with part two of reality, art and illusion. Well, now you know that one of the great problems that has arisen out of the western study of Indian philosophy as well as out of the tradition of western philosophy in relation to the whole problem of illusion is the question of what is called in the technical jargon of western philosophy subjective idealism. This is the theory that all reality is mental. And we have to start by making a clear distinction between subjective idealism and solipsism. Solipsism is the doctrine that you are the only person who exists and everybody else is your dream. And you can see there is a certain analogy between that and the Hindu idea that all this cosmos is the dream of the godhead. But the difference here is that in the solipsistic doctrine it is just you as you more or less know yourself from a conscious standpoint as a finite individual and not much more than that having this dream that all these other people exist. There is no way of really producing an argument against solipsism because you can always say to a solipsist what evidence if someone could produce it would you regard as disproving your idea? That's a very disconcerting question to ask anybody and I give it to you if ever you get involved in philosophical one-upmanship. Ask a Freudian what evidence if it could be brought forward would you consider to disprove the Oedipus Complex theory? You'll find he can't think of anything at all. Or ask a theologian what evidence would you find conclusive as disproving the existence of God? And he can't think of any. Whereas other people if you ask them that question will suggest an experiment and say alright if this experiment is negative then we'll accept the evidence and one of the classic experiments of this nature is the Michelson-Morley experiment which disproved the existence of the ether as at any rate in the form that people had conceived ether and it's been generally accepted. Somebody thought out what would happen if there were really ether. So this is always one of the problems of solipsism and we're going to see it's one of the problems of subjective idealism. But the difference between solipsism and subjective idealism is contained in the famous double limerick. There was a young man who said, "God, I find it exceedingly odd that a tree as a tree simply ceases to be when there's no one around in the quad." And the reply, "Young man, your astonishment's odd. I'm always around in the quad, so the tree as a tree never ceases to be since observed by yours faithfully God." The great subjective idealists in the tradition of western philosophy are of course Berkeley, the bishop, and Bradley. A.F. Bradley. And it's in some ways difficult to make out exactly what they were saying when they said that everything is in the mind because they could never say clearly what they meant by the mind. But if you will be a little naive for a moment and seem at least to understand what you mean when you use the word mind they will pitch the argument in the following way. You do not know anything except in your own mind. The whole existence of an external world is something known to you in your mind. The distance of other people and other objects from you is a distance that exists in the mind. You cannot possibly conceive any world existing unless it be an experience. How could there be an unexperienced world? That would not be a world for anyone or anything therefore it would not be at all because being is always being for something. It is in other words relational. The sun is light for eyes. Eyes are organs of vision for a mind. If there are no eyes the sun gives forth no light. If there are no nerve ends it gives forth no heat. If there are no muscles nothing is heavy and if there are no soft skins nothing is hard. Because it's only in relation to a certain softness that something hard can be said to be hard. Only in relation to a certain degree of measurement performed by the neurons that things can be said to be relatively hot or cold. Hot and cold are the impact of energies on a nervous system. Energies at all are recognized as energies by their impact on something. So the Zen poem says the tree manifests the spiritual power of the wind the water the miraculous energy of the moon. So the tree is waving and we wouldn't know there was any wind around you see, unless there were a tree or something like it to wave in it. And in the same way as the moon when the water ripples breaks up into a thousand fragments and shimmers all over the place, you see. We wouldn't know that the moon had this miraculous power to duplicate itself, to triplicate, quadruplicate, multimillionaire itself were it not for the water. So these are the foundations of the idealist theory. You must distinguish between philosophical idealism and ethical idealism. They are two totally unrelated ideas. Philosophical idealism means that only the ideal world is the real world that is to say the world in the mind. Now, the theory is incredibly plausible as it has been stated by people like Berkeley and Bradley and the Western idealists but today it is about the most unfashionable philosophical theory in the academic world that you could follow because Western philosophy has undergone a great revolution since about 1914. In that year there was published Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Wittgenstein came from the so-called Vienna School or was influenced by the Vienna School of people who call themselves scientific empiricists sometimes logical analysts sometimes logical positivists and they said only statements that are empirically verifiable have meaning. They never verified that statement but that was their point of departure, that's their basic assumption. Everybody has a metaphysical assumption which he can't prove, watch out for it. It's basic to all thought. For example, you must be consistent. Try and be consistent. But at any rate this school has had immense influence in the 20th century and it argues basically that in order to say something meaningful he's having fun [laughs] you must be able to verify it. That is to say, you verify things by prophecy. If you make a prediction based on your statement and it comes true, you verified it. If it doesn't come true, you haven't verified it, you've de-verified it. A statement which was de-verified, shown to be untrue, might be meaningful but untrue. But a statement that you can't think any way of verifying it is in this theory meaningless. Now so you say the world is ruled by God. Everything that happens, happens under the governance of God. So the logical analyst says, you've made a statement now that says everything is affected by X, God. Suggest a way of verifying this. What difference would it make if it weren't so? Would it make any difference to the way things are going on if they weren't governed by God? This is a problem because it's just the same as if you had said all bodies whatsoever in the universe that includes all stars, all galaxies, all planets are moving in a certain direction. Now there's no way of verifying this because you can only verify movement in a certain direction by comparison with something that's relatively still. But there will not be any still body with reference to which all the other bodies move because you said in the beginning all bodies in the universe are moving in such and such a direction. So you could only say everything in the universe is governed by God if you made an exception. But there are certain things that are not. You see? Then according to logical analysis you could have made a meaningful statement. But when you start making statements about everything there's nothing you can do about it. You can't prove it, you can't disprove it. And so they say although you think you have said something you haven't really said anything at all. You made a statement that was actually as nonsensical as asking why is a mouse when it spins. But this statement about God doing or ruling all things sounded meaningful because we're used to it. Because we're used to it. But it's really pure nonsense. This has been so persuasive in the climate of academic philosophy today that idealism of all kinds is as I said extremely unfashionable. But there are considerations that might cause us to reflect on this more carefully. Because we can think of situations analogous to the idea that all things are ruled by God or all things exist only in the mind. There are situations analogous to that in our everyday experience. [Silence] Only we can be aware of these situations because we stand outside them. [Silence] Now first of all consider a mirror. A mirror will reflect all kinds of shapes and colors. And when you look at the mirror the mirror itself will be the ground or the underlying element common to all those shapes and colors. And it is not meaningless to say that they are all reflections in a mirror. Because the mirror has an edge and you can see other things around the mirror which behave in a different way from the reflections. You can't put your hand out and pull the necktie of a reflection in the mirror. But you can reach your hand out and pull the necktie of somebody standing beside the mirror. You see? But nevertheless, within the context of the mirror all the things that are there are reflected in it. And if the mirror weren't there, they wouldn't be there. Those reflections. Now supposing similarly, everything that exists has its being in a mirror called the mind. Only, there is no way of seeing the edge of this mirror. Does that... Is that meaningful? Is that possible? The positivists, the logical analysts will say no. Because the statement makes no difference to anything. It makes no difference to anything in this thing you call the mind that it's in the mind. It makes no difference to anything in the mirror that it's in the mirror. For example, your face is not immediately changed by being reflected in a mirror. The mirror doesn't exercise influences or so they say, upon the reflections. But it very well could. Let's consider what we were discussing last night. Lenses in cameras influence the kind of world they photograph. A convex lens will give you one thing. A concave lens will give you another thing. And one can think of all sorts of wonky lenses, prismatic lenses, bent lenses, squirrely lenses. Now you see, if the lenses of your eyes could be said to distort the physical world, you would take that distortion as normal. Because there would be no way of setting up a standard and saying, "By that standard, my eyes are wrong." Unless you simply took some other kind of a lens and said, "This is right," and the eyes distorted. You would have always seen things that way. So, uh... Nevertheless, whether the eyes are distorted or not distorted is impossible to decide. So according to this way of logic, that is a meaningless question. There is no way of deciding the answer, and it makes no difference whether it is or whether it isn't. Also they say. But I think that they have neglected certain kinds of difference that these things do make. First of all, there is a difference of feeling and very often a difference in behavior. Between a person who is aware of an underlying ground or continuum for every experience and every reality and the person who is not aware of it. The person who is aware of it feels at home in his surroundings. The person who is not aware of it doesn't. The first belongs and the second doesn't feel he belongs. He feels he's engaged in a contest. Furthermore, one of the difficult ideas to get across and express well in any language which wants to be, to assert a pluralistic universe in which there is no unifying ground. Any language based on that assumption is going to have difficulty talking about relationships. Let's go back in the history of philosophy and look at former instances of this difficulty. The thing that really bogged Descartes down and that puzzled him, he never could answer, was the relationship of mind and matter or spirit and matter. He had inherited from Platonism and from Christianity the theory of the two worlds, the natural and the supernatural, the material and the mental, the real and the ideal. And what never could be explained in, by the philosophies of the people who believe that way, was how the one influenced the other. How does the spiritual world influence the material? As is well known, all ghosts, all good, well-behaved ghosts, walk straight through walls without budging a brick. Now, if my mind is my ghost within me, how on earth does it lift my arm? When a ghost doesn't budge a brick when it walks through a wall. See, this is the real problem. It all sunk on this. They couldn't explain that. [Pause] And you see, [Pause] in just the same way as the Cartesian cannot explain the influence of mind on matter, so a person who works according to the theories of logical analysis can't really explain relationship [Pause] between so-called things. If he's going to take a pluralistic theory of the universe, in which there is no unifying continuum, but there are just these events, you see, there are these things we can talk about in a scientific descriptive manner. How are they related? They obviously are related. They obviously influence each other. [Pause] But how? Put it in another way of historic philosophical problem. How does a cause influence an effect? [Pause] Kind of amazing, you know, that they do. We say there are causes and effects. But how does a cause lead to an effect? [Pause] Is it something like a row of dominoes that stand on their end, and they all knock each other down, the first one, and they go clickety-clickety-clickety-clickety, and all knock each other down? Or a row of billion balls? That was the idea of Newtonian physics, of course. That the atoms were things like billion balls, and they banged each other around. And so you got results. [Pause] But this really won't do. [Pause] For very many reasons. They influence each other backwards. [Pause] Uh... [Pause] A future event can change a past event. [Pause] A lot of people aren't aware of that, but it can. [Pause] If I say... [Pause] The bark of the dog, and the bark of the tree. [Pause] What happens to bark, the former event, is very seriously influenced by the later event, dog or tree. [Pause] Uh... although the word sounds the same, and is spelled the same, it has a different meaning, according to what happens later. [Pause] So, in the same way, in music, [Pause] what is happening at this moment, may be changed altogether by something happening later. [Pause] A note has one meaning in one context, another meaning in another context. [Pause] So, what is the cause-effect relationship between them, when apparently the earlier event seems to be causally affected by the later event? You see how puzzling all that is? [Pause] But it's very easily illustrated by certain phenomena of music. [Pause] When a person is tone-deaf, that is to say, he cannot hear melodies. He only hears noise, and he can't understand why other people find music attractive. [Pause] What is his deficiency? Where is he blind? His blindness is that he cannot hear relationships, or rather, in musical language, he doesn't hear intervals. [Pause] If you are musically sensitive, what you hear in a melody is not a string of notes. You hear the steps between them. [Pause] You recognize the major scale of C as ascending. [Pause] Why do we think of that as up? What does it mean that one sound is higher than another? That's nonsense to a person who is tone-deaf. [Pause] There are just different sounds. There are boomy sounds and squeaky sounds, but they don't rise. [Pause] You see, he hears no motion in them, because each note is static, and he doesn't hear the lead from one to the other, the step. [Pause] Also, a person who is illogical positive, is a tone-deaf philosopher. [Pause] See? And you can't explain, there's nothing you can do to a tone-deaf person to explain how you hear music, just as there's absolutely no way of making a congenitally blind person understand color. [Pause] We may find out one eventually, when we find out a lot more about our senses, but in the ordinary way, he just can't get it. And so in exactly that same way, there are people who cannot get certain things. We say of such people, "You know all the words, but you don't know the music." And you may as well not waste your energies trying to convince, but there are alas, these poor afflicted souls who just aren't functioning on a certain wave band. [Pause] But now I don't want to say, you know, make a kind of a esoteric scene out of this. A lot of people are trained to pretend that they are not on that wave band. You may be perfectly capable of understanding the relationship between a cause and effect. You know what the relationship is? It's very simple. They're the same event, only divided into two parts. If you see a cat walk by a very narrow window, you see first the head and a little later the tail. If you speak in cumbersome philosophical language, you're going to start talking about the event head being the cause of the event tail. Well, it's all one cat. [Pause] And that's it. So when you see causes and effects, what you're saying is this. Aha! I realize at last my perception is limited. And when I saw one thing that's invariably followed by something else, what I hadn't noticed is that they're continuous with each other. So that when one part of this pattern arises, I should expect the other part. They're one pattern. They're not cause and effect. They're not something that is an action and a response to that action, an action and a reaction. They're a single action. That's why they're related in this way. All right, so I've got these two discrete events. And I call them cause and effect. But I find they are really one. Okay, in exactly the same way, I've got the two discrete events, you and I. [Pause] We could equally well, couldn't we, just say that there may be some sense in which they are one. Or the organism and the environment. It's becoming plainer and plainer that they are one. [Pause] Now what this goes back to, again we're looking at philosophical history, is the Western debate between the two schools of thought called the nominalists and the realists. And the modern logical philosophers are nominalists. Their fight is as follows. The realists say there are real, this is how they get the word realist, it's not what we call a realist today at all, it's quite different. The realist says there are in reality substances which could be called matter, or spirit, or humanity, just to take an example. Every individual human being is an instance of something called mankind. And mankind is a real entity. You could say too, the United States of America is a real entity. [Pause] And all these individual examples of it are as it were members of a body, constituted by the real mankind, or the state, or the society, or the church, or the whatever. In contradistinction the nominalist says, all your so-called real natures are abstractions. There is no such thing as mankind. There are simply these individual people. And calling them all men is a way of identifying them, but there is no such thing as mankind. In the same way, there is no such thing as the United States. There are all these people living here, who imagine that they're the United States and call themselves that. But the United States as such has no physical existence, and when you say the policy of the United States towards Russia is thus and so, you don't mean the policy of the geographical territory. And nominalism, you see, is a very big thing for the followers of Korzybski, and for all logical analysts and so on. Because they take the point of view, the whole thing in Korzybski is that you mustn't just go around calling things dogs. You must recognize there is Fido sub-one, Fido sub-two, and Fido sub-three. And so this helps you, as the song says, to see each doggy differently. [laughter] So the idea in semantics is this tremendous precise accuracy of getting the details clear. Seeing that not every colored man is a nigger. Not every Chinese is a chink. Not every Italian is a wop. You see? Now, of course, yes, there's the richness of detail. But these are philosophical fashions that go back and forth between the prickly-minded people and the gooey-minded people. The prickly-minded people are the nominalists, who like to emphasize the details, the atomic discontinuous structure of things. The gooey-minded people like to emphasize the great connected generalities, the way things form into bodies. But you see very clearly what happens if you press nominalism to its logical conclusion. The answer is there are no people. There are only amalgamations of cells. What you really are are these cells. Or you want to go further? Say what you are is only these electrons. That's all there is, you see? And this idea that they add up in some way to a person is just an abstraction. You're not really there, you see? There's just all that. Now, wait a minute, Mr. Nominalist. Suddenly, you are beginning to turn into a believer in Maya. What's your step, you see? If you push anybody far enough philosophically, they all arrive at the same place. [laughs] You suddenly tell me you don't believe human beings really exist. There are only these atoms. Well, well, well. So I suppose we can argue the same thing about connections in time. Melody is then an illusion. They're only the individual notes, after all. If you're going to be a nominalist, then a melody is something that just doesn't exist at all. Okay? That's almost what the Buddhists say. When I was explaining to you this morning, the moment, moment, moment, and you don't connect the moments, there's only one moment, you know? Well, that's the same thing the same way. I'm saying that all the connections are an illusion. [clears throat] So, the only... push your nominalist right into the corner. You see, the only things that exist are the multiplicity of atoms, and actually they only exist now. See? Because... Only... wait! No! You can't even say it. Only this moment is real. The ultimate hairline, you see? [whoosh] That's why the precisionist is making watches that have hairlines narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower, so they can only be seen by amazing microscopes. Exactly. They want to know when does that thing cross that thing? Boing! See? So, eventually they're going to get down and down and down, and the universe has no time to exist, and therefore it doesn't exist, therefore it's an illusion. That was what... what bugged Zeno, when he got the paradox of motion. And now either an arrow is somewhere or it isn't. If it's moving, it isn't anywhere, but it's obvious if it isn't anywhere it couldn't exist, you know? It's the same problem as Achilles and the Taurus. [short pause] Manifestly, the Achilles in a race overtakes the Taurus. But you can talk about this race in such a way that he can't. Well, how do you do the trick? What you do is this. Although Achilles in the physical world overtakes the Taurus, in the intellectual world, which you are using to measure the process, you measure his approach to the Taurus by a narrower and narrower scale as he approaches the Taurus. [short pause] Although he runs right by it, your measuring process gets more and more minute. You take longer and longer to think about it, because you're counting more units, so that you can indefinitely subdivide the distances he is passing in his approach to the Taurus. And you can go on talking about their subdivisions forever, so that in terms of your talking, he never gets by the Taurus. As you're drawing the lines finer and finer and finer and finer and finer. [short pause] So now who's making the abstractions? The nominalist is telling the realist, "You're making the abstractions. You're talking about these vast generalities called humanity and America. But now who's making the abstractions? I thought you were the prickly fellow who was so precise and said, "Only these specific, particular details exist." Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. You see? But he disappears into abstraction. So the pot calls the kettle black. [short pause] You see, that fight goes out the window. Because they both, if you push them far enough, they come back to each other. Push a realist far enough, and he comes into a nominalist. Push a nominalist far enough, and he turns into a realist. What does that mean? Well, it means the same thing as if you investigate matter thoroughly, you turn up with mind. If you investigate mind thoroughly, you turn up with matter. If you investigate yourself, what do you mean by you? How do you know you exist? In terms of what? What do you discover? Well, if you push that, why, you discover everything else. That you thought wasn't you. You only know you exist because you've got things to feel and other people to talk to. And because you go ya-ya-ya, you reflect the external world. So investigate you and you get the external world. Now what happens if you investigate the external world? Well, you get you. [pause] That's what happens, you see, when finally the physicists wanted to know, how are things like when we are not looking at them? [pause] That's the great question, you see. In order to see how electrons behave, I've got to put them in a process which influences their behavior. I'm really bombarding electrons with electrons. Now what is the electron doing when I'm not looking at it? [pause] See, does the light really go off in the refrigerator when you close the door? [laughs] So you find, you see, that knowing, the act of knowing, changes what you are knowing. Knowledge of something is the same as action upon it. You do not know that a ball is rubber until you bounce it. And that acts upon the ball. And that's so with everything. All knowing is not something you merely are a passive spectator. All knowing is the result of experiments on things. Only in the most trivial instances are you ever, and even then if you go into the neurology of it, the electronics of it, you're not a passive spectator. [pause] You may just observe things and write them down. Although when you do, it's pretty trivial. [pause] The really good knowledge is always accumulated by an action upon the world to see what changes that action makes. [pause] So, for example, we take certain fields of science. Let's take medicine and antibiotics. Now, antibiotics are something, first of all, done in very carefully restricted experiments. They were found very useful, and so they were spread over the social, uh, social world, so that almost everybody has had antibiotics by now. But the problem now arises is this. The people as we studied them before they ever had antibiotics were different from the people we are studying now who've had them. What we knew about people before antibiotics has a little less value. We've got to re-study them every time, because we've changed them. [pause] And the insects, you see, although the germs also adapt to this. They say, you know, these human beings throwing down all this jazz and confusing us and killing us off, we've got to do something about that. And so they change themselves, so they have to be studied again to know how to attack them the next time. Once upon a time, a spaceship arrived on a strange planet. And they came down, didn't seem to be anything living on it. And they put a lot of stalls in, and finally they found that some little bugs were eating the grain that they had stored. So they got insecticides and fixed those bugs. Later they found they had mice. And they were nibbling up things, so they got some cats sent on the next spaceship from Earth. And the cats took care of the mice. Then lo and behold, dogs turned up, started making trouble for the cats. So, uh, they, uh, decided, uh, that they'd better shoot the dogs. And they did. And one day they saw suddenly a man coming over the horizon with a gun. And they said to the chief, look at that, there's, there are people on this planet after all, and he's got a gun, shall we, shall we, uh, shall we shoot him? And he said, no, because I have no, no way of knowing what it will turn up as the next time. [laughter] Well, now look here. What I've been trying to show is that you cannot use the language of illusion, that is to say, the language of accurate, separative description too far, without getting into confusion. Push your nominalism, and it becomes realism. Push your scientific materialism, and it turns into mysticism. I love doing this, I've had great fun. I gave a lecture at Harvard, um, some time ago, on B.F. Skinner. And B.F. Skinner is the arch-behaviorist. He is Mr. Mechanist Psychology. And, uh, I took many, many passages from his works, and said, now just see what he's really saying, and so on, so on, so on. He's a mystic. He really believes in the unity of the universe, and all that jazz, you see, that the individual organism is a function of the cosmos. And if I say that, you see, I say he's a mystic, does this ruin his scientific reputation? What does it do? But that, you see, that's the great game to play. Just push it, along its logical lines, and you arrive up in that predicament. One way or the other, and it really doesn't matter which way you do it. You either show that nothing exists at all on their terms, or else that it's all one. So, in this way then, we have to resolve the problem of mind and matter by what I referred to this morning as looking at these as dimensions of each other, or as different languages for talking about the behavior of the same thing. What the thing is that's doing this behavior, or the behavior is that has no thing doing it, really no one can say. And you can't say what it is for exactly the same reason that you cannot touch the tip of this finger with this finger. To the tip of this finger, the tip of this finger is always inaccessible to its own touch, you see. And that's the problem of every nerve end. The nerve end can tickle another nerve end and say, "Hi, are you there? Am I here?" And it says, "Yes, you're here." Oh, but it needs another to do it. Now, the whole universe hasn't got another to rub itself against. So it can't define itself. So the basic self in you can't define itself. That's why the highest attainment in Zen is no attainment. Why no, it involves no idea. Why Buddha, when he talked in the Diamond Sutra to Subhuti, says, "Subhuti, when I attained complete and unexcelled awakening, I didn't attain anything at all." But you can see, I think, that this "nothing at all" is a statement of the same kind as when a logical positivist says, "In making your metaphysical assertion, you said nothing at all." And if you are Zen, you say, "Correct. I entirely agree with you." And yet, you see, that "nothing at all" was all in all. That was the thing. That was the big thing. So you lost everything and gained everything in one fell swoop. As having nothing but possessing all things. Because obviously, you see, if the mirror weren't there, the images wouldn't be. And there'd be no connection between them. They couldn't jostle together. If the water weren't there, how would the fishes get around? If the air weren't there, how would the birds fly? If consciousness weren't there, how would experiences occur? You see? If being weren't there, how could there be beings? So there are in Buddhist philosophy what are called the four inconceivables. Water to the fish, air to the bird, consciousness to man, and enlightenment to the ignorant. That is to say, to the ignorant in the sense that melody is inconceivable to the tone-deaf person. In the same way that color is inconceivable to the blind man, sound to the deaf man. This is KPFK Los Angeles. We just heard Alan Watts with part two of the four-part seminar, "Reality, Art, and Illusion." {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 2.09 sec Transcribe: 3836.78 sec Total Time: 3839.51 sec