Tonight, at any rate, we've got to go through some theoretical material, so we're on a head
 trip. I don't know where the trip will end up, it depends on you. But in order to lay
 the foundation for this, we've got to examine ideas that are basic to our common sense.
 Ideas are very powerful. It's not only emotions that are powerful in human life. Psychoanalysis
 has of course examined the emotional bases of human opinions and beliefs, but one should
 also examine the intellectual bases of psychological principles, or theories, or therapies. Because
 everybody who speaks a language at all has underneath the surface of the language, or
 the figuring that he uses, certain basic assumptions which are usually unexamined. And these unexamined
 systems of belief are extremely powerful in their influence over our lives. We'll begin
 with one very common idea that's built into our common sense, which is that the world,
 the physical world, consists of two aspects, respectively form and matter. This was foisted
 on us by Aristotle, and also by the Bible, because it is said that God created man out
 of the dust of the earth, and as it were, made a figurine in his own image, and then
 breathed the breath of life into its nostrils, so that this form of clay became a living
 being. And so underneath that lies the notion that everything material is made of some sort
 of basic stuff, like clay is the basis of pots. And for centuries, scientists, philosophers,
 wanted to know what is that stuff? What are we made of? Now look here, a carpenter makes
 tables out of wood, and a potter makes pots out of clay. But I ask you, is a tree made
 of wood? Obviously not. A tree is wood. It's not made of it. Is a mountain made of rock?
 Obviously not. It is rock. See, our language contains innumerable ghosts. Supposing I say,
 the lightning flashes. Surely the flashing is the same as the lightning. There is not
 one thing called lightning and another called flashing. The lightning is the flashing. It
 is raining. What is this it that is raining? The raining. I can make a noun out of a verb
 any time by turning it into a gerund. So we populate the world with ghosts, which arise
 out of the structure of our language, and thus, therefore, of the structure of our thinking,
 because we think in language or in figuring and numbers. And so it's an intensely fascinating
 investigation to find out what are the hidden assumptions that underlie language and figuring.
 In other words, language and mathematics. And here is this basic assumption, you see,
 that is almost with us all. It comes again and again into our everyday speech, that form,
 pattern, organization, organisms are made of something. As if there were some inert,
 primordial, and of course, stupid stuff, which had to be put into shape by an energy and
 an intelligence other than the stuff. Like the intelligence of the potter shapes the
 clay. So therefore, we have a basic picture of the world in which everything is being
 pushed around. There's a boss. There's somebody in charge who is different from what that
 somebody is in charge of, and puts everything into shape, because our common sense does
 not allow that things shape themselves. Very odd. In Chinese, the word for nature is zi
 zi, which is that which is so of itself, the spontaneous. The Chinese have no difficulty
 in thinking about nature as self-shaping. A Chinese child would not ask its mother,
 how was I made? It would ask its mother, how did I grow? Which would be quite different,
 I think. So to be made is to be commanded, and therefore, every good being obeys. Whether
 you obey God, or whether you obey the laws of nature, you obey. And the analog, therefore,
 of the world that has been put into our common sense is one of military command. Note that.
 Because the image of God, I would go further and say the idolatrous image of God, which
 has been handed down to us, is one of the beneficent tyrant, the boss, big papa. So
 then, when our physicists started to find out what stuff was, they went into it and
 examined it with ever more minute instruments. They first started cutting up things with
 knives and cutting them smaller and smaller and smaller until the particle that they wanted
 to dissect was exactly the same width as the edge of the knife. And so they got an atom,
 and that word in Greek, atomos, means the non-cuttable. A non-tomos-cuttable. That's
 the basic atom. What you can't cut anymore, because you got down to the end. Well, they
 weren't satisfied with that. So they got an atomos, in other words, a particle of something
 or other that was just the same width as the blade of the knife edge, and they looked at
 it under a microscope. And they saw that it seemed to be composed of more small particles.
 So they found out means of working those out. And then they found out extraordinary means
 of investigating the properties of matter. Then they reached a point where they couldn't
 decide whether it was particles or whether it was waves. So they called them wavicles.
 They thought they had come to certain ultimate wavicles called electrons. But then, unfortunately,
 everything fell apart and they found protons, mesons, and many other extraordinary things.
 Because of course, what they didn't realise was that as you make more and more powerful
 microscopic instruments, the universe has to get smaller and smaller in order to escape
 the investigation. Just as when the telescopes become more and more powerful, the galaxies
 have to recede in order to get away from the telescopes. Because what is happening in all
 these investigations is, through us and through our eyes and senses, the universe is looking
 at itself. And when you try to turn around to see your own head, what happens? You see?
 It runs away. You never get at it. You can't bite your own teeth. You can't touch the tip
 of this finger with the tip of this finger. This is the principle. Shankara explains it
 beautifully in his commentary on the Kena Upanishad, where he says that that which is
 the knower, the ground of all knowledge, is never itself an object of knowledge, just
 as fire doesn't burn itself. So there's always that profound mystery that you are never going
 to be in absolute control of what goes on, because if you were, it would be like making
 love to a plastic woman. And who wants that? There always is the mystery. The thing we
 don't know. As Van der Leeuw put it, "The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved,
 but a reality to be experienced." If there were not that, you see, there would be no
 life. The reason why certain people turned to philosophy, why I became a philosopher,
 was that since I was a little boy, I always felt that existence as such was weird. I mean,
 here we are. Isn't that odd? Of course it's odd. What do you mean by odd? Well, that's
 what's different from even. I mean, what's odd stands out. What's even lies flat. But
 you can't see the outstanding without the flat background. Here's the thing standing
 out. It's odd. Each one of you is odd. Strange, unique, particular, different. How do we know
 what we mean by that except against the background of something even that is not differentiated,
 like space? And so you get this philosophical itch. You begin to scratch your head and think
 about why is that so? Well, after a while you realize that's a meaningless question.
 Then you ask, "How is it so?" Well, that leads you into science and other investigations.
 So you want to know, "What is it?" I mean, this happening, this thing called existence.
 What is it? You ask that question long enough and it suddenly hits you that if you could
 answer it, you wouldn't know what terms to put the answer in. I mean, when we investigate
 the properties of nature and we do get some answers, all the answers are in terms of particular
 structures, forms, patterns. And these can be measured and their behavior can be predicted.
 But when I want to ask the question, "What are the forms made of?" I mean, what is it
 really? We can't think of any way in which we could answer the question. Because we would
 have to have a class of all classes. When you ask the question, "What?" it's like saying,
 "Is you is or is you ain't? Is you animal? Is you vegetable? Is you mineral? Are you
 Republican or Democrat? Are you male or female? Are you a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu or
 what have you?" We classify, always, to give an answer to the question, "What is it?" And
 when you classify, you distinguish an inside group from an outside group. Right. So what
 we want to know is, what is the group of all groups? Well, we can't imagine what the outside
 would be. So we can't answer the question, "What is it?" So the physicists finally abandoned
 the quest for stuff. And they gave us a description of the universe entirely in terms of form.
 The pattern, not the stuff. When people ask, "What's the web?" "Yeah, but you can't do
 that. What's the pattern made of?" Surely, mustn't there be an answer to that? See, what
 happens is, when you turn up the microscope, all stuff turns into form. It becomes articulate.
 You know, the carpet looks like some sort of stuff. But when you look at it under a
 microscope, you will see the crystalline structure of the nylon or whatever it's made of. See?
 They want to know, "What are those crystals made of?" All right. Turn up the volume, and
 you'll find molecules. Turn up the volume, you find wavicles. But we think, "The wavicles
 must be of something." But of course, they're not. We find substance or stuff totally vanishes.
 And we're left with form. Sanskrit doesn't really have a word for matter. It has namarupa,
 which means named form. It's the form that matters. Or let's put it in another way, everything
 is a matter of form. [laughter] Now, let's go into this. It's fascinating. You say, "Does
 it matter?" What does that mean? Does it matter? Is it important? In other words, does it measure
 up to anything? All right, let's go back to the Indo-European roots of the language. Matter
 comes from a Sanskrit root, matra, which means to measure, to lay out the foundation, say,
 for a building. So from this root, matra, we get going on into Sanskrit, we get the
 word maya. And maya is generally translated illusion, although it also means magic, creative
 power. The word illusion, switch over, we get that from Latin. And that comes from the
 Latin ludere, to play. Let's pretend that we matter. And so, also from the root matra,
 see, you get meter. That is also to measure. You get metir in Greek, mater in Latin, which
 means mama, mother. The mother of Buddha was called maya. Mary, ma again, is the mother
 of Jesus. Ma, ma, ma, ma, ma. But ma, you see, is a matter of form, pattern. The Chinese
 call the basic principle of nature li. And the character for li means the markings in
 jade, the fiber and muscle, the grain in wood. So Joseph Needham translates it organic pattern.
 That's what's going on. And there isn't any stuff involved. What stuff is, is a pattern
 seen out of focus, where it becomes fuzzy, like kapok, see? We say kapok is the stuffing
 of a cushion, and that's stuff. It's, you know, some kind of goop. But when we examine
 the kapok closely, we find structure. And that's what you will find, and there never
 will be anything else. Crazy, because it completely flouts our common sense. We say, but surely,
 philosophers beat tables that are in front of them. And you know, they say, it is there,
 because bang, you know? There must be something that is stuff, that is substantial. But the
 only reason why you can't pass your hand through a table is the table is moving too fast. It's
 like trying to put your finger through an electric fan, only it's going much faster
 than an electric fan. Anything solid is going so fast that there's no way to get this through
 it. That's all. So, you say, what is it that is going so fast? Well, that question is based
 on a grammatical illusion. The grammatical illusion is that all verbs have to have subjects.
 Can you imagine anything more weird than the idea that a verb or an action or event must
 be set into motion by a noun? That is to say, a non-event or thing. Now, what's the difference
 between a thing and an event? I can't, for the life of me, tell. We say, this is a fist.
 That's a noun. What happens to it when I open my hand? The thing has unaccountably disappeared.
 So I should have called this a fisting. And this is a handing. It may also be a pointing.
 So we could devise a language such as that of the Nootka Indians, where there are no
 nouns, there are only verbs. Chinese is very close to that. I think the superimposition
 of the idea of noun and verb on the Chinese language is a Western invention. I can't think
 of any Chinese word for a noun. But all those languages of Indo-European origin have nouns
 and verbs in them. They have agents and operations. And that's one of the basic snags. When we
 divide the world into operations and agents, doers and doings, then we ask such silly questions
 as who knows, who does it, what does it, when the what that is supposed to do it is the
 same as the doing. And you can very easily see that the whole process of the universe
 may be understood as process. Nobody's doing it. Because when you go back to doing it,
 you go back to the military analogy, the chain of command, the boss who goes bang and the
 object obeys. It's a very crude idea, very unsophisticated. So if you can bear it, we
 have suddenly eliminated a spook. And the spook was called stuff. So we're now more
 at ease with ourselves in a world of form, namarupa, named forms. We can of course get
 rid of the names. We can go further and try the experiment of not calling the forms by
 any names. Just observing the forms, although when we've got rid of the names, we can't
 even call them forms. Because that's a name. And there's the bazaars going on, which
 is called tathata. And that means suchness or thusness. Actually, tathata is dadada.
 Because when a baby first talks, it says da. Da, da, da, da. And fathers flatter themselves
 that it's saying dada, daddy. It isn't. It's saying da. And so the Upanishads say
 tatvamasi. You're it. The basic da. Because da doesn't mean anything. Da is like everything
 else. See, the world is a musical phenomenon. Good music never refers to anything except
 the music itself. You don't ask Mr. Bach, Mr. Ravishankar, what do you mean by this
 music? What is it intended to express? Bad music always expresses something other than
 itself like the 1812 overture or the sunken cathedral. Good music never talks about anything
 other than the music. If you ask Bach, what is your meaning? He'd say, listen. That's
 the meaning. Giraffes are giraffing. Trees are treeing. Stars are starring. Clouds are
 clouding. Rain is raining. And if you don't understand, look at it again. And people are
 people. Wow.
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