Coincidence

It's really a very unorthodox and unacademic thing to do, to start a discussion with a

group of psychologists on the subject of metaphysics. But we have to do that. Because a lot of people

say that their approach to life is scientific, as distinct from metaphysical, and that metaphysics

is Bosch, anyway. But everybody, by virtue of being a human being, is willy-nilly a metaphysician.

That is to say, everybody starts from certain fundamental assumptions as to what is the

good life, what he wants, what are his, shall we say, axioms for living. And I find that

psychologists tend to be blind to these fundamental assumptions. Maybe it's truer of psychiatrists

than it is of psychologists, but they tend to feel that they are scientists. They're

rather bending over backwards to have a scientific status, because that, of course, is fashionable

in our age. But you know, it's so amusing that when, say, let's take psychoanalysis,

for example, as pointed out to many philosophers, that their philosophical ideas are capable

of being shown to have a psychoanalytic reference. For example, John Wisdom wrote a book about

the philosophy of Berkeley, in which he attributed a great deal of his point of view to his experiences

in toilet training as a child. The philosopher is very grateful to the psychoanalyst for

revealing to him his unconscious and its emotional contents. But the psychoanalyst must in turn

await a revelation from the philosopher as to his philosophical unconscious and the unexamined

assumptions which lie in it. So, if I may start by insulting your intelligence

with what is called the most elementary lesson, the thing that we should have learned before

we learned 1, 2, 3, and ABC, but somehow was overlooked. Now, this lesson is quite simply

this, that any experience that we have through our senses, whether of sound or of light or

of touch, is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects, one called on and the other

called off. Vibration seems to be propagated in waves, and every wave system has crests

and it has troughs. And so life is a system of now you see it, now you don't. And these

two aspects always go together. For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation

of sound and silence. And that's simply the way things are. Only you must remember that

the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or

troughs without crests, just as you don't encounter in life people with fronts but no

backs, just as you don't encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although

the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are

different, they're at the same time one. And one has to get used fundamentally to the notion

that different things can be inseparable. That what is explicitly two can at the same

time be implicitly one. If you forget that, very funny things happen. If therefore we

forget you see, that black and white are inseparable and that existence is constituted equivalently

by being and non-being, then we get scared. And we have to play a game called, "Uh-oh,

black might win." And once we get into the fear that black, the negative side, might

win, we are compelled to play the game, "But white must win." And from that start all

our troubles. Because you see, the human awareness is a very odd mechanism. I don't think mechanism

is quite the right word, but it'll do for the moment. That is to say, we have as a species

specialized in a certain kind of awareness, which we call conscious attention. And by

this we have the faculty of examining the details of life very closely. We can restrict

our gaze, and it corresponds somewhat to the peripheral field, I mean the central field

of vision in the eyes. We have central vision, we have peripheral vision. Central vision

is that which we use for reading, for all sorts of close work, and it's like using a

spotlight. Whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight. Now civilization

and civilized human beings for maybe 5,000 years, maybe much longer, have learned to

specialize in concentrated attention. Even if a person's attention span is short, he

is, as it were, wavering his spotlight over many fields. The price which we pay for specialization

in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field. I would rather say ignorance

than ignorance, because if you concentrate on a figure, you tend to ignore the background.

You tend, therefore, to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things

and events seriously, imagining that these really do exist, when actually they have the

same kind of existence as an individual's interpretation of a Rorschach plot. They're

what you make out of it. In fact, our physical world is a system of inseparable differences.

Everything exists with everything else. But we contrive not to notice that, because what

we notice is what is noteworthy. And we notice it in terms of notations. Numbers, words,

images. What is notable, noteworthy, notated, noticed, is what appears to us to be significant,

and the rest is ignored as insignificant. And as a result of that, we select from the

total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction. And this causes us to

believe that we are separate beings, isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the

rest of the world. And you see, this is also the mechanism involved in not noticing that

black and white go together. Not noticing that every inside has an outside, and that

the inside, what goes on inside your skin, is inseparable from what goes on outside your

skin. Do you see that, for example, in the science of ecology, one learns that a human

being is not an organism in an environment, but is an organism-environment. That is to

say, a unified field of behavior. If you describe carefully the behavior of any organism, you

cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment. And by that

you know that you've got a new entity of study. You are describing the behavior of a unified

field. But you must be very careful, indeed, not to fall into old Newtonian assumptions

about the billiard ball nature of the universe. The organism is not the puppet of the environment,

being pushed around by it. Nor, on the other hand, is the environment the puppet of the

organism, being pushed around by the organism. The relationship between them is, to use John

Dewey's word, transactional. The transaction being a situation like buying and selling,

in which there is no buying unless somebody sells, and no selling unless somebody buys.

So that fundamental relationship between ourselves and the world, which is in an old-fashioned

way by people such as Skinner, who have not updated his philosophy, interpreted in terms

of Newtonian mechanics. He interprets the organism as something determined by the total

environment. He doesn't see that in a more modern way of talking about it, we're simply

describing a unified field of behavior, which is nothing more than what any mystic ever

said. That's a dirty word in the modern academic scientific environment. But if a mystic is

one who is sensibly, or even sensuously, aware of his inseparability as an individual from

the total existing universe, he is simply a person who has become sensible, aware through

his senses, of the way ecologists see the world. So when I'm in academic circles, I

don't talk about mystical experience, I talk about ecological awareness. Same thing.

And so the next aspect of our metaphysical introduction must be about games. Do you know,

I think there are really four questions that all philosophers have discussed from the beginning

of recorded time. First is, who started it? The second is, are we going to make it? The

third is, where are we going to put it? And the fourth is, who's going to clean up? When

you think these over, it poses a fifth question. Is it serious? And that's the one I want to

discuss. Is existence serious? Like you say to a doctor, after he's looked at your X-ray

picture, is it serious? What does that mean? It means, am I in danger of not continuing

to survive? The question is, ought I to continue to survive? In other words, must I survive?

If life is serious, then of course I must survive. If it is not serious, it really doesn't

matter whether I do or I don't. Now, in Western culture, it is practically a basic assumption

that existence is serious. This is particularly true among people who call themselves existentialists.

When they talk about a person who exists authentically, they mean that he takes his life seriously,

and other people's lives seriously. But the poet and essayist G.K. Chesterton once observed

that the angels fly because they take themselves lightly. And if I may venture into mythology,

if the angels take themselves lightly, how much more so the Lord of the angels. But you

see, we have been brought up in a mythological context where the Lord God definitely does

take himself seriously, and is indeed the serious person. So that when we go into church,

laughter is discouraged in the same way as it's discouraged in court. This is a serious

matter, and everybody has to have the right expression on their faces. Because this is

the great, great authority figure. This is Grandpa, who says, "Buh, buh, buh, buh, buh,

buh, buh, all you kids," you know. And we don't realize that he has a twinkle in his

eye. But the basis of it all is this, then. If we say, "You must survive," or "I must

survive," "Life is earnest, and I've got to go on," then your life is a drag and not a

game. Now it's my contention, my personal opinion, this is my basic metaphysical axiom,

shall we put it that way, that existence, the physical universe, is basically playful.

There is no necessity for it whatsoever. It isn't going anywhere. That is to say, it doesn't

have some destination that it ought to arrive at. But that it is best understood by analogy

with music. Because music, as an art form, is essentially playful. We say, "You play

the piano." You don't work the piano. Why? Music differs from, say, travel. When you

travel, you are trying to get somewhere. And of course, we, because being a very compulsive

and purposive culture, are busy getting everywhere faster and faster and faster, till we eliminate

the distance between places. I mean, with the modern jet travel, you can arrive almost

instantaneously. And what happens as a result of that is that the two ends of your journey

become the same place. So you eliminate the distance, and you eliminate the journey. Because

the fun of the journey is to travel, not to obliterate traveling. So then, 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.

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, kiddie, kiddie, kiddie." And now you go to kindergarten, you know,

and that's a great thing, because when you finish that, you'll 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 by expectation. Look

at the people who live to retire, and put those savings away. And then when they're

65, they don't have any energy left, they're more or less impotent, and they go and rot

in an old people's senior citizens' community. Because we've simply cheated ourselves the

whole way down the line. 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. But you had to do that thing. You didn't let it happen. And so, in this

way, the human being sometimes becomes an organism for self-frustration. Let's take

Kozibsky called man a time binder. That means that he's the animal peculiarly aware of the

time sequence, and as a result of this is able to do some very remarkable things. He

can predict. He studies what's happened in the past, and he says the chances are so and

so of that happening again. So he predicts. This is very useful to be able to predict,

because that has survival value. But at the same time, it creates anxiety. You pay for

this increased survival ability involved in prediction by knowing that in the end you

won't succeed. You're all going to fall apart by one way or another. It might happen tomorrow.

Might happen 50 years from now. But it all comes apart in the end. And people get worried

about that. They get anxious. So what they gained on the roundabout, they lost on the

swings. So then, if you see, on the other hand, that existence - this is, as I said,

my basic metaphysical assumption, which I won't conceal from you - that existence is

musical in nature. That is to say that it is not serious. It is the play of all kinds

of patterns. We can look upon different creatures as we look at different games, as we look

at chess, checkers, backgammon, tennis, there's the tree game, the beetle game, the grass

game, or you can look at them as you look at different styles of music, mazurkas, waltzes,

sonata, etc., etc., all down the line. There are all these different things doing their

stuff, and they're going to do-to-do-to-do-to-do-to-who-do-do-to-do, you know, in different rhythms. And we're doing

that. If you were in a flying saucer from Mars or somewhere, and you came and looked,

trying to make out what was living on this world, from about 10,000 feet at night, or

early morning, you would see these great ganglia, with tentacles going out all over the place.

And early in the morning, you see little blobs of luminous particles going into the middle

of them. And then in the late afternoon or early evening, it would spit them all out

again. And they say, well, this thing breathes. And it does it in a special rhythm. It goes

in and out, in and out, in and out, once every 24 hours. But then it rests a day and doesn't

spit so much. It spits in a different way. That's a kind of irregularity. And then it

starts spitting all over again the same way. Well, you see, that's very interesting. That's

the kind of thing we have. See? This is something that goes this way.

Now existence, you see, is something that is spontaneous. The Chinese word for nature,

zhizhan, means that which happens of itself. Your hair grows by itself. Your heart beats

by itself. You breathe pretty much by itself. Your glands secrete their essences by themselves.

You don't have voluntary control over these things. So we say it happens spontaneously.

So when you go to sleep and you try to go to sleep, you interfere with the spontaneous

process of going to sleep. Try to breathe, you know, real hard, and you find you get

balled up in your breathing. So if you're going to be human, you just have to trust

yourself to have bowel movements and go to sleep and digest your food. Of course, if

something goes seriously wrong and you need a surgeon, that's another matter. But by and

large, the healthy human being doesn't, right from the start of life, need surgical interference.

And he lets it happen by himself. So with the whole picture, that is fundamental to

it. You've got to let go and let it happen, because if you don't, you're going to be all

clutched up. You're going to be constantly trying to do what can happen healthily only

if you don't try. And when people, when you think a bit what people really want to do

with their time, what do they do when they're not being pushed around and somebody's telling

them what to do? They like to go, they like to make rhythms. They listen to music, they

dance or they sing or they do something of a rhythmic nature, playing cards or bowling

or raising their elbows. Everybody wants to spend their time swinging. That's the nature

of this whole thing we're in, you see, it likes to swing. That's why it does it.