The Joker

Now, you know that in ancient times, all kings had at their courts a court fool.

And sometimes it probably was true that the fool was a crazy person,

who had a peculiar capacity for making inappropriate remarks.

And there's something about inappropriate remarks that can be very funny.

I remember as a child we used to play a game in which we had first of all a booklet with a story in it,

but every now and then a word was left blank.

And then you were given a pile of cards that were shuffled around the players,

and in turn, as the story was read by one person, the players turned up whatever card they had and said the word.

And the most extraordinary things happened.

And in this way, of course, a person who could make inappropriate remarks at the right moment

can sometimes bring the house down.

But actually, as time went on, the function of the fool became more sophisticated than that.

And he became a person whose function was not simply to make jokes and to be a funny man,

but to remind the monarch of his humanity, so that he would never, never get too stuffy.

You remember, perhaps, the lines in Richard II, where the king says,

within the crown, within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of the king, keeps death his watch.

And there the antic sits, the antic being the court fool.

And there the antic sits, scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp,

allowing him a little time to monarchize, be feared and killed with looks.

And then at the last comes death, and with a little pin bores through his castle wall,

and farewell king.

See, that was in a way the function of the fool.

He was reminding you of your finitude, of your mortality, and death at the end,

in somewhat the same way as monks used to keep on the desks in their cells a grinning skull.

And all this is, of course, nowadays thought very morbid,

because today we repress death very, very strongly.

And the whole function and role of the mortician in our culture

is to pretend in some way that death doesn't happen.

He's a husher-upper.

He sweeps you under the carpet at considerable expense.

Now then, I try to think whether there is any institution in modern society

that really corresponds to the court fool.

And there isn't.

There is, of course, the political cartoonist.

There is the satirist.

There is the commentator.

But he doesn't sit in the president's office.

And the president can ignore him altogether if he so chooses.

We don't like, nowadays, anyone to suggest

that our social institutions are not altogether serious.

We can't stand it because we are much too insecure.

And this is a very dangerous state of affairs.

And so it really is high time that in many ways

the institution of the fool was reintroduced.

I want to point out a parallel to this.

In some ways the fool or the joker and the monk have a parallel function.

The monk is a person who abandons society.

He is an outlaw.

Only he's an outlaw on the upper side instead of on the lower side.

As the ordinary criminal is, as it were, below caste,

the outlaw in the sense of the monk is above caste.

And in the Buddhist religion, at its inception,

the followers of the Buddha wore those dark yellow robes

because those were the garments of criminals.

It's just as if today we were to take the kind of blue jeans

they wear over in San Quentin and go around in those.

Or the old-fashioned striped things that were put on jailbirds.

And so they took on the garments and external appearance of the lower outcast.

But they were in fact respected as upper outcasts.

But in modern society it is very very difficult to be in that position.

For example in such a true republic as France

every monk and priest is subject to military service.

That is not true in the United States.

Nor is it true in England.

They are not quite so republican as the French.

But in this kind of modern society more and more

you must belong.

As Thoreau said, wherever you may go men will seek you out

and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.

And the monks that exist today, Catholic monks and Anglican monks

are really a little bit of a freak in our society.

They represent in other words the opinions and the discipline of a particular sect.

They are not really, they have no actual official and social recognition.

Because you see our society cannot stand non-participation.

It cannot stand really fundamental criticism.

And so it is in a very very weak state.

In, I remember as a boy in London going often to Hyde Park Corner

and listening to people orate against anything they wanted to orate against.

They could criticize and vilify even the most sacred institutions.

And the police would stand by and pay no attention.

Sort of lean against the lamppost and let it all go on.

And that is because the people as a whole in those days had a tremendous sense of security.

They knew they were right and therefore there is no point stopping anybody from criticizing them.

But when you are not sure you are right you have to stifle criticism completely.

And the worst kind of criticism is the person who pokes fun.

Non-participation of the monk isn't so bad.

But the person who somehow suggests that society occasionally is something that needs to be giggled at.

You see this is the whole position.

The joker doesn't outrightly deride things.

He is not a slapstick comedian.

He gives people the giggles about things that they thought were terribly sacred.

And that is extremely demoralizing.

So in our day and age you see you must belong.

And we need to relax on this.

And allow for non-participation under certain conditions.

And these are the ancient conditions.

That the person who does not participate in society cannot call upon society for certain things.

He cannot call upon the protection of the police or of the army.

He cannot call upon education for his children.

He is not supposed to have any children.

He may I suppose in this day and age make what arrangements he chooses about his love life.

But he mustn't be the head of a family.

And he mustn't feel entitled to the protection and support of the community.

If the community respects him and wants to support him just out of its own free will then that's their affair.

So that's the way of the monk.

But the fool is in a different class from the monk.

And to understand his role fully we have to go into a number of preliminary things.

The most important of which is to understand the nature of a social institution.

Because you see the standpoint of the fool is that all social institutions are games.

He sees the whole world as game playing.

And that's why when people take their games seriously.

And put on stern and pious expressions.

The fool gets the giggles.

Because he knows it's all a game.

Now when I say that he sees everything as a game.

This does not mean mere game.

Hamlet although it's a play.

Is not mere entertainment.

Or when you go to listen to a great orchestra.

It is playing music indeed.

But you are not seeing something purely frivolous.

The idea of game basically is this.

That the nature of the world is musical.

That is to say it is doing all these forms of trees and stars and people and all their complexities.

Just to do them.

It has no purpose beyond doing it.

And in exactly the same way in music.

Music has no destination.

It isn't aimed at the future.

It does travel in time.

That is true.

But it doesn't aim at a goal in time.

The point of music is every phrase as it unfolds itself.

And as you perceive the relationship of those phrases to earlier and later phrases.

But music itself is dance.

It's dancing with sound.

And likewise in the art of dancing.

You are not traveling.

You are not aiming at a particular place.

You are dancing to dance.

And so what you might call the musical or game theory of the world.

Is that everything that is happening is its own point.

It's true that things do develop.

For example the seed develops into the tree.

And you might say from one point of view then.

That the point of the seed is the tree.

That's the purpose of the seed.

But that doesn't really hold up.

Because then the tree goes and has seeds again.

And so you might say then that the purpose of the tree is the seed.

Which is which.

The whole thing is one process you see.

They really aren't parts.

The seed isn't one event and the tree another.

It's all one long continuous event.

Going on and on.

Just for the sake of going on and on.

Now of course you can read purpose in it in another way.

That is to say that a tree is only possible in a certain kind of environment.

There have to be for there to be trees.

There has to be a certain kind of temperature.

A certain kind of atmosphere.

And there have to be insects.

And there have to be bacteria in the soil.

And there have to be weeds.

There have to be birds.

All kinds of things are necessary if trees are to live.

So you could say this is symbiosis.

That the tree lives to look after the birds and provide them with perches.

That the birds live to eat the worms which might destroy the roots of the tree.

And so everybody lives to support everybody else.

Well the word to or in order to is not quite correct.

It's a little clumsy.

What we should see rather than that.

Is that the whole relationship of trees and birds and worms and bees and so on.

Is a network.

And every aspect of the network.

You might say every part of it.

Depends for its existence on every other part.

That means you see that the network as a whole.

Is a single organism.

Just as in your own physical body.

And you call yourselves a single organism.

There are billions of creatures.

Of very different kinds.

And they're all running around inside your bloodstream.

And doing their stuff.

They're having battles.

Love affairs.

All kinds of things.

And this huge variety of stuff going on.

Constitutes your life.

As an individual.

And so in turn.

You are some kind of a little wiggle.

In some other sort of stream.

Which constitutes a larger organism yet.

And.

But really and truly.

This tremendous network.

Doesn't have any separate parts.

It's not like a machine.

A machine.

Is a lot of separate parts.

That are put together.

Whereas this is different.

The parts of this machine.

Of this network.

Don't come into it from outside.

I mean.

When you drive your car up to the shop.

And you want a new carburetor or something.

They pull the old one out.

And they take another one off the shelf.

And jam it in.

So it comes off the shelf.

Into the car.

But in this network.

Of life that we live in.

Things don't come in from outside.

Everything that comes into it.

Comes from inside.

Which is a giveaway.

That the whole thing.

Is really one process.

And it's all a game.

Because.

In the sense that.

It has no other object.

Than doing what it's doing.

That's the fun of it.

But.

It plays.

You see.

Parts.

It varies itself.

And.

In playing.

Playing always involves.

A certain element of make believe.

That is to say.

Illusion.

And the word illusion.

Is from the latin.

Ludere.

To play.

It involves the illusion.

Of the parts being.

Separate.

And so then.

There is.

There are these variety of games.

The tree game.

The beetle game.

The butterfly game.

The bird game.

The cat game.

The people game.

The human game.

And if you will look on all these things.

As.

Differentiated in the same way as chess.

And backgammon.

And football.

And hockey.

And polo.

Or as.

Rumba.

Waltz.

Twist.

Minuet.

Or again.

As.

Concerto.

Partita.

Fugue.

Sonata.

You will begin to see.

That it's a perfectly reasonable attitude.

To look at the world as a game system.

Now.

You see.

We look at the fundamental games.

Of what we call.

Physical and biological.

Entities.

Or events.

But.

Over and above those.

We have the social institutions.

The subdivisions.

Of the human game.

Now.

Then.

The social institution.

Is of many kinds.

It's not simply things like.

Marriage and the family.

The various forms of government.

The.

Institutions of the government.

Like the public health department.

It's not just things like.

Hospitals and banks.

And business corporations.

It's not even.

Money.

Only.

That's a social institution.

So.

Are all our.

Weights and measures.

Our.

Systems of timing.

Our clocks.

And.

You see.

What makes these things.

Social institutions.

Is.

That they are.

In another sense.

Conventions.

Things that we.

Agree upon.

From.

The latin conveniere.

To come together.

We.

Come together.

In agreement.

About.

Where.

Is.

At.

twitter.

Is.

And.

By.

Agreeing about these things.

We can.

Order our lives.

Order.

Our communal.

Intercourse.

I have sometimes.

Mentioned.

The.

Buddhist.

And.

Well they're mainly.

Buddhist.

Divinity.

Is.

Who you see.

Guarding temple gates.

And.

They are called the.

the heavenly kings, and they're always very fierce, and they carry weapons.

And they are the guardians of the ten directions.

In Buddhism, Buddhist philosophy, there are ten directions,

the eight points of the compass, and up and down.

And it's terribly important to keep the ten directions clear,

because if I'm not clear about it, I could never meet you

at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.

So I wouldn't meet you at all, I could never have a date,

without knowing the ten directions.

And so these Dharma kings are the cosmic traffic cops,

and they're keeping everything straight, so that everybody can know where they are.

So these are the guardians of the social institutions,

the agreements we have to make about money and language and law,

and also about certain values.

Some of these values vary startlingly, but they are still social institutions.

Did you realize pain is a social institution?

In some cultures, like ours, it's very unpleasant to go to the dentist.

But there are cultures in which dentistry is no problem at all,

but on the other hand they have extreme pain when their fingernails are cut or their hair is cut.

We are very largely talked into pain in extreme childhood.

And it varies enormously as to what may be considered painful,

and I think it's not only human beings who do this, but animals do.

Experimentation with hypnosis shows that pain is an extremely relative thing.

Maybe you have to have some pain, but where you have it is very, very variable.

Also, we know too that social institutions govern what we notice.

An American male pays relatively little attention to the back of a girl's neck.

It's perfectly okay for her to grow her hair down long and cover it.

But to a Japanese, the back of a girl's neck is the most exciting sexual feature.

And so, when you see a well-dressed Japanese girl, her kimono hangs a little bit down the back like this, exposing her neck.

They pay no attention, though, to breasts, which seem to so fascinate the American male.

It just doesn't seem to appear.

And the way that a traditional Japanese woman clothes herself is exposing the neck,

but looking very flat in front, and not at all showing the hips.

She's willowy.

She doesn't look very willowy underneath, as a rule, but she does when dressed in a kimono.

Now, so you see, it isn't just that nature has built in to the human organism certain attractive features about other people.

It's the social institution of what is to be attractive.

And, of course, this comes out very, very strongly in the vagaries of fashion and how to do one's hair, paint one's face, etc., etc.

But now, social institutions go a great deal deeper than anything we've mentioned.

And the most important kind of social institution is that which has to do with role-playing.

Role-playing.

Who you are.

Now, when we ask the question, who are you, people think of this question in two different ways.

One person, when asked, who are you, will answer, I'm a doctor.

Another person will fall silent because he realizes how profound the question is.

He realizes that he's been asked what his ego is.

But a lot of people don't realize that when they are asked, who are you.

I've noticed just a little bit of difficulty in my investigations of discussing identity with people.

That they fix on their role and use that to describe their identity.

Their name, their family, their place in society, what they do, what their hobbies are, and so on.

All these are roles.

And then also there is the role of character playing.

All people are more or less taught to act.

We are all hams from the beginning.

And we were schooled in acting in our childhood, although it wasn't called that.

It was called education.

It was called upbringing.

But a great deal of it is schooling in acting.

And you very soon learn as a child from your peers and from your parents what acts are appropriate and what are not.

It is the concern of all parents that their child learns a role in life and has an identity by which the child can be recognized.

It would be extraordinarily disconcerting, wouldn't it?

If a child had one personality one day and another the next.

But children can do that.

Don't you remember as a child that you were many different personalities?

Depending on your environment.

That you were one person at home with your parents.

You were quite a different person out alone with other children.

Then when you went to visit your uncle and aunt you were somebody else altogether.

And so on.

And finally the whole trend of education is to shake all this down and make you more or less constant in every sort of social environment that you enter so that everybody knows who you are.

Otherwise it's disconcerting, you see.

So we are made to believe that we have a real self.

That is to say somebody who we really are and whom we have to find.

To find yourself, to settle down, to grow up, you see, means to fit into a role.

And there are a lot of people, you see, who are troubled in our society and who seem to be misfits and are terribly unhappy because they just can't find the role that they're supposed to fit.

They don't know who they are.

There is an inner pandemonium and conflict.

But it's obvious, isn't it, that the role you play is a social institution.

Because you can't be an object to your own consciousness, at least not in the ordinary way.

You are a subject from your own point of view.

And you can only become an object to the extent that you adopt the attitudes that other people take towards you.

Other people, from the beginning of life, are mirrors.

And by the way they respond to you, you begin to learn what they think of you and therefore who you are.

We all tell each other who we are.

And so the role we play, the identity that we have in that sense, is a social institution.

But going further, there is the ego itself.

There is this feeling that inside us there is an eye center,

which receives experience and directs action.

And this is the inmost myself.

And we have all, of course, been taught in this day and age that if this is not our soul,

it is a function of our body.

It is a chemical sort of efflorescence of the brain.

The feeling of eye.

Now, as I have told many of you before in various ways,

this sensation of being a separate eye cut off from all other eyes is an illusion.

It is a pure hallucination.

Because that is not the way we are functioning physically.

We are functioning physically not as separate entities,

but as beings that live in such a close relationship with everything else

that there really is no way of dividing us from it.

And so you see the mystic, in all times and places,

discovers the illusory nature of this ego,

and realizes with a glorious shock,

that the true I myself,

the thing that one really is fundamentally,

is the entire game.

The works.

The...

Some people call it God,

or Brahman,

or the Tao,

or whatever you want.

The name doesn't make the slightest difference.

Anyway,

that fundamentally what you are,

is the which than which there is no Witcher.

And so relax.

Don't worry.

Because you don't, you see,

this doesn't ordinarily come into consciousness,

in just the same way that the structure of your brain

doesn't ordinarily come into consciousness.

It's very much there.

But you don't see it directly,

and you have no memory of it.

So in the same way,

you have no memory of being the witch than which there is no Witcher.

But there's no need to have a memory of that.

Because the thing doesn't need a memory.

Memories are only necessary for creatures that have to defend themselves.

And to creatures that have problems,

they need memories.

But the perfectly gloriously happy person wouldn't remember anything.

Because every experience would be completely satisfactory.

All memory is really a form of regurgitation of undigested experience.

But you see,

also don't forget,

as we all know,

memory can be fun.

And so can burping.

But memory isn't necessary for the whole thing.

Except in certain brief forms of memory.

Where the continuance of anything at all,

you see,

of any particular form is a sort of memory.

In the sense that it is a repeated gyration of certain physical vibrations.

But it's possible, you see,

to wake up and realize that your ego is a game.

And that what we call the necessity for survival is also a game.

But society is playing a very, very weird game.

The first rule of which is,

this game is not a game.

This game is serious.

And so,

the great social institutions that we inherit from the past, like the church,

are places to be serious.

I don't think there ever was a jester in church.

But what it sounds like.

Yeah.

I don't think we're supposed to be in church.

It's not a game yet.

But now,

it's probably because of the willingness of being not used to be on the church.

And that's not all for the most important ones.

Of course, the church formed itself around the particular jester, and who couldn't be

stirred and so had to be crucified, it was just too much.

But the whole attitude, you see, of the church is that you are standing in the presence

of the most serious God the Father, who really is in earnest and no fooling, you see, and

everybody has to keep a straight face.

And so also in the court of law, in our excessively serious society, I was giving evidence not

so long ago, and the two defendants were smiling at each other, and the judge suddenly

wrapped his gavel and said, you young men ought to realize that you are on trial for

a very serious crime and it's no joking matter.

And I want to see proper behavior and conduct in this court.

And the attorney stood up and said, your honor, this is the first time they have ever been

on trial and they are not used to these things, and he said, well it's about time they learned.

So you see, the thing is that the game, there is always the fear, the underlying fear that

the game may be given away.

Now that fear isn't altogether unreasonable, because part of the fascination of games is

that it is to get involved and in a way to forget that they are games.

The actor on the stage does his damnedest to persuade you that he is moving in the real world.

And children love to get completely absorbed in their games, and get the actual thrill of

adventure in playing at war, and so on.

And you see, one reason why people don't really want to know the future, why a really expert

fortune-teller gives most people a little bit of trepidation, is that if you know what

the future is going to be, it is less worthwhile going ahead towards it.

If you know the outcome, why bother?

See, this is one of the ways we are trying to stop war.

The Rand Corporation is trying to make computer systems that at any immediate future date can

predict the outcome of a war, so that it won't be necessary to fight it.

If we did fight, this would happen.

So the person who gets the winner claims the diplomatic advantage, and we go on.

So this is the reason, you see, why we don't want to know that the game is only a game.

Now if we can make believe that the game is real, whatever that means, we are not really

very clear about that.

But somehow we know what it means in our bones if we don't know very well in our heads what

is for real.

And we are always testing things out, what is for real.

But when the whole world game becomes too real, and people become too earnest, it's highly

necessary to play a new game, which is the game of game against non-game.

As how far can you get away with giving the show away about the game?

Nobody really wants to go the whole hog until you are ready for final nirvana.

You know, then you give the show away so far as you are concerned.

And that's it.

But in the meantime, the fascination of seeing how to put together, knowing it's a game,

and still playing it.

And doing this is what in Mahayana Buddhism is called being a bodhisattva.

A bodhisattva is a person who doesn't give his show away completely.

He doesn't simply release his consciousness from playing the human game.

He is released and yet still in it.

He knows the human game is a game.

But he goes on playing it with considerable gusto.

And his gusto derives in a great deal from the fact of knowing it's a game.

You see, you can do that.

And it's one of the peculiar properties of self-consciousness.

To be able to know it's a game and yet enjoy doing it.

It's like being happy and knowing you're happy.

Now a lot of people are afraid of that.

They feel that if the moment they say, well I'm happy, that it'll somehow stop.

That it'll be like being too conscious of digesting your food.

There is a point there where enjoying dinner very slowly merges into disgust.

But it needn't be like that.

The real gourmet never gets into that bind.

And so in the same way, doing something, being happy and knowing that you're happy,

has about it a certain quality of what I would call resonance.

For example, if I talk in a room which is completely sound-proofed.

It's terrible, I can't stand it, there's no resonance.

No little tiny echo.

I feel I'm talking into the proverbial wet blanket.

But if there's a little resonance, if there's a feedback, you see,

that makes the thing go, vibrate a bit more than it ordinarily would.

So one gets feedback from an audience.

And it's much easier to talk to an audience than it is to a microphone.

Because there's feedback.

And so consciousness is feedback.

So for that reason, your voice sounds better when you're singing in the bathtub

than it does when you're singing out in an open room.

Because you get resonance.

And so we put resonators, let's say a guitar or a violin, has a sounding box in it.

That's a resonator to make it echo a bit.

And so great churches at one time was, or at the last, built by acoustic experts.

So concert halls to give them the proper resonance.

But when resonance gets too much, you know, it starts chattering.

It gets a system of echoes set up.

And some of the old cathedrals, which weren't built with acoustical knowledge,

you can hear the echoes of the choir going on forever and ever and ever.

It sounds very marvellous from a certain point of view,

but it's not from a musical point of view.

It's a kind of a, it's more sentimental.

And, er, we used to even to be taught to sing, in church, with an echo technique in the voice.

So that, even if you weren't in a great cathedral, with its echoes,

you'd slightly sound as if you were.

Isn't that, isn't that trickery for you?

That's real showbiz.

So, to play the game, er, and to know it's a game,

can be, er, quite fascinating.

And not, er, really giving the show away,

but giving it away enough, somehow.

And that, you see, is the, the joker's function.

So, what he is doing then,

is he is in a point of view

where he sees all that is going on as a game.

He doesn't take anything seriously.

But, don't forget that that doesn't mean that he is simply shallow and frivolous.

Because, for example, if somebody were to say to me,

I love you, and I turned to them and said,

Are you serious?

She might say, No.

I'm sincere.

Because, love isn't necessarily serious.

We, you see, we use the word serious very frequently,

where we should be using the word sincere.

And the lack of proper delineation between these two words

causes a great deal of confusion.

It's like the confusion about the word must.

You must do this.

Where, whether it's a commandment, or whether it's a condition.

A state of affairs that simply is so.

And so, in the same way, we need a clarification of must.

And we need a clarification of serious.

And it can be divided down into serious on the one hand,

or sincere on the other.

What is sincerity?

Sincerity is being integrated.

Being all of a piece.

Now, you see, we often think that the person who doesn't take life seriously,

isn't all of a piece.

That is to say, his heart's not really in it.

He is out here living, you see,

and going along and talking to people.

But the feeling is of an insincere person,

there's something in the back of his mind,

that isn't participating.

That's what worries people about actors.

Are they acting in real life?

Are they still playing the part?

Is this person I'm introduced to as Charlie Chaplin,

the same man as, or different from the funny little man,

with a derby hat?

And so, actors occasionally bother and bug people.

And people may be apt to say,

well, they're always on the stage.

They are never really genuine.

And we have a feeling, you know,

when we know when somebody is being genuine.

See?

But, but mark it.

When you know somebody is being genuine,

they are not necessarily being serious.

They're not necessarily being grave or solemn.

What I want to give the idea of is sincere laughter.

And also sincere play.

There is a perfectly sincere laughter.

And it may be, ideally, I mean, the sincere laughter,

expresses a spirit of irrepressible gaiety.

And it is not, in other words, a defense mechanism.

Laughter is often a defense mechanism.

We laugh, what we call a nervous laugh.

Or laughing someone to scorn,

can very often be a forced laugh.

That isn't really,

isn't really funny at all.

But the real laugh is, of course,

the resolution of anxiety.

The anxiety is serious.

And anxiety is a state of palpitation,

of the trembles.

Anxiety comes upon us when we cannot decide

which way to go.

Or which way things are going to go.

And so we tremble between alternatives.

Now, because, of course,

we tremble between alternatives,

because we are under the illusion

that it matters very much

which of these two things happens.

Now, once one has seen the nature of the game,

you realize that it matters superficially

which of these two things happens.

but it doesn't fundamentally matter

because all negative things pair with positives.

There is no positive without negative.

And there is no negative without positive.

I heard a very amusing story

which kind of goes with these rugs.

The question is,

is a zebra a yellow horse with black stripes

or a black horse with yellow stripes?

The answer is,

it is an invisible horse

which has been striped yellow and black

so that people won't bump into it.

Now, in a similar way,

reality is an invisible state of affairs

beyond all description and thought

but it has been striped black and white

so as to be seen.

And this is life and death,

up and down,

sound and silence,

the whole vibratory character of being.

And the game,

the fundamental game that the universe is playing

is to forget that this is so.

You see,

what you might say in theological language,

the invisibility of God

is his self-forgetfulness.

And the visibility of the world

is the game being played.

Now, the nature of the game,

I think I've told some of you this before

but I see some I haven't.

The nature of the game

is let us pretend

that the positive and the negative

are not really identical.

You see,

they're explicitly different

but implicitly the same

because they always go around together.

And that reveals a hidden,

implicit conspiracy between black and white.

And the truth is,

you can't have one without the other.

But if we can pretend

that they don't go together,

that they are actually enemies,

then we can have all sorts of games.

The first game of which is,

oh dear, black might win.

The next game is,

but white must win.

And from that position,

you can develop all the games you want.

And it's interesting, isn't it,

how our,

so many of our table games,

like chess,

and dominoes,

and checkers,

checkers,

and so on,

use the black and white pieces.

And you can find in the conventions of chess,

one could discuss all this,

the problem,

in terms of chess.

When I bring up the joker,

of course,

we're in a way discussing it in terms of the game of cards.

Because the joker,

is the card beyond roll,

the card that's wild,

that can be,

any card in the pack.

In other words,

it's delivered from,

being a particular someone,

and can be in anyone.

And it pops up here,

and it pops up there,

and it pops up here.

And you never know,

where is the joker?

Who is the joker?

You see?

The thing that,

that we have to understand,

really,

is that all the roles,

are the joker,

playing them.

And the joker is looking at you,

out of all pairs of eyes.

There he is.

Only,

he's pretending very often,

that he's not the joker at all.

Oh no,

this is just me.

I'm not the joker.

Where is the joker?

Well,

let's have an intermission.

Now,

to,

revise a little bit about this morning's talk,

so that we're all up to date.

I have been discussing the role,

of a certain,

person called the joker.

The joker being the one,

who has insight into the fact,

that all our social institutions are games.

The social game,

is played,

with an initial rule.

The first rule being,

this game is serious,

or this game is not a game.

And therefore,

there is a tendency within society,

to resist very strongly,

any notion,

that what it is doing,

is not altogether serious.

And at a still deeper level,

beneath the level of social institutions.

There is also the recognition,

on the part of the joker,

that the basic forms of nature,

are also games.

The human game,

the rabbit game,

the mouse game,

the bee game,

the tree game,

the stone game.

Because all these,

are forms of a musical nature,

that is to say,

they are forms played for themselves.

They are played in the most intimate,

interconnection,

and interrelationship,

with each other.

But,

they don't have any purpose,

beyond what is happening.

In the same way,

as music,

and dancing.

But when people take games,

seriously,

and part of the fun of the game,

you must remember,

is to take it seriously.

They acquire an attitude,

which strikes the joker,

as being,

half funny,

and sometimes,

a little pitiful.

A good joker,

is inclined,

really,

not to laugh at people.

Because,

if a person,

is terribly seriously involved,

in the sense of the kind of person,

we call colloquially,

a square.

The joker,

feels sorry for them.

Because,

they live a deprived life.

But,

the point is,

that he is the one,

who is a wild man.

Which is to say,

he has no fixed role.

He can play,

as the joker can,

in the deck of cards,

any role.

And,

in a way,

in that sense,

all of us,

are roles of the joker.

Because,

the real joker,

of whom,

any human joker,

is a manifestation.

The real joker,

is,

Brahman.

Is the,

ultimate,

player of the game.

The divine ground,

of the universe.

So then,

if you look upon the world,

as play,

as what the Hindus call,

the Vishnu Leela.

Vishnu,

being the,

one of the names of God.

And Leela,

meaning,

sport,

or play,

from which we get our word,

lilt.

Then,

Vishnu,

or Brahman,

is the big joker.

And,

anyone who realizes this,

is the little joker.

And,

the art of the joker,

is very paradoxical.

Because,

it is,

to give the show away,

that it is a game.

And yet,

keep the show going on.

There is something about a joker,

of a now you see it,

now you don't character.

So that,

even when,

somehow,

you find,

in studying,

all these Hindu and Buddhist texts,

that when,

they are discussing,

one's awakening,

to the very final secret.

Somehow,

there is the feeling of,

well,

what did we get?

Because,

you step into a new dimension.

You see,

from the standpoint of,

this sort of awakening,

that really,

and truly,

you were awakened,

all the time.

Imagine,

going through a gate,

in a wall.

Here is this great barrier.

You walk through it,

you turn around,

and the wall,

and the gate,

have both disappeared.

And you see,

you were always there.

One of the most extraordinary things,

that happens,

in,

entering into,

a,

a sort of mystical state,

of consciousness.

One of the most delightful things,

about it,

is the discovery,

that you don't have to stay,

in ecstasy.

That ordinary consciousness,

is alright too.

That,

is part of the,

whole,

total fitness of things.

You see,

that everybody is,

as it were,

right in the place,

where he stands.

Imagine a pearl necklace,

how it's arranged.

Down in the center,

they put the big pearls.

And then they trail off slowly,

until there are very tiny pearls,

at the back.

And so,

it doesn't matter,

whether you are a big pearl,

or a little pearl.

You all constitute,

the harmony of the whole.

So they say,

in Zen Buddhism,

a long thing,

is the long body of Buddha.

A short thing,

is the short body of Buddha.

Or,

in the spring scenery,

there is nothing superior,

nothing inferior.

Flowering branches,

grow naturally.

Some short,

some long.

So,

from that standpoint,

you see,

everybody,

is seen to be,

a perfect manifestation,

of the Godhead.

Or of the void,

or whatever you want to call it.

Everybody.

And,

even though,

the very fact that they don't know it,

and that they are unhappy,

that they quarrel,

etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,

etcetera,

is still,

a manifestation of this.

The whole thing is seen,

like this.

Just as,

I was discussing,

the balances of a garden,

in which,

the birds eating the worms,

and the snails eating the lettuce.

All these processes,

of conflict,

build up,

the ongoing miracle,

of the garden itself.

So,

in the same way,

things that you see in yourself,

as neuroses,

as forms of ill health,

as things that you shouldn't be,

they are your slugs and worms.

And,

uh,

they,

uh,

there is nothing,

nothing at all,

in your whole being,

that's unnatural.

All of it,

is an integral part of the game.

And,

if you weren't as awful as you are,

you might be creating very serious trouble.

Now,

I don't want to say that,

uh,

so that you can say,

in turn,

well,

uh,

let me be more awful still.

You know,

St. Paul,

got all tangled up in this.

He,

having explained,

that without sin,

there could be no grace.

He said,

shall we then sin,

that grace may abound?

And,

his Greek,

you know,

heaven forbid.

But,

this is of course,

a problem,

that simply has to be,

faced.

That,

the universe,

in its,

grand design,

has nothing special to do with morality.

Or rather,

nothing,

no more,

special connection with morality,

than with anything else.

Morality,

is a part of the universe.

It's a,

a way of playing the human game.

And,

uh,

but the thing itself,

is,

really,

beyond good and evil.

Now,

as I see it,

that's,

that's the way it is.

And, uh,

whether one likes it or not.

It's always still up to you,

how you want to behave.

If,

we try to get people to behave,

decently,

by scaring them,

and saying that if they don't behave decently,

they'll be out of sorts with God,

this doesn't help at all.

Because it merely inculcates a new kind of fear,

and a new kind of false basis for morality.

One can only be moral,

because you like to do it that way.

There really is no other reason whatsoever.

And to try and find other reasons,

always perverts morality.

In just the same way,

the powers of the universe,

the power of fire,

the power of electricity,

the power of steel,

they are neither good nor evil.

You can use either one,

for the blessing of people,

or for their destruction.

And so,

the truth itself,

I mean,

the,

the foundation reality of the world,

is something like that.

Although it does have this certain edge to it.

And so does all human activity.

And the edge is something like this.

Those powers that we call positive,

are always in a process of overcoming those that we call negative.

It's the nature of the positive to win,

and the nature of the negative to lose.

But win and lose always go together.

Nobody wins unless somebody loses.

Nobody loses unless somebody wins.

Their relationship is transactional,

in the same way as buying and selling.

But,

if it were the other way round,

you see,

if the negative were always

...

in the situation of overcoming the positive. You would get a universe that would not be

a continuing game. It would be 100% tragedy. The very, you see, the positive and the negative

together constitute existence. We have to use existence as a neutral word that doesn't

have as an opposite non-existence. Existence already includes non-existence. You could say

being and non-being constitute existence. Just as we know physically, sound is constituted

by sound silence in very rapid alternation. So, being, non-being constitute existence.

And existence is something of which you may say the game is worth the candle. If it weren't,

it wouldn't be. It's like that. Some people try to say there is good and bad with small

g and small b and they together constitute good capital G. Or one might say that humanity

and the good of humanity is a curious combination of beneficence and rascality, of reason and passion.

human beings didn't have those two sides, they would be less than human. Man is in a certain

sense redeemed by his passions. Redeemed by being something of a rascal. Because if he weren't, he

would be like a stew with no salt in it. The salt somehow is something that in a large quantity

is horrible. But in a certain small quantity, delightful. And so everybody has to be salted

with a certain amount of unrespectability. Otherwise, they're impossible and intolerable. The only

thing is, as a fervent cook, don't overdo it. It is in that respect, you know, that it's said

of great gurus in India. They have a very funny thing, they say. Westerners go over and they

meet this man who's supposed to be extremely holy. And they are all agog, you know. And then

after spending a few days with him, they begin to wonder. They find he smokes cigarette. They

find that he occasionally loses his temper. And they begin to think, well, is this man so holy

after all? I mean, he surely should not be dependent on these little habits and luxuries and so

on. And then they find he has a girlfriend. And then they leave because they're so scandalized.

Well, then the Hindus say, uh-uh-uh-uh. Now you shouldn't get so upset about this because

if this man didn't have a few little vices, he would cease to manifest. He would simply disappear.

He has to have these things to keep him grounded, to keep him in the world. Or, uh, if suddenly,

you know, uh, he gets terribly angry with a certain student and seems to lose his temper,

they say, oh, no, no, no. That's a tactical anger. That he did on purpose to wake you up

to something. It was for your own development and for your own good. He didn't really feel

angry at all. Oh, dear. But do you see the point? There is something in the fact that if he didn't

have these little, uh, attachments, he wouldn't be manifesting. He'd simply disappear. There's something

in that. Only, don't take it too piously. I think you get the point. So then, we now, uh, have to explore

a very important aspect of the Joker as, uh, equivalent to Gurdjieff's Sly Man. You see, he points out the

four ways, the monk, the fakir, the yogi, and the sly man. And all the first three ways are ways of great difficulty. They

involve very, very strenuous discipline. And, of course, as we get it, uh, through the books about

Gurdjieff, the way of the Sly Man involves a discipline too. But, I, I think there's more to be said about the

way of the Sly Man than appears in any of those writings. Because this is very closely connected with the whole

approach of Taoism, the Chinese philosophy of, uh, Wu Wei, or non-aggression, and with what is called in

Buddhism, the middle way. When the Buddha first, uh, discussed the middle way, he put it like this. He said,

to try and solve the problem of suffering by immersing yourself in pleasure only leads to a hangover. To try and

solve the problem by asceticism also brings no liberation. You merely get tied up in a kind of masochism, where you

say, I know I'm right, just so long as I'm hurting. And all that is doing is expiating your, uh, kind of

infantile guilt sense. So, he said, there is a middle way between asceticism on the one hand and hedonism on the

other. But actually, uh, the middle way is more subtle than that, and it's beautifully discussed in, uh,

Professor Baum, uh, a book called The Philosophy of Buddha. That's B-A-H-M. Professor of Philosophy at the

University of New Mexico. And he gives a very, very fascinating analysis of the middle way, uh, in the form of a

dialogue, whereby, the, it works simply like this. The student brings a problem to the teacher. And he

says, I suffer, and it's a problem to me. And the teacher says, you suffer because you desire. If you

didn't desire, you wouldn't suffer. So try not to desire. And the student goes away, and says, I'm not very

successful in this. I can't stop desiring. It's terribly difficult. And furthermore, I find that in

trying to stop desiring, I'm desiring to stop desiring. Now, what am I to do about that? And the teacher

replies, do not desire to stop desiring any more than you can. And so, the student goes away and

practices that. But he comes back to the teacher and said, I still find myself desiring excessively to stop

desiring. And it doesn't work. So the teacher says, do not desire too much not to desire to stop desiring.

Now, do you see what's happening? Step by step, almost like Achilles approaching the tortoise, the student is

being brought together with himself, to the point where he catches up with his own inner being, and can't accept

it completely. And that is, you see, the most difficult thing to do, to accept oneself completely. Because the moment you

can do that, you have in effect done psychologically what is the equivalent of saying in philosophical or theological terms, you as you are now, are the Buddha. Just as I was explaining a few minutes ago. That's unbelievable. Because we are always trying to get away from ourselves as we are now, in one fashion or another.

And it's only, we will only stop doing that through a series of experiments in which we try resolutely to get away from ourselves as we are. So that is the middle way. But ordinarily in these other ways, the way of the yogi, the fakir and the monk, the individual makes a big thing out of the work of liberation.

And especially likes the kind of teacher who will put him through the most severe paces. It's interesting how there arise from time to time schools in the West, where someone comes along offering people say, look, it's all very well to go to discussion groups and talk about these things. But that's not the real thing.

It's not the real thing.

What you need. What you need is really to get down and do some work. And often these teachers are very rude and very stern. But people love it. And such a person will always attract a great following. Because people get the feeling, now we are at serious business here. This is really something, you see.

And this can be an awful problem. Let's suppose that you have some difficult and distressing habit, like drinking too much. And you're assured that once you become the victim of this habit, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to get rid of it. And it requires intense willpower.

And so that kills you right off. You're a dead duck from then on. It's as if you see you had said to the devil one morning, look, I'm going to get rid of you. I'm not going to have anything to do with you anymore.

So the devil, who is an archangel and is terribly clever, is all set for you. And because he knows that you are getting out of his way, he surrounds you with greater temptations than you ever imagined. If you are going to outwit the devil, it's terribly important that you don't give him any advance notice.

And this is where the work of the sly man comes in. Put it in other terms, in Hindu or Buddhist terms, in the popular terms of popular Hinduism and Buddhism, liberation is getting out of the toils of karma.

It's like this. During your many past lives, you've done all kinds of deeds, good and bad, and you are reaping the consequences of these deeds today. And also today, you are setting up future consequences.

Now, before you can be liberated, you've got to pay off your karmic debts. And so the moment you set your foot on the path of liberation, you are apt to find that all your karmic creditors will come to your door.

And that's why it's often said that people who start out on a serious work of yoga suddenly get sick and lose their money and their best friends drop dead and all kinds of ghastly things happen.

That's because, you see, they served notice that they were going to do this. And so all the creditors came around.

If you are going to leave town and you owe lots of money, you know, you mustn't announce that you're leaving or give a farewell party to your friends because the grocer will find out.

Now, so the art of the sly man is to make no contest, but simply to leave without one word. In other words, that's the meaning of Wu Wei in the technical vocabulary of Taoism.

Wu Wei, not to interfere, not to force things. That's the best translation of Wu Wei, not to force things. But so he just drops it like that. But you are in this respect, you see, you're your own worst enemy.

Because even if you serve notice privately on yourself, that suddenly you're going to drop it all. Already the devil knows. Because who do you think the devil is?

Now this lies behind the whole problem that is discussed in the book Zen in the Art of Archery. The necessity of letting go of the bowstring without first deciding to do so.

Another way of putting it is that the decision to release the bowstring and the action of doing so must be simultaneous. Not to decide and then act, but to act decide all at once.

Now why is this? If you are going to be an expert archer, you must shoot before you think, otherwise it will be too late. You don't aim and then shoot. It's all one action.

And this is true likewise of any sort of pistol shooting as well. That if you aim, if you decide and then fire, you're apt to do things like pulling the trigger instead of squeezing. All kinds of wrong things are done.

And you're always a moment too late. And you're always a moment too late if you decide first. You have to act and decide simultaneously. So what does that do, you see? That puts up a very curious problem, which in its own turn becomes a bind.

To try and act quickly enough so that you overtake the preliminary decision. To try not to decide first. And that is an impossible problem. I wonder if you ever read von Kleist's story about the fighting bear.

This is included in Nancy Wilson Ross's book, The World of Zen, as a kind of Western Zen. It's a story about a man who has a fight with a circus bear. And the bear reads his mind and always forestalls any attack that he makes on it.

There's absolutely nothing he can do to get past the bear. And so in the same way, you might imagine a guru who is a mind reader. And he always knows if you decide before you act. And if you do, you see, the devil will catch you.

Instead, you see, the devil will catch you. Instead of deciding that you won't be an alcoholic anymore. The only thing to do is not to drink without any previous decision on this matter. But how can anyone do that, you see? That's the question.

How can I decide not to decide? How can I announce that I won't make any announcement without making an announcement? You see, there is no way out of that bind. Try as you may. You go on and on and on, trying as Herigel did to release the bowstring without thinking first to release it.

But then, strangely enough, one day, the thing happened. He did it. And this is involved in our learning of almost all techniques. That we work and work to leave that final point of perfection.

And it doesn't come, it doesn't come, and then one day it happens. Now, what is the reason for that? Is it simply, and this is really, you know, a way it's usually explained, but this is an over-simplification.

It is not that we have practiced it so often that it suddenly becomes perfect. It is much more subtle than that.

What happens is that we have practiced it so often that we find out we can't do it. And it happens at the moment you know you can't do it. When you reach a certain point of despair, when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim.

At that moment you are swimming. At that moment you are swimming. Because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call don't care.

You stop trying. You stop not trying. Try to get it that way. You just have arrived at the insight that your decision, your will, doesn't have any part in the thing at all.

And that's what you needed to know. You've overcome, you see, the illusion of having a separate ego.

There is no way of telling anyone that that's an illusion, and getting appropriate action, because we are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that it's real.

And if I say, well, I'm going to get rid of my ego, that's what the Taoists call beating a drum in search of a fugitive.

He hears you coming. So, the ego, that is to say, the illusion of having a separate will, and a separate eye center, that can be an effective agent,

that cannot be overcome by a decision which seems to be centered in the ego.

You might as well put out fire with fire. It can come only when an attempt to act from the ego center has been revealed to be completely futile.

Then the thing happens, because you've really discovered that it was, after all, an illusion.

Now, be very careful how you formulate this sort of thing philosophically.

This could, of course, correspond to the kind of person who feels unafraid, and who feels very free, because he's a complete fatalist.

A lot of people are, and are very happy in their fatalism.

They really feel that they don't do anything, it just happens, and that it's all life, and that they won't die until it's their time to die.

And so, why worry? Everything, they have the sense of everything, is just happening to them.

And this is a kind of floating feeling. It's as if you didn't have to push things at all. They just float along.

Well, now, that state of affairs, that feeling of, you don't have to push anything, it just floats along, is very similar to the experience I'm describing, if not the same thing.

But, this person has interpreted it, as a fatalist, in a rather passive way.

That is to say, he has felt, that there still is some kind of a little differentiation, between himself as the experiencer, on the one hand, and the force, or set of forces called fate, on the other.

He is pushed around, but he is pushed around, but he witnesses being pushed around.

Now, in this state, this person still has a little fragment of impurity left.

There's still one fly left in the ointment, and that's the sensation of being pushed around.

There is still a fundamental division, between the knower and the known.

And in this case, the case of the fatalist, the knower seems to be the passive thing, and everything known, the objective world, or the goings-on of his own physiology, they appear to be the active end.

And the knower just has the experience of himself being moved, moved, moved, moved, by the tides of life.

The important thing to find out is this, that the sensation of being the knower, and the experiencer of all this, is not, as it were, aside from everything else that's going on, but is part of it.

Just as you, although you experience your own existence subjectively, you are nevertheless part of the external world.

You are in my external world, just as I am in your external world.

So, in this way, the final barrier between the knower and the known is broken down.

There is nobody, as it were, being carried along by fate.

There is just the process.

And all that you are is part of the process.

Then there is a curious flip.

The individual, who has always felt himself to be the tiny little thing on the end of the big determining process,

suddenly goes bloop.

Have you watched sometimes a tiny little piece of mercury coming nearer to a large piece of mercury?

The sudden moment when they touch each other, bloop,

the little thing vanishes into the big one,

almost more dramatically than a drop into the ocean.

In this case, that I'm talking about,

it isn't that the individual organism vanishes.

The individual human being doesn't vanish.

But he experiences no longer a passive relationship to the world.

He simply sees that all that he is and all that he ever was,

was something that the entire process was doing.

At the time, in other words,

when he felt himself to be separate.

He sees that that is, in a certain way,

just what he should have felt.

Because that was what the process was doing in him.

In exactly the same way that it was giving him brown or blue eyes,

or blonde or brunette hair.

And that's going through the door,

and turning around and seeing there wasn't a door.

A finding that you aren't fated.

That you're not trapped,

because there's nobody in the trap.

And it takes something trapped to make a trap.

We'll begin by refreshing memories

as to what went before.

Before, in discussing the theme of the joker,

I have been talking about a point of view,

the joker's point of view,

from which not only our social institutions,

but also all the formations of the natural world

are seen as games.

Be careful of the word game.

It doesn't mean as trivialities.

Because when we say it's just a game,

this often means it is just trivial.

There can be important games.

As when we play the piano or musical instruments,

we are not necessarily doing something frivolous.

But we are playing.

And there is something in the nature of all play

that is not serious,

but at the same time may be sincere.

And I tried to give you the picture

of the multiplicity of natural forms on the one hand,

and of human social institutions,

and all the things that we do

and consider important and busy ourselves with

as human beings.

I tried to give you the point of view

from which these can be seen as games,

as things being done, as it were,

simply for themselves,

and not for some ulterior motive.

And therefore,

these games are in a way best played

when they are played as games.

Although,

it's really alright for people

to take them seriously,

except that

they are a little bit deprived.

They are missing something.

And so when the Joker sees a person taking his life seriously and regarding himself as

extremely important, there is something a little bit funny about it, and he is inclined

to get the giggles.

And it's all he knows, that the very intensity of seriousness with which the individuals concerned

are taking these games will be a kind of foil for the subsequent bursting into laughter,

when he sees that it wasn't serious after all.

You see that?

You might say there are these classes of people.

There are the very far out people and the very far in people.

Now ordinarily we say someone's very far out when they are oddballs.

When they are exceedingly unconventional.

But I want you to turn the picture round and look as a conventional person, look at a square

as a person who's very far out.

That is to say, he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost.

He doesn't know where he started from and he thinks he's there.

But he's completely lost.

Because he is actually under the cover of his assurance, of his status, of his position

in society, he's really a very anxious person.

I said a lot yesterday about the way in which our society shows anxiety because it cannot permit

the existence of people who don't belong.

And it cannot really permit the criticism of laughter.

It cannot permit the presence of the old-fashioned court jester.

Because these people are so far out.

They are so involved, and from a certain standpoint, you see, from the joker's standpoint, he doesn't

condemn such people.

He rather congratulates them on their heroism for getting so lost and involved.

But to keep the far-out people from going quite insane, there have to be far-in people.

And the far-in people are those who keep contact with the original goings-on behind the scenes.

They are like the prompter in the theatre, where there are the actors out on the stage, relying

on their memories, etc., and they are supposed to get completely involved in the play.

But there's a concealed prompter with the script in front of him.

And he is the connection of the actor on the stage with the green room behind the stage.

And you see, in this dramatic analogy of the universe, the green room is the central point,

the still point of the turning world.

The green room is how God is, when he's back home, not involved in all these games.

And takes off the mask.

See on the Hindu theory that everybody is a mask of God.

Like a wonderful line in one of Chesterton's poems.

And now a great thing in the street seems any human nod, where move in strange democracy

the million masks of God.

The million masks of the Joker.

Because the Joker is the player.

The trick player, who plays ultimately the great trick on himself.

So really, there can be no resentment about this.

Nobody to blame.

Nobody to turn around during the end and say, you, you bastard, you did this to me.

Because it's always you who are ultimately responsible.

So this prompter, you see, keeps the actor on the stage in touch with the green room.

And so there are certain people in the world who might be a kind of a priesthood sometimes,

although priesthoods are apt to become corrupt and square.

But a kind of people in the know.

There always has to be somebody around in the know.

So that, as it were, the wheel of society and of existence, the wheel of the squirrel cage,

the wheel of the rat race, can have an axle firmly planted.

And at the center then, there have to be the far in people.

So this is the domain of Jokers.

Now having developed that side of the Joker, the person who sees through the social institutions

as games, I went on in the second session to discuss another aspect of the Joker as the

sly man, in comparison with the monk, the fakir, and the yogi, who undertake, all those three,

undertake in certain different ways disciplines which have the intent of releasing them from

their karma.

The individual, in other words, challenges his involvement, his attachments, his limitations,

his finitude, and endeavors to overcome it.

But in each of these three cases, the individual involved stirs up an immense opposition.

Because he serves notice upon the devil, or shall we say, upon his karmic creditors, that he is

about to leave town.

And so all the creditors come rushing to the door, all his past sins catch up with him,

and the devil lays his temptations in the way all the more thoroughly.

So that the sly man is the one who, when he is going to leave town, does so instantaneously,

without any prior announcement.

And so in this way there is, shall we say, a cunning manner of becoming a Buddha.

And that is to become one instantly, without any preparation or warning whatsoever.

This is why Zen is called the sudden school, and why satori is a sudden awakening.

Because it has to be done without the slightest warning.

Now, but then, I pointed out that the moment you have any idea about doing this, you've already

ceased to be sudden.

That is to say, the moment you seek for some spiritual attainment, which is becoming a Buddha,

becoming awakened, becoming released, getting in there, you've already served notice upon

your creditors.

So that somehow or other, you find that you have to do it without intending to do it.

And that is a double bind, which you impose upon yourself when you say, I must find a way

of doing this spontaneously.

That's the old, old basic double bind.

You must be spontaneous.

You are commanded, or you command yourself to do something which is acceptable only if it

happens spontaneously.

Then you think about that and say, well, well, well.

What a fix that is.

Here am I saying, I must be surprised.

And I'm going to lay plans to surprise myself.

So by going through this, you discover naturally that that can't be done.

You can't surprise yourself on purpose.

Yet that's what you have to do.

So what about it?

You come to a state of total paralysis.

You're stuck.

The one thing that is terribly important to be done, can't be done.

It has to happen, it really does if you're earnest about this.

You want to get out of the trap.

But you can't do anything about it, either actively or passively.

But then as you begin to see what you are doing all the time, you notice a very odd fact,

which is that you can't help being spontaneous.

If I say to you, good morning, and you say good morning, what is that?

Did you plan this answer?

Did you make preparations to grow your hair?

Do you make decisions about having blue eyes, you see, about breathing?

Is this all planned, about beating your heart?

And what about your thinking, even if it's very blocked thinking?

Even if you feel, from a certain point of view, that you're all mixed up?

What is going on anyway?

You see, you can't stop it.

It's like trying to...

We were discussing the Gurdjieff thing yesterday, the self-remembering exercise.

The attempt to live completely in the present.

Well, that's not only a Gurdjieff idea, that's a very ancient yoga and Buddhist discipline,

to be completely here and now.

But, of course, as you pursue this, you discover you can't do it.

Because you couldn't even, you know, know when to go shopping, unless you made plans and

started thinking about the future.

You couldn't move.

But then you discover, you see, that in the long run there's nothing to think about except

the here and now.

There really isn't anything else.

Because even when you make plans for the future, and you remember the past, you're doing it

all in the present.

Your memory is a present activity.

There's no way of not being self-remembering and having presence of mind.

So when you discover that, there's nothing left to you but to have a good laugh.

Well now, I want to develop, to a greater extent, something I only touched on yesterday afternoon.

When we were discussing anxiety and laughter, and the relationship between the two, I suggested

that anxiety and laughter are really the same phenomenon, but seen from different points

of view.

As we all know, we can have shudders of horror and shudders of delight, tears of grief and

tears of joy.

And it's the same shudders and the same tears in either case, but they have a completely

different meaning.

Now life is a matter of oscillation.

Light is vibration.

Ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya the whole time and all the way through.

Question is, how are you going to interpret that?

Is it tremble-tremble-tremble-tremble?

Or is it laugh-laugh-laugh?

Huh?

That's the... that's the great thing.

And sometimes it's one, and sometimes it's the other.

So that the whole thing of the Joker comes into being, as it were, at the point when

the anxiety interpretation of the trembling becomes the laughing interpretation.

We were talking about monks who had skulls in their cells to remind them of mortality.

And we think a grim thing, the skull is a grim thing, but Chesterton had the poem about

the skull, Chattering finch and water fly are not merrier than I.

Here among the flowers I lie, laughing everlastingly.

No, I may not tell the best.

Surely friends, I might have guessed, death was but the good king's jest.

It was hid so carefully.

So you can see the skull, not as a grim thing, but as a laughing thing.

It's all that's left of a human being.

And all the surface is peeled off, and nothing but this beautiful bone remains, it laughs.

Now why?

What is it about death being a jest?

We discussed the problem of the zebra.

You remember?

Whether a zebra is a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes.

And, of course, you can see it either way.

And you can argue till all is blue about which side is right.

And let's suppose that a black horse is a horse of ill omen, even though striped with yellow.

And a yellow horse is a horse of joy and good omen, even though striped with black.

This is our eternal problem.

We are in the state of egocentric consciousness, firmly convinced that death is a threat.

We are so convinced of this, even though individuals may say, well, I'm not really afraid of death.

What I'm afraid of is dying in an unpleasant way.

Nevertheless, since almost all moralists and people concerned with ethics seem to agree, whatever their differences of opinion, that survival is a good thing.

In some sense, if not survival in this body, even the most, I mean, the people who would rather be dead than red, firmly believe that that is true because they believe there is a hereafter where they can go and where they can be rewarded for the courageous stand against evil which they have taken.

You see?

So that's still some kind of insistence on the value of survival.

And we all cling to this idea of survival with tremendous passion.

But we have been fooled because survival is an important ideal only so long as you have bothering you the bugbear of death.

That the world might stop altogether.

And that your death, so far as you are concerned, is curtains forever.

And that is really the bogey.

You see, that's all very well to rationalize and say, no, it's not death I'm afraid of, it's the pains of death.

But if you think about it deeply, there are several stages in thinking about it deeply.

The first stage is the real horrors of endless night, of the futility, of the whole conception that one's own life, or indeed the whole life of the cosmos, might be nothing but a flash, and beyond that nothing.

Nothing, nothing, nothing in all directions.

When, for example, we think of the physicists' idea that the universe is running down, that all energy is seeking a stable state.

Supposing, for example, to give an illustration of what they mean, I have a jar of black pepper and a jar of salt.

And I pour them together into another jar, and I can see the white salt and the black pepper fairly well delineated.

Then I start shaking the jar.

And slowly, slowly, slowly, the black and the white disappear into a grey.

That can never be sorted out again into black and white.

In this sort of way, as things go on, the universe, they say, tends to attain a stable state, to run down, run down, run down, until that's the end.

And nobody knows how it could possibly start all over again.

But I always say, and I feel it in a sort of funny, intuitive way, that what happened once can happen again.

If this world started at some time, supposing there was a colossal explosion which set all these galaxies flying out,

then what existed before that explosion must surely have been something like the stable state to which we shall run down in the end.

And if it went bang once, there's absolutely no reason why it shouldn't go bang again.

I suppose there are temperaments in logic.

I have a temperament whereby I just cannot...

I mean, it seems to me absolutely basic that what happened once can happen again.

But there are other people who so cherish the unique

that they can conceive the idea of something like existence happening only once.

But you see, something that happens only once doesn't happen at all.

What happens if you... a given sound consists of only one vibration?

What is the up crest of a wave apart from the down crest? Can you conceive that?

That's the same koan as what is the sound of one hand?

Ha!

You see, it always takes two.

You can't have a purely left-sided person.

Imagine.

So, in this way, just as you can't have just one vibration...

I mean, it's like saying the greatest strength of mind is to eat one peanut.

Ha!

And so, it can hardly be done.

Ha!

So, there isn't just one vibration.

And, uh, a dip but no da sort of thing.

Uh, you have to have it do more.

So, in just the same way, when you magnify this principle,

there isn't just one cosmos, or one big explosion that starts and stops.

All stopping implies starting.

Someone just wrote to me, we haven't parted because we never met.

Ha!

So, the whole point of saying this is the realization that existence is eternal.

The going out of existence implies the coming in.

And St. Thomas had some points here,

when he said,

there could never have been a time when there was not being,

because if there had been a time when there was nothing,

there was nothing in nothing to produce something.

But he didn't quite have the point,

because what he didn't see was that nothing is productive,

in the sense that you can't have nothing without something.

They go together.

And all this thing is an argument,

again, about whether the zebra is yellow striped black,

or black striped yellow.

And what we see is that the black and the yellow, the darkness and the light,

are simply two phases of the same.

And that realization is exactly what transforms anxiety into laughter.

suddenly to see that you just, after all this anxiety,

that you don't have anything to worry about.

Now, that doesn't mean that there will not, in our future,

lie some extremely painful experiences,

or experiences that we would ordinarily interpret as horribly painful.

We may all die of ghastly diseases,

or of radiation burns,

or of unimaginable things.

But look here.

I very briefly touched on pain yesterday,

and the way pain is interpreted.

If you interpret pain as something that is destroying you,

and is going in the direction of total death,

then it's very serious indeed.

And it's perfectly terrifying.

But I've been investigating experiences of people who have undergone torture.

I don't know if anybody in this room has.

It's always possible.

But, and then if so, you can correct me.

But the worst part of torture is the beginning.

When, of course, you're full of all your illusions,

and all your fears about black and white,

and the terror that black may win.

But it's said that as torture proceeds,

it slowly changes the state of mind of the victim

to a kind of drunken, masochistic giving in to the torture,

so that it becomes something that he cooperates with.

And that if the torturer notices this,

he knows he's through and has to kill him.

So, in other words, there is a point

at which pain becomes an experience

without having a negative interpretation put upon it.

becomes, in other words, converted into ecstasy.

It simply becomes, you see, a way of going through extraordinarily far-out sensations,

which have no meaning.

If they have meaning, the meaning of threat,

the meaning of death looming at the end,

and you know this is the tearing apart and the destruction of you,

then you see it is absolutely horrendous.

But if it has no meaning at all,

just transpose yourself into another dimension to illustrate it,

because the dimension I'm talking about is a very tough one.

But let's go back to a simpler one.

Let's take sounds.

Now, if you lie down and listen to all the goings-on in this area,

and you will hear planes moving and cars and fog horns

and all kinds of crazy sounds, you see,

people this way and that and so on.

And you can listen to that and find it very interesting, very beautiful.

But if someone were to do what John Cage does,

and put you in a concert hall with the expectation of hearing music,

and by having a purely silent playing of the piano,

compel you instead to listen to all the sounds going on around you,

you would be shocked and feel that some kind of an avant-garde hoax

had been perpetrated.

You see, it depends on the set,

on the way you approach the experience.

Now, you can listen to sounds that are ordinarily considered unpleasant

in a totally unprejudiced way.

You can listen to discordant musical noises,

and find them extremely interesting, if you listen carefully enough.

You can listen to a squalling brat, and find it musical.

That this child...

I'll never forget waking up one morning and listening to a child whining.

The child wasn't saying anything.

There were no words in it.

It was just a plaint.

It wasn't exactly crying.

It was a kind of...

There was something marvellous about it.

This child's wonderfully articulate protest against some sort of nuisance.

And so, listening into those things without interpreting them,

listening to one's own interior frustration and pain in the same way,

without interpreting it as being on one side or the other,

on the good side or the bad side,

on the black side or the white side,

is what makes it possible, you see, to transmute these things.

But you can't do this.

You can't really, honestly, transmute pain into a form of play,

a form of weird, far-out sensations that are basically just that.

So long as...

You fail to see the inner unity of the opposites, so long as you fall for the idea that you are nothing more than this particular life, than this particular ego, which came from nowhere and is going nowhere.

While you remain under that illusion, you see, you, first of all, you don't see your identity with everything else that exists.

If death then is a joke, I remember the biggest joke on death I ever saw, I mention this in my book.

We visited the Capuchin Friars crypt in the Via Veneto in Rome, some of you may have seen it, where there are three underground chapels where everything is made of bones.

And the altar is made of bones, the pedestals of the altar are all shin bones.

And then there are piles of skulls, and the decoration of flowers on the ceiling are ribs alternating with vertebrae.

And the vertebrae are the flowers, and the ribs curl this way, curl this way, curl this way, the twining stems.

And the whole thing is bones, and they have even a few full intact skeletons dressed in monk's robes standing on either side of these altars.

It's the craziest thing you ever saw.

And then when you have seen it and you come out, there is a little friar with a beard taking your offering at the top of the steps.

And he had a funny wicked gleam in his eye.

And one could see that this was a joke, the whole thing was a joke.

It was constructed by people who had somehow overcome the fear of death.

He couldn't possibly have such a thing as that.

And so I was fascinated by it because I thought that on the day of the resurrection there is going to be a tremendous scuffle

for fitting all those bones together and everybody getting up the stairs for the last judgment.

Well, so if it is seen that death is the jest, but the question is, you see, we are so tormented by the bugbearer of it being the real end, by the imagination of the possibility of being in the dark.

Now, you really must think this through because it is a pure delusion.

If you think first of all seriously about annihilation of consciousness, you will realize that annihilation of consciousness couldn't possibly be an experience.

But being in the dark forever could be an experience.

Supposing you were buried alive and somehow you were immortal, but you had to stay shut up in a tomb for always and always and always.

That would be pretty grim.

But the annihilation of consciousness is not an experience at all.

There isn't anything there to be afraid of.

So, if that's what's going to happen, there's nothing to worry about, I assure you.

But on the other hand, if you think about it longer, about a state of eternal just not being at all, you know,

you realize that nature abhors a vacuum.

And that since, just as the universe happened once, it can happen again.

Since you were born once, you know, it did happen really.

Well, it can happen again.

Only, the, the next you won't remember the one now, just as the one now doesn't remember the one before.

Not because you've forgotten, but because memory is transmitted along certain channels.

It requires the vehicle of brains, for example.

It requires books and other records to maintain it.

But as I pointed out yesterday, the fundamental what have you that underlies all this doesn't need a memory.

It doesn't need to store memories.

And so, just in the same way as you don't need to be conscious of the inner formations of your brain.

Also, I mean, here I'm, I'm talking speculatively.

Also, there are curious connections where we don't see any.

That is to say, the interval between events is not insignificant.

Just as you don't hear melody unless you hear the interval between tones.

It's the interval that counts.

So, in the same way, at blank intervals between successive manifestations of the universe,

and blank intervals between your forgetting who you are altogether and dying,

and someone suddenly becoming a baby.

The blank intervals are not insignificant.

Every painter knows, every architect knows, that the space around an object, or inside an object,

is just as important as the object.

That, again, is the fact.

If you don't notice the importance of intervals, and you don't notice the importance of space,

it is as if you had settled on the carpet here, for the black design being the thing,

and the white background as having no, no significance.

So, what about the inside of this room?

What about the shape of space that it encloses?

We would say this is nothing more than a certain quantity of air.

But, don't you see that the distance, the space between that wall and this window, is life room.

That is not nothing.

That is just as important.

It comes into being at the same moment as the walls come into being.

It connects them.

And so, likewise, the space between our planet and other planets is not insignificant.

So, once you see that intervals of apparent nothingness are significant intervals,

that their size makes all the difference to what's happening.

When the intervals between dits are short, the note is high.

When the intervals between the dits are long, the note is low, or large, the high being little.

See, why do we say high and low as distinct from little and big?

Big instruments make big noises.

Little instruments make tiny noises.

But, at any rate, it's the interval that's important.

So, then, once you see the importance of the interval, you have seen that the white is as important as the black,

or the other way round, if you want to change your analogy.

Do you see how you can switch these analogies?

In one case, the white can be the nothing, the unimportant.

Whereas the black is the mark somebody made, with a crayon.

Or, the other way round, the black can be the darkness.

And the white is the flash of lightning that appears in the darkness.

Change your analogy.

It's like saying, once we used to say about high matters, you know, high matters, lofty thoughts.

But now, we don't, it's more fashionable to say deep matters and profound thoughts.

Someone was telling me yesterday, in the group here, that they were going to an Indian village, in New Mexico,

where they had Christianity.

But when the speaker referred to Jesus and God and so on, he pointed down all the time.

Because, you see, he felt that things grew up like this from below.

Whereas, of course, the ancient cults, out of which the Jewish and Christian religions grew,

had the idea that the life of the sun and the rain came down from the heavens,

and fertilized the feminine earth, which then responded.

But these things keep changing, because you can keep switching your point of view.

You can see the black as the design against the white background,

and the white as the design against the black background.

And you can flip back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

The more you do that, the more you realize that the pairs go together.

Anxiety is the state of trying not to flip.

All life is flipping.

It's called its flip-flop ability, is the condition of life.

This way and that way.

When you're trying to resist flip-flop ability, you're anxious.

You see?

When you push against it, it throbs in a way that you interpret as fear.

And all rigid personalities, people who can't swing,

who have no movement in their hips, as it were, psychologically,

they are resisting flip-flop ability.

But when you understand flip-flop ability, and that this is the way things are,

then you laugh, because that is the big flip-flop.

This morning I was discussing the joke of death, and the principal point that I was making,

was that death and life, or that is to say, in other words, the interval and the event.

Death being the interval between events, between one appearance and another of human beings,

in the same way as winter, is the interval between the appearance of the leaves in spring,

and their disappearance in the fall.

But there is, you see, the chronic fear that the interval may be all that there is.

That the interval may triumph, and there may be no event.

And I was trying to show you that there is a polarity between the event and the interval between events,

in such a way that you can no more have the one without the other,

than you can have the crest of the wave without the trough.

And that this goes on and on and on, in endless cycles,

where there are small intervals, making up, small intervals and waves,

which group together, and make up a set of intervals and waves,

and they, in themselves, constitute the crest of a larger wave, with a much longer trough.

And then again, there comes the group of intervals and waves on a short rhythm.

And that this thing that goes like, you see, like this, you see,

that this thing, in its turn, is the crest of a still greater wave.

And that the nature of being is that this is the scheme of things.

But the joke about it, what makes it exciting, is the constant anticipation

that there might not be anything again after the interval.

That it might all come to an end.

And the real problem, in order to turn death into a joke,

that is to say, suddenly to recover from this terrible anxiety,

that it might be finished.

And then transmute the vibration trembling of anxiety into laughter.

It is the same thing.

Only the trembling of laughter is the trembling of anxiety seen from a different point of view.

Now, what are the things that are obstacles to our being able to see that?

It's almost as if life were itself a guru.

And you know how gurus throw out tests to their students

to see if they can pass these various initiations,

all of which require nerve in the face of some formidable obstacle.

All fairy stories are full of this.

And so life itself throws out all kinds of reasons for supposing

that we are faced with something serious instead of something playful.

And I want to discuss with you a few ways which in Western history

this obstacle has been thrown out and how we today are bamboozled by these obstacles.

In the history of Western civilization there have really been, in the past 2,000 years,

two dominant mythologies.

One has had a long run and the other has had a fairly short run.

But they are both ways of terrifying you so that you won't see the point.

But at the same time they are perhaps not merely negative things,

but challenges barriers of the same kind that a guru would offer.

For example, in the study of Zen, each koan is referred to as a barrier.

And if you can pass the barrier, you see, you get in, in, in.

But the function of the teacher is to put the barriers up to see how you'll react to them.

So, in a way, we could say that the two great mythologies which have dominated the Western world in the past 2,000 years are two barriers.

The first, of course, is the Christian mythology.

And in the Christian mythology, the individual is made to feel that he is strictly on probation.

That he does not really belong.

That if he is at all a son of God, he is so by adoption and grace.

He isn't really one of the family.

Let me explore the theology of that a moment.

In Christian theology, God has only one son.

The monogonies, or the only begotten son of God,

who is the second person of the Trinity, the Logos.

The divine idea of itself.

The Trinity constitutes a family.

Naturally, it's therefore threefold.

Because all, for the Greek mind,

and it was the Greek mind that molded Christian theology,

meaning entirely depends on the structure of the Greek language.

And Greek, in common with all Western languages,

and indeed also Sanskrit, from which it is derived,

has a sentence structure in which there is the subject, the verb, and the predicate.

And we can't make any sense without those three things.

We have to have an I love you or an I know you sentence

for there to be any love or for there to be any knowledge.

There must be the lover.

The lover can't love without having a beloved,

and the lover doesn't relate to the beloved without the relationship of love between them.

So there you have the subject, the predicate, and the verb.

And so naturally, in Greek ideas, the very inner nature of reality of the Godhead itself must be threefold,

following the structure of Greek thought and Greek grammar.

So, in this way, the inner life of the Godhead is completely self-sufficient.

There is the sun, the object of God's love,

so that God doesn't need any created world of finite beings as the necessary object of his love,

so that he can be love. You see?

So then, the created world is something extraneous.

It's something that the Lord threw off in a fit of exuberance.

And although it is very much beloved by him, he doesn't in any way depend on it.

He, in a sense, fathered it, but he fathered it out of nothing.

It had no true mother.

And so, in a way, it's an orphan.

And the relationship between the creator and the creature in popular Christianity

has always been the relationship between the king and the subject.

And the relationship between the king and the subject is very, very strange, estranged,

because the king, in the archetypes of kingship, which existed in the Near East in ancient times

and upon which this theological imagery was originally modeled,

the king was really afraid.

He always appeared in the throne room with his back to the wall.

He didn't stand in the middle of his people and say, you know, and look around at everybody like that.

He stood with his back to the wall like this.

It's funny how all altars, buddhas and things, have their backs to the wall.

Because there you can't be stabbed.

And you have your guards and your henchmen on either side of you.

And all the people prostrate themselves.

Because that way you can watch them all.

They can't see you and you can see them.

So you're safe.

And that's the imagery, you see, which has given us our Western conception of God.

Of the father whose children have become a little bit too much for him.

He's had too many.

And they have to be kept in their place.

And so he's a little bit frightened.

And so the rules are set up.

You just do so and so and so and so.

And you must feel grateful for having been fathered.

You're a miserable worm.

And therefore, inwardly, because without me you might not have been.

You owe everything you have to my having produced you.

And you are a debtor.

And because you are debtor you have a duty.

Duty is the same word as debt.

Debit.

You owe life to me who produced you.

Although I won't admit I had a great deal of fun doing it.

And so you must all crawl.

Now you see that that conception of our relationship to reality.

Has been the popular idea for centuries in the Western world.

So that you never really knew where you stood with the authority.

Because the authority gives you the impression that you are so bad intrinsically.

That at any time you ought to be punished and eaten up.

And it's only a matter of mercy that you are not being eaten up.

So the prayers of the Christian church are full of the idea.

Oh Lord we are not worthy.

And since it is only of thy great mercy that we continue to survive at all.

We humbly beseech thee, et cetera, et cetera.

Imagine.

Going around with that feeling about the nature of reality.

That it is watching you all the time.

That you are always on probation.

Like a released prisoner.

And therefore there is an all-seeing eye.

At every moment of the day and night surveilling you.

Much more efficiently than any big brother could watch you.

Through tiny TV cameras in your bedroom.

I know a friend of mine who is a devout Catholic.

And in her toilet.

But she is different.

She has a sense of humor.

And in the toilet.

You know it's an old fashioned one.

There is a tank and a pipe coming down to the john.

And there is a little placard on it.

With a big eye.

Painted.

And in Gothic letters underneath it it says,

Thou God seest me.

So always everywhere, according to this mythology.

There is the eye of the paternal judge watching you.

Now what can you do with a situation like that?

If that's the way things really are.

You don't know whether this Lord has a sense of humor.

And whether you can say to him.

Hey look don't take such an advantage of me like that.

Turn down that light a little.

Close off your eyes sometimes.

You don't need to be all that particular.

You know I can't do anything to you.

I can't knock you over.

Why do you need to bug me all the time?

That sort of attitude is too much.

And so people couldn't stand it.

You know 600 years of it was enough.

And it became intolerable.

Really intolerable.

Because everybody knew they were sinners.

And that they were doing all the things against the rules in the book.

And nobody could possibly put up with it.

So the only thing they could do to relieve themselves of this horrible father figure.

Was to make out that the universe didn't have a father at all.

That it was really an orphan.

Not even virgin born.

It didn't even have a mother.

In other words in order to escape from the mythology.

Of a conception of ultimate reality.

Which was much too intelligent.

And much too nosy.

People had to invent a conception of the ultimate reality.

That was completely banal and dead.

So the second western mythology.

Is the mythology of the mechanical universe.

Which is a fluke emerging from a process of absolutely blind energy.

And you must notice the language in which the great thinkers of the 19th century.

Thought about the world.

Freud for the basic psychic energy used the word libido.

Which in the 19th century Vienna.

Was exceedingly uncomplimentary.

Libido.

Blind lust.

And so in the same way.

The science philosophers of the 19th century.

Talked about the world as being based on brute force.

Unintelligent energy.

And worked out a conception of man.

As a really rather unfortunate natural fluke.

Consciousness.

Reason.

And indeed also.

The passions and feelings and desires of the human heart.

Were nothing but.

The end product.

Of a roulette wheel.

Of natural selection.

It's a most curious paradox.

That.

Those philosophers of the 19th century.

Who denied the supernatural origin of man.

And who insisted that man is simply a part of nature.

One of the members of nature.

Nevertheless.

Set up a state of alienation.

Between man and nature.

Without precedent.

I am a part of nature.

I am something that nature.

Uh.

Fluked into being.

But nevertheless.

This fluke.

Is something that nature doesn't care about.

It doesn't care about my ego.

And its future.

All that is important to nature is the species.

The individual is irrelevant.

At the same time.

This philosophy.

Uh.

Arose.

When we were becoming conscious of this.

Sheer magnitude of the universe.

And it took.

The first impression of this vastness.

As a pretext.

For making little of human beings.

And saying.

What do you matter in this huge cosmos?

You're just a little fluke.

You're just a little nothing at all.

This thing goes way on, on, on, on, on.

Beyond all imagination.

And therefore man is just.

So much fungus on a rock.

And a very tiny rock at that.

In other words, it took the standpoint, let's set up a scale between two limits.

We will, and this is the traditional Western opposition.

On the one end of the scale to the left here, you have matter.

The inert, the clay put into shape by the potter.

On the other end of the scale, you have spirit, which is intelligence.

And these are what the mathematicians call limits.

And a limit is something you approach, but you never actually get there.

Now, what the 19th century mythology did was to think of all things towards the limit called matter.

It said, in effect, there is this dead material stuff.

It is energetic, but the energy is unintelligent.

It is a kind of roaring mechanical energy like fire or electricity or so on.

It is not intelligent.

And everything is really that.

What we call human intelligence and consciousness are merely complicated forms of this primordial energy.

And, uh, they are nothing but that.

Uh, in the same way, we are evolved from lower orders of animals.

And I can trace my ancestry to a protoplasmal globule, as Poopar says.

And, uh, you know, that's what you really are.

You're only a complicated protoplasmal globule.

Now, do you see the intent behind this mythology?

The intent is to deprecate.

The intent is, as we say now, to put down the human being.

Because the human being felt that hitherto he had been put up too far in the wrong way.

You are a child of God.

And the Lord loves you very dearly, but.

You know?

Uh, that's just insufferable.

To be put up in that way.

You have an immortal soul.

Your life is endless.

But it can very well turn out to be a life of endless agony.

When you fry in hell.

And that was a very serious threat.

To both, uh, Protestants and Catholics.

And so, it's much better, much more comfortable,

to have a dead universe.

Than a living universe so everlastingly threatening.

So then, the mythology of the 19th century,

under which most of us still operate.

Because, we, we operate under it because it has become so plausible.

The, the science out of which this mythology arose has been so effective.

It has produced such a marvelous splash of technological marvels.

That, its point of view, or the point of view of those scientists who started the whole thing going,

has become amazingly persuasive and convincing.

After all, if I can reach into your brain with a very, very subtle instrument,

and I can poke about inside and press there, and suddenly,

on a certain point when I press it,

a world of memory comes to life so vividly that you see it before your very eyes.

I remove the instrument, it vanishes.

I touch another place.

You experience, uh, intense pleasure.

Absolutely unbelievable pleasure.

I remove it, the sensation vanishes.

Every time I touch inside,

you get a sensation externally of intense reality.

And I say, after all, I was only just pushing things in your brain.

You see what a push-button thing you are?

That's it.

I can just poke around, and you can see anything.

But all that's happening is I'm putting a little electrode or something on certain parts of your brain.

That's all you are, poor fish.

You're just a, you're just that kind of a sensitive sponge inside your head bone.

Well, that gets very persuasive.

You see?

And people are, therefore, in a position,

they are prejudiced to favor a mythology

that will make out

that

you are, after all,

nothing but

something or other.

Nothing but

a kind of, uh,

complicated neurological jello.

And that point of view,

as I said,

has become enormously convincing.

It's plausible today.

Whereas the old point of view

of God the Father

and all the angels

isn't plausible.

It's, uh,

it seems kind of weird

in relation to what we know about

the state of the universe.

Now,

what we have to see

is that both of these points of view

are equally mythological.

and there's no more reason

to take one than the other.

And that

what these points of view reflect

are nothing other

than certain attitudes

to, to living.

Now, you see,

if you want to live

in a way

that always

is saying

I think

that life

is disgusting.

Supposing you want

to deny

being,

then

you can always

describe it

in ways

that are offensive.

You can always say

playing the violin

is just scraping

cat's entrails

with horse hair.

That puts it down.

And you say,

you know,

and you say,

people who play golf

they're a bunch of idiots

who go out on a,

take a walk

and they hit a stupid

little ball with sticks.

Or that

people who

like music

are just a bunch of idiots

who sit around

and go out of their minds

listening to a lot

of complicated noises.

See,

there's always a way

of talking about something

to make it sound terrible.

Equally,

there's a way

of talking about something

to make it sound great.

Now,

do you want

to live your life

in such a way

that you're always

saying to it,

hmm,

yeah,

you know?

Do you want to,

is that a good way

to conduct things?

Or do you want

to live your life

in such a way

that you,

you say,

come on,

let's go,

you see,

let's,

let's swing this thing.

On the one hand,

you see,

you're always

in tension against it.

Do you remember

I pointed out to you

in this morning

that the person

who's anxious,

constantly anxious,

is the person

who is resisting

the flip-flop ability

of things.

Life is vibrating,

it's going

blub,

all the time,

and the anxious person

says,

God's sake,

don't do that.

Because,

you know,

you might do it

too much.

I don't want to

blub like this,

it makes me feel

nervous.

Let's do it.

And so,

as he puts his weight

on this

blub,

he goes

blub,

like this,

you see,

it gets trimming.

So instead of

saying,

come on,

let's blub,

let's go

and do this thing,

so in exactly

the same way,

the person

who wants to say,

well,

you're nothing

but,

you're nothing

but some kind

of chemicals,

and they're

just a lot of,

you're a bag

of pus and blood,

basically,

with a few

bones inside.

And,

that person

is doing

the same thing,

you see,

as the person

is putting pressure

on the flip-floppability

of things,

and so he gets

anxious.

And the person

who does this,

he wants to say,

he's always,

look,

think about your

friends,

and the people

who are

philosophical

and enthusiastic

materialists.

They're always

going to pose

themselves

as a certain

kind of hero.

After all,

you're just a

dreamer,

but I face

facts.

See,

I'm a hard-headed

realist,

and I,

I'm,

as a matter of

fact,

I'm an

intellectual

porcupine.

I have my

prickles out

all over the

place,

because I'm

the kind of

person who,

in the academic

world,

at any rate,

is full of

rigor.

I ask,

what precisely

is the

evidence about

this?

And,

I'm

analytical,

and I'm

believe in,

I don't like

woolly and

vague thinking.

I like it

clear-cut,

and you can

see that

porcupine's

bristle going

right through

like that.

See,

well,

this is a

personality type

who wants

to play

that role,

whose message

in saying

all this

jazz is,

I'm the

kind of

person

who is

all dry

as a

bone,

but I

believe that

that is

strength,

and that's

reality.

And another

kind of

person says

to him,

oh,

you are

intolerable.

You're so

dry,

you're so

dull,

you rattle,

you don't

have any

juice in

you.

And what

we need

is juice,

and we

need flow,

we need

lilt and

rhythm and

gaiety,

you see.

So that's

an opposed

mythology.

And that's

another

character part

you're going

to play.

But so

we've got

to consider

these are

games,

you see,

as I tried

to show

you earlier.

The kind

of roles

we play

are the

kind of

games we

play.

So,

but the

question

is,

which

is

the

optimal

game?

Certainly

we can't

do

without

some

prickly

people,

because

life is

prickles

and goo.

And

it's

basically

gooey

prickles

and prickly

goo,

but the

gooey

people

are always

trying to

make out

that it's

only goo,

and the

prickly

people are

always

trying to

make out

it's

only

prickles.

And we

do need

both,

see?

But

the question

is fundamentally

which game

works better,

the game

that resists

the vibration,

the flip-flop,

or the game

that goes

with it?

Obviously

the game

that goes

with it,

that cooperates

with the

general scene,

will be

a longer

game,

and a

more

amusing

game,

than one

that totally

resists it.

Although,

I don't want

to,

I said

totally,

advisedly,

because it's

great fun

to resist

it at

times.

See,

it's just

like

when somebody

massages

you,

you know,

and they're

really expert

and those fingers

are just vibrating

like this

on your back,

you can

give and

impact

of this

thing,

see?

But what I

want to,

the real point

I want to get

across

is that

what seems

to us

the hard-boiled

common sense

of a mechanistic

view of the

universe

is nothing

other than

a myth.

You don't

have to be

taken in

by this,

because there

is no more

solid argument

that that

is the way

things are

than any

other argument

about any

other way

things might

be.

Now,

it goes

like this,

you see.

Again,

think of the

idea of

limits.

We'll take

different

limits this

time.

We'll take

one limit

on the

right hand

here as

consciousness.

Extreme,

lively

sensitivity.

And on

the other

hand,

we'll take

the stone,

the blind

energy,

the electrical

force without

any consciousness

whatsoever.

These are

observable

things.

We see

the living

human being

on one

extreme,

and we see

the stone

or the fire

on the

other.

Now,

our 19th

century

mythologist

wants to

describe this

limit in

terms of

this one.

He wants

to say

that consciousness

is nothing

but a very

complicated

form of

minerals.

Why can't

you go

the other

way and

just as

easily say

minerals are

a very

simple form

of consciousness?

That works,

doesn't it?

I mean,

after all,

here is this

mineral.

I knock it

and it says

that to me.

This is a

rudimentary

form of

consciousness.

This thing

inside is

not making

a noise to

itself because

that requires

ears.

But in

some way,

this thing

into itself

is shaking

like that.

And that's

its consciousness.

Its response,

its resonance.

It isn't

totally

unconscious.

But its

consciousness

is extremely

simple.

Now,

you may think

I'm spinning

fairy stories.

But is that

any more of

a fairy story

than to say

that your

consciousness

is nothing

but chemistry?

I mean,

you think

you're conscious

and that you

have this

high and mighty

state of affairs

but actually,

of course,

if we look at

this very

realistically,

all this

is just

colloidal

substances

bubbling around.

See?

Both

that story

and the

other story

can be made

to seem

equally

fanciful.

But the

question is

this.

If I say

about the

gong,

look,

my friend,

I respect

you because

you are a

little bit

conscious.

See?

You relate

to me.

You're kind

of a younger

brother and

you know.

Then there's

something

endearing and

warm about

this attitude

to things.

Whereas if I

say,

you're just a

piece of

metal and

as a matter

of fact,

I'm just a

piece of

metal too.

That's a

kind of

insult.

Now the

people who

believe that

are really

suicidal

maniacs.

They want

to put

themselves

down.

They are

against

their own

life.

And they

take a

great pride

in being

that way.

And they

call it

being

realistic.

And I'm

only saying

it's a

better gamble

to take

it the

other way

and say

the best

thing you

can say

about it.

That this

is a

living being

but not

so much

of a

living being

as a

snail or

something that

actually wanders

along and

wiggles.

So you

see the

pressure upon

us of

the whole

mythology of

the 19th

century,

the whole

attitude of

putting down

the universe

because the

previous myth

had been

too uncomfortably

alive,

is simply a

way of

looking at

things.

Let me

give another

illustration of

the same

thing.

If you

study the

various forms

of life

from the

standpoint

of natural

selection,

you may

come up

with a

rationalization

for everything.

Somebody

wants to

know,

why do

butterflies

have

eyes on

their

wings?

Some

butterflies.

Well,

somebody

scratches his

head and

says,

oh,

well,

there must

be an

explanation

for

that.

There's

an

explanation

for

everything.

Why

is there

an

explanation

for

everything?

Because

the

universe

is

really

a

eyes.

Well,

it so

happened

that

some

fluke

of

a

butterfly

once

got

an

eye

on

its

wing

and

birds

would

avoid

it

so

those

tended

to

multiply.

So

this

is

a

perfectly

easy

simple

explanation

of

why

butterflies

have

eyes

on

their

wings.

Of

other

things,

some

birds

with

extraordinary

plumages

which

look

so

obvious

that

anybody

could

catch

them,

any

cat,

any

hunter.

No,

they

survived

because

they

were

so

attractive

to

their

females.

And

so

they

bred

very

well.

As

a

matter

of

fact,

this

isn't

true,

they

didn't.

will

do

provided

it

seems

to

explain.

Now

that

is

one

way

of

looking

at

things.

You

can

make

an

extremely

consistent

theory

for

the

different

kind

of

species

of

flowers

and

birds

and

insects

and

all

their

markings

and

so

on

just

why

they

have

them.

But

on

the

other

hand

you

can

equally

well

explain

it

in

a

completely

different

way.

You

can

say

it

would

exceedingly

dreary

if

there

one

uniform

type

of

life.

Supposing

there

never

been

anything

but

amoebas

and

they

were

just

globules

and

they

divided

and

then

they

divided

again

and

then

they

divided

again.

You

know

that

could

have

gone

on

and

could

have

been

terribly

efficient

because

the

minute

you

went

to

hit

an

amoeba

you

would

strike

it

but

suddenly

find

you

killed

only

one

of

them

because

it

split

just

before

you

hit

marvellous

arrangement

and

you

know

they

could

split

very

fast

you

could

suddenly

go

at

another

with

two

hammers

hoping

to

catch

the

both

amoebas

but

suddenly

they

split

and

there

were

eight

of

them

before

you

knew

where

you

were

that

would

be

fine

but

actually

or

the

reason

why

there

is

all

this

colossal

variety

and

all

these

patterns

on

butterflies

wings

is

that

nature

is

and

is

simply

having

a

wonderful

time

making

all

this

variety

and

doing

all

these

various

things

and

that

explanation

is

just

as

plausible

as

the

efficient

explanation

it's

a

you

see

philosophy

is

to a

large

extent

a

matter

of

taste

what

sort

of

explanations

suit

your

personality

if

you're

an

anal

retentive

type

and

rather

tight

then

you

like

the

efficient

explanation

on

the

other

hand

if

you're

an

effusive

type

you

like

the

poetic

explanation

but

there

are

though

beyond

that

certain

considerations

of

which

of

these

explanations

affords

better

games

and

the

economic

anal

retentive

explanation

can give

good

games

up to

a

point

because

there's

all the

thrill

of

working out

the

chains

of

interconnection

all the

reasoning

whereby

finally

you

go through

all sorts

of

rational

conniptions

and explain

why the

butterfly

has a

big

eye

on

its

wing

fine

but

where

do

you

end

up

you

end

up

in

a

mechanical

straitjacket

you've

got to

be

careful

along

the

other

line

of

approach

that

you

just

don't

end

up

in

a

morass

you

could

do

that

so

you

look

for

a

middle

way

but

the

point

that

emerges

from

don't

be

bamboozled

into

fearing

that

the

black

will

win

because

the

white

is

the

only

thing

there

is

and

the

black

the

nothing

that

surrounds

it

will

eventually

engulf

it

all

these

are

as

it

were

nursery

stories

to

terrify

children

you

live

in

and

the

darkness

of

unconsciousness

go

back

and

forth

just

as

the

crests

and

the

troughs

of

the

waves

and

this

situation

of

yang

and

yin

positive

and

negative

is

exceedingly

productive

it's

like

a

male

and

a

female

who

become

the

parents

of

all

sorts

of

children

and

out

of

yang

and

yin

black

and

white

come

all

these

adventures

through

the

original

stratagem

of

pretending

that

the

one

is

and

the

other

isn't

that

yang

is

and

that

yin

isn't

both

have

equally

good

arguments

on

their

side

and

one

now

wins

and

the

other

now

wins

back

and

forth

back

and

forth

back

and

together

and

the

thing

that

you

most

fear

the

awful

thing

that

could

happen

think

it

through

what

could

that

be

what

could

the

very

end

be

what

is

it

that

you

dread

and

you

find

out

that

if

you

go

down

into

what

you

dread

be

swallowed

up

be

annihilated

let

the

horrible

scorpion

spider

mother

the

and

take

you

down

into

its

inmost

guts

what

will

it

do

with

you

why

it

will

transform

you

into

itself

and

then

when

you

are

it

as

I

said

every

creature

feels

like

it's

a

human

being

because

after

all

that's

I

so

fish

when

they've

eaten

up

something

and

that

thing

has

become

them

you

know

and

the

fish

looks

around

and

says

gee

that

was

a

good

dinner

and

it

feels

human

and

the

fish

looks

around

and

it

sees

things

that

aren't

fish

and

they

look

like

cows

and

human

beings

wandering

around

there

they

look

like

predatory

monsters

of

some

kind

awful

looking

things

ghastly

teeth

and

weird

un

inhumane

arms

and legs

like

a

really

good

person

should

look

so

you

know

this

thing

this

thing

of

death

and

of

being

transformed

is

where

our

life

reaches

a

certain

point

where

it

has

to

go

and

in

the

moment

you

go

you

forget

you

lose

control

you

see

that's

the

sensation

when

control

is

going

you're

just

on

the

verge

of

the

crisis

where

it's

going

and

you

say

well

where

was

I

gee

this

is

strange

I'm

alive

I

don't

remember

where

I

was

before

that's

the

sensation

of

coming

to

birth

and

you

grow

and

grow

and

you

become

more

familiar

with

this

and

more

familiar

when

you're

completely

familiar

it

goes

and

you're

new

all

over

again

see

quite

different

we

never

believe

you

see

when

it

gets

to

the

point

where

we

know

it's

into

life

we

always

think

it's

going

to

go

into

something

dreadful

but

you

see

once

you

know

it's

going

to

keep

flipping

and

the

only

thing

is

to

go

with

that

flip

see

get

ready

to

go

are

you