And so all these powers are projected upon the Zen Master. He is a Buddha. He is a master
 of life. And if he is, the reason why he is, is that he has discovered the unreality of
 the whole problem. There is not life on the one hand and you on the other. It's all the
 same. But you see, you can't tell people that, and just by telling, get them to see it. Just
 in exactly this way, people who know that the earth is flat can't be reasoned with.
 People who believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, absolutely impossible to reason
 with them at all, because they know it is so. So in the same way, we tend to know that
 we are all separate, poor little me, and that we are in need of salvation or something.
 And we know this is so, and so somebody says, "Well, you are not really that. You know that
 that feeling of separateness is an illusion." Well, that's all very nice in theory, but
 I don't feel it. So what will you do? What will you do with a person who is convinced
 that the earth is flat? No way of reasoning with him. If it's for some reason important
 that he discovered that the earth is round, you've got to play a game with him. You've
 got to play a trick on him. You tell him, "Great, the earth is flat. Let's go and look
 over the edge." Wouldn't that be fun? Of course, if we're going to look over the edge of the
 earth, we must be very, very careful that we don't go round in circles or we'll never
 get to the edge. So we've got to go along consistently, along a certain line of latitude
 westwards. And then we're going to come to the edge of the earth, just so long as we're
 consistent. In other words, in order to convince a flat earthist that the world is round, you've
 got to make him act consistently on his own proposition, and go consistently westwards
 to find the edge of the world. Now, at last, when he, by going consistently westwards,
 he comes back to the place where he started, he's been convinced that the earth is at least
 cylindrical. And he may believe you, then take it on faith that if he goes along a line
 of longitude, the same thing will happen. But you see, what you did was to make him
 persist in his folly. Now, that's the whole method of Zen, to make people become perfect
 egotists, and so explode the illusion of the separate ego. So what happens? In effect,
 then, in the discipline of Zen, when you finally convince the master that you're stupid enough
 to be accepted as a student, because you've persisted and because you've defined yourself
 as someone having a problem, he has warned you well in advance that he has nothing to
 teach. But he says, "Now I will ask you a question." There are many ways of asking this
 question, but they all boil down to one common theme, and that is, "Who are you?" You say
 you have a problem. You say you would like to get out of the sufferings of life. You
 say you'd like to get one up on the universe. I want to know who's asking this question.
 Show me you. And only they put it in such ways as, "Before your father and mother conceived
 you, what was your original nature?" Questions like that. And they'll say, "Now, look, I
 don't want to be shown. I don't want a lot of ideas about who you are. I don't want to
 know who you are in terms of a social role, you know, that you have such degrees or you
 have such professional qualifications and such a name and such a family. All that's
 the past. I want to see you genuinely now." It's like saying to a person, "Now, don't
 be self-conscious, see? I want you right this minute to be completely sincere. Come on now."
 When nothing is better calculated to make a person incapable of sincerity. It's as when
 relatives come and aunts and uncles and there's a little child and they want to review this
 child and see it and the parents say to the child, "Darling, come on now and play for
 us." See? And the poor child is completely nonplussed. Doesn't know what to do. Because
 you cannot play on demand.
 Now what is the Zen teacher doing in saying to a person, "You must answer this question
 by coming before me," in in fact a rather formal situation. The kind of context in which
 a Zen master interviews his students is very formal. And there he sits, a sort of enthroned
 tiger. He's definitely in this culture a sensei, a authority figure. And so he's the last kind
 of person you can be spontaneous with. Because you feel that he knows you through and through.
 And that, do you know, ever read that story of von Kleist about a man who has a fight
 with a bear? The bear is a mind reader and always knows what move he's going to make.
 So that the man can never conquer the bear unless he makes a move which he doesn't think
 about first. How will you do that? And they get the same feeling with relationship to
 a Zen master. You feel that he is absolutely aware of everything phony about you. That
 he reads you like a book. But that you can't find a way of being not phony. Think about
 this a little. You see, it's, we can arrange a group session, and this is a little game
 that's being played by lots of people. It's a kind of psychotherapy. We can arrange a
 group session in which the gimmick is this, that when anybody says anything or does anything,
 the group or some section of the group challenges its sincerity. And says, "Why are you coming
 on so strong? Are you trying to dominate us?" And you see, anything that you do can be interpreted
 in that way. Because the moment a group of people becomes, starts making comments on
 its own behavior, it is setting up a situation within the group which is analogous, say,
 in a TV studio, to turning the camera on the monitor. So when we start thinking about thinking,
 being aware of being aware, this is what is called in Japanese the observing self. I watch
 myself all the time, see? You're in a hopeless mess. But this is the price that human beings
 pay for having become self-conscious. Anxiety and guilt. Anxiety because, "Am I sure that
 I thought this out sufficiently carefully? When I left the house, did I turn off the
 gas stove? And incidentally, I remember turning it off, but can I trust my memory? I've learned
 to think about memory now, and I wonder if I can trust it. Maybe I'd better go back and
 look. I went back and I looked. But did I really see? I'm thinking about my sight, and
 whether this is quite authentic. Did I look properly? Because you know how the unconscious
 can alter your senses. And so I'd better go and look again. See, soon now I've got into
 a sort of vicious circle where I'll never get away from the house. And this, all this
 sort of getting mixed up, is the penalty we pay for the advantageous gift of being able
 to know that we know. There was a young man who said, "Though it seems that I know that
 I know, what I would like to see is the eye that knows me when I know that I know that
 I know." And so this is the Zen trick. It's to put you into this situation in a very crucial
 way. To think about, thinking about, thinking about, thinking about. Or just the same thing,
 to make a very strong effort not to think. That's Zazen. Sit, let your senses operate,
 and be responsive to whatever there may be around, but don't think about it. But now
 this is already thinking. I'm thinking about not thinking. How will I stop thinking about
 not thinking? So there you are. See, you're all caught up. It's like somebody came to
 you and they put tar in one hand, molasses, feathers in the other, slapped the two hands
 together, rubbed them around, said, "Now pick off the feathers." So you see what happens.
 The teacher is well aware that he's played this trick on you. And he's going to see what
 will happen if you act, and he's going to help you to act, consistently on this foolishness.
 Now you see what he's done is he simply made a special case of what society does to us
 all anyhow. And this is true of most cultures. The high cultures of the world, whether they're
 of the East or whether they're of the West, play a game on every new member. They don't
 know they're playing this game, because their forefathers played it on them. And they're
 still its hopeless victims. The game is called the double bind. And the formula under which,
 or specifies, everybody comes into this world is as follows. You are required to do something
 which will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily. You must love me. You must go
 to sleep. You must be natural. You must be free. Listen to that. You must be free. Now
 what happens, you see, society, the community into which every child enters, defines the
 child. We know who we are as other people reactors. So the other people say to us, "You're
 an independent agent. You're responsible. You are a freely acting individual. But this
 is a commandment. And we obey it because we can't help it." The child has no way of criticizing
 this, or of seeing there's something phony about it. So the child has to be free because
 he is commanded to be so by the community. Now then, the community sets itself a problem.
 Having defined the child as an independent agent, and having got the child to believe
 that he's an independent agent because he isn't, in other words, he wouldn't believe
 this if he were independent, it then has trouble getting him to behave as the community wants
 him to behave. So they feel then there's something ornery about all children. They're born in
 original sin. They're refractious and so on. Of course they are, because they've been defined
 in a self-contradictory way. So when the community says to a person, "You must be free," or when
 we are in a family relationship in which the members of the family are saying to each other,
 "You must love me. It's your duty to love me," what a bunch of rot. Supposing one day
 you get up and you say to your wife, "Darling, do you really love me?" And she replies, "Well,
 I'm trying my very best to do so." Is that the answer you wanted? No. You wanted her
 to say, "Darling, I can't help loving you. I love you so much I could eat you." You don't
 want her to try to love you. And yet that is what you put on people in almost any marriage
 ceremony, that you shall love this person. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God. Thou shalt
 love thy neighbor as thyself." This is a double bind. And anybody who lives under the dominance
 of a double bind lives in a state of chronic frustration, because he is devoting his whole
 life to solving a meaningless, nonsensical problem. Let's take the double bind that is
 the deepest of all. You must go on living. Now, living is a spontaneous process. And
 to say to it, "You must happen," is exactly the same thing as saying to any kind of creative
 artist, "You must come through with the goods." Tonight you must give the superb performance,
 and above all, you must be unselfconscious. Well, this is being done to us all the time.
 And the object of the Zen discipline is that instead of doing this to people unconsciously,
 as parents do it and as teachers do it to children, and as the children's peers do it
 to their own peer members, in Zen the double bind is put on you deliberately, knowing how
 stupid it is. The teacher is well aware of everything he's doing and what tricks he's
 playing on you, because he has behind it all the compassionate intent of getting you into
 such a fierce double bind that you will see how stupid it is. So then, what happens is
 this. He gives you the double bind. Be genuine. "I want to see you do something that is the
 real you." I had a friend who was studying Zen, and he was given some koan like this
 to work on. And when he was one day going for his interview, he walked through the garden
 that connected the sodo, or the monk's study quarters, with the master's place, and there
 was a big bullfrog. Bullfrogs in this country are rather tame. People don't eat them. And
 so he swept up the bullfrog and dropped it into the sleeve of his kimono. And when he
 got in front of the teacher to answer the koan, that is to say, to do spontaneously
 produce his genuine self, he produced the bullfrog. And the teacher looked at it and
 shook his head and said, "Mm-mm, too intellectual." Or as we might say, "Too contrived, too studied."
 That's not yet you. How do you see the bind in this? It's like being told that everything
 is all right at this moment so long as you don't think of a green elephant. So try not
 to think of a green elephant. Now as he works at this, as he tries to produce the genuine
 you, the teacher really strings him out on this and makes him work and work and work
 over a period of many months, until he comes to the point of seeing this. "There is nothing
 you can do to be genuine. The more you do, the phonier you are. But at the opposite extreme,
 there is nothing you can not do." That is to say, you cannot give up trying to be genuine.
 You can't relax, you know, and be completely passive and say, "Well, let's forget about
 it. Let's think about practical matters and forget all these spiritual concerns." The
 moment you do that, your abandonment of trying is itself an insidious form of trying. For
 example, there's a very interesting Hindu teacher by the name of Krishnamurti that many
 of you may know about, and he tells people, you know, that all their religious inquiry,
 their yoga practices, their reading religious books and so on, is nothing but a form of
 perpetuating one's egocentricity, but on a very refined and highbrow level. So he gets
 a kind of disciple who studiously avoids reading any kind of philosophical or edifying book.
 They're reduced to reading mystery stories. And they become devoted non-disciples. See,
 what a clever bind that is. It's the same as the Zen technique. You can't, in other
 words, let go of your... We've seen, you see, my point was at the beginning, we saw that
 the way of Buddhism is to let go of yourself, to see that you live in a universe in which
 nothing can be grasped. Therefore, stop grasping. So here's the problem. I come and say to the
 teacher, "Teach me not to grasp." He'll say, "Why do you want to know?" And he shows you
 that the reason why you want to stop grasping is that it's a new form of grasping. You feel
 that you will beat the game by being unattached. See, it's horrible to grieve when somebody
 you love dies. So maybe by being unattached to that person I can avoid grief. Pretty cold,
 isn't it? Maybe, you see, by not having an ego. When life comes and bangs on me, if there's
 nobody there, it'll be all right. So that's why I want non-ego state. That's phony. All
 this is a new way of safeguarding and protecting the ego. So this is the way in which Buddhism
 is a dialogue. So you see, if you go back to fundamental, primitive Buddhism, people
 say to the Buddha, "I want to escape from suffering." It's a perfectly honest statement.
 "Realize that suffering is caused by desire. Try not to desire." So the student goes away
 and tries to eliminate desires by controlling his mind and practicing yoga. Comes back to
 the teacher and says, "It's pretty difficult, but I have managed at least to get rid of
 some desires." Teacher says to him, "But you're still desiring to get rid of desire. What
 about that one?" And then the student sees that if he strives to stop desiring to get
 rid of desire, but then he's got to stop desiring to get rid of not desiring to desire. And
 suddenly he finds himself once more with molasses in one hand and feathers in the other, absolutely
 tied up in a vicious circle. So he realizes, "There is nothing I can do about it, and there's
 nothing I can not do about it." And this predicament in Zen is called a mosquito trying to bite
 an iron bull. A position of such psychic extremity that nothing can be done about it. Now the
 point here is, what does this situation mean? When you find yourself in that kind of a trap,
 what's the meaning of the trap? Why that's very simple. If there's nothing you can do
 and also nothing you can not do about a given situation, it means that you are phony. That
 in other words what we call a separate ego isn't there. Of course it can't do anything
 because it is not an agent. And by virtue of the fact that it can't do anything equally,
 it can't not do anything. It's completely phony. So what has happened is to expose the
 fiction of there being a separate ego, either to force its actions upon the world or to
 have the actions of the world forced upon it as a puppet. This thing just doesn't exist,
 except as a figment of the imagination, or except as a game rule. Let's pretend everybody
 is responsible, is independent, is separate. Sure, that's a great game, but it's a game.
 And so the whole object of this Zen dialogue between the teacher and the student is to
 carry that game of being the separate ego to its logical conclusion, to its reductio
 ad absurdum, so that as Blake said, "The fool who persists in his folly will become
 wise."
 [BLANK_AUDIO]


{END}
Wait Time : 0.00 sec
Model Load: 0.81 sec
Decoding  : 1.52 sec
Transcribe: 2290.28 sec
Total Time: 2292.61 sec