[Music] In this third session, let me start by briefly summarizing what has happened up to this point. We have been studying the ways in which our sense of existence, of personal identity, is influenced by social factors. And in the first session, I described the two great myths of the nature of man and the universe which have dominated Western society. The Judeo-Christian myth, first of all, of our existence as being the creation of a cosmic king who is the foundation of being, who is reality itself, but to whom we are related as a sovereign and judge, and who therefore keeps us in a chronic state of guilt. This particular myth became so highly uncomfortable that it had to be abandoned by most intelligent people. And in the 18th and 19th centuries, they substituted for it another myth, which is the myth of a purely mechanical universe, which is unintelligent, unfeeling, unseeing, the total opposite of the one they had before, and in which we can live without being judged, but nevertheless with a fundamental sense of futility. This latter myth has become extremely plausible today, and it is as far as I can make out the thing that most people really believe in. You can always press what people believe in by what they do. I'm highly suspicious of most Christians, because I don't think they believe it at all. They'd be screaming in the streets if they did. They'd be terribly earnest. They'd have the most hair-raising television programs on the fate and destiny of man if they took this thing seriously, but they don't. You see, what's happening in most of the churches is that the theological schools are very advanced, very liberal, but they feel they can't give their congregations yet what they think. And their clergy are apt, therefore, to be extremely frustrated people, always wondering in the back of their minds whether they ought to, in good conscience, maintain their jobs. So the plausible myth today is not the Christian myth or the Jewish myth. The plausible myth is this mechanistic universe, which I call the Newtonian myth. And what I wanted to get across to you in the first session was that that rather plausible and so-called realistic view of how things are is just as much a myth as anything else. It's a way, it's a formulating an attitude to life, which has nothing really connected with the way things are at all. Then we went on in the second session to explore the influence of social institutions on our sense of identity. And I tried to show how social institutions involve the most fundamental ideas that we have, and that our ideas of time and space are the nature of ourselves and of the nature of the good life and of the necessity for survival. Our social institutions are exactly the same kind as the lines of latitude and longitude. Those are abstractions. They do not exist concretely, but they're extraordinarily useful ideas. Because it's only through, as it were, spreading networks and grids over the world in our imagination by means of which we can measure things that you and I can arrange to meet at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and whatever the street is here, Vermont Avenue. It's interesting, in Buddhism you find that all temples are guarded by very fierce-looking authoritative beings. They're not like modern authorities. They don't have the same kind of glumness. They are much more ecstatic in their fierceness. And these are called the Dharma Rajas. That means the kings of the ruled. They are the guardians of the ten directions of the universe. Buddhism and Hinduism have ten directions, that is to say, eight points of the compass, plus above and below. And these very fierce creatures stand at all temple entrances. And they are essentially the cosmic traffic cops. Because they have to be fierce. Because somebody has to lay down the law that we do recognize north, south, east and west in a very firm way. And up has to be clearly distinguished from down, you see. So these people have a very important function. But at the same time, the Dharma Rajas have a slight twinkle in the eye for all their fierceness. They know, you see, that the ten directions are conventional. They don't think that they are absolutely real. They are enlightened, all of them. They're all bodhisattvas in the aspect of a bodhisattva which is wrathful. I suppose I haven't looked closely enough, but if you look around these paintings, you will find here, for example, is a wrathful bodhisattva, the sort of person who would be a guardian of the directions. In up here, there's this bodhisattva, this bodhisattva, and this one, they're beneficent. They appear in white color and they have serene faces. But this one appears in black color and has a wrathful face. This is not a devil or demon in the Western sense of the word at all. He's simply a manifestation of the fierce side of reality. Some people don't feel really alive unless they're sitting on a spike. That tells them they're there. I went to Mexico this summer to explore this, because in Mexico they enjoy bullfighting and they enjoy a kind of Catholicism in which suffering is the big bit. We went to the shrine of Guadalupe and watched young girls walking about half a mile on their knees to get into the shrine for the special blessing. Then you find in the stores where they sell venduserie, that is to say religious goods, all kinds of horrendous paintings of Christ with the crown of thorns on. We made some very special meditations in the cathedral of Oaxaca in the inner chapel where they keep the sacrament. And in there is a crucifix that's just about as bloody as it can get. And on either side, pictures of Jesus being flogged on one side and of the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane on the other. And I was trying to penetrate what is this thing? Why do people go into this kind of spiritual masochism? And it seemed to me very much that there is that end of things which is a spite, and which is extreme agony, and which is terribly real. And that you know you're there when you're on that point. The other end you see is the womb, is the all-embracing softness and loveliness. That's there too. But if you go too far into that, you see you don't know you're there. So this was a digression, but it is in terms then of our various social institutions that we formulate directions, structures, maps, weights and measures in our Rorschach blot universe. Although you see, and let me re-emphasize this point that I made in both former lectures, this is not exactly our projection on the universe. Many of you probably read a book called "The Pathetic Fallacy," which is a discussion of the way men have in past times attributed human feelings and emotions to nature. And the wind is sorrowful, and the moon is serene, and the sun is joyous. And the whole theme of 19th century philosophy was that this is not true. The sun is not joyous. The wind does not sigh. It's you who sigh. But that's not quite true, because a sighing human being is only possible in a universe where there is wind. A joyous human being is possible only in a place where there's a sun. All these things that are called the external world are part and parcel of your whole mental existence. And so we borrow from the sun. We say so-and-so has a sunny disposition. So-and-so is a lunatic, oddly influenced by the moon. All our language is full of references to our external environment, simply because our external environment is one with us. That's why in ancient times, and some people today, feel that you can draw the picture of a human being's soul by drawing a diagram of the arrangement of the universe as it was at the time when he was born. See, that's the art of astrology. Now I personally think that modern astrology is pretty phony, because it is an archaic way of thinking about these problems, in rather the same way that Paracelsus' idea of medicine was primitive as compared with modern medicine. Nobody has ever seriously thought out an up-to-date astrology. That is because the whole idea of astrology has been out of fashion among the more vigorous intellects for several hundred years. But the idea of it is in principle correct, that your soul is not inside your body. Your body is inside your soul. And what your soul is, is of course fundamentally the total universe. Now our astrological maps don't include the total universe. They include only phenomena in the solar system. And in the surrounding galaxies, some of the stars, which appear to be overpassed by the sun in its annual course, have been selected to be significant. But if you were a super-astrologer, you should put in all the galaxies, or as many of them as you're aware of, and think about them. But you see, the idea of astrology, the truth that underlies it, is that the universe is your character. And the way it is disposed and focused at your birth moment, which is really a rather arbitrary point to choose. When did you start? Did you start when you were at the moment of parturition, the moment of conception, or when you were an evil gleam in your father's eye? It's arbitrary. And one should say, of course, that every here and now that you have and are, is a focal point of all that there is. The moment of birth is simply selected as being significant because when the officials ask you who you are, they always ask you where and when were you born. For some reason or other, this establishes your age, this establishes your nationality, or something like that. And so that's been, that's a social institution. It's been agreed on as a peculiarly significant moment. So but all moments, fundamentally, are just as significant as the moment of birth. You have a birthday every day, if you understand it right. So there is a tacit conspiracy in society to ignore the fact that the body is inside the mind or the soul, and that you are therefore playing the game of being a creature separate from everything else, all alone, locked up inside a bag of skin, and worrying like all get out whether you're going to make it, and being frustrated by the ultimate knowledge that you're not. That we all, because we are time binders, we know we're going to die, and that we'll eventually collapse, and that we'll get colder and colder and colder, and it will be most unpleasant, and then we'll fade out. But because we've got our minds turned inside out, you see, we've got our identity, our center of gravity in the wrong spot, then this worries us a great deal. But with that worry we do all kinds of magic. If people didn't worry about dying, there'd be no medicine. The whole craft of the physician and the surgeon and all the skills and marvellous things that it involves is based on worry about death. There are children born occasionally who can't be boxed into the scheme, and very often the so-called Mongolian idiot, or a child who is schizophrenic for some reason from birth, can't be made to be afraid of death. And some of those children just are playing everything for all it's worth. They see a light on a reflecting surface like that, and they dig that light, they go "Bleurgh!" You know? And everybody says, "Now, come to yourself, behave." They don't care. If they come to an end, that'll be great too. They'll be fascinated with that experience. It doesn't matter what it is, they have no discrimination. They'll eat anything, put anything up their noses, they have absolutely no sense of what you should do and what you shouldn't do. The trouble is, you see, that if they had an understanding of the game that the rest of us are playing, they could get on very well, knowing their different game, and put the two together. And that's what I'm talking to you about. Trouble with them is that they don't understand our game, but that's the trouble with them from our point of view. You see, that all decisions as to who is crazy are a question of majority vote as to what is reality. And that sometimes it's touch and go. You see, look, reality is what it is according to the kind of senses you have. Since in this room almost everybody's eyes are of the same structure, we are here, and we agree. Everybody's ears and their auditory nervous systems are of the same pattern, so we can all converse. Now if a fly comes into our presence, he has an eye of a very different structure from ours. A fly, apparently, because of the multiplicity of lenses, sees the surrounding world from a considerably different number of points of view. They're not very different, but they're just subtly different. And that gives the fly certain advantages. But he doesn't see the world as, you know, if I see you there, sitting there, he sees you ever so many times. But he manages to unify that in some way. Now the awkward matter for decision is, when a human being has a different kind of consciousness from the average, to make the decision, is he advanced and seeing new things that nobody has seen before, or is he retarded and hasn't yet developed what the rest of us have? This is a very difficult decision to make. This is to madness close allied. But you've always got to... one thing that our culture is a little bit defective about as compared, say, with the culture of the Arabs or the Hindus, we are not sufficiently respectful of crazy people. So more or less what has happened is this. In the development of games, there was a time when human beings were wild. And that's what we call, in modern anthropological jargon, they lived in hunting cultures. They didn't live in any fixed place, and they roved and they hunted. They killed other creatures to live. Now in a hunting culture, every male member of the culture knows all of the culture. They don't have a division of labor. Every man is a master of quite a number of skills, and naturally every woman knows all her side of the thing. But they're not fixed. The religion of a hunting culture is shamanism. A shaman is a liberated man who gets his liberation by going into the forests alone. The Indian cultures of the United States, especially in the West, are to a very large extent cultures of this kind, and their religion is a form of shamanism, and shamanism is a universal religion. It spreads over the whole world. Mircea Eliade has written a marvelous book on shamanism. But the essential thing of the shaman is that he becomes liberated from even this loose sort of a culture by going off by himself. And naturally the highly socialized people have a terror of solitude, because in solitude the awesome facts are slowly going to appear. First of all, the triviality of your role game, and then deeper and deeper in you get, until at last, one night all alone and cold under the stars, you find out who you are. That's what every shaman does. And then he comes back into the world, in those kind of societies, as a magic man. But when human societies become agrarian and become settled, they divide labor, and they put a stockade around themselves at the crossing of two roads. All cities are fundamentally that. Where two roads cross, and the cross is encircled with a pail. Pail, parlow, tree, trunks spiked on top, and you say of somebody who isn't really at all nice that he's beyond the pail. You see, so we settled that way, and then what we did was we divided the functions of labor into the four quarters encircled by the city. And we made four castes. The first was priests, lord spiritual. The second was officials, soldiers and rulers, lord temporal. The third was merchants, or the commoners. So the House of Commons in England is really a merchant's debating society. And finally, in the, as it were, the latter of the quarters, the laborers, the workers. These are the four castes of Hinduism. The priests, brahmana, the officials, kshatriya, the merchants, vaisya, and the laborers, shudra. And so the holy man of an enclosed society of this kind is a priest. And he gets his authority not from going off by himself, but from a hierarchy. Now then, that's the game that we're still playing, only we've modified it enormously. We're not living any longer in walled cities, but we have different kinds of walls. We have the dewline, the radar belts, and all that kind of thing. It's still essentially the same game, but it's been spread out in the most extraordinary way. And we have become so absorbed in this game that we don't have quite the same sense that our primitive ancestors had of there being an outside to the game. Because you see, there are two kinds of people beyond the pale. There are the people we throw out, and there are the people who go out. The outlaw who's a criminal is fighting one sort of game. The outlaw who is a saint is beyond the pale in the sense that people can't understand him. His experience is ineffable. That means what can't be effed or spoken from the Greek phoebe. So notice then this curious companionship between the saint and the no good. They've always been associated. And it's a very odd thing. Jesus as we know sought out as his friends the disreputable people in the community. The whores and people who are now called notorious evil livers. I say not now, but they were. In the prayer book of the Episcopal Church there is a passage about notorious evil livers who should not be admitted to communion. But you see, the funny odd queer thing is that it is precisely the notorious evil livers that people like Jesus cultivated. Because they were interesting. Because there is something in people like that that is manurish, feisty, that somehow cultivates a new thing. As the book of the Revelation says, because thou art neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I will spew thee out of my mouth. You cannot pretend that you don't have the dark side in you. Everybody has a shadow. And if you won't acknowledge your shadow, you'll push it onto someone else. For example, often we find that people who are sexually repressed, and as I say sexually, sex being the taboo in our culture was the problem thing, are very cruel. But here is the game involved, but it's an unconscious game. If you make sex the chief taboo of the culture, you make it terribly important. I've said that Christianity is the religion about sex. I mean, we think there are sexual religions like priapism, which is phallic worship, or tantric yoga, which uses sexual intercourse as a form of meditation. But compared with Christianity, these are things only mildly interested in sex. Christians are utterly obsessed with sex. And today, the function of the churches is primarily to be family and sexual regulation organizations. That's about the only thing they do. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] [BLANK_AUDIO] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.63 sec Decoding : 1.27 sec Transcribe: 2570.42 sec Total Time: 2572.32 sec