Now, you see, what has led me to speak specifically for a moment, I said the subject of this is
 LSD. LSD is one such chemical that does produce this curious effect of making you aware of
 the polarity of things. It does lots of other things. It does lots of rather unessential
 and trivial things. And these, of course, in all the publicity in the various national
 magazines about LSD, get thoroughly emphasized. In other words, when somebody says something's
 real psychedelic, they mean bizarre. And when the national magazines try to illustrate the
 effect of these chemicals with various photographs, they come on with blurred photographs of all
 sorts of things, higgledy-piggledy, messed together, naked girls seen through prisms.
 Well that's absolutely nothing to do with it. If you wanted some sort of appropriate
 illustration for a Life magazine article on the effects of LSD, you would have one very
 simple solution. You would publish the most gorgeous color reproductions of Persian miniatures
 and of Moorish arabesques and of the illuminations of Celtic manuscripts. That would give you
 the story, so far as changes in human sensation are concerned. But there would be one thing
 very difficult to put across in pictures, because the people who looked at them, if
 they didn't get the point of view, wouldn't see it. And that is what I will call the sensation,
 as well as the intellectual understanding, of polarity. That is to say, that the inside
 and the outside, the subjective and the objective, the self and the other, go together. In other
 words, there is a harmony, an unbreakable harmony. When I'm using the word harmony,
 I don't necessarily mean something sweet. I mean absolute concordant relationship between
 what goes on inside your skin and what goes on outside your skin. It isn't that what goes
 on outside is so powerful that it pushes around and controls what goes on inside, equally
 so. It isn't that what goes on inside is so strong that it often succeeds in pushing around
 what goes on outside. It is very simply that the two processes, the two behaviors, are
 one. What you do is what the universe does, and what the universe does is also what you
 do. Not you in the sense of your superficial ego, which is a very small, little tiny area
 of your conscious sensitivity, but you in the sense of your total psychophysical organism,
 conscious as well as unconscious. This is not something that arrived in the world from
 somewhere else altogether, that confronts an alien reality. What you are is the universe,
 in fact the works, what there is, and always has been, and always will be forever and ever,
 performing an act called a John Doe. And this is such a subversion of common sense, but
 it's a matter of fact something, if you stop to think about it, that is completely obvious.
 Only everything conspires to prevent you from seeing that obvious thing. Because when you
 were babies, practically, all your parents and your teachers and your aunts and uncles
 and your older brothers and sisters got together and they told you who you were. They defined
 you as Johnny, who is just Johnny, and don't you come on too strong Johnny, because, no,
 you've got elders and betters around here. But you're responsible, you're a free agent,
 you'd better be. And so when you are told from childhood that you are expected and commanded
 to behave in a way that will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily, you remain
 permanently mixed up. That, if anything, is permanent brain damage. But that's the idea,
 you see, because that's the game we're playing. You started it, I didn't. That's the game
 we're playing. And we can make all kinds of complexities out of that, and really, in a
 way, have enormous fun. But once anybody sees through that, well, we're frightened. Once
 you get this sense of polarity, of your inside being the same process as your outside, and
 your ego being one and the same process as the whole universe going on, then we are afraid
 that people may say, "Well, good equals bad, and we can do anything we like, and we didn't
 in any way be further subject to the ordinary rules of human conduct, and we can wear what
 clothes we like, or no clothes at all, we can have what sexual life we like, we can
 do anything, and we are going to generally, because the world is being rather oppressive
 towards us, challenge the whole thing and run amok." And a lot of people are doing just
 exactly that. So I want to introduce into this whole problem some ancient wisdom. I
 have really two things to talk about. How cultures, which always did know in some way,
 or among whom a large number of people always did know this secret, handled it. And then
 I want to make some observations about how we are trying to handle it, and how it's not
 going to work. Among the Hindus and among the Buddhists, this view of the real identity
 of a human being has always been known, at least by a very influential minority. The
 central doctrine of the Hindu way of life, I call it that rather than a religion, is
 in Sanskrit, "Tattva-masi," "You're it," to put it in a kind of colloquial way. "You're
 it," and "It" is the witch than which there is no witcher, which they call the Brahman,
 or the Atman, with a capital A, meaning the self. You are only just kidding that you're
 just poor little me. See, the function of a guru, that is to say a spiritual teacher
 in India, is to look, give you a funny look in the eye, because you come to him and say,
 "Guru, I have problems. I suffer, and it's a mess, and I can't control my mind, and I'm
 miserable and depressed," and so on. And he gives you a funny look. And you feel a bit
 nervous about the way he looks at you, because he's reading your thoughts. And this man is
 a great magician. He can read everything that's in you. He knows right down into your unconscious,
 and you know all the dreadful things you've thought, and all the awful desires you have,
 and you are rather embarrassed that this man looks right through you and sees them all.
 That's not what he's looking at. He's giving you a funny look for quite another reason
 altogether, because he sees in you the Brahman, the Godhead, just claiming it's poor little
 me. And he's going to eventually, by all sorts of subtle techniques that are called in Sanskrit
 upaya, that in politics means chicanery, and in spiritual education means skillful pedagogy,
 he is going to try and kid you back into realizing who you really are. That's why he gives you
 a funny look, and why he seems to see right through you, as if to say, "Shiva, oh boy,
 don't kid me. I know who you are, but you're coming on beautifully in this act, that you're
 somebody else altogether. And I congratulate you, you're doing a wonderful job playing
 this part, which you call the person, my person, you know a person is a fake, the word means
 a mask. So if you read books on how to be a real person, you're reading books on how
 to be a genuine fake. The word persona, as you know, means a mask, worn in Greco-Roman
 drama. So if you come on to the guru and say, "Well, he asked you who you are, Sri Ramana
 Maharshi, when anybody came to him and they said to him, as people do, "Who was I in my
 last incarnation, or will I be reincarnated again?" He always replied, "Who's asking the
 question?" And everybody was irritated because he wouldn't give them answers about what they
 were in their former lives. He just said, "Who are you?" And he looked at you, have
 you looked at photographs of this man? I keep a photograph of him, you know, close by, because
 of the humor in his eyes. They're looking at you with a dancing twinkle, saying, "Come
 off it."
 Now then, in these Asiatic traditions, it is well recognized that people who get the
 knowledge that you're it may very well run amok. And therefore, they always couple any
 method of gaining this, whether it is yoga, whether it is smoking something, or drinking
 something, or whatever is the method, they always couple it with a discipline. Now I
 know the word discipline isn't very popular these days, and I would like to have a new
 word for it, because most people who teach disciplines don't teach them very well. They
 teach it with a kind of violence, as if a discipline was something that is going to
 be extremely unpleasant, and that you're going to have to put up with. But that's not the
 real secret of discipline. I would prefer to use the word skill. Discipline is a way
 of expression. Say you want to express your feelings in stone. Now stone doesn't give
 way very easily. It's tough stuff. And so you have to learn the skill or the discipline
 of the sculptor in order to express yourself in stone. And so in every other way, whatever
 you do, you require a skill. And it's enormously important, especially for American people,
 to understand that there is absolutely no possibility of having any pleasure in life
 at all without skill. Money doesn't buy pleasure. Ever. Look, if you want to get stone drunk
 and go out and get a bottle of bourbon and down it, you can't do that except for people
 who have practiced the distiller's art. You can't even make love without art. Where I
 live in Sausalito, we have a harbor full of ever so many pleasure craft. Motor cruises,
 sailing boats, all kinds of things. And they never leave the dock. All that happens with
 them is their owners have cocktail parties there on Saturdays and Sundays because they
 discovered having bought these things that the discipline of sailing is difficult to
 learn and takes a lot of time. And they didn't have time for it, so they just bought the
 thing as a status symbol. So in other words, you can't have pleasure in life without skill.
 But it isn't an unpleasant task to learn a skill if the teacher in the first place gets
 you fascinated with it. There is immense pleasure in learning how to do anything skillfully.
 To make carpentry things, to cook, to write, to calculate, anything you want can be immensely
 pleasurable to learn the discipline. And it is completely indispensable. Because look,
 you may be a very inspired musician. I'm not a musical technologist, you see, and I regret
 it, but I'm a word technologist. But I can hear in my head all kinds of symphonies and
 all kinds of marvelous compositions, but I don't have the technique to write them down
 on paper and share them with somebody else. Too bad. Maybe next time around. But you see,
 so far as words are concerned, I can express ideas because I have studied language. And
 I work very hard. Not that I didn't like it, I intensely enjoy the work of writing a book,
 although it is difficult. But it's fascinating to say what can never possibly be said. So
 you see what's happening. What you have to do, you have inspiration, but then you have
 to have technique to incarnate, to express your inspiration. That is to say, to bring
 heaven down to earth. And to express heaven in terms of earth. Of course, they are really
 one behind the scenes. But there's no way of pointing it out unless you do something
 skillful. You see, we are all at the moment absolutely in the midst of the beatific vision.
 We are all one with the divine, or some, I don't like that sort of wishy-washy language.
 But we are all there. But we are so much there that we are like fish in water. They don't
 know they're in water. Like the birds don't know they're in the air because it's all around
 them. And in the same way we don't know what the color of our eyes is. I don't mean whether
 you've got blue or brown eyes, but the color of the lens of your eye. You call that transparent.
 No color. See, because you can't see it. But it's basic to being able to see anything.
 So in order to find out where you are, there has to be some way of drawing attention to
 it. And that involves skill. Upaya in Sanskrit. Skillful means. So, it's all very well. Anybody
 can have ecstasy. Anybody, as a matter of fact, can become aware that he is one with
 the eternal ground of the universe. But since that's what you are anyway, I'm going to ask,
 so what? When a hero goes on an adventure, and he leaves his people, and he's going to
 a strange land, he can go away and just hide himself around the corner in an obscure house,
 and then appear a year later and say, "I've been on a heroic journey," and tell all sorts
 of tales. And they say, "Prove it." Because they expect him to bring back something. Something
 which nobody has seen before. Then they believe, "You've been on the journey." So in the same
 way exactly, anybody who goes on a spiritual journey must bring something back. Because
 if you just say, "Oh man, it was a gas," anyone can say that.
 Now this is why in the doctrines of Buddhism, there is a differentiation between two kinds
 of enlightened beings. They are both forms of Buddha, which is to say the word Buddha
 means somebody who has awakened, who has discovered the secret behind all this. In other words,
 all this thing we call life with its frantic concerns is a big act, which you, in your
 unconscious depth, are deliberately setting up. So you can do one of two things when you
 discover this. You can become what's called a pratyekabuddha, that means a private Buddha,
 who doesn't tell anything. Or you can become a bodhisattva. A pratyekabuddha goes off into
 his ecstasy and never is seen again. A bodhisattva is one who comes back and appears in the everyday
 world and plays the game of the everyday world by the rules of the everyday world. But he
 brings with him upaya. He brings with him some way of showing that he's been on the
 journey, that he's come back, and he's going to let you in on the secret too. If you, if,
 if, if, you'll play it cool and also come back to join in the everyday life of everyday
 people. Because this is the rule. If the world is dramatic, if the world, as the Hindus say,
 is a big act put on by the divine self, one of the rules of coming on stage is that you
 don't come on as yourself. You come on as the part that you're going to play. It's very
 bad form if an actor always acts the same way. That's what's called a star, as distinct
 from an actor. A real actor can become anything. And so, but in private life, well, he's just
 Mr. Jones. And, but he doesn't come on the stage that way. So in the same way, if you
 know that behind the scenes, in the depth, fundamentally, you are it, you don't come
 on that way. It always comes on as something else. That's the rule of the stage. Because
 without that, there wouldn't be a play. It would only be reality. No illusion. And the
 whole point of life is illusion. From the word Latin, ludere, to play. Showbiz. The
 show must go on, so don't give it away. But truth has a way of leaking. It gets out. But
 then the important thing is, you see, when the truth gets out, those who catch hold of
 it must find a way of staying in contact with what society calls reality. That is to say,
 if you have a radio, you don't only need an antenna, you also need a ground. So what happens
 in the world of mysticism, of psychedelic visions, and so on, needs to be grounded.
 So then there are always two directions in which such a discipline works. One, preparatory.
 In other words, those who taught disciplines for awakening in the Orient were always careful
 to screen, first of all to screen those who applied, and then after screening them, to
 make them sensible, so that they knew how to handle the game of ordinary human existence
 and play it by the ordinary human rules. In other words, that they had strength of character,
 and were not the sort of people who would be wiped out because they had no strength
 of character, by an overwhelming experience. Then they let them in. But there are certain
 disciplines such as Zen, where you get into the essential secret very early on in the
 discipline. And after that, they are concerned with much more training in showing you how
 to use it, how to use the power to use the vision which you have acquired. And so it
 is with the current, what we will call LSD scene, that is raging through the United States.
 It unfortunately lacks discipline. And I'm not trying to say this in a kind of severe,
 authoritarian, paternalistic way, but only that it would be so much more fun if it had
 it. In other words, when people try to express what they have seen in this kind of changed
 state of consciousness, they show five movies going on at once, projected upon torn bedsheets,
 with stroboscopic lights going as fast as possible at the same time, and eleven jazz
 bands playing. And they're going to blow their minds, baby. And everybody else who hasn't
 seen this thing, look around and say, "Well, it's a mess. I don't like the looks of it."
 Let's suppose that while you were very, very high on LSD, you looked into a filthy ashtray,
 and you saw the beatific vision. Which is, of course, the case, because wherever you
 look, if your eyes are open, you will see the face of the divine. Then you come out
 of your ecstasy with the dirty ashtray and say to everybody, "Here it is."
 No. There is a possibility, if you are an extraordinarily skillful painter, or even
 photographer, of presenting the dirty ashtray so that everybody else will see almost what
 you saw in it. But you will have to have a technique which will translate every grain
 of ash into a jewel, because that's what you actually saw. But that requires mastery
 of an art. And I'm afraid people think that all it's necessary to do is just throw out
 any old thing, because under that transformed state of consciousness, any old thing is the
 way it works. But nobody else can see it if they haven't shared that point of view.
 So then, this becomes for us in the United States an extremely important social problem.
 The cat is out of the bag. We are living in a scientific world where secrets cannot be
 kept. And anyone, any time, can pick up something which will short-circuit all the ancient religious
 techniques, yoga practice, meditation, etc. etc. This is all very embarrassing, but it
 will happen, not for everybody, but for a lot of people. And they will see what all
 those sages and buddhas and yogis and prophets saw in ancient times, and it will be very
 clear. So what? So, you see, you can say, "Look at all these people who haven't seen it. This
 is a temptation. Look at them all going about their business, earning money and grinding
 it out at the bank or the insurance office or whatever it is every day, and how serious
 they look all about it and they don't really know it's a game." And you can cultivate a
 certain contempt for people like that. But it's very, very bad to do that. Because, of
 course, don't forget they have a certain contempt for you. You see, always the nice people in
 town who live in the best residences, they know that they're nice, because there are
 some people on the other side of the tracks who are not nice. And so at their cocktail
 parties they have a lot to say about the people who are not nice, because that boosts their
 collective ego. There would be no other way of doing it. You don't know that you're a
 law-abiding citizen unless there are some people who aren't. And if it's important to
 you to congratulate yourself on being law-abiding, you therefore have to have some criminal classes,
 outside the pale, of course, of your immediate associates. On the other hand, the people
 who are not nice, they have their parties, and they boost their collective ego by saying
 that they're the people who are really in. Whereas these poor squares who deliver the
 mail faithfully, and who carry on what you call responsible jobs, they're just dupes.
 Or when they earn their money, all they do is they buy toy rocket ships with it, and
 go roaring around and so on, and they think that's pleasure. So the people who are not
 nice boost their collective ego in that way. Neither of them realizing that they need the
 other just as much as a flower needs a bee, and a bee needs a flower. So when you see
 the people who you think are not in on the secret, if you really understand, you have
 to revise your opinion completely, and say that the squares are the people who are really
 far out. Because they don't even know where they started. See, an enlightened Hindu or
 Buddhist looks at the ignorant people of this world, and says, "My respects." Because here
 I see the divine essence, having altogether forgotten what it is, and playing the most
 far out game of being completely lost. "Congratulations, how far out can you get?" So if you understand
 that, you don't start a war with people you might say are square. Don't challenge them,
 don't bug them, don't frighten them. The reason is not because they are immature, because
 they are babies, and you mustn't scare babies. It's nothing to do with that. You mustn't
 frighten them because they are doing a very far out act. They are walking on a tightrope
 miles up, and they've got to do that balancing act, and if you shout, they may lose their
 nerve. See, that's what we call the responsible people of the world are doing. It is an act,
 it's a game, just like the tightrope walker. But it's a risky one, and you can get ulcers
 from it, and all sorts of troubles. But you must respect it, and say, "Congratulations
 on being so far out."
 [Music]


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