So, Yang and Yin go together. But, through not seeing this, the whole of our life is,
 as I said, geared to the thought that we might be able to make the Yang side win. And so,
 in every sort of human enterprise, we are trying to have white without black. This connects
 with what I was trying to get across this afternoon. When you talk about improving the
 world, you are meaning, presumably, that you want it more white than black. Or whichever
 one you call the good one. Maybe you think the black is the good. It's all right in existence,
 it makes the slightest difference. Which side are you going to take in the game of chess,
 black or the white? It doesn't make much difference, except white gets first move.
 I'll always wait to see what you're going to do. We think, could we get rid of the other
 side? Now, as you know, in all matters of practical living, it never works. You think
 now, I've been miserable all this time because I haven't had enough money. I never know whether
 I can make the payments on the car. I never know whether there's going to be sickness.
 And if only I had a little more money, I'd really feel great. So you get it. And in the
 transition from one stage to the other, whoops, you feel very elated. Of course you feel elated,
 you're going up, five thousand dollars a year, say. It makes a difference. When you've gone
 up, then of course you're on a level again. And no longer do you have to worry about making
 the payments. But you get a new worry. Supposing I get sick and die of it. Supposing someone
 robs me, takes it away from me, worry about that. You say, oh, I'd feel so much happier
 if I had a medical examination. You go to a fancy doctor, and he says, I can't find
 anything wrong with you. Then always there might be burglars. So you get an alarm system
 and new locks, and finally you go to the Holmes Patrol and get a private guard to watch you,
 and that makes you feel better for a while, except then he begins to nag you. Gee, if
 I have that Holmes Patrol man out there, they'll know I've got something. Maybe I'd better
 have two men on the job. So it grows. You worry. Because you found out that you didn't
 get yang without yin. You got a new yang, a bigger yang, instead of the former little
 one you had, but you got a big yin with it. It's no joke getting rich. It implies a great
 deal of responsibility, and you've got more to worry about. Don't envy rich people. It's
 a great mistake. Don't envy anyone. So, in the same way, Zhuangzi puts it thus, he's
 Laozi's successor. People who speak of having good government without its correlative misrule,
 or right without its correlative wrong, do not understand the basic principles of the
 universe. One might just as well speak of having yang without yin, and such people must
 be either knaves or fools. Of course, how would we know we were wise unless there were
 knaves and fools? But here it is, you see. You cannot beat the game. You can have the
 temporary illusion of winning, but by compensation you will ever so often have the temporary
 illusion of losing. When you go down a step from yang to yin, you'll feel I've lost something.
 When you go up a step from yin to yang, you'll feel I've gained something. How would you
 know gain without loss? How could you have the sensation of more, unless in relation
 to the sensation, less? For sensation is simply awareness of contrast. That's what life is.
 Now, if we realize that, we get the same feeling of frustration as I wanted to give you this
 afternoon, in trying to make it clear that so far as the improvement of ourselves and
 of the world is concerned, there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. And this is simply
 another way of saying the same thing. You cannot have more yang than yin. You cannot
 play a game which is win and no lose, or a game in which everyone wins. You're stuck
 with it. Now, in just the same way, if we recognize that, applying yang and yin to all
 the possible situations of life, we get this awful feeling of "so what's the use?"
 I mean, what do you expect me to do? Jump into the river and drown? Now, wait a minute.
 Why, at that point, do we get the feeling of "oh, what's the use?" Simply because
 we've found that our favorite game won't work. And we think that is the only thing
 for which there is any use, is the game in which white must win. But why not change the
 morale? Isn't that a good game? Because you go "why, why, why, why, why, why, why, why?"
 Like this, goes in and out. It's the undulation of a wave, the crest and the trough. You can
 go on a, every kid likes a roller coaster ride. It's great. So having both is the game.
 See, it's no game. What we think is the game isn't a game at all. To win all the
 time. Win, win, win. That's no game. Because the game is always the hide and seek. Now
 you see it, now you don't. The game is the story in which the villain might win. And
 the whole idea of drama is to make it seem to the audience that the villain absolutely
 must win. There's no way out, and then suddenly, for whom, the secret thing is revealed and
 the hero wins. Or if you want a good cry, to have a tragedy, and the villain wins. But
 don't you see? There is no vitality, unless there's that negative element. The villain,
 the devil, the nothing, the death, the out, you've lost, finish, bye bye, quit. See, if
 that's not there, then the other one isn't there. And you're always winning. Supposing
 you know, you sit at home with your wife and you play cribbage. Lots of married couples
 try to forget holy deadlock by playing games with each other. And if one partner, be it
 wife or husband, always wins at cribbage, the game ceases to be of interest. Because
 every good player likes a sprightly opponent who sometimes wins. Wins just a little bit
 less than me, mind you, but wins a great deal of the time, yes, it's okay, just a little
 bit. So, if you don't have the unknown, space, death, darkness, negative, you don't have
 the light. So the art of life consists rather in something else than trying to make wife
 win. You didn't sit down and weep because somebody tells you you can't make wife win
 all the time, forever and always, so that black doesn't exist. Because black by its
 very nature is darkness and it doesn't exist. You're trying to make it not exist. It's irrelevant.
 The very fact that it doesn't exist is its power. Non-existence is the necessary condition
 for existence. It doesn't have to have a front before you can have a back, or a back
 before you can have a front. They come into being together, so do existence and non-existence.
 So what are you afraid of? In trying to get rid of nothing which is already gotten rid
 of. So we think, hmmm, but surely this is rather monotonous. It goes up and down, up
 and down, up and down, see, saw, life, death, life, death, life, death, birth, death, birth,
 death, birth, death. Isn't there some way of, I mean, must we play this game? It's like
 the game of one-upmanship I showed you earlier this afternoon. You can't get out of it.
 You're always playing it. If you say I won't play it, it means I've got a more interesting
 game than yours. Which is just the same game all over again. Would there be a way somehow
 to transcend black and white? So we've got black and we've got white. That makes it even.
 But isn't there something else? Couldn't there be a tertiary quid? A new possibility, so
 we can have a three basis instead of a two basis? Somebody comes up and says, ha, alright,
 you're black and white, A and B, you constitute the two ends of the base of a triangle, and
 I'm the apex. How about that? You say, that's odd. Of course it's odd because the first
 two were even. I mean, when something happens, that's one, and that's odd. See, it's odd
 that anything should have happened. Very odd, it's queer. Would it have been easier for
 there to be nothing? But then something happened. So then they said, that's odd. Then they recognised
 it was something and nothing, and then they said, alright, that's right, we're even. So
 this third fellow comes along and says, now what about it? And they say, you're odd. Oh,
 wait a minute. You stand over against us, so that makes two. We're even, and you're
 odd. Alright, so that makes two out of three. Three equals two. Because we're together,
 we two. We recognise that we're black and white. You can't have one without the other,
 so we're together. And you say you want to be different. Okay, that makes black and white
 different from whatever you say you are, so we've got the new yang and yin. You can't
 get out of it. Make four, and there's the same all over again. Make five, it's the same
 all over again. This was how Leibniz reasoned an arithmetic that could represent any number
 using merely zero and one. Damn, can't we get out of this? Hey, what would it be if
 you were allowed, five minutes with God, and you're allowed to ask one question? What do
 you want to know? Because you know, you've thought this over now, you know about the
 opposites, about the yang and the yin. And you know you can't ask God and say, hey Big
 Daddy, will you give me a tip to beat the game? It won't work. What shall I ask God?
 See, of all the things you might ask for, you know, an electric guitar, a million dollars,
 and you know that wouldn't be the answer, because that would be yang. There would be
 a big yin along with it somewhere. I don't know what to ask. So you go in and say, God,
 beyond positive and negative, what is reality? And God says, my child, your question has
 no meaning. Oh dear, you thought, there it's gone, my one chance lost. What do you think?
 You get a friend of yours and say, hey, look, you go in. And tell me what he says. You ask
 him, what question should I ask you? He goes in and says, oh God, what question should
 I ask you? And God says, so you do want a problem. Well, you've got one. You thought
 it up. You wanted a game in which white only wins. There's your problem. You made it up.
 You had to have that problem. Because otherwise, if you don't have a problem, you wouldn't
 know you were here. It's like, you can't be yourself without something you call other.
 How will you know you were you, unless somebody else is somebody else altogether? In other
 words, the sensation of I here, living, sensitive, alive, peeking out, beady-eyed out of my skin,
 entirely is with reference to something over there, which isn't me. I don't know what it
 is, but it works all by itself, and this is pretty scared of it. And there it is. But
 I can't have this feeling without that feeling. There's the same hocus-pocus going on here.
 If I can't feel me without having other, that's the exoteric. Esoteric means I am the other.
 They're inseparable. How can you have self without other? How can there be other without
 self? You other on me, and self on yourself. I self on me, and other on you. But you can't,
 as it says, you can't have one without the other. Yang and yin. So in the same way, I
 say, well, this other, I'd like to manage it. I'd like to control it. Now I don't want
 all these people around messing up my life. I don't want them to be that much other. I'm
 going to fix you. Then I get on a power kick, and there are all kinds of power kicks, let
 me warn you. It's not just politics, and economics, and business. The worst power kicks are spiritual.
 Like astrology. You'd like to know the future? Would you really? It's a power kick to know
 the future so that you can control it. No surprise. If you know the future, it's already
 past. But if you want to know something, and have knowledge, then there must be the unknown.
 Just as if you want self, you must have other. So the future is always the unknown. The past
 is the known. And what we witness as our present is the magical appearance of the known from
 the unknown. You know what's going to happen the next second? I mean, there might be another
 big earthquake right underneath us. Any minute now. Or the Russians might decide to release
 the A-bomb. Any minute, you have a heart attack, drop dead. You don't know what's happening.
 You're going to have heart attacks. Watch, watch, watch this thing happen. It's incredible.
 Just watch it. You, it, self, other, it's this vibration going on. But you think, also, now
 wait a minute. Self and other, that means voluntary versus involuntary. What I do and
 what happens to me? Now, what do I do? Well, I walk, I think, I talk, I move my hands.
 I can be nice to you or nasty to you. I would regard both as my doing. What about my blood
 circulation? I normally think that that happens to me. I mean, if my heart would stop, I wouldn't
 say I'd done it. I would have said that it happened to me. But Buddhists will say, "Your
 heart stopped? That was your karma." And karma means nothing else except doing. It's your
 doing that your heart stopped. You know, that doesn't mean, don't take it literally in a
 superstitious way, that because you spat in someone's face in a past life, you're having
 heart failure as a punishment for it this time around. The universe is not geared to be a
 kind of judicial system. I mean, a lot of priests figure it that way in order to frighten
 people. But karma means simply, if you die in a plane crash or have a heart attack, it's
 your doing. But that simply means you've got to rethink what you mean by doing. Now I've
 already proved to you that black is white. So now I'm going on to prove to you that what
 you do is what happens to you, and what happens to you is what you do. Because you can't tell
 the difference between doing. You can't tell what you mean by doing unless something happens
 to you to contrast it with, and vice versa. You can't tell something that happens to you
 unless it feels different from something you do. Now let's take a look at our breath. Are
 you doing it, or does it happen to you? If you do a breathing exercise, you can feel
 I'm doing it. Just I'm breathing in just as I might raise my hand. But after a while I
 feel I'm breathing out. I feel I'm breathing out. And I can forget all about it, and it
 goes on, and it happens to me. That's why in yoga, which means, yoga means union, joining,
 same as the Latin, "jungere". While yoga you breathe. Breathing is the main thing in yoga.
 That is to teach you that there's no difference between what you do and what happens to you.
 You learn that through breathing. You can make the very best breath. See, we get into
 Christian terms here. The Holy Spirit, Spirit means breath. Spiritus in Latin, plasma in
 Greek, "gwach" in Hebrew. Breath. Now there's ordinary breath, when you, you know, most
 people's normal breathing. Or forced breath, when, or you know, when people try to sing
 and their voice is forced. And then the next breath is called Holy Spirit. Holy breath.
 That's when the breath is no longer forced, it happens. When it's Nirvana breath, blow
 out, same thing as Holy Spirit. And then that, you see, the unforced one. Go on and on. So
 that's why when monks chant, or devotees of any kind chant, they have the idea that I
 am a flute, and the breath, the prana, the spiritus of the divine flows through it. That's
 what chanting is all about. Make yourself a tube for the divine wind. But that also
 means, realize the unity of the voluntary and the involuntary. That's really what's
 meant by doing the will of God. Do the will. It's one reason why we get confused in English
 as to whether we mean will or whether we mean shall. I will drown and no one shall save
 me. So, think, behind what you call voluntary, you decide. Having reviewed the evidence,
 I've decided it would be best to buy this brand of detergent. Made a decision. How did
 you make a decision? Well, I reviewed the evidence, I added up the price, I came to
 the conclusion, I know all that. How did you work the machinery? The computer in your head?
 You know, you pushed all these buttons, but what's underneath the buttons? Oh, I don't
 know, I never looked. So, you see, that involuntary growth, called the brain, underlies your voluntary
 decision. Because when you decide, you don't first decide to decide, and decide to decide
 to decide. You just decide. But that means there's something else behind it. Well, you
 think that's terrible, because if what I do happens to me, and it isn't really doing it
 all, then I'm in a fatalistic scene. Yes, but I said on the other hand, what happens
 to you is what you do. It works equally that way. You know, you have an earthquake. And
 the thoughts in your head drift about like clouds in the sky. But it can't do anything.
 So, in the same way, this whole strain, the futility of the strain to make white women
 to improve the world, that entire futility, the frustration of it is what you mean by
 "I". Now it goes. It won't work. And the "I" collapses. Everybody is terrified of this
 happening. Suddenly finding out that you don't have an ego. Heaven preserve me from that
 because I've been building up this personality of mine all these years. I've been very carefully
 nurtured this personality. You tell me it doesn't exist. No, because your personality
 is a phantom even more insubstantial than your body. Personality is a work of art. It's
 like music, which vanishes as soon as it's played.


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