I wonder if it's ever struck you how curious a thing it is that most of the things that
 we experience, we regard as things that happen to us, which we ourselves do not originate,
 which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves.
 And if you consider that, you realize that what you mean by yourself is rather narrowly
 circumscribed.
 Even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of things that happen
 to us in the same way as things that go on in the world outside our skins.
 If there's a thunderstorm or an earthquake, well, it happens to you.
 You're not responsible for it.
 But so in the same way, when you have hiccups, you didn't plan on it.
 If you have belly rumbles, you had no intention of doing it.
 And as to the catastrophic act of getting born, well, you had nothing to do with that.
 And you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in
 which you find yourself.
 And this way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood as something that happens
 to you goes right down to our general feeling about life.
 It goes down to the way in which, as Westerners, we have been accustomed to look at human existence
 as a precarious event in a cosmos that, on the whole, is depicted as being completely
 unsympathetic and alien to our existence.
 In other words, if you are reared with a 20th century, or shall we say an early 20th century
 common sense, which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century, with its rejection
 of Christianity and Judaism, you regard yourself as an accident, a biological accident, in
 a stupid universe, which is mechanical, but has no feelings, no finer feelings.
 A vast, pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur.
 Of course, if you don't have that point of view and you are more traditional, you look
 upon yourself as a child of God, and therefore under authority.
 In other words, there's a big boss on top of all this, who allowed you, at his pleasure,
 to deign to have the disgusting effrontery to exist.
 And you better watch your Ps and Qs, because that Almighty is looking after you with the
 attitude of, "This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you."
 And when you look at the world in that image, or in the other image, that it's a stupid
 mechanism, either point of view you take, you don't really belong.
 You are not really part of all this.
 And I could use a stronger word than "part," only we don't have it in English.
 We have to say something like, "Connected with it, essential to it," or to put it in
 the strongest possible way, it is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external
 world, which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself as something
 that you got caught up with, it is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you
 yourself.
 Because you see, we have such a myopic view of what one's self is.
 It's as if, in other words, we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as
 me, as if you focused your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole panorama of
 things that you experience, and say, "I will take sides with that much of it."
 Now we come here, right at the start, to an extremely important principle, which is the
 different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification.
 That is to say, you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way,
 you can look at it with a naked eye and see it in a certain way, you look at it with a
 telescope and you see it in another way.
 Now which level of magnification is the correct one?
 Well obviously, they're all correct, but they're just different points of view.
 You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass, and where
 with the naked eye you will see a human face, with the magnifying glass you will just see
 a profusion of dots, rather meaninglessly scattered.
 But as you stand away from that connection of dots, which all seem to be separate and
 apart from each other, they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern.
 And you see that these individual dots add up to some kind of sense.
 Now you'll see at once, from this illustration, that maybe you, when you take a myopic view
 of yourself, as most of us do, but you may add up to some kind of sense that is not apparent
 to you in your ordinary consciousness.
 When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope, we see there's one hell of a fight going on.
 All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up.
 And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the microscope,
 we should start taking sides, which would be fatal, because the health of our organism
 depends on the continuance of this battle.
 What is, in other words, conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level.
 And could it possibly be, therefore, that we, with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses,
 sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures, and everything that goes on in human life,
 are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of
 harmony?
 Well, it is claimed, you see, that some human beings have broken through to that vision,
 that they slipped somehow or other into states of consciousness where they see the apparent
 disintegration and disorganization of everyday life as the functioning of a totality which
 at its level is completely harmonious.
 And you could say, "Aha!
 At last I see.
 I got the point.
 I've seen how all this makes sense."
 But what this insight depended upon was your overcoming the illusion that space separates
 things.
 That is to say, the space, the interval between your body and mine, the interval created by
 birth at one end and death at the other, and then after somebody's death, then somebody
 else's birth, these are events with intervals between them.
 And normally we regard these intervals in time and these intervals in space as having
 no importance, no function.
 We tend to see the universe itself as really consisting in all the stars and galaxies.
 That's what it is.
 That's what we notice.
 But the space in which all this happens is sort of written off as something that isn't
 really there.
 But what one has to realize is that the space is an essential function of the things in
 the space.
 After all, you can't have separate stars unless there is a space around them.
 Eliminate the space and you will see you couldn't have this phenomenon at all, and vice versa.
 You couldn't have the space.
 They wouldn't be there in any sense whatsoever if there weren't the bodies in it.
 So the bodies in the space and the space are two aspects of a single continuum.
 They're related together in exactly the same way as a back and a front, and you just don't
 get one without the other.
 So the moment you see that intervals, that space, is connective, you can understand at
 once how you are not just to be exclusively defined as a flash of consciousness that occurs
 between two eternal darknesses, which is the popular common sense view which Western man
 has of his own life.
 That you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth, there was no you,
 and in the eternal darkness that follows your death, there is likewise no you.
 And I'm going to discuss these matters not by appealing to any special spooky knowledge,
 as if I had been traveling on the higher planes and knew all my previous incarnations and
 therefore could tell you authoritatively that you are much more than this individuality.
 I'm going to do it on a basis of complete common sense, that everybody has access to
 the facts, and that just what you have to realize is that life is a pattern of immense
 complexity.
 And what you call yourself as a living organism, say, I am my whole body at the very least.
 Now what is that body?
 That body is recognizable, and I recognize my friends when I meet them again, with luck,
 and you recognize me.
 Although the last time any of you saw me, I was absolutely something entirely different
 from what I am now, just as the flame of a candle is never a constant.
 A flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas.
 Only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant.
 Well it is a recognizably constant pattern.
 The spear-shaped outline of the flame and its coloration is a constant pattern.
 But in exactly the same way, we are all constant patterns.
 And that's all we are.
 The only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being.
 It's the way we behave, the way we dance.
 Only there's no we that dances, there's just the dancing.
 Just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas, just as a whirlpool in a river is a whirling
 of streaming water.
 There is no thing that whirlpools.
 There is the whirlpool.
 And in the same way, each one of us is a very, very delightfully complex undulation of the
 energy of the whole universe.
 Only by our process of miseducation, we've been deprived of the knowledge of that fact.
 Not as if there was someone to blame for this, because it's always with our own tacit consent.
 Because life is basically a game of hide and seek.
 Because life is pulsation, on and off.
 Here it is and now it isn't.
 And by being this pulsation, we know it's there.
 See, you don't know what you mean by on unless you know what you mean by off.
 That's why when we want to awaken someone, we knock at the door.
 It's not enough to slam the door once with your fist and make a big noise, but you keep
 up a pulsation, because that by its on and off-ness attracts attention.
 All life, you see, is this flickering in and out.
 Only there are enormous rhythms in it.
 There are very fast flickering ins and outs, like the reaction of light upon our eyes,
 such that if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark and I spin it, you will see a circle
 of fire.
 Because the reflection of that cigarette tip on your retina lasts, it endures.
 Just in the same way as on a radar screen, an image stays a little while until it's revivified
 by another round.
 So in that way, you see, you notice continuity.
 And in the same way, then, you notice the continuity of a light, because although, like,
 say, with an arc lamp, an arc lamp is actually a flickering light.
 And that's why they don't allow arc lights to be used in any shop where there's a circular
 saw moving, because sometimes the flickering speed of the arc light so synchronizes with
 the turning speed of the teeth on the blade that the teeth look as if they're not moving.
 And so anybody who might put his hand on the blade would have it chopped off, thinking
 it was a still one.
 So in this way, very fast impulses are looked upon us as constant.
 And we see where there are fast impulses a solid thing.
 When you look at the blade of a propeller or an electric fan, the separated four or
 three blades become a solid disk, and you cannot throw an egg through it.
 Well, so in exactly the same way, you can't put your finger through a rock, because the
 rock is moving too fast for your finger to go through.
 That's the meaning of the whole phenomenon of hardness.
 Hardness in nature is immense energy.
 But acting in a very concentrated space, restricted space, but going to beat hell, that's why
 you can't get through it.
 Now from those very tiny fast rhythms, which give us the impression of continuity, there
 are also in this universe immensely slow rhythms.
 And these are very difficult for us to keep track of.
 And they impress us and depress us as our own life and death, as our coming and going,
 which goes for what is to us such a slow pace that we can't possibly believe that it is
 really a rhythm.
 We think of it as our birth, as something quite unique that could never occur again,
 because we're so close to it, you see, and it's moving so slowly.
 And so with that point of view, we are, like Marshall McLuhan said, he borrowed a metaphor
 from me, which is that we are driving a car looking at the rear vision mirror.
 That means that the environment in which you believe yourself to exist is always a past
 one.
 It isn't the one you're actually in.
 The process of growth, the basic process of biology, is one in which lower orders are
 always being superseded by higher orders.
 But the lower order can never figure out, or only very rarely figure out, what the higher
 order is that's taking over.
 And may see it as a terrible threat, as total disaster, as the very end.
 But therefore can never be aware that the principle of growth always has and always
 will continue, because that's what's going on.
 But you never know what the next step is going to be, because if you did know, you wouldn't
 take it, because it would already be past.
 Do you understand this?
 That any certainly known future is an event of which we can say you've had it, and in
 that sense it's past.
 When we play games, and we say in chess or in bridge or whatever game you're playing,
 the outcome of the game becomes certain.
 We at that point cancel the game and begin a new one.
 Because the whole zest of the thing, which takes me back to the idea that this whole
 thing is a hide-and-seek game, is that you don't know what the next order coming up is.
 But one thing you can be sure of, it will be an order, and it will comprehend you.
 At the moment we stand at a time in history where we're beginning to think of the Great
 Countdown on the end of the human race.
 Terrifying possibility that through atomic energy we may obliterate this planet and turn
 the whole globe into a star.
 Maybe that's the way all the stars started.
 Imagine, you know, this great thing coming up, the Countdown on the end.
 Seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
 Where have you heard that before?
 You sit on the seashore and you hear the waves going in and out.
 And you don't stop to think.
 That's what you're doing.
 That's what the whole business is doing.
 And there are places where the wave mounts and mounts and it gets too big for its boots
 or whatever and it spills and breaks.
 We could do just that.
 But very important to realize that that's what you're doing, because then you don't
 get panicky about it.
 And the person who's going to press that button is the person who's going to be in panic.
 So if you realize that that's what it is, and that it doesn't really matter if the whole
 human race blows itself up, then there's a chance that it won't do it.
 That's the only chance we have.
 Not to do this thing which attracts us like a kind of vertigo, like a person who looks
 over a precipice and is all set to throw himself over.
 Or a person who jumps out of a plane when they're skydiving and forgets to pull the
 parachute ring because he gets fascinated with a target.
 It's called target fascination.
 He just goes straight at it, you see.
 So we can get absolutely fascinated with disaster, with doom.
 Or, you know, all the news in the newspapers is invariably bad news.
 There is no good news in the newspapers.
 People wouldn't buy a newspaper consisting of good news.
 Even the free press is full of terrible news.
 Except the San Francisco Oracle.
 And the fascination, you see, for this doom might be neutralized if we would say, "Well,
 why bother about that?
 It's just another fluctuation in this huge, marvelous, endless chain of our own selves
 and our own energy going on."
 See here's the problem.
 Because of our myopia, because of our, the way we've, as it were, restricted consciousness
 to focus upon just that certain little area of experience that we call voluntary action,
 that's us.
 And everything else happens to us.
 Now that's obviously absurd.
 Suppose you take in your hand one of those toys, a gyroscopic top, and you suddenly notice
 the minute you get this in your hand that it has a kind of vitality to it.
 It seems to resist you.
 It starts pushing you in a certain way, see?
 And sometimes you're with it and following it.
 Then sometimes you see it's just as if you held a living animal in your hand.
 You know, you pick up a hamster, you know, or a guinea pig, and you hold this little
 thing in your hand, it's always trying to escape.
 So the gyroscope always seems to be trying to escape your hold.
 Now in exactly the same way, what you're experiencing all the time, all sorts of things are getting
 out of control and doing things you don't expect.
 It's trying to escape your hold.
 All right, then don't grab it so hard.
 And you discover that this living thing that you're feeling, like the gyroscope top, it's
 your own life.
 Because you can see very simply that you would not understand the experience that you call
 voluntary action and decision, being in control and being yourself, unless in opposition to
 that there was something else.
 You couldn't realize self and control and will unless there was something other, out
 of control and instead of will, won't.
 It's the two together only that produces the sensation that you call having a personal
 identity.
 Only, there is a funny thing about human consciousness which has been worked out very carefully in
 Gestalt psychology, which is that our attention is captured by the figure rather than the
 background, by the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area, and by something
 moving rather than what is relatively still.
 And to all those phenomena that in this way attract our attention, we attribute a higher
 degree of reality than the ones we don't notice.
 That's only because for the moment those are more important to us.
 Consciousness, you see, is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble,
 just in the same way as a ship's radar is looking for rocks or other ships.
 And the radar therefore does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks,
 no other ships.
 So in the same way, our eyes, or rather the selective consciousness behind the eyes, only
 pays attention to what we think is important.
 I am at this moment aware of all of you in this room, of every single detail of your
 clothing, of your faces and so on, but I'm not noticing it all.
 And therefore I will not be able to remember tomorrow exactly how each one of you looked
 and what you were wearing.
 Because what I notice is restricted to things that I think are particularly important.
 If I notice some particularly beautiful girl in the audience, then I might notice also
 what she's wearing, and that would be memorable.
 But by and large, you see, we scan things over, but we pay attention only to what our
 set of values tells us we ought to pay attention to.
 But quite obviously, you as a complete individual are much more than the scanning system.
 You are in relationships with the external world that on the whole are incredibly harmonious.
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