He wrote to Richard Wilhelm's translation of a Chinese Taoist text called "The Secret of the Golden Flower."
 And it was Jung who helped me to remind myself that I was by upbringing and by tradition always a Westerner,
 and I couldn't escape from my own cultural conditioning,
 and that this inability to escape was not a kind of prison,
 but was the endowment of one's being with certain capacities like one's arms and legs and mouth and teeth and brain,
 which could always be used constructively.
 And I feel it's for this reason that I have always remained for myself in the position of the comparative philosopher,
 wanting to balance East and West rather than to go overboard with enthusiasm for exotic imports.
 But there are aspects of Jung's work far beyond this that I want to discuss.
 And first of all, I want to call attention to one fundamental principle that underlay all his work,
 and that was most extraordinarily exemplified in Jung himself as a person.
 And this is what I would call his recognition of the polarity of life.
 That is to say, his resistance to what is to my mind the disastrous and absurd hypothesis
 that there is in this universe a radical and absolute conflict between good and evil, light and darkness,
 that can never, never, never be harmonized.
 This conflict has come up to us in a very vivid way in recent days with the trial of Adolf Eichmann,
 and with Arthur Koestler's passionate denunciation of any sort of philosophy of life.
 And he's thinking in mind, he has in mind particularly Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Hinduism,
 which so slur the absolute differences between good and evil,
 that in their name one could justify the sort of crimes which were committed in the concentration camps of Germany.
 And it's interesting too, certain people accused Jung also of Nazi sympathies,
 because he too would not subscribe to the absolute state of a war between good and evil,
 going down to the very roots of the universe.
 Obviously, when certain crimes and catastrophes occur, human emotions are deeply and rightly aroused.
 And I would for myself say that were I in any situation where an Eichmann was operating,
 I would be roused to a degree of fury that I can hardly imagine in my present existence,
 but I know it would come out from me.
 I would oppose those sorts of villainies with all the energy that I have,
 and if I was trapped in such a situation, I would fight it to the end.
 But at the same time, I would recognize the relativity of my own emotional involvement.
 I would know that I was fighting a man like Eichmann,
 in the same way, shall we say, as a spider and a wasp,
 insects which naturally prey upon one another and fight one another do so.
 But as a human being, I would not be able to regard my adversary as a metaphysical devil,
 that is to say, as one who represented the principle of absolute and unresolvable evil.
 And I think this is the most important thing in Jung,
 that he was able to point out that to the degree that you condemn others and find evil in others,
 you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself,
 or at least of the potentiality of it.
 There can be Eichmanns and Hitlers and Himmlers,
 just because there are people who are unconscious of their own dark sides,
 and they project that darkness outward into, say, Jews or Communists or whatever the enemy may be,
 and say, "There is the darkness, it is not in me,
 and therefore because the darkness is not in me, I am justified
 in annihilating this enemy, whether it be with atom bombs or gas chambers or whatnot."
 But to the degree that a person becomes conscious that the evil is as much in himself as in the other,
 to this same degree he is not likely to project it onto some scapegoat
 and commit the most criminal acts of violence upon other people.
 Now this is to me the primary thing that Jung saw,
 that in order to admit and really accept and understand the evil in oneself,
 one had to be able to do it without being an enemy to it.
 As he put it, you had to accept your own dark side.
 And he had this pre-eminently in his own character.
 I had a long talk with him back in 1958,
 and I was enormously impressed with a man who was obviously very great,
 but at the same time with whom everyone could be completely at ease.
 There are so many great people, great in knowledge or great in what is called holiness,
 with whom the ordinary individual feels rather embarrassed.
 He feels inclined to sit on the edge of his chair
 and to feel immediately judged by this person's wisdom or sanctity.
 Jung managed to have wisdom and I think also sanctity in such a way
 that when other people came into its presence, they didn't feel judged.
 They felt enhanced, encouraged, and invited to share in a common life.
 And there was a sort of twinkle in Jung's eye
 that gave me the impression that he knew himself to be just as much a villain as everybody else.
 There's a nice German word, "Hintergedanke,"
 which means a thought in the very far, far back of your mind.
 Jung had a hintergedanke in the back of his mind, which showed,
 it showed in the twinkle in his eye,
 it showed that he knew and recognized what I sometimes call
 the element of irreducible rascality in himself.
 And he knew it so strongly and so clearly and in a way so lovingly
 that he would not condemn the same thing in others
 and therefore would not be led into those thoughts, feelings, and acts of violence towards others,
 which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves
 upon the outside, upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat.
 Now this made Jung a very integrated character.
 In other words, here I have to present a little bit of a complex idea.
 He was a man who was thoroughly with himself,
 having seen and accepted his own nature profoundly.
 He had a kind of unity and absence of conflict in his own nature,
 which had to it this additional complication that I find so fascinating.
 He was the sort of man who could feel anxious and afraid and guilty
 without being ashamed of feeling this way.
 In other words, he understood that an integrated person is not a person
 who simply eliminated the sense of guilt or the sense of anxiety from his life,
 who is fearless and wooden and a kind of sage of stone.
 He's a person who feels all these things, but has no recrimination against himself for feeling them.
 And this is, to my mind, a profound kind of humor.
 Now, in humor there's always a certain element of malice.
 There was a talk given on the Pacific Estations just a little while ago,
 which was an interview with Al Cap.
 And Al Cap made the point that he felt that all humor was fundamentally malicious.
 Now, there's a very high kind of humor, which is humor at oneself.
 A real humor is not jokes at the expense of others.
 It's always jokes at the expense of oneself.
 And of course it has an element of malice in it.
 It has malice towards oneself,
 the recognition of the fact that behind the social role that you assume,
 behind all your pretensions to being either a good citizen or a fine scholar
 or a great scientist or a leading politician or physician or whatever you happen to be,
 that behind this facade there is a certain element of the unreconstructed bum.
 Not as something to be condemned and wailed over,
 but as something to be recognized as contributive to one's greatness
 and to one's positive aspects in the same way that manure is contributive to the perfume of the rose.
 Jung saw this and Jung accepted this.
 And I want to read a passage from one of his lectures,
 which I think is one of the greatest things he ever wrote
 and which has been a very marvelous thing for me.
 It was in a lecture delivered to a group of clergy in Switzerland a considerable number of years ago.
 And he writes as follows.
 "People forget that even doctors have moral scruples
 and that certain patients' confessions are hard even for a doctor to swallow.
 Yet the patient does not feel himself accepted unless the very worst in him is accepted too.
 No one can bring this about by mere words.
 It comes only through reflection
 and through the doctor's attitude towards himself and his own dark side.
 If the doctor wants to guide another or even accompany him a step of the way,
 he must feel with that person's psyche.
 He never feels it when he passes judgment.
 Whether he puts his judgments into words or keeps them to himself makes not the slightest difference.
 To take the opposite position and to agree with the patient offhand is also of no use.
 Feeling comes only through unprejudiced objectivity.
 This sounds almost like a scientific precept,
 and it could be confused with a purely intellectual, abstract attitude of mind.
 But what I mean is something quite different.
 It is a human quality, a kind of deep respect for the facts,
 for the man who suffers from them, and for the riddle of such a man's life.
 The truly religious person has this attitude.
 He knows that God has brought all sorts of strange and inconceivable things to pass
 and seeks in the most curious ways to enter a man's heart.
 He therefore senses in everything the unseen presence of the divine will.
 This is what I mean by unprejudiced objectivity.
 It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor
 who ought not to let himself be repelled by sickness and corruption.
 We cannot change anything unless we accept it.
 Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
 I am the oppressor of the person I condemn, not his friend and fellow sufferer.
 I do not in the least mean to say that we must never pass judgment when we desire to help and improve.
 But if the doctor wishes to help a human being, he must be able to accept him as he is.
 And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.
 Perhaps this sounds very simple, but simple things are always the most difficult.
 In actual life, it requires the greatest art to be simple,
 and so acceptance of oneself is the essence of the moral problem
 and the acid test of one's whole outlook on life.
 That I feed the beggar, that I forgive an insult,
 that I love my enemy in the name of Christ, all these are undoubtedly great virtues.
 What I do unto the least of my brethren, that I do unto Christ.
 But what if I should discover that the least amongst them all,
 the poorest of all beggars, the most impudent of all offenders,
 yea, the very fiend himself, that these are within me,
 and that I myself stand in need of the arms of my own kindness,
 that I myself am the enemy who must be loved, what then?
 Then, as a rule, the whole truth of Christianity is reversed.
 There is then no more talk of love and long-suffering.
 We say to the brother within us, "Raca," and condemn and rage against ourselves.
 We hide him from the world. We deny ever having met this least among the lowly in ourselves,
 and had it been God himself who drew near to us in this despicable form,
 we should have denied him a thousand times before a single cock had crowed.
 Well, you may think the metaphors rather strong,
 but I feel that they are not so needlessly.
 This is a very, very forceful passage, and a memorable one in all Jung's works,
 trying to heal this insanity from which our culture in particular has suffered,
 of thinking that a human being can become hale, healthy, and holy
 by being divided against himself in inner conflict,
 paralleling the conception of a cosmic conflict between an absolute good and an absolute evil,
 which cannot be reduced to any prior and underlying unity.
 In other words, our rage, and our very proper rage,
 against evil things which occur in this world,
 must not overstep itself.
 For if we require as a justification for our rage
 a fundamental and metaphysical division between good and evil,
 we have an insane and in a certain sense schizophrenic universe
 of which no sense whatsoever can be made.
 All conflict, Jung was saying, all opposition, has its resolution in an underlying unity.
 You cannot understand the meaning of to be, unless you understand the meaning of not to be.
 You cannot understand the meaning of good, unless you understand the meaning of evil.
 Even St. Thomas Aquinas saw this, for he said,
 "Just as it is the silent pause which gives sweetness to the chant,
 so it is suffering, and so it is evil,
 which makes possible the recognition of virtue."
 This is not, as Jung tries to explain, a philosophy of condoning the evil.
 To take the opposite position, he said, and to agree with the patient offhand is also of no use,
 but it strangles him, the doctor, or it strangles him, the patient, as much as condemnation.
 Let me continue further, reading from this extraordinary passage.
 "Healing may be called," Jung says, "a religious problem.
 In the sphere of social or national relations,
 the state of suffering may be civil war,
 and this state is to be cured by the Christian virtue of forgiveness and love of one's enemies.
 There at which we recommend, with the conviction of good Christians,
 as applicable to external situations,
 we must also apply inwardly in the treatment of neurosis.
 This is why modern man has heard enough about guilt and sin.
 He is sorely beset by his own bad conscience,
 and wants rather to know how he is to reconcile himself with his own nature,
 how he is to love the enemy in his own heart, and call the wolf his brother.
 The modern man does not want to know in what way he can imitate Christ,
 but in what way he can live his own individual life,
 however meager and uninteresting it may be.
 It is because every form of imitation seems to him deadening and sterile,
 that he rebels against the force of tradition that would hold him to well-trodden ways.
 All such roads for him lead in the wrong direction.
 He may not know it, but he behaves as if his own individual life
 were God's special will which must be fulfilled at all costs.
 This is the source of his egoism,
 which is one of the most tangible evils of the neurotic state.
 But the person who tells him he is too egoistic
 has already lost his confidence, and rightly so,
 for that person has driven him still further into his neurosis.
 If I wish to effect a cure for my patients,
 I am forced to acknowledge the deep significance of their egoism.
 I should be blind indeed if I did not recognize it as a true will of God.
 I must even help the patient to prevail in his egoism.
 If he succeeds in this, he estranges himself from other people.
 He drives them away, and they come to themselves as they should,
 for they were seeking to rob him of his sacred egoism.
 This must be left to him, for it is his strongest and healthiest power.
 It is, as I have said, a true will of God,
 which sometimes drives him into complete isolation.
 However wretched this state may be, it also stands him in good stead,
 for in this way alone can he get to know himself
 and learn what an invaluable treasure is the love of his fellow beings.
 It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness
 that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.
 End of quote.
 This is a very striking example of Jung's power to comprehend and integrate
 points of view as well as psychological attitudes
 that seem on the surface to be completely antithetical.
 For example, even in his own work, when he was devoting himself
 to the study of Eastern philosophy, he had some difficulty
 in comprehending the, let's say, the Buddhistic denial of the reality of the ego.
 But you can see that in practice, in what he was actually trying to get at,
 he was moving towards the same position that is intended
 in both the Hindu and the Buddhist philosophy about the nature of the ego.
 Just for example, as the Hindu will say, that the I principle in man
 is not really a separate ego but an expression of the universal life of Brahman or the Godhead.
 So Jung is saying here that the development of the ego in man is a true will of God
 and that it is only by following the ego and developing it to its full extent
 that one fulfills the function which this, you might say, temporary illusion has in man's psychic life.
 For he goes on and says here, when one has several times seen this development at work,
 one can no longer deny that what was evil has turned to good
 and that what seemed good has kept alive the forces of evil.
 The archdemon of egoism leads us along the royal road to that in-gathering which religious experience demands.
 What we observe here is a fundamental law of life, enantiodromia, or conversion into the opposite.
 And it is this that makes possible the reunion of the warring halves of the personality
 and thereby brings the civil war to an end.
 End of quote.
 In other words, he was seeing that, as Blake said, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
 That the development of egoism in man is not something to be overcome or better integrated by opposition to it,
 but by following it. It's almost, isn't it, the principle of judo?
 Not overcoming what appears to be a hostile force by opposing it,
 but by swinging with the punch or rolling with the punch.
 And so by following the ego, the ego transcends itself.
 And in this moment of insight, the great westerner, who comes out of a whole tradition of human personality
 which centers it upon the ego, upon individual separateness,
 by going along consistently with this principle, comes to the same position as the easterner.
 That is to say, to the point of view where one sees conflict,
 which at first sight had seemed absolute, as resting upon a primordial unity,
 and thereby attaining a profound, unshakable peace of the heart,
 which can nevertheless contain conflict.
 Not a peace that is simply static and lifeless,
 but a peace that passes understanding.
 You've been listening to Alan Watts with a talk entitled...
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 Finishing off our lecture, tribute to Carl Young tonight and Alan Watts here on WFMU.
 And we'll be right back in a second with part two.
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 [music]
 I suppose that some of you have read a very fascinating work that was written many years ago by C.G. Jung,
 a commentary that he wrote to a translation of a Chinese classic by Richard Wilhelm called The Secret of the Golden Flower.
 Now you may remember that in that commentary,
 he takes up the very fascinating problem of the dangers inherent in the adoption of oriental ways of life by Westerners,
 but more particularly the adoption of oriental spiritual practices such as yoga.
 And I remember I learned a great deal from that essay and appreciated it very much in ever so many ways,
 because even in my own fascination with forms of oriental philosophy,
 I've never been tempted to forget that I'm a Westerner.
 But as I think this essay over, I'm not sure that Jung discouraged the practice of yoga by Westerners for quite the right reasons.
 I find so often the difficulty in Jung's ideas lies in his theory of history,
 which is, I feel, a hangover from 19th century theories of history encouraged by Darwinism,
 namely that there's a sort of orderly progression from the ape through the primitive to the civilized man.
 And of course, naturally, at that time, that was all hitched in with the theory of progress,
 and it was highly convenient for the cultures of Western Europe, which were then one up on everybody else,
 to consider themselves in the van of progress.
 And when they visited the natives of Borneo and Australia and so on,
 to be able to feel that they were perfectly justified in appropriating their lands and dominating them,
 because they were giving them the benefits of the last word in evolution.
 And therefore, under the influence of that sort of theory of history,
 which is felt in the work of both Freud and Jung,
 one gets the feeling of there being a kind of progressive development of human consciousness.
 And Jung is charitable enough to assume that because the Chinese and Indian civilizations are immeasurably older than ours,
 they've had the possibility of far more sophistication in psychic development,
 even though he feels, and probably rightly, that there are things they can learn from us.
 But the reason why he discourages the Westerner from the practice of yoga is that he says,
 "This is a discipline for a far older culture than ours, which along certain lines has progressed much further,
 and has learned certain things that we haven't mastered at all yet."
 And thus he points out that when somebody embraces Vedanta or Theosophy or any yoga school in the West,
 and tries to master a discipline of concentration in which they have to oust from their consciousness all wandering thoughts,
 he says that this, for a Westerner, may be a very dangerous thing indeed,
 because just exactly what the Westerner may need to do is to allow free reign to his wandering thoughts
 and his imagination and his fantasy, because it's only in this way that he can get in touch with his unconscious,
 and that his unconscious will not leave him in peace until he gets in touch with it.
 And he assumes the members of Oriental cultures have done this long before they went in for yoga practice.
 Now I don't think this is quite true,
 but I do think there are other reasons why Western people need to exercise a good deal of discrimination and caution
 in adopting Eastern disciplines and ways of life.
 In other words, it's rather like the problem of taking medicine.
 You know, if you don't feel very well and you go to a friend's medicine cabinet
 and you sort of look it over and see bottles of medicine in there,
 and you say, "I'm sick, I need medicine," so you take some medicine.
 Any medicine will do. Well, it won't.
 And according to what's the matter with you, so the medicine has to be prescribed.
 And I don't think that the things which some of the Eastern disciplines are designed to cure
 are quite the same things that we need.
 Now it's fundamental to my view of the nature of such forms of discipline as Buddhism and Taoism
 that they are ways of liberation from a specific kind of confinement.
 That is to say, they're ways of liberation from what I've sometimes called the social hypnosis.
 In other words, every culture, every society, as a group of people in communication with each other,
 has certain rules of communication.
 And from culture to culture, these rules differ in just the same way that languages differ.
 And a culture can hold together on very, very different kinds of rules.
 I won't say any kinds of rules, but very different kinds of rules,
 always provided that the members agree about them,
 whether they're forced to agree, whether they agree tacitly, or whatever the reason may be.
 And these rules are, in a way, very much like the rules of a game.
 In other words, take a game like chess.
 You can have the kind of chess we play with an eight square board,
 or you can have a kind of chess that the Japanese play with a nine square board.
 It doesn't make any difference so long as you both play on the same board and by the same rules.
 But since this is a chess is a game,
 and in the same way the development of human cultures is also, in a way, a game,
 that is to say, it's the elaboration of a form of life.
 And the fun of it, in a way, is the fun of elaborating it in just some interesting form.
 That's the same as the fun of a game. The fun of a game is it has a certain interest.
 But it doesn't follow that the rules of the game correspond to the actual structure of human nature,
 or to the laws of the universe.
 But because in every culture it's necessary to impress upon especially its younger members
 that these rules jolly well have to be kept,
 they are usually in some way or other connected with the laws of the universe
 and given some sort of divine sanction.
 And there are indeed cultures in which the senior members of the group realize that that's a hoax,
 that that's as if it's made up and is done to terrify the young.
 And when they become senior members of the culture themselves,
 they see through the thing, but they don't let on, they keep it quiet.
 They don't let out to those who are supposed to be impressed that this was really a hoax to get them to behave.
 Well, anyway, after a great deal of careful study, I've come to the conclusion
 that the function of these ways of liberation is basically
 to make it possible for those who have the determination,
 and we'll see why in a while,
 to make it possible for those who have the determination to be free from the social hypnosis.
 In other words, if you were a member of the culture of India,
 at almost any time between maybe 900 BC and 1800 AD,
 it would be for you a matter of common sense about which everybody agreed,
 that you were under the control of a process called karma.
 Not exactly a law of cause and effect,
 but a process of cosmic justice,
 whereby every fortune that occurred to you
 would be the result of some action in the past that was good,
 and every misfortune that occurred to you
 would be the result of some action in the past that was evil.
 And furthermore, that this action in the past
 might not have been done in this present life, but in a former life.
 It was simply axiomatic to those people
 that they were involved in a long, long process of reincarnation,
 reaping the rewards and punishments.
 And there was not only the possibility of being reincarnated again in the human form,
 but if you were exceedingly good, you might be born in one of the heavens,
 the paradises, and if you were exceedingly bad,
 you might be born for an insufferable period of years, not forever,
 in a purgatory.
 And the purgatories of the Hindus and Buddhists
 are just as ingeniously horrible as those of the Christians.
 Well, of course, everybody knows, I mean, anybody seems to have any sense,
 that all this imagination of post-mortem courts of justice
 is a way of telling people,
 "Well, if the secular police don't catch you,
 the celestial police will catch you, and therefore you had better behave."
 And it's an ingenious device for encouraging ethical conduct.
 Now, but remember that for a person brought up in that climate of feeling
 where everybody believes this to be true,
 it seems a matter of sheer common sense that it's so.
 And it's very difficult for a person so brought up
 not to believe that that is the state of affairs.
 Take an equivalent situation in our own culture.
 It's still enormously difficult for most people to believe
 that space may not be Newtonian space,
 that is to say, a three-dimensional continuum which extends indefinitely forever.
 The idea of a four-dimensional curved space seems absolutely fantastic
 and can't even be conceived by people unversed in the mathematics of modern physics.
 Or again, as I've often pointed out,
 it's very difficult for us to believe
 that the forms of nature are not made of some stuff called matter.
 That's a very unnecessary idea from a strictly scientific point of view,
 but it's awfully difficult for us to believe it,
 to believe, in other words, that there isn't this underlying stuff.
 And not so long ago,
 it was practically impossible for people to conceive
 that the planets did not revolve about the Earth encased in crystalline spheres.
 And it took a very considerable shaking of the imagination
 when astronomers began to point out that this need not necessarily be so.
 All right, so now let's go back to the problem of somebody living in the culture of ancient India.
 Here it is, as a matter of common sense, you see,
 that he is going to be reborn.
 Now, there's some, perhaps exceedingly intelligent person,
 who, for one reason or another, discovers that this idea is not so.
 After all, when you get such disciplines as Vedanta and Buddhism,
 they say that the ultimate goal of the discipline
 is release from the rounds of rebirth,
 and incidentally also, which is fundamental to it,
 release from the illusion that you are a separate individual confined to this body.
 But so far as both of these things are concerned,
 they also say that the person who is liberated from the round of rebirth,
 as well as from the illusion of being an ego,
 sees, when he is liberated,
 that the process of rebirth and the whole cosmology of reincarnation and karma,
 as well as the individual ego, are in a way illusions.
 That is to say, he sees that they are maya.
 And I would like to translate maya at this moment, not so much illusion,
 as a playful construct, a social institution.
 So he sees, you see, that those things are not so.
 They are only pretended to be so.
 And you see, he ceases to believe in karma and reincarnation and all that,
 in exactly the same way that a modern agnostic
 no longer believes in the resurrection of the body at the day of judgment.
 I know this to be so because,
 although you will get very many Hindus and Buddhists
 who say that they believe in reincarnation,
 and come over here and teach it as part of the doctrine of Vedanta or Buddhism,
 the most sophisticated and the most profound,
 I'll say perhaps profound rather than sophisticated Buddhists that I have known,
 have said that they don't believe in it literally at all.
 And so I could say that those who do believe in it,
 believe in it simply because it's part of their culture,
 and they've not yet been able to be liberated from it.
 And so it seems to me very funny indeed,
 when Western people who become interested in Vedanta or Buddhism,
 that is to say, in forms of discipline,
 to liberate Hindus and Chinese people from certain social institutions,
 Western people adopt it, and then also adopt the ideas of reincarnation and karma
 from which these systems were designed to liberate them.
 Of course they adopt them because they feel it's consoling that one will go on living,
 and that wasn't the point at all.
 Or that it explains something, that why one suffered in this life was not because the universe was unjust,
 but because you committed some misdeed in the past.
 And so Westerners who take up the Oriental doctrines in that spirit,
 unfortunately take up the very illusions
 from which these doctrines were supposed to be ways of deliverance.
 Now that may be difficult to see just because
 so many practicing Hindus and Buddhists say
 they believe in reincarnation and this whole process of the cycles of karma and so on,
 and they, after all, are practicing it and they should know.
 Well now look here, there's a certain good reason why they shouldn't.
 Of course, I'm making an exception of the Indian or Chinese who's been educated in Western style,
 and he ceases to believe, maybe, in the cosmologies of his own culture,
 but he's not liberated in the Buddhist sense because in receiving a Western education
 he's become a victim of our social institutions instead,
 and he's just exchanged, as it were, one trouble for another.
 But when you take the situation as it stands, or as it did stand in India,
 isolated from Western culture,
 obviously no society can tolerate within its own borders the existence of a way of liberation,
 a way of seeing through its institutions,
 without feeling that such a way constitutes a threat to law and order.
 Anybody who sees through the institutions of society
 and sees them for, as it were, creative fictions,
 in the same way as a novel or a work of art is a creative fiction,
 anybody who sees that, of course, could be regarded by the society as a potential menace.
 But then you may ask, well, if Buddhism and Vedanta and so on were indeed ways of liberation,
 how could Indian or Chinese society or Burmese society have tolerated their presence?
 Well, the answer lies simply in the much misunderstood esotericism of these disciplines.
 In other words, that those who taught them the masters of these disciplines
 made it incredibly difficult for uninitiated people to get in on the inside.
 And their method of initiating them, in a way,
 was to put them through trap after trap after trap to see if they could find their way through.
 In other words, such a master would not dream of beginning by disabusing the neophyte
 and saying, well, you know, all these things you heard from your father and mother and teachers and so on were fairy tales.
 Oh, no, indeed.
 He would do what is called in Buddhism "exercise the use of upaya,"
 the Sanskrit word meaning "skillful devices" or "skillful means,"
 sometimes described as giving a child a yellow leaf to stop it crying for gold.
 After all, when you approach one of these ways of liberation from the outside,
 it looks like something very, very fantastic.
 Here you are literally going to be released from a literally true and physical cycle
 of endless incarnations in heavens and hells and all kinds of states.
 And therefore, naturally, to do that, what an undertaking that must be.
 What a wonderful, extraordinary person you've got to become.
 And so the neophyte is ready for almost anything.
 And the teacher, because the fundamental problem in this whole thing is for him to get rid of the illusion, you see,
 that he's a separate ego.
 If there's no separate ego or sort of soul, then there's nothing to be reincarnated.
 So all the teacher really, in his all kinds of complicated ways of doing it,
 but all that he really says to him is, "Well, now, if you will look deeply into your ego,
 you will find out that it is a non-ego, that your self is the universal self,"
 as he might say if he were a Vedantist.
 Or if he were a Buddhist, he might say, "If you look for your ego, you won't find it.
 So look for it and see and really go into it."
 And so he gets the man meditating and trying by his ego to get rid of his ego.
 Well, that is a beautiful trap. It can last forever until one sees through it.
 In other words, this is like trying to, you know, sweep the darkness out of a room with a broom.
 Or it's like, it's worse than that.
 Lao Tzu, Zhuang Tzu rather, had a nice figure for it, beating a drum in search of a fugitive.
 That's to say, you know, when the police go out because they've had a telephone call that was a burglar,
 they come racing to the house with a siren full blast and the burglar hears it and runs away.
 Because, of course, to try and get rid of the ego, for one's advantage in some ways,
 is an egotistic enterprise and you can't do it.
 And so, of course, the student gets to the point where he begins to realize that
 everything he does to get rid of his ego is egotistic.
 And this is the kind of trap in which the teacher gets him.
 Until, of course, he comes to the point of seeing that his supposed division from himself into, say, I and me,
 the controller, controlling part of me and the controlled part of me, the knower and the known and all that, is phony.
 There is no way of standing aside from yourself, in other words, as it were, changing yourself in that way.
 But he discovers this finally.
 At the same time, he discovers, almost at the last minute you might say,
 the fallacy, or rather the fantasy nature, the game-like nature,
 of the system of cosmology which has existed to, as it were, underpin or give the basic form
 of the social institutions of his particular culture or society.
 In other words, you may put it in another way, one of the basic things which all social rules of convention conceal
 is what I would call the fundamental fellowship between yes and no.
 Say, in the Chinese symbolism of the positive and the negative, the yang and the yin,
 you know you've seen that symbol of them together like two interlocked fishes.
 Well, the great game, I mean, the whole pretense of most societies is that these two fishes are involved in a battle.
 There's the up fish and the down fish, the good fish and the bad fish, and there's out for a killing.
 The white fish is one of these days going to slay the black fish.
 But when you see into it clearly, you realize that the white fish and the black fish go together.
 They're twins. They're really not fighting each other. They're dancing with each other.
 That, you see, though, is a difficult thing to realize.
 In a set of rules in which yes and no are the basic and formally opposed terms,
 when it is explicit in a set of rules that yes and no, or positive and negative, are the fundamental principles,
 it is implicit but not explicit that there is this fundamental bondage or fellowship between the two.
 The fear is, you see, that if people find that out, they won't play the game anymore.
 I mean, supposing a certain social group finds out that its enemy group, which it's supposed to fight, is really symbiotic to it.
 That is to say, the enemy group fosters the survival of the group by pruning its population.
 We'd never do to admit that. We'd never, never do to admit the advantage of the enemy, just as George Orwell pointed out.
 In his fantasy of the future in 1984, that a dictatorial government has to have an enemy, and if there isn't one, it has to invent one.
 And by this means, by having something to fight, you see, having something to compete against,
 the energy of society to go on doing its job is stirred up.
 And what the Buddha or Bodhisattva type of person fundamentally is, is one who's seen through that,
 who doesn't have to be stirred up by hatred and fear and competition to go on with the game of life.


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