I realize that every professional group has a special concern when they attend such a seminar as this,
 with the practical application to their specific jobs of the ideas that are being discussed.
 And the question has been put to me very concretely, that if I'm discussing the human game
 and promulgating some sort of philosophy of life as play,
 how will you get this across to your clients, your students, your patients, etc., however you name them?
 And I want to assure you that this is the one subject on earth that you should not be concerned with.
 Now, I very often talk, I talk to all sorts of groups, and in these groups there are invariably parents,
 and they hear about this sort of point of view and they want to know how to apply it to their children,
 as if children were certain things that you apply something to.
 Children are very canny, and the moment you start applying a method to them, they're aware that something's afoot.
 And the only way to do anything at all with children is to be natural, to be you.
 But there's no way of doing that, because the moment you know you're being natural, you're not.
 If you, however, are a person fascinated with something, deeply interested in anything at all,
 it doesn't matter what the devil it is, a child is intrigued, catches the infection of it from you by osmosis.
 And so in exactly the same way, if you are deeply absorbed in life,
 you can commit psychotherapy without any technique at all.
 Only, there are rituals which bring you into contact with people.
 You know, they have to make an appointment and they have a problem and they want to discuss it with you.
 And so that has to be tolerated.
 But beyond that, what they really want to meet is a person whose own life is really satisfactory to him or her,
 rather than a person who is a professional in setting other people's lives right.
 There's no way of doing that.
 And so, the thing that I want to talk to you very seriously about, or very sincerely,
 about certain things that seem to me important in the life of anybody in your position,
 and certain things that are ordinarily quite out of the bounds of psychiatrists' and psychologists' discussions.
 Speaking quite frankly, the thing that oppresses me in my constant contact with psychotherapeutic circles
 is the amazing superficiality of it all.
 You know, let's be psychologists and let's not venture any deeper than that.
 Let's be quite clear that we are working with something empirical, something matter-of-fact,
 and let's not get anything really spooky mixed up with this.
 Because after all, we are, as I explained earlier, we are still under the influence of the 19th century mythology of the world.
 And this has become a tremendously important thing for all those branches of the academic profession that want to be scientific and aren't.
 Now, science is a discipline possible only in very, very special situations.
 The nature of science is the accurate description, first of all.
 And accurate description is possible only when the subject matter to be described is very carefully limited and restricted.
 In other words, in situations where all the important factors are measurable.
 And in order, say, to have a test tube containing certain chemicals, which need to be measured with extreme accuracy,
 you've got to isolate this test tube from the external world.
 If the mixture is in any way unstable, a passing truck might damage things,
 a subtle alteration of temperature when the sun comes out might upset something.
 And so more and more you have to isolate your specimen in an influence-proofed room.
 And that's a very expensive and a very difficult thing to construct.
 But once you've done it, when you've got your, all the variables in the situation are known and measurable,
 you can have some approximation to a truly scientific experiment.
 To pretend to be able to do this in human relations is absurd.
 Your variables are infinite. You've no real idea what they are.
 But that is not to say, in any sense whatsoever, that therapy cannot be performed.
 And that you, as psychologists consulting schools, cannot do your jobs.
 I only ask of you, don't sail under false pretenses.
 Don't assume the mask of science.
 Don't aspire to the status of being scientists in the sense that a physicist or a chemist or a mathematician can be scientists,
 with their rigorous precision and their elimination of variables.
 You, if you are successful, must be artists.
 And an artist is a person who performs certain things skillfully, but doesn't really know how he does it.
 You learn art by methods that you don't know how you learn.
 You can't describe, because your brain is capable of absorbing all kinds of information that is much too subtle to be translated into words.
 You see, let's take, we're doing an enormous, in the academic world today, we're doing an enormous number of studies on creativity.
 How do we get creative people?
 Couldn't we somehow pin this down and try and analyze and specify the factors which lead to creativity in engineering, in inventive work, in psychology, anything you want?
 Well, it's fun doing that.
 It's all right to analyze creativity and see if you can make any sense of it, but you won't.
 But that doesn't deny the fact that creativity exists and can indeed be stimulated.
 Creative people can stimulate creativity in others by osmosis, by exposure.
 And so, as a form of creativity, also the power of psychotherapy can be learned, provided you do not pretend it is a science and that there is a specific method for learning it.
 It can be learned provided you expose yourself to a therapeutic person.
 You don't know, do you, how you digest vitamins?
 You don't, when you take these pills, have to know the precise steps by which they are turned into your life energies.
 Your body knows how to do it, but that's not a process analyzable into words and figures.
 So, in exactly the same way, through certain kinds of human contact with people who have the gift of therapy, you can absorb their wisdom like you absorb the virtues in vitamins.
 But don't be anxious about it and try to define the whole thing.
 I remember when I was a little boy, I once thought the idea that I would write a book which would pass down all knowledge to a subsequent civilization that would know nothing about us.
 And the first thing I had to do was to write down how the letters of our alphabet were pronounced.
 Figure that one out.
 I made a way of saying how A was pronounced, but I had to use A to show how A was pronounced.
 And that is the semi—that is an epitome of the problem that we have.
 You can't say in words how words are used.
 And so, do you know a game called Vish?
 What you do is everybody has a standard college dictionary, Webster's College Dictionary.
 You sit around a table, and then there's a hat, and you pull out—somebody pulls out a word, and everybody looks the word up.
 Then they write down on a pad the key words and the definition of that word, and then they start looking them up.
 And the first person who gets back to the original word calls out "Vish," short for "Vicious Circle," and he wins the round.
 And the referee—there's always a referee—he decides whether you worked fairly, whether you didn't take an illegitimate shortcut.
 You know, like looking up "and" or something like that in the definition.
 You have to look up a key word, because so long as a dictionary doesn't include pictures, all it does is define words in terms of words.
 It never makes the bridge between words and the physical universe, which Korzybski so delightfully called the "unspeakable world."
 It's so fascinating. "Unspeakable" also means "disreputable."
 The world that is not academically respectable.
 Do you know that in recent controversy at Harvard about the experiments with psychedelic drugs,
 some member of the Department of Social Relations actually said, "No knowledge is academically respectable knowledge unless it can be expressed in words."
 Completely throws out the football team.
 You know, did you ever hear of the football team doing a thesis on how to play football?
 Obviously not, because that's something that has to work.
 Notice, too, in the academic world that all subjects which are effete are studied in terms of their history.
 When you start studying mathematics, you do not study the history of mathematics as the initial course,
 but history of philosophy, history of religions, is the start-out course in these topics.
 Medicine, you don't start studying the history of medicine until you're in graduate school.
 History of science is a graduate school subject.
 History of psychology.
 Whenever you think a subject is practical, you go right into doing it rather than being historical about it.
 But the point simply is that you cannot pretend to be scientific and to adopt the gestures and attitudes and postures of scientists
 about things that are arts and that require a certain kind of personal magic, profundity, or whatever to carry them off.
 And so I would say that the thing that affects me and depresses me about the whole world of psychiatry,
 psychology, and psychotherapy, is a certain extraordinary lack of depth,
 and almost bending over backwards not to encounter anything profound,
 because that would expose us to the charge of mysticism, or some other bugbear.
 But this is quite fatal, because what your patients are concerned with is profound things.
 Have you ever looked into the literature on the relation between psychotherapy and death?
 You will find a lot of blank pages. There's hardly anything about it.
 There are, I know of two books, and I don't know how many articles, I'm not in the habit of reading articles very much,
 but so far as books are concerned, I know about two books, outside of the work of Freud,
 where he discusses death wishes and so on, and outside the work of Jung,
 who has said that he regards his kind of psychotherapy in particular as a task for the second half of life in which a person prepares for death.
 But by and large, ordinary psychotherapeutic work ignores the subject.
 Likewise, the whole orientation of medicine to death is one where death is a misfortune, it's not allowed to happen.
 Doctors don't prepare people to die. When somebody is in a state of terminal cancer,
 all their friends come around and say, "Cheer up, old boy, you'll be all right in another two weeks,
 you'll be back and having a beer again, or we'll go out to the country and you'll be back at work,
 love to see you in the office once again, this person knows jolly well you're going to disappear within a couple of days."
 And knows this, and feels the strange mockery of his friend's unwillingness to accept this,
 and therefore a lack of genuine human relationship.
 And so the physician is embarrassed in a way that maybe a priest is not embarrassed.
 When somebody says to him, "Listen, I am sick of being ill, I want to die.
 I want to stop all this stuff being fed into my veins, and I want to be through."
 And the doctor in his role can't say, "Of course, that's perfectly understandable."
 And insofar as the psychotherapist takes his cue from medical role-playing,
 he can't say to a person, "All right, you should die. I think it's a good thing."
 A very wise man once said, this was Ananda Kumaraswamy,
 "I would rather die ten years too early than ten minutes too late."
 There's a time to die. And dying should be one of the great events of life,
 like birth and marriage, graduation, anything like that.
 All cultures have had the rites of passage.
 But in our culture, death is a very strongly repressed event.
 We call it passing away. And our morticians, who call themselves that instead of undertakers,
 make up bodies in the mockery of a beauty sleep.
 And they have a kind of oily, unctuous, avuncular approach, which is extremely beastly.
 And they make a huge racket out of the whole thing.
 You know, the fantasies about Forrest Lawn, which is the epitome of all this kind of thing.
 Henry Miller's one, I was quoting to someone at dinner, where he says,
 "Swallow a dozen vitamins and throw anything down the hatch.
 If that doesn't work, see a surgeon. If that doesn't work, get a Hollywood funeral."
 They're the duckiest, cutest, craziest funerals in the world.
 You could have your beloved embalmed and sitting on a couch,
 reading something edifying like the Bhagavad Gita and smoking a cigarette.
 Cigarette guaranteed not to rot away before the lips and the buttocks.
 "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
 And this you see because the healing professions today
 are working on the basis, the metaphysical basis,
 of that 19th century scientific mythology.
 That this world is nothing but a mechanism.
 And that when you're dead, you're dead, as people love to say and lick their tongues around it.
 As if that really said anything at all.
 So what we are reduced to is, on the matters on which we are fundamentally embarrassed,
 we carefully keep silence. We have no answers about that.
 We'd rather not talk about it, but it's a thing people are fundamentally fascinated with.
 Now you can rationalize all you want and say that questions about the ultimate meaning of the universe have no meaning.
 Be as logical positivist as you please, but that will never quash the questions.
 And a person who doesn't somehow have a sense of relationship with whatever it is that's eternal,
 will rattle rather than speak.
 And so I would say to you, talking frankly here tonight,
 that the most important thing for any kind of psychologist or therapist
 is not religion in the old sense of this word,
 because religion is something in our world partisan.
 Are you a Catholic or a Baptist, a Methodist or an Episcopalian?
 You deal there, you see, in our sectarian religion, with things that are beliefs.
 And therefore, not knowledge.
 These are expressions of opinions and hopes, but they're not.
 These religions have no power, because they have no knowledge, they have no experience.
 In fact, they hate experience.
 If you try and discuss, as I did, when I was a minister in the Anglican Church,
 problems of mystical experience, most clergy will say you're a nut,
 because they will say, "That's all subjective."
 And what matters is, do you adhere to a certain standard of traditional doctrine or behavior?
 That's objective, that's something we have out there, see?
 When it comes to experience, actually knowing something in your bones, they're scared out of their wits.
 And I said this afternoon, the same thing is true in psychiatry.
 The psychiatrist is terrified to experience something
 outside the banalities of ordinary, everyday consciousness.
 And as I said, he clings to that with a peculiar passion.
 I remember once I was undergoing an LSD experience, and the psychiatrist in attendance,
 he wasn't a bad fellow at all, I mean, he was a very imaginative man, but he said,
 "What are five and seven? What are nine and three?"
 You know, "Could I still negotiate these mathematical trivialities?"
 And these are tests of sanity.
 Now, I don't want to deride that completely, because anybody who explores into worlds
 beyond the everyday world should be able, ideally, to come back with an account of what he's seen.
 I believe very much in being a bridge between worlds,
 and being able to put into intelligible and rational language
 things that come from experiences beyond the intelligible and rational.
 That's the task of a poet. A poet is supposed to be a person who says what can't be said.
 At least, he's always approximating to that.
 In a way, nothing can be described, except to those who already know what it is.
 You know what I mean by water, because you've tasted water and seen it.
 If you had never seen water, you wouldn't know what I meant by the word.
 On the other hand, what will I do with a person who is congenitally blind,
 and he's never seen light, and doesn't know what color is?
 I'm going to make a hell of an attempt to describe it to him.
 I'm going to exercise all my wits and say, look,
 there is something like what you experience as different degrees of temperature.
 You know what hot is, and you know that there are many degrees from hot to cold.
 Now, there's something else like that.
 We talk about hot and cold colors, reds and blues.
 There are different ends of a spectrum, which is like you experience between hot and cold,
 or between rough and smooth.
 But this thing also is like what you hear in sound.
 You hear high and low notes, and you can see a whole range of different tones between them.
 So there's something else in which these things happen,
 and it's a sense you don't have, and so I can't tell you directly, but it's like all that.
 And I can really work on it, give him an idea of something else.
 He won't get it directly from my book, but he will,
 through the conviction with which I'm speaking and through the care with which I'm trying to outline this thing,
 know that there is another dimension beyond his imagination.
 And so in just the same way, there are dimensions beyond the imagination
 that our ordinary academic education gives us.
 It would be all right if we were as definitively excluded from them
 as people who are congenitally blind are excluded from color and light, but we're not.
 We keep slipping in and out of them, sometimes in a way that is beneficent,
 and sometimes in a way that is deeply troubling.
 When a person who is brought up in Arkansas and has no other religion than the fundamentalist interpretation of the King James Bible
 slips accidentally into a mystical experience,
 there is no other way to describe what has happened to him than to say that he is Jesus Christ, or God.
 This is blasphemous in his community,
 but to give him the benefit of the doubt, they say he's crazy.
 And whenever somebody says such a thing, we challenge them in our culture with technical questions.
 If you are God, command that this glass be made into a rabbit.
 How did you create the universe in six days?
 There was once a poor woman in an asylum who was asked this question,
 and she replied, "I never talk shop."
 [laughter]
 But there it is, you see.
 These states do occur,
 and psychology and psychiatry can do nothing with them except call them aberrations,
 unless psychiatrists and psychologists have themselves explored these experiences.
 Why should we pursue them?
 Because you have to deal with them.
 And because what is always being asked of you is...
 You see, people go to you today, whereas before they went to clergymen.
 The clergyman is a pretty hopeless case today,
 because people feel that if they go to him with a real problem, all they'll get is platitudes.
 Especially if it's a moral problem of any kind, he'll be a little...
 He'll be understanding, they know that because he's been to a modern theological school
 where they had courses in pastoral psychology and counseling.
 But they know fundamentally that a clergyman is out to get you.
 He wants to enroll you in a community, in a church, and so that you'll be a regular contributor.
 They have a little bit more confidence in a doctor, or somebody associated with doctoring,
 because they know a doctor wants to get rid of his patients.
 A doctor doesn't want to get you hooked on medicine, if he's an honest doctor.
 But a clergyman wants to get you hooked on the religion.
 So you people, who stand midway culturally, are looked to because you have the aura of science.
 And therefore people say, "Well, that's rather more objective, that's a little safer.
 I feel I can risk this person because he's not out to get me into some hocus-pocus."
 See?
 So I'm afraid of that clergyman, because eventually, however understanding he is,
 he's going to wag his finger at me and say, "Naughty, naughty, naughty, you mustn't do that."
 Especially, see, in effect today, our churches are nothing but sexual regulation societies.
 That's all they are interested in.
 They get a little bit riled up about race relations.
 But fundamentally, what can you get kicked out of a church for?
 That's the test.
 Especially if you're a minister.
 You can live openly in envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness,
 hardness of heart, and contempt of God's word and commandment.
 And be a bishop.
 But the moment you sleep with your secretary, and furthermore continue to do so,
 you're out, out, out.
 If you're a homosexual, it's even worse.
 That's the test. That's what it's all about.
 Let's reserve questions to a little later, and then we can take them all together.
 But over and over again, this is the thing that matters.
 So people who, for various reasons, are involved in a form of love or sexual relationship,
 which is by these standards irregular,
 they know that when finally they get down to it with the minister,
 he's going to say, "Naughty, naughty, naughty."
 And so it goes. So they go with him.
 Because he stands for pure squaredom.
 However softly he puts it over the soft cell.
 But they know with the psychotherapist, they're going to get some less judging
 and more understanding attitude.
 But they will pursue the psychotherapist to a certain extent
 and find that beyond a certain point he collapses.
 Because he doesn't know what to do with death.
 He has no metaphysical ground.
 The priest has too much metaphysics.
 He has no understanding on the level that the psychotherapist has competence in.
 So therefore, to be truly effective, the psychotherapist needs a kind of deeper vision.
 And he hasn't any reason to be afraid of it
 or to be feeling that this will injure his scientific respectability.
 Because as I've given you the clues this morning,
 you don't need to talk about mysticism.
 You need to talk about ecological awareness.
 There is always a language you can translate this into
 that will placate behaviorists, logical positivists,
 and other people who want to insist fundamentally that the universe is dull.
 You see, that's what lies behind all these mythologies.
 The person who wants to say on the one hand that the universe is something
 that strikes him as profoundly mysterious
 will talk about the Godhead and the things behind it.
 The person who on the other hand who wants to say, "Oh well, it's just...
 it's just a thing that's not really very important,"
 he'll find a language so as to describe the universe in a slightly contemptuous way.
 He'll say it's nothing but.
 And neither of these people can prove that what they say is true.
 They're just two different ways of expressing the kind of person you are
 or what role you're playing with respect to life.
 See, a lot of people want to advertise the fact that they are sound and reliable
 and nobody can put over any nonsense on them, they're tough-minded.
 So in the academic world they'll always play a certain role.
 You can watch it, you know exactly what it is, how they come on.
 Other people want to say to those people,
 "You're dry as bones, you rattle, you know the words but you don't know the music."
 You see, all, really, all these people really are differentiated between two schools of thought.
 The prickly people and the gooey people.
 And on the side of goo we have the romanticists,
 and on the side of prickles the classicists.
 In medieval times, on the side of goo we had people who were then called realists,
 and on the side of prickles the people who were called nominalists.
 Now realists believe that every man, individual person,
 was an example of an essence called mankind.
 The realists said, "That's a lot of nonsense. There are only particular people.
 There is no such essence called mankind."
 And today, the logical positivists and behaviorists are examples of prickly people,
 and mystics and idealists in the Berkeley-ian sense are examples of gooey people.
 And this is an eternal debate.
 When you examine any substance closely, you find structure.
 But when your lens gets out of focus, you find substance or goo,
 because you can't see the details.
 So it is all homogeneous, like homogenized milk.
 So depending on the level of magnification with which you look at life,
 you see prickles, or structure, and goo, or stuff.
 And all philosophical debates go along between these people.
 Whereas the truth of the matter is, of course, that life is gooey prickles and prickly goo.
 Now, don't get taken in by being too prickly.
 This is the thing that in our academic world today,
 considering what its fashions are, is the besetting temptation.
 That to secure oneself as an honest and respectable academician
 who is of sound scientific approach,
 people who ought not to be so prickly,
 because they're dealing with things in which there are infinitely many variables,
 put on the idea that they know what all the prickles in this psychological situation are,
 and we just don't.
 You have to get a bit gooey.
 And don't be ashamed of it.
 So then, we have to consider mythology.
 We've looked at myths, now two myths, which have been so influential on our culture.
 And one myth was an authoritarian, paternalistic one,
 that we are under God.
 We are the subject of the divine king,
 who acts towards us in the role of a cosmic grandfather.
 This was all rather uncomfortable.
 And so, as I pointed out, there's a reactionary myth.
 Look, the universe isn't interested in us at all.
 It was too interested in us, you see, with the God-the-Father myth.
 So the reaction to that is that it's not a bit interested.
 Nature cares nothing for the individual, only for the species. You know that story.
 I invite you to consider another myth, and I say myth,
 which is, of course, the famous Hindu myth,
 that the universe is a drama.
 See, a drama is an image, just like an artifact,
 considering the universe as something constructed, put together, manufactured.
 That's a myth.
 But the dramatic myth is different from the constructionist myth.
 In the dramatic myth, there is a very immediate relationship
 between any member of the world, that is to say, a human being,
 and the root and ground, what there is.
 Because in the dramatic myth, every one of you is basically connected
 with the reality which for untold billions of years
 has sparkled in these galaxies and nebulae.
 These are not things foreign to you.
 What you see outside you, or apparently outside you,
 although it looks distant and foreign, is most fundamental to you.
 There was sense in what is now only a superstition, astrology.
 Astrology as a means of predicting what is going to happen to any individual in his life
 is, as far as I could make out, of almost null value.
 But there was one sensible idea behind it.
 When you cast a person's horoscope, what you did was you drew a map
 of the then-known universe as it was at the time this child was born.
 And this was supposed to be a map of his soul.
 What an ingenious idea.
 It is to say, your soul is the whole world as it focuses upon your moment.
 Now, ordinarily, when we talk of souls, we think of something clad in a sheet
 with holes in it, you know, like a Halloween ghost.
 It is a kind of miasmic creature that inhabits your body,
 and when you die, it leaves you like the breath leaves you.
 But that's not the soul at all.
 The soul is something which contains the body.
 The body doesn't contain the soul.
 The soul, if we put it into modern language,
 is the entire complex of relationships in whose context this organism exists.
 So it includes social relationships, communications relationships,
 dynamic relationships of heat and temperature,
 relationships with animals, with insects, with bacilli,
 relationships with gravity, with cosmic rays, and interstellar balances.
 All these things, as they are focused at any individual point in the world,
 constitute the soul.
 That was the truth in the astrological diagram.
 But we are, as I said, taught to feel this system inside out,
 to ignore the soul and identify with the body, with the organism.
 It's not that the body and soul are different in the Cartesian sense.
 It's not that they are different substances.
 They're all the same world.
 The soul is the physical world in its entirety,
 and God only knows what that contains,
 because our senses are attuned only to a very small spectrum band
 of the physical world.
 But there it is.
 And if you persist in screening out the knowledge of yourself
 as all that has been defined in our system of conventions as other than you,
 you're going to be very unhappy,
 because you're going to feel estranged.
 And this estrangement that we, most of us feel in our culture,
 is reflected in things that we do that are very destructive.
 We constantly hear of man's conquest of nature,
 and we talk about the conquest of space,
 and we talk about when we climb great mountains,
 we speak as if we were conquering them.
 Why this hostility?
 Look at this rocket.
 These enormous, aggressive phallic emblems being zoomed at the moon.
 What do you think that means?
 They're going to screw the moon.
 Poor old Venus.
 Well, now this is a ridiculous way to explore space.
 You're never going to get anywhere in a rocket.
 It's a crawling thing.
 It's a horse and buggy.
 If you want to explore space, the right direction to go is radio astronomy,
 because that makes the outer space come to you.
 You don't have to go to it.
 You're in space.
 Here we are, floating on this Earth, which is way out in space.
 We're already there.
 All we need to do to find out what's around us is get more sensitive, more open,
 develop things that are like the radio astronomical things.
 Maybe we can find instruments more sensitive yet than those,
 and they will bring the outside to us instead of going, "Boom," and conquering it.
 And so in the same way, in California where I live, everything is being bulldozed.
 They go to the hills.
 People would love to live in the hills.
 They take a bulldozer, and they flatten out whole terraces in the Hollywood Hills and elsewhere
 and make them into track plots where they can build conventional houses that the banks will finance.
 Whereas any good architect knows how to put a house bang on the side of a hill
 with making no more alteration of the land than building a road to get at it.
 Better still, on the top of the house, a landing for a helicopter.
 And then those hills aren't disturbed.
 People who want to live in the hills presumably want to enjoy the hills.
 They want to destroy them by living there, but that's what they do.
 So they conquer the hills.
 They bash them about with bulldozers, and then the rains come.
 And since all the vegetation has been torn off, the soil starts to erode,
 and eventually the house falls down the hill.
 Sovereign right.
 But a good architect goes to a hill and says, "Good morning. I'm delighted to meet you.
 I would like to live on you, and I would like you to tell me what kind of a house you would like me to build on you."
 And so he studies the nature of hills and eventually learns how to live on one without disturbing it.
 As a Zen Buddhist poem which says of a wise man,
 "Entering the forest, he does not disturb a blade of grass.
 Entering the water, he does not make a ripple."
 Because he first of all becomes one with the environment.
 That is to say, in our more precise scientific language,
 he studies thoroughly the ecology of the situation before he does anything to interfere with it.
 We must interfere. We can't help interfering with the world around us.
 Because even to know something is to interfere with it.
 Even when you shine a light on something to look at it, you alter it by shining the light on it.
 When you examine the behavior of an electron, you change its behavior.
 And so you want to know what does it do when you're not looking at it.
 Does the light in the refrigerator go out when you close the door?
 How can you look inside to see?
 But if we are sensitive enough to recognize that the outside world is our own physical body,
 and that we should respect it just as we respect our own feet, head, hands, and stomachs,
 that's literally true. It's physical, not merely metaphysical.
 And so with this fantastic technology that we have,
 we have power to alter the physical world as nobody ever had.
 But do we have the sensitivity to interact with the physical world as our friend,
 as our own body, as our own self? We don't have that sensitivity,
 so long as our knowledge that this is so remains purely theoretical.
 Now, many scientists, biologists, ecologists, zoologists, botanists, forestry people,
 they know theoretically up here, cortically, that this relationship exists.
 But they don't know it here. They are still Christian souls,
 living in bodies, constituting egos that came into this world
 instead of having come out of it.
 And so from my thought, what really constitutes therapy,
 not merely the therapy of peculiar individual variations of people
 who cannot adapt themselves to a particular social context,
 the important therapy is the therapy of the social institution itself,
 the institution of the ego.
 Individual variations will crop up, I think, anyhow,
 but they will crop up in extraordinary numbers in a society
 where the conventional view of the self is in such tremendous disparity
 from the state of affairs as we see it
 through the best tools of knowledge that we have.
 That's what one can claim for scientific knowledge.
 You can't claim that it's absolutely true, but you can claim
 that using the most careful means that you have of knowing anything,
 it shows you the world to be in a certain way.
 Now, if that's the way the world is, then the way you feel the world
 should ideally correspond to the way in which you know it theoretically.
 So the task of the therapist in this case becomes to help people
 to feel subjectively how it is to exist in a way that corresponds
 to the best of our objective knowledge.
 And that leads us into, you see, areas which scientists have avoided
 because they are associated with religion and mysticism
 and weird things of that nature.
 And supposing then it does turn out, you see,
 that that which seems to me most far from you, most remote, most alien,
 you look out, take a telescope or whatever you have,
 and look out at the vast distances of space,
 and it seems all very foreign and remote.
 That's because you've been hypnotized to feel it that way.
 When human beings thought at one time there was just a cozy little cosmos,
 the Earth was the middle of it, and all those planets were in crystal spheres,
 and right up there was God the Father and the angels,
 and Jesus Christ, when he ascended, he was shot up a few miles,
 and he was there, cozy.
 Then as a reaction to that, see, when people wanted to depersonalize the universe
 because the personalization of it was too traumatic,
 they said, "Billions of light years in comparison with which we are of no importance."
 Just a reaction.
 Crazy, billions of light years.
 And you can think across them.
 And then you go the other direction, and you look into your own physiology,
 and that's as queer and weird as anything there is outside.
 When you feel your own pulse, what's that funny thing going thump-thump in you?
 It gives some people the creeps.
 When you think about the fantastic structure of your own neurology,
 is that me?
 It seems so strange.
 But the stranger it gets, the farther away it gets,
 the more essential it gets, the more it really is you, but unrecognizable,
 until the moment you look at it and amaze it and say, "Well, that's me."
 But as every device is used in the human game to stop you seeing that,
 don't you dare.
 Don't you dare do that.
 And the best method of stopping it is fear.
 Now, I was going to say something about guilt.
 Guilt, guilt, guilt.
 This is the prime emotion which cuts us off from this sense of solidarity
 with the whole works.
 And there are various kinds of guilt. There's academic guilt and there's religious guilt.
 Academic guilt is you have to subscribe to the myth that man is not really important
 and that geology is more fundamental than biology.
 Older.
 And that biology is a sort of excrescence, a little fungus, on the top of geology.
 Now, the whole point of guilt is that it's undefined.
 You are charged with a crime which has not been specified.
 This is the way all dictators and sinister people like that work.
 You don't know what you're charged with.
 What was original sin?
 It wasn't sex. You may be sure of that.
 You study the really subtle theologians on the subject of original sin. It's thrilling.
 What did Lucifer do in the beginning of the world?
 Well, they say vaguely, his sin was spiritual pride.
 He loved himself more than he loved God.
 Well, that's pretty vague.
 But the really interesting theologians will say,
 "You can no more put into words what the sin of Lucifer was than you can describe the vision of God. It's ineffable."
 It was infinitely diabolical, more horrible than anything you could possibly imagine.
 And incidentally, it wasn't just Lucifer. You are implicated in this.
 You did it!
 Something unspeakable.
 And you all jolly well know you did, and you won't admit it.
 Now, this can be a therapeutic gambit if you know how to use it.
 Some psychotherapists use this in their analysis of dreams.
 There's something you've done.
 I mean, it may only turn out to be the Oedipus complex, but, uh, incest-wish.
 But, take it further.
 Take it further back. What is the awful thing you've done?
 Won't you confess? Don't you know?
 Adults play the weirdest games.
 Quite incomprehensible to children.
 And there's no explanation forthcoming.
 So, they feel strangers.
 And so, then, later on, everybody feels a stranger.
 therapist gets called in to sort the whole thing out.


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