You can listen to a squalling brat and find it musical.
 That this child, I'll never forget waking up one morning and listening to a child whining.
 The child wasn't saying anything, there were no words in it, it was just a plaint.
 It wasn't exactly crying, it was a kind of "ehhhhh" and there was something marvellous
 about it.
 This child's wonderfully articulate protest against some sort of nuisance.
 And so, listening into those things without interpreting them, listening to one's own
 interior frustration and pain in the same way without interpreting it as being on one
 side or the other, on the good side or the bad side, on the black side or the white side,
 is what makes it possible, you see, to transmute these things.
 But you can't do this.
 You can't really, honestly transmute pain into a form of play, a form of weird, far-out
 sensations that are basically just that.
 So long as you fail to see the inner unity of the opposites, so long as you fall for
 the idea that you are nothing more than this particular life, than this particular ego,
 which came from nowhere and is going nowhere, while you remain under that illusion, you
 see, first of all you don't see your identity with everything else that exists.
 Now if death, then, is a joke, I remember the biggest joke on death I ever saw.
 I mention this in my book.
 We visited the Capuchin friars' crypt in the Via Veneto in Rome, some of you may have
 seen it, where there are three underground chapels where everything is made of bones.
 And the altar is made of bones, the pedestals of the altar are all shin bones, and then
 there are piles of skulls, and the decoration of flowers on the ceiling are ribs alternating
 with vertebrae.
 And the vertebrae are the flowers, and the ribs curl this way, curl this way, curl this
 way, the twining stems.
 And the whole thing is bones, and they have even a few intact skeletons dressed in monk's
 robes standing on either side of these altars.
 It's the craziest thing you ever saw.
 And then when you have seen it and you come out, there is a little friar with a beard
 taking your offering at the top of the steps, and he had a funny wicked gleam in his eye.
 And one could see that this was a joke, the whole thing was a joke.
 It was constructed by people who had somehow overcome the fear of death.
 You couldn't possibly have such a thing as that.
 And so I was fascinated by it because I thought that on the day of the resurrection, there's
 going to be a tremendous scuffle, fitting all those bones together and everybody getting
 up the stairs for the last judgment.
 So if it is seen that death is the jest, but the question is, you see, we are so tormented
 by the bugbear of it being the real end, by the imagination of the possibility of being
 in the dark forever.
 Now you really must think this through because it is a pure delusion.
 If you think first of all seriously about annihilation of consciousness, you will realize
 that annihilation of consciousness couldn't possibly be an experience.
 But being in the dark forever could be an experience.
 Supposing you were buried alive and somehow you were immortal, that you had to stay shut
 up in a tomb for always and always and always.
 That would be pretty grim.
 But the annihilation of consciousness is not an experience at all.
 There isn't anything there to be afraid of.
 So if that's what's going to happen, there's nothing to worry about, I assure you.
 But on the other hand, if you think about it longer, about a state of eternal just not
 being at all, you know, you realize that nature abhors a vacuum.
 And that since, just as the universe happened once, it could happen again, since you were
 born once, you know, it did happen really.
 Well it can happen again.
 Only the next you won't remember the one now, just as the one now doesn't remember the one
 before.
 Not because you've forgotten, but because memory is transmitted along certain channels.
 It requires the vehicle of brains, for example.
 It requires books and other records to maintain it.
 But as I pointed out yesterday, the fundamental what-have-you that underlies all this doesn't
 need a memory.
 Doesn't need to store memories.
 And so, just in the same way as you don't need to be conscious of the inner formations
 of your brain.
 Also, I mean, here I'm talking speculatively.
 Also there are curious connections where we don't see any.
 That is to say, the interval between events is not insignificant.
 Just as you don't hear melody unless you hear the interval between tones.
 It's the interval that counts.
 So in the same way, blank intervals between successive manifestations of the universe
 and blank intervals between your forgetting who you are altogether and dying and someone
 suddenly becoming a baby, the blank intervals are not insignificant.
 Every painter knows, every architect knows, that the space around an object or inside
 an object is just as important as the object.
 That again is the fact.
 If you don't notice the importance of intervals and you don't notice the importance of space,
 it is as if you had settled on the carpet here, for the black design being the thing
 and the white background as having no significance.
 So what about the inside of this room?
 What about the shape of space that it encloses?
 We would say this is nothing more than a certain quantity of air.
 But don't you see that the distance, the space between that wall and this window is
 life room, that it's not nothing, that it's just as important, it comes into being at
 the same moment as the walls come into being.
 It connects them and so likewise the space between our planet and other planets is not
 insignificant.
 So once you see that intervals of apparent nothingness are significant intervals, that
 their size makes all the difference to what's happening.
 When the intervals between dits are short, the note is high.
 When the intervals between the dits are long, the note is low or large, the high being little.
 See, why do we say high and low is distinct from little and big?
 Big instruments make big noises, little instruments make tiny noises.
 But at any rate it's the interval that's important.
 So then, once you see the importance of the interval, you have seen that the white is
 as important as the black or the other way round if you want to change your analogy.
 You see how you can switch these analogies?
 In one case the white can be the nothing, the unimportant, whereas the black is the
 mark somebody made with a crayon.
 Or the other way round, the black can be the darkness and the white is the flash of lightning
 that appears in the darkness.
 Change your analogy.
 It's like saying, once we used to say about high matters, you know, high matters, lofty
 thoughts, but now we don't, it's more fashionable to say deep matters and profound thoughts.
 Someone was telling me yesterday in the group here that they were going to an Indian village
 in New Mexico where they had Christianity, but when the speaker referred to Jesus and
 God and so on, he pointed down all the time.
 Because you see, he felt that things grew up like this from below.
 Whereas, of course, the ancient cults out of which the Jewish and Christian religions
 grew had the idea that the life of the sun and the rain came down from the heavens and
 fertilized the feminine earth, which then responded.
 But these things keep changing because you can keep switching your point of view.
 You can see the black as the design against the white background and the white as the
 design against the black background, and you can flip back and forth, back and forth, back
 and forth.
 The more you do that, the more you realize that the pairs go together.
 Flip-floppability is the state of trying not to flip.
 All life is flipping.
 It's called, flip-floppability is the condition of life, this way and that way.
 When you are trying to resist flip-floppability, you're anxious.
 You see?
 When you push against it, it throbs in a way that you interpret as fear.
 In all rigid personalities, people who can't swing, who have no movement in their hips,
 as it were, psychologically, they are resisting flip-floppability.
 But when you understand flip-floppability and that this is the way things are, then
 you laugh, because that is the big flip-flop.
 This morning I was discussing the joke of death, and the principal point that I was
 making was that death and life, or that is to say, in other words, the interval and the
 event, death being the interval between events, between one appearance and another of human
 beings in the same way as winter is the interval between the appearance of the leaves in spring
 and their disappearance in the fall.
 But there is, you see, the chronic fear that the interval may be all that there is, that
 the interval may triumph, and there may be no event.
 And I was trying to show you that there is a polarity between the event and the interval
 between events, in such a way that you can no more have the one without the other than
 you can have the crest of the wave without the trough.
 And this goes on and on and on in endless cycles, where there are small intervals making
 up—small intervals and waves, which group together and make up a set of intervals and
 waves, and they in themselves constitute the crest of a larger wave with a much longer
 trough.
 And then again there comes the group of intervals and waves on a short rhythm.
 And that this thing that goes like, you see, like this, you see, that this thing in its
 turn is the crest of a still greater wave, and that the nature of being is that this
 is the scheme of things.
 But the joke about it, what makes it exciting, is the constant anticipation that there might
 not be anything again after the interval, that it might all come to an end.
 And the real problem, in order to turn death into a joke, that is to say, suddenly to re-emerge
 to recover from this terrible anxiety that it might be finish, and then transmute the
 vibration trembling of anxiety into laughter.
 It is the same thing, only the trembling of laughter is the trembling of anxiety seen
 from a different point of view.
 Now what are the things that are obstacles to our being able to see that?
 It's almost as if life were itself a guru.
 And you know how gurus throw out tests to their students to see if they can pass these
 various initiations, all of which require nerve in the face of some formidable obstacle.
 All fairy stories are full of this.
 And so life itself throws out all kinds of reasons for supposing that we are faced with
 something serious instead of something playful.
 And I want to discuss with you a few ways which in Western history this obstacle has
 been thrown out and how we today are bamboozled by these obstacles.
 In the history of Western civilization there have really been, in the past two thousand
 years, two dominant mythologies.
 One has had a long run and the other has had a fairly short run.
 But they are both ways of terrifying you so that you won't see the point.
 But at the same time they are perhaps not merely negative things, but challenges, barriers
 of the same kind that a guru would offer.
 For example, in the study of Zen, each koan is referred to as a barrier.
 And if you can pass the barrier, you see, you get in, in, in.
 But the function of the teacher is to put the barriers up to see how you will react
 to them.
 So in a way we could say that the two great mythologies which have dominated the Western
 world in the past two thousand years are two barriers.
 The first, of course, is the Christian mythology.
 And in the Christian mythology the individual is made to feel that he is strictly on probation,
 that he does not really belong, that if he is at all a son of God, he is so by adoption
 and grace.
 He isn't really one of the family.
 Let me explore the theology of that a moment.
 In Christian theology, God has only one son, the monogamies, or the only begotten son of
 God, who is the second person of the Trinity, the logos, the divine idea of itself.
 And the Trinity constitutes a family.
 And naturally it's therefore threefold, because all, for the Greek mind, and it was the Greek
 mind that molded Christian theology, meaning entirely depends on the structure of the Greek
 language.
 And Greek, in common with all Western languages, and indeed also Sanskrit, from which it is
 derived, has a sentence structure in which there is the subject, the verb, and the predicate.
 And we can't make any sense without those three things.
 We have to have an "I love you" or an "I know you" sentence for there to be any love or
 for there to be any knowledge.
 There must be the lover.
 The lover can't love without having a beloved, and the lover doesn't relate to the beloved
 without the relationship of love between them.
 So there you have the subject, the predicate, and the verb.
 And so naturally, in Greek ideas, the very inner nature of reality of the Godhead itself
 must be threefold, following the structure of Greek thought and Greek grammar.
 So in this way, the inner life of the Godhead
 is completely self-sufficient.
 There is the Son, the object of God's love, so that God doesn't need any created world
 of finite beings as the necessary object of his love so that he can be love.
 You see?
 So then, the created world is something extraneous.
 It's something that the Lord threw off in a fit of exuberance.
 And although it is very much beloved by him, he doesn't in any way depend on it.
 He in a sense fathered it, but he fathered it out of nothing.
 It had no true mother, and so in a way it's an orphan.
 And the relationship between the creator and the creature in popular Christianity has always
 been the relationship between the king and the subject.
 And the relationship between the king and the subject is very, very strange, estranged,
 because the king, in the archetypes of kingship which existed in the Near East in ancient
 times and upon which this theological imagery was originally modelled,
 the king was really afraid.
 He always appeared in the throne room with his back to the wall.
 He didn't stand in the middle of his people and say, you know, and look around at everybody
 like that.
 He stood with his back to the wall like this.
 It's funny how all altars, Buddhas and things, have their backs to the wall, because there
 you can't be stabbed.
 And you have your guards and your henchmen on either side of you.
 And all the people prostrate themselves, because that way you can watch them all.
 They can't see you and you can see them.
 So you're safe.
 And that's the imagery, you see, which has given us our Western conception of God.
 Of the father, whose children have become a little bit too much for him.
 He's had too many.
 And they have to be kept in their place.
 And so he's a little bit frightened.
 And so the rules are set up.
 You just do so and so and so and so.
 And you must feel grateful for having been fathered.
 You are a miserable worm, and therefore, inwardly, because without me you might not have been.
 You owe everything you have to my having produced you.
 And you are a debtor.
 And because you are a debtor, you have a duty.
 Duty is the same word as debt, debit.
 You owe life to me who produced you.
 Although I won't admit I had a great deal of fun doing it.
 And so you must all crawl.
 Now you see that that conception of our relationship to reality has been the popular idea for centuries
 in the Western world.
 So that you never really knew where you stood with the authority.
 Because the authority gives you the impression that you are so bad intrinsically, that at
 any time you ought to be punished and eaten up.
 And it's only a matter of mercy that you're not being eaten up.
 So the prayers of the Christian church are full of the idea, "Oh Lord, we are not worthy.
 And since it is only of thy great mercy that we continue to survive at all, we humbly beseech
 thee, etc., etc."
 Imagine, going around with that feeling about the nature of reality.
 That it is watching you all the time, that you're always on probation, like a released
 prisoner.
 And therefore there is an all-seeing eye at every moment of the day and night surveilling
 you, much more efficiently than any big brother could watch you through tiny TV cameras in
 your bedroom.
 I know a friend of mine who is a devout Catholic, and in her toilet, but she is different, she
 has a sense of humor.
 And in the toilet, you know it's an old-fashioned one, there's a tank and a pipe coming down
 to the john, and there's a little placard on it with a big "I" painted.
 And in Gothic letters underneath it, it says, "Thou God seest me."
 So always, everywhere, according to this mythology, there is the eye of the paternal judge watching
 you.
 Now what can you do with a situation like that?
 If that's the way things really are, you don't know whether this Lord has a sense of humor,
 and whether you can say to him, "Hey, look, don't take such an advantage of me like that.
 Turn down that light a little, close off your eyes sometimes, you don't need to be all that
 particular.
 You know I can't do anything to you.
 I can't knock you over.
 Why do you need to bug me all the time?"
 The "Ahhhh" sort of attitude is too much.
 And so people couldn't stand it.
 You know, 600 years of it was enough.
 And it became intolerable, really intolerable, because everybody knew they were sinners,
 and that they were doing all the things against the rules in the book, and nobody could possibly
 put up with it.
 So the only thing they could do to relieve themselves of this horrible father figure
 was to make out that the universe didn't have a father at all.
 That it was really an orphan, not even virgin-born.
 It didn't even have a mother.
 In other words, in order to escape from the mythology of a conception of ultimate reality,
 which was much too intelligent and much too nosy, people had to invent a conception of
 the ultimate reality that was completely banal and dead.
 So the second Western mythology is the mythology of the mechanical universe, which is a fluke
 emerging from a process of absolutely blind energy.
 And you must notice the language in which the great thinkers of the 19th century thought
 about the world.
 Freud, for the basic psychic energy, used the word "libido," which in a 19th century
 Vienna was exceedingly uncomplimentary.
 Libido.
 Blind lust.
 And so in the same way, the science philosophers of the 19th century talked about the world
 as being based on brute force.
 Intelligent energy.
 Worked out a conception of man as a really rather unfortunate natural fluke.
 Consciousness, reason, and indeed also the passions and feelings and desires of the human
 heart were nothing but the end product of a roulette wheel of natural selection.
 Thank you.
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