I suppose most of you have heard of Zen, but before going on to explain any details about
 it, I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a Zen Buddhist. I am not advocating
 Zen Buddhism. I am not trying to convert anyone to it. I have nothing to sell. I am an entertainer.
 That is to say, in the same sense that when you go to a concert and you listen to someone
 play Mozart, he has nothing to sell except the sound of the music. He doesn't want to
 convert you to anything. He doesn't want you to join an organization in favor of Mozart's
 music as opposed to, say, Beethoven's. And I approach you in the same spirit as a musician
 with his piano or a violinist with his violin. I just want you to enjoy a point of view which
 I enjoy.
 Now then, when that's been said, and I hope it's put your minds at rest, let me give you,
 first of all, some simple historical information. Zen is a form of Buddhism. It originated in
 China about 500 A.D., and about 1200 A.D. it migrated to Japan, where it exists today.
 And it is a form, it's a way of life that has had an immense influence on the arts and
 on the culture, the poetry, and architecture of the Far East. It has lately become of enormous
 interest to many people in other parts of the world.
 Now normally when one talks about Buddhism, and Zen is a form of Buddhism, it is supposed
 that you're talking about a religion. And people are apt to classify themselves as Buddhists,
 as they might say, "I am a Catholic," or a Methodist, or a Baptist, or an Episcopalian,
 or a Jew. But that is rather misleading. Buddhism is not a religion in that sense. If we want
 to find an equivalent to Buddhism in our society today in the West, probably the nearest thing
 to it is psychotherapy. When a person goes to a psychiatrist or a psychoanalyst to work
 out a serious personal problem—not because he's just nutty, I mean, not necessarily
 because he has hallucination or excessive singing in the ears with no clear physical
 origin—but when a person feels that his whole life is somehow disoriented and wrong,
 and he doesn't go to the preacher because the preacher only moralizes to him and says,
 "My man, you should have more faith in God," or something. So he goes instead to a doctor
 because in our day a man with a tag of science on him has more prestige than a man who has
 the tag of religion. And so when a psychiatrist goes to work on you, his objective is more
 or less to change your state of consciousness. That is to say, if your state of consciousness,
 your state of mind, is one of being day after day constantly depressed, the objective of
 going to a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist is to have your state of consciousness changed
 to one of happiness.
 Now in a somewhat similar way, the objective of Buddhism in all its forms is to bring about
 a fundamental change in a human being's everyday state of consciousness. If I make it yet more
 specific, it's to bring about a change in your sense of personal identity, that is to
 say, in your sensation of who and what you are. And in this way, Buddhism, which I suppose
 you know, is a method of changing consciousness, discovered or invented by a man called Gautama,
 who lived in India shortly after 600 B.C., who was given the title "Buddha" because
 the word means "the awakened one," "the man who woke up." And therefore, that very title
 suggests that ordinary people are asleep.
 I remember a very wise man who used to give lectures like this, and when he came in he
 used to be silent and he would look at the audience, and he would gaze at everybody in
 the audience particularly, for a long time, and everybody would begin feeling vaguely
 embarrassed. And when he had gazed at them for a long time, he'd say, "Wake up! You're
 all asleep, and if you don't wake up I won't give any lecture."
 Now in what sense are we asleep? The Buddhists would say that almost all human beings have
 a phony sense of identity, a delusion, a hallucination as to who they are. I'm terribly interested
 in this problem of identity, and I try and find out what people mean when they say the
 word "I." I think this is one of the most fascinating questions. Who do you think you
 are? Now, what seems to develop is this. Most people think that "I" is a center of sensitivity
 somewhere inside their skin. And the majority of people feel that it's in their heads. Civilizations
 in different periods of history have differed about this. Some people feel that they exist
 in the solar plexus. Other people feel that they exist about here. But in American culture
 today, or in the Western culture in general, most people feel that they exist in here.
 And there is, as it were, a little man sitting inside the center of the skull, and he has
 a television screen in front of him which gives him all messages from the eyeballs.
 He has earphones on, and that gives him all messages from the ears. And he has in front
 of him a control panel with various dials and buttons and things which enable him to
 influence the arms and legs and to get all sorts of information from the nerve ends.
 And that's you. So we say in popular speech, "I have a body." Not, "I am a body," but
 "I have one," because I am the owner of the body in the same way as I own an automobile.
 And I can take the automobile to the mechanic and occasionally in the same way I have to
 take my body to the mechanic, the surgeon, the dentist, the doctor, and have it repaired.
 But it belongs to me. It goes along with me. I'm in it. A child, for example, can ask
 mother, "Mom, who would I have been if my father had been someone else?" That seems
 a perfectly simple and logical question for a child to ask.
 Because of the presumption that your parents gave you your body and you were popped into
 it, maybe at the moment of conception or maybe at the moment of birth, from a repository
 of souls in heaven, and your parents simply provided the physical vehicle. So that age-long
 idea that is indigenous, especially to the Western world, is that I am something inside
 a body, and I am not quite sure whether I am or am not my body. There's some doubt
 about it. I say, I think, I walk, I talk, but I don't say I beat my heart. I don't
 say I shape my bones. I don't say I grow my hair. I feel that my heart beating, my
 hair growing, my bone shaping is something that happens to me. And I don't know how
 it's done. But other things I do.
 And next, I feel quite surely that everything outside my body is quite definitely not me.
 There are two kinds of things outside my body. Number one is other people. And they are the
 same sort of thing as I am. But also they are all little men locked up inside their
 skins. And they're intelligent, they have feelings and values, and are capable of love
 and virtue. But number two is the world that's non-human, that we call nature. And that's
 stupid. It has no mind. It has emotions, maybe, in animals. But on the whole it's a pretty
 grim business. Dog eat dog. And when it gets to the geological level, it's as dumb as
 dumb can be. It's a mechanism. And there's an awful lot of it. And that's what we
 live in the middle of. And the purpose of being human is, we feel, to subjugate nature,
 to make it obey our will. And we arrived here, we don't feel that we belong in this world.
 It's foreign to us. In the words of the poet Haussmann, "I, a stranger and afraid, in
 a world I never made." And so all around us today, we see the signs of man's battle
 with nature. I'm living at the moment in a marvelous house in the Hollywood Hills.
 And we are overlooking a lake. And on the other side of the lake, the whole hill has
 suddenly been interrupted with a ghastly gash, where they have made level lots for building
 tract homes of the kind you would build on a flat plain. This is called the conquest
 of nature. These houses will eventually fall down the hill, because they are causing soil
 erosion and they are being maximally stupid. The proper way to build a house on a hillside
 is to do it in such a way as to effect the minimum interference with the nature of the
 hill. After all, the whole point of living in the hills is to live in the hills. There's
 no point in converting the hills into something flat and then going and living there. You
 can do that already on the ground. So people, the more people live in the hills, the more
 they spoil the hills, and they're just the same as people living on the flat ground.
 I mean, how stupid can you get?
 Well, anyway, this is one of the symptoms of our phony sense of identity, of our phony
 feeling that we are something lonely, locked up in a bag of skin, confronted with a world,
 an external, alien, foreign world that is not me. Now, according to certain of these
 great ancient philosophies, like Buddhism, this sensation of being a separate, lonely
 individual is a hallucination. It's a hallucination brought about by various causes, the way we
 are brought up being the chief of them, of course. I remember as a child, and you probably
 have very similar memories to mine, that all our parents were desperately interested in
 identifying us. Don't you remember that sometimes you went out and played with other
 children, and there was someone in the group of other children you admired and looked up
 to, and you came home imitating the mannerisms of that other child? And your mother said
 to you, "Johnny, Johnny, that's not you, that's Peter." And you felt a little bit
 ashamed, because somehow you had let her down. She wanted you to be you, her child, and not
 Mrs. Jones's child, Peter. And so in many ways we are all taught this. For example,
 the main thing that we are all taught in childhood is that you must do that which will only be
 appreciated if you do it voluntarily. Now, darling, a dutiful child must love its mother.
 But now I don't want you to do it because I say so, but because you really want to.
 Or, you must be free. See, this comes into politics. Everybody must vote. You see, imagine
 you are members of a democracy, and you must be members of a democracy. See, you are ordered
 to. Crazy. Also, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." Is that a commandment or a joke?
 You know, if you suggest that the Lord is joking, most people in our culture are offended,
 because they have a very moronic conception of God, as a person totally devoid of humour.
 But the Lord is highly capable of joking, because joking is one of the most constructive
 things you can do. So when you are told who you are, and that you must be free, furthermore
 that you must survive, you must go on living, and that becomes a kind of compulsion, you
 get mixed up. It's very simple. Of course you get mixed up. If you think you must do
 something, which will only be the thing required of you if you do it freely.
 These are the sort of influences, then, that cause human beings all over the world to feel
 isolated, to feel that they are centres of awareness locked up in bags of skin. Now,
 this sensation of our identity can be shown and demonstrated to be false by some of the
 disciplines of our own science. When we describe a human being, or any other living organism,
 from a scientific point of view, all that means is that we are describing it carefully.
 We are going to describe very carefully what a human being is and what a human being does.
 All right. And we find that as we go on with that description, we can't describe the
 human being without describing the environment. We can't say what a human being is doing
 without also saying what the world around him is doing. Just imagine for a moment that
 you couldn't see anything up here except me. You couldn't see the curtains behind
 me, you couldn't see the stage, you couldn't see the microphone, you could only see me.
 That was all you could see. What would you be looking at? You wouldn't see me at all,
 because you wouldn't see my edges. And my edges are rather important for seeing me.
 My edges would be identical with the edge of your eyesight, with that vague oval curve
 which is the field of vision. And what you would be looking at would be my necktie, my
 nose, my eyes, and so on, but you wouldn't see my edges. So you'd be confronted with
 a very strange monster, and you wouldn't know it was a human being, because to see
 me you need to see my background. And therein lies a clue of which we are mostly ignorant.
 In Buddhist theory, the cause of our phony sense of identity is called avidya, and that
 means ignorance, although it's better to pronounce it ignorance. Having a deluded sense
 of identity is the result of ignoring certain things. So when you look at me, and I manage
 by behaving up here in a kind of a more or less interesting way, I cause you to ignore
 my background, because I concentrate attention on me. Just like a conjurer, a stage magician,
 in order to perform his tricks misdirects your attention. He talks to you about something
 he's doing here, and he talks to you about his fingers and how empty they are, and he
 can pull something out of his pocket in plain sight and you don't notice it. And so a magic
 happens. That's ignorance. Selective attention, focusing your consciousness on one thing to
 the exclusion of many other things. So in this way, we concentrate on the things, the
 figures, and we ignore, we don't concentrate on the background. And so we come to think
 that the figure exists independently of the background. But actually, they go together.
 And they go together just as inseparably as backs go with fronts, as positives go with
 negatives, as ups go with downs, and as life goes with death. You can't separate them.
 So there's a sort of secret conspiracy between the figure and the background. They are really
 one, but they look different. They need each other, just as male needs female, and vice
 versa. But we are ordinarily completely unaware of this. So then, when the scientist starts
 paying attention to behavior of people and things carefully, he discovers that they go
 together, that the behavior of the organism is inseparable from the behavior of its environment.
 So you see, if I'm to describe what I am doing, what am I doing? Am I just waving my legs
 back and forth? No, I'm walking. And in order to speak about walking, you have to speak
 about the space in which I am walking, about the floor, about the direction, left or right,
 in relation to what kind of room, what kind of stage, what kind of situation. Because
 if, obviously, if there isn't a ground underneath me, I can't very well walk. So the description
 of what I am doing involves the description of the world. And so the biologist comes to
 say that what he is describing is no longer merely the organism and its behavior. He is
 describing a field, which he now calls the organism-environment. And that field is what
 the individual actually is. Now, this is very clearly recognized in all sorts of sciences.
 But the average individual, and indeed the average scientist, does not feel in a way
 that corresponds to his theory. He still feels as if he were a center of sensitivity locked
 up inside a bag of skin. The object of Buddhist discipline, or methods of psychological training,
 is as it were to turn that feeling inside out, to bring about a state of affairs in
 which the individual feels himself to be everything that there is, the whole cosmos focused, expressing
 itself here, and you as the whole cosmos expressing itself there and there and there and there
 and there and so on. That what, in other words, the reality of myself fundamentally is, not
 something inside my skin, but everything, and I mean everything outside my skin, but
 doing what is my skin and inside it. I mean, imagine that every one of us—look, in the
 same way that the sea, when the ocean, has a wave on it. The wave is not separate from
 the ocean, is it? Every wave on the ocean is the whole ocean waving. The ocean waves
 and it says, "Yoo-hoo! I'm here!" See? But I can wave all over the place. I can
 wave in many different ways. I can wave this way, go, and wave that way. So the ocean of
 being waves every one of us, and we are its waves, but the wave is fundamentally the ocean.
 Now, in that way, your sense of identity would be turned inside out. You wouldn't forget
 who you were, you wouldn't forget your name and address, your telephone number, your social
 security number, and what sort of role you're supposed to occupy in society. But you would
 know that this particular role that you play, this particular personality that you are,
 is superficial, and the real you is all that there is.
 [ challenge accepted ]


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