It's curious, very, very odd, and yet nobody realizes it, that human beings are brought
 up to feel as if they were strangers in the world.
 We are given a sense of our own existence that is in flat contradiction to the facts
 of nature.
 So in its own way there is something natural about that, because nothing can happen at
 all.
 It is not in some way connected with an elaborate scheme, not a scheme that, as it were, had
 a plan in mind, but nevertheless a scheme that is musical in its nature.
 And even our delusions are part of that.
 But nevertheless they are sometimes extraordinarily odd, and we are given by our society, by our
 tradition and upbringing, by our culture, a very weird sensation of our own existence.
 And that is the sensation of strangeness, of being somebody who, as we say, comes into
 this world, whereas when you are born you should say that you came out of this world.
 You don't come into it.
 Where else is there to come from?
 In the philosophy that we've inherited, however, and that underlies our common sense, there
 are some ideas which account for this sensation of strangeness.
 And I'm going to spend the first session examining the history of that.
 But what I want to say to make things clear from the outset, especially to those of you
 who are strangers to these seminars, is that, strictly speaking, you, that which you feel
 most inwardly and intimately to be yourself, is obviously part and parcel of the works.
 You might say the plays.
 But what there is, we could say in a slangy way, the which than which there is no witcher.
 The Hindus say, "Tatva Masi," which is in Sanskrit saying, "That thou art."
 You're it.
 Only you're playing, you aren't.
 And that's what it was always doing.
 But basically, never fear.
 What is absolutely central and fundamental to you is what the Christians might call God
 or the Godhead.
 And you're pretending you aren't.
 And you're pretending very cleverly, so that the illusion is extraordinarily convincing.
 Or if we put it in terms that do not require these, what we today call mythological concepts
 of God or Brahman or whatever, we can simply say that every individual is what the total
 cosmos is doing at a place called here and now, or a place called I.
 I is a pronoun of position, like this, here, so on.
 And so that's the way things actually work.
 And anyone can see it and it can be proved to the satisfaction of anybody by purely physical
 evidence.
 Only we are trained to feel the exact opposite, you see, that we are little creatures sort
 of looking over our shoulders and wondering where the hell we are and what's going to
 happen next.
 And that this isn't our arrangement at all and that we're caught in a great cosmic trap.
 "Oh thou who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the road I was to wander in."
 You know, that kind of idea.
 Now what accounts for this?
 How could we possibly have come to feel this way?
 Well, there are a lot of reasons, but the two that I want to concentrate on this morning
 are two mythologies that have influenced everybody's thinking in the Western world.
 The first we'll call the Jewish Christian mythology, and the second the Newtonian mythology,
 or mechanistic mythology.
 And the latter, of course, has a far more dominant influence on educated people today
 than the other one.
 But let's look and see what they really involved in our feelings about the world and about
 our place in it.
 First of all, in the Jewish Christian mythology, we are here in a relationship to the ultimate
 reality which is comparable to the relationship between a great king and his subjects.
 This king is modeled on the ideal type of a great Near Eastern king who might have lived,
 say, around 4 or 3,000 BC.
 You remember, don't you, in reading about the fact that when those kings died, all their
 families and servants and many of their subjects were buried with them.
 They were killed outright by being, well, buried alive in the royal tomb.
 And Thomas Mann made the observation that in those days it seemed as if human heads
 had no backs to them, as if one were simply a mask, and that what was behind you was something
 altogether beyond you so that you were completely identified with your tribe, with your human
 family.
 And so the king was like a queen bee, the, well, we would say the kingpin upon which
 everything depends.
 And when that's blown out, everybody collapses with it.
 Only later did we grow backs to our skulls and then begin to feel enclosed.
 That was a very important step, but a troublesome one.
 We don't feel in the lines of G.K.
 Chesterton, "But now a great thing in the street, seems any human nod, we're moving
 strange democracy, the million masks of God."
 We don't feel that, we see, we feel all by ourselves.
 But we can get it back, this sensation of being absolutely one with the whole, and at
 the same time retain everything that we have won by the development of Western-style personality,
 the ego.
 So then, this model of the world, based on the idea that we are all subjects of the divine
 king, was, you might say, a political model, based on the organization of the great city-states
 of the ancient Near East.
 And that image, you see, has absolutely haunted Western man throughout his whole development,
 because he has felt that he is, in this universe, on probation, on sufferance.
 He doesn't quite belong here, because there's this great big giant spirit who's saying to
 him, "Now you watch out.
 You're just a miserable little worm, and I evoked you here out of nothing.
 Of course I love you, because I am love.
 I'm a very good father.
 And everything that I do, however much it hurts, is for your good.
 But you watch out, and don't you dare look me in the eye."
 So everybody does this.
 You see?
 All those customs where the ruler is faced this way, with head down, and so no looking
 at him directly, is based on this mythology.
 And of course it's based, too, on some political facts, because when a big man does attain
 to eminence, everybody is against him secretly.
 They hate him for it.
 So he has to be surrounded with guards and secret police.
 And people all lie with their faces on the floor, so that they're in a position where
 they can't attack.
 That's the whole idea.
 And that's why in the royal court, the throne has its back to the wall.
 There is nothing behind the throne.
 There are just guards on either side who can be watched a little.
 You see?
 So in a church, when the altar, or the episcopal throne, is right with its back to the wall,
 this really indicates a situation of fear.
 But if I'm not afraid of you, I shouldn't really have my back to the wall at all here
 in this situation.
 Only rooms are designed, our whole architecture, following the design of original courthouses,
 is made that way.
 After all, one should walk out into the middle of people and have people behind you, if you
 can trust them.
 So this model, I call it a model of the universe, based on the kingly court, did certain very
 important things for us.
 It gave us the idea, for example, of universal law.
 It lies at the roots of many of our best ideas of justice.
 But it bugged us.
 It really bugged us, because you felt that you were never, never free from the penetrating
 glance of an all-seeing eye that watched everything you do.
 I have a friend who is a humorous Catholic, and in her toilet, she has an old-fashioned
 kind with a tank and a pipe going down to the seat.
 And right on that pipe, there is a little pile with an "I" on it.
 And written underneath in Gothic letters, it says, "Thou God seest me."
 So everywhere, there is no escape.
 At the most intimate moments or in the most intimate thoughts, you are under judgment.
 You are being watched.
 Big Father is watching you, you see?
 Now that made the Western world more and more and more uncomfortable.
 They couldn't stand it.
 They felt that this was the paradox involved.
 To believe in that kind of a God, a personal God, has this good thing about it, that it's
 saying that the ultimate reality, that which underlies everything that happens, is intelligent.
 And not only intelligent, but beneficent, even if in a rather stern and authoritarian
 way.
 But at least it's alive.
 The universe, in other words, has a heart.
 But we switched to the opposite mythology, because we couldn't stand it.
 And in the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, evolved the idea that the universe doesn't
 have a heart at all, that it is essentially stupid, and that we, sensitive, intelligent
 beings capable of love and all sorts of feelings, are an accident.
 A really deplorable accident.
 But what a monstrous system, in which the tender, sensitive nervous systems that we
 are could appear in a world that consists principally of rock and fire.
 That is an impersonal, vast, gyrating nonsense, which has no consideration for us men whatsoever.
 Now why did such an idea possess the Western world?
 Why could it be that in the 19th century, Freud could talk about the basic energies
 of the psyche as libido, and compare them to the blind forces of brute emotions, you
 know?
 Think of that language.
 At the same time, Ernst Haeckel and T.H.
 Huxley and so on were thinking about the world as the manifestation of energy.
 Say Henri Bergson with the idea of the élan vital.
 What was the nature of this energy which manifested everything?
 Essentially it was something like electricity.
 Now electricity, it does wonderful things for us, but essentially electricity is rather
 dumb.
 You switch it on and switch it off.
 Supposing I could just switch you on and switch you off, you see?
 But just like that, say, "Please don't bother me anymore."
 And you'd vanish.
 But that's the way, you see, they thought of the world as being just a surge of, like
 this, you see?
 But completely stupid.
 Only after they, how on earth they ever got intelligence out of this is a miracle.
 But they did by explaining that if you gave it enough time, it would eventually become
 intelligent.
 Well that's the most nonsensical idea anybody ever thought of.
 But if just time, you see, would make things more complicated.
 I want you to, this is the thing that is difficult today, because that idea of the mechanical
 universe that is essentially dead is a very persuasive one.
 And most intelligent people today, who are products of the college and that particular
 system of propaganda and indoctrination, really feel that this is the case.
 That they are strangers in an alien world.
 And that when you die, it'll just be like you were a caterpillar that was squashed.
 And that will be that.
 That you're, in other words, an interlude of consciousness between eternal darknesses.
 And that's all there is.
 It doesn't mean anything.
 It is just, just that.
 And not much of that, anyway.
 Not much of a that.
 Now what is important is to understand that this is a myth.
 There aren't, just as the other thing about the great cosmic king is also a myth.
 There is no foundation for it in fact whatsoever.
 But it's a way, you see, of putting the world down when it had been put up too much.
 It's a reaction.
 The world had been put up too much by being made embarrassingly intelligent.
 You see, there was that all-seeing eye who would say to you, "Duh, duh, duh, duh, duh,
 duh," every minute, you see.
 Better a dead world than one watching me like that.
 Now let's look at certain elements in the 19th century myth, the Newtonian myth, that
 are very interesting.
 First of all, let's consider what it says about the nature of human consciousness, of
 the mind, of being aware.
 There really is no such thing as a mind.
 What we call mind and life is a kind of scum that grows after a long time on the top of
 rocks.
 You see, it looks upon the human being as a cell-infested skeleton, just as it looks
 upon the earth as a life-infested rock.
 It sees no real connection between the rock, which is the earth, or the fiery metallic
 ball, and the life that's creeping on its surface.
 That's an expressence.
 Now expressance means something that grows out of.
 But look how we use the word, an excrescence, it's something, it sounds almost like excrement.
 We use it in a deprecatory way.
 And you've got to watch very much how people use words and the tone of voice they put into
 them, because that shows you what game they're playing.
 So when they say life is an excrescence, or they've got another word they have at those
 times, an epiphenomenon, a mere epiphenomenon.
 Note the word mere.
 That word does more damage in philosophy than any other one I know.
 It's merely energy, you know?
 You are, all's the matter with you is that you're merely nervous, or something like that.
 So in this system of things, they explained that the whole world is merely mechanical,
 but that we are here is a sort of accident, and we are an excrescence, we are a fungus,
 we're a sort of growth like lichen on rocks.
 And that's all we are.
 Now this was to say, on the one hand, that man is a product of nature.
 He's not the special creation of a supernatural God.
 But they didn't, as a result of feeling that man is a product of nature, become friendly
 with nature, as you would have supposed they might.
 They hated nature all the more, and all the more furiously, for bringing us forth, and
 therefore waged and initiated the war against nature that began with the 19th century, and
 has been pressed into the 20th.
 The idea, in other words, that the only hope there is for the human spirit is to beat the
 environment into submission, because it's an alien environment.
 It's a hateful, mechanical, stupid bunch of nonsense.
 And if we don't get in there with our cleverness and power, and smash it into submission, we
 have no future.
 We're just going to be wiped out one day when the sun gets too hot and blows up.
 And that'll be that.
 But before that happens, which may be a million years from now, we expect to inhabit other
 galaxies, to have the sun under control, you know, all sorts of wires fixed into it and
 things, and so it'll behave itself.
 And then we'll rule the roost.
 Now, having examined, then, these two mythological forms which underlie the Western man's intense
 feeling of alienation and separateness, we have to go into another dimension of the question.
 And that is the influence upon who we think we are of our social institutions.
 We know that there are things like the family, marriage, the police, the courts, the law,
 the church, and we know that these are social institutions.
 But social institutions are far more subtle than those things.
 Time, for example, is a social institution, because it is a matter of convention, that
 is to say, of coming together to agree to measure time in a certain way.
 And we have international agreement about that.
 Likewise, obviously, money is a social institution.
 So are weights and measures.
 So are ideas of value.
 What is the good life?
 Who is contributing to society, and who is working against it?
 So you see, we were discussing this morning, among other things, the idea of survival,
 and that survival is a good thing.
 And to survive as long as possible is a very good thing.
 But that is a form of social institution.
 It is something we have come to agree about.
 It isn't necessarily true in the sense that, shall I say, the French language is not a
 truer language than the English.
 But so long as people agree to speak a certain language, they can communicate.
 And they've decided that communication is a good thing.
 So any language that makes communication possible is a good language.
 And in a way, the more people who agree about it, the better.
 But it is a matter of agreement.
 You see, same way, the lines of latitude and longitude are conventions.
 They are, but they don't exist.
 You can't tie up packages with the equator.
 But it's a very useful idea.
 And so in the same way, the ways in which we have shaped the constellations, that we
 all agree that the stars called the Big Dipper look something like a dipper.
 And though, you know, there aren't any strings tying them together, the constellation is
 not there as a constellation.
 So in a sense, we project our institutions onto the world in rather the same way that
 psychiatric patients project images onto a Rorschach plot.
 And what interests the psychiatrist is what sort of images this person produces that tells
 him something about the person.
 In the same way, our social institutions tell us something about people.
 When we see some very exquisite pattern, we look at it and say, "My, isn't that wonderful?
 Isn't that intelligent-looking?
 I wonder who did it?"
 Because we associate all intelligence with a "who."
 And when you look at a plant, it's obviously intelligent.
 Its shape, its rhythm, all its wonderful tubes inside, its complex relationship to bees and
 birds and to the surrounding atmosphere and light.
 This is a very intelligent affair.
 Now in just the same way, we are related to the external world, as plants are, in amazingly
 complicated ways.
 And by and large, we don't notice them.
 Because the aspect of our consciousness with which we notice things is very limited.
 It notices what it calls facts, things, and events, and pinpoints them.
 It pulls them out as significant.
 You see, when you remember coming here and what you saw and who was here, you only remember
 very tiny bits of the whole scene.
 You will not remember what very many people wore unless you happen to be interested in
 clothes.
 You won't really remember how they did their hair, what their styles were, unless you are
 peculiarly interested in hairstyles.
 You probably won't notice their shoes at all.
 And goodness knows what else that nobody has ever thought to notice.
 But when, under certain circumstances, our consciousness becomes expanded, as in mystical
 vision, you begin to become aware of things that you don't notice.
 One of the most important things that we don't notice is space.
 Most people regard space as nothing.
 It's just a void in which we move around.
 But actually, space is terribly important.
 It has properties.
 We are all something happening in space in rather the same way that a whirlpool occurs
 in water.
 Space has turns in it.
 It has ripples in it.
 It has places where it's denser than at other places.
 And this is all becoming clear in physics.
 But it's certainly not impinged upon the consciousness of the average intelligent person.
 There is no manifestation of energy without space.
 Also we can drag in time, but I don't want to make it complicated.
 I want to make this little image as simple as possible so as to understand the importance
 of space.
 That is to say, of the surroundings of things, of the background.
 And the background is ignored in ordinary consciousness.
 But in mystical consciousness, the background becomes important.
 You become aware vividly of the fact that you as an individual imply by your existence
 everything else that exists.
 Whatever has existed or ever will exist, you can't exist as the kind of person you are
 without all that.
 Now that's the secret to the connection between you and the cosmos.
 Just as a back doesn't exist without a front.
 In just that sort of way, all of it doesn't exist without you, and you don't exist without
 all of it.
 Even if you die, you see, and disappear totally, nevertheless, the fact that you have existed
 is still a fact.
 And a universe in which there has been a person like Socrates is quite a different universe
 from a universe in which there hadn't been a person like Socrates.
 Socrates, having existed, is a symptom of the way things are.
 So fundamentally, we get a picture of the cosmos in which the self, the real I, is the
 whole thing, just as we say of an individual human body.
 You are John Doe, and that's all of you.
 Although if we look at you very carefully under an electron microscope, we will find
 that molecules in your blood are further apart than the earth and the sun.
 What makes you think you're a unity?
 It's quite a thought.
 Well it's space.
 And so in the same way as such a relationship exists between our galaxy and other galaxies
 and so on, it's obvious.
 So then, by various conventions and social institutions, we develop the impression that
 this isn't so.
 We learn to ignore.
 We learn not to notice certain things.
 And do you know not noticing is very, very important?
 In the Hindu theory of politics, all the, what are spiritual virtues, have political
 counterparts.
 For example, in the spiritual domain, the word upaya, U-P-A-Y-A, means merciful techniques
 for awakening people.
 Clever devices used by a teacher.
 In the political domain, the word upaya means cunning, deceit.
 Likewise in the spiritual domain, upaksha means equanimity.
 In the political domain, upaksha means overlooking.
 When for example the boss of a big concern finds that one of his employees is taking
 out a little bit of the petty cash, now he figures out, is this man worth it?
 Are his services really worth it and shall I merely ignore the fact that he's doing this?
 That would be upaksha.
 Now in our whole society, we do an enormous amount of upaksha.
 The things we overlook.
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