaxies flying out, then what existed before that explosion must surely have been
 something like the stable state to which we shall run down in the end.
 And if it went bang once, there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't go bang again.
 I suppose there are temperaments in logic.
 I have a temperament whereby I just cannot, I mean it seems to me absolutely basic that
 what happened once can happen again.
 But there are other people who so cherish the unique that they can conceive the idea
 of something like existence happening only once.
 But you see, something that happens only once doesn't happen at all.
 What happens if a given sound consists of only one vibration?
 What is the upcrest of a wave apart from the downcrest?
 Can you conceive that?
 That's the same koan as what is the sound of one hand.
 You see, it always takes two.
 You can't have a purely left-sided person.
 Imagine.
 So in this way, just as you can't have just one vibration, I mean it's like the saying
 the greatest strength of mind is to eat one peanut.
 And so it can hardly be done.
 So there isn't just one vibration.
 And a dip but no da sort of thing.
 You have to have it do more.
 So in just the same way when you magnify this principle, there isn't just one cosmos or
 one big explosion that starts and stops.
 All stopping implies starting.
 Someone just wrote to me, "We haven't parted because we never met."
 So the whole point of saying this is the realization that existence is eternal.
 The going out of existence implies the coming in.
 And St. Thomas had some points here when he said, "There could never have been a time
 when there was not being because if there had been a time when there was nothing, there
 was nothing in nothing to produce something."
 But he didn't quite have the point because what he didn't see was that nothing is productive
 in the sense that you can't have nothing without something.
 They go together.
 And all this thing is an argument again about whether the zebra is yellow striped black
 or black striped yellow.
 And what we see is that the black and the yellow, the darkness and the light, are simply
 two phases of the same.
 And that realization is exactly what transforms anxiety into laughter.
 Simply to see that you just, after all this anxiety, that you don't have anything to worry
 about.
 Now that doesn't mean that there will not, in our future, lie some extremely painful
 experiences or experiences that we would ordinarily interpret as horribly painful.
 We may all die of ghastly diseases or of radiation burns or of unimaginable things.
 But look here.
 I very briefly touched on pain yesterday and the way pain is interpreted.
 If you interpret pain as something that is destroying you and is going in the direction
 of total death, then it's very serious indeed.
 And it's perfectly terrifying.
 But I've been investigating experiences of people who have undergone torture.
 I don't know if anybody in this room has, it's always possible.
 But, and then if so, you can correct me.
 But the worst part of torture is the beginning.
 When of course you're full of all your illusions and all your fears about black and white and
 the terror that black may win.
 But it's said that as torture proceeds, it slowly changes the state of mind of the victim
 to a kind of drunken masochistic giving in to the torture so that it becomes something
 that he cooperates with.
 And that if the torturer notices this, he knows he's through and has to kill him.
 So in other words, there is a point at which pain becomes an experience without having
 a negative interpretation put upon it.
 Becomes in other words converted into ecstasy.
 It simply becomes, you see, a way of going through extraordinarily far out sensations
 which have no meaning.
 If they have meaning, the meaning of threat, the meaning of death looming at the end, and
 you know this is the tearing apart and the destruction of you, then you see it is absolutely
 horrendous.
 But if it has no meaning at all, just transpose yourself into another dimension to illustrate
 it because the dimension I'm talking about is a very tough one.
 But let's go back to a simpler one.
 Let's take sounds.
 Now if you lie down and listen to all the goings on in this area and you will hear planes
 moving and cars and foghorns and all kinds of crazy sounds, you see, people this way
 and that and so on.
 And you can listen to that and find it very interesting, very beautiful.
 But if someone were to do what John Cage does and put you in a concert hall with the expectation
 of hearing music and by having a purely silent playing of the piano compel you instead to
 listen to all the sounds going on around you, you would be shocked and feel that some kind
 of an avant-garde hoax had been perpetrated.
 You see, it depends on the set, on the way you approach the experience.
 Now you can listen to sounds that are ordinarily considered unpleasant in a totally unprejudiced
 way.
 You can listen to discordant musical noises and find them extremely interesting if you
 listen carefully enough.
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