[Music]
 Whether you have a thousand arms or only six, the principle is still the same.
 The centipede walked happily until a toad in fun said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?"
 This worked her mind to such a pitch, she lay distracted in a ditch, considering how to run.
 I should have had a picture with a thousand arms, but I could only get one with six,
 courtesy of the Asia Society. But I want to introduce you to this being, known as
 Avalokiteshvara, which is the Sanskrit name and it means the watchful lord.
 If I may be permitted to make a perfectly ghastly Sanskrit pun,
 you can remember the meaning of the name by Avalokiteeshvara.
 Ishvara meaning the lord, Avalokita, watchful. In Chinese the name is Guan Yin,
 in Japanese, Kan. And that means, Kan, the contemplator, or watcher,
 Noun, of sound. And that's usually interpreted as being one who observes the cries of suffering
 of all sentient beings. Because this figure is popularly known as the goddess of mercy.
 Thus in Japanese, Kanon, in Chinese, Guan Yin, in Tibetan, Chenrazi, and in Sanskrit, Avalokiteshvara.
 And so although in the Far East this being is feminine, actually it is hermaphroditic.
 Male, female, for which we don't have a name. And we need a pronoun that isn't merely it,
 especially in the days of women's liberation. As yet I have no suggestions to make on this matter.
 Now I want to go into the attributes of this being because they're extraordinarily interesting.
 First of all, Avalokiteshvara is a manifestation of Amitabha, the Buddha of boundless light,
 who is one of five Buddhas not manifested like Gautama Buddha in this world,
 but a representation of cosmic principles behind everything. Amitabha is known to the Japanese as Amida,
 and is the principal object of veneration in the most popular form of Buddhism in Japan,
 known as Jodo Shinshu. Guan Yin, as a bodhisattva, represents an embodiment of compassion,
 because a bodhisattva is, as it were, one who has attained the rank of a Buddha.
 That is to say, who has become supremely and perfectly awakened to the illusory nature of this whole cosmos,
 and could, if so desired, just turn it off. But out of compassion for all those beings who still are stuck with it,
 the bodhisattva is one who keeps manifesting or reappearing in the world to assist all others
 to deliver themselves, though not in the spirit of a missionary who tries to force people
 to become enlightened or saved by preaching at them in a violent way.
 The essential art of a bodhisattva is what is called in Sanskrit "upaya," and this word means
 "skillful devices," "spiritual cunning." In politics, of course, it means deceit, camouflage, cleverness.
 But in the domain of religion, it means the skillful art of being a teacher,
 and that is to say, not simply one who explains things so that you cannot miss the point,
 but rather the kind of teacher who enables you to find things out for yourself.
 In other words, it is of more benefit to somebody to teach them how to fish than to give them a fish.
 And so, teachers throughout Asia seem to us to be rather uncooperative, because when asked questions
 as to what is the nature of nirvana or of enlightenment, they will give laconic answers like,
 "When you understand, you won't ask the question."
 But the purpose of that kind of teacher is to give you the feeling, not that somebody told you,
 but that you found it out for yourself. And what always makes me happy in the course of my
 explanation of various things of this kind, is when people say, "Well, I always thought that myself,
 but I've never quite been able to say it that way." Because of course, what I'm talking about
 is something that all of you know already. You may not admit that you do, but you do.
 And I, in my role as one who lectures on these things, must not be regarded as a guru.
 That is to say, as a spiritual authority whom you can follow and in whom you believe,
 because if I were to be permitted to do that, I would be like somebody who steals your watch
 and then sells it to you. Because you must remember that all so-called spiritual authorities
 are given their authority by their followers. It's like daylight saving time.
 Instead of just getting up an hour early, we put the clock forward, because that makes it official.
 Somehow there's a certain authority in state and federal laws requiring that the clock be put
 forward an hour. And I shall have more to say about this curious shifting of responsibility
 from the individual to the government, to the state, to the spiritual teacher,
 to the Buddha, or even to the Lord God Almighty. This is a form of profound self-deception.
 Now, our friend here is also depicted, as I said, with 1,000 arms, and like this one,
 with 11 heads that look in all directions. These 1,000 arms have each one in the palm of the hand
 and eye. And the arms hold all kinds of things. Lotuses, bells, prayer wheels, drums, thunderbolts,
 scimitars, clubs, scalpels, telephones, billy clubs, toothbrushes, mops, axes, saws, drills,
 paintbrushes, and every kind of appliance you could possibly imagine, from electric irons to cameras.
 And all these activities, by this miraculous being, are carried on simultaneously.
 And that is a miracle which can be achieved only if you do not stop to think about it.
 And you know very well how it is, when you've learned how to knit,
 that somehow it goes along automatically until you stop to think about it.
 And then you begin to wonder if you really remember how to do it.
 And so, in the same way, if when you start, say, practicing yoga and pay attention to your breathing,
 for some people it becomes very awkward. You feel that you've forgotten how to breathe,
 and you begin to get anxious that you might lose your breath altogether.
 Or even in so daily an activity as tying a necktie, sometimes one forgets how to perform the knot.
 And when you think about it, you're damned if you can remember.
 And how much more must it be so, when it is not a simple thing of that nature,
 but something exceedingly complicated, wherever so many variables have to be looked after at the same time?
 And this, you see, is the real human problem.
 Because the average person cannot keep track of more than three variables at once without using a pencil.
 Three variables, by that I mean, say, parts in music.
 Organists get to be very clever because they play with their feet as well as their hands.
 And so you have a rhythm for the left hand, a rhythm for the right, a rhythm for the left foot,
 and a rhythm for the right, that's four variables running at once.
 And then, of course, the individual five fingers on each hand can take care of some variables themselves,
 and an organist maybe get up to perhaps ten variables going at the same time.
 And that is a considerable achievement requiring great practice.
 Other human situations where we take care of an enormous number of variables are found in nuclear physics,
 where we deal with millions of variables at once, but we cope with that by treating them statistically.
 By that I mean it's rather similar to the actuarial tables of insurance companies,
 whereby we calculate that most people will die around 65 years of age,
 but we cannot make this prediction of any particular individual.
 But that everyday practical situations of human life lie somewhere in between the simple four variables,
 of which we can keep track with a pencil, and the millions of variables which we can handle statistically.
 Everyday problems are in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and lower millions of variables.
 And that is the very devil to keep track of, especially when you have a one-track mind.
 And almost all of us do have one-track minds because it's drummed into our heads
 that you can think only of one thing at a time.
 And our language and our number systems are more or less constructed that way,
 because every, all language, with the slight exception of Chinese, is strung out in a line.
 A series of words, a series of numbers, or a series of impulses on a magnetic tape.
 And this is why our education takes so deplorably long,
 because we have to scan thousands of miles of information and make sense of it.
 And we make sense of the thousands of miles of information by abbreviating it, by making quasi's of it.
 And, but this takes, for say a psychiatrist, 30 years to get through with it.
 And then he is the first person to admit, as a psychiatrist or a neurologist,
 that he's hardly begun to understand the complexity of the human brain.
 Because the human brain is unlike the mind, and I will use the word mind,
 specifically in the sense of the processes of conscious attention.
 Conscious attention, or scanning along with such aid memoirs as words and numbers and visual symbols,
 that scans the world, but the brain behind the mind can do more than that.
 The brain is in charge of all the simultaneous operations of our bodies.
 The focusing of the eyes, the conveyance of messages from the eyes to the optical nervous system,
 the relation of those messages to memories and to information received through the ears, the fingers, the nose and the tongue.
 The operation of the glands, the circulation of the blood, the balancing of the breathing,
 the general homeostasis of the body temperature, metabolism, and all that goes with it.
 This is all taken care of, all together, all at once.
 But if we are to describe in language what is going on, or to measure it accurately,
 this takes a deplorably long time, even with the help of computers.
 And then when you add the difficulties and the variables in,
 add to the difficulties and the variables in one single body,
 all the things going on in all the other bodies, and in the birds, and in the bacteria, and in the animals,
 and in the meteorological factors, the vegetable factors, and the hydraulic factors with which we have to deal in everyday life,
 the message of this whole symbolism and the story of the centipede is,
 "Don't mess around with what you can't understand."
 Because that's what has happened to us,
 and in a way, New York City is a monumental and archetypal illustration of the problem.
 However, so as not to be entirely pessimistic,
 I would say that although we should not mess around with things that we don't understand,
 there is a possibility that we might in some way overstand them.
 And this is a new word I'm coining for tonight.
 How on earth, then, is Avalokiteshvara's body governed?
 How is your body governed?
 Because it is quite apparent that there's no boss.
 Anyone, any centralized intelligence which would take care of all this,
 would be suffering from intellectual elephantiasis on a vast scale.
 And we always find that when anybody attempts to put themself in that position,
 whether he be mayor of New York, head of the FBI, president of the United States, or of Russia, or of China,
 he is inclined to go completely crazy.
 And to become like Big Brother in Orwell's "1984,"
 or like the ideal tyrant in the Hindu book called the "Arthur Shastra,"
 where the regulations are given for how you must behave if you are to be a Chakravartin,
 a complete ruler of men.
 Because if you would govern the world,
 you must have to take into consideration all these variables.
 And instead of being a watchful lord like this one, Avalokiteshvara,
 you'll have to be a watchful lord in another sense.
 A watchful lord with a one-track mind.
 That means you'll have all your time taken up with guarding the situation.
 You'll never be able to take a walk in the park,
 never have a moment off, even when you eat.
 There will have to be chemists present to be sure that your food is not poisoned.
 How can you trust the chemists?
 There will be spies watching them.
 And in your curtained office, there will be guards behind the curtains,
 and there will be other guards watching the guards behind the curtains.
 And you will have an escape trapdoor should it come to a grave emergency,
 with a secret passageway going out to a field some distance from your palace
 where a small Lear jet is parked, should you need to escape.
 And on the way, there is a button which will instantly destroy the palace and everybody in it.
 That's the sort of madman you have to be if you would run the world.
 And I simply cannot imagine who in his right mind would volunteer
 to be a candidate for presidency, or to take the world in order.
 And yet it is astonishing, isn't it, that our physical bodies on the whole do manage to run
 without anybody being in conscious control of everything that goes on.
 Oh, you may say God is in control.
 But do you suppose seriously that God is a monarch?
 How, as a citizen of the United States, which is a republic,
 can you believe that the universe is a monarchy?
 I could have believed so as a British subject, but now we have a constitutional monarchy.
 And there is still, you see, one of the great conflicts that is going on in the United States
 and lies behind all kinds of social issues, is between republicans who believe in the republic
 and republicans who are still monarchists.
 And they talk about authority and law and order,
 as if it were something that you had imposed upon you from above and which you had to obey.
 Authority.
 Whereas the whole idea was the delegation of authority to the people,
 to the people not considered as a mass, not a collectivist counting of heads,
 but to the people as individual people, each one of them moving on his own freely,
 like the many legs of the centipede and the many arms of Avalokiteshvara.
 But as things stand, the individual living in a city like this today
 feels that he is trapped in an appalling mess.
 I visit this city once a year, and every time I come the mess is worse,
 and I am amazed, and even have a certain degree of reverent awe, that the thing still is there.
 I expect one day all the toilets to back up,
 or that there will be a traffic jam in which every conveyance simply has to be abandoned and left standing,
 or that the power will go out for good,
 or that enormous rats will emerge from the sewer and scare everybody with this.
 But it still goes on.
 And the reason why it goes on, as far as I can make out,
 is not really anything to do with the government,
 but a certain kind of basic responsible sanity, which people have by themselves,
 as a result of which they get up in the morning and attempt to go about some business
 in order to have something interesting to do.
 That's why it works.
 But we don't realize that sufficiently, because, as I said, each one of us feels so impotent.
 And this grows with a nation, say, involved in a war, which it doesn't know how to stop,
 where, as a matter of fact, we can single out all kinds of villains.
 We can think of the terrible people who run the military-industrial complex,
 who are heads of the worst capitalist corporations,
 but realize that if those people stopped,
 they would immediately be grabbed by psychiatrists and put into nuthouses.
 This is very difficult to be powerful.
 It's like being in charge of a runaway truck,
 which, if you stop it suddenly, will simply disintegrate,
 and must be stopped gradually because it's carrying urgent supplies to a disaster area.
 And anybody who gets in charge of one of these things isn't really in charge.
 He's simply at the wheel of a completely runaway concern.
 Well, you get to be made president of anything.
 You find out that the show is actually run by your underlings,
 and although you can give them orders to behave differently,
 it's another thing to see that they're obeyed.
 If they're to be obeyed, you have to have one policeman per individual.
 Where do you get the policeman from?
 And when you've got the policeman, who polices the policeman?
 Who, in fact, guards the guards?
 Now, there's a very important lesson, however,
 in the discovery that you can't do much about it.
 And I want now to convey to you some rather difficult ideas.
 Difficult not because they're complicated,
 but because they're extremely unfamiliar.
 I shall sound at first as if I were an advocate of dismay and doom,
 and doing nothing about it.
 I shall be held to have sold out the revolution,
 to be the most ghastly friend of the establishment and wickedness,
 and, uh, but you must be patient and hear me out,
 because that will be the first impression.
 Why is it that we have this sense of impotence as individuals?
 And it's interesting, it's not only a sense of frustration
 about social and political matters.
 It's also about ourselves.
 And you know this particularly if you practice psychiatry,
 or if you're a minister,
 or connected in some way with the mental health movement.
 You know that your cures and the good you do for people
 is to a very large extent bogus.
 People talk themselves into all kinds of improvements,
 but I notice with people who are busy improving themselves,
 that they go from one system to another,
 and get an initial sense that this is very good for me,
 and that I'm really making progress,
 but after a while it gets boring,
 and they feel the same as they always felt.
 People go through their very difficult systems,
 the sort of masochistic systems of self-improvement you can go in for,
 where they bang you about, or give you ghastly exercises to do,
 or you can practice Zen Buddhism and sit on your ass
 for interminable periods of time,
 and then come out and brag how good this all was for you,
 how tremendously your legs hurt,
 and then give evidence that there is no ego trip
 like the trip of getting rid of one's ego.
 I'm trying though not to say that in a condemnatory way,
 because it's a free country,
 and if you want an ego trip you can of course have it.
 But the reason why you feel you cannot change yourself radically,
 that is to say, you feel you're a selfish person, you're unloving,
 you're also frightened and anxious,
 and you think you ought to be able to beat all that.
 There ought to be a way whereby you can be serene and calm,
 unafraid of death, of terminal cancer, and of great Siberian itch,
 and that you should be loving to all people, and smile, and be pleasant, reason.
 There ought to be a system, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be,
 because the reason why you want to be unselfish is that you are selfish,
 and would have a better opinion of yourself if you were that way than some other way.
 But you don't really want to be that way, because if you did you would be.
 So the question is how to change what one wants.
 Do you want, if you want to change what you want,
 it means simply that you want something different,
 and if you don't, you don't.
 But then an additional difficulty is added to this,
 that we are under the impression concerning ourselves
 that there is something corresponding to the word "I"
 which is supposed to be in charge of our psyche and our body,
 known as the soul, the ego, or the person.
 It's very difficult to be sure what this is,
 and since we bandy these words I want to be rather precise in my definition of them.
 What I would refer to as the ego, or rather as the person,
 is one's image of oneself, one's idea of oneself.
 And that is really almost a caricature of oneself,
 because there's so much it doesn't include.
 See, my own idea of something called Alan Watts is very fragmentary,
 because the public personality and even the private personality known as Alan Watts
 is a big act, it's a show, and I've absolutely no qualms
 in saying to you perfectly frankly I'm in showbiz,
 I'm a philosophical entertainer.
 And this fellow, the concept of Alan Watts,
 the consciousness and the memory of Alan Watts,
 includes absolutely no information about
 how I manage to have blue eyes,
 how I beat my heart, how I breathe,
 how I open and close my hands, how I make decisions.
 It contains only a very small amount of information
 about my unconscious psychophysical processes.
 It contains very little information about relations with other people
 which do not cross my attention,
 and still less information about my relationships with bacteria,
 with blood chemistry, with what happens to what I eat,
 with who does what to what I eat anyway in the first place,
 to the weather, to the influences, if any, of the heavenly bodies,
 whether by gravity or other emanations.
 All that information is screened out,
 so that my image of me contains very little
 that is important about me at all.
 And since it's only an image and only an idea of myself,
 it's a symbol, it's an abstraction,
 and there is nothing that it can do.
 But understand this, you cannot quench thirst with the word water
 or with a photograph of water.
 It won't work.
 But we are nevertheless quite sure that there is something
 to which this image of ourselves corresponds.
 We feel there is something called "I" as when we make an effort,
 or as when we will, and when we make a decision.
 When we really put our mind to doing something,
 we feel there is something there corresponding to the ego.
 And you can easily find out what that is
 by making the very simple expression, experiment,
 of looking at me very carefully and very hard.
 As we say, "Take a hard look at me and concentrate,
 whether you like it or not."
 What are you doing when you take a hard look at me
 that you're not doing when you take a soft look at me?
 I think you will find, if you're looking really hard,
 that you're going tense around your eyes,
 that you're clenching your teeth, or staring,
 or in some way making a muscular effort
 which has absolutely nothing to do with clear vision.
 Now you see, we do that chronically,
 because ever since we were little,
 our parents and teachers have told us to try.
 And we've convinced them that we really were trying by grunting,
 or by screwing up our faces,
 or by making the efforts of somebody undergoing great difficulty.
 So we say, "Grin and bear it, grinch your teeth,
 pull yourself together."
 And so we do, we pull our stomachs together,
 and we get rectal tensions and stomach tensions,
 which are the cause of all sorts of organic disorders.
 And all this being chronic,
 generates a constant feeling of tenseness inside us,
 which although it has nothing to do with the efficient performance of any action,
 is the feeling that corresponds to the word "I".
 If you didn't have those tensions,
 there would be no feeling corresponding to the word "I".
 Because when your eyes are operating properly,
 they are totally unaware of themselves.
 When your ears are healthy, you don't hear your ears,
 like when your ears are singing,
 because of some mild disorder, you are hearing your ears.
 And when you have cataract, you are seeing your eyes.
 So, properly, one should be unconscious of one's ego.
 Although I'm not saying that one should have no strength of character.
 When psychologists speak of the importance of ego strength,
 I would rather say, of strength of character,
 that is to say, the ability to behave consistently.
 Not too consistently,
 because a lot of us take our personalities from novels.
 And novelists are criticized when their characters are, like people, inconsistent.
 And so, our mothers and teachers and fathers
 try to give us all consistent identities and consistent behavior patterns.
 But the point is that this thing that we call our person,
 is a hoax.
 It's an illusion, that is to say, a symbol,
 married to a futility,
 that is to say, straining to do what straining will not accomplish.
 You know, it's like when you're taking off in a jet plane,
 and you think rather too much of the runway has gone by,
 and the plane isn't off the ground,
 and you start pulling at your seatbelt,
 see if you can lift it up.
 That's what we call willpower.
 So, it's enormously important that we realize
 that that image of ourselves attached to that particular feeling is a fraud,
 and cannot achieve anything.
 Especially anything of a creative nature.
 So, since that is what we ordinarily mean by ourselves,
 I would say frankly, about the mess of New York City and the world,
 you, as ego, can do nothing at all, except make a mess.
 And the road to hell will be paved with our good intentions.
 As in the proverb, "Kindly let me help you or you'll drown,"
 said the monkey putting the fish safely up a tree.
 So, then you say, "Well, that's the most terrible thing you can say.
 I can't do anything about the state of the world,
 which is in urgent need of having something done about it.
 And for worse still, I can't do anything to improve myself,
 because lots of people say that if you're going to improve the world,
 you must first improve yourself,
 because if you don't, when the wrong man uses the right means,
 the right means will work in the wrong way.
 You have to become the right man first.
 Well, how are you going to do that?
 Well, I say, "You can't.
 You don't want to.
 Not really.
 So, there's nothing to do about it."
 Well, you say, "Do we just sit?
 Do we forget all about it and do something else?
 Go and see a movie?"
 Wait a minute, not so fast.
 What happens when it's perfectly clear to you
 that all that you understand as yourself is just a symbol,
 just imaginary?
 What happens?
 Well, you're still breathing.
 You're still seeing.
 You're still hearing.
 The wind is still blowing.
 The clouds are drifting overhead.
 You are transacting with the light of the sun.
 All that is going on, but you say, "Well, that's just happening."
 Well, that is real action.
 And what you are aware of at that point
 is what I might call the real you,
 the you that is not you.
 It's perfectly spontaneous,
 and everything that it does,
 like the many legs of the centipede
 and the many arms of Avalokiteshvara,
 seems to be a happening,
 something which happens of itself,
 like your heart beats of itself.
 But that action which happens,
 that is unstrained, straight, intelligent action.
 And so I would suggest that when you discover
 that the other kind of action,
 which is called will and interference
 and ego strength and so on,
 when that doesn't work,
 you sit a while and get used to the feeling
 that the actual you,
 as distinct from the symbol,
 is all that you are aware of,
 and all that is happening.
 That's what Hindus and Buddhists mean
 when they say that what happens to you is your karma.
 The word karma in Sanskrit simply means action.
 It does not mean cause and effect.
 It means simply doing.
 So if you have a calamity,
 and somebody says, "Well, it's your karma,"
 it doesn't necessarily mean
 that you did something dreadful in a past life
 and are now having to pay for it,
 as if the universe kept books on you.
 It means simply that this is your own doing,
 and there's nobody else to blame for it but yourself.
 That's pretty weird,
 because we have a doctrine of responsibility
 whereby we accept responsibility
 for what we believe to have been caused by our egos.
 Note, therefore, that in Roman Catholic moral theology,
 you do not have to confess any sin committed in a dream,
 whereas such a sin would be of intense interest to a psychoanalyst,
 because the psychoanalyst is interested in the deeper you.
 And one really has to be responsible for one's deeper self,
 because it's very deep indeed.
 What do we mean by self, anyway?
 That which operates freely
 and which isn't pushed around by anything else.
 Well, in that case, the only real self
 that isn't being pushed around by anything else is the universe.
 That is to say, everything.
 The witch, than which there is no witcher.
 And when it comes down to it, that's you.
 Because although you can detach your ego,
 because it's a separate concept from everything else,
 you can't detach your body from everything else.
 Your body goes with an environment
 as the same way as a flower goes with a field.
 You never saw a flower growing all by itself in mid-air.
 And so, likewise, you, as a psychophysical being,
 are not divided from the rest of the world by a skin envelope.
 You're joined to it by that envelope,
 which is full of tubes and nerve endings
 and all kinds of things which connect you
 to what goes on outside.
 So that one of the important things represented by our he/she here
 is what the Buddhists call "jiji-moge,"
 and which we will translate into scientific language
 as "the system of holograms."
 That is to say, a universe in which every single
 or isolable thing or event implies all the others.
 So in holography, you can take a small piece
 out of a photographic negative,
 photograph it with the aid of laser beams,
 and reproduce the entire negative from the tiny piece.
 Because the whole crystalline structure of the negative
 was implicit in a small little bit of the structure.
 It all goes together.
 So in the same way, every cell, every atom in this universe
 implies the rest, and would only be what it is
 in relation to all the rest.
 So in that sense, we may regard the individual
 as an aperture through which the entire cosmos is aware of itself.
 For when you look into eyes,
 whether it be the two eyes on either side of your nose
 or the eye in the hand palm of Avalokiteshvara,
 look into an eye, what are you looking at?
 When you look into somebody's eyes,
 is it just John or Jane you're looking at?
 Something about an eye that's deeper than that.
 I think a new kind of encounter group might be yoga on eyes.
 People don't readily look at each other's eyes.
 They turn away,
 fearing that their eyes may be too revealing.
 And when they meet with great spiritual teachers,
 they feel spooked, because they feel,
 "He sees right through me.
 He sees all my dreadful secrets."
 Yeah, maybe.
 But he couldn't care about that.
 He looks at you and smiles, and says, "Hi."
 And you look at him in a puzzled way.
 He says, "Don't worry, please.
 You don't need to kid me, God.
 Why don't you wake up and realize who you are?"
 Because that's what he's smiling about.
 He's not smiling at all the dreadful things you've done.
 I mean, superficial stuff in the foreground.
 When he looks right into your eye,
 what he sees, as it were, is...
 looks down a tube which goes to the heart of the universe.
 Because each one of us is a production of the whole universe,
 physically considered.
 I mean, we don't need to bring in, invoke any occult, special spiritual knowledge.
 Don't think they're obvious from a physical point of view.
 That we grow out of and in this galaxy.
 We are symptoms of it.
 And so when you look down into the real middle of a being,
 you look into the middle of the galaxy.
 That seems to me to be obvious.
 But it isn't obvious to most of us because of a Gestalt principle.
 The Gestalt psychologists, in their psychology of perception, have pointed out
 that when we are confronted with a figure-ground situation,
 we pay attention to the figure and ignore the ground.
 So in the same way,
 we pay attention to all the particulars which cross our consciousness
 and enter into our experience.
 But what's in back of it all?
 We can't even think about it.
 Because, you see, we can only think about things we can differentiate from something else.
 Now we are aware of differentiations.
 Of black and white, of light and darkness, of life and death.
 But what is it that is aware of black and white?
 What is beyond black and white,
 in such a way that you can't have black without white and white without black?
 Well, we can't think of what that would be.
 But where are we going to get an answer?
 Well, from the person who asked the question in the first place.
 Why did you do this to me?
 See, there's always that.
 That alibi.
 There's always "they".
 There's someone in there.
 The son of a bitch.
 The villain.
 Someone we can blame.
 Say, "You did it!"
 "Oh, we love it!"
 "Wow, we love to get some wretched victim here."
 Who we can back upon.
 Whether it be Lieutenant Calley or Timothy Leary or Eldridge Cleaver or Mao Tse-Tung or...
 I don't know.
 Or Mr. Hoover.
 I mean, it's a "you" person.
 "You unspeakable wretch!"
 Bang, bang, bang.
 We have Charles Manson and that bunch of nuts.
 The public loves being able to have somebody to put down the scapegoat.
 So you can feel, "Well, I'm glad I'm not like that!"
 I'm not saying that the world doesn't contain a lot of different kind of people.
 But I think it's simply stupid to blame people for what they do to me.
 I'm not even going to blame myself.
 Because I think if I were God and could have anything and do anything, I would turn to
 my court vizier in heaven and say, "Oh, this is rather a bore.
 We've seen it for eons.
 We know what will happen.
 We are in complete control.
 Give me a surprise."
 And suddenly I find myself sitting here.
 Phew!
 I'd say I didn't bargain for that.
 The vizier would say, "You wanted a surprise, didn't you?"
 See you're all in that situation.
 That's the only sense I can make out of it and everything that's going on.
 That we're doing it.
 And we do it by this Jiji Mugi principle whereby everybody's doing it so that my deeds are
 your deeds and your deeds are my deeds.
 And I must accept responsibility for what you do just as you must accept responsibility
 for what I do.
 It's fair enough, isn't it?
 Because after all, if we go around and say, "No, that's the responsible fellow.
 Bang him or praise him."
 Then come the questions if we begin to think about it.
 Well, is he really responsible?
 This is the whole problem of evil.
 The theologians never succeeded in figuring out how Satan, Lucifer, with all his advantages,
 with the direct beatific vision of God in front of his eyes, could have had the incredible
 folly to start the mess.
 So they said it wasn't folly, it was sheer malice.
 Well, where did he get it from?
 I mean, if he thought up an entirely new principle in the universe called malice, that's really
 something that only God could do.
 And because then, you see, it puts God in a pretty silly position, because then God
 can turn to the devil and say, "You did it."
 I don't think I want to worship that kind of God, because it's sort of irresponsible.
 So this business of finding out the person who's guilty and punishing that one, we find
 always circumstances alter cases.
 Why was he in that position?
 And the psychiatrists have something to say, the sociologists have something to say, the
 lawyers have something to say.
 And before we know where we are, we're in a tangle, because when you pick up anything
 in this universe, all the rest comes with it.
 You know, it's like picking up a piece of cloth.
 You pick it up and then all the rest of the cloth comes too.
 So when we blame ourselves and praise ourselves, you can't really do one without the other.
 And both of them are pretty silly.
 The person who praises himself doesn't realize that the real things for which he should be
 praised, he doesn't even know how he did it.
 Every genius has no idea how he does such things.
 If he did, he could teach it.
 But no genius can simply teach other geniuses to be geniuses.
 Otherwise we'd have an overplus of geniuses.
 I mean, imagine if the Juilliard School of Music turned out Bach's by the dozen.
 I mean, after a while we would say, "Oh, this is a bore.
 Try Shostakovich.
 Try John Cage."
 And with that is in fact what happens.
 So the genius can't explain.
 So there's no point praising myself.
 I don't particularly praise myself for the kind of voice I have, for the way my bones
 are built, because I feel I didn't do it.
 It happened.
 But I did do it.
 My ego didn't do it.
 My concept of myself had nothing to do with it at all.
 I had all this long before I had a concept of myself.
 So when we put aside praising and blaming, we put aside the main cause for having a fear
 of responsibility.
 Because there is simply nothing for it in the sort of situation in which we are but
 to do it yourself.
 But to do it with skill, in the sense of, "Let the real you do it, and not the bogus
 you that screams and panics and praises and blames."
 So when the great Zen master, Joshu, was approached by a young monk who said, "I've been in this
 monastery for some time and would like instruction."
 And Joshu said, "Have you had breakfast?"
 He said, "Yes."
 "Then go wash your dishes."
 Now, it sounds a little Philistine.
 It sounds like the people who say, "Oh, forget all the questions about the universe and get
 on with your job."
 They're like a pestiferous child, asks its father, "Why, why, why?"
 And the child says, "Suck your lollipop, Darren."
 It's not quite like that.
 Because that sudden sense that, "Well, why not sweep your own sidewalk?"
 Down to something other than a chore, duty.
 We're all doing these things out of a sense of duty.
 And nobody can keep up doing things out of a sense of duty for more than a few days without
 becoming embittered.
 But you see, nobody wants to sweep the sidewalk because they've got much more important things
 to do.
 Such as, think of something, running the country, making a mess of things.
 So I firmly believe that we could begin to act as limbs of canon if we get rid of the
 idea that I, of myself, do anything at all.
 It happens.
 So it means like something like this, and this again is a difficult idea because it's
 unfamiliar.
 You can't do anything creative in the world until you realize that nothing needs to be
 done.
 The world as is, New York as is, is Avalokiteshvara.
 It seems unbelievable.
 But each one of these creatures also, I may remind you, has a horrendous aspect, which
 is sometimes depicted, where they have black faces with staring eyes and fanged teeth.
 And necklaces and garlands of skulls.
 And they're not devils in our sense.
 They're just a look at the other side of things.
 They're the way your teeth look.
 The teeth of the most beautiful girl look that way to a live shrimp.
 And don't forget that the shrimp thinks it's human.
 You may look down on shrimps and think that they're a lower form of life, but they don't
 think they are.
 They think you are not a higher form of life, but a rather puzzling form of life.
 There's something like a quasar or an earthquake that's sort of unpredictable and weird.
 But they know as shrimps that they're perfectly civilized, intelligent people.
 Each one of them feels it's in the middle of the universe, feels that that's the way
 things are.
 And you may put it down and say it has a primitive nervous system.
 But when you start studying that primitive nervous system with an electron microscope,
 it becomes infinitely complicated.
 Watch out for shrimps.
 They are people.
 So are plants.
 And they have, they're not altogether well adjusted to the teeth even of a saint who's
 a vegetarian.
 So life has that aspect, you see.
 Try to get rid of that aspect of life, which we'll call the wrathful side, the dark side.
 You get rid of the light side at the same time.
 Because they are interdependent and you wouldn't realize one without the other.


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