[Music]
 Of course it's affected.
 There's no doubt about that whatsoever.
 Because all personality is an affectation.
 If you are aware of your behavior, you can't but be affected.
 And so once you know that, you stop worrying about it.
 You affect this, you affect that, whatever pleases you, whatever when suits you.
 And let it go at that.
 Because life is style.
 As a French writer used to say, "Le style, c'est l'homme-même."
 Style is the man's self.
 But that in America is harassment.
 For almost all Americans.
 Style, that's affectation, that's a put-on.
 But you don't realize that the lack of affectation is also put-on.
 You come to California, everybody addresses everybody else by their first names.
 In Europe, to address someone by his first name means
 that you are on a very particularly friendly basis.
 Here, it implies we all ought to be on a particularly friendly basis.
 And therefore I call you Jim and Susie and Boo Boo or whatever is my pity.
 And it doesn't mean a thing.
 It doesn't mean anything at all.
 There's a clerk in the post office in Sausalito who calls me Al.
 Nobody calls me Al.
 And I resent it.
 He's a vulgar person.
 So, I'm saying all this because I want you to understand why I'm here
 and what my relationship to you is.
 But please understand that you mustn't take me too seriously.
 Even if I look serious, enough of the, uh, these sort of Buddhistic surroundings,
 that's merely and only because I like the style of it.
 Some people like this kind of flower, this kind of painting, this kind of music.
 It's pleasing to me.
 It entertains me.
 Possibly it will entertain you.
 I don't know.
 But, why I invited you here through the Tahoe Institute,
 and presumably why you came,
 was that you wanted to find something out about meditation.
 And presumably, you wanted to find out about meditation
 for roughly the same reason that I'm interested in it.
 Which goes back to this fundamental, overwhelming, curiosity, wonder at existence itself.
 Do we feel?
 Obviously we do.
 Or we wouldn't be here.
 That there's a problem.
 A question.
 That living, just exactly as we do ordinarily,
 leaves us puzzled, and frightened, even terrified.
 We've heard of mystics.
 We've heard of very, very marvelous people,
 who have had a spiritual experience, as a consequence of which they no longer fear anything.
 That as a consequence of this experience, the world seems to them completely transparent,
 or shall I say translucent.
 So that behind every form they see an expression of total joy and love.
 And that everything that's going on is really an expression of this.
 And these people manage to manifest this in their own lives and attitudes,
 so you can feel in the presence of such a person, a total peace,
 and feel engulfed in this person's love.
 And you say, "Wowee, I'd like to be like that."
 "Oh, what a fortunate position to be in."
 "Could I be that? Can you tell me? Can I tell you how I could be such a person like that?"
 I say, "Well, let's see. Let's look at ourselves."
 Let's start, like all these people say they do, they start meditating.
 And part of meditation is to be aware of who and what you are.
 And then you find inside, that rather than this joyous, peaceful being who is free from fear,
 and who sees all life transparent in all directions, so that there are no blocks,
 no hang-ups, no attachments, and he's completely free and delighted.
 Instead you find you're a sort of quaking, palpitating mess of anxiety.
 You know, something which needs to be stroked, which needs love, which needs attention,
 which just has the horrors.
 And the funniest thing of all about it is, it's terrified of an event called death,
 which would put an end to its misery.
 That's what we are.
 Really and honestly, that's it.
 Well, I must admit that I find that sort of thing in myself, not only that.
 People are always looking at this ideal of the Buddha, the perfect mystic, the Christ,
 that kind of person.
 Wish we could find one.
 And so all these gurus come around and they come on that they are really that.
 And people slowly find out that they have funny little defects.
 You know, they get bad tempers, they like to screw girls, they smoke or drink,
 or are cantankerous, picky about money, and all that kind of thing.
 It's too bad.
 Let's look for another one.
 But,
 the point
 is that when you come down to it, and you find out that you're what I will call,
 just for purposes of shorthand, the quaking mess,
 that's something that exists in your experience.
 You see this? Just in the same way as say, cancer, measles, a rainy day, a difficult person,
 those also exist in your experience.
 Can you begin to take the attitude that what you experience about yourself,
 your thoughts, your feelings, is on the same level as what you experience about everything and everyone else?
 Instead of making the inside different from the outside,
 you take your inside experience, what you feel about you,
 and what you feel about the world out there, as all being more or less on the same level.
 In other words, if I experience myself as a mess, it's very much like the experience of a wretchedly cold day with steams and hail.
 It's one of those events that I experience.
 And put up with it.
 I'm saying all this to kind of get a feel, a personal relationship with you,
 so that I can talk to you as I could talk to myself.
 I don't, in other words, I don't want you to regard me as an authority.
 Because if you do regard me as an authority,
 I will be so only by virtue of your own opinion that I am.
 So that it will be you who make me of the authority.
 And then you are fooling yourselves.
 My objective, if anything, is to set you free from any authority, so that you're on your own.
 [Music]
 [Music]
 Now from this there follows a principle.
 And it goes like this.
 Step one.
 Realize that anybody whom you consider in matters spiritual, psychological and so on, has an authority.
 Has this authority because of your opinion that he has, or she has.
 How do you know?
 If you say, for example, like a Protestant fundamentalist, that you believe in the Bible,
 that the Bible is inspired, or you may say as a more liberal kind of Christian that Jesus Christ
 is the greatest being that ever lived on earth.
 How do you know?
 It's your opinion that that is so.
 Lots of people may have told you so.
 And you may be very impressed by those people, but you bought it.
 And so therefore if you say, well I would like to become like that.
 That's an expression of the way you are.
 You couldn't feel, I would like to become like that.
 Like the authority, like the Christ.
 Except as an expression of the way you are now.
 And the way you are now is the quaking mess.
 And therefore your emulation, your desire, your idealism to become like Christ,
 is merely one of the appetites of your quaking mess.
 It's an expression of you as you are.
 Don't fool yourselves.
 I'm not trying to put you down by talking about the quaking mess.
 The quaking mess may be in fact something very, very natural.
 The way we are, the state of affairs.
 And we shouldn't be ashamed of it.
 I'm not ashamed of it. I told you all the tragedy.
 But it is important not to fool oneself about this.
 But there does, doesn't there, seem to remain a problem.
 About existence, about being alive.
 Now let's go into what is that problem.
 At the sort of nitty gritty level.
 Very basic in our thinking is that we, as it say, one must live.
 We need to survive, to go on.
 We need therefore money for food, for this that and the other.
 We must go on.
 And we know that we are not going to get away with it for very long.
 That after a certain number of years we are going to die.
 The thing is going to end.
 The thing that we call "I" is going to be as it is in sleep.
 Deep sleep, with no dreams.
 But that between now and that hour, there may be the most ghastly pains.
 Not only perhaps the pains of physical disease, or being wounded, or hurt.
 But the pains of worrying about our failure of responsibility to people who depend on us.
 And we suffer other people's suffering simply because we are sensitive and have imagination.
 And participate in their sufferings, and our adrenaline and our chemicals respond simply by imagination to the sufferings of other people.
 And what about that?
 So we can look at these problems and say, now quite obviously, all these problems cannot be solved in a physical way.
 That is to say, we do not expect in our lifetime that medical skill will make us exempt from death.
 We do not seriously expect that human beings will all learn to be nice to each other.
 And will refrain from war, and horrors of that kind, racial prejudice and so on.
 We don't seriously expect to find a method of being protected by taking some sort of drug against all possible disease and pain.
 So therefore we say, now maybe there's another way around.
 Maybe, that instead of solving these problems at the technical level, we could solve them at the psychological and spiritual level,
 by so disciplining ourselves, by so doing something of ourselves, that we wouldn't be afraid of it anymore.
 And so, in accord with that motivation, we seek out spiritual teachers, psychological teachers, this, that and the other.
 Could we somehow be made over, so that we don't worry about the quaking mess, by a spiritual discipline or whatever.
 And you see, if you examine that, that this wanting to overcome the quaking mess, and not have it anymore,
 that precisely is the quaking mess.
 The thing that we object to about ourselves, is precisely what we do about overcoming it.
 In other words, the activity that we employ in overcoming it, is the mess that we object to.
 Do you see that?
 And it's very important to realize that.
 And if you do realize it, you raise the question, then what can I do?
 What can I do to transform the quaking mess, into the state of mind of the true mystic?
 Well if you are the quaking mess, there is obviously nothing you can do, to transform yourself into the state of mind which you idealize as that of being the true mystic, the Christ the Saint or whatever.
 So, you realize that everything is fun.
 That all your ideals, are simply manifestations of the quaking mess, trying to get away from yourself.
 And that you are put in the position of, it is absolutely necessary for me to be different from the way I am.
 But, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it, because being the way I am, I cannot be different from that.
 Let's say this, but we can put it in different ways. I know that I ought not to be selfish.
 And I would very much like to be an unselfish person. But the reason why I want to be an unselfish person, is that I am very selfish, and would far more love myself and respect myself, if I were unselfish.
 You see?
 I know that I ought to love God.
 And, whatever, and why do you want to love God?
 Well, because God is the biggest boss, and it's best to be on the side of the big battalions.
 That's really why I want to do it. In other words, because I'm looking for the safety of my own spiritual skin.
 So, I think I ought to love God. Oh, sophisticated saints have known this. St. Paul understood it, St. Augustine understood it, Martin Luther understood it.
 They didn't know what the hell to do about it.
 But there was nothing to do.
 And yet, something has to be done.
 Obviously.
 But you realize, when you really look into yourself, there's nothing you can do.
 And this, therefore, is our point of departure.
 That we here,
 perhaps, perhaps not, mutually realize,
 there is nothing we can do to be anything else than what we are.
 To feel any other way than what we feel at this moment.
 And to be, then, this breaking mess, which has the capacity for the horrors, about what life can do to us.
 Now, however, this isn't as much of a blind alley, a cul-de-sac, as it sounds.
 Because if you discover a blind alley, it tells you something.
 Watch the flow of water, when it crosses over an area of land,
 and you will see that it puts out fingers.
 And some of them stop, because they come into blind alleys.
 The water doesn't pursue that course.
 It simply rises, and then it finds a way it can go.
 But it never uses any effort.
 It only uses weight, gravity.
 It takes the line of least resistance, and eventually finds a course.
 Now, we will do the same thing.
 Only we're ashamed of it. But we're going to do it anyway.
 We think that when we come to a dead end, a blind alley, "Oh, I failed!"
 Supposing the water, at each place where a finger of water stretches out over dry ground,
 and doesn't go any further because the land is too high,
 the water were to say to itself, "I failed."
 We would say it was neurotic water.
 Just wait, and it will find a way.
 Now, when you find, you see, that there's this predicament that I've been describing to you,
 that there's no way of transforming yourself.
 To become this fearless, joyous, divine being, as distinct from the waking mass.
 When you say, "There's no way,"
 this is not a gloomy announcement.
 It is a very, very important communication.
 It's telling you something.
 Because the land is telling the water, "This isn't the way to go."
 There's another way, "Cry over here."
 So in the same way, life is telling you, "That's not the way to go."
 It's telling you, the message underlying this is, "You cannot transform yourself."
 It is giving you the message that
 the you that you imagine to be capable of transforming yourself doesn't exist.
 In other words, an ego, an I,
 separate from my emotions, my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences,
 who is supposed to be in control of them,
 cannot control them because it isn't there.
 And as soon as you understand that, things will be vastly improved.
 Now we can go into this, what do you mean by the word "I"?
 We're going to make some experiments on this, on a number of different levels,
 but in the ordinary way, what do you mean by the word "I"?
 I, myself, your personality, your ego, what is it?
 Well, first of all, obviously, it's your image of yourself.
 It's composed of what people have told you about yourself, who you are,
 how they've reacted to you and given you an impression that that's the sort of person you are.
 It's all your education goes into this, the style of life you put on and so forth.
 But it's an image, it's an idea, it's your thought about yourself,
 and I suppose yourself is in fact not this, but is to begin with your total physical organism,
 your psychological organism, and beyond that,
 an organism doesn't exist as an isolated thing any more than a flower.
 It exists without a stalk, without roots, without earth.
 So in the same way, although we are not stalked on the ground,
 we are nevertheless inseparable from a huge social context of, well to begin with,
 parents, siblings, people who work for us, everything.
 I mean, it's just impossible to cut ourselves off from the social environment
 and also furthermore from a natural environment.
 We are that. There's no clear way of drawing the boundary between this organism
 and everything that surrounds it.
 And yet the image of ourselves that we have does not include all those relationships.
 Our idea of personality of ourselves includes no information whatsoever
 about the hypothalamus, an organ of the brain, the pineal gland,
 really of the way we breathe, of how our blood circulates,
 of how we manage to form a sentence, how we manage to be conscious,
 how you open and close your hand.
 The information contained in your image of yourself contains nothing about all that.
 And therefore, obviously, it's an extremely inadequate image.
 But nonetheless, we do think that the image of self refers to something
 because we have the impression, very strongly indeed, that I exist.
 And this isn't just an idea, we think, my God, it's a feeling.
 It's really substantially there in the middle of us.
 And what is it?
 What do you actually sense?
 Like, you know, when you're sitting on the floor and you feel the floor is there and it's green and hard.
 Okay, what are you sitting on the floor?
 What do you have the sensation of?
 You know, it's you here.
 When you're not hitting yourself.
 What is it?
 In what part of your body do you feel yourself?
 The real I exists.
 We can explore this very deeply.
 But I'm going to give you a preliminary and superficial answer.
 The sensation which corresponds to the image of ourselves is a chronic muscular tension
 which has absolutely no useful function whatsoever.
 It is when you try, say, to concentrate.
 What do you do when you try to pay attention?
 When I was a little boy in school, I had sitting next to me another boy who had great difficulty in reading.
 And as he worked over the textbook with its perfectly piffling information,
 he groaned and grunted to try to read, to get out the sounds as if he were heaving enormous weights with his muscles.
 You know, "see, spot, rock, run,
 ah, ah, ah, ah, her, an", you know.
 He was enormous weight he was heaving.
 And you know, the teacher was vaguely impressed that he was trying.
 Phew!
 And that absolutely, you know, all this tying yourself up into a knot has absolutely nothing to do with the way your mind works.
 Try to see hard.
 Look very intensely.
 And you make tight muscles around here.
 Maybe you clench your jaws a bit.
 If anything, that will make your vision more fuzzy.
 Because if you want to see something clearly, you must not make an effort.
 You must simply trust your eyes and your nervous system to do their thing.
 So he just looked like that.
 I was writing the other night and I completely forgot somebody's name.
 But I knew that eventually my memory would produce it.
 And I just sat for a while and said to my memory,
 "You know very well who this person is.
 Please give me the answer."
 He said, "Boing!" There it was.
 Because that's the way nerves work.
 They don't work by force.
 And yet we've all been brought up to try to force our nervous activity,
 our concentration,
 our memory,
 our comprehension,
 and indeed our very love.
 We've tried to force it with muscles.
 Men will understand me if I say,
 "You cannot force by muscular effort yourself to have an erection."
 Women will understand me if I say,
 "You cannot force yourself with muscles to have an orgasm."
 It has to happen.
 And you must trust that.
 There is absolutely nothing you can do about it by using your muscles.
 Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
 So, in precisely the same way...
 Well, let's complete the picture.
 So, therefore, the notion that we have of ourselves, of ego,
 is a compound of an image of ourselves which does not fit the facts,
 and a sensation of muscular straining which is futile.
 So that what you perceive to be yourself is the marriage of an illusion and a futility.
 [laughter]
 So, well, what are we?
 If that isn't the case, well, obviously,
 if you want to take a scientific point of view by that mythology,
 then you're organism, about which we know very little.
 And the organism, as we've seen, is inseparable from its environment.
 And so you are the organism environment.
 In other words, you are no less than the universe.
 Each one of you is the universe,
 expressed in the place which you feel is here and now.
 You're an aperture through which the universe is looking at itself,
 exploring itself.
 And we're going to go into that much more deeply.
 So when you feel that you are a lonely, put upon, isolated, little stranger,
 confronting all this, see, you have an illusory feeling.
 Because the truth is the reverse.
 You are the whole works that there is, always was, and always has been, always will be.
 Only, just as my whole body has a little nerve end here,
 which is exploring, which contributes to the sense of touch,
 you are just such a little nerve end for everything that's going on.
 Just as the eyes serve the whole body, and help it find its way around,
 so you are, as it were, serving the whole universe.
 You're a servant.
 And it's exploring itself.
 So that you as a function, you are a function of all that.
 And therefore, if this is so, it just doesn't fit the...
 These facts do not fit the way we feel.
 Because we feel it the other way around.
 I am a little lonely thing exploring all this universe and trying to get, make something out of it,
 get something out of it, do something with it.
 And I know I'm going to fail because I know I'm going to die one day.
 So we're all fundamentally depressed.
 And think up all these fantasies about what's going to happen to us when we're dead,
 and all that kind of thing.
 What's going to happen to you when you're dead?
 What do you mean, you?
 If you are basically the universe that questions irrelevant,
 you never were born and you never will die.
 Because what there is, is you.
 And that should be absolutely obvious.
 But it is not obvious at all.
 That should be the simplest thing in the world.
 That you, the I, is what has always been going on and always will go on forever and ever.
 But we have been bamboozled by religionists,
 by politicians,
 by fathers and mothers,
 by all sorts of people, to tell us,
 "You're not it."
 And we believed it.
 So, you see now, why, if I put it to you,
 in this very negative way,
 you can't do anything to change yourselves, to become better,
 to become happier,
 to become more serene,
 to become mystics or anything.
 If I say, "You can't do a damn thing."
 Can you understand this negative statement in a positive way?
 What I'm really saying is, that you don't need to.
 Because if you see yourselves in the correct way,
 you are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature,
 as say, trees,
 clouds,
 the patterns in running water,
 the shape of fire,
 the arrangement of the stars, the form of a galaxy.
 You are all just like that.
 There's nothing wrong with you at all.
 Except that I have to add this little flip.
 You have, any of you, you do think there's something wrong with you.
 See?
 And there's no question, you do.
 We all object to ourselves in various ways.
 And I'm going to add, there's nothing wrong with that either.
 Because that's part of the flow.
 That's part of what is going on.
 That's part of what we do.
 So I don't, you see,
 what I'm actually going to do is, I'm going to deliver you from the sense of guilt.
 Because I'm going to teach you,
 that you needn't feel guilty because you feel guilty.
 Of course you feel guilty.
 It's like someone put a match on you and you feel hot.
 So they talk to you as a child, you feel guilty, and you feel guilty.
 And you say, well, it comes along and says, well you shouldn't.
 It's not the point.
 I'm going to say, not that you shouldn't, but that you do, and don't worry about it.
 And if you want to say further, but I can't help worrying about it,
 I'm going to say to you, okay, worry about it.
 This is the principle called in Japanese, Judo.
 Meaning the gentle way.
 Go along with it, go along with it, go along with it.
 Now, the difficulty we have here, I have already slightly explained,
 in referring to encounter groups.
 If I say you are perfectly okay as you are,
 and that this whole idea of changing yourself, making yourself over, is phony,
 what happens next?
 If you are a barbarian, you will say, well, if I'm the way I am,
 you know, I'll pick my nose and flick the snots of the world,
 you know, I'll do anything I like.
 But you see, the trouble here is, that there comes in a purely artificial
 preconception of what it is to be natural.
 Someone has told you on the idea, that a natural person is a vulgar person.
 Is an unmannered, is a bum.
 And so you act the bum, see, in order to convince yourself that you are being natural.
 And this again is just as much a method of false self-transformation
 as if you were trying to make yourself into a saint.
 One school of thought, in other words, is saying,
 restrain your desires, discipline your appetite.
 Very, very proper.
 Now a school of thought is saying, ah, what the hell,
 oh, that's another thing, that's not natural.
 Act up like a smart ass.
 But both of them, you see, are acting in accordance with a purely artificial idea.
 They don't know where they are.
 So, you know, the most interesting thing you can do in an encounter group,
 is try to find out.
 It's really purposeful.
 It's calling first in the rules of the game.
 Saying, if we say, let's all be honest with each other.
 What do you mean by honest?
 What is the truth?
 Do you know what the truth is?
 If you call these things first, then a terrible thing happens.
 And that is that nobody knows what they are supposed to do.
 That's the most embarrassing situation in life.
 When we are all here and we don't know what we are supposed to do.
 Now we are really up against reality.
 You don't know what you are supposed to do.
 Wow, that's it.
 No program.
 So therefore, this is the beginning of meditation.
 You don't know what you are supposed to do.
 What can you do?
 Well, if you don't know what you are supposed to do, you watch.
 You simply watch what's going on.
 Like, say, somebody plays music.
 You listen.
 You just follow those sounds.
 And eventually you understand the point of the music.
 The point cannot be explained in words, because music is not words.
 But after a while, in listening to any music, you will understand the point of it.
 And that point will be the music itself.
 So in exactly the same way.
 You can listen to all experiences, because all experiences whatsoever are vibrations coming at you.
 You are these vibrations, as a matter of fact.
 If you really feel out what is happening,
 what you are aware of as you and as everything else is all the same.
 It's a... vibrations of all kinds, and they're on different bands of a spectrum.
 Sight vibrations, emotion vibrations, touch vibrations, sound vibrations.
 All these things adding together are woven.
 All the different senses are woven.
 And you get a pattern in the weaving.
 And that pattern is the picture of what you now feel.
 The scene can be...
 See?
 Now, instead of saying, "What should I do about it?"
 Because who knows what to do about it?
 To know what to do about this, you would have to know everything.
 And if you don't, then the only thing at least to begin with,
 to begin with, you can do is watch.
 Watch what's going on.
 Watch not only what's going on on the outside, but also what's going on on the inside.
 Treat your own thoughts, your own reactions, your own emotions about what's going on outside,
 as if those inside reactions were also outside things.
 Because you're just watching.
 So you simply watch.
 And everything going on, without attempting to change it in any way,
 without judging, without calling it good or bad, you watch it.
 That is the essential process of meditation.
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