I want to draw your attention to the fact that very vivid Tibetan painting has a curious way
 of creating a state of mind, if you really start looking at it, that I can only call
 psychedelic. It's, I don't know anything else quite like it. As you get into the detail
 of it, it's like this. Let's suppose that you look at some object and instead of the
 whole thing becoming fuzzy and fading out, it always gets more detailed, more clear,
 more alive. And you suddenly find out that what you thought was just a bunch of blur
 is 16,000 maggots with bright eyes on them and that every eye was a deep jewel. And you
 go down into these deep jewel-like eyes and you find inside them that there are cross-legged
 Buddhas with Orioles around them and necklaces of human heads. And then you start looking
 at those and by Jove, in every eye on one of those human heads, you look inside it and
 there's another Buddha sitting there, see? And you go on like that forever and ever and
 ever in myriad detail, see? But now that is a state of consciousness which these artists
 are trying to represent. It is the idea of the dharmadhatu, which I explained in last
 seminar. That is to say, the net of jewels where every jewel reflects all the other jewels
 and therefore naturally contains the reflection of all the other jewels in each other jewel
 that it reflects, you see? The infinite interrelatedness, or they call it mutual penetration, of everything
 in the universe. And so this is an art form designed to get you into the mood to understand
 that by looking at it. It is absolute, total fascination. But what I was trying to describe
 to you about the nature of these art forms, where you look at the details and then you
 suddenly discover that behind the details there are millions more details. And you never
 fuzz out. You find, in other words, that the possibility to see down into something goes
 on forever and ever. Now then, that is the visual equivalent of hearing when you work
 with mantras, with these formal chants. To get to hear sound in such a way that, just
 as you could say that a visual field is rich in detail, like these paintings are, like
 a piece of Hindu beautiful silk weaving, which is rich with gold and flowers, and you see
 detail in that. Now, you can hear sound in the same way, and that's what Hindu music
 is playing with. And so when you get down into that, you see, you are what I would call
 truly listening in to the universe. Because eventually, if you listen to sound that way,
 or you look at form that way, you discover its secrets. This is just another way of investigation
 of life, comparable to our scientific investigation, with microscopes and chemical analysis, and
 there's that and the other. But it's a different road. Scientific investigation does what we
 call looking out into matter, into the physical world. This is going in the opposite direction,
 but it's all the same thing. It's the same continuum. But it's going into the nature
 of your feeling of it. That is to say, into the center of awareness, into the self. And
 what these, all these drawings are, from various points of view, is they're drawings of your
 own interior world, looked at in this way, under the influence of the traditions of a,
 indeed a particular culture, which is not our culture, and which therefore strikes us
 as a little strange. But whenever you look at a work of art, and you feel, "Gee, isn't
 that weird? It's not the way people look." You know, for people's first impression of
 Chinese art, say, they perhaps don't meet Tibetans so easily, is that it's, well, everything's
 got curls on it. It wiggles. It's very strange. And that, the reason for that, is that they
 are showing you a vision of the universe which you haven't looked at. And so it looks odd
 to you. And what you mean by odd, is, well, it curls where it shouldn't. Or, I don't see
 things that way. I don't see them with that extra flip on them. No, indeed you don't.
 Because the way you see things is what you call ordinary, and what you're used to. And
 as you know, when we see things, we ignore. We screen out certain aspects of things which
 we don't notice. And therefore, by studying other people's art forms, we are taught to
 see things that we wouldn't ordinarily notice. So that when you become used to Chinese or
 Tibetan painting, you say, why, of course, that's the way the world is, also. So the
 feeling of the strange, of the, we say, we use the word exotic. And that means looking,
 a thing looks exotic when you look at it from somebody else's point of view. And eventually
 you get used to it. And so if you move into a state of consciousness, such as I've been
 trying to describe, that is not the usual kind of state of consciousness, you say, it's
 kind of weird, isn't it? And if you aren't prepared for that, you might be afraid of
 it. And say, am I going mad? Am I going out of my mind? Yes, you are. You're going out
 of your set, ordinary set of mind, but you're going into just another aspect of mind. And
 at first, it always feels weird. That's why people have difficulty in meditation. When