So this is the first of a series of four weekends devoted to the subject of the future.
 And each session is pretty much, each weekend is pretty much self-contained.
 There's a certain continuity, but it's moving towards a center point from various different points on a circumference.
 And in the first weekend, this weekend, we are considering the subject of time and the whole concept of the future.
 And the point of departure that I would like to suggest to you is that time is a social institution and not a physical reality.
 There is, in other words, no such thing as time in the natural world, the world of stars and waters and mountains and clouds and living organisms.
 There is such a thing as rhythm, rhythm of tides, rhythm of biological processes.
 But time as such is a social institution.
 In the same way that language is, that number is, that concepts are, and/or measurements, inches, meters, lines of latitude and longitude,
 all those things are social institutions or conventions.
 The word "convention" from the Latin "convenire," to come together, to agree about something, to hold a convention,
 and thus, of course, in its deteriorated sense, when we say of something it's purely conventional.
 That is to say, you needn't take it seriously.
 Now, of course, are we going to take time seriously?
 That is the big question, and it depends what you mean.
 If you don't understand that time is a convention, of course you take it seriously, and you are driven by time.
 Time is money. Time is of the essence.
 And we do, don't we, live in a culture, or a complex of cultures in the Western world where we are literally driven by time.
 If you read a book like Jules Henry's marvelous work, Culture Against Man,
 he documents in the most extraordinary way to what an extent this particular culture is driven,
 so that even the psychologists have altered the old-fashioned word "instincts," and now they call them "drives."
 Because there's this feeling you've got to make that deadline.
 There's something there you've got to get to.
 And people feel driven even when, supposing, something's going to happen.
 You've got an appointment coming up, and some people find that in a strange way unsettling.
 They are so either eager to make this thing or so anxious about it that in between time they can't do anything else.
 They're incapacitated until it happens, until the blessed event or whatever it is occurs.
 But in the natural physical world, there is rhythm and there is motion.
 And time then obviously is a way of measuring motion, by comparing motion with some sort of constant.
 Now the constant in the question of time is a circle marked out in 360 or 60 degrees.
 And that is time.
 We cause a hand, a pointer, to revolve around that circle at a regular speed,
 and that gives us a constant with which we compare all kinds of motions and rhythms.
 And so the clock is just like a ruler and is as abstract as a ruler,
 and must be taken just for that, which means in a way not seriously, you see.
 That doesn't mean, of course, that you say, "Well, from now on we're going to melt down all clocks and use them for something else."
 Because conventions, social institutions, are very valuable.
 Corresponding to the watch, there is the compass.
 And that also is a circle, divided four ways, north, south, east, and west.
 The Buddhists speak of ten directions because they have not only the eight points of the compass, but they add to that above and below.
 And in their mythology, they have guardian kings whose duty it is to guard the ten directions.
 And you see them at the entrances to temples and places like that.
 All a fearsome aspect.
 The cosmic traffic cops, who are that fierce and are that firm about it all,
 because it is after all important that I can meet you at four o'clock in the afternoon at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.
 Because if we couldn't make that sort of agreement, that sort of convention, we couldn't convene.
 And insofar as it is important to us to meet, we require these sorts of compasses and timers in the vast emptiness of the cosmos.
 But we must recognize that these things are, as it were, written across vast emptiness.
 The ground of being, as Tillich calls God, has nothing in it where you can stand.
 You can't catch hold of it. You can't describe it.
 But you can imagine all sorts of things in it. Indeed, perhaps the whole physical universe is such an imagination.
 But don't take it for being ultimately real.
 There are, of course, sort of gradations of reality.
 One could say the clock, the lines of latitude and longitude, and words and things like that, abstractions, have a rather flimsy kind of reality.
 Next in order will come, of course, what we call ordinarily the physical world.
 We say, well, that's material. That matters. And so it has a little harder kind of reality.
 And most people stop there and they think there's nothing at a deeper level than that.
 And that's simply because of the limitations of man's, of consciousness, of his conscious attention.
 Conscious attention is so worked out that it tends to ignore all constants.
 In other words, when you move from the Middle West and come and live in California, at first when you get here you think, oh, this is a fantastic place.
 See? It is so beautiful and so lush and so on. And you stay here after a while.
 And in a few years you start taking the place for granted, because it's a constant stimulation of consciousness.
 Also, for example, when you're listening to recorded music, there is always a kind of electronic hum.
 But we screen that out and ignore it. And so it becomes unconscious.
 Well, so in a similar way, there is what you might call a continuum, a something or other, in which all physical phenomena exist.
 And you ignore it, unless in some way or other you can make it hum.
 And so various practices, like performing yoga exercises, or Zen meditations, or certain kinds of chemicals, can cause your entire sensorium to hum.
 And this draws your attention to the ground, the background, of everything that you're perceiving, which you ordinarily ignore.
 I think there is going around an entirely new religion called hum.
 And hum has no organization, no hierarchy, no doctrines, only music and ritual.
 And just hum. If anybody asks what's it all about, they say, "Well, come and see."
 Come in here, come and hum. That would be kind of nice to have something like that.
 I don't know whether it exists or not, but it ought to.
 But at any rate, the continuum in which everything occurs is, of course, basically what you are.
 Only, because we get absorbed in details, we forget all about it.
 Deep down, far, far within yourself, you know very well indeed that you are that.
 And that what we call consciousness and unconsciousness, coming and going, life and death, are changing modalities within this whatever it is we are.
 And your identities come and go, your forms, your bodies, your this, your that, it's all oscillating, like everything oscillates.
 It wouldn't hum if it didn't.
 And so, though we are, each one of us, all this cosmos and all this universe, its ground, we don't know it.
 Because we can't make it an item of knowledge, a particular.
 And we think the only kind of knowledge there is is knowledge of particulars.
 A logical positivist will argue this to the death and say, well, because your thing that is common to all makes no difference.
 It's true. In a mathematical equation, you cancel out, as irrelevant, terms that are equivalent on both sides of the equation.
 You remove them as redundant.
 But, you know, these things aren't redundant.
 While it's as perfectly true that a statement about the ground of being is, from the standpoint of formal logic, quite meaningless,
 it makes an enormous difference to the way a person actually feels and behaves, whether he's aware of the ground of being or not.
 The ground of being isn't a logical proposition. It enters into human life as an extremely vivid experience.
 And the difference between a person who sees that and a person who doesn't is quite startling.
 They behave differently. It may not be the way you want them to behave, but it's sure different.
 And so it's like being in love. It's quite unreasonable to be in love.
 But when you're in love, you're entirely changed and you behave differently, even though you may be crazy.
 So certain crazy things like being in love or like being aware of the ground of being are immense factors in human life,
 even though from the standpoint of academic philosophy and the kind of a scientist, scientific, I won't say scientific, I want to say scientismic, kind of phony science,
 they don't, they shouldn't be matters of scholarly attention. Nevertheless, they're tremendously important.
 So within this enormous so-called void, call it void not because it's nothing in the literal sense, but because you can't pin it down.
 But you can experience it. And when you do experience it, you wonder why the devil you didn't see it all along,
 because it was so obvious. Nothing is more obvious than this.
 So within that void, you see, we set up these two great circles, the time circle and the space circle,
 and we notch them all the way around and we use these concepts, which are really in our heads, as constants by which we regulate all sorts of events.
 Now then, when you lose sight of the conventionality of these things, because you are absorbed in details and have become unconscious of the totality,
 you begin to invest emotions in them. You may, for example, go to a game of some kind, football, basketball, or chess, you know, and you watch the game.
 And you know it's only a game. At least that was what you understood when you went in.
 But as it progresses and you become more absorbed in the back and forth of the game, your emotions begin to be affected.
 And you start cheering for one side or want to take the part of the underdog, or something of this kind.
 And that's what happened to us when we were born. We got into a gaming room.
 And it was only a game, but we begin to take it all terribly seriously.
 And each one of us is given a part in the game. And people tell us who we are. We're from babyhood up. They say, "This is the way you are."
 "It's not like you to do a thing like that," you see, as your mother says to you.
 Because she establishes an identity for you. And this identity is something you have to make, because you've got to amount to something. You've got to be someone.
 I mean, as if... Of course, in the beginning, I suppose, really we are nobody. But that simply means nobody.
 Um...
 [LAUGHTER]


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