It's curious how, past the middle of the 20th century, there's a very strong evidence of a revival in Western philosophy
 of what used to be called idealism, not in the moral sense but in the metaphysical sense.
 That is to say, of the feeling that the external world is in some way a creation of the mind.
 Only we come to this point of view with very different assumptions than were held by people like Hegel or Berkeley or Bradley,
 the great idealists of the European metaphysical tradition.
 And probably rather more akin to similar trends in Buddhist philosophy, emerging from India about 400 AD.
 The difference of approach, the difference of the way in which today this thing arises,
 and the way in which it arose in the thought of a man like Bishop Berkeley,
 is that the new idealism has a kind of curiously physical basis.
 When one would argue, everything you know is in your mind, and the distance, the feeling of externality between you and other objects and people
 is also a content of consciousness, and therefore it's all your consciousness.
 This of course created all sorts of weird feelings.
 Are things there when I'm not witnessing them all? Is there anybody else there?
 Or are you all my personal dream?
 And one has only to imagine a conference of such people, of solipsists, those who believe that they alone exist,
 arguing as to which one of them is really there, to make the whole idea rather laughable.
 And furthermore, there seemed to be no clarity in such philosophical thinking as to what the term "mind" or "consciousness" meant.
 It had long associations with the miasmic and the gaseous, by way of images.
 Mind and soul and spirit were always vague and formless.
 And matter, by contrast, was very rugged, craggly.
 And how these two ever influenced each other, nobody ever could decide.
 Because all properly behaved ghosts walk straight through brick walls without disturbing either the bricks or the ghost.
 And so how can a mind incarnate in a material body move that body in any way? This was always a puzzle.
 So people began to think that the differentiation between mind and matter was of no use.
 Because actually what happens in making such a differentiation is that you impoverish both sides of it.
 When you try to think of matter as mindless or mind as immaterial, you get a kind of a mess on both sides.
 It's the same way when you get a mystic who's not a bit of a sensualist, and a sensualist is no wit of a mystic.
 Such a sensualist is boring. Such a mystic is a fanatic. Too spiritual.
 It's the same when we divide the medical profession from the priesthood.
 Both are losers. Not just because they lose their so-called opposite half.
 But the problem is when you separate a doctor from a priest, you do more than create a specialization out of what was originally one field.
 You create two specializations.
 Because a priest-physician is more than a priest plus a physician.
 By having, as it were, the binocular vision from medicine and from religion.
 He just doesn't see two added areas.
 He sees the area in three dimensions as a result of this combination.
 In a similar way, when we have the concepts of mind and matter, working separately, both are impoverished.
 Mind becomes vague, kind of a gas, psychic gas, and matter becomes mere stuff.
 But you see, what has enabled us to make a transition is,
 first of all, above all I would say, two sciences.
 Biology and neurology.
 Because through biology, and to some extent physics, the method of physics has shown us
 that the idea that man can be an objective observer of an external world,
 that is, not himself, so that as it were he can stand back from it and look at it and say, "What is out there?"
 We see that this cannot be done.
 We can approximately do it, but we cannot really and fully do it.
 For two reasons.
 One, the most important reason, is that the biologist will show us very clearly,
 there is no way of definitively separating a human organism from its external environment.
 The two are a single field of behavior.
 And then furthermore, to observe something, either simply by looking at it,
 or more so by making experiments, by doing science on it, you alter what you're looking at.
 You cannot carry out an observation without in some way interfering with what you observe.
 It is this that we try when we're watching, say, the habits of birds,
 to be sure that the birds don't notice us that we're watching.
 To watch something, it must not know you're looking.
 And of course, what you ultimately want to do, is to be able to watch yourself without knowing that you're looking.
 Then you can really catch yourself, not on your best behavior, and see yourself as you really are.
 But this can never be done.
 Likewise, the physicist cannot simultaneously establish the position and the velocity of very minute particles or wavicles.
 And it's in part because the experiment of observing nuclear behavior alters and affects what you're looking at.
 This is one side of it.
 The inseparability of man and his world, which deflates the myth of the objective observer,
 standing aside and observing a world that is merely mechanical, a thing that operates like a machine out there.
 The second is from the science of neurology,
 where we understand so clearly now that the kind of world we see is relative to the structure of the sense organ.
 That in other words, what used to be called the qualities of the external world,
 qualities of weight or color, texture and so on, are possessed by it only in relation to a perceiving organism.
 The very structure of our optical system confers light and color upon outside energy.
 And in this sense then, especially if you want to read a very easily digestible account of this thing,
 you get the book by J.Z. Young called Doubt and Certainty in Science.
 But you see here from a new basis altogether, we have a new answer to the old riddle.
 If a tree falls in the forest when nobody is listening, does it make a noise?
 The answer in terms of modern science is perfectly clear.
 That the falling tree creates vibrations in the air, and these become noise if and only if
 they relate to an eardrum and to an auditory nervous system.
 Just as in ordinary drums, however hard you hit, the drum will make no sound if it has no skin.
 Because sound is not something that exists in the external world.
 Sound is a relationship between vibrating air and certain kinds of biological organisms.
 And therefore it is these organisms which confer what we call sound upon a vibration,
 which in an earless world would make no noise.
 Now you see that is perfectly clear and straightforward.
 But now we can, dare we take certain steps from that?
 Could we say for example that before any organisms existed, there was no world?
 And what we are talking about when we talk about a world prior to the existence of organisms
 is what is called an extrapolation.
 Let me explain extrapolation for a moment.
 Supposing you have a map of Kansas, and you want from the evidence contained in the map
 to guess at what kind of territory lies beyond its edges.
 Well naturally you will extend those straight line roads off and off and off.
 That's the only basis you've got to go on.
 Nothing in the map of Kansas would warn you that a little way west you will encounter the Rocky Mountains
 and that the roads will have to wiggle.
 And still less will warn you that you're going to encounter the Pacific Ocean way out beyond,
 where you can't build any roads.
 So naturally you see extrapolation, we extrapolate from what we know to the unknown.
 And so one might say then, is the existence of a universe before there were any living organisms
 an extrapolation?
 All we are saying is this is how things would have been if we had been around.
 But we weren't, so it wasn't.
 That is a possible argument, although in the climate of opinion today it is one that is not fashionable.
 You must watch out above all for fashion in philosophy, fashion in science.
 There are completely irrational functions that govern what is or what is not a respectable scientific opinion.
 And although there is very careful work done, very valuable and thoughtful experimentation,
 always in the background of this work there are these irrational fashions of what is believable and what is not.
 Many things that we accept today were completely unbelievable.
 We are always coming across this.
 Authoritative pronouncements that no one will ever reach the moon because of uncontrovertible evidence about this, that and the other.
 But nowadays we have swung over perhaps to be a little bit too uncritical.
 And as Norbert Wiener warned in his book "The Human Use of Human Beings",
 we must not take science as a sort of fairy godmother,
 and say well we have all these problems of overpopulation and lack of water and so on,
 but science will solve it, don't worry.
 See that's the other extreme.
 But there are these fashions.
 If I can possibly realize that the way the world is, is evoked by the structure of my organism.
 It is that way. All mountains and suns and moons and stars are the inhabitants of a strictly human world.
 Perhaps insects with their different sense organs have a very different universe, and that is an insect universe.
 This is again, it seems to be a recrudescence of what used to be called the pathetic fallacy,
 which was the attribution of human qualities and emotions to natural phenomena.
 The wind sighs in the trees, and my heart is sad.
 And somebody comes along and says it isn't the wind that's sighing, it's you.
 True and not true. Because you wouldn't be able to sigh if there were no wind.
 And you sighing and wind blowing go with each other.
 I've invented this new word, go with, G-O-W-I-T-H, or goes with.
 It is to replace the idea of causality. Certain things go with each other.
 And sighing wind goes with a same world in which there are human hearts and human emotions.
 And if there were not a world with human hearts and emotions, there would be no wind.
 And if there were no wind, air, there would be no human hearts and emotions.
 It's a transaction, it's reciprocity.
 Every event then in the external world is as dependent on the observer for its happening,
 as for example is a rainbow.
 The sun is shining, and there's moisture in the atmosphere.
 And the sun being at the right angle to the moisture, makes a rainbow.
 And if somebody is there, they see the rainbow.
 That is a mythology, a way of putting things that is acceptable to us in the current climate of philosophical and scientific fashion.
 But I want to put it in another way.
 The sun is shining, and there is a person standing.
 If there were moisture in the atmosphere, there would be a rainbow.
 But there isn't. So there is no rainbow.
 If you want to be fair, there is no rainbow if nobody is watching it.
 And what applies to the tenuous, filmy, luminescent rainbow,
 applies equally well to the hardest rocks, the solidest mountains, and the hottest fires.
 Because all existence is a relationship.
 It's like the skin of the drum.
 If it's not there, no amount of hitting a non-existent skin will produce any noise.
 So you see, energy is, we can see this, energy is relationship.
 We can see the falling fist and the skin of the drum, boing, like that.
 And if there isn't both the falling fist and the skin, no noise, no existence.
 But existence is not only the impact of rocks upon each other.
 Existence requires, always as its third, you can get the rocks knocking, the sun and the moisture,
 the tree crashing to the ground, the sun pouring out electrical energy.
 But none of these things constitute existence until related with the neurological complex.
 But then you have to look backwards and say at the same time,
 the neurological complex belongs to the same world as the sun.
 It's a physical pattern, physical behavior, physical energy.
 But it takes this complexity of pattern to evoke the world.
 You see, this idea is unfamiliar.
 And that's the difficulty of understanding it, that's all. It's a very simple idea.
 But it's an unfamiliar one and it's an unfashionable one.
 Although as I say, this sort of thinking is coming back to us at this time.
 One gets the perfectly uncanny feeling of the world and oneself as simply two phases of a single process.
 Well, as the rainbow metaphor illustrated, we arbitrarily favor an explanation of the triangle.
 The impact of energies in the external world and an observer of this impact,
 which as it were energizes or realizes them, makes them real.
 The difficulty that we have in our prejudice, that it's the two forces out there that are real,
 and the observer is irrelevant to the reality of the situation,
 it's what we're really saying, goes back to the whole notion that man himself is irrelevant.
 Man is conceived as something therefore that is irrelevant in various ways.
 He could be said to be irrelevant because he is a spiritual visitor from another world altogether.
 He could be said to be irrelevant because he's unimportant.
 He makes very little difference to the total universe. He's very small.
 But when you get this kind of thinking, you want to go back and ask,
 "Why do people want to believe that man is irrelevant?"
 When you hear today people's comments on that old myth of man as the head of nature,
 they come back in a very funny way. They say, "Oh, that's the most conceited point of view.
 Man is part of nature."
 Yes, but why is it that the naturalists who think that man is part of nature are always fighting nature?
 Because they don't understand what it means to be the head of nature.
 Every creature is the head of nature in its turn.
 And we all take turns because it's taking turns that makes the world go round.
 Every creature in its turn is the head of nature, because each creature creates the world in its own image.
 And so each creature as a creator of the world is man.
 Man simply means the middle position.
 This is the whole idea of man. The middle, the middle way, the mean.
 And so wherever is the central point, that is the point called man,
 just as you are the center of your universe.
 And as the astrologers explained, that when you wanted to draw the map of the soul,
 you took the center point occupied by the individual organism.
 In other words, a date and a time.
 That gave you a latitude and a longitude.
 And so in relation to that date and time, how was the universe arranged shows the map of the individual soul?
 Because the individual is the whole universe considered from this point of view,
 or focused at this point of view.
 So in like way, the cosmic situation of a bee or a mouse,
 puts that mouse in the position of man when the mouse is considered the center of the universe.
 Now every point in a curved space-time continuum is the center of the universe.
 You can see it, although this is only a metaphor and is not quite the right mathematical and physical description,
 but when you consider the surface of a ball, of a sphere,
 any point on that surface can be the center.
 Just rotate it to what appears to be the front as you look at it,
 and it's the center of the surface of the sphere.
 Any point.
 So in that kind of, if our space is curved like the surface of a sphere,
 then any point on it may legitimately be considered the center.
 And so considered as the center, that is the point called man.
 Although as I say, it may be mouse, it may be ant, it may be insect, anything.
 But this becomes inconceivable and unimaginable
 to individuals who have no experience of themselves as center.
 And people who insist on the idea of being an objective observer,
 of standing outside and watching the individual, the world,
 as a kind of television screen or movie screen upon which there is a distant panorama of passing events,
 that person, by adopting that position, has excluded himself from the feeling of centrality.
 In fact, he rather looks down on the feeling of centrality.
 He says, "That is the egotistic situation. You think you're the center of everything."
 But you know, you may call it all sorts of bad names.
 You may call it the egocentric predicament, but that's the way it is.
 When we see that the degree to which individual behavior is a factor of the whole environmental scene,
 we tend to try and understand that in terms of determinism.
 That the individual organism is helplessly pushed around by and responding to environmental forces.
 But on the other hand, if the relationship between the organism and its environment is transactional,
 it won't be that one-sided.
 If the relationship is transactional, it will be true simultaneously,
 that the individual organism behaves in accordance with the environment,
 and the environment behaves in accordance with the individual organism.
 So if we put that in startling practical terms,
 if you got into a mess, that was what you wanted.
 Well, you say, "I didn't know I wanted it. I certainly didn't think I wanted it."
 No, because that will be true. You didn't want it.
 So long as you refer to yourself only in terms of the conscious spotlight,
 which scans experience bit by bit, and which thinks about it,
 to the degree you identify your own functioning with that alone,
 then you will say, "What happens to you?"
 "Well, I didn't ask for this. It has nothing to do with me. I wasn't responsible."
 Children don't think that they are responsible for being born.
 They blame their parents, not realizing that they can't really separate themselves from their parents,
 that in the measure that, for example, I have sexual desires,
 I can really understand my father's predicament.
 And I couldn't possibly blame him, because actually I was the evil gleam in his eye when he approached my mother.
 You know, I asked for it.
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