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 Some time ago, I received a visit from a woman who, as a result of listening to these talks,
 was wondering if I could help her to regain an experience which she had had while undergoing a surgical operation.
 As is generally known, anesthetics sometimes induce peculiarly vivid and unusual states of consciousness.
 And every now and then, a person under anesthesia will undergo a specific and particular experience which is of the utmost fascination.
 It's the kind of experience which I suppose we would ordinarily call mystical or spiritual,
 and which, while it lasts, carries the most powerful sensation of understanding with complete clarity and certainty
 what is the mystery and meaning of the world.
 This occurs sufficiently often to have been made a subject of experimentation.
 Perhaps you know the story of the investigator who took doses of anesthetic for this purpose
 and equipped himself with pencil and paper to record, at the moment of awakening, whatever revelation might have been given to him.
 Fortunately, the expected experience took place,
 and for a brief period the investigator had the vivid conviction of complete comprehension of this universe of life and death.
 He regained waking consciousness, with the tail end of the sensation still upon him,
 grabbed the pencil and swiftly recorded the essential content of the experience just before it faded.
 After several minutes, during which his mind returned to its normal state, he looked at what he had written.
 And there upon the paper was the following immensely profound observation.
 "Everything in this universe is the smell of burnt almonds."
 I suppose that all sensible and hard-headed people would agree that this is just the sort of inanity
 to which all these mystical revelations ultimately boil down.
 In the clear, cold light of rational consciousness,
 the seemingly inspired and utter convincing knowledge of dreams, of drug delusions, and of mystical experiences
 comes down to just this sort of idiotic anticlimax.
 Masked in the poetic or exotic obscurantism of such phrases as "All is Brahman"
 or "The Divine Unity Beneath the Multiplicity of the World,"
 it may sound for a moment as if it meant something.
 But the essential nonsense of these feelings, and the purely subjective character of the sense of insight which they involve,
 at once becomes obvious when "Brahman" or "The Divine Unity" is replaced by the smell of burnt almonds.
 We might settle for this conclusion if some of us had not had the same sensation,
 not under drugs or hypnosis, but when very wide awake.
 And I for one will not quarrel with the smell of burnt almonds as the key to the mystery.
 I like it much better and feel it makes much more sense than "Brahman" or "The Divine Unity,"
 for its very banality, its very consequential silliness, brings out the real significance of the experience in question.
 For the importance of the mystical revelation does not lie in the precise nature of what everything in this universe is.
 It can be God or Brahman or burnt almonds or applesauce or anything you like.
 Its importance lies rather in the simple sensation of wholeness,
 in the part of the sentence which runs, "Everything in this universe is, no matter what."
 For the conviction which has come to the experiencer
 is that his habitual sensation of isolation from his environment, from the rest of the world, is an illusion
 and that as a corollary his own deeds and misdeeds, fortunes and misfortunes
 are the same process as the changing seasons and the circling stars.
 And unreasonable as it may seem, this gives him the sensation that his whole life, past, present and future
 is somehow perfectly natural and in order
 and that he himself is not just the mind enclosed in the skull, but the total process of the world.
 The significance of this experience does not, I think, lie in any consequences or conclusions which might be drawn from it.
 It is not an important experience in the sense that it is useful for some other purpose.
 It's simply like playing or listening to music,
 which is obviously phony in the very moment that we do it for some ulterior motive, such as to appear cultured or to convey an ideological message.
 Its significance for human beings is not like that of, say, the second law of thermodynamics,
 but like that of the Mozart sonatas or the arabesques on a Persian rug.
 The significance of useful knowledge, like the second law of thermodynamics, is precisely that by applying it,
 human beings may be enabled to go on experiencing such things as music or love or mystical insight.
 But what could I say to the woman who under anesthetic had once had this experience
 and wanted it again more than anything else in the world?
 Go and have another operation, get yourself some ether or mescaline or lysergic acid or take up yoga
 or get thee to a nunnery.
 There are still other, and much too pat, answers to this question,
 as that she is failing to revive the experience by the very act of seeking for it.
 As well tell a starving man that his very hunger is what prevents him from finding food.
 For once a person has had an experience of this kind, he is gone.
 It's easier to get rid of an addiction to heroin or to choose something more natural,
 to get rid of the love of the opposite sex.
 No, I could better say something like this.
 The answer is in the very experience which you have had.
 Didn't you know then, for certain, with utter clarity,
 that your whole life, past, present and future,
 was somehow, as you yourself put it,
 part and parcel of that universal harmony which the Chinese call the Tao?
 I feel sometimes that
 phrases like "universal harmony" are so hackneyed, so almost slushy and sentimental
 that it's terribly difficult to begin to find the right word for this kind of thing
 without sounding like Voltaire's Mr. Pangloss,
 without sort of jumping on this "best of all possible worlds" business,
 because the thing isn't like that at all.
 It's very, very much stronger than the feeling that this is the best of all possible worlds.
 And the curious thing about it, it isn't that it glosses over anything,
 but it makes the most awful things seem that way too,
 without at the same time making them cease to seem terrible.
 It's very peculiar.
 Well, she had seen then, for certain,
 at the time of that experience, seen with total clarity,
 that her whole past, present and future life
 was in some way part and parcel of what we are perforce
 driven to call the universal harmony of the Tao.
 But what one doesn't seem to understand then
 is that this still remains true of what one is today.
 You are in the stream when seeking for what you have lost
 and when feeling perfectly ordinary, no less than when you were in ecstasy.
 You're not feeling the experience, and you're striving to regain it,
 is, as a matter of fact, the very future
 which you saw to be in such perfect accord with the process.
 Let me remind you of a celebrated tale that was told by Sri Ramakrishna,
 the story of one of his disciples who had learned from the master
 that all the multiplicity of this world is the illusory outward form
 of the one eternal divine Brahman underlying the entire process.
 And having sat and listened to this exposition, the disciple got up and went his way
 and in passing down a rather narrow street, he saw an elephant coming towards him
 and a mahout riding on top of the elephant.
 Well, the mahout saw the disciple wandering down the center of the road and shouted at him,
 "Hey you, get out of the way! This elephant isn't very nice!"
 But the disciple thought, "Now the master Ramakrishna has told me that I am Brahman
 and that everything is Brahman and therefore the elephant is Brahman
 and therefore it will be perfectly all right if I walk straight along.
 The elephant will do me no harm since I realize this to be true."
 So he ignored the warning of the mahout and approached the elephant
 and the elephant swung his trunk and swatted that disciple hard
 and threw him into the ditch where he was scratched with the brambles.
 Well, he was very upset and he came crawling back to Sri Ramakrishna and said,
 "Master, you have deceived me. I understood that everything is Brahman,
 that I am Brahman and all other creatures. Is that not so, master?"
 And the master said, "Yes, it is so."
 Well, he said, "I was walking out on the road and I saw this elephant coming towards me
 and it didn't seem to me to be necessary to get out of the way
 when the mahout riding the elephant warned me to do so
 because I figured that I was Brahman and the elephant was Brahman and I could come to no harm."
 "You stupid man," said Sri Ramakrishna,
 "you didn't realize that the voice of the mahout was also Brahman
 and you should have heeded that too."
 So also in this case, the one who is trying to regain the vision is the disciple
 and the vision they are trying to regain is the elephant.
 But the way you are actually feeling now
 and which you are ignoring because of your eagerness to feel some other way,
 that is the voice of the mahout and that too is Brahman.
 Nine times out of ten, an observation of this kind will mean nothing
 and will fall as flat as being told that everything in this universe is the smell of burnt almonds.
 But the tenth time, it will dawn upon you as a statement of total and luminous clarity.
 I do not think we need have any fear that this tenth time will never come
 for in other circumstances it has come again and again.
 Think back to school days when with the utmost care your teacher explained over and over
 the mysteries of percentage or sentence structure or daylight saving time
 and you consistently failed to see the point
 and then suddenly something clicked in your mind and the principle became clear.
 There is a Chinese poem which says, "Words do not make a man understand.
 It takes the man to understand the words."
 Now today we are living in an age which is quite peculiar
 because in the world of science there are no longer any secrets
 because the method of science requires that all scientists be in communication with each other
 and therefore that every scientist as soon as he has discovered something
 or got a good idea, he rushes into print.
 And it's important for him to do so because some other scientist somewhere else in the world
 might be thinking about something on the same lines and would be stimulated in his work
 by this man's speculations even if not by discoveries.
 And so the whole scientific world tries to remain in communication
 and for this reason it was absolutely impossible to keep atomic energy a secret.
 In former ages that might have been managed because there were many secrets once upon a time
 and people were not admitted to these secrets unless they were in some way tested
 and found capable of handling them without running amok.
 We live in such a dangerous age because all the secrets are out in the open
 and anybody can run amok with them.
 And that's just the situation we have to face and that is just the situation we have to handle.
 It is too late to stop it because that would be, as they say,
 locking the door after the horse has bolted.
 The vice president of an extremely important corporation in the United States,
 very progressive and very vital, a few months ago said,
 "There are two major forces operating in the world today for good or for evil.
 One is Red China, the other is LSD."
 And there is a certain reason why such a thing as a certain chemical
 which is capable of opening people's minds in a certain way
 should be something extremely disturbing.
 Because this particular chemical, in common with a number of others that have been known for centuries
 but have been rather played cool through those centuries,
 is capable of doing something which simply cannot be tolerated.
 That is to say, capable of letting properly prepared individuals
 or sometimes improperly prepared individuals in on a secret
 which is very closely guarded and which is, as a matter of fact,
 the deepest and most fundamental of all our social taboos.
 I have just finished writing a book which I have had, with a sort of tongue-in-cheek attitude,
 had the temerity to call "The Book."
 And it is subtitled, "The Book," you see, "On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are."
 Because that is really the thing that cannot be let out.
 Sex is not really a serious taboo in our culture.
 If you are initiating a young person into life
 and you realize that your son or daughter is going to college
 and that you ought therefore to have a serious talk with them, they'll laugh at you
 and say, "All this thing you're telling us about sex, we knew years ago.
 And we know more about it than you do."
 So that is not a subject for a serious initiation talk to a young person.
 So we have to think again and try and find out, think deeply,
 what is fundamentally taboo in this culture and perhaps in other cultures as well.
 What information, in other words, would really let the cat out of the bag and give away the show?
 Now, quest around a bit.
 Ask yourself this, for what reason would a person be considered hopelessly insane?
 What sort of claims must a person simply not make?
 Well, there is one, and that is if anybody claims that he is God.
 That simply isn't done. Certainly not in our culture, although it's very frequent in India.
 But in our culture, that is simply not allowed because we,
 most of us from a Christian background and if not that from a Jewish background,
 and there's a great deal in common.
 Because both Christians and Jews are deeply concerned about somebody called Jesus Christ.
 Both Christians and Jews are in a way followers of Jesus Christ in different ways.
 He is a problem to both.
 Because he was the man who came out and discovered he was God.
 And that simply is impermissible.
 The Jews handled it in one way.
 The Christians handled it, quite as effectively, in another way.
 The Christians handled Jesus perfectly, even more tactfully than the Jews.
 By putting him on a pedestal and saying,
 "This was the only man who ever was God and nobody else was really so before
 and certainly nobody can be so afterwards."
 Stop right there.
 Put him on the altar, bow down to him, worship him,
 so that everything he had to say will be null and void.
 And it worked beautifully.
 But you see the trouble about deep secrets is they can't be repressed indefinitely.
 Now here's the problem, you see, that there are certain processes,
 some of which are what you might call spiritual exercises,
 others are simply chemicals,
 others are just horse sense,
 whereby one comes to see very clearly indeed
 that black goes with white and self goes with other.
 And as this becomes clear to you,
 it's rather shaking.
 Because, look, if what you define as you
 is inseparable from everything which you define as not you,
 just as front is inseparable from back,
 then you realize that deep down between self and other there is some sort of conspiracy.
 If these things always occur in combination
 and look very different from each other and feel quite different,
 nevertheless the feeling of difference between them
 allows each one to exist.
 And so underneath the opposition or the polarity between self and other
 or between any other pair of opposites you can think of,
 there is something in common as there is, for example, between figure and background.
 You can't see a figure without a background.
 You can't have an organism without an environment.
 Equally, you can't have a background without a figure
 or an environment without organisms in it or without things in it.
 You can't have space which is unoccupied by any solid.
 You cannot have solids not occupying some space.
 This is absolutely elementary and yet we don't realize it
 because, for example, the average person thinks that space is nothing.
 That it's just a sort of not-there-ness in which there are things.
 And we are slightly afraid that not-there-ness,
 that nothingness, that darkness, that the negative poles of all these oppositions will win.
 That they will eventually swallow up every kind of being and every kind of there-ness.
 But when you catch on to the game you realize that that won't happen
 because what is called not-existing is quite incapable of being there
 without the contrast of something called existing.
 It's like the crest and the trough of a wave.
 You can't have a wave that is all trough and no crest
 just as you can't have a wave which is all crest and no trough.
 Such a thing has never been manifested in the physical universe.
 They go together.
 And that is the secret.
 There really is no other secret than that.
 But it is thoroughly repressed.
 And therefore we are all educated to feel
 that we've got to fight for the white because the black might win.
 We've got to survive.
 You must survive.
 That's the great thing we're all working under.
 And pounding it out day after day in anxiety
 because this is a description of anxiety.
 Anxiety is the fear that one of a pair of opposites might cancel the other.
 Forever.
 And if by any chance, by any means, you find out that that is not so
 you have an entirely new attitude to what human beings are doing
 which may be very creative but which also may be very dangerous.
 You see through the game.
 The game called "white must win"
 because you know that neither black nor white are going to win
 because they belong to each other.
 So one of the problems of the various chemicals
 which can change the human mind in certain ways
 so that it becomes apparent that inside and outside go together
 is that they do rather give the show away
 and people who take these chemicals and see through the human game
 cannot be trusted.
 They may decide to be good sports
 and go back into the game and play it as if it were for real
 or they may not.
 They don't. And what's going to happen?
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