It's a most curious paradox that those philosophers of the 19th century who denied the supernatural
 origin of man and who insisted that man is simply a part of nature, one of the members
 of nature, nevertheless set up a state of alienation between man and nature without
 precedent.
 I am a part of nature, I am something that nature fluked into being, but nevertheless
 this fluke is something that nature doesn't care about.
 It doesn't care about my ego and its future.
 All that is important to nature is the species, the individual is irrelevant.
 At the same time this philosophy arose when we were becoming conscious of the sheer magnitude
 of the universe and it took the first impression of this vastness as a pretext for making little
 of human beings and saying, "What do you matter in this huge cosmos?
 You're just a little fluke.
 You're just a little nothing at all.
 This thing goes way on, on, on, on, on beyond all imagination and therefore man is just
 so much fungus on a rock and a very tiny rock at that."
 In other words, it took the standpoint, "Let's set up a scale between two limits."
 This is the traditional Western opposition.
 On the one end of the scale to the left here you have matter, the inert, the clay put into
 shape by the potter.
 On the other end of the scale you have spirit, which is intelligence.
 And these are what the mathematicians call limits.
 And a limit is something you approach, but you never actually get there.
 Now what the 19th century mythology did was to think of all things towards the limit called
 matter.
 It said in effect, "There is this dead material stuff.
 It is energetic, but the energy is unintelligent.
 It's a kind of roaring mechanical energy like fire or electricity or so on.
 It is not intelligent."
 And everything is really that.
 What we call human intelligence and consciousness are merely complicated forms of this primordial
 energy.
 And they are nothing but that.
 In the same way, we are evolved from lower orders of animals.
 And I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmal globule, Poo-pa says.
 And you know, that's what you really are.
 You're only a complicated protoplasmal globule.
 Now do you see the intent behind this mythology?
 The intent is to deprecate.
 The intent is, as we say now, to put down the human being because the human being felt
 that hitherto he had been put up too far in the wrong way.
 You are a child of God and the Lord loves you very dearly, but, you know, that's just
 insufferable to be put up in that way.
 You have an immortal soul.
 Your life is endless, but it can very well turn out to be a life of endless agony when
 you fry in hell.
 And that was a very serious threat to both Protestants and Catholics.
 And so it's much better, much more comfortable to have a dead universe than a living universe
 so everlastingly threatening.
 So then, the mythology of the 19th century, under which most of us still operate, because
 we operate under it because it has become so plausible, the science out of which this
 mythology arose has been so effective, it has produced such a marvelous splash of technological
 marvels that its point of view, or the point of view of those scientists who started the
 whole thing going, has become amazingly persuasive and convincing.
 After all, if I can reach into your brain with a very, very subtle instrument and I
 can poke about inside and press there and suddenly, and a certain point when I press
 it, a world of memory comes to life so vividly that you see it before your very eyes.
 I remove the instrument, it vanishes.
 I touch another place, you experience intense pleasure, absolutely unbelievable pleasure.
 I remove it, the sensation vanishes.
 Every time I touch inside, you get a sensation externally of intense reality and I say, after
 all I was only just pushing things in your brain.
 You see what a push-button thing you are?
 That's it, I can just poke around and you can see anything, but all that's happening
 is I'm putting a little electrode or something on certain parts of your brain, that's all
 you are, poor fish, you're just that kind of a sensitive sponge inside your head bone.
 All that gets very persuasive, you see.
 And people are therefore in a position, they are prejudiced to favor a mythology that will
 make out that you are after all nothing but something or other.
 Nothing but a kind of a complicated neurological jello.
 And that point of view, as I said, has become enormously convincing.
 It's plausible today, whereas the old point of view of God the Father and all the angels
 isn't plausible.
 That seems kind of weird in relation to what we know about the state of the universe.
 Now what we have to see is that both of these points of view are equally mythological and
 there's no more reason to take one than the other.
 And that what these points of view reflect are nothing other than certain attitudes to
 living.
 Now you see, if you want to live in a way that always is saying, "I think that life
 is disgusting," supposing you want to deny being, then you can always describe it in
 ways that are offensive.
 You can always say, "Playing the violin is just scraping cat's entrails with horsehair."
 That puts it down, and you say, you know, and you say people who play golf are a bunch
 of idiots who go out on a, take a walk and they hit a stupid little ball with sticks.
 Or that people who like music are just a bunch of idiots who sit around and go out of their
 minds listening to a lot of complicated noises.
 See there's always a way of talking about something to make it sound terrible.
 Equally there's the way of talking about something to make it sound great.
 Now what do you want to do?
 Do you want to live your life in such a way that you're always saying to it, "Mm, mm,
 nah."
 You know, do you want to, is that a good way to conduct things?
 Or do you want to live your life in such a way that you say, "Come on, let's go, you
 see, let's swing this thing."
 On the one hand you see, you're always in tension against it.
 Do you remember I pointed out to you this morning that the person who's anxious, constantly
 anxious is the person who is resisting the flip-floppability of things.
 Life is vibrating, it's going blurp, blurp, blurp, blurp, blurp all the time and the anxious
 person says, "God's sake don't do that because, you know, you might do it too much.
 I don't want to blurp like this, it makes me feel nervous.
 Just stop it."
 And so, as he puts his weight on this 'blup blup' he goes 'dhlu*blublublublublblu*blublublublublublu*bludwlu*blublu*blublu*bludu*blublublu*bludwlu*blu*blu*blu*blublu*blu*lublu*blu*blu*like this.
 You see he gets trembling. So instead of him saying 'come on, let's blup, let's go and do this thing'.
 So, in exactly the same way the person who wants to say
 'well, you're nothing but, you're nothing but some kind of chemicals.
 And they're just a lot of, you're a bag of pus and blood, basically with a few bones inside.
 And that person is doing the same thing, you see, as the person who's putting pressure on the flip-flop-ability of things, and so he gets anxious.
 And the person who does this, he wants to say, he's always, look, think about your friends and the people who are philosophical and enthusiastic materialists.
 They're always going to pose themselves as a certain kind of hero.
 After all, you're just a dreamer, but I face facts.
 See, I'm a hard-headed realist.
 And I'm, as a matter of fact, I'm an intellectual porcupine.
 I have my prickles out all over the place.
 Because I'm the kind of person who, in the academic world at any rate, is full of rigor.
 I ask 'what precisely is the evidence about this?'
 And I'm analytical.
 And I'm, believe in, I don't like woolly and vague thinking.
 I like it clear-cut.
 And you can see that porcupine's bristle going right through like that.
 See, well, this is a personality type.
 Who wants to play that role.
 Whose message in saying all this jazz is, I'm the kind of person who is all dry as a bone.
 But I believe that that is strength.
 And that's reality.
 And another kind of person says to him, 'Oh, you are intolerable.'
 'You're so dry, you're so dull, you rattle.'
 'You don't have any juice in you.'
 'And what we need is juice.'
 'And we need flow, we need lilt and rhythm and gaiety, you see.'
 So that's an opposed mythology.
 And that's another character part you're going to play.
 But so we've got to consider these are games, you see.
 As I tried to show you earlier.
 The kind of roles we play are the kind of games we play.
 So, but the question is, which is the optimal game?
 Certainly we can't do without some prickly people.
 Because life is prickles and goo.
 And it's basically gooey prickles and prickly goo.
 But the gooey people are always trying to make out that it's only goo.
 And the prickly people are always trying to make out it's only prickles.
 And we do need both, see.
 But the question is fundamentally which game works better.
 The game that resists the vibration, the flip-flop,
 or the game that goes with it.
 Obviously the game that goes with it, that cooperates with the general scene,
 will be a longer game and a more amusing game than one that totally resists it.
 Although, I don't want to, I said totally, advisedly,
 because it's great fun to resist it at times.
 See, it's just like, um,
 when somebody massages you, you know,
 and they're really expert and those fingers are just vibrating like this on your back,
 you can give and just go, "Woof."
 But it's also fun sometimes to tighten yourself, your muscles against it,
 so as to feel the full impact of this thing, see.
 But what I want to, the real point I want to get across
 is that what seems to us the hard-boiled common sense
 of a mechanistic view of the universe
 is nothing other than a myth.
 You don't have to be taken in by this,
 because there is no more solid argument that that is the way things are,
 than any other argument about any other way things might be.
 Now, it goes like this, you see.
 Again, think of the idea of limits.
 We'll take different limits this time.
 We'll take one limit on the right hand here as consciousness.
 Extreme, lively sensitivity.
 And on the other hand, we'll take the opposite limit,
 which is geological.
 The stone, the blind energy,
 the electrical force without any consciousness whatsoever.
 These are observable things.
 We see the living human being on one extreme,
 and we see the stone or the fire on the other.
 Now, our 19th century mythologist wants to describe this limit
 in terms of this one.
 He wants to say that consciousness is nothing but a very complicated form of minerals.
 Why can't you go the other way,
 and just as easily say, minerals are a very simple form of consciousness?
 That works, doesn't it?
 I mean, after all, here is this mineral.
 I knock it, and it says that to me.
 This is a rudimentary form of consciousness.
 This thing inside is not making a noise to itself, because that requires ears.
 But in some way, this thing is going "yoi yoi yoi yoi yoi yoi yoi" to itself.
 It's shaking like that.
 And that's its consciousness, its response, its resonance.
 It isn't totally unconscious, but its consciousness is extremely simple.
 Now, you may think I'm spinning fairy stories,
 but is that any more of a fairy story than to say that your consciousness is nothing but chemistry?
 I mean, you think you're conscious,
 and that you have this high and mighty state of affairs,
 but actually, of course, if we look at this very realistically,
 all this is just colloidal substances bubbling around.
 See, both that story and the other story can be made to seem equally fanciful.
 But the question is this.
 If I say about the gong, "Look, my friend, I respect you because you are a little bit conscious.
 You relate to me, you're kind of a younger brother."
 And, you know, then there's something endearing and warm about this attitude to things.
 Whereas if I say, "Psst, you're just a piece of metal, and as a matter of fact, I'm just a piece of metal too."
 That's a kind of insult.
 Now, the people who believe that are really suicidal maniacs.
 They want to put themselves down.
 They are against their own life,
 and they take a great pride in being that way,
 and they call it being realistic.
 And I'm only saying it's a better gamble to take it the other way
 and say the best thing you can say about it.
 That this is a living being, but not so much of a living being as a snail
 or something that actually wanders along and wiggles.
 So, you see, the pressure upon us of the whole mythology of the 19th century,
 the whole attitude of putting down the universe because the previous myth had been too uncomfortably alive,
 is simply a way of looking at things.
 Let me give another illustration of the same thing.
 If you study the various forms of life from the standpoint of natural selection,
 you may come up with a rationalization for everything.
 Somebody wants to know, "Why do butterflies have eyes on their wings?"
 Some butterflies.
 Well, somebody scratches his head and says, "Oh, well, there must be an explanation for that."
 There's an explanation for everything.
 Why is there an explanation for everything?
 Because the universe is really a tight engineering job.
 So, why do some butterflies have eyes?
 Well, it so happened that some fluke of a butterfly once got an eye on its wing,
 and birds would avoid it because that eye looked at them and it was just too much.
 So those butterflies that had eyes on their wings bred,
 whereas the butterflies that didn't have eyes got eaten up more easily.
 Although some of them had other alternatives, because of not having eyes, they were invisible and the birds couldn't see them.
 And so more of that kind survived, although those with the terrifying eyes survived,
 and so they didn't get eaten up either.
 So it tended to multiply.
 So this is a perfectly easy, simple explanation of why butterflies have eyes on their wings.
 Of other things, some birds with extraordinary plumages,
 which look so obvious that anybody could catch them, any cat, any hunter.
 No, they survived because they were so attractive to their females.
 And so they bred very well. As a matter of fact, this isn't true, they didn't.
 And, you know, but any explanation will do, provided it seems to explain.
 Now, that is one way of looking at things.
 You can make an extremely consistent theory for the different kind of species,
 of flowers and birds and insects, and all their markings and so on, just why they have them.
 But on the other hand, you can equally well explain it in a completely different way.
 You can say, "It would be exceedingly dreary if there were nothing but one uniform type of life."
 Supposing there had never been anything but amoebas, and they were just globules,
 and they divided, and then they divided again, and then they divided again.
 You know, that could have gone on and it could have been terribly efficient,
 because the minute you went to hit an amoeba, you would strike it,
 but suddenly find you'd killed only one of them because it split just before you hit.
 Isn't that a marvellous arrangement?
 And you know, they could split very fast.
 You could suddenly go at another with two hammers, hoping to catch both amoebas,
 but suddenly they split, split, split, split, and there were eight of them before you knew where you were.
 That would be fine.
 But actually, the reason why there is all this colossal variety,
 and all these patterns on butterflies' wings, is that nature is a poet.
 And is simply having a wonderful time making all this variety, and doing all these various things.
 And that explanation is just as plausible as the efficient explanation.
 You see, for philosophy is to a large extent a matter of taste.
 What sort of explanations suit your personality?
 If you're an anal-retentive type, and rather tight, then you like the efficient explanation.
 On the other hand, if you're an effusive type, you like the poetic explanation.
 But there are, though, beyond that, certain considerations of which of these explanations affords better games.
 And the economic, anal-retentive explanation can give good games up to a point.
 Because there's all the thrill of working out the chains of interconnection,
 all the reasoning, whereby finally you go through all sorts of rational conniptions,
 and explain why the butterfly has a big eye on its wing.
 Fine.
 But where do you end up?
 You end up in a mechanical straitjacket.
 You've got to be careful along the other line of approach that you just don't end up in a morass.
 You could do that.
 So you look for a middle way.
 But the point that emerges from all this is,
 don't be bamboozled into fearing that the black will win.
 Because the white is the only thing there is.
 And the black, the nothing that surrounds it, will eventually engulf it.
 All these are, as it were, nursery stories to terrify children.
 You live in a cosmos where the light of consciousness and the darkness of unconsciousness go back and forth,
 just as the crests and the troughs of the waves.
 And this situation of yang and yin, positive and negative, is exceedingly productive.
 It's like a male and a female who become the parents of all sorts of children.
 And out of yang and yin, black and white, come all these adventures,
 through the original stratagem of pretending that the one is and the other isn't,
 that yang is and that yin isn't.
 Both have equally good arguments on their side.
 And one now wins, and the other now wins.
 Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
 But don't be deceived.
 The two are always together.
 And the thing that you most fear, the awful, awful thing that could happen,
 think it through.
 What could that be?
 What could the very end be?
 What is it that you dread?
 And you'll find out that if you go down, down, down, down, down, down, down, down, into what you dread,
 be swallowed up, be annihilated, let the horrible scorpion, spider mother, the octopus thing catch you,
 and take you down into its inmost guts, what will it do with you?
 Why, it'll transform you into itself.
 And then when you are it, as I said, every creature feels like it's a human being.
 Because after all, that's I.
 So fish, when they've eaten up something, and that thing has become them, you know,
 and then the fish looks around and says, "Gee, that was a good dinner."
 And it feels human.
 And the fish looks around and it sees things that aren't fish, and they look like cows,
 and human beings wandering around there, they look like predatory monsters of some kind.
 Awful looking things.
 Ghastly teeth, and weird, inhumane arms and legs on them.
 Not nice, orderly fins and tails and beautiful scales on the side, like a really good person should look.
 So, you know, this thing of death and of being transformed is where our life reaches a certain point
 where it has to go blub.
 And in the moment you go blub, you forget.
 You lose control, you see.
 That's the sensation, when control is going, you're just on the verge of the crisis where it's going to blub.
 And you say, "Well, where was I?
 Gee, this is strange.
 I'm alive.
 I don't remember where I was before."
 That's the sensation of coming to birth.
 And you grow and grow and you become more familiar with this and more familiar.
 When you're completely familiar, it goes blub.
 And you're new all over again, see, quite different.
 We can never believe, you see, when it gets to the point where we know it's about to go blub,
 we never believe that it will go into life.
 We always think it's going to go into something dreadful.
 But, you see, once you know, it's going to keep flipping.
 And the only thing is to go with that flip.
 See, get ready to go.
 Are you ready? Blub.
 Then you can laugh, because you know there's no way out.
 [BIRDS CHIRPING]
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