Now, it has been announced that I will speak this evening about the I Ching. I should just
 say then briefly that the Book of Changes is thought to be the oldest of the great Chinese
 classics and to date from perhaps as early as 1300 BC. Although perhaps the figures of
 which this classic is a discussion may be much earlier than that, they may go back to
 the earliest phases of human thought because the I Ching really is the ground plan of the
 way in which the Chinese think, and not only the Chinese. It's almost a mapping of the
 thinking processes of man. And it may surprise you to know that the system of arithmetic
 which is used by digital computers came from the I Ching. We have a binary system of arithmetic
 in which all numbers may be represented by 0 and 1 in various arrangements. Is you is
 or is you ain't? So there's a sudden unexpected link between the most sophisticated mathematical
 machinery and a book originating at least 1300 BC. But what the I Ching really goes
 into is this question of "is you is or is you ain't?" It sounds terribly simple.
 Black or white. And we keep saying to people, you know, life isn't just black and white,
 or black or white. There are many shades of grey. True. But against some backgrounds,
 grey is dark. In another context, grey is light. And really, all colours, in fact all
 information whatsoever, can be translated into terms of yang and yin. For example, when
 you look at colour television, the signals are broadcast to your set as a stream of pulses.
 They could be put on magnetic tape in terms of an arrangement of pulses indicating either
 yes or no. This technique has reached such sophistication that with the aid of laser
 beams, we can translate a physical object, let's take a complicated one, let's take
 a dandelion flower gone to seed, a dandelion clock. You take a dandelion clock about so
 big, it can be turned into a formula, passed through channels, enlarged to any size, say
 this big, and with laser beams cut in solid plastic in a matter of moments. So that you
 can get this reproduction of a three-dimensional object, but the transition between the two
 was handled simply in terms of pulses. So likewise, the nervous system is so constituted
 that the neuron carrying a message either fires or does not fire. If it fires or if it's
 activated, that registers as a yes. If it is not fired, the absence of firing is represented
 as a no. And so you could say that all your perceptions, in all their variety and in all
 their colour, are made up of a vast composite of little yeses and little nos, in every conceivable
 variation. So out of these two come everything. Yang means the positive, and yin the negative.
 Yang is identified with the south or sunny side of a mountain, yin with the north or
 shady side. And note at this moment that you cannot have a one-sided mountain. Imagine
 it. And this then is the crucial thing that one must understand about the Yang-Yin philosophy,
 and it is represented in the symbol of a circle crossed with an S-curve, one side of which
 is black and the other side is white. And so they're like two fishes. And in the head
 of the black fish is a white eye, and in the head of the white fish there is a black eye.
 These two sides are interdependent because the black one is outlined by the white one,
 and the white one is outlined by the black one. And they chase each other in the form
 which is really the double helix, the pattern of the spiral nebulae, and also the pattern
 of love-making between many, many kinds of creatures. The spiral folding into itself,
 black chasing white, and white chasing black. Now, obviously white and black are as different
 as different can be. When we say of someone that he's an awful liar and a conman, we say
 why he could prove to you that black was white. But strangely enough, black is white in a
 certain sense, and white is black. If you take the copulating word "is" to mean "implies".
 Because black implies white, and white implies black. Or positive implies negative, and negative
 implies positive, because you can't have the one without the other. So to put this into
 clear words, we can say explicitly black and white are different, but implicitly, that
 is to say by implication, they are one. So, exoterically, outwardly, the positive and
 the negative of life are very different. Life is different from death, and good is different
 from evil. But esoterically, the secret is that they are one. As God says through the
 prophet Isaiah, "I am the Lord and there is none else. I form the light and create the
 darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord do all these things." But that information
 is not normally handed out from the book. So we have to begin then seriously considering
 yang and yin, black and white. First of all, if I have a black background, somehow I am
 tempted to make a white mark on it. If I have a white background, I am tempted to put a
 black mark on it. Because if there were nothing to see but black, that would be tantamount
 to being blind, because there would be no difference. Nothing would matter, nothing
 would make a difference, so there wouldn't be anything. Likewise, if everything were
 white, it would be as good as being blind, for there would be no difference. It is only
 by contrast, when black and white are put together, that we know black as black and
 white as white. However now, when I look at a small white circle or disc on a black background,
 or a small black disc on a white background, I once get this in my thought, "Which is positive
 and which is negative?" Does black represent the negative because it's dark? Like night.
 But when I look at the black dot on the white background, I think, "The black dot is the
 thing there, so that must be positive." It was put on. And therefore the white represents
 negative because it suggests nothing. No mark, like white paper behind the print. Blank.
 The English blank and the French blanche, which means white, it's the same. Blank, negative.
 Isn't this mysterious, you see, that both white and black can play the negative role?
 But then let's think of white as light, and it's playing the positive role. And when we
 think of black as the thing, the mark, then it's playing the positive role. See, both
 can play the negative and both can play the positive. But still, you can't have one without
 the other. I look at the black with the white dot, and I say, "Is that a white glowing sun
 in the night, or is it a hole through a wall?" In which case the black will be the thing,
 and the white the absence. I look at the black dot on the white background and say, "Yes,
 obviously the black dot is the thing, but on the other hand it may be a picture of a
 white box with a hole in it." You see, they're reversible. Therefore, some reflections about
 these. It isn't easy for a human being, the way we've been trained, to notice that you
 can't have one without the other. Because our attention has difficulty in seeing both
 sides at once. You know that Gestalt image, where you get two faces in profile, and they
 are drawn as black silhouette. So you get two faces in profile about to kiss. But then
 look again and you notice the white ground between them, and it is a cup, like a chalice.
 What have we got here? Kissing faces or chalice? People have difficulty in seeing both together.
 You must have one or the other. Either will do, but make your choice. It's like, are you
 going to be a boy or a girl? Either will do, but you have to choose one of them. And yet,
 bodhisattvas are always represented as hermaphrodite, as being, as it were, bisexual, transcending
 sexual differentiation. Because after all, everybody who exists is the result of a boy
 and a girl. Boys can't be boys without girls, and girls can't be girls without boys. They
 are very different. Et vive la différance. But by reason of their interdependence, they
 are one. Talking of the bees and the flowers, where there are bees, there must be flowers,
 and where there are flowers, there must be bees, or some sort of insect equivalent. And
 this implies that the bee and the flower are really one organism. The head of the body
 looks very different from the feet, just as the bee looks different from the flower. But
 a complete body requires both head and feet. So the head and the foot are obviously one
 organism. It's less obvious with the bee and the flower, but they are one organism. What
 is very difficult for us to see, however, is that solids are all of a piece with spaces.
 Now here comes the thing, you see. Take a situation in which we say of a given figure-ground
 relationship that the black is the thing, the black letter on the white page. We say
 yes, it's the black letter that's important, that's the thing. But supposing it's a white
 letter on a black page, still we say the letter's the thing. That's important. Alright, so we
 say we look out in the sky at night and we see the stars and the planets. We say that's
 what's there. That's the thing. Around them is darkness and nothingness, corresponding
 to the area of the magnetic tape which isn't magnetized, which delivers no message and
 therefore the message zero. But that you see does deliver a message. Absence speaks. Nothingness
 is important. But we are brought up, we are so brainwashed, we are so bamboozled, we are
 so hypnotized, that we don't know that. That's the whole trick that we play on ourselves.
 We don't know that nothing is something. And it's important. Lao Tzu put it this way, "The
 usefulness of a vessel is not so much in the clay surround, but in the empty space in which
 something can be carried. The usefulness of a window is not so much in the frame as in
 the empty space through which light can be seen." It sounds odd and paradoxical and almost
 a little contradictory, but nevertheless there it is. The space is after all not nothing.
 I had an argument with Buckminster Fuller about this. And he had to grant me that I
 was theoretically correct, because he said, "So far as I'm concerned, space is just negative
 event." Just negative event. The fallacy wasn't in the word "negative event," that's a beautiful
 phrase. It was in the word "just," "only." As if space could be dismissed. And so in
 exactly the same way, when we don't recognize that side of life, people can play all kinds
 of tricks on us. The main trick is, "I can scare you with death." "You won't be, see?"
 "I can remove you." "Wowee, we're going to get removed anyway one of these days, and
 you just won't be. Won't that be awful?" "That would be just terrible." You know, supposing
 you won't be, there'll be nobody to realize how terrible it is. But this is the thing,
 this is one of the great tricks of life, and you have to be watching for this, as people
 use it, because they've all been taught to use it. It's really the fall of man, was not
 to recognize the other side. So everything that we think of as nothing, space, empty
 space, death, sleep, dissolution, decay, any sort of weakness, anything that goes against
 structure, that is against the thing, that we think is bad, bad, bad, and we're trying
 to get a world where that side of things is rendered impotent. Nothingness must no longer
 constitute a threat to somethingness. In other words, we want to play black and white, and
 if we'll call white the light and the positive, white must win. That's the game we're trying
 to play. Not realizing that there cannot be winning without losing. If white must win,
 black must lose. But if black loses, we can congratulate black for having helped white
 to win. Because unless black loses, white won't win. You can translate this into the
 difficult and thorny question of race relations. How would you know you were free, white and
 twenty-one? How could you be proud of being a white man, unless you were a black man?
 You wouldn't know you were living on the right side of the tracks, unless you were people
 living on the left side of the tracks. You know, there's an IQ thing that says, "Up is
 to down as blank is to left." Or left is to blank. You're supposed to fill in. I would
 say, "Taken and left." Right and left. Right and wrong. These opposites get tricky. But
 the point is, people are afraid of the negative one. Don't be negative. The power of positive
 thinking. That's all nonsense. The negative is the source of the positive. This is absolutely
 fundamental to the I Ching. This is why in the hexagrams, of which the I Ching is about,
 there are sixty-four combinations of six black and white symbols. Actually, they use an unbroken
 line for the positive and a broken line for the negative. Six such lines. There are sixty-four
 combinations of groups of six, or hexagrams. And in all those, there is not one bad one.
 There is no sign of the I Ching which you can draw, and the Oracle tell you, "This is
 just plain bad." Because you can get to the very end of the night, the black is pitch
 black, and it is precisely at that moment that the yang, the positive element, is reborn.
 Because you see, it is recognizing that energy is waves, energy is pulsation. Now you can't
 have a pulse without a vibration. It sounds if I go 'oh' that I'm making something without
 a nothing. But actually, if you listen very closely to that sound, you'll hear 'oi oi oi' you'll hear pulse. Because without that little 'chunk' which is a pulse, nothing happens. So this table which is level and solid, and philosophers are always talking about tables because they always have tables in front of them in classrooms, but here it's solid. But this thing is going 'ling ling ling' at a terrific clip inside it.
 And why don't we look at that, analyze, and we find that there are cellular structure in wood. Analyze that, molecules, and when we find to our amazement, if you take a molecule out of this table, and it's about the size of my fist, blow it up to that, the next molecule will be way way over the other side of the room, at that level of magnification.
 Say what's in the molecules? Atoms. Take an atom the size of my fist, what will the next one be? Somewhere in Los Angeles. I mean, you know, I was talking fancy shapes and figures. Anyway, a long way away. What's inside the atom? Ooh, electrons, protons, masons, etc. And they are the size of my fist. We don't even know if they're particles or waves, so it's difficult to talk about this, but they are a long long way from the atom to the atom.
 They are a long long way from each other, so we suddenly find that in this solid table there's more space than there is anything solid. It's a little bit of solid. But as you ferret it out, and you go a step, step down, it's like approaching a limit in mathematics.
 When you have a curve sweeping towards an axis, supposing it's an asymptotic curve, it's always getting nearer and nearer and nearer to that axis, but never actually collides with it. So we get nearer and nearer as we study substance. We get nearer and nearer to finally, what is the shell round the emptiness?
 We get nearer, we never quite catch it. Solid disappears into space. As at this level of magnification, the space has disappeared into the solid. See, if I just have one finger, or I have a better illustration, if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark, I've just got one point, but I whiz it around and you see a continuous circle.
 That's how you see a solid table. Because they're going zrrr so fast, that your eye can't catch the spaces between. Too little, too quick, too pfft.
 So, looking at things from one point of view, we find a lot of emptiness. Looking at them from another point of view, we find a lot of solid. But what you have to realize is that the solid is based on the emptiness just as much as the emptiness is based on the solid. So don't be afraid of nothing.
 It can't bite you. It's only something that can bite you. There's nothing to be afraid of in nothing. And yet, mysteriously, nothing is the source of something. It's like the womb and the seed.
 [Music]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.63 sec
Decoding  : 1.23 sec
Transcribe: 2352.47 sec
Total Time: 2354.33 sec