It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium
 is what there is to life.
 And we still have going into our common sense the nineteenth-century myth, which succeeded
 the ceramic myth in Western history.
 I call it the myth of the fully automatic model.
 Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock ball that revolves about an insignificant
 star on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies.
 But on the other hand, if you think about that for a few minutes, I am absolutely amazed
 to discover myself on this rock ball rotating around a spherical fire.
 It's a very odd situation.
 And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite
 weird.
 I know that.
 You see, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people
 take for granted.
 And sensible people, existence is nothing at all.
 I mean, it's just basic, and just go on and do something.
 See, this is the current movement in philosophy.
 Logical analysis says you mustn't think about existence.
 It's a meaningless concept.
 Therefore philosophy has become the discussion of trivia.
 No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man and the nature of
 God and all that sort of thing, because a philosopher today is a practical fellow who
 comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five.
 He does philosophy during the day, which is discussing whether certain sentences have
 meaning and if so, what.
 And then he would, as William Earle said in a very funny essay, he would come to work
 in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.
 Problem is, he's lost his sense of wonder.
 Wonder is like, in modern philosophy, something you mustn't have.
 It's like enthusiasm in eighteenth-century England, with its very bad form.
 But you see, I don't know what question to ask when I wonder about the universe.
 It isn't a question that I'm wondering about, it's a feeling that I have.
 Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder.
 The moment my mouth opens to utter it, I suddenly find I'm talking nonsense.
 But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy.
 So there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in the sense of awe,
 astonishment at existence.
 And that is also a basis of respect for existence.
 We don't have very much of it in this culture, even though we call it materialistic.
 In the culture that we call materialistic today, we are of course bent on the total
 destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as
 possible.
 This is not a materialistic culture, because it has no respect for material.
 And respect is in turn based on wonder, on feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble
 in your fingers.
 Look, here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples.
 And we call it an apple tree, because the tree apples.
 That's what it does.
 All right, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of
 this solar system is that at least on the planet Earth the thing peeples, in just the
 same way that an apple tree apples.
 Now maybe two million years ago somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and
 had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders
 and said, "Just a bunch of rocks," and they went away.
 Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again, and
 they said, "Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peepling, and
 it's alive after all, it has done something intelligent."
 As you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple
 tree.
 If evolution means anything, it means that.
 But you see, we curiously twist it.
 We say, "Well first of all, in the beginning there was nothing but gas and rock, and then
 intelligence happened to arise in it, you know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the
 top of the whole thing."
 But we're thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks.
 Where there are rocks, watch out.
 Watch out, because the rocks are going eventually to come alive.
 Theology has not, as a matter of fact, had a very distinguished record in promoting the
 study of other than the Christian religion.
 Because you see, if you know in the first place that you have the true religion, there
 really is no point in studying any other one, and you can very quickly find reasons for
 showing them to be inferior, because that was a foregone conclusion.
 They had to be.
 Because if, for example, you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound and
 spiritual character than Jesus Christ, you arrive at your decision on the basis of a
 scale of values which is of course Christian.
 And in this sense the judge and the advocate are the same.
 Now as you know, I'm not being very fair and very kind to modern theology, but there is
 this strange persistence of insisting that our group is the best group.
 And I feel that there is in this something peculiarly irreligious, and furthermore it
 exhibits a very strange lack of faith.
 Because I believe that there is a strong distinction between faith on the one hand and belief on
 the other.
 That belief is, as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith.
 Because belief is really wishing, it's from the Anglo-Saxon root "leaf" to "wish,"
 and belief, stated, say, in the Creed, is a fervent hope that the universe will turn
 out to be thus and so.
 And in this sense, therefore, belief precludes the possibility of faith, because faith is
 openness to truth, to reality, whatever it may turn out to be.
 I want to know the truth.
 That is the attitude of faith.
 And therefore, to use ideas about the universe and about God as something to hang on to,
 in the spirit of "rock of ages cleft for me," and there's something very rigid about a rock.
 And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age where it becomes more and
 more obvious that our world is a floating world.
 It's a world floating in space, where all positions are relative and any point may be
 regarded as the center.
 A world which doesn't float on anything, and therefore the religious attitude appropriate
 to our time is not one of clinging to rocks, but of learning to swim.
 And you know that if you get in the water and you've nothing to hold on to, and you
 try to behave as you would on dry land, you will drown.
 But if on the other hand you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float.
 And this is exactly the situation of faith.
 I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan and he got pretty desperate to produce the
 answer of who he really is.
 And on his way to an interview with the Master to give an answer to the problem, he noticed
 a very common sight in Japan, a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden.
 And he swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono.
 And then he went into the Master, and to give the answer of who he was, he suddenly produced
 the bullfrog.
 And the Master said, "Mm-mm, too intellectual."
 In other words, this answer is too contrived.
 It's too much like Zen.
 You've been reading too many books.
 It's not the genuine thing.
 And so the method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools persist
 in their folly.
 But very rigorously and very consistently and very hard.
 Now if you go to a Zen teacher, he'll say, "Well I have nothing to teach."
 There is no problem, everything's perfectly clear.
 And you think that one over.
 And you say, "He's probably being cagey."
 But the teacher says, "Quite honestly, I haven't anything to tell you.
 I don't teach anything.
 I have no doctrine.
 As I said to you in the beginning of this talk, I have nothing whatsoever to sell you."
 So the student thinks, "My, this is very deep, because this nothing that he's talking
 about, this nothing that he teaches, is what they call in Buddhism shunyata, and it's
 supposed to be the ultimate reality.
 But as you know, if you know anything about these doctrines, this doesn't mean real nothingness,
 not kind of just nothing there at all, not just blank, but it means no-thingness.
 It's the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things, and that's
 something very deep and profound.
 So he knows that when the teacher said, "I have nothing to teach," he meant this very
 esoteric no-thing.
 Well, he might also say, "Then if you have nothing to teach, what are all these students
 doing around here?"
 And the teacher says, "They are not doing anything.
 They are just a lot of stupid people who live here."
 And he knows again, you see, the stupid doesn't mean just straight stupid, but the higher
 stupidity of being people who are humble and don't have intellectual pride.
 The Christian proverb is that man's extremity is God's opportunity.
 And so people, in other words, have to get desperate.
 Imagine the idea that the moment you were born, you were kicked off the edge of a precipice,
 and you are falling.
 As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you, and it's traveling alongside you.
 And you're clinging to it for dear life, and thinking, "Gee, I've got to hold on to this."
 You see?
 Well, it doesn't do a thing for you.
 We are all headed straight for death as if we had been condemned by a judge.
 And yet here we are all clinging on to things.
 And we have all sorts of alibis for doing this.
 We say, "Well, I have responsibilities for my dependence, and I've got to cling on."
 But all you're doing is you're teaching your dependents to cling the same way as you are.
 And making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively.
 So the thing is, same way if you're caught in a torrent, and you try to get out of it
 by swimming against it.
 You'll just wear yourself out, and you're still carried along with it.
 So the sensible thing to do is to turn around and swim with it.
 And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge.
 But go with it.
 Same way when you're sailing.
 Always keep the wind in your sails.
 If you want to go against the wind, tack.
 But use the wind.
 So it's this way.
 You know, we're all in this great stream of change, which we call life.
 We are the stream.
 If you imagine you're separate from it, and you're being carried along by it as if you
 were a cork, that's a delusion.
 You're a wave of the stream itself.
 So get with it.
 So you perform a discipline by experiment.
 By reductio ad absurdum of his premises.
 And so in the same way the guru, whether Hindu or Buddhist, performs a reductio ad absurdum
 on the premise of the skin-encapsulated ego.
 Well what happens then?
 You might imagine from garbled accounts of Eastern mysticism that one thereupon disappears
 forever into an infinite sea of faintly mauve jello.
 And become so lost to the world and entranced that you forget your name, address, telephone
 number and function in life.
 And nothing of the kind happens.
 The state of mystical illumination, although it may in its sudden onset be accompanied
 by a sensation of tremendous luminescence and transparency, as you get used to it, it's
 just like everyday life.
 Here are the things that you formerly thought were separate individuals, and here is you
 who you formerly thought was merely confronting these other people.
 When the great Dr. D.T.
 Suzuki was asked what is it like to be enlightened, he said it's just like ordinary everyday
 experience except about two inches off the ground.
 Because what is altered is not the way your senses perceive.
 What is altered is what you think about it, your definitions of what you see, your evaluation
 of it.
 So when you don't cling to it, when you have no longer a hostile attitude to the world
 because you know the world is you, it is.
 I mean let's take it from the point of view of biology.
 If I describe the behavior of a living organism, I cannot possibly describe that behavior without
 simultaneously describing the behavior of the environment.
 So that I discover that I don't describe organisms in environments, I describe a unified
 field of behavior called an organism environment.
 It's an awkward word, but there it is.
 The environment doesn't push the organism around, the organism doesn't push the environment
 around.
 They are two aspects or poles of the same process.
 You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art, we always find the interchange
 of two personality types which I call prickles and goo.
 The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism.
 They want rigor, they want precise statistics, and they have a certain clipped attitude in
 their voices.
 And you know this very well in academic circles, where there are people who are always edgy
 like that.
 And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague and miasmic and mystical.
 But the vague, miasmic and mystical people accuse the prickly people of being mere skeletons
 with no flesh on their bones.
 And they say to you, "You just rattle.
 You're not really a human being.
 You know the words, but you don't know the music."
 And so therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent
 of matter is particles.
 If you belong to the gooey type, you hope it's waves.
 If you are prickly, you're a classicist, and if you're gooey, you're a romanticist.
 And going back into medieval philosophy, if you're prickly, you're a nominalist.
 If you're gooey, you're a realist.
 And so it goes.
 But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively.
 It's gooey prickles and prickly goo.
 And you see, it all depends on your level of magnification.
 If you've got your magnification on something so that the focus is clear, you've got a prickly
 point of view.
 You've got structure, shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined.
 You're a little out of focus, and you've got bleh, and you've got goo.
 But we're always playing with the two, because it's like the question is, is the world basically
 stuff like matter, or is it basically structure?
 Well we find out of course today that in science we don't consider the idea of matter, of just
 there being some sort of stuff, because supposing you wanted to describe stuff, in what terms
 would you describe it?
 You always have to describe it in terms of structure.
 Something countable, something that can be designated as a pattern.
 So we never get to any basic stuff.
 There is a sense in which the universe is purely game, but not in the sense of a one-upmanship
 game, but in the sense of music, which is lulling with sound, is dancing delightfully
 with sound, you see.
 And nobody was ever able to give a better account of what it's all about.
 I mean, let's take the traditional Christian account of what the angels do in heaven.
 Why they sit around the throne of God and sing "Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia", and they're
 going, you know, that's not just "Alleluia" in a sort of formal way, but they're going,
 "Doo-dee-dah, dee-doo-dee-dah, dee-doo-dee-dah, dee-doo-dee-dah, dah-dah-dah, dah-dah, doo-dee-dah,
 dee-doo-dee-dah, dee-doo-dee-dah, dee-doo-dee-dah, dee-doo-dee-dah, dah-dah-dah."
 No, they're really swinging.
 And by the time you know where they are, the swinging has reached such fantastic proportions,
 they've thought out the most amazing little "goody-doody-doody-doody-doos" that you've
 got the whole physical universe happening.
 Yeah, that's the way it starts.
 And so, I mean, this game is great.
 In music, though, one doesn't make the end of a composition the point of the composition.
 If that were so, the best conductors would be those who played fastest.
 And there would be composers who wrote only finales.
 People go to a concert just to hear one crashing chord, because that's the end.
 Same way in dancing.
 You don't aim at a particular spot in the room.
 That's where you should arrive.
 The whole point of the dancing is the dance.
 Now, but we don't see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.
 We've got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression.
 It's all graded.
 And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind
 of "Come on, giddy-giddy-giddy."
 And yeah, you go to kindergarten, you know.
 That's a great thing, because when you finish that you get into first grade.
 And then come on, first grade leads to second grade, and so on, and then you get out of
 grade school, you go to high school, and it's revving up, the thing is coming.
 Then you're going to go to college, and by Jove, then you get into graduate school, and
 when you're through with graduate school, you go out to join the world.
 And then you get into some racket where you're selling insurance.
 And they've got that quota to make.
 And you're going to make that.
 And all the time the thing is coming.
 It's coming, it's coming, that great thing, the success you're working for.
 Then when you wake up one day about 40 years old, you say, "My God, I've arrived.
 I'm there."
 And you don't feel very different from what you always felt.
 And there's a slight letdown because you feel there's a hoax.
 And there was a hoax.
 A dreadful hoax.
 They made you miss everything.
 We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose
 at the end.
 And the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you're
 dead.
 But we missed the point the whole way along.
 It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being
 played.
 Why do we love nonsense?
 Why do we love Lewis Carroll with his "Twas drilling in the slithy toves, Did gyre and
 gimble in the wave, All mimsy were the borrow-groves, And the mom-raths outgrabe?"
 Why is it that all those old English songs are full of "Faldi riddle I do" and "Hey
 nonny nonny" and all those babbling choruses?
 Why is it that when we get hep with jazz, we just go "boo dee boo dee boop dee boo"
 and so on and enjoy ourselves swinging it?
 It is this participation in the essential glorious nonsense that is at the heart of
 the world, that isn't going anywhere, that is a dance.
 But it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point
 of this and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is
 no purpose, and that its sense is nonsense.


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