The Arts Reality Art & Illusion

...with part two of Reality, Art, and Illusion.

Well, now you know that one of the great problems

that has arisen out of the Western study of Indian philosophy,

as well as out of the tradition of Western philosophy

in relation to the whole problem of illusion,

is the question of what is called in the technical jargon of Western philosophy,

subjective idealism.

This is the theory that all reality is mental.

And we have to start by making a clear distinction

between subjective idealism and solipsism.

Solipsism is the doctrine that you are the only person who exists.

And everybody else is your dream.

And you can see there's a certain analogy between that

and the Hindu idea that all this cosmos is the dream of the Godhead.

But the difference here is that in the solipsistic doctrine,

it is just you, as you more or less know yourself from a conscious standpoint,

as a finite individual,

and not much more than that,

having this dream that all these other people exist.

There's no way of really producing an argument against solipsism,

because you can always say to a solipsist,

what evidence, if someone could produce it,

would you regard as disproving your idea?

That's a very disconcerting question to ask anybody,

and I give it to you if ever you get involved in philosophical one-upmanship.

Ask a Freudian,

what evidence, if it could be brought forward,

would you consider to disprove the Oedipus complex theory?

You'll find he can't think of anything at all.

Or ask a theologian,

what evidence would you find conclusive as disproving the existence of God?

And he can't think of any.

Whereas,

other people, if you ask them that question,

will suggest an experiment,

and say, all right, if this experiment is negative,

then we'll accept the evidence.

And one of the classic experiments of this nature

is the Michelson-Morley experiment,

which disproved the existence of the ether,

as at any rate, in the form that people had conceived ether.

And it's been generally accepted.

Somebody thought out

what would happen if there were really ether.

So, this is always one of the problems of solipsism,

and we're going to see it's one of the problems of subjective idealism.

But the difference between solipsism and subjective idealism

is contained in the famous double limerick.

There was a young man who said,

God, I find it exceedingly odd

that a tree as a tree simply ceases to be

when there's no one around in the quad.

And the reply,

young man, your astonishment's odd.

I'm always around in the quad,

so the tree as a tree never ceases to be

since observed by yours faithfully, God.

And the great subjective idealists in the tradition of Western philosophy

are, of course, Berkeley,

the bishop,

and Bradley,

A.F. Bradley.

And, uh,

it's in some ways difficult to make out exactly what they were saying

when they said that everything is in the mind

because they could never say clearly what they meant by the mind.

But if you will be a little naive for a moment

and seem at least to understand what you mean

when you use the word mind,

they will pitch the argument in the following way.

You do not know anything except in your own mind.

The whole existence of an external world

is something known to you in your mind.

The distance of other people and other objects from you

is a distance that exists in the mind.

You cannot possibly conceive

any world existing

unless it be

an experience.

How could there be an unexperienced world

that would not be a world for anyone or anything

therefore it would not be at all

because being is always being for something.

It is, in other words, relational.

The sun is light for eyes.

Eyes are organs of vision for a mind.

If there are no eyes,

the sun gives forth no light.

If there are no nerve ends,

it gives forth no heat.

If there are no muscles,

nothing is heavy.

And if there are no soft skins,

nothing is hard.

Because it is only in relation

to a certain softness

that something hard can be said to be hard.

Only in relation to a certain

degree of measurement

performed by the neurons

that things can be said to be relatively hot or cold.

Hot and cold are the impact

of energies

on a nervous system.

Energies at all

are recognized as energies

by their impact on something.

So the Zen poem says,

the tree

manifests the spiritual power

of the wind,

the water

the miraculous energy

of the moon.

So the tree

is waving.

And we wouldn't know

there was any wind around,

you see,

unless there were a tree

or something like it

to wave in it.

And in the same way

as the moon,

when the water

ripples,

breaks up into

a thousand fragments

and shimmers all over the place,

you see,

we wouldn't know

that the moon

had this miraculous power

to duplicate itself,

to triplicate,

quadruplicate,

multimillionaire itself

were it not for the water.

So these are the

the foundations

of the idealist

theory.

You must distinguish

between philosophical idealism

and ethical idealism.

They're two totally

unrelated ideas.

Philosophical idealism

means that

only the ideal world

is the real world.

That is to say,

the world

in the mind.

Now,

the theory

is incredibly plausible.

As it has been stated

by people like

Berkeley and Bradley

and the Western idealists,

but today

it is about

the most unfashionable

philosophical theory

in the academic world

that you could follow.

because Western philosophy

has undergone

a great revolution

since about 1914.

In that year,

there was published

Wittgenstein's Tractatus

and Wittgenstein

came from the

so-called Vienna School

or was influenced

by the Vienna School

of people who

call themselves

scientific empiricists,

sometimes logical

analysts,

sometimes logical

positivists.

And they said

only statements

that are

empirically verifiable

have meaning.

They never verified

that statement.

But that

was their point

of departure.

That's their

basic assumption.

Everybody

has a metaphysical

assumption

which you can't prove.

Watch out for it.

It's basic

to all thought.

For example,

you must be consistent.

Try it.

But at any rate,

this school

has had immense

influence

in the 20th century

and it argues

basically

that

in order to say

something meaningful

he's having fun

you must be able

to verify it.

That is to say

you verify things

by prophecy.

If you make a prediction

based on your statement

and it comes true

you verified it.

If it doesn't come true

you haven't verified it.

You de-verified it.

The statement

a statement

which was de-verified

shown to be untrue

might be meaningful

but untrue.

But a statement

that you can't think

any way of verifying it

is in this theory

meaningless.

Now so you say

the world is ruled by God.

Everything that happens

happens under the governance

of God.

So the logical analyst says

you've made a statement now

that says

everything is

affected by X

God.

Suggest a way

of verifying this.

what difference

would it make

if it weren't so?

Would it make any difference

to the way things

are going on

if they weren't

governed by God?

This is a problem

because it's just the same

as if you had said

all bodies

whatsoever

in the universe

that includes

all stars

all galaxies

all planets

are moving

in a certain direction.

Now there's no way

of verifying this

because you can only

verify

movement in a certain

direction

by comparison

with something

that's relatively still.

But there will not be

any still body

with reference to which

all the other bodies

move

because you said

in the beginning

all bodies in the universe

are moving

in such and such

a direction.

So you could only say

everything in the universe

is governed by God

if you made an exception.

But there are certain

things that are not.

You see?

Then, according to

logical analysis

you could have made

a meaningful statement.

But when you start

making statements

about everything

there's nothing

you can do about it.

You can't prove it

you can't disprove it.

And so they say

although you think

you have said something

you haven't really

said anything at all.

You made a statement

that was actually

as nonsensical

as asking

why is a mouse

when it spins?

But this statement

about God

doing or ruling

all things

sounded meaningful

because we're used to it

but is really

pure nonsense.

This has been

so persuasive

in the climate

of academic philosophy

today

that

idealism

of all kinds

is as I said

extremely unfashionable.

But there are

considerations

that might cause us

to reflect on this

more carefully

because we can think

of situations

analogous to

the idea that

all things are ruled

by God

or all things

exist only

in the mind.

There are situations

analogous to that

in our everyday

experience.

Only

we can be aware

of these situations

because we stand

outside them.

Now first of all

consider a mirror.

A mirror

will reflect

all kinds of shapes

and colors.

And when you look

at the mirror

the mirror itself

will be the ground

or the underlying

element common

to all those shapes

and colors.

And it is not

meaningless to say

that they are all

reflections in a mirror

because the mirror

has an edge

and you can see

other things

around the mirror

which behave

in a different way

from the reflections.

You can't put

your hand out

and pull the necktie

of a reflection

in the mirror.

But you can

reach your hand out

and pull the necktie

of somebody

standing beside

the mirror.

You see?

But nevertheless

within the context

of the mirror

all the things

that are there

are reflected in it.

And if the mirror

weren't there

they wouldn't be there.

Those reflections.

Now supposing

similarly

everything that exists

has its being

in a mirror

called the mind.

Only

there is no way

of seeing the edge

of this mirror.

Does that

is that meaningful?

Is that possible?

The positivist

the logical analyst

will say no

because

the statement

makes no difference

to anything.

It makes no difference

to anything

in this thing

you call the mind

that it's in the mind.

It makes no difference

to anything

in the mirror

that it's in the mirror.

For example

your face

is not immediately

changed

by being reflected

in a mirror.

The mirror

doesn't exercise

influences

or so they say

upon the reflections

but it very well could.

Let's consider

what we were discussing

last night.

Lenses

in cameras

influence

the kind of world

they photograph.

A convex lens

will give you one thing.

a concave lens

will give you another thing.

And one can think

of all sorts

of wonky lenses

prismatic lenses

bent lenses

squirrely lenses.

Now you see

if the lenses

of your eyes

could be said

to distort

the physical world

you would take

that distortion

as normal

because there

would be no way

of

setting up a standard

and saying

by that standard

my eyes are wrong

unless you simply

took some other

kind of a lens

and said

this is right

and the eyes

distort it.

you would have

always seen

things that way.

So

nevertheless

whether

the eyes

are distorted

or not distorted

is impossible

to decide.

So

according to

this way of logic

that is a

meaningless question.

There is no way

of deciding

the answer

and it makes

no difference

whether it is

or whether it isn't

or so they say.

But I think

that they have

neglected

certain kinds

of difference

that these things

do make.

First of all

there is

a difference

of feeling

and very often

a difference

in behavior

between a person

who is

aware of

an underlying

ground

or continuum

for every

experience

and every

reality

and a person

who is not

aware of it.

The person

who is aware

of it

feels at home

in his surroundings

the person

who is not

aware of it

doesn't.

The first

belongs

and the second

doesn't feel

he belongs.

He feels

he is engaged

in a contest.

Furthermore

one of the

difficult ideas

to get across

and express

well

in any

language

which wants

to be

to assert

a pluralistic

universe

in which

there is

no unifying

ground

any language

based on

that assumption

is going to

have difficulty

talking about

relationships.

Let's go back

in the history

of philosophy

and look

at former

instances of

this difficulty.

The thing

that really

bogged Descartes

down and

that puzzled

him

he never

could answer

was the

relationship

of mind

and matter

or spirit

and matter.

he had

inherited

from

Platonism

and from

Christianity

the theory

of the

two worlds

the natural

and the

supernatural

the material

and the

mental

the real

and the

ideal

and what

never could

be explained

by the

philosophies

of the people

who believe

that way

was how

the one

influenced

the other.

How does

the spiritual

world

influence

the material

as is well

known

all ghosts

all good

well behaved

ghosts walk

straight through

walls without

budging a brick.

Now if my

mind is my

ghost within

me how on

earth does

it lift my

arm when

a ghost

doesn't budge

a brick when

it walks

through a

wall.

See this

is the real

problem.

It all sunk

on this.

They couldn't

explain that.

And you

see

in just

the same

way as

the Cartesian

cannot explain

the influence

of mind

on matter

so a

person who

works

according

to

the theories

of logical

analysis

can't really

explain

relationship

between

so-called

things.

If he's

going to

take a

pluralistic

theory of

the universe

in which

there is

no

unifying

continuum

but there

are just

these events

you see

there are

these things

we can

talk about

in a

scientific

descriptive

manner.

How are

they related?

They obviously

are related.

They obviously

influence each

other.

But how?

Put it in

another way

of historic

philosophical

problem.

How does a

cause influence

an effect?

kind of amazing

that they do.

We say there

are causes

and effects.

But how

does a cause

lead to

an effect?

Is it

something like

a row of

dominoes

that stand

on their

end and

you flip

down the

first one

and they

go clickety

clickety

and all

knock each

other down?

Or a row

of billiard

balls?

That was

the idea

of Newtonian

physics

of course.

And the

atoms

were things

like billiard

balls and

they banged

each other

around.

And so

you've got

results.

But this

really won't

do.

For very

many reasons.

One is of

course that

things influence

each other

backwards.

A future

event can

change a

past event.

A lot of

people aren't

aware of that

but it can.

If I say

the bark of

the dog

and the bark

of the tree

what happens

to bark

the former

event

is very

seriously

influenced by

the later

event

dog or

tree.

Although

the word

sounds the

same and

is spelled

the same

it has a

different

meaning

according to

what happens

later.

So in

the same

way in

music

what is

happening

at this

moment

may be

changed

altogether

by something

happening

later.

A note

has one

meaning

in one

context

another

meaning

in another

context.

So what

is the

cause-effect

relationship

between

them

when

apparently

the

earlier

event

seems

to

be

causally

affected

by the

later

event.

You see

how puzzling

all that

is.

things

but it's

very easily

illustrated by

certain

phenomena

of music.

When a

person is

tone deaf

that is to

say he

cannot hear

melodies

he only

hears noise

and he

can't

understand

why other

people find

music

attractive.

What is

his

deficiency?

Where is

he blind?

His

blindness

is that he

cannot hear

relationships

or rather

in musical

language he

doesn't hear

intervals.

If you

are musically

sensitive

what you

hear in a

melody is

not a

string of

notes.

You hear

the steps

between them.

You recognize

the major

scale of

C as

ascending.

Why do we

think of that

as up?

What does

it mean

that one

sound is

higher than

another?

That's

nonsense to

a person

who is

tone deaf.

There are

just different

sounds.

There are

boomy

sounds and

squeaky

sounds but

they don't

rise.

You see

he hears

no motion

in them

because

each note

is static

and he

doesn't hear

the lead

from one

to the

other

of the

step.

Also

a person

who is

a logical

positive

is a

tone deaf

philosopher.

See?

And you

can't explain

there's

nothing you

can do

to a

tone deaf

person to

explain how

you hear

music just

as there's

absolutely

no way

of making

a congenitally

blind person

understand

color.

Or we

may find

out one

eventually

when we

find out

a lot

more about

our senses

but in

the ordinary

way he

just

can't

get it.

And so

in exactly

that same

way there

are people

who cannot

get certain

things.

We say

of such

people

you know

all the

words

but you

don't

know

the music

and you

may as

not waste

your

energies

trying to

convince

but there

are

alas

these

poor

afflicted

souls

who just

aren't

functioning

on a

certain

waveband.

But now

I don't

want to

say

you know

make a

kind

of a

esoteric

scene

out of

this.

effect

you know

what

the

relationship

is

it's

very

simple

they're

the

same

event

only

divided

into

two

parts

if

you

see

a

cat

walk

by

a

very

narrow

window

you

see

first

the

head

and

a

little

later

the

tail

if

you

speak

in

cumbersome

philosophical

language

you're

going to

start

talking

about

the

event

head

being

so

when

you

see

causes

and

effects

what

you're

saying

is

this

aha

I

realize

at

last

my

perception

is

limited

and

when

I

saw

one

thing

that's

invariably

followed

by

something

else

what

I

hadn't

noticed

is

that

they're

continuous

with

each

other

so

that

when

one

part

of

this

pattern

arises

I

thing

that

is

an

action

and

a

response

to

that

action

an

action

and

a

reaction

they're

a

single

action

that's

why

they're

related

in

this

organism

and

the

environment

it's

becoming

plainer

and

plainer

that

they

are

one

now

what

this

goes

back

to

again

we're

looking

at

philosophical

history

is

the

western

debate

between

the

two

schools

of

thought

called

the

nominalist

and

the

realists

and

the

modern

logical

philosophers

are

nominalists

now

their

fight

is

as

at

all

it's

quite

different

the

realist

says

there

are

in

reality

substances

which

could be

called

matter

or

spirit

or

humanity

just to

take

an

example

every

individual

human

being

is

an

instance

of

something

called

mankind

and

mankind

is a

real

entity

to

the

would say, too, the United States of America is a real entity, and all these individual

examples of it are, as it were, members of a body constituted by the real mankind, or

the state, or the society, or the church, or the whatever.

In contradistinction, the nominalist says, all your so-called real natures are abstractions.

There is no such thing as mankind, there are simply these individual people, and calling

them all men is a way of identifying them, but there is no such thing as mankind.

In the same way, there is no such thing as the United States.

There are all these people living here, who imagine that they're the United States and

call themselves that.

But the United States as such has no physical existence, because when you say the policy

of the United States towards Russia is thus and so, you don't mean the policy of the geographical

territory.

And nominalism, you see, is a very big thing for the followers of Korzybski, and for all

logical analysts, and so on.

Because they take the point of view, the whole thing in Korzybski is that you mustn't just

go around calling things dogs, but you must recognize there is Fido sub one, Fido sub two,

and Fido sub three.

And so this helps you, as the song says, to see each doggy differently.

So the idea in semantics is this tremendous precise accuracy of getting the details clear,

seeing that not every colored man is a nigger, not every Chinese is a chink, not every Italian

as a whop.

You see?

Now, of course, yes, there's the richness of detail.

But these are philosophical fashions that go back and forth between the prickly-minded

people and the gooey-minded people.

The prickly-minded people are the nominalists, and they like to emphasize the details, the atomic

discontinuous structure of things.

The gooey-minded people like to emphasize the great connected generalities, the way

things form into bodies.

But you see very clearly what happens if you press nominalism to its logical conclusion.

The answer is there are no people.

There are only amalgamations of cells.

What you really are are these cells, although you want to go further, say what you are is

only these electrons.

That's all there is, you see?

And this idea that they add up in some way to a person is just an abstraction.

You're not really there, you see, they're just all that.

Now wait a minute, Mr. Nominalist.

Suddenly you are beginning to turn into a believer in Maya.

What's your step, you see?

If you push anybody far enough philosophically, they all arrive at the same place.

You suddenly tell me you don't believe human beings really exist.

There are only these atoms.

Well, well, well.

So I suppose we can argue the same thing about connections in time.

Melody is then an illusion.

There are only the individual notes.

After all, if you're going to be a nominalist, then melody is something that just doesn't

exist at all.

Okay.

That's almost what the Buddhists say.

When I was explaining to you this morning, the moment, moment, moment, and you don't connect

the moments.

One moment, you know, the thing.

Well, that's the same, the same thing the same way.

I'm saying that all the connections are an illusion.

So the only, you push your nominalist right into the corner, you say, the only things that

exist are the multiplicity of atoms.

And actually they only exist now.

See?

Because...

Only...

You can't even say it.

Only this moment is real.

The ultimate hairline.

You see?

That's why the precisionist is making watches that have hairlines narrower and narrower and

narrower and narrower, so they can only be seen by amazing microscopes.

Exactly.

When does that thing cross that thing?

Boing!

See?

So, eventually, they're going to get down and down and down.

And the universe has no time to exist it, therefore it doesn't exist, therefore it's

an illusion.

That was what, what bugged Zeno when he got the paradox of motion.

Now, either an arrow is somewhere or it isn't.

If it's moving, it isn't anywhere, but it's obvious if it isn't anywhere, it couldn't exist.

You know, it's the same problem as Achilles and the tortoise.

Manifestly, the Achilles in a race overtakes the tortoise, but you can talk about this race

in such a way that he can't.

Well, how do you do the trick?

What you do is this.

Although Achilles in the physical world overtakes the tortoise, in the intellectual world, which

you are using to measure the process, you measure his approach to the tortoise by a

narrower and narrower scale as he approaches the tortoise.

Although he runs right by it, your measuring process gets more and more minute.

You take longer and longer to think about it, because you're counting more units, so that

you can indefinitely subdivide the distances he is passing in his approach to the tortoise.

And you can go on talking about their subdivisions forever.

So that in terms of your talking, he never gets by the tortoise, because you're drawing

the lines finer and finer and finer and finer and finer.

So now who's making the abstractions?

The nominalist was telling the realist, you're making the abstractions.

You're talking about these vast generalities called humanity and America.

But now who's making the abstractions?

I thought you were the prickly fellow who was so precise and said only these specific, particular

details exist, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you see?

But he disappears into abstraction.

So the pot calls the kettle black.

Now you see, that fight goes out the window.

Because they both, if you push them far enough, they come back to each other.

Push a realist far enough, and he comes into a nominalist.

Push a nominalist far enough, and he turns into a realist.

What does that mean?

Well it means the same thing as if you investigate matter thoroughly, you turn up with mind.

If you investigate mind thoroughly, you turn up with matter.

If you exist, if you investigate yourself, what do you mean by you?

How do you know you exist?

In terms of what?

What do you discover?

If you push that.

Why, you discover everything else that you thought wasn't you.

You only know you exist, uh, because you've got things to feel and other people to talk

to, and because you go, ya-ya-ya, you reflect the external world.

So investigate you and you get the external world.

Now what happens if you investigate the external world?

Well you get you.

Uh, that's what happens, you see, when finally the physicists wanted to know, how are things

like when we're not looking at them?

That's the great question, you see, in order to see how electrons behave, I've got to put

them in a process which influences their behavior.

I'm really bombarding electrons with electrons.

Now what is the electron doing when I'm not looking at it?

See, does the light really go off in the refrigerator when you close the door?

So you find, you see, that knowing, the act of knowing, changes what you are knowing.

Knowledge of something is the same as action upon it.

You do not know that a ball is rubber until you bounce it.

And that acts upon the ball.

And that's so with everything.

All knowing is not something you merely are a passive spectator.

All knowing is the result of experiments on things.

Only in the most trivial instances are you ever, and even then if you go into the neurology

of it, the electronics of it, you're not a passive spectator.

You may just observe things and write them down.

Although when you do, it's pretty trivial.

The really good knowledge is always accumulated by an action upon the world to see what changes

that action makes.

So for example, we take certain fields of science.

Let's take medicine and antibiotics.

Now antibiotics are something, first of all, done in very carefully restricted experiments.

They were found very useful, and so they were spread over the social world so that almost

everybody has had antibiotics by now.

But the problem now arises is this, that the people as we studied them before they ever had

antibiotics were different from the people we are studying now who have had them.

What we knew about people before antibiotics has a little less value.

We've got to restudy them every time, because we've changed them.

And the insects, you see, or the germs, also adapt to this.

They say, you know, these human beings throwing down all this jazz and confusing us and killing

us off, we've got to do something about that.

And so they change themselves, so they have to be studied again to know how to attack them

the next time.

Once upon a time, a spaceship arrived on a strange planet.

And they came down, and there didn't seem to be anything living on it.

And they put a lot of stores in.

And finally they found that some little bugs were eating the grain that they had stored.

So they got insecticides and fixed those bugs.

And later they found they had mice.

And they were nibbling up things, so they got some cats sent on the next spaceship from

Earth.

And the cats took care of the mice.

Then lo and behold, dogs turned up, started making trouble for the cats.

So they decided that they'd better shoot the dogs.

And they did.

And one day they saw suddenly a man coming over the horizon with a gun.

And they said to the chief, look at that, there are people on this planet after all, and he's

got a gun.

Shall we shoot him?

And he said, no, because I have no way of knowing what it will turn up as the next time.

Well now look here.

What I've been trying to show is that you cannot use the language of illusion.

That is to say, the language of accurate, separative description, too far, without getting into

confusion.

Push your nominalism, and it becomes realism.

Push your scientific materialism, and it turns into mysticism.

I love doing this, I've had great fun.

I gave a lecture at Harvard some time ago, on B.F Skinner.

And B.F Skinner is the arch-behaviourist.

He is Mr. Mechanist Psychology.

And I took many, many passages from his works and said, now just see what he's really saying

is so and so and so and so.

He's a mystic.

He really believes in the unity of the universe and all that jazz, you see, that the individual

organism is a function of the cosmos.

And if I say that, you see, I say he's a mystic, does this ruin his scientific reputation?

What does it do?

But that's, you see, that's the great game to play.

You just push it along its logical lines, and you arrive up in that predicament.

One way or the other, and it really doesn't matter which way you do it.

You either show that nothing exists at all on their terms, or else that it's all one.

So in this way, then, we have to resolve the problem of mind and matter by what I referred

to this morning as looking at these as dimensions of each other, or as different languages for

talking about the behaviour of the same thing.

What the thing is that's doing this behaviour, or the behaviour is that has no thing doing

it, really no one can say.

And you can't say what it is for exactly the same reason that you cannot touch the tip of

this finger with this finger.

To the tip of this finger, the tip of this finger is always inaccessible to its own touch,

you see.

And that's the problem of every nerve end.

The nerve end can tickle another nerve end and say, Hi, are you there?

Am I here?

And it says, Yes, you're here.

Oh.

But it needs another to do it.

Now, the whole universe hasn't got another to rub itself against.

So it can't define itself.

So the basic self in you can't define itself.

That's why the highest attainment in Zen is no attainment.

I know it involves no idea.

Why Buddha, when he talked in the Diamond Sutra to Subuti, says, Subuti, when I attained

complete and unexcelled awakening, I didn't attain anything at all.

But you can see, I think, that this nothing at all is a statement of the same kind as when

a logical positivist says, in making your metaphysical assertion, you said nothing at all.

And if you are Zen, you say, Correct.

I entirely agree with you.

And yet, you see, that nothing at all was all in all.

That was the thing.

That was the big thing.

You know, you lost everything and gained everything in one fell swoop as having nothing but possessing

all things.

Because obviously, you see, if the mirror weren't there, the images wouldn't be.

And there'd be no connection between them.

They couldn't, they couldn't jostle together.

If the water weren't there, how would the fishes get, get around?

If the air weren't there, how would the birds fly?

If consciousness weren't there, how would experiences occur, you see?

If being weren't there, how could there be beings?

So there are, in Buddhist philosophy, what are called the four inconceivables.

Water to the fish, air to the bird, consciousness to man, and enlightenment to the ignorant.

That is to say, to the ignorant in the sense that melody is inconceivable to the tone deaf

person, in the same way that color is inconceivable to the blind man, sound to the deaf man.

This is KPFK Los Angeles.

We just heard Alan Watts with part two of the four-part seminar, Reality, Art, and Illusion.

Now here is Alan Watts with part three of Reality, Art, and Illusion.

I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of illusion.

The question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not.

That is to say, whether the plot is comic or tragic.

And if it's tragic, you see, is it, must we say that it's ultimately tragic?

The question of who are you?

And are we to say that I myself, right down at root, am just a little kind of, that really

has nothing to do with this cosmos, but just arises in it, and is here on sufferance for

a short period, and then absolutely nothing follows, you see?

Or, the alternative to that, is what I really am, as the whole thing, that is, the works,

the it, or whatever you want to call it, Rahman, God, the Tao, the great void, the Buddha

nature, I don't care, the self, anything, any name you want.

And whereas that attitude, you can look at it from various points of view in judging it,

you can say, it's wishful thinking, you can say that it's insufferable pride, but the point

of the matter is, as I tried to show, any other way of looking at things is kind of schizoid.

It looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches

of a barren tree. They just got settled there, you know, they don't belong. The sense of being

strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Well, where is this other domain?

And how does it relate to this one? Are they separate? I showed you that even when we say

that two domains are the poles apart, the very fact that they're poles shows that they have

a hidden connection. And the hidden connection is the big thing in life. All you junkies know

that. And so, in other words, we get a pattern of organization that is radial, that are out of

the infinite waste of space, and sort of began to... Whereas the other pattern, which is so much

more sensible... And I showed you how the crystals, and the stars, and the octopuses, and even

the human beings, are all radial structures. Of course, we don't see our radial relationship

to the totality of the universe, because it isn't obvious. It's obvious that a tree is an arm

of the earth reaching up and waving at the sky. And a mountain is another kind of radiation from

the earth. And so is a leg from a body, and hair, and things like that. But what makes

human beings, as the highest of the mammals, so conscious of being independent, is that

they are topologically an enclosed surface, you see, which wanders around independently of

the ground. What we don't notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all. That

wandering around is something that is entirely related to there being some ground. In other

words, when you run up a hill, the hill also runs you up it. The hill rises and lifts you,

as you run, you see. And if you understand that, you don't take a hostile attitude to mountains

and hills. You're grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air, because that's presumably

why you went up. But the thing was high. It was lifted up. You wanted to be lifted up.

It lifted you up. You had to cooperate, of course. I always like the illustration that

I've used before, perhaps you haven't heard it, of the thistle-down. The thistle-down too

comes moving through the sky. I once was playing with the thing, you know, and it just came out

of the blue sky and it caught it like that. Pulled it under my nose and it started to pull,

to get away. See? Looks as if it were a butterfly or something that pulls away when you catch

it by the leg. And I thought, oh no, of course, that's not the thistle-down, it's the wind.

Well, which was it? You know, in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen,

there were two monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind, whether it was the wind

or the flag that was moving. And he said, it's neither, it's the mind. And so, in a way,

the same thing was true about the thistle-down. The mind is the moving thing because which point

of view will you take? Which attitude of mind will you take towards this? Is it the wind moving

the thistle-down? Or is it the thistle-down that is moving itself with the wind? After all,

when you see a sailing boat and there's a man in the sailing boat, who is moving the boat? Is it

the wind moving the boat? Or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a

sail? Much smarter way of getting around than rowing. You don't have to work. It's intelligence,

you see, the mind that moves the boat. And so, in the same way, I thought, you know,

this thistle-down has some kind of intelligence. It's radial, it's organized, it's beautiful. And

it's used that to sail itself with the wind, to enable itself to pull like a little organism playing

with the wind. And so, in just the same way, each one of us uses the universe to get around.

And the universe uses us to play with, and to make games and patterns, and to do its stuff.

So, because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin, that is a very deceptive

thing, because the skin is not really the boundary of man. You'll notice that in various periods of

art, human beings have been shaped in different ways, and have been more or less transparent at

some times, at other times opaque. And sometimes, the emphasis has been on the state of mind, which

this human being is in. At other times, the emphasis is on the bodily conformations, and so on. In the

work of painters today, one sees images that, at first sight, one doesn't recognize as being human.

There was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, some years ago, called The New Image

of Man. And these things didn't look like human beings at all. Some of them did, but that's because,

what does a human being look like? That depends on your point of view. You see, if you are prejudiced

that a human being is only what is inside his skin, then you think that when anybody paints the human

being beyond those boundaries, that he's lost the image of man. He hasn't necessarily lost it at all.

You see, there's an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man.

I don't know if you've ever heard that said. That man is the microcosm, and that the universe as a whole

is the macrocosm. Now, as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically,

it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that, at first sight, seem utterly remote.

How could they have anything to do with us? They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way,

when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body, you come across all kinds of funny

little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image.

Look at a spermatozoan under a microscope, that little tadpole. And how can that have any

connection with a grown human being? It's so unlike, you see. It's foreign feeling. And you get

the creeps sometimes, the foreign feeling about yourself, if you feel your own pulse. Or if you're

able to look at an x-ray, in some way, of your inner organs working. See, they're all strangers to us,

we don't know about them. And they give us the creeps, as if they were, you know, coming across

some weird insects in the dark. And that sort of feeling. But what we will always find out in the

end, you see, when we meet the very strange thing, and we look into the distant reaches of space,

there will one day be the dawning recognition. That's me. Why, that's me. And the, the whole game of

the universe, you see, is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can. That's how one keeps

variety going. That's how one keeps wonder going. And all kinds of exciting developments. How different

can you get? In the beginning, the Lord said, get lost to himself, you see. So, uh, we, we shall find,

for example, that space that you see all around you and containing you. And you can, in, feel space

in many ways. Space is not only something that comes through the eyes. The movement of your arms,

if with closed eyes, if for a blind person, is his way of knowing space. And you can hear space

audibly. Lots of, uh, sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces.

And, uh, silence that goes with sound corresponds to space.

And even St. Thomas Aquinas, that old Catholic theologian, said

that good derives its virtue from evil, just as it is the silent pause that gives sweetness to the

chant. So, but space, you see, that seems to contain. Space is one's mind. This was common sense to people

living, uh, in the early Renaissance, for example, at the time of Dante. There are many references in

Dante's poetry to the identity of mind and space. And in, likewise, in a eighth century text in China,

the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, he likens the nature of mind to the nature of space. He says,

just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the universe,

people in the mountains and the forests so the nature of mind the nature of

consciousness the nature of oneself contains all these things so you see

that if you think that way you have an image of man that is global that is very

different from the image in which man is defined as bounded by his skin that

that's a prejudice we think now for example I have my own private thoughts

nobody has private thoughts because one thinks in images and words and these

words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in

which you live we think thoughts the domain of mind is very similar to the

grid structure of an electric power supply system you know what happens is

there's a network of power stations and transformers so arranged that if one of

them gives out and fails to supply a certain area immediately the grid

connects them with other sources of power well in rather a similar way our minds are

connected let's take one very obvious example of it what Northrop Frye calls the

order of words the order of words is all existing literature both rhetoric what

is spoken of course and what is written down now it's his theory that as a scholar

of literature and the history of literature he can take any piece of

writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was written because everything

that is written and said is inescapably related to the whole order of words and

it's amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away because he

can say well obviously he has read this thinking say of a particular novelist or

poet so it must come after the date when that novel was published but he

couldn't possibly use an expression like that say for example that it was a

capital day he would never he would never use that expression living say in

contemporary 20th century America that's a Victorianism or as an Edwardian

way of talking and so in by all sorts of little clues like that the scholar can

pin down a piece of writing to when it was written you see that is because every

individual piece of writing is a function of all writing that's being done well now

that's a very specific and almost crude illustration of something that's going

on in a far more complicated way than that it isn't only all writing all thinking

is being done in relation to the total order of thought and in a still more

subtle way all living is being done in relation to the total order of life to what the

chardin calls the biosphere and it goes way beyond that because of the vast

interplay of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields which

embrace everything that there is that is why even the ancients when a person was

born cast his horoscope that was a map of the universe at the time of that

person's birth and therefore it was a drawing of his soul because the soul is

not inside the body the body is inside the soul the soul your soul is the whole

universe as it is focused upon your organism now of course astrology is a very

primitive science and it interpreted the influence of the universe upon the

individual in very crude ways and it works mostly by good guesswork on the

part of the astrologer if you know how to tell fortunes at a fair you will find out a

great deal about how all these predictive psychic sciences work because the client

invariably gives himself away either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his

anxiety to conceal it they work equally well now but but there is you see

underneath the astrological notion a sound idea that the true map of the soul is the

picture of the universe surrounding the individual it isn't necessarily the your

soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born you

see it goes along all the time you live because the whole thing expresses itself

through you and therefore in that sense the the map of the stars the horoscope

etc was a image of man in just the same way as we regard a picture of the human body as an image of

man and it's an image from a different point of view it's a bigger image it shows in

other words that your mind is very largely outside your body after all it's inside too

it's simultaneous you see I cannot think I can't have a mind without seeing feeling and relating to

other people without all the social institutions not only language but the laws the customs the

gestures the rituals by which we relate to each other all those things compose the mind for the

mind is a huge network of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity mind and

matter are of course polar they go together there are two ways of thinking about the same thing or shall

we say two dimensions of the same thing just like length and breadth or just shall we say like shape and color

you see nobody ever saw a shape that wasn't colored nobody ever saw a color that wasn't shaped and yet we

can see there's a very clear difference between color and shape but they always go together they're

always found together well it's the same sort of relationship between mind and matter and the

difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other and saying well the world is only

material or saying on the other hand that it's only mental is the same difference you would have in

trying to reduce all shapes to colors or all colors for shapes shape and color are made for each other like a

marriage made in heaven they go together so perfectly and yet stay so marvelously different that's why the

buddhist say difference is identity identity is difference it sounds goofy but it makes a great deal of

sense because what it's saying in is a relational thing that you don't know what identity is unless you know

what difference is and you don't know what difference is unless you know what identity is that relationship

between so-called opposites is called in the Chinese technical Taoist vocabulary mutual arising so they say to be and

not to be arise mutually high and low are mutually posited long and short are mutually delineated and so on now what we see then is the

totality of the cosmos focused at each point, you see, gives rise to the illusion of the

independence of the point from the whole. Just as the human being by virtue of having

an enclosed epidermis and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground

presents the illusion of being separate. And so that's why I asked Vada to do these

demonstrations last night because he showed visually the interdependence of the

figure and the background and how the two play together, how you can switch from

paying attention to one to paying attention to the other and in each case

it's significant. That is an art that we have lost in our day-to-day perception of

life and it leads, practically speaking, to the serious problem of ecological

blindness. That is to say, to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer

from, especially in our culture, that they are inseparably related to their

physical environment. It looks as if we aren't. It looks as if we can go out with

bulldozers and insecticides and every kind of a gadget and make over our

physical environment as it suits our whims. But then we discover to our

consternation that we've upset all sorts of balances. That the house we made such a

nice flat lot for on the hillside suddenly slides down the hill when there's a

rainstorm because we took away all the shrubbery that was binding the hill

together. And, you know, this happens in Hollywood every day. And nobody ever seems to

learn. And that's, you see, this immense importance of overcoming the illusion of

separateness. But people are afraid of that because they think it's communistic. They

think that, uh, the West, the, the grand style, the great thing about Western

civilization, is its stress on individual personality and its value. And that we have

created the ideal of personal integrity. That is to say that the most important thing

in the world is the individual. All collectivities, corporations, states, and so on, exist as servants

of the individual. And if they get in his way and they interfere with his private

enterprise, whatever that may be, uh, it's a bad thing. Man, the individual, is the crown

of creation from this point of view. And therefore, when anybody suggests that individual man is not

what you thought was an individual, but is in some way, um, united with, grounded in the totality,

then if you're of this kind of rugged individualist, you mix up your vocabulary and you call the totality

the collective. Now, the collective and the totality are two completely different things. The idea of

collectivism is based on individualism. It's the idea that the society of mankind and the physical

environment beyond it is a collection with nothing of the kind. That's a, that's the, that's the idea

of cosmic flotsam and jetsam that all floated together into a collection. And that's the odverse

of individualism. You know, American individualism is the same philosophy as Marxist collectivism, seen

from the other side. Because they're both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality.

Now, what people don't understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter of being

isolated. It's a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one's relationship to the whole

surrounding cosmos. Let's suppose that I'm preparing to make a date with some lady and she's such an

individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself. She never thinks about anything that isn't

herself. Well, she's an awful bore. She has nothing to say. She's not interested in any books, in any

landscapes, in any works of art, in any literature, in any other people. She's a total bore. But the more,

on the other hand, she would be interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself,

the more of a colourful personality she becomes. So, the rule is to get away, you see, from these ideas

of the individual, as finding his individuality and uniqueness through independence, but rather finding

his individuality and uniqueness through being related. Because, you see, that's what makes us look at, look at

the word relation from another point of view, when we talk about our friends and relations. Supposing I come across some

individual who I can't make out what kind of a thing he is. I can't make out where he came from. His accent isn't

American. It isn't British. It isn't particularly Middle Western. It certainly doesn't have the overtones of New York or

New England. He just talks flat. And as to his style of clothing, it's utterly nondescript. Well, I think this is

pretty much of a bore. What I like to see in an individuality, in a physical individual, is ways that I can relate

him to his ancestry. That he has this little subtle accent, or this mannerism, or this eccentricity, or whatever

it is, that connects him with a great background. You see? But it's his connection with his background that makes

him so significant. If I can't see that connection, he becomes uninteresting. So, there is no thought in this

approach to devalue the individual. What really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or

political philosophy that overstresses his isolation. And this is something that Californians, in particular,

need to take note of. And because many, many people feel, you see, that the development of technology, and of

centralized government, is a direct threat to the value of personality. Well, in some ways it is. But that is only

because technology is being developed by personalities who don't understand what personality is. They're working on the

old individualist-collectivist point of view. They're the same. So then, you see, this is then the illusion created. That the

individual is operating all by himself. That actions and thoughts and deeds proceed solely from inside his skin, so that we can say,

there's where it started. You see? Well, that's the game of praising and blaming. The game of who started it, who can we

give candy to, who can we bang on the head. In other words, somebody has to be it. As in the farmer in the dell, you know, and

finally get the end, the cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone. I heard the dairy over cheese stands alone.

Well, why? Who started it? The group. Well, another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility, if they see through the illusion of separateness.

The truth of the matter is, actually, that no philosophy of history has really succeeded in making anybody more or less responsible. In other

words, let's say that you are a Christian, a Catholic, of the old-fashioned medieval type, who believes that you've got an

individual soul with free will, and that you're under responsibility to God, to obey his law, and that if you don't, the most

disastrous consequences imaginable will befall you. You'll fry in hell forever. There's no evidence whatsoever that believing in that

made people any more virtuous than they are today. None at all. Indeed, clergy who believed in all this, owned whorehouses, and, uh, are all

all kinds of things, uh, uh, they were just as contemptuous of law and order as anybody could be now. And part of the reason

was, of course, that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty, like the H-bomb. Uh, it's just too big to think about, and really brings

justice into disrespect, because it uses such crude and clumsy methods. You know, it's like, uh, using a-a steam hammer to drive in tax.

Responsibility is a thing like a nice face, which you either have or haven't. Uh, certain backgrounds, certain interests, certain

certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings. And, uh, they-they live that way, not because

they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible. It's because

they're intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all round.

That's all there is to it. And, uh, of course, that's all is a big all, but, you-you won't, in other-what I'm saying is, the people who are

frightened that people will-other people will abandon responsibility, never did have any way of thinking that would guarantee that

people would be responsible. There is no such guarantee. If there were, we should be automata.

Now, I want to switch to another aspect of illusion. The quickness of the hand to seize the eye. And that is, of course,

the great illusion of what we call matter. Density. Impenetrability. Opacity. I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter,

because I'm a materialist. That is to say, I like material. And though I may seem to you to be quite self-contradictory.

For example, a wine should have body. Pure alcohol doesn't. And it's terribly important in human character

for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism between sensuality and spirituality. You see,

people who are purely sensuous and materialistic get very boring. You can fill your lives with all good things. With, uh,

alpha-romeos and hi-fis and wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and, uh, criss-crafts and, uh,

dry martinis and Chanel No. 5, you know. And after a while, if that's all you've got, it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the martinis taste like medicine.

And somehow, uh, you get a distaste for life. And even for mountains and trees and waters. And then on the other hand, the purely spiritual approach to things is, uh, too rarefied. Too earnest. Too abstract. Too, uh, purely Euclidean. And, uh, the, the people who are intensely spiritual and don't have any sense of the

spirituality are always desperately serious. Colorless. Lacking in humor. And never are able to meet one as man to man with a kind of a friendly leer in the eye.

That's terribly important. They live at a level of frantic intensity. I see that these two extremes need each other. They're, say, spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp. And sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars. You know, to wonder about.

The sensualist as such, the materialist as such has no wonder. And the mystic, the pure mystic, has no body. He's pure. So, if then one should say that material is an illusion, this seems to be selling out to the spirit people and to the mystics.

And so, Christian scientists are generally speaking as personalities totally lacking in materialism. And they're prissy and, uh, lacking in color. And their churches are very, very disagreeable.

They're all reading desks. And they're too bookish. And they, they have no ritual, no ceremonies, no, no verb. You see? It's all cerebral. And, uh, likewise, um, when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism, they go into the same ultra mysticism.

Ultra mysticism. They start disbelieving in all material pleasures as crutches. And it's very bad to have crutches, you see?

Uh, you shouldn't take aspirin when you've got a headache. Uh, you shouldn't wear glasses. Uh, you shouldn't, um, show dependence on anything.

You mustn't like your food too much, because that's becoming, uh, gluttonous. So you eat very plain food, which is not spiced, and you eat it out of a sense of duty.

That is to keep the body functioning. Uh, you drink only water, because other drinks might cause certain dependencies and give you too much pleasure.

And because the idea is, you see, you've got to control your mind and keep it absolutely calm and still, so that you are not dependent on matter.

And that's altogether the wrong approach, because, uh, well, I mean, it is a game you can play. It is one of these possible things.

I mean, you can play the Jehovah's Witness game. You can play the Three Seed and the Spirit Baptist game.

All these are various things which you can play, just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or, uh, fishing or something like that.

But, uh, what happens is, you see, that the, the, the notion that the material world is an illusion is turned into a judgment of value.

If it's an illusion, therefore, it's bad. I ought not to be under this illusion.

Well, the reality of the matter is, that if you see that the material world is an illusion, you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn't.

A true materialist, therefore, is one who knows that material is an illusion.

Then he's not afraid of it. Then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest.

Because, you see, if you're a false and a fake materialist, what's happened?

You've borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac, an impressive house, a ranch style with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool.

And you've bought, uh, a lot of stock and you somehow wangled the money and borrowed it.

And you keep lying away at night wondering if you're going to make the payments.

Well, there's no point in that at all.

Well, how can you possibly enjoy all this jazz?

If that's the kind of jazz you want to enjoy, you've got to worry about whether you pay for it or not.

And you get hopelessly involved, you get commitments here, commitments there, and finally you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself.

The only way to enjoy material is to disbelieve in it.

Just as one can disbelieve in money.

Uh, then you, you can have zest for it. You see?

Otherwise it's much better to be poor.

I mean, if you, if you have no taste for the, this kind of life and, uh, no real interest in it, but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons, it's much better to stay poor.

Not have any of that stuff at all.

So, then this is the important thing I'm trying to say.

Material is an illusion, but a great illusion.

And the point is to swing it and not to run away from it on the one hand or to get stuck on it in the other.

Then you can play with it.

Just like a wheel going round.

The wheel is too loose on the axle that wobbles all over the place.

If it's too tight, it won't revolve.

But you kind of sit loose, you see, to this thing.

Not too loose though.

Now, in what way then is the material world an illusion?

Well, we know a lot about this now from our physics.

And we know that what we call solidity is force.

Contained force.

The agitation of particles or wavicles or whatever they are at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations.

So that when I put my foot on the floor, the reason it doesn't go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can penetrate.

Like an airplane propeller, you can't put your head through it without...

getting it chopped off only that if it were going far faster still it wouldn't

even cut your head off it would just be like banging your head against the brick

wall and it has to be going fast to within an extraordinarily small and

restricted space the airplane propeller is whizzing around through a

considerable space in relation to the size of the head but if it were going

much faster but through much smaller spaces you see then it would be like

banging your head against the brick wall so what we've got in our so-called

physical objective world is a behavior of energy where the where matter arises from

it through its behavior in restricted spaces density is a quality of space

rather than a quality of matter you see what I mean I gave the illustration of

the airplane propeller to try and show that so that are all this is an

electronic diathomous world very similar to

other creations of electronic patterns the dance of forms on the TV screen the

rainbow the aurora borealis it's all fundamentally like that only we are of

the same kind of jazz you see our bodies are this dance too and therefore the

the physical world feels real to us in other words it feels solid because we are

something of the same time if we were on a different wavelength we'd walk right

through it in the same way as radio waves come right through the house they are of

such a nature that they can penetrate the in the spaces the interstices or in some

way jazz signals through and we are on the same wavelength you see as the wall and so

don't go through it but nevertheless the whole cosmos is therefore a function of

energy or you could say of light something like light and therefore we and it are

all diaphanous now it's easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren't

so dense there's only one other creature as intelligent as man and this lives in a

medium that is less dense and this is the dolphin the dolphin is a mammal and many

millions of years ago it seems the dolphins were living on the land but they are

very clever and they decided that the land was no place to live because getting

food was difficult and you have to lug yourself around and there were many many

bad shows about the land it had very curious changes of temperature it became

unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot and you had in fact to work and no

sensible person ever works I never work I get played for playing and everybody

should do that that's the the mark of an educated man is that eventually he gets a

job where he's paid for playing and a worker or a proletarian isn't necessarily a

poor man lots of put them in a poor man like say say Lee Morgan Roth or Eric Barker

around here they're not proletarians proletarian is a person who is fettered to

the process of work that is to say to doing chores every day that he really

doesn't like and that aren't in the least interesting in order to go on living so the

port the the dolphins decided this is ridiculous this land existence and they

went back to the water and it's pretty easy to fish you see there are plenty of

fish in the water and things to eat as we know the ocean is the greatest food

supply in the world and when they've eaten a few fish or whatever they need they

decided just to have a ball so the dolphin can get abreast of a ship get one of the

the wakes coming out on the side can set its tail at an angle of 26 degrees no and

be pushed along by the ship and it's not going anywhere there's no reason to go

along there as you know as if it had to get to another part of the sea is pretty

much the same all through but they're just going and they chatter and dance and

they're they're they're really highly civilized beings and so please don't

anybody ever kill dolphins or be unkind to dolphin because they're exemplary

high-minded creatures and we shall soon discover this as soon as we can set up

communication with them they will tell us all about it and we will then invent new

style of civilization based on frolic

but you see that they they they dance in the in the mode of water now human

beings as Toynbee has pointed out as their civilization progresses they begin to lose

their roots and they are less and less tied to the land they go into the air and

what's going to happen as if man develops without blowing himself to bits he can get

over the hurdle you see that dangerous point is that gradually all roads are

going to disappear and the earth will have centers of human habitation you see

but no roads they'll be as obsolete as railroad tracks because everybody will

fly and once you're in the the medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of

water and as we fly you see on the land your values are all values of

permanent solidity firmness they're architectonic in the sense of our great

stone structures pyramids and things like that but in the air and on the water all

values are fluid and what you have to know to be a good airman is of course

stars like white throats and other migrating birds migrate by the stars imagine but once

you start relating yourself to the stars you realize that you're living in a

universe where directions are all relative and you become a being capable of

existing in non-solidity and that's why Buckminster Fuller you know believed that

all techniques and really all culture came from the sea the men who first learned to

sail with the wise men he has a fantastic idea that there were initiates great

priests who were ships captains and that although some of their humble seamen didn't

know all the secrets these priests were the first people who knew that the world

was round and that that gives one an entirely different theology you see and if

you believe that the world is flat and so from the the priests of the ocean the

landsmen learned how to use cranes blocks and tackles how to build how what a good house an

overturned ship made and so to this day a cathedral has a nave as its central auditorium nave from

latin navis ship showing the connections between ships and the first temples so fuller goes on to say

now if you're a good architect as the ancient architects learn from the ocean first thing you

should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane

factory and understand the beautiful thing that man has made in a fine fine airplane you see which

is as great as a bird in its own way because that's the architecture of insecurity and that

he really lives with insecurity

this is kpfk los angeles we've just heard alan watts

part three of the four-part seminar

reality art and illusion

just a short resume about this morning

i was discussing the various meanings of the word maya which in sanskrit means illusion

or at least that's the way it's generally translated

now i was trying to explain that it doesn't necessarily mean illusion in a bad sense

when we say a person is suffering from delusions hallucinations

and so on it's always a put-down word

but maya is not so necessary

so i showed you how

it has

the meanings of measurement

as when we pretend

that the world is divisible actually into feet or inches

or seconds

or degrees

and divide

things from each other

by these measurements that is to say

by

the cutting power of thought

thought from in the latin skio

means to cut

and so thought is

you see that what you have to understand is that everything

is really a think

a thing is a unit of thought in the same way as an inch is a unit of measurement

we divide

the wiggly

continuous

wobbly

wild

rorschach

blot of the physical universe

into things

so that we can think about it

and one thinks by

a process which is essentially the calculus

calculate

calculates what was it originally

so the word calculus means a pebble

originally

so i can't i remember something one two three four times four pebbles

like using your fingers

rosaries have been used for this purpose

and so later the abacus

as a kind of amazing rosary

uh... that's calculation you see

pretending that the world is a collection of bits

but the world isn't the collection of bits

the world is continuous in the sense that

every bit of it is interrelated as much as a human body

and you realize

you know

if you magnify the human body

to an enormous degree so that you are looking at its individual molecules

one molecule of our body is

the size of my fist

say you know

magnified to that size

the next one would be the other side of the room

now what joins them together

i move my hand all those vastly separated molecules all move together

they haven't any strings tied between them

and it's the same way when the little birds fly

in my boat in Sausalito we have a lot of little tiny tiny sandpipers

and they fly having one mind

they become a total organism when they fly

and they change direction instantly

i mean it isn't that they turn like this and follow the leader

they're going like that and then they go like that

and they're only individuals when they start pecking on the mud

then they wander around all over the place

but the slightest movement

they're all in the air again

and going as one mind

now that's how your molecules move in your hand

so

but so calculus

pretends that the molecules are separate

they're not

they're related to each other by the space between them

and space is relationship

space is order

i remember this one's very vivid illustration

i had a friend who was giving a lecture

and she wanted us to use her studio

for the lecture

and she had some

those canvas chairs that you pull open like that

and they have arms

canvas back and canvas seat

you know movie directors chairs

and she got them all lined up across the room

this way

and she said i can't possibly get all the people in here

i said wait a minute

space is order

you say you don't have enough space

you do

so i put the speaker at that side of the room

and i arranged all the chairs

round

and coming across like that

then the next row

and the next row

and there are far more seats in there than they had before

you see

so space is order

space is terribly important

but the maya that i pointed out you see

is that

we ignore it

so maya is measurement

singing

chopping things into bits so as to count them

number two maya

is play

that is to say

it's um

it's a game

it's hide and seek

the universe is playing peekaboo with itself

now you see it

now you don't

and the basis of that is the throb

of vibration

up

and then down

up and then down

which is male

female

positive negative

light

darkness

this side

that side

see

everything is going

and it's going so fast

that it seems to be

continuous

but now you see it

now you don't

see solid space

here and gone

everything is

is that

see if i put my

your my hand on your knee

and uh you

leave it there

you cease to remember i'm there

but if i do this

you know i'm there all the time

because each time it's renewed

so

it's play

maya is also magic

and i gave the illustration of the theater

of creating the illusion

that the drama is reality

all the illusory possibilities of the theatrical art

then i meant specifically maya is art

maya is skill

in

creating something

and i showed how the artist

can give us

all kinds of different visions of the universe

from the vision of

let's say

jato

with its amazing transparency

to

rembrandt

with its density

to the great

great flemish painters

like

van eyck

who begin

photographic realism

onto

the

similar painters

of the 19th century

and then through

picasso

and so on to

splatters

like jackson pollard

enabling us to see the world in different ways

by their revelation

and so the possibilities of artistry

are infinite

more and more artists will come and notice the world in different ways

and there are probably infinitely many ways in which the world can be noticed

only the human mind has works at a certain pace

it seems incapable of bringing

uh...

more than a few at a time

don't assimilate them

and then i discussed the final question

does that mean that the world is nothing but our imagination

that is to say

going back to the analogy of the rorschach blot

we say in testing a person on a rorschach blot

that uh... he projects a story or a picture into the blot

and that reveals not something about the nature of the blot but about the

condition of his psychological structure

are we going to have to say that in the same way

all scientific knowledge about the universe

is a projection

you see that's been very cogently argued

it's argued for example that laws of nature

do not exist in nature

but are methods of

measuring nature

in other words

to say that

uh... stones always fall

downwards to the center of the earth

we invent for that the law of gravity

now

is that a law

is there something called the law of gravity

which stones obey

well many scientists would say no

if the stone didn't fall to the ground it would be a balloon

uh...

it obeys no law it does that

and we make a law out of it simply because it happens regularly

if i regularly do what you tell me to

that becomes in human affairs a law

but nobody tells the stone that it's got to fall down

it does so

because that's part of the definition of being a stone

if it didn't it would be a balloon

or a feather in the wind

so laws of nature are regarded by some scientists

as tools

invented by human beings

and to say that there is a law of gravity

is neither more nor less true than saying there are three feet in a yard

because we arranged it that way

although twenty-four hours in a day

laws are simply

observed regularities

and we make these regularities by the way we look at things

we might not even notice that stones fell to the ground unless it was significant to us

but

the difficulty of pushing that theory too far

is that it makes the human mind ridiculously independent of the physical world

say that everything is a projection

out of the human mind

would be to say that the human mind isn't really part of the world

but it is

our being is continuous with the being of the whole universe as i explained

each one of us is something

just as every wave is something that the sea is doing

and well we are waves of the universe and it's waving and saying

you i'm here

and i'm called alan watts right now

but it's called so and so and so and so and so and so and so all around the room

but it's all the same thing doing this jazz

and i explained how we have been taught to ignore that

and to be under the illusion that we're all

now that was what we were talking about this morning

now i i want to press one aspect of this theme particularly this afternoon which is the aspect of play

the distinction uh the the you see the whole point is

that a man who's who knows

a woman

is it objectionable to you that we have to use man as the general word for human beings

anyway that the person who knows

that this is maya

is as i said somewhat disconcerting because we know that he doesn't take life seriously

that is to say he doesn't take it absolutely seriously

he takes it seriously up to a point

but as we might say when it really comes down to it he doesn't

now you might think that such a person

would be extremely undependable

and therefore he's ethically suspect

if he knows that all the distinctions between good and evil

and between life and death

between uh the valuable and the non-valuable

if he knows that all those distinctions are illusory

would he not be

we're afraid a very dangerous person

would he fail to keep his contract

heal when he felt like it

would he bump somebody off when it suited his convenience

isn't it more trustworthy

for human beings to believe that there are absolute laws

that it matters absolutely

that you never kill anybody

et cetera

now this is a very

fascinating question

and i want to suggest to you first of all

that

a person who believes

in absolute laws

is liable to be quite dangerous

because

he puts

rigid structures

in a place of higher honor

than

oh such a good old word

that no longer used

inwit

i-n-w-i-t

inwit

and what is inwit?

the Chinese word

which uh

has to be

the gift and the essential virtue of a good judge

good judge in the law courts

and this word

uh

like this

you know

um

is pronounced li

there are several kinds of li in Chinese

but this one means an innate sense of fair play

of equity

which can't be written down in laws

it can't be formulated

they also have a word for laws that can be formulated

which is

looks like that

because

their character

was originally this

and they had picture writing

and that's a picture

of a

bronze cauldron

with a knife beside it

because

in very ancient times

when people brought sacrifices

to the sacrificial cauldrons

a-

the rulers caused the laws

to be engraved on the cauldrons

so that they would read them

and the sages said

that is a bad idea

because the moment the people know what the laws are

in literal terms

they will develop a litigious spirit

and they will start haggling over words

so

although there has to be the tse

the formulated law

a good judge must know a lot more than the written law

he must have a sense of equity

because every case that comes to his attention is really different

there is no way of describing exhaustively all the possible relationships between man and man

and so a judge has to have this sort of rule of thumb like a good gardener has to have a green thumb

which is something beyond anything you can read in a book

so uh...

belief

is the sense of justice

tse

would be belief

in absolutes

in that you must never do so and so

or you must always do so and so

thou shalt thou shalt not

so a person who holds to absolute rules

will be an inflexible fool

when it comes to the test

he is reliable up to a point

but this is what you get in bureaucracy

i'm sorry to say it but there is a specially

offensive kind of

usually female secretary

of some government department

who is utterly unreasonable

totally goes by the book

and will not under any circumstances do anything one way or the other beyond the letter

well

people like that have a certain use

but they have the same sort of uses machinery

machinery which is foolproof which does the same everything every time and can't be changed

but there must always be some boss over this kind of person

who can consider the case from a different point of view

and say well obviously in this case the rules are unreasonable and they have to be altered

so you see a person who takes the laws absolutely seriously becomes inflexible

and therefore mechanical and therefore inhuman

now it's like the roman catholics

when they get on this bit about birth control or

divorce or something like that

they get utterly inflexible and they seem to enjoy being inflexible

because they think it's a mark of tough mindedness

you know i've been most endless theological controversies going on these days

i don't know if you know it perhaps some of you don't read these things

but i have a certain interest in uh... christianity

and uh...

i love reading the theological controversies

well there's a character called the bishop of woolwich in england

who's written a book that stirred everybody up

and there's not really anything new in it but he's just suggesting that god

isn't an old gentleman with a beard

and uh...

it seems to have created a terrific turmoil

and uh...

people though who are standing the opposition to all this

want to say

all this liberal thinking is vague

and therefore wishy-washy and gutless

to prove that you have guts you've got to believe something absurd

and stick to it

see come hell or high water you believe that the virgin mary was sucked up bodily into heaven

no and it really went up

see and brrrr

all these other people are weak-minded

because they reduce these eternal dogmatic truths to mere myths and symbols

see

and they they they get a sense of masculinity out of this

just in the same way as some people get a sense of masculinity out of being fascists

do they believe we've got a real tough political theory

colonel damn it shoot them all used to call them in england

and uh... they they they stick to this and they think that now i feel like a man

you see

or i feel like a real businesswoman like ayn rand or you know

they they they they like to be

they they they like to be

i'm an individual you see

like that

but these people are inflexible fools

because they they they have no give

they don't know when to give

and the whole art is to

have a certain rigidity in life

but always to know when to give

see

that's judo

so in the same way

person who takes life absolutely seriously doesn't know when to give

and he has this idea you see that life is a contest

and that we got to win

and we've got to win

now if you go into a battle

with the idea that

you've got to win

you get nervous

like walking across a wall

with a big drop on one side

feeling that you've got to stay steady

you start worrying

And, like someone once told me when I was a boy, that there was a certain examination and I simply must not fail it.

It just, I had to get it, you know, I got absolutely nonplussed by the whole situation.

Because, you see, you've got to have a certain flexibility.

So that when you know it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, then you can really play.

This is the secret of all gamesmanship.

To play golf, you know, stop caring.

You've got to learn some technique first, whatever it is, but then stop worrying.

How do you think you drive a car?

You learn the things to do and then you go zooming along.

It's terribly dangerous to drive a car, much more unsafe than taking a ride in a plane.

And yet we all do it.

Nobody seems to worry much about it.

Well, that's how to drive.

But if you get nervous on the road, you react too fast and you're all over the place, you're a mess and a nuisance.

So you mustn't take it quite seriously.

So then the fellow who regards life as fundamentally an illusion would on the whole then be more reliable than the person who is in dead earnest.

Because he has basically at his heart the most valuable human trait, which is the ability to come off it.

You know, you say to someone, oh, drop it, you know.

And in the end, you see, a man who can come off it, who may make a terrific case for some point of view, but has a certain twinkle in his eye.

You see, this is a true human being and has what Confucius would call Run, spelled J-E-N for some reason.

This is human heartedness.

And that is human heartedness because it is at the heart of the nature of things and the nature of things is play.

Now, we contrast here, you see, the two fundamental views of life as set forward in the drama.

You remember the comic and the tragic masks.

The tragic view of the world is that the world is a... you can take it from two points of view.

They really come to the same thing.

But one of the points of view is in the tragic idea.

The world contains the possibility of an irremediable disaster.

Things can go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the most vivid representation of the tragic view in all history is, of course, Christianity.

Orthodox, old-fashioned Christianity in which there is the possibility of eternal damnation.

See, that is things going wrong always.

It isn't the king that is not just a failure that you die and cease, but that you are tortured forever, without hope of respite, forever and ever and ever and ever.

That's the maximum tragic view of the world.

So, in that view of the cosmos, things are very serious indeed.

Because that might happen to you.

And you must not let it happen.

That's absolutely necessary to be avoided.

Now, on the other hand, you see, although the Hindu and Buddhist mythologies have their various purgatories rather than hells.

There's one called Avicii, which is the deepest of all these purgatories.

And the souls that get lost in Avicii are there for an unendurably long time.

Many kalpas, and a kalpa is 4,320,000 years.

But in the end, they get out.

In other words, when they've paid for their bad karma that gets from there, they get out and begin again.

So, it isn't quite serious.

It's very serious, but not absolutely serious.

You see?

And that's the difference.

So, in this Hindu view, the Lord, in his Maya creation of the world, creates terribly serious situations.

He scares himself out of his own wits by playing that he's all of us.

And imagining, forgetting who he is, you see, or what he is.

And imagining that he's us.

And he is terrified, or thinks he is, by all the situations of life.

And, nevertheless, in the end, it turns out it was all a game.

It was all hide and seek.

Now, what about that?

You see?

When we think of that as a point of view, let's not ask whether or not it's true.

No serious philosopher asks anymore whether things are true or not.

He only asks whether they're plausible.

We can say no more.

It would be arrogance to say more.

Truth is a dimension where we stop talking, you know.

We know things in another way than words.

But, it is plausible, because we could say, well, does a thing have to be absolute to be important?

It is important that we make a distinction between good and bad.

It's not good to murder people, generally speaking.

You see?

That's important.

But, to make it important, do we really have to make it absolutely important?

See, I tell you, the religious mentality, or not only the religious mentality,

but the kind of mentality you find around.

What's the real secret of it is it loves to have something to condemn.

One of the most, one of the biggest kicks a person can have is to feel righteous indignation.

And also, people who go to church love to be lectured and scolded.

A real scoldy sermon from a Baptist preacher is a big, big bang.

They come out feeling so satisfactory.

So, supposing then we say, well, in the end, all the sinners and the dreadful people who lived in the world

will realize that they were manifestations of God like everybody else.

Some people stop and think about that and say, oh dear, a very dangerous doctrine.

What they are really worrying about is that they are not going to have the satisfaction

of seeing those people they don't like writhing in torment forever and ever.

Now who ought to be fried in hell? You know?

And so this is saying, you see, that if a thing is not important,

when it's not eternal,

say there was no point in singing a song because it came to an end.

No, there was no point in marrying this girl because she eventually died.

There was no point in anything that's finite in time, you see.

That's the argument.

But it obviously is important that a song be sung, even though it ends,

that a person live, even though they die,

because that's the rhythm of life.

People who take this point of view

that what isn't ultimately serious isn't serious at all

are simply crude in their thinking.

They just plainly lack judgment.

They're like children who have to believe that two and two are always and invariably four

because they might say one day they were five.

These children are a little whimsical.

So then, the idea of Maya suggests two things, really,

which are very difficult things for most of us to accept

because they're so outrageous in comparison with our accustomed viewpoints.

The one side of what it suggests is that life is not ultimately serious.

If you fall far enough, you'll find there's no concrete to hit

because you are one with a free-floating universe that has nothing outside it.

I sometimes say, you know, that when God created the world, what he really did,

I gave you one other version of it this morning, but he said,

have a ball.

See, what are you going to do with this ball?

There's nowhere to put it.

It can't get lost.

There it is.

It's the ball of being, you see.

Have a ball, you see.

So, the thought that all this life which is so intensely involved and tragic and struggle

is really diathomous.

It's like a dream.

Would you dare believe that?

This is a test of nerve.

The other side to the doctrine is that you, in your heart of hearts, are really the Lord,

playing but being you.

Will you dare believe that?

I mean, we often say that's the touchstone of madness in our culture.

A person who thinks he's God is really out of his wits.

Only, of course, it depends what kind of a God you're thinking about.

If you're thinking about Mr. Know-It-All, who can explain how everything's done,

that would be one story, you'd be pretty much of a megalomaniac.

But God, as the Hindus and Buddhists think of God,

it's really wrong to use the word God, perhaps, for this being,

or both neither being or non-being.

But, in their idea, you see, the Lord doesn't have to know how things are done.

He just doesn't.

The same way you grow your hair without knowing how to.

And so, a person who realizes he is the Lord in disguise,

does not therefore claim to know all the answers to all possible scientific questions.

But the conviction, you see, that you are somehow within the inmost depth of your being,

the works, the reality of everything that there is, you see.

You are it.

Tatva Masi, it said in Sanskrit, that art thou.

Now, is that...

See, these two things.

It isn't serious, and you are it.

We react in our cultural background against these things

because they seem to be haughty.

They seem to be fantasy, fantastic, claiming too much, getting too big for one's boots.

Because we are used to feeling that we are right if we cringe.

The moment we start talking ourselves down and saying,

well, I am just a little fragment of dust.

I come into being, I disappear, I am a mess, I am imperfect,

I don't know anything, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

We feel safe when we do that.

It's like feeling that you are right when you hurt.

Oh, I bless the good Lord for my boils, for my mental and bodily pains,

for without them my faith all congeals, and I am doomed to hell's near-ending pains.

How very good it is for me to hurt so much.

See?

We have been brought up to feel that way.

And also, to be very careful about letting anyone know we are happy.

The gods might overhear.

It's not good for you to be happy.

You might get uppish.

You might have hybris, pride, and start boasting to the heavens.

And then the old gentleman would get annoyed,

because the old gentleman is pretty insecure.

And he doesn't like the children rushing around and stamping their feet.

Something might happen.

They might go too far.

You see?

So...

To you.

So then if we can...

Oh, but I...

Excuse me.

Pardon me for having the disgusting effrontery to exist.

But you see, this is fake.

It's as fake as it can be.

It's phony.

It's another kind of pride.

How good I am at being humble.

Hmm?

And it's terribly dishonest.

And, uh...

It is something that our cultural attitudes take very seriously.

And the trouble is that having taken this seriously,

and having felt for so long through literature,

through schooling, through attitudes of teachers and preachers and parents,

that it's good for us to be humble.

When we revolt against it, we go make the opposite mistake, you see,

of being unnecessarily cocky.

Because that's compensation.

There is no need, you see, to take on the universe and say,

I'm man, I'm the works, I'm the Lord in disguise, and all this can get lost.

You don't need to do that.

If you really know, you see, as I said at the end of this morning's talk,

to believe that you are the disguised Lord is unnecessary.

It's a form of doubt.

So, in the same way, to assert it in a kind of defiant way

is also a form of doubt.

Although, please, remember, you're perfectly free to do that.

Don't get caught in it by feeling that you oughtn't to.

You know, I remember when I was a child,

we used to read that the sin against the Holy Ghost was unforgivable.

Just wonder what the sin against the Holy Ghost was.

And there'd be a little thing in the back of your mind, whispering,

Damn the Holy Ghost!

How are the Holy Ghost, you know?

You're just, you know, you're absolutely sucked into it by the very prohibition,

the kind of vertigo where a person looks so repressive,

feels he's got to throw himself down.

It's a funny thing in human psychology.

So, in many forms of symbolism that you find in the Orient,

there is the idea of the liberated man, who he is,

as a man who can't be phased.

You know, for example, that Bodhidharma,

who's supposed to have brought Zen to China,

is made into a toy in Japan.

which is like a shmoo,

only it's this shape.

And it's weighted so that you can't knock it over.

Push it down, but it always springs up.

And this is the sort of figure of this.

It says a poem,

Seven times down and eight times up, such is life.

Or it may be the image in Hindu literature of the tightrope walker.

The man walking the path of the razor's edge.

It's the balance again, you see.

But the Bodhidharma is in a way more flexible.

He can be pushed right to the floor, but the minute you let go, he's back up.

Or the Taoist image of water.

You can squeeze it, you can jump on it, you can cut it, but you can't hurt it.

It always comes together again.

Look, for example, I gave the illustration this morning of a human being as something like a whirlpool in water.

Constantly changing, but always the same.

Now what happens if you chop up a whirlpool?

You know, you can smash it, you can put your fist through it.

And you can make it disappear for a while.

But after a while, there's the pattern again.

See?

So in the same way we think we can solve problems with violence.

We think we can...

Look, killing people is an answer to a problem.

It's only temporary.

As if you knock out, say, a Hitler.

Another one comes up.

Because you haven't understood the problem of this sort of manifestation.

Anything that's destroyed with violence eventually recurs again.

Because the persistence of life in its continuity is a persistence of patterns.

So long as the...

For example, the principles of surface tension hold true.

Or the principles of crystallization.

You're going to get crystals everywhere.

Anywhere in the universe you're liable to get a crystal of something or other.

Well, life is the same kind of thing.

It's a pattern.

Which is going to keep cropping up.

It doesn't matter how long it has to wait.

A million years is nothing.

You blot it out here, it'll turn up somewhere else.

It's only a matter of time.

Because it's in the nature of the patterns.

So in this sense then,

let's review these two ideas.

Sincerely speaking, I should say.

Is it demoralizing to believe that it's all play?

That at the last minute...

No, when the screaming memes are right on.

And everything is awful.

At the very last minute,

will you wake up and find it's a dream?

You could say, I hope so.

I hope so.

But life sometimes gets so black

that it's impossible to hope so.

You know it's the end.

Now, I remember once a marvelous conversation

with Count von Durkheim

who is a kind of German Zen master.

And he said, you know,

during the war,

people have the most utterly soul-searing experiences.

So then, the three general kinds of experience.

Of course in the air raids,

when you heard the whistling bomb

right above you,

and you knew that was the end.

But sometimes it was a dud.

And it didn't go off.

But you resigned yourself

as you heard that scream.

And completely accepted the fact

that you were about to cease to exist.

Or else you were in a concentration camp.

And you saw absolutely no hope

of ever getting out alive.

Absolutely none whatever.

And you gave up.

Or, he said, you were displaced.

The town where you worked

and you had your occupation was erased.

And you were a person

with absolutely no background,

no career, no future, nothing.

And you accepted it.

Now, he said, so often in all these cases

the individual concerned

had the most extraordinary experience.

They had, in other words,

the cosmic consciousness.

Satori.

they woke up.

They realized suddenly

that there was

worry about it all.

That I,

the real I,

not the superficial ego,

the real I,

is the whole cosmos.

Then he said their friends,

they tried to explain this

to their friends afterwards.

And their friends said,

Oh, you're crazy.

You were under such strain

that you got a little touched.

And so they would try to forget it

and put down this experience.

He said, most of my work

is in reviving this

and telling people

that this is an authentic experience.

So that's what I mean

that the gamble

that it isn't really serious.

If you don't,

at the last moment,

you see,

as it were,

call in the police.

If you don't scream for help.

I'm using that as a metaphor.

To accept,

well,

I'm going to die.

See?

That's it.

There's nothing to hold on to,

you see?

The moment you really

stop holding on to anything

because you see

there is nothing to hold on to,

what happens?

You become the ball.

Now the ball,

it has nowhere to bounce,

you see?

You become the ball

with nothing to hold on to.

But you can only see that

when you're not holding on

to anything anymore.

When you've given up.

Resignation,

or whatever it is.

In other words,

that urgency

to succeed,

to be something,

to get there,

to make it,

to, er,

be right.

When you see

you can't

and you give up,

you get reborn.

Because that's

with death.

The real meaning

of going to heaven

after death

has nothing to do

with literal death.

It has to do

with this death.

Now the other side

of the picture.

What about

the notion that

you're it,

that Tlamasic?

Not only that it

isn't serious,

but that fundamentally,

right at the root

of things,

you are

the ultimate reality.

Not you,

as I repeat,

as this apparently separate ego,

that is a kind of

phantom,

like the equator,

a social institution.

But the you,

which,

as I say,

grows the hair,

and, er,

blues the,

or browns the eyes,

and, er,

so on.

Now the,

the difficulty

for our common sense,

and it does present

a difficulty to our common sense,

is that we've all

been brought up

to feel alienated

from the world.

In the sense that

it is something we came into,

and it is something

that we confront.

a meeting,

we face it.

So we face facts,

we face reality.

We encounter,

Martin Buber's emphasis

on dialogue,

on I,

thou,

the confrontation.

See?

This is a silly notion.

At least,

it's silly if it doesn't

have something

undergirding it.

In other words,

you can't have a relationship

without an underlying unity.

You can't have a battle,

even,

between the tiger

and the shark,

because they have

no common ground.

And Tweedledum

and Tweedledee

agreed to have a battle.

So underlying

all conflict in nature

is common ground.

Unity.

Because,

even when we say

that two things

are the poles apart,

that's a way of saying

they're connected.

Because,

the whole earth

joins the two poles.

The whole magnet

joins the north

and the south poles.

So,

just as we

have been taught

to ignore

the background

behind the figure,

the space

behind the solid,

so also,

we've been taught

to ignore

the joining link

between the two poles.

the poles.

I once said that,

the way most of us think,

somebody asks for a banana,

he ought to be satisfied

with just the two ends

of the banana.

See?

When you can go so fast

from San Francisco

to New York

that the intervening

United States

is abolished,

San Francisco

and New York

become the same place.

So there's no point

in going to New York.

but just if there's a distance

between them,

there's some difficulty

in getting from one place

to the other,

so that not everybody

in New York

can go to San Francisco,

not everybody in San Francisco

can go to New York,

then they're different places

and it's worth going there.

So also,

for the two ends

of the banana

to have any significance,

you've got to have the banana

of which the two ends

are ends.

So in the same way,

each individual

isn't something

that comes into the world

from nowhere

and confronts it

or from somewhere else

altogether

and the universe

is not a kind of

heap of flotsam

and jetsam

that happen to collect

in space

like a bunch of old

rubber tires

and broken logs

in some

little nook

on the San Francisco Bay.

Because there was the bay

underneath the whole thing,

you see, actually.

so in the same way,

to think...

See, the Christians

and the Jews

to some extent

have gone over this idea

that we are

created out of nothing.

Now, of course,

there's an esoteric sense

to that.

In a way,

a Maya,

an illusion,

is a creation out of nothing.

Suddenly,

the magician

makes a phantasm

to appear

in the empty room.

In a way,

that's a creation

out of nothing,

see.

He does it, say,

by hypnosis.

Magic.

But this idea

of being created

out of nothing

has certain

psychological

and moral overtones

or undertones

in which

you are supposed

to be

nothing

down to the marrow

and core

of your existence.

See,

what that means

is psychologically

that there's

someone wagging

his finger at you

and saying,

never forget

that you

are really a jerk.

you see, that you're a little worm. You don't deserve anything. You exist entirely by the

grace and pleasure of another. And the sooner you grovel suitably to acknowledge this, the

better. Because the consequences of saying this and the meaning of saying this is what's

going to be done about it. So there's the choice, you see, in your thinking, in your myth-making,

in your imagination. Do you want to settle for a completely schizoid universe in which

there is a gulf between the Lord and the illusion, the Brahma and the Maya, so total that forever

and ever the one is not the other? Or would you rather have a unified, integrated universe

in which the Maya is something that the Lord is doing? It's his act, his play. Or its act,

if you don't like the masculine personal pronoun. The Great Mother. And it seems to me that these

two views are sort of like this, you see, with a diagram. See, one person is looking at the

universe this way. Here's the domain of existence. Being. And everything comes into it thus, from

nowhere. See? That's one way of looking at things. How this ever got together, you can't

even think. You have to turn your mind inside out and get this kind of collective flotsam and

some idea. The other diagram is this. Here again is the domain of being. But it's like a star.

It radiates. The whole of it radiates each individual point of focus. You see? Now there you've got

an integrated situation. And that's what things look like. Stars look like that. Crystals look

like that. Crystals look like that. Octopuses look like that. Spiders look like that. Human

beings stick out like that. It all works that way. Because underneath the differences, there

are the differences all the way around, is the unity. If you don't know unity, you don't know

you're different. They go together. This is KPFK Los Angeles. We've just heard Alan Watts with

part four, concluding the seminar, Reality, Art, and Illusion.