[Music]
 There are obvious things that we don't talk about.
 There's the taboo side to life that we don't mention.
 We're supposed to overlook it.
 You know, when silk stockings were first invented,
 with the fine mesh type,
 a present of several dozen of them was sent by an important American businessman
 to the Queen of Spain.
 And they were returned by her chamberlain
 with a letter which said,
 "You should recognize that Her Majesty the Queen of Spain has no legs."
 [Laughter]
 In other words, those legs don't officially exist.
 [Laughter]
 So, only what exists officially is what is noticed,
 and as we say, noted, noteworthy,
 make a note of it in your mind, in your date book.
 Noting and noticing, notation, you see,
 they're all based on the same idea,
 what we attend to.
 But there are a lot of very attention-worthy things that we ignore.
 But part of the whole game, you see, of the cosmos is played in this way.
 Imagine the cosmos as a great harp.
 You know, the angels are supposed to play harps in heaven.
 Well, the actual harp they play is the total possibility of vibrations.
 Now, you know about the spectrum of light.
 That is a series of vibrations.
 So is the spectrum of sound.
 Then beyond light, there are other vibrations which are not picked up by our senses,
 but instruments pick them up.
 And then there must also be many vibrations as yet not picked up by any instruments that we have.
 Now, what is, you see, what we call nature is a system of picked-up vibrations.
 Some vibrations aren't picked up, and therefore nothing appears.
 That seems that the space around things, because the vibrations there aren't picked up.
 They're not noticed.
 And this is why there is a whole domain of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy called Tantra.
 Tantra refers to the idea of weaving.
 And so when you have a warp and a woof,
 the weaver decides what threads are going to be picked up and appear on the front,
 which is what everybody's going to look at,
 and those threads will be overlooked, repressed, put behind the scenes.
 They'll be behind.
 And so it will appear that we have a birdie here and a birdie there and a birdie there,
 and no connection between the birdies.
 Actually, if you look on the other side,
 you will see that the red threads which made the birdies against the white background continues.
 Only that's not noticed.
 So in this way, we are taught from childhood.
 We are indoctrinated in a system of social institutions that are simply rules about what is to be noticed and what is not to be noticed.
 That's why children are sometimes very odd questions about things that adults don't notice.
 The famous story of the little boy who's been taken to a concert where a lady is singing,
 and he says, "Mama, why does she scream when she yawns?"
 And in the same way, inventive poets put together images that people never thought of before.
 It's like Yeats' famous phrase, "The be-loud glade."
 You know, it was a beautiful idea for a nice glade to be be-loud.
 And everybody says, "Oh, think of that. We never thought of that before.
 We never thought of it in just that way. We didn't notice that."
 And the question, the fundamental koan, as it would be called in Zen, is, "What is it you haven't noticed?
 What are you ignoring? What have you forgotten?"
 You know, you've forgotten something. Very important.
 In fact, you came in here, you know, without clothes on, in a sort of fit of absent-mindedness.
 And if you say, "Haven't you forgotten something?"
 You say, "What? Well, I, uh, oh, good heavens."
 So in the same way, the fundamental who we are, the basic identity, the Brahman, the Tat, which is Tvam Asi,
 that's what we've all forgotten. But by ignoring it, we make this game.
 So then, let's see what we do, precisely in steps, about social institutions in training the young.
 First of all, it's important to identify a child.
 The child has got to be someone.
 And we often say of a child we think is dumb and incompetent, "You're never going to amount to anything.
 You're just going to be unimportant. You're going to be something unnoticed."
 So a child has to find out the approved way of drawing attention to itself.
 If a child succeeds in not drawing attention to itself, it won't get fed, for one thing.
 So the very first yell of a baby is, in a way, a way of getting attention.
 And that's what we want people to do.
 But we want a certain kind of way of asking for attention.
 We don't like it when babies howl and get attention that way.
 But it gets attention because it's annoying, and we want to stop it.
 So we fundamentally want people to love us.
 And we don't believe that they will, unless somehow we put them in a situation where they must.
 So we have all kinds of processes for charming people and eliciting their love.
 They range, you see, first of all on one end of the spectrum from being physically attractive.
 That elicits attention.
 Another way is to be funny. And people laugh, and they like you having something around that's funny.
 Another way is to be helpful, to wash the dishes and things like that. That's good.
 Another way is to be weird.
 Only that's a little disconcerting. You have to be careful how you play that one.
 Or they may put you in a place where you're not seen.
 All the time you're playing this game, of course everybody else is reacting to it.
 And they're talking to you, and they're giving you messages about the kind of attention-making scene you're playing.
 And they don't want you to do anything in this game that will discombobulate them.
 They want you to play it according to certain rules so that they'll know what you'll do next.
 That's terribly important.
 People mustn't be too surprising.
 We, you know, we like things to stay put. We like them to be regular.
 And if you had a kettle which suddenly developed legs and walked off the stove, you would say it was uncanny.
 And put it in a zoo or something where it would be safe, where it wouldn't do anything further unpredictable.
 So for the same reason, we have a fairly large number of acceptable character roles that people are allowed to play.
 You should watch these things very carefully because it's tremendously instructive to figure out what kind of roles your friends are playing.
 They have, of course, through long, long accustomedness, come to believe that that's who they really are.
 And that when they are playing their role, they are being themselves and being straight and honest.
 That's a deception that's very easily arranged by choosing between a number of roles in early life that you might play.
 You've got to decide whether you're going to be a serious person or a clown or whatever, you know.
 And then you behave as if the roles you've discarded were the superficial ones.
 The one you've decided to play is the deep one, and that's really you.
 That is soon done in this way. A child notices very early in life that he's a different person in different environments.
 He is one person in the company of his parents, sometimes one person with his father and another with his mother.
 He's another person with a nursemaid. He's another person at school.
 He's still quite another person, alone with other children, and still someone else when he's by himself.
 He makes a visit to relatives.
 I know very well that I was a different personality in my aunt and uncle's home than I was in my own home.
 Because you respond to the environment, you get very, very subtly delivered cues that certain attitudes are expected of you.
 And you don't just play these attitudes outwardly in how you speak and gesture.
 You play them inwardly. You think the thoughts that the other people are suggesting you think.
 If you listen to your, what you call your own mind, very carefully, you will discover that it's full of the echoes of other people's voices.
 "What do I think about this?" And you think that actually it's your mother talking to you.
 Or the sort of thing she would say. Or whoever else it may be, someone you admire very much.
 So, the interchange of our own behavior and the messages that come from the environment, and especially from other people,
 give us the message that identifies us. It tells us who we are.
 And in this culture, you see, the messages that we get from the social environment do not tell us very many things about ourselves.
 They do not tell us, above all, about the big secret.
 How we are connected with the cosmos. Because that, in this weaving game, has been left out in the background.
 Now, I have spoken, obviously, of many of these social institutions in a somewhat, a way that will sound critical to you.
 As if they weren't too, as if some of them weren't really a very good idea.
 And we have to figure out ways of deciding about social institutions.
 Whether they are good games or not. And that's quite difficult.
 When we contrast a Victorian family with a modern family, there are very different game rules that are being played.
 And we have more or less decided today that they weren't playing very good game rules.
 If you contrast a book, for example, on child rearing, written in, say, 1860, with Dr. Spock.
 Well, Dr. Spock is post-Floyd. And since Floyd, ideas of child rearing have altered quite radically.
 And also, one must not forget that Montessori and Froebel and all sorts of other people,
 and not to mention, what's his name, Summerhill, come in between.
 Now, on what grounds will we say that the game in which a child is now educated at a reasonably progressive school
 is better than the kind of school I went to?
 Which was based on the fundamental game rule of this school is "suffering builds character."
 And therefore, you could mistreat somebody out of compassion. That it is good for him.
 Now, you could say, well, I've had many arguments with my father about this.
 My father's a really genuine philosopher. A man with a very open mind.
 But he said once, he said, "Think of any great man who ever came out of a co-educational school."
 You know, it's the sort of question that you've never thought of, and so you don't have any ready answers.
 But he was convinced, you see, that in a boy's life, association with women is weakening to the character.
 And that's why boys are sent away to be in the company of men. Get them out of those womanish ways.
 And make them tough, you see.
 Now, if you are playing society by that sort of game rule, and you want men to be soldiers,
 and so they'll be happy with each other, with no women around, and you want them to be explorers,
 and all that sort of thing, then you will say, that kind of education produces good results.
 But you see, we are living in a world where soldiers are becoming obsolete.
 They're just becoming a menace and a danger.
 And we've got to be very careful that we only breed a few of them.
 Just like bees have these problems of how many of this type of worker and so on to breed.
 And we have this as a very serious problem, and it's changing rapidly.
 It's changing so rapidly that we're in considerable doubt as to what kind of human characters are advantageous to have.
 You see, there are circumstances in which people who simply conform and cooperate are a damn nuisance.
 Because they don't get any new ideas.
 And what we needed was new ideas, and we needed people with the courage of their convictions.
 There are other circumstances where we've got enough ideas.
 And people with new ideas just make things complicated.
 I have a psychiatrist I met recently on my travels,
 and he said, "I don't know if I'm going to come to your seminar."
 We'd had a conversation, got on rather amusingly.
 He said, "It would be a terrible, terrible problem to me to get any new ideas."
 He said, "I would have to reorganize my entire operation."
 And it's going along pretty smoothly now.
 And I, you know, said, "I have a hospital, and I have many men under me working, and we've got a system going.
 If you give me new ideas, it's going to be awful."
 So, the basic thing, then, is we're given a choice of roles.
 And we are encouraged to be consistent in our roles through the novel and through drama
 and through all kinds of other means, so that people will be controllable.
 So that they won't be too jumpy.
 What is it that worries you about somebody who is insane?
 See, a friend of mine had a patient who, when he came into the outpatient department in the Veterans Hospital every day,
 would have to sign himself in.
 And on the roster where you signed yourself in, there was a place for your occupation.
 But he changed his occupation every day.
 And one day, when my friend received the card, you know, that he signed as he comes in,
 he said, "Oh, I see you're the mailman today."
 And he said, "Yup, and I'm married to a mailbag."
 Well, think of the meanings in that.
 You know?
 The trouble with certain schizophrenics is that they've got an association pattern going.
 They make the most devastating puns.
 And the people don't appreciate these puns because they're too deep.
 They don't follow them.
 And the schizophrenic person gets worried because people don't appreciate it.
 And he sees how everything goes together and plays this language.
 And if people don't appreciate it, it leads to trouble.
 Well, it so happens that my friend is very sharp and loves that kind of message.
 And they got on very well together.
 And we finally explained to him how to use languages,
 how to say the right things on the right occasion,
 because these nuts called sane people won't understand you if you make that pun.
 But therefore, remember at the same time, though,
 that the role you have over the years gradually acquired and are playing
 is a social institution.
 It isn't the real you.
 And in many cases, therapy, as a result of which a person feels that they've found themselves,
 means that they have exchanged an impossible game for a possible one.
 They haven't really found themselves.
 They haven't gone, or very rarely gone, behind the game.
 So you see, we like a game that teases us,
 that is comprehensible but not too comprehensible.
 And this suggests, then, that the world itself, the nature of the cosmos,
 is comprehensible but not too comprehensible.
 Even God, if you will imagine yourself in the situation of God,
 would be bored in knowing everything.
 So what does God do?
 God, therefore, plays hide-and-seek.
 Now you see it, now you don't.
 And that game is of the essence of being.
 It is the up-and-down motion of a wave.
 The crest of the wave is now you see it.
 The trough of the wave is now you don't.
 And the whole of existence is waves, is undulations, is vibrations.
 So there it is.
 Now, but you can't say, as if to toss the thing off,
 "Well, it's just vibration."
 It's only vibration.
 It's mere vibration, because wow, when that happens, it isn't mere.
 Because what this vibration thing is doing,
 it's saying, "Come on now, how far can we go this way?
 Whee! It goes way out that way."
 It says, "All right, now how far can we go the other way?"
 Without, you know, falling apart.
 And then it goes way out like that.
 Then suddenly it falls apart, because it's found out that by falling apart in this dimension,
 you can come into being in another.
 So there are endless ways of going.
 You can do it this way, that way, and you can think out dimensions that we've never thought of at all,
 for our ordinary practical purposes.
 But always, you see,
 to be in this way implies not to be in another way,
 and not to be in that way implies to be in that way.
 So don't worry.
 The whole point of the thing is, however,
 now watch this, this is terribly important.
 The whole point of the thing is worked out
 so that nobody, even God, is going to be too sure.
 Because if the moment there is total certainty, there is no life.
 Being has ceased at the moment when it's all white and no black.
 It's all clear and nothing obscure.
 At that moment, you see, it stops.
 But what we call existence,
 life, all those things, is a pulsation
 which involves a constant uncertainty.
 It always involves the second philosophical question,
 "Are we going to make it?"
 And there are people, you see, like philosophers and sages and whatnot, who say yes.
 Don't be afraid.
 You're going to make it.
 But it's always going to feel as if you know.
 But that's the fun, you see.
 That's all children love, to take risks.
 They like going roaring around in hot rods or on those skateboards and things like that.
 It's terribly dangerous.
 But that courting of danger is life.
 Tillich is calling it the courage to be.
 So when we get older and we think, "Oh, Lord, for heaven's sakes."
 You know, I just celebrated my 50th birthday.
 And I realize I've made it through half a century.
 And I can't make out whether I'm just getting older or getting wiser.
 I mean, I do think, you know, the nature has certain merciful processes in it.
 And that, for example, for a person in extreme pain, the pain can be converted into ecstasy.
 A person who is starving can begin to feel way up.
 And the same way as you get older, maybe you do in a funny way get wiser and feel more at peace with yourself.
 You've accepted yourself with all your limitations.
 And you begin to understand more and more your connection with the total cosmos.
 And that as you approach death and you vanish, so what?
 You're going to come back again as somebody else.
 And maybe as many other people at the same time.
 And that'll be great.
 Only you'll always think you're one.
 Only one.
 Because that's the element of the unknown.
 That's the thrill.
 That's the joke in the thing.
 So then, the way of putting the emphasis on the mechanical aspect of things, the mechanical way of understanding,
 do not confuse that with the truth.
 It is simply a way, a fashion, in philosophy.
 See, philosophy has fashions in exactly the same way as clothing does.
 And in the academic world, is riddled with fashion.
 After all, what a lot of people are doing when they come on in the academic world,
 with a great to-do about how cautious they are, how rigorous, how solemn all this is,
 what they're really doing is they're saying,
 "By going through these rituals and writing these learned contributions to journals,
 I'm really saying I'm a very sound and reliable person.
 That's the signal, the message I'm giving you."
 I mean, he can be writing about something of absolutely no practical consequence whatsoever,
 some amusing game about Sanskrit calligraphy in the 15th century.
 Fine.
 You know, that's fine to study that.
 And you come on with such a very... way about it.
 But now, we've got a curious thing going in our culture,
 where we're playing this game which we caught from the original god, the father,
 because he was very serious.
 He meant you to know when he was around.
 My God, he was around.
 Boy, don't you dare laugh or anything like that.
 And now, you see, you've got the reflection of the type of adult ruler here who's very insecure.
 On the other hand, there's no earthly reason whatsoever why a creative, responsible, loving human being
 should have to put on this act about being grave.
 You see, we... what is it?
 Our men in this culture are possessed by looking like clergymen.
 And to go around wearing black and things like that, it's terrible.
 Why not break out?
 Enjoy color, delight, and so on.
 Because people are afraid if they wear too many colors.
 Do you know what the real reason is?
 Somebody will shoot you.
 You can be seen.
 You don't disappear into the landscape.
 So, or, you know, or the Lord will say,
 "Who do you think you are, coming on like this?
 What's all this stuff about?
 Disappear!
 You annoy me.
 You're too colorful."
 You won't be wiped out for that reason.
 There are plenty of other reasons nowadays, but not that one.
 So, you know, it is important for us to recover from myths which constantly bug us.
 Which constantly annoy inside.
 That you have to watch out.
 Of course, some corporations are arranged so that you do.
 You work across the street.
 IBM, they require you to look as ordinary as possible.
 Because that would make them nervous if you didn't.
 You know, things that aren't ordinary can't be thought of in terms of punch cards.
 Everybody who's sin will go around wearing a notice on them,
 "Do not fold, spindle, or miter."
 So, then, what is the, what I want to summarize, what I've been saying this morning,
 which is this.
 A peculiar culture, social culture, based on a fearful attitude to reality,
 makes each one of us feel that we don't belong.
 It's working on the idea of being scared as the basis of a culture.
 So that you could say, "All our literature, our drama, our religion, our music,
 is a complicated way of being scared."
 And we cannot really, and not in our culture, there are cultures where they do,
 that we can't let go and stretch out our arms and breathe deeply and say,
 "Oh, for heaven's sake, I belong in it.
 All the whole thing is me."
 Not me, in the sense of Alan Watts.
 Not quite like that, but all of you,
 that it's the whole thing goes together as one enormous organism that is living it up.
 That's what we call being alive, isn't it?
 And doing all these things around us.
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