The Bomb Ching And Civilization

about it, that I said to her, "You know, you scare me because I think you're the kind of

person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going

to push it first." And she told me that I had no love for my future generations, no

responsibility for my children, and I was the phony Swami who believed in retreating

from facts. But I maintained my position. Robert Oppenheimer, a little while before

he died, said that it's perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. The

only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from

doing so. Because you see, all the troubles going on in the world now are being supervised

by people with very good intentions. Their attempts to keep things in order, to clean

things up, to forbid this and prevent that possible horrendous damage. And the more we

try, you see, to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. And it

gets worse. And maybe that's the way it's got to be. Maybe I shouldn't say anything

at all about the folly of trying to put things to right. But simply on the principle of Blake,

let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise.

Would this be an argument against conservationists?

This is an argument against all kinds of do-gooding. In other words, it's simply, it's the, what

I'm saying is, don't take me too seriously. I'm pitching a case for the fact that the

civilization has been a mistake. That it would be much better to leave everything alone.

That the wild animals are wiser than we. In that they, putting it in our crude and not

very exact language, they just follow their instincts. And if a moth mistakes a flame

for the signal on which it gets a mating call and flies into the flame, so what? That just

keeps the moth population down. And the moth doesn't worry. You know, it doesn't go buzzing

around in a state of anxiety, wondering whether this sex call is the real thing or just a

flame. It doesn't think consciously about the future. At least we suppose this is so.

Maybe it does, but we suppose that it doesn't. And therefore, it isn't troubled. And, but

the species of moths goes on and on and on. And it's, so far as we know, it's been around

for an incredibly long time. And maybe even longer than we have. Bees, ants, creatures

of this kind, they have long since escaped from history, so far as we can see. In other

words, they live a settled existence, which you might consider rather boring, because

it doesn't have constant change in the way that we do. They live the same rhythm again

and again and again and again, but because they don't bother to remember it consciously,

it never gets boring. And because they don't bother to predict, they're never in a state

of anxiety. And yet they survive. Now we, who look before and after, as Emerson says,

and predict, and are always concerned whether this generation is going to be better or worse

than the one that came before, we are tormented. And we just don't realize, because of this

tremendous preoccupation with time, we don't realize how beautiful we are, in spite of

ourselves. Because you see, the conscious radar is a troubleshooter. It's always on

the watch out for variations in the environment, which may bring about disaster. And so, our

consciousness is from one day's end to another, entirely preoccupied with time and with planning,

and with what has been and with what will be. And since troubleshooting is its function,

we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble. And we ignore in this preoccupation

with conscious attention how marvelously we get on, how, for most of the time, our physical

organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship. How our body relates by all sorts of unconscious

responses to the physical environment. So that if you became aware of all the adjustment

processes that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism, you would

find yourself in the middle of great music. And of course, this occasionally happens.

Well, the mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of your true physical

relationship to the universe. And you're amazed, thunderstruck by the feeling that underneath

anything that goes on in this world, the fundamental thing is a state of unbelievable bliss. Well,

why not? Why else would there be anything happening? Because if the game isn't worth

the candle, if the universe is basically nothing but a tormented struggle, why have one? Hasn't

it ever struck you that it would be much simpler not to have any existence? It would require

no effort. There would be no problems. So why is there anything going on? Let me say

not why, but how is there anything going on? Because if it's all fundamentally a drag,

I just don't see any reason for its being. Everything would have committed suicide long

ago. And to be at rest. Abu Ben Adhem may his tribe decrease by cautious birth control

and be at peace. So we might work on this possibility then. That civilization is a mistake.

And that we've taken completely the wrong track and should have left things to nature,

as it were. And of course, this is the same problem that is brought up in the book of

Genesis. Actually, the fall of man in Genesis is his venture into technology. Because in

the Bible, the Hebrew words for the knowledge of good and evil are connected with techniques.

What is technically expeditious and what is not. Words connected with actually metallurgy.

And to be as God, you see, when you eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you

become as God, means you think you're going to control your own life. And God says, "Okay,

baby, you wanted to be God, you try it. But the trouble with you is you've got a one-track

mind and therefore you can't be God. To be God, you have to have an infinitely many-tracked

mind, which is, of course, what your brain has, you see. The brain is infinitely many-tracked,

but consciousness is not, it's one-tracked. As we say, you can only think of one thing

at a time. And you cannot take charge of the universe with that kind of a consciousness.

Because there's too much of it. As I explained before, too many variables. And our science

can take care of a few variables, or of an enormous number of variables, as in quantum

mechanics, by statistical methods. As we can use statistical methods to predict that most

people will live to be 65 years old, at least, but we cannot say of any given individual

whether he will live to 65 or not. That's what we wanted to know. But the problem is

that the variables on each individual are too complicated. And we have not yet, you

see, developed a science which can deal with, say, 50, 100, or 500 variable systems. It's

too complicated to think about. The computers are going to help us. But as yet, we're either

on the low number, or the extremely high number. And these are outside the range of the problems

with which we're really concerned. That's why, for example, a lot of people have taken

to using the I Ching, the Book of Changes. Because if you're tossing a coin to make your

decisions, and everybody does fundamentally make their decision by tossing coins, it's

better to have a 64-sided coin than a two-sided coin. The I Ching gives you 64 possibilities

of approach to any given decision instead of just two, yes or no. It's based on yes

or no, because it's based on the yang and the yin. But in the same way that computers,

digital computers, use a number system which consists only of the figures zero and one,

out of which you can construct any number. And this was invented by Leibniz, who got

it from the Book of Changes. It's amazing how this book is somehow always with us. But

this then is a way of arriving, of helping your own multivariable brain arrive at decisions,

cooperating with your own mind. Because then again, after you've tossed your 64-sided coin,

the oracle that you read that explains each particular hexagram in the Book of Changes

is a sort of Rorschach plot. It is very laconic remarks into which everybody reads just exactly

what they want to read. But that helps you make a decision by the fact that you don't

really have to accept responsibility for it. See, then you can say, "It told me. I consulted

the oracle." Same way when you go to a guru. You say, "My guru is very wise and he has

instructed me to do this, this, that and the other." But it was you who decided on this

guru. How did you know he was a good one? You see, you gave him his authority because

you picked him out. It always comes back to you. But we like to pretend it doesn't. But

the thing is that oneself is certainly not the stream of consciousness. Oneself is everything

that goes on underneath that, and of which the stream of consciousness is a mere—well,

it has about the same relation to oneself as the bookkeeping does to a business. And

if you're selling grocery, there's very little resemblance between your books and what you

move over your shelves and counters. There's just a record of it, and that's what our consciousness

keeps. Now supposing then we work with the argument that we've made an awful mistake

in bringing out civilization, and we're not going to survive. Now there are various things

that can be said about this. Just as I made the joke that all stars used to be planets.

One could say, "Well, is it such a good thing to survive?" You know T.S. Eliot's Wasteland

where it says, "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper." But

some people would rather end with a bang than a whimper. Some people are stingy, and they

like to burn up their fire very gradually, conserving the fuel, and just keep enough

heat going so that they get a long time. Other people prefer a kind of a potlatch situation,

where they have a huge whiz-bang fire that goes out in a hurry. Now who is right? Do

you want to be a tortoise? You know, the tortoise that lives for hundreds of years, but drags

itself around all the time, very slow, slow, slow, solemn. Or would you rather be some

little hummingbird? Yeah, yeah, hummingbird, that's the thing. See, that dances and lives

at a terrific pace. Well, you can't say one is right and the other is wrong. And so there

may be nothing wrong with the idea of a world, a civilization, a culture, that lives at a

terrific increasing pace of change and then explodes. That may be perfectly okay. My point

is that if we could reconcile ourselves to the notion that that is perfectly okay, then

we would be less inclined to push that button. It's the anxiety. If you cannot stand anxiety,

and if you cannot simply be content for issues to be undecided, you are liable to push the

button because you say, "Let's get it over with." People who have trouble with the law

and are manipulating the courts in one way or another always learn to delay everything,

put it off, introduce legal red tape, manage to, like Ralph Ginsburg, who's been in trouble

because of the Eros magazine. He's got a very smart attorney who simply, although the case

has gone to the Supreme Court, he's simply mumbling away and putting up all sorts of

listings so that he keeps Ralph out of jail. And that's life. Life is simply a way of postponing