I find it a little difficult to say what the subject matter of this seminar is going to be
because it's too fundamental to give it a title.
I'm going to talk about what there is.
Now, the first thing though that we have to do
is to get our perspectives with some background
about the basic ideas which, as Westerners living today in the United States,
influence our everyday common sense,
our fundamental notions about what life is about.
And there are historical origins for this,
which influence us more strongly than most people realize.
Ideas of the world which are built into the very nature of the language we use
and of our ideas of logic and of what makes sense altogether.
And these basic ideas I call myth, not using the word myth to mean simply something untrue,
but to use the word myth in a more powerful sense.
A myth is an image in terms of which we try to make sense of the world.
And we at present are living under the influence of two very powerful images,
which are, in the present state of scientific knowledge, inadequate.
And one of our major problems today is to find an adequate, satisfying image of the world.
Well, that's what I'm going to talk about.
And I'm going to go further than that, not only what image of the world to have,
but how we can get our sensations and our feelings in accordance with the most sensible image of the world that we can manage to conceive.
All right, now, the two images which we have been working under for 2,000 years and maybe more,
are what I would call two models of the universe.
And the first is called the ceramic model, and the second, the fully automatic model.
The ceramic model of the universe is based on the book of Genesis,
from which Judaism, Islam and Christianity derive their basic picture of the world.
And the image of the world in the book of Genesis is that the world is an artifact.
It is made.
As a potter takes clay and forms pots out of it,
or as a carpenter takes wood and makes tables and chairs out of it.
Don't forget Jesus is the son of a carpenter, and also the son of God.
So the image of God and of the world is based on the idea of God as a technician,
potter, carpenter, architect,
who has in mind a plan and who fashions the universe in accordance with that plan.
So basic to this image of the world is the notion, you see,
that the world consists of stuff, basically.
Primordial matter, substance, stuff, as pots are made of clay.
And the potter imposes his will on it, and makes it become whatever he wants.
And so in the book of Genesis, the Lord God creates Adam out of the dust of the earth.
In other words, he makes a clay figurine, and then he breathes into it,
and it becomes alive.
Because the clay becomes informed.
By itself it is formless, it has no intelligence.
And therefore it requires an external intelligence and an external energy
to bring it to life, and to put some sense into it.
And so in this way, we inherit a conception of ourselves as being artifacts, as being made.
And it is perfectly natural in our culture for a child to ask its mother,
how was I made?
Or who made me?
And this is a very, very powerful idea.
But for example, it is not shared by the Chinese or by the Hindus.
A Chinese child would not ask its mother, how was I made?
A Chinese child might ask its mother, how did I grow?
Which is an entirely different procedure from making.
You see, when you make something, you put it together.
You arrange parts.
Or you work from the outside to the in, as a sculptor works on a stone,
or as the potter works on clay.
But when you watch something growing, it works in exactly the opposite direction.
It works from the inside to the outside.
It expands, it burgeons, it blossoms.
And it happens all over itself at once.
In other words, the original simple form, say of a living cell in the womb,
progressively complicates itself.
And that's the growing process.
And it's quite different from the making process.
And so there is, for that reason, a fundamental difference between the made and the maker.
And this image, this ceramic model of the universe,
originated in cultures where the form of government was monarchical.
And where, therefore, the maker of the universe was conceived also, at the same time,
in the image of the king of the universe.
King of kings, lord of lords, the only ruler of princes,
who dost from thy throne behold all dwellers upon earth.
I'm quoting the Book of Common Prayer.
And so all those people who are oriented to the universe in that way,
feel related to basic reality as a subject to a king.
And so they are on very, very humble terms in relation to whatever it is that works all this thing.
I find it odd, in the United States, that people who are citizens of a republic,
have a monarchical theory of the universe.
Because we are carrying over, from the very ancient Near Eastern cultures,
the notion that the lord of the universe must be respected in a certain way.
People kneel, people bow, people prostrate themselves.
Because, and you know what the reason for all that is,
that nobody is more frightened of everybody else than a tyrant.
He sits with his back to the wall.
And his guards on either side of him.
And he has you face downwards on the ground because you can't use weapons that way.
When you come into his presence,
you don't stand up and face him because you might attack.
And he has reason to fear that you might because he's ruling you all.
And the man who rules you all is the biggest crook in the bunch.
Because he's the one who succeeded in crime.
The other people are pushed aside because they, the criminals,
the people we lock up in jail.
They're simply the people who didn't make it.
So naturally, the real boss sits with his back to the wall,
and his henchmen on either side of him.
And so when you design a church, what does it look like?
A Catholic church with the altar as it used to be.
It's changing now because the Catholic religion is changing.
But the Catholic church has the altar with its back to the wall at the east end of the church.
And there, the altar is the throne.
And the priest is the chief vizier of the court.
And he is making obeisance to the throne in front.
But there is the throne of God, the altar.
And all the people are facing it and kneeling down.
And a great Catholic cathedral is called a basilica, from the Greek basileus, which means king.
So a basilica is the house of a king.
And the ritual of the Catholic church is based on the court rituals of Byzantium.
A Protestant church is a little different, but basically the same.
The furniture of a Protestant church is based on a judicial courthouse.
The pulpit.
The judge in an American court wears a black robe.
He wears exactly the same dress as a Protestant minister.
And everybody sits in these boxes.
Like there's a jury box, there's a box for the judge, there's a box for this, there's a box for that.
And those are the pews in an ordinary kind of colonial type Protestant church.
So both these kinds of churches, which have an autocratic view of the nature of the universe,
decorate themselves, are architecturally constructed in accordance with political images of the universe.
One is the king and the other is the judge.
Your honor.
There's a sense in this.
When in court you have to refer to the judge as your honor,
it stops the people engaged in litigation from losing their tempers and getting rude.
There's a certain sense to that.
But when you want to apply that image to the universe itself, to the very nature of life,
it has limitations.
For one thing, the idea of a difference between matter and spirit.
This idea doesn't work anymore.
Long, long ago, physicists stopped asking the question, what is matter?
They began that way.
They wanted to know what is the fundamental substance of the world.
And the more they asked that question, the more they realized they couldn't answer it.
Because if you're going to say what matter is,
you've got to describe it in terms of behavior.
And that is to say in terms of form, in terms of pattern.
You tell what it does.
You describe the smallest shapes of it that you can see.
Atoms, electrons, protons, mesons, all sorts of sub-nuclear particles.
But you never, never arrive at the basic stuff.
Because there isn't any.
What happens is this.
Stuff is a word for the world as it looks when our eyes are out of focus.
Fuzzy.
Stuff, the idea of stuff is that it's undifferentiated as some kind of a goo.
And when your eyes are not in sharp focus, everything looks fuzzy.
When you get your eyes into focus, you see a form, you see a pattern.
And so all that we can talk about is patterns.
So the picture of the world in the most sophisticated physics of today
is not formed stuff, potted clay, but pattern.
A self-moving, self-designing pattern.
A dance.
And we haven't yet, our common sense as individuals hasn't yet caught up with this.
Well now, in the course of time, in the evolution of Western thought,
the ceramic image of the world ran into trouble.
And changed into what I call the fully automatic model or image of the world.
In other words, Western science was based on the idea that there are laws of nature.
And it got that idea from Judaism and Christianity and Islam.
That, in other words, the potter, the maker of the world, in the beginning of things,
laid down the laws and the law of God, which is also the law of nature.
It's called the logos.
And in Christianity, the logos is the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as Jesus Christ,
who thereby is the perfect exemplar of the divine law.
So we have tended to think of all natural phenomena as responding to laws as if, in other words,
the laws of the world were like the rails on which a streetcar or a tram or a train runs.
And these things exist in a certain way and all events respond to these laws.
You know that limerick, there was a young man who said,
Damn, for it certainly seems that I am a creature that moves in determinate grooves.
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram.
So here's this idea that there's a kind of a plan and everything responds and obeys that plan.
Well, in the 18th century, Western intellectuals began to suspect this idea.
And what they suspected is whether there is a lawmaker, whether there is an architect of the universe,
and they found out or they reasoned that you don't have to suppose that there is.
Why?
Because the hypothesis of God does not help us to make any predictions.
In other words, let's put it this way.
If the business of science is to make predictions about what's going to happen,
science is essentially prophecy.
What's going to happen?
By studying the behavior of the past and describing it carefully,
we can make predictions about what's going to happen in the future.
That's really the whole of science.
And to do this and to make successful predictions,
you do not need God as a hypothesis.
Because it makes no difference to anything.
If you say everything is controlled by God,
everything is governed by God,
that doesn't make any difference to your prediction of what's going to happen.
And so what they did was simply drop that hypothesis.
But they kept the hypothesis of law.
Because if you can predict, if you can study the past and describe how things have behaved,
and you've got some regularities in the behavior of the universe, you call that law.
Although it may not be law in the ordinary sense of the word, it's simply regularity.
And so what they did was they got rid of the lawmaker and kept the law.
And so they conceived the universe in terms of a mechanism.
Something, in other words, that is functioning according to regular clock-like mechanical principles.
Newton's whole image of the world is based on billions.
The atoms are billiard balls and they bang each other around.
And so your behavior, every individual therefore is defined as a very, very complex arrangement of billiard balls,
being banged around by everything else.
And so behind the fully automatic model of the universe is the notion that reality itself is,
to use the favorite term of 19th century scientists, blind energy.
In, say, the metaphysics of Ernst Haeckel and T. H. Huxley,
the world is basically nothing but blind, unintelligent force.
And likewise, in parallel to this, in the philosophy of Freud,
the basic psychological energy is libido, which is blind lust.
And it is only a fluke.
It is only as a result of pure chances that, resulting from the exuberance of this energy,
there are people with values, with reason, with languages, with cultures, and with love.
Just a fluke.
Like, you know, one thousand monkeys typing one thousand typewriters for a million years,
will eventually type the Encyclopedia Britannica.
And, of course, the moment they stop typing the Encyclopedia Britannica,
they will relapse into nonsense.
And so in order that that shall not happen, because you and I are flukes in this cosmos,
and we like our way of life.
We like being human.
If we want to keep it, say these people,
we've got to fight nature,
because it will turn us back into nonsense the moment we let it.
And so we've got to impose our will upon this world as if we were something completely alien to it from outside.
And so we get a culture based on the idea of the war between man and nature.
And we talk about the conquest of space.
The conquest of Everest.
And the great symbols of our culture are the rocket and the bulldozer.
The rocket.
You know, compensation for the sexually inadequate male.
Poo!
So we're going to conquer space.
You know, we're in space already, way out.
If anybody cared to be sensitive and let what's outside space come to you,
you can if your eyes are clear enough.
Aided by telescopes, aided by radio astronomy,
aided by all the kind of sensitive instruments we can devise.
We are as far out in space as we're ever going to get.
But, you know, sensitivity isn't the pitch.
Especially in the WASP culture of the United States.
We define manliness in terms of aggression.
You see?
Because we're a little bit frightened as to whether we are really men.
And so we put on this great show of being a tough guy.
It's completely unnecessary.
You know, if you have what it takes, you don't need to put on that show.
You don't need to beat nature into submission.
Why be hostile to nature?
Because after all, you are a symptom of nature.
You, as a human being, you grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree.
So let's say the tree which grows apples is a tree which apples.
Using apple as a verb.
And a world in which human beings arrive is a world that peoples.
And so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in.
Just as spots on somebody's skin are symptomatic of chickenpox.
But we have been brought up by reason of our two great myths, the ceramic and the fully automatic.
Not to feel that we belong in the world.
So our popular speech reflects it.
We say, I came into this world.
You didn't.
You came out of it.
We say, face facts.
We talk about encounters with reality.
As if it was a head on meeting of completely alien agencies.
And the average person has the sensation that he is a somewhat that exists inside a bag of skin.
The centre of consciousness which looks out at this thing and what the hell is it going to do to me?
You see?
I recognise you.
You kind of look like me.
And I've seen myself in a mirror.
And you look like you might be people.
So maybe you're intelligent.
Maybe you can love too.
And perhaps you're alright.
Some of you are anyway.
If you've got the right colour of skin.
Or you have the right religion.
Or whatever it is.
You're okay.
But there are all those people over in Asia.
Africa.
And they may not really be people.
When you want to destroy someone you always define them as un-people.
Not really human.
Monkeys may be.
Idiots may be.
Machines may be.
But not people.
But we have this hostility to the external world.
Because of the superstition, the myth, the absolutely unfounded theory.
That you yourself exist only inside your skin.
Now I want to propose another idea altogether.
You know there are astronomers that say there was a primordial explosion.
Enormous bang millions of years ago.
Billions of years ago.
Which flung all the galaxies into space.
Well let's take that just for the sake of argument.
And say that was the way it happened.
It's like you took a bottle of ink.
And you threw it at a wall.
Smash.
And all that ink spreads.
And in the middle, it's dense, isn't it?
And as it gets out on the edge, the little droplets are finer and finer.
And make more complicated patterns.
See?
So in the same way, there was a big bang in the beginning of things.
And it spread.
And you and I, sitting here in this room, as complicated human beings,
are way, way out on the fringe of that bang.
We're the complicated little patterns on the end of it.
Very interesting.
But so we define ourselves as being only that.
If you think that you are only inside your skin,
you define yourself as one very complicated little curly cue.
Way out on the edge of that explosion.
Way out in space and way out in time.
Billions of years ago you were a big bang.
But now you're a complicated human being.
And then we cut ourselves off, like this,
and don't feel that we're still the big bang.
But you are.
Depends how you define yourself.
You are actually, if this is the way things started,
if there was a big bang in the beginning,
you're not something that is a result of the big bang.
On the end of the process, you are still the process.
You are the big bang, the original force of the universe,
coming on as whoever you are.
See, when I meet you, I see not just what you define yourself as,
Mr so and so, Miss so and so, Mrs so and so.
I see every one of you as the primordial energy of the universe
coming on at me in this particular way.
I know I'm that too.
But we've learned to define ourselves as separate from it.
And so, what I would call a kind of a basic problem
we've got to go through first,
is to understand that there are no such things as things.
That is to say, separate things or separate events.
That that is only a way of talking.
And if you can understand this, you're going to have no further problems.
I once asked a group of high school children,
what do you mean by a thing?
And first of all, they gave me all sorts of synonyms.
They said, it's an object.
Which is simply another word for a thing.
It doesn't tell you anything about what you mean by a thing.
And finally, a very smart girl from Italy, who was in the group, said,
a thing is a noun.
And she was quite right.
A noun isn't a part of nature, it's a part of speech.
There are no nouns in the physical world.
There are no separate things in the physical world either.
See, the physical world is wiggly.
The clouds, mountains, trees, people are all wiggly.
And only when human beings get working at things, they build buildings in straight lines
and try and make out that the world isn't really wiggly.
But here are we, sitting in this room, all built on straight lines,
but each one of us is as wiggly as all get out.
Now then, when you want to get control of something that wiggles,
it's pretty difficult, isn't it?
You try and pick up a fish in your hands and the fish is wiggly and it slips out.
What do you do to get hold of the fish?
You use a net.
And so the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world.
And so if you want to get hold of this wiggle, you've got to put a net over it.
And I can number the holes in a net.
So many so holes up, so many holes across.
And if I can number these holes, I can count exactly where each wiggle is
in terms of a hole in that net.
And that's the beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world.
But in order to do that, I've got to break up the wiggle into bits.
And I've got to call this a specific bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle,
and this the next bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle.
And so these bits are things or events.
Bits of wiggles, which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle,
in order to measure it, and therefore in order to control it.
But in nature, in fact in the physical world, the wiggle isn't bitted.
Like you don't get a cut up fryer out of an egg.
But you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it.
You bite it.
But it doesn't come bitten.
So the world doesn't come finged.
It doesn't come evented.
You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
The ocean waves.
And the universe peoples.
And as the wave, I wave at you and say, you.
The world is waving at me with you.
And saying, hi, I'm here.
But we, our consciousness, are the way we feel and sense our existence.
Being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things.
Our consciousness has been influenced, so that each one of us does not feel that.
We feel we have been hypnotized, literally hypnotized, by social convention.
Into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins.
That we are not the original bang.
But just something out on the end of it.
And therefore we are scared stiff.
My wave is going to disappear.
And I'm going to die. And that would be awful.
We've got a mythology going now, which as Father Maskell put it,
we're nothing but something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium.
And that's it. And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.
Now, this is what people really believe today.
You may go to church, you may say you believe in this, that and the other.
But you don't.
Even Jehovah's Witnesses, who are the most fundamentalist fundamentalists,
they're polite when they come round and knock at the door.
But if you really believed in Christianity, you'd be screaming in the streets.
But nobody does.
You'd be taking full-page ads in the paper every day.
You'd have the most terrifying television programs.
The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believe what they teach.
But they don't.
They think they ought to believe what they teach.
They believe they should believe, but they don't believe it.
Because what we really believe is the fully automatic model.
And that is our basic plausible common sense.
You are a fluke.
You are a separate event.
And you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium and that's it, baby.
That's it.
Now, why does anybody think that way?
There's no reason to, because it isn't even scientific.
It's just a myth.
And it's invented by people who wanted to feel a certain way.
They want to play a certain game.
See, the game of God got embarrassing.
The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe, is good.
It makes you feel that life is, after all, important.
There is someone who cares.
It has meaning.
It has sense.
And you are valuable in the eyes of the Father.
But after a while, it gets embarrassing.
And you realize that everything you do is being watched by God.
He knows your tiniest, inmost feelings and thoughts.
And you say, after a while, quit bugging me.
I don't want you around.
So you become an atheist.
Just to get rid of it.
Then you feel terrible after that, because you got rid of God,
but that means you got rid of yourself.
You're just nothing but a machine.
And your idea that you're a machine is just a machine, too.
So if you're a smart kid, you commit suicide.
Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question,
which is whether or not to commit suicide.
I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions.
The first one is, who started it?
The second is, are we going to make it?
The third is, where are we going to put it?
The fourth is, who's going to clean up?
And the fifth, is it serious?
But still, should you or not commit suicide?
This is a good question.
Why go on?
And you only go on if the game is worth the candle.
Now, the universe has been going on for an incredible long time.
And so really, a satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that's worth betting on.
That's a very, seems to me, absolutely elementary common sense.
If you make a theory of the universe which isn't worth betting on, why bother?
Just commit suicide.
But if you want to go on playing the game, you've got to have an optimal theory for playing the game.
Otherwise, there's no point in it.
But the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very funny game.
What they wanted to say was this.
All you people who believe in religion are old ladies and wishful thinkers.
You've got a big daddy up there and you want a comfort and thing, but life is rough.
Life is tough.
And success goes to the most hard-headed people.
That was a very convenient theory when the European-American world was colonizing the natives everywhere else.
They said, we're the end product of evolution.
And we're tough.
See, I'm a big strong guy because I face facts.
And life is just a bunch of junk.
And I'm going to impose my will on it and turn it into something else, you see.
And I'm real hard.
See, that's a way of flattering yourself.
And so it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world works.
In academic circles, no other theory of the world than the fully automatic model is respectable.
Because if you're an academic person, you've got to be an intellectually tough person.
You've got to be prickly.
See, there are basically two kinds of philosophy.
One's called prickles, the other's called goo.
And, uh, prickly people are precise, rigorous, logical.
They like everything chopped up and clear.
Goo people like it vague.
For example, in physics, prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of matter are particles.
Goo people believe it's waves.
And, uh, in, in, uh, philosophy, prickly people are logical positivists and goo people are idealists.
And they're always arguing with each other.
And what they don't realize is that they, neither one can take his position without the other person.
Because you wouldn't know you advocated prickles unless there was somebody else advocating goo.
You wouldn't know what a prickle was unless you knew what goo was.
Because life is not either prickles or goo.
It's gooey prickles and prickly goo.
They go together, like back and front, male and female.
And that's the answer to philosophy.
See, I'm a philosopher.
And I'm not going to argue very much because if you don't argue with me, I don't know what I think.
So if we argue, I say thank you.
Because, though, going to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what I mean.
So I can't get rid of you.
But however, you see, this whole idea that the universe is just nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it,
is a put down theory of the world.
People who had an advantage to make a game to play by putting it down.
And making out that because they put the world down, they were a superior kind of people.
So, that just won't do.
We've had it.
Because if you seriously go along with this idea of the world, you're what is technically called alienated.
You feel hostile to the world.
You feel that the world is a trap.
It is a mechanism.
It's electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught.
And you, poor thing, have to put up with being in a body that's falling apart and that gets cancer,
that gets the great Siberian itch, and it's just terrible.
And these mechanics, doctors, are trying to help you out but they really can't succeed in the end.
And you're just going to fall apart and it's a grim business and it's too bad.
So if you think that that's the way things are, you may as well commit suicide right now.
Unless you say, well I damned.
Because there really, after all, there might be eternal damnation in the back of the thing if I did that.
Or then I identify with my children or something and I think of them going on without me and nobody to support them.
But of course if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them,
I shall merely teach them to be like I am.
And they'll go on dragging it out to support their children and they won't enjoy it.
And they'll be afraid to commit suicide and so will their children.
They all learn the same lesson.
So you see, all I'm trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world
that is influencing most people in the United States today, the fully automatic model, is simply a myth.
If you want to say that the idea of God the Father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth,
in the bad sense of the word myth, so is this other one.
It's just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs.
Why?
And let's get this clear.
If there is any such thing at all as intelligence and love and beauty, well, you found it in other people.
In other words, it exists in us as human beings.
And as I said, if it is there in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things.
We are as symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree or the rose of the rose bush.
The earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells.
The earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people.
And our existence on the earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances,
as much as the solar system in turn is a symptom of our galaxy.
And our galaxy in its turn is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies.
Goodness only knows what that's in.
But you see, when as a scientist you describe the behaviour of a living organism, you try to say what a person does.
It's the only way in which you can describe what a person is.
Describe what they do.
Then you find out that in making this description you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin.
In other words, you can't talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor.
Because when I walk I don't just dangle my legs in empty space.
I move in relationship to a room.
And so in order to describe what I'm doing when I'm walking I have to describe the room.
I have to describe the territory.
So in describing my talking at the moment, I can't describe this just as a thing in itself.
Because I'm talking to you.
And so what I'm doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also.
So if that is necessary, if in other words in order to describe my behaviour,
I have to describe your behaviour and the behaviour of the environment,
it means that we've really got one system of behaviour.
That what I am involves what you are.
I don't know who I am unless I know who you are.
And you don't know who you are unless you know who I am.
There was a wise rabbi who once said,
If I am I because you are you, and you are you because I am I,
then I am not I and you are not you.
In other words, we are not separate.
We define each other. We are all backs and fronts to each other.
You know, you can't for example, have two sticks.
You lean two sticks against each other and they stand up because they support each other.
Take one away and the other falls.
They interdepend.
And so in exactly that way, we and our environment and all of us and each other are interdependent systems.
We know who we are in terms of other people.
We all lock together.
And this is again and again the serious scientific description of how things happen.
And any good scientist knows, therefore, that what you call the external world is as much you as your own body.
Your skin doesn't separate you from the world.
It's a bridge through which the external world flows into you and you flow into it.
Just for example, as a whirlpool in water, you could say because you have a skin, you have a definite shape, you have a definite form.
Right? Here is a flow of water and suddenly it does a whirlpool.
And then it goes on.
The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it.
The whirlpool is something the stream is doing.
And exactly the same way the whole universe is doing each one of us.
And I see you today and I recognize you tomorrow.
Just as I would recognize a whirlpool in a stream.
I'd say, oh yes, I've seen that whirlpool before.
It's just near so-and-so's house on the edge of the river.
And it's always there.
So in the same way, when I meet you tomorrow, I recognize you.
You're the same whirlpool you were yesterday.
But you're moving.
The whole world is moving through you.
All the cosmic rays, all the food you're eating, the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything
right through you.
When you're wiggling the same way, the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you.
But the problem is, you see, we haven't been taught to feel that way.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense
have not taught us to feel identical with the universe.
But only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it, aliens.
And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal universe, each one of us.
Otherwise we're going to go out of our heads.
We're going to commit suicide.
Collectively, with courtesy of H-bombs.
And, alright, supposing we do, well that will be that, and it will be life making experiments on other galaxies.
Maybe they'll find a better game.
Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture from the Nature of Consciousness lecture series.
Well now, I was discussing two of the great myths or models of the universe which lie in the intellectual and psychological background of all of us.
The myth of the world as a political, monarchical state in which we are all here on sufferance as subjects of God.
In which we are made artifacts, who do not exist in our own right.
God alone, in the first myth, exists in his own right.
And you exist as a favor.
And you ought to be grateful.
It's like your parents come on and say to you, maybe,
look at all the things we've done for you.
All the money we spent to send you to college.
And, uh, you turn out to be a beatnik.
And you're a wretched, ungrateful child.
And you're supposed to, uh, say, sorry, but, um, I really am.
But you're, you're definitely in the position of being on probation.
So that, that idea of the royal god, the king of kings and the lord of lords,
which we inherit from the political structures of the Tigris-Euphrates cultures and from Egypt.
The pharaoh Amenhotep IV is probably, as Freud suggested, the original author of Moses' monotheism.
And the, certainly, the Jewish law code comes from Hammurabi in Chaldea.
And these men lived in a culture where the pyramid and the ziggurat, the ziggurat is a Chaldean version of the pyramid,
indicating somehow a hierarchy of power from the boss all the way down.
And God, in this first myth that we've been discussing, the ceramic myth, is the boss.
And the idea of God is that the universe is governed from above.
But you see, this parallels and goes hand in hand with the idea that you govern your own body.
That the ego, which lies somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes, in the brain, is the governor of the body.
And so we can't understand a system of order, a system of life in which there isn't a governor.
Oh Lord our governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world.
But supposing, on the contrary, there could be a system which doesn't have a governor.
That's what we are supposed to have in this society.
We are supposed to be a democracy and a republic.
And we are supposed to govern ourselves.
And yet, as I said, it's so funny that Americans can be politically republican, I don't mean republican in the party sense, and yet religiously monarchical.
It's a real strange contradiction.
So what is this universe?
Is it a monarchy?
Is it a republic?
Is it a mechanism or an organism?
Because you see, if it's a mechanism, either it's a mere mechanism, as in the fully automatic model, or else it's the mechanism under the control of a driver, a mechanic.
If it's not that, it's an organism.
And an organism is a thing that governs itself.
In your body there is no boss.
You can say, you can argue for example, that the brain is a gadget evolved by the stomach
in order to serve the stomach for the purposes of getting food.
Or you can argue that the stomach is a gadget evolved by the brain to feed it and keep it alive.
Whose game is this?
Is it the brain's game or the stomach's game?
It doesn't make, actually, they are mutual.
The brain implies the stomach, the stomach implies the brain, and neither of them is the boss.
You know that story about all the limbs of the body?
Said, the hands said, we do all our work.
The feet said, we do our work.
The mouth said, we do all the chewing.
And he has this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn't do a thing.
But he doesn't do any work.
So let's go on strike.
And the hands refused to carry.
The feet refused to walk.
The mouth refused to chew.
And said, now, we're on strike against the stomach.
But after a while, all of them found themselves getting weaker and weaker and weaker and weaker
because they didn't recognize that the stomach fed them.
So there is the possibility, then, that we are not in the kind of system that these two myths delineate,
that we are not living in a world where we ourselves in the deepest sense of self are outside reality
and somehow in a position that we have to bow down to it and say,
as a great favor, please preserve us in existence.
Nor are we in a system which is merely mechanical and in which we are nothing but flukes trapped
in the electrical wiring of a nervous system which is fundamentally rather inefficiently arranged.
What's the alternative?
Well, we can put the alternative in another image altogether.
And I will call this not the ceramic image, not the fully automatic image, but the dramatic image.
Consider the world as a drama.
What's the basis of all drama?
The basis of all stories, of all plots, of all happenings.
It's the game of hide and seek.
You get a baby.
What's the fundamental first game you play with a baby?
You put a book in front of your face and you peek at the baby like this.
The baby starts giggling.
Because the baby is close to the origins of life.
It comes from the womb, really knowing what it's all about, but it can't put it into words.
See, what every child psychologist really wants to know is to get a baby to talk psychological jargon
and explain how it feels.
But the baby knows.
You do this, and this, this, this, and the baby starts laughing.
Because the baby is a recent incarnation of God.
And the baby knows, therefore, that hide and seek is the basic game.
See, before, when we were children, we were taught one, two, three, and A, B, C.
But we weren't sat down on our mother's knees and taught the game of black and white.
That's the thing that was left out of all our educations.
That life is not a conflict between opposites, but a polarity.
The difference between a conflict and a polarity is simply.
When you say about opposite things, we sometimes use the expression,
these two things are the poles apart.
You say, for example, with someone with whom you totally disagree,
I'm the poles apart from this person.
But your very saying that gives the show away.
Poles.
Poles are the opposite ends of one magnet.
And if you take a magnet, there's a north pole and a south pole,
right, chop off the south pole, move it away.
The piece you've got left creates a new south pole.
You never get rid of the south pole.
Things may be the poles apart, but they go together.
You can't have the one without the other.
That's the basic idea of polarity.
What we're trying to imagine is the encounter of forces
that come from absolutely opposed realms that have nothing in common.
When we say of two personality types that bear the poles apart.
We are trying to think eccentrically instead of concentrically.
And so in this way,
we haven't realized that life and death,
black and white,
good and evil,
being and non-being,
come from the same center.
They imply each other,
so that you wouldn't know the one without the other.
Now I'm not saying that that's bad.
That's fun.
You are playing the game that you don't know that self and other go together
in just the same way as the two poles of the magnet.
So that when anybody in our culture slips into the state of consciousness
where they suddenly find this to be true and they come on and say,
come on and say, I'm God.
We say you're insane.
Now, it's very difficult.
You can very easily slip into the state of consciousness
where you feel you're God.
It can happen to anyone.
Just in the same way as you can get the flu or
measles or something like that,
you can slip into the state of consciousness.
When you get it,
it depends upon your background and your training
as to how you're going to interpret it.
If you've got the idea of God that comes from popular Christianity,
God as the governor, the political head of the world,
and you think you're God,
then you say to everybody,
well, you should bow down and worship me.
But if you're a member of Hindu culture
and you suddenly tell all your friends I'm God,
instead of saying you're insane,
they say congratulations, at last you found out.
Because their idea of God is not the autocratic governor.
When they make images of Shiva,
say he has ten arms,
how would you use ten arms?
It's hard enough to use two.
You know, if you play the organ,
you've got to use your two feet and your two hands,
and you play different rhythms with each member.
It's kind of tricky.
But actually we're all masters at this.
Because how do you grow each hair without having to think about it?
Each nerve.
How do you beat your heart and digest with your stomach at the same time?
You don't have to think about it.
In your very body you are omnipotent,
in the true sense of omnipotence,
which is that you are able to be omnipotent.
You are able to do all these things without having to think about it.
When I was a child I used to ask my mother,
of course, all sorts of ridiculous questions.
that every child asks. And when she got bored with my question, she'd say,
Darling, there are some things we're just not meant to know.
I said, Will we ever know? She said, Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven,
God will make everything plain. That's why I used to imagine that on wet afternoons in heaven,
we'd all sit around the throne of grace and say to God, Well, now, why did you do this?
And how did you do that? And he would explain it to us.
Heavenly Father, why are the leaves green? And he would say, Because of the chlorophyll.
And we'd say, Oh.
But in the Hindu universe, you would say to God, How did you make the mountains?
And he would say, Well, I just did it.
Because what you're asking me for, when you ask me how did I make the mountains,
you're asking me to describe in words how I made the mountains.
And there are no words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I made the mountains
any more than I can drink the ocean with a fork.
A fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it,
but it won't, it is no use for imbibing the ocean.
It would take millions of years. So it would take millions of years.
In other words, you would be bored with my description long before I got through it,
if I put it to you in words.
Because I didn't create the mountains with words.
I just did it. Like you, open and close your hand.
You know how to do this, but can you describe in words how you do it?
But you do it.
You are conscious, aren't you? Do you know how you manage to be conscious?
Do you know how you beat your heart?
Can you say in words, explain correctly, how this is done?
You do it, but you can't put it into words.
Because words are too clumsy.
And yet you manage this expertly for as long as you are able to do it.
This concludes session one of Out of Your Mind, Essential Listening
from the Alan Watts Audio Archives.
Our program continues with session two.
We are playing a game.
And the game runs like this.
The only thing you really know is what you can put into words.
Let's suppose I love some girl, rapturously.
And somebody says to me, would you really love her?
Well, how am I going to prove this?
Well, say, write poetry.
Tell us all how much you love her.
Then we'll believe you.
So if I'm an artist and I can put this into words
and convince everybody that I've written the most ecstatic love letters ever written,
they say, all right, okay, we'll admit it.
You really do love her.
But supposing you're not very articulate.
Are we going to tell you you don't love her?
Surely not.
You don't have to be Heloise and Abelard to be in love.
So the whole game that our culture is playing
is that nothing really happens unless it's in the newspaper.
So when we are at a party and there's a great party,
somebody said, it's too bad there wasn't a tape recorder.
And so our children begin to feel that they don't exist authentically
unless they get their names in the papers.
And the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime.
And then you'll be photographed, then you'll appear in court,
then everybody will notice you.
It really happened if it was recorded.
In other words, if you shout and there doesn't come back an echo,
it didn't happen.
Well, that's a real hang-up.
It's true, there's fun with echoes.
We all like singing in the bathtub because there's more resonance there.
And when we play a musical instrument like a violin or a cello,
it has a sounding box because that gives resonance to the sound.
And in the same way, the cortex of the human brain
enables us when we are happy to know that we're happy.
And that gives a certain resonance to it.
If you're happy and you don't know you're happy, there's nobody home.
But this is the whole problem for us.
Several thousand years ago,
human beings evolved the system of self-consciousness.
And they knew, they knew.
There was a young man who said, though,
it seems that I know that I know.
What I would like to see is the eye that knows me
when I know that I know that I know.
You see?
And this is the human problem.
We know that we know.
And so there came a point in our evolution
when we didn't guide life by distrusting our instincts.
And had to think about it.
And had to purposely arrange and discipline
and push our lives around
in accordance with foresight and words and systems of symbols,
accountancy, calculation, and so on.
And then we worry.
Once you start thinking about things,
you worry as to whether you've thought enough.
Did you really take all the details into consideration?
Was every fact properly reviewed?
And by Jove, the more you think about it,
the more you realize that you really couldn't take everything into consideration.
Because all the variables in any human decision are incalculable.
So you get anxiety.
And this, though, also, this is the price you pay
for knowing that you know.
For being able to think about thinking,
to feel about feeling.
And so you're in this funny position.
Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage?
What has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness,
a certain kind of reflexive consciousness, being aware of being aware,
being able to represent what goes on fundamentally in terms of a system of symbols,
such as words, such as numbers.
You put, as it were, two lives together at once.
One representing the other.
The symbols representing the reality.
The money representing the wealth.
And if you don't realize that the symbol is really secondary,
it doesn't have the same value.
You know, people go to the supermarket and they get a whole cartload of goodies
and they drive it through.
And then the clerk fixes up the counter and this long tape comes out.
And you say, $30, please.
And everybody feels depressed.
Because they give away $30 worth of paper.
But they've got a cartload of goodies.
And they don't think about that.
They think they just lost $30.
But you've got the real wealth in the cart.
All you parted with was the paper.
Because the paper in our system becomes more valuable than the wealth.
It represents power, potentiality.
Whereas the wealth, you think, oh well, that's just necessary.
You've got to eat.
I mean, that's to be really mixed up.
So then, if you awaken from this illusion,
and you understand that black implies white,
self implies other, life implies death,
or shall I say, death implies life,
you can feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world,
not as something here on probation,
not as something that has arrived here by fluke,
but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.
What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in,
is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.
So, say in Hindu mythology,
they say that the world is the drama of God.
God is not something in Hindu mythology with a white beard that sits on a throne,
and that has royal prerogatives.
God, in Indian mythology, is the self.
Satchitananda, which means sat, that which is chit,
that which is consciousness, that which is ananda, is bliss.
And in other words, what exists, reality itself, is gorgeous.
It is the plenum, the fullness of total joy.
Wowee!
And all those stars, if you look out in the sky,
is a firework display like you see on the 4th of July,
which is a great occasion for celebration.
The universe is a celebration.
It is a fireworks show to celebrate that existence is.
Wowee!
And then they say, but however,
there's no point just in sustaining bliss.
Let's suppose that you were able, every night,
to dream any dream you wanted to dream.
And that you could, for example, have the power,
within one night, to dream 75 years of time.
Or any length of time you wanted to have.
And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams,
you would fulfill all your wishes.
You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive.
And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each,
you would say, well, that was pretty great.
But now let's have a surprise.
Let's have a dream which isn't under control.
Where something is going to happen to me
that I don't know what it's going to be.
And you would dig that and come out of that and say,
wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?
And then you would get more and more adventurous.
And you would make further and further out gambles
as to what you would dream.
And finally, you would dream where you are now.
You would dream the dream of living the life
that you are actually living today.
That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have.
Of playing that you weren't God.
Because the whole nature of the Godhead, according to this idea,
is to play that he's not.
The first thing he says to himself is,
man, get lost.
Because he gives himself away.
The nature of love is self abandonment.
Not clinging to oneself.
Throwing yourself out.
As in, for example, in basketball,
you're always getting rid of the ball.
You say to the other fellow, have a ball.
See?
And that keeps things moving.
That's the nature of life.
So in this idea then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality.
Not God in a politically kingly sense,
but God in the sense of being the self.
The deep down basic whatever there is.
And you're all that.
Only you're pretending you're not.
And it's perfectly okay to pretend you're not.
To be absolutely convinced,
because this is the whole notion of drama,
when you come into the theater,
there is a proscenium arch and a stage,
and down there is the audience.
And everybody assumes their seats in the theater,
and are going to see a comedy, a tragedy, a thriller,
or whatever it is.
And they all know, as they come in and pay their admissions,
that what is going to happen on the stage is not for real.
But the actors have a conspiracy against this,
because they're going to try and persuade the audience
that what is happening on the stage is for real.
They want to get everybody sitting on the edge of their chairs.
They want to get you terrified or crying or laughing.
Absolutely captivated by the drama.
And if a skillful human actor can take in an audience and make people cry,
think what the cosmic actor can do.
Why, he can take himself in completely.
He can play so much for real that he really believes it is.
Like you sitting in this room, you think you're really here.
Why, you've persuaded yourself that way.
You've acted it so damn well that you know this is the real world.
But you're playing it.
It's because the audience and the actor is one.
Because behind the stage there's the green room.
Off scene, obscene, where the actors take off their masks.
You know that the word person means mask.
The persona, which is the mask worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama,
because it has a megaphone-type mouth,
which throws the sound out in an open-air theatre.
So per, through, sona, what the sound comes through, that's the mask.
How to be a real person.
How to be a genuine fake.
A mask.
So the dramatis personae at the beginning of a play
is the list of masks that the actors will wear.
And so in the course of forgetting that this life is a drama,
the word for the role, the word for the mask,
has come to mean who you are genuinely.
The person.
The proper person.
Incidentally, the word parson is derived from the word person.
The person of the village.
The person around town.
The parson.
Funny.
So anyway then, this is the drama.
I'm not trying to sell you on this idea in the sense of converting you to it.
I want you to play with it.
I want you to think of its possibilities.
I'm not trying to prove it.
I'm just putting it forward as a possibility of life to think about.
So then, this means that you are not victims of a scheme of things.
Of a mechanical world.
Or of an autocratic god.
The life you are living is what you have put yourself into.
Only you don't admit it.
Because you want to play the game that it's happened to you.
In other words, I got mixed up in this world.
My parents.
I had a father who got hot pants over a girl.
And she was my mother.
And because he was just a horny old man.
And as a result of that, I got born.
And I blame him for it.
And say, well that's your fault.
You've got to look after me.
And he says, I don't see why I should look after you.
You're just a result.
But let's suppose we admit that I really wanted to get born.
And that I was the ugly gleam in my father's eye when he approached my mother.
That was me.
I was desire.
And I deliberately got involved in this thing.
Look at it that way instead.
And that even if I got myself into an awful mess.
And I got born with syphilis.
And the great Siberian itch.
And tuberculosis.
And in a Nazi concentration camp.
Nevertheless, this was a game.
Which was a very far out play.
It was a kind of cosmic masochism.
But I did it.
Isn't that an optimal game rule for life?
Because if you play life on the supposition that you're a helpless little puppet that got involved.
Or if you play it on the supposition that it's a frightful, serious risk.
And that we really ought to do something about it and so on.
It's a drag.
There's no point in going on living unless we make the assumption that the situation of life is optimal.
That really and truly we're all in a state of total bliss and delight.
But we're going to pretend we aren't just for kicks.
You play non-bliss in order to be able to experience bliss.
And you can go as far out as non-bliss as you want to go.
And when you wake up it'll be great.
You know, you can slam yourself on the head with a hammer because it's so nice when you stop.
And it makes you realize, you see, how great things are when you forget that that's the way it is.
And that's just like black and white.
You don't know black unless you know white.
You don't know white unless you know black.
This is simply fundamental.
So then, here's the drama.
My metaphysics, let me be perfectly frank with you, are that there is the central self, you can call it God, you can call it anything you like.
And it's all of us.
It's playing all the parts of all beings whatsoever, everywhere and anywhere.
And it's playing the game of hide and seek with itself.
It gets lost, it gets involved in the farest out adventures, but in the end it always wakes up and comes back to itself.
And when you're ready to wake up, you're going to wake up.
And if you're not ready, you're going to stay pretending that you're just a poor little me.
And since you're all here and engaged in this sort of inquiry and listening to this sort of lecture,
I assume that you're all on the process of waking up.
Or else you're teasing yourselves with some kind of flirtation with waking up, which you're not serious about.
But I assume maybe you are not serious but sincere, that you are ready to wake up.
So then, when you're in the way of waking up and finding out who you really are, you meet a character called a guru.
As the Hindus say this word, the teacher, the awakener.
And what is the function of a guru?
He's the man who looks at you in the eye and says, oh, come of it.
I know who you are.
You know, you come to the guru and say, sir, I have a problem.
I'm unhappy and I want to get one up on the universe or I want to become enlightened.
I want spiritual wisdom.
And the guru looks at you and says, who are you?
You know, Sri Ramana Maharshi, that great Hindu sage of modern times.
People used to come to him and say, Master, who was I in my last incarnation?
As if that mattered.
And he would say, who is asking the question?
And he'd look at you and say, basically, go right down to it.
You're looking at me.
You're looking out.
And you're unaware of what's behind your eyes.
Go back in and find out who you are, where the question comes from, why you ask.
And if you've looked at a photograph of that man, I have a gorgeous photograph of him.
And you look in those.
I walk by it every time I go out of the front door.
And I look at those eyes and the humor in them.
The lilting laugh that says, oh, come off it, man.
Shiva, I recognize you.
When you come to my door and you say, I'm so and so, I say, ha ha.
What a funny way God has come on today.
There are all sorts of tricks, of course, that gurus play.
They say, well, we're going to put you through the mill.
And the reason they do that is simply that you won't wake up until you feel you've paid a price for it.
In other words, the sense of guilt that one has or the sense of anxiety
is simply the way one experiences keeping the game of disguise going on.
Do you see that?
Supposing you say, I feel guilty.
Christianity makes you feel guilty for existing.
That somehow the very fact that you exist is an affront.
You are a fallen human being.
I remember as a child when we went to the services of the church on Good Friday.
They gave us each a colored postcard with Jesus crucified on it.
And it said underneath, this have I done for thee.
What doest thou for me?
You know, you fell off.
You nailed that man to the cross.
Because you eat steak, you have crucified Christ.
Because he killed the bull.
After all, you depend on it.
Mithra.
It's the same mystery.
And what are you going to do about that?
This have I done for thee?
What doest thou for me?
You feel awful that you just exist at all.
But that sense, that sense of guilt is the veil across the sanctuary.
Don't you dare come in.
In order to, you know, in all mysteries, when you're going to be initiated,
there's somebody saying, ah, ah, ah, ah, don't you come in.
You've got to fulfill this requirement, and this requirement, and this requirement,
and this requirement, then we'll let you in.
And so you go, you go through the mill.
Why?
Because this is your saying to yourself, I won't wake up until I feel I deserve it.
I won't wake up until I've made it difficult for me to wake up.
So I invent for myself an elaborate system of delaying my waking up.
I put myself through this test and that test, and when I feel it's been sufficiently arduous,
then I may at last admit to myself who I really am, and draw aside the veil,
and realize that after all, when all is said and done, I am that I am,
which is the name of God.
And when it comes to it, that's really rather funny.
They say in Zen, when you attain Satori, nothing is left to you at that moment but to have a good laugh.
But naturally, all masters, Zen masters, yoga masters, every kind of master,
puts up a barrier and says to you, he simply plays your own game.
You know we say anybody who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
Because you, when you go to a psychiatrist, you define yourself as somebody who ought to have his head examined.
Same way the Zen masters say anybody who studies Zen or comes to a Zen master
ought to be given thirty blows with a stick because he was stupid enough to pose the question that he had a problem.
But you're the problem. You put yourself in this situation.
So it's a question fundamentally.
Do you define yourself as a victim of the world or as the world?
You can define yourself. You see, if you identify you with what you call the voluntary system of the nerves
and say only that's me and that's really a rather limited amount of my total performance, what I do voluntarily,
then you've defined yourself as the victim in the game.
And so you are able to feel that life was a trap.
Something else, whether it was God or whether it was fate or whether it was the big mechanism, the system, imposed this on you.
And you can say, poor little me.
But you can equally well and with just as much justification define yourself not only as what you do voluntarily,
but also what you do involuntarily. That's you too. Do you beat your heart or don't you?
Or does it just happen to you?
And if you define yourself as the works, then nobody's imposing on you.
You're not a victim. You're doing it.
Plus you can't explain how you do it in words because words are too clumsy.
And it takes too long to say. You get bored with it.
But actually, then you can say, with gusto, I am responsible for this life.
Whether comedy or tragedy, I did it.
And it seems to me that that is a basis for behavior and going on,
which is more fundamentally joyous and profitable and great
than defining ourselves as miserable victims or sinners or what have you.
Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture from the Nature of Consciousness lecture series.
I was discussing an alternative myth to the ceramic and fully automatic models of the universe.
I'll call the dramatic myth.
The idea that life as we experience it's a big act and that behind this big...
...
act is the player. And the player, or the self, as it's called in Hindu philosophy,
the Atman, is you. Only you are playing hide and seek, since that is the essential game
that's going on. It's the game of games, the basis of all games, hide and seek. And
so since you are playing hide and seek, you are deliberately, although you can't admit
this or won't admit it, you are deliberately forgetting who you really are, or what you
really are, and the knowledge that your essential self is the foundation of the universe, the
kind of being, as Tillich calls it, is something you have as what the Germans call a Hintergedanke.
A Hintergedanke is a thought way, way, way in the back of your mind, way back here somewhere.
Something that you know deep down, but can't admit. So, in a way then, in order to bring
this to the front, in order to know that that is the case, you have to be kitted out of your
game. You see, the problem is this. We identify in our experience a differentiation between
what we do and what happens to us. We have a certain number of actions that we define
as voluntary. And we feel in control of those. And then over against that, there is all those
things that are involuntary. But the dividing line between these two is very arbitrary.
Because for example, when you move your hand, you feel that you decide whether to open it
or to close it. But then ask yourself, how do you decide? When you decide to open your hand,
do you first decide to decide? You don't, do you? You just decide and how do you do that?
And if you don't know how you do it, is it voluntary or involuntary? Let's consider breathing.
You can feel that you breathe deliberately. You can control your breath. But when you don't
think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary or involuntary? And so, we come to have a very
arbitrary definition of self. That much of my activity which I feel I do. And that then
doesn't include breathing most of the time. It doesn't include the heartbeats. It doesn't
include the activity of the glands. It doesn't include digestion. It doesn't include how you
shape your bones, circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now, if you
get with yourself and you find out that you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens.
You find that your body knows that you are one with the universe. In other words, that the
so-called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining.
If you find out that it's you who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find
out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process
with everything else that's going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean,
your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos. And it's all you. Only
you are playing the game that you are only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there
are in physical reality no such things as separate events. So then, remember also when
I tried to work towards a definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence is not knowing how everything
is done, it's just doing it. You don't have to translate it into language. Look, supposing
when you got up in the morning you had to switch your brain on, and you had to think and do
as a deliberate process, waking up all the circuits that you need for active life during
the day. Why, you would never get done. Because you have to do all those things at once. How
can a centipede control a hundred legs at once? Because it doesn't think about it. And so in the
same way you are unconsciously performing all the various activities of your organism. Only
unconsciously isn't a good word. Because it sounds sort of dead. Superconsciously would be better.
give it a plus rather than a minus. Because what consciousness is, is simply a sort of specialized
form of awareness. When you look around the room, you are conscious of as much as you can notice.
And you see an enormous number of things which you don't notice. If, for example, I look at a girl
here and somebody asked me later, what was she wearing? I may not know. Although I've seen.
Because I didn't attend. But I was aware. You see. And perhaps if I could, under hypnosis,
be asked this question. Where I would get my conscious attention out of the way, through being
in the hypnotic state, I could recall what dress she was wearing. So then, just in the same way as
you don't focus your attention on how you make your thyroid gland function, so in the same way you don't
have any attention focused on how you shine the sun. So then, let me connect this with the problem of
birth and death. Which puzzles people enormously, of course. Because in order to understand what the
self is, you have to remember that it doesn't need to remember anything. Just like you don't need to
know how you work your thyroid gland. So then, when you die, you're not going to have to put up with
everlasting non-existence. Because that's not an experience. A lot of people are afraid that when
they die, they're going to be locked up in a dark room forever. And sort of undergo that. But one of
the most interesting things in the world, this is a yoga, this is a way of realization. Try and imagine
what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Think about that. Children think about it.
It's one of the great wonders of life. What will it be like to go to sleep and never wake up?
And if you think long enough about that, something will happen to you. You will find out, among other
things, that it will pose the next question to you. What was it like to wake up after having never
gone to sleep? That was when you were born. You see, you can't have an experience of nothing. Nature
reports of vacuum. So after you're dead, the only thing that can happen is the same experience or the
same sort of experience as when you were born. In other words, we all know very well that after
people die, other people are born. And they're all you. Only you can only experience it one at a time.
Everybody is I. You all know you are you. And wheresoever beings exist throughout all galaxies,
it doesn't make any difference. You are all of them. And when they come into being, that's you
coming into being. You know that very well. Only you don't have to remember the past in the same way
you don't have to think about how you work your thyroid gland or whatever else it is in your organism.
You don't have to know how to shine the sun. You just do it like you breathe, isn't it? Doesn't it
really astonish you that you are this fantastically complex thing and that you're doing all of this
and you never had any education in how to do it? You never learned, but you're this miracle?
Well, the point is that from a strictly physical, scientific standpoint, this organism
is a continuous energy with everything else that's going on.
And if I am my foot, I am the sun. Only we've got this little partial view. We've got the idea that no,
I'm just something in this body. The ego. That's a joke. The ego is nothing other than the focus of
conscious attention. It's like a radar on a ship. The radar on a ship is a troubleshooter. Is there
anything in the way? And conscious attention is a designed function of the brain to scan the environment
like a radar does. And note for any trouble making changes. But if you identify yourself with your
troubleshooter, then naturally you define yourself as being in a perpetual state of anxiety.
And the moment we cease to identify with the ego and become aware that we are the whole organism,
you realize as the first thing how harmonious it all is. Because your organism is a miracle of harmony.
All this thing functioning together, even those corpuscles and creatures that are fighting each other in
the bloodstream and eating each other up. If they weren't doing that, you wouldn't be healthy.
So what is discord at one level of your being is harmony at a higher level. And you begin to realize
that and you begin to be aware too that the discords of your life and the discords of people's life,
which are a fight at one level, at a higher level of the universe, are healthy and harmonious.
And you suddenly realize that everything that you are and do is at that level as magnificent
and as free of any blemish as the patterns in waves, the markings in marble, the way a cat moves,
and that this world is really okay and can't be anything else because otherwise it couldn't exist.
But the reality underneath physical existence, or which really is physical existence, because
in my philosophy there's no difference between the physical and the spiritual. These are absolutely
out of date categories. It's all process. It isn't stuff on the one hand and form on the other. It's
just, it is pattern. Life is pattern. It is a dance of energy. So I will never invoke spooky knowledge.
That is to say that I've had a private revelation or that I have sensory vibrations going on a plane
which you don't have. Everything is standing right out in the open. It's just a question of how you
look at it. So you do discover when you realize this, the most extraordinary thing to me that I never
cease to be flabbergasted at whenever it happens to me. Some people will use a symbolism
of the relationship of God to the universe, wherein God is, say, brilliant light, only somehow veiled,
hiding underneath all these forms that you see as you look around you. So far so good. But the truth
is funnier than that. It is that you are looking right at the brilliant light now that the experience
you are having, which you call ordinary, everyday consciousness, pretending you're not it, that
experience is exactly the same thing as it. There's no difference at all. And when you find that out,
you laugh yourself silly. That's the great discovery. In other words, when you really start to see things,
and you look at an old paper cup, and you go into the nature of what it is to see, what vision is, or what
smell is, or what touch is, you realize that that vision of the paper cup is the brilliant light of the cosmos.
Nothing could be brighter. Ten thousand suns couldn't be brighter. Only they're hidden in the sense that
all the points of the infinite light are so tiny when you see them in the cup. They don't blow your eyes out.
But it is actually, see, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world,
the sun would not be light. You evoke light out of the universe. In the same way, you, by virtue of
having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin.
It's your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being the
whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything, you see. But in the
mythology that we've sold ourselves on during the end of the 19th century, when people discovered how
big the universe was. And that we live on a little planet in a solar system on the edge of a galaxy,
which is a minor galaxy. Everybody thought, oh, we're really unimportant after all. God isn't there
and doesn't love us and nature doesn't give a damn. And we put ourselves down, you see. But actually,
it's this little funny microbe, tiny thing, crawling on this little planet, that's way out somewhere,
who has the ingenuity by nature of this magnificent organic structure to evoke the whole universe out
of what would otherwise be mere quanta. There's jazz going on. But do you see, this little little
ingenious organism is not merely some stranger in this. This little organism on this little planet
is what the whole show is growing there, and so realizing its own presence. Well, now here's the
problem. If this is the state of affairs which is so, and if the consciousness state you're in at this
moment is the same thing as what we might call the divine state, if you do anything to make it different,
it shows you don't understand that it's so. So the moment you start practicing yoga or praying or
meditating or indulging in some sort of spiritual cultivation, you are getting in your own way.
The Buddha said, we suffer because we desire. If you can give up desire, you won't suffer. But he
didn't say that as the last word. He said that as the opening step of a dialogue. Because if you say that
to someone, they're going to come back after a while and say, yes, but I'm now desiring not to desire.
And so the Buddha will answer, well, at last you're beginning to understand the point.
Because you can't give up desire, why would you try to do that? It's already desire.
So in the same way you say, you ought to be unselfish or to give up your ego. Let go, relax.
Why do you want to do that? Just because it's another way of beating the game, isn't it?
The moment you see you hypothesize that you are different from the universe, you want to get one
up on it. But if you try to get one up on the universe and you're in competition with it, it
means you don't understand you are it. You think there's a real difference between self and other.
But self, what you call yourself and what you call other, are mutually necessary to each other,
like back and front. They're really one. But just as a magnet polarizes itself in north and south,
it's all one magnet. So experience polarizes itself as self and other. But it's all one.
So if you try to make the north pole get the mastery of it or the south pole get the mastery
of the north pole, you show you don't know what's going on. A guru or teacher who wants to get this
across to somebody because he knows it himself. And when you know it, you know you like others to see
it too. So what he does is he gets you into being ridiculous harder and more assiduously than usual.
In other words, if you are in a contest with the universe, he's going to stir up that contest
until it becomes ridiculous. And so he sets you such tasks as saying. Now, of course, in order to
be a true person, you must give up yourself. Be unselfish. So the Lord sits, steps down out of
heaven and says, the first and great commandment is, thou shalt love the Lord thy God.
God. You must love me. Well, that's a double bind. You can't love on purpose. You can't be sincere
purposely. It's like trying not to think of a green elephant while taking medicine.
But if a person really tries to do it, so, you know, this is where Christianity is rigged,
you should be very sorry for your sins. And though everybody knows they're not,
but they think they ought to be. And so they go around trying to be penitent
or trying to be humble. And they know the more assiduously they practice it, the phonier and phonier
the whole thing gets. And so in this way, it's what it's called the technique of reductio ad absurdum.
If you think you have a problem, you see, and that you're an ego and that you're in difficulty,
the answer that the Zen master makes to you is, show me your ego. I want to see this thing that has a
problem. When Bodhidharma, the legendary founder of Zen came to China, a disciple came to him and said,
I have no peace of mind. Please pacify my mind. And Bodhidharma said, bring out your mind here
before me and I'll pacify it. Well, he said, when I look for it, I can't find it. So Bodhidharma said,
there it's pacified. See, because when you look for your own mind, that is to say, your own
particularized center of being, which is separate from everything else, you won't be able to find it.
But the only way you'll know it isn't there is if you look for it hard enough
to find out that it isn't there. And so everybody says, all right, know yourself, look within,
find out who you are. Because the harder you look, you won't be able to find it. And then you
realize that it isn't there at all. There isn't a separate you. Your mind is what there is.
Everything. But the only way to find that out is to persist in the state of delusion as hard as
possible. That's one way. I don't say the only way, but it is one way. And so almost all spiritual
disciplines, meditations, prayers, et cetera, et cetera, are ways of persisting in folly,
doing resolutely and consistently what you're doing already. So if a person believes that the earth is
flat, you can't talk him out of that. He knows it's flat. Look out of the window and see it's
obviously it looks flat. So the only way to convince him that it isn't is to say, well,
let's go and find the edge. And in order to find the edge, you've got to be very careful not to walk
in circles. You'll never find it that way. So we've got to go consistently in a straight line due west
along the same line of latitude. And eventually, when we get back to where we started from,
you've convinced the guy that the earth is round. But that's the that's the only way that will tell
that will teach him because people can't be talked out of illusions. Well, now there is another
possibility, however, but this is more difficult to describe. Let's say we take us the basic supposition,
which is the thing that one sees in the experience of Satori or awakening or whatever you want to call it,
that this now moment in which I'm talking and you're listening is eternity. That although we
have somehow conned ourselves into the notion that this moment is rather ordinary and that we may not
feel very well and that we're sort of vaguely frustrated and worried and so on and that it ought
to be changed. This is it. So you don't need to do anything at all. But the difficulty about explaining
that is that you mustn't try not to do anything because that's doing something. And how to explain
that? Because there's nothing to explain. It is the way it is now, you see. And if you understand that,
it will automatically wake you up. That's why Zen teachers use shock treatment to sometimes while
they hit people or shout at them or create a sudden surprise. Because it is that jolt that suddenly
brings you here. See, there's no road to here because you're already there. And if you ask me,
how am I going to get here? It'll be like the famous story of the American tourist in England
who asked some yokel the way to Upper Tuddenham, the little village. And the yokel scratched his head
and he said, well, sir, I do know where it is, but if I were you, I wouldn't start from here.
So you see, when you ask, how do I attain the knowledge of God? How do I attain nirvana,
liberation? All I can say is it's the wrong question. Why do you want to attain it? Because
the very fact that you're wanting to attain it is the only thing that prevents you from getting there.
You already have it. But of course, it's up to you. It's your privilege to pretend that you don't.
That's your game. That's your life game. That's what makes you think you're an ego.
And when you want to wake up, you will. Just like that. If you're not awake, it shows you don't want
to. You're still playing the hide part of the game. You're still, as it were, the self pretending
it's not the self. That's what you want to do. So you see, in that way too, you're already there.
When you understand this, a funny thing happens, and some people misinterpret it.
You will discover, as this happens, that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary
behavior disappears. You will realize that what you describe as things under your own will
feel exactly the same as things going on outside you.
You watch other people moving, and you know you're doing that, just like you're breathing,
or circulating your blood. If you don't understand what's going on, you're liable to get crazy at this
point, and to feel that you are God in the Jehovah sense. To say that you actually have power over
other people, so that you could alter what they're doing, and that you are omnipotent in a very crude,
literal kind of Bible sense, you see. And a lot of people feel that, and they go crazy.
They have to put them away. They think they're Jesus Christ, and that everybody ought to fall down and
worship. That's only they got their wires crossed. They haven't been able to, this experience happened
to them, but they don't know how to interpret it. So be careful of that. Jung calls it inflation.
People who get the holy man syndrome. That, uh, I suddenly discovered that I'm the Lord, and that I'm
above good and evil, and so on, and that, that, uh, therefore I start giving myself heirs and graces.
But the point is everybody else is too. If you discover that you're that, then you ought to know
that everybody else is. Well, for example, let's see how in, in other ways you might realize this.
Most people think when they open their eyes and look around, that what they are seeing is outside.
It seems, doesn't it, that you are behind your eyes, and that behind the eyes there is a blank.
If you can't see at all, turn around, and you see something else in front of you. But behind the eyes
there seems to be something that has no color. It isn't dark, it isn't light, it's just, it's there
from a tactile standpoint. You can feel it with your fingers, although you don't get inside it.
But what is that behind your eyes, you see? Well, actually, when you look out there and see all
these people and things sitting around, that's how it feels inside your head. The color of this room,
is back here in the nervous system, where the optical nerves are at the back of the head.
It's in there. It's what you're experiencing. What you see out here is a neurological experience.
Now, if that hits you, and you feel sensuously that that's so, you may think that then therefore
the external world is all inside my skull. But you've got to correct that with the thought that
your skull is also in the external world. So, you suddenly begin to feel, well,
wow, what kind of a situation is this? It's inside me, and I'm inside it, and it's inside me, and I'm inside it.
And I'm inside it, and I'm inside. And I'm inside it, and I'm inside it. And I'm inside it.
So, you can tell me if you're on the screen, I'm gonna be able to show back to the front of the front of the head.
And I'm inside it. And I'm inside it. And I'm inside it. And I'm inside it.
but that's the way it is this is the what you could call transaction rather than interaction
between the individual and the world just like for example in buying and selling there cannot be an
act of buying unless there's simultaneously an act of selling and vice versa so the relationship
between the organism and the environment is transactional the environment grows the organism
and in turn the organism creates the environment the organism turns the sun into light but it
requires there to be an environment containing a sun for there to be an organism at all
and the answer to it is simply they're all one process and uh it isn't that
organisms by chance came into this world put it rather that this world is the sort of environment
which grows organisms it was that way from the beginning just in the same way for i mean the
organisms may in time have arrived in the scene or out of the scene later than the beginning of the
scene but from the moment it went bang in the beginning if that's the way it started
organisms like us are sitting here were involved in it you see look here let's take the propagation of
an electric current i can have an electric current running through a wire that goes all the way around
the earth and uh here we have our power source and here we have a switch here's the positive pole
here's the negative pole now before that switch closes there is the current doesn't exactly behave
like water in a pipe there isn't current here waiting to jump the gap as soon as the switch is closed
the current doesn't even start until the switch is closed from the positive pole it never starts
unless the point of arrival is there now it'll take an interval for that current to get going and
uh circuit if it's going all the way around the earth it's a long run but the but the finishing
point has to be closed before it will even start from the beginning in a similar way although uh in
in the development of any physical system there may be billions of years between the creation of the
most primitive form of energy and then the arrival of intelligent life that billions of years is just
the same thing as the trip of the current around the wire takes a little time but it's already implied
it takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak but the oak is already implied in the acorn and so in
any lump of rock floating about in space there is implicit human intelligence sometime somehow somewhere
they all go together so don't differentiate yourself and stand off against this and say i am a living
organism in a world made of a lot of dead junk rocks and stuff it all goes together those rocks are just as
much you as your fingernails you need rocks what are you going to stand on what i think you know awakening
really involves is a re-examination of our common sense we've got all sorts of ideas built into us
our common sense has been rigged you see so that we feel strangers
and aliens in this world and this is terribly plausible simply because it's what we're used to
that's the only reason but when you really start questioning this say is that the way i have to
assume life is i know everybody does but does that make it true it doesn't necessarily it ain't
necessarily so and so then you is as you question this basic assumption that underlies our culture
you find you get a new kind of common sense it becomes absolutely obvious to you
that you are continuous with the universe for example people used to believe that the people
who lived in the antipodes would fall off and that was scary but then when somebody sailed around the world
and we all got used to it and now we travel around in jet planes and everything we have no problem about
feeling that the earth is globular none whatever we got used to it so in the same way einstein's
relativity theories the curvature of the propagation of light that began to bother people when einstein
started talking like that but now we're all used to it well in a few years it will be a matter of
common sense to very many people that they're one with the universe it'll be so simple and then maybe
if that happens we shall be in a position to handle our technology with more sense with love instead
of with hate for our environment this concludes session two of out of your mind essential listening
from the alan watts audio archives our program continues with session three
the web of life let me try from the first to indicate the point that we're aiming at the point is this
that human consciousness is at the same time as being a form of awareness and sensitivity and
understanding it's also a form of ignorance the ordinary everyday consciousness that we have
leaves out more than it takes in and because of this it leaves out things that are terribly important
it leaves out things that would if we did know them allay our anxieties and fears and horrors and
if we could extend our awareness you see to include those things that we leave out we would have
a deep interior peace because we would all know the one thing that you mustn't know you know according
to the rules of our particular social game the one thing you mustn't know that's really not allowed
that is the lowdown on life and then the lowdown on the one hand means the real dirt on things but the lowdown is
also what is profound what is mysterious what is in the depths and there's something left out
and our everyday consciousness screens this out in the same way that when you say you have weaving
you have say on this uh rug here in front of us when the black finishes here the black threads will go
underneath and then appear again over here then they'll go underneath the white and then they'll appear
again over here you know so that the back will be the obverse pattern of the front now the world is like that
our sense organs are selective they pick out certain things they're receptive for example we have a small
small band of uh what you might call a spectrum of light of sound of tactile sensation and so on to
which the human organism is sensitive but we know that outside that small band there is a huge range of
vibrations to which we have built instruments that are sensitive things like cosmic rays ultraviolet rays
uh gamma rays uh gamma rays hard x-rays so on they're all outside the band of our spectrum
and obviously there are things that are outside the range of our instruments we may build new instruments
someday which will evoke bring into our consciousness other orders of vibration altogether but yet as yet we
don't know about them so you could imagine you see the universe is a vast vast system of vibrations
and has infinite possibilities all these vibrations you know are like the strings on a harp
and the harps that the angels are supposed to play in heaven are really this huge
possibility see when you play the harp you select strings you don't play all the strings it's stupid
to just run your finger along the whole edge of the heart back and forth back and forth and go
what you do is you pick out with your fingers select just like on the piano you don't go you pick
out certain notes and these make the patterns but at the same time as you pick out you reject
what you don't pick out but it's all there constituting a fundamental continuity the kind of continuity of
the thread as they go to the back of the woven material and make up the obverse of the pattern that's on the front
now the question that is absolutely basic for all human beings is what have you left out you see you
are focused on certain things that constitute what you call everyday reality look you single out people
and you see them sitting sitting sitting all around and you know there are things that are really there
and then behind the people are the houses or whatever we live in and the earth and behind all that the sky
and so on but we see the world as a collection of rather disjointed events and things and i might say to
you as you came in here today now my goodness you all forgot something what did you forget and you think
my goodness did i put my pants on did i wear a sweater did i put my glasses and my hair on or my wig
or whatever and uh no no it's none of that well something you've forgotten see everybody's forgotten
something you left it out you've just missed it see see and so i can bring this out what you've forgotten
if i ask you who are you well you say i'm paul jones or whatever your name happens to be
i say oh no no no don't give me that stuff who are you really and you think um whoa of course i'm just
i'm just me no i don't give me that i don't want to hear all that nonsense you're playing a trick on me
really deep down who are you i don't know well that's the thing to find out that's the thing that's
been forgotten see that's the underside of the tapestry the thing that's been left out because
what we are carefully
taught to ignore is uh that every one of us fundamentally deep deep inside let's put it that
way is a an act of a function of a performance of a manifestation of the works the whole blinking
cosmos with all its galaxies and forever and ever and ever whatever it is beyond that what uh you might
call god in the western tradition or brahman in hindu philosophy or tao in chinese
and every one of us is really that but we are pretending we aren't and we are pretending with
tremendous skill and deception now what i would call a really swinging human being
is a person who lives on two levels at once he's able to live on the level of being his ordinary ego
his everyday personality and play his role in life and to observe all the rules and so on that go with
that but if he's only on that level if he's only playing that kind of thing and thinks that's all there
is it becomes a drag and he starts being the kind of person who feels that he's just got to go on
surviving see it's terribly important to go on surviving to live and uh he works at that and his uh
children learn the same attitude from him and they you know he says well i i've got to survive because
i've got all these children i want to support and so on so forth and then they take the same attitude
and they breed up children and they feel compulsive about supporting them because they've got to go on
and so nobody really has any fun
it's just
we've got to make this thing you see and you don't have to
see whenever i get somebody who comes to me and says i really can't go on and i have to commit
suicide i say well that's entirely uh you're you're right there's really no reason why you should go on
and if you want to commit suicide do it you can check out of course this reduces anxiety when they
feel free to commit suicide they don't really have to commit suicide so so much
you know you you you you can commit partial suicide
so uh the sense that you just have to go on living see that life is a must when you say to anything
spontaneous see life is spontaneous it happens in the words of the taoists which means of itself so
that's their chinese expression for nature what happens by itself what isn't pushed but it just
pops up you see like um gee i'll never forget there was a great zen master i knew once in new york
he was giving a lecture one evening and he was dressed in his gold ceremonial robes
and he was sitting in front of an altar like with this sort of thing and but he had a table in front of
him with very formal with candles on it and a sutra scripture on a little desk and he was
lecturing on the sutra and he said um fundamental principle in buddhism is no purpose purposelessness
when you drop fart you don't say at nine o'clock i drop fart it happen of itself
you know and all these pious western devotees you know kind of put their handkerchiefs in their mouths
and tried not to laugh so but that's the meaning of something that happens of itself like drop drop fart
or have hiccups or uh um just you you came into being you know it happens in a kind of a plop way like
that see now you can't tell that process you ought to happen you must happen because that
puts a bind on it in the same way as when you have a little child and all the relatives have
come to a party on thanksgiving and you put the child into the middle of all the relatives and say
now dear play see and absolutely bugs the child to do it like that and so this is the problem for every
artist because an artist is a man who makes his living by playing whether he's dancing or painting or
playing music or whatever it is and he has to overcome this problem he has to know how to play
in public at a given time on an appointment see now that's not an easy thing to learn but when you
catch on to the trick of it you can do it to play on demand that's the hardest lesson of life to contrive
what is called by my japanese artist friend sabro hasagawa a controlled accident
the thing is that we have been educated to use our minds in a certain way
a way that ignores or screens out the fact that every one of us is an aperture
through which the whole cosmos looks out you see it's as if you had a
light covered with a black ball and in this ball were pinholes
and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out
so in that way every one of us is actually a pinhole through which the fundamental light
that is the existence itself looks out only the game we're playing
is uh not to know this to be only that little hole which we call me my ego my specific john jones
or whatever if however you see we can maintain at the same time
the sense of being this specific john jones with his role in life or whatever
and know also underneath this that we are the whole works you get a very marvelous and agreeable arrangement
this is a most remarkable harmoniousness i mean it gives one's life a great sense of joy
and exuberance if you can carry on these two things at once if you in other words you know that
all the serious predicaments of life are a game now i want to put it two ways i'm not saying
that it's a bad thing something to be condemned to take your own individual life seriously in dead
earnest and to have all the problems that go with that do you understand that that being that way
that being a real mixed up human being is a manifestation of nature that is something just like um the patterns
on the waves out here or like a seashell you know we pick up shells i i always keep one around uh sort of
an example for many things and say my goodness isn't that gorgeous there's not an aesthetic fault in
it anywhere it's absolutely perfect now i wonder i wonder if these fish look at each other's shells
and say don't you think she's kind of fat
oh my those markings aren't really very well spaced because that's what we do see we don't realize
that all of us in our various goings on and behavior and so on are just as more marvelous
much more complicated much more interesting all these gorgeous faces that i'm looking at you know
every one of them some are supposedly pretty some are supposedly not so pretty but they're all absolutely
gorgeous and everybody's eyes is a piece of jewelry beyond compare beautiful but
we have specialized in a certain kind of awareness that makes us neglectful of that you see we specialize
in more or less briefly concentrated pinpoint attention we look at this and we look at that
and we select from all the things we might possibly be aware of only certain things and as a result of that
we leave out of our everyday consciousness
and generally speaking two dimensions of experience one amazing beauty
of experience that we never see at all
and on the other hand, the very deep thing, the sense of our basic identity, unity with, oneness with, the total process of being.
See, because we are staring, as it were, at certain features of the landscape, we don't see the background.
And because we get fascinated with, you know, I could go into details of this shell, as I said,
and put myself in the mind of a conch or whatever it is that lives in this thing,
and say, hmm, that's not so hot, that one.
Like that, you see.
And so, I wouldn't see the whole thing.
But when I look at it like this, when anybody looks at it like that, we say, oh my God, isn't that gorgeous.
Another way of talking about the web is that there are different levels of magnification.
For example, supposing you take a piece of embroidery, and here it is, obviously in front of you, an ordered and beautiful object.
And then you take out a microscope, and you look at the individual threads.
At a certain point, as you turn up the microscope, you'll get a hopeless tangle, which doesn't make any sense at all.
The wrapped fiber that constitutes the thread is a mess.
Hasn't been organized, nobody did anything about it.
But at the level of magnification at which you actually see it with the naked eye, it's all been organized.
All right.
Now, keep turning up that microscope.
Take one of those individual threads in the fiber that seems to be so chaotic,
and go into the constitution of that.
And again, you'll find fantastic order.
You'll find the most gorgeous designs of molecules.
Then keep turning it up.
And again, at a certain level, you'll find chaos again.
All right.
Keep going.
And at another level, you'll find this marvelous order.
Now, you see, order and randomness constitute, in other words, the warp and the woof.
Where everything is in order, everything is under control, in randomness, it's all a mess.
But we wouldn't know what order was unless we had messes.
It's the contrast of order and messes that order itself depends upon.
And so, in exactly the same way, it is the contrast of on and off, there and not there.
In other words, life and death, being and non-being, that constitutes existence.
Only, we pretend that the random side of things, the disorderly side of things,
could possibly win in the game of competition, or I would rather call it collaboration between the two.
When you lose sight of the fact that the order principle and the random principle go together,
that's exactly the same predicament as losing sight of the fact that all individually delineated things and beings are connected underneath.
You know, just like mountains stick out of the earth, and there's a fundamental earth underneath them.
So, all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality, and there's a continuity underneath.
But you ignore that, you see, that's the thing that's left out.
See, I'm just giving you many examples of the same principle.
But really, deep down, we are, each one of us, everything that there is.
Doing it this way, and then again that way, and then again another way,
and that's what it keeps up doing forever and ever.
Only, it has holidays.
Host.
Thanks.
Thanks, moi.
Hey, I've got a lot of friends at the start of the right time
to do things fascinating.
And again, I've been interested in this study here.
Tell us about that time to do it.
Have a great day.
which are called deaths.
You know in the story of the creation of the world in the Bible,
God works for seven days and rests the seventh.
It's necessary to have a holiday.
Holidays, holy day.
And the Sabbath for the Jews is Saturday, for the Christians is Sunday,
because Saturday is the last day of the week,
but Sunday is the first day of the week.
And it's a slight difference of alteration between a Jewish temperament
and a Christian temperament.
Some people like to take the holiday and then do the work.
Other people like to do the work and then take the holiday.
And since the Jews do the work first and then take the holiday,
they're always a little up on the Christians in business.
But the point is that a holiday,
this pause between something going on,
is of the essence of the idea of a web.
For example, as a famous Irishman is supposed to have described a net
as a lot of holes tied together with string.
So the holes are very, very important.
And these are the holy days.
You see, the holes.
This all goes together.
So, there must be that interval.
And it exists on all kinds of levels.
It isn't simply that there is, for example,
a sound that is sounded.
It is a vibration.
And the sound goes on and off.
Everything that we call sound is sound silence.
There is no such thing as pure sound.
You couldn't hear it.
What you hear is that tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap against the eardrum.
But it happens very fast.
So that you get more of an impression of sound than you do of silence.
But between every little undulation of sound, there is also an interval.
When you listen to music, you hear a melody.
But what you hear, actually, that makes the melody significant are the steps between the
tones, what we call the intervals.
And a person who doesn't hear intervals is tone deaf.
He only hears noises.
He doesn't hear the steps.
So, that interval between whatever happens is as important as what happens.
So we'll call these two things, the sound and the silence, the life and the death, somewhat
analogous in weaving to the warp and the woof.
Now, look at the marvelous way in which warp and woof go together.
A piece of cloth is an extraordinary thing when you consider it's made of a line of string.
There's something that always struck me as a child, fabulous, that string, just thread,
could turn into cloth.
Why should it hang together?
How improbable.
My mother was a very great artist in embroidery, did absolutely fabulous work.
And she could do everything with thread, sewing, knitting, embroidery, make tapestries, repair
tapestries.
Oh, just fabulous work.
So, I've grown up in a background where thread is of enormous importance.
She made a living this way for a while.
So, I was always amazed at the way, say, you take a ball of wool with knitting needles and
suddenly it turns into a sweater, fantastic.
But I found out, you see, the secret of this, which is that it will do this, it will hold
together by this combination of warp and woof, by this process where one thread goes under
the other, omits the next, goes under the other and then the next thing does the same
thing but in the opposite way, connect that, and they hold each other up.
For example, you can put two sticks of wood and lean them against each other and they'll
stand up.
You know, the Chinese character for man looks more or less like that.
And although this is simply the brush form, the brush abbreviation of what were originally
the legs of a little human stick figure, there's a story that Japanese children sometimes learn
from their mothers, that this, the reason this is the character for man, is that two sticks
lent together, as I described, will keep each other up and the one depends on the other.
It's mutual.
And so, in the same way, the existence of human beings depends on our supporting each other.
Without that, no one of us can exist.
But that, which may seem a little trite, a little sort of moralistic and so on, but it
is absolutely fundamental, that anything that there is, whenever we can say that something
exists, existence is a function of relationship.
In itself, as a function of relationship.
For example, forgive me if some of you have heard this one before, but it's a very important
basic lesson.
If there is only one object, one small ball in the middle of endless space, nobody knows
whether it's moving, because you can't tell whether it's approaching anything or whether
it's going away from anything, because there's nothing else.
So in that state of affairs, no motion exists.
But if we introduce a second ball into the picture, and the two either come towards each
other or go away from each other, then we can say that both of them, or either of them,
is in motion.
We can't decide which is the one that's doing the moving, because it could be one, could
be the other.
Now we'll put three balls into space.
And we find two of them staying together, and the other one going away.
Now it's up to the two of them to decide whether the other one is going away from them, or they're
going away from the other, because two is a majority in this case.
And the vote always, of course, goes to the majority, the universe being basically a democratic
organization.
And so it goes.
Now once you've got that, you can see that motion is a form of relationship.
All right, let me put it in another way.
Energy is a form of relationship.
If the universe is basically a play of energy, then you can say energy and relationship go
together.
Now, what is this saying?
This is saying that being, existence itself, is relationship.
Let's look at it in several other ways.
You know the old question.
If a tree crashes in a forest and there is nobody around to hear it, is there a noise?
This question has been discussed in many futile ways.
But noise, basically, is a state of affairs that requires an eardrum and an audio nervous system
behind the eardrum.
When the tree falls, it makes the air vibrate.
If there is anywhere around an ear with the appropriate nervous system, there will be a noise.
Because noise is a relationship between motion in the air and ears.
If there is not any ear around, there won't be any noise, although there will be vibration
in the air.
And if there is some instrument around, such as a microphone attached to a tape recorder,
which is a mechanical copy of a human ear, then, according to that, there will be noise.
There will be a vibration.
In the same way, let's suppose the sun sends out light into space.
Now, the space surrounding the sun will be black darkness, as if there were no light
in it, unless a planet happens to float by.
When a planet floats by, there will be light in the darkness.
But if there isn't anything to relate to the sun in that way, then comes no light.
Now, this goes right down to the root and ground of everything.
It goes down to the essence of your nerves, of your whole being, that it's all an interdependence.
And that's why one of the basic symbols of the universe is the Chinese yin yang symbol, which
you know is a circle with an S curve in the center.
One side of the S is black, the other is white.
And so it makes, as it were, two commas or two fishes.
And the eye of the fish is the opposite color.
The white fish has a black eye, the black fish has a white eye.
And these things are going like this, see, curling in on each other.
Now this thing is called a helix.
And that is the fundamental form of the galaxies.
The great nebulae we see out in space are doing this, curves.
And this is basically to the position of sexual intercourse.
This is love making.
And this is, you know, when you hold hands and so on.
This is it.
But there are two involved.
And the two are secretly one.
Now, this is what I really want you to understand.
To get into the unitive world, underneath underlying and supporting the everyday practical world,
there have to be certain alterations in one's common sense.
Now there are certain ideas, and beyond these ideas certain feelings, that are difficult
to get across, not because they are intellectually complicated, not at all because of that, but
because they are unfamiliar, they are strange.
We haven't been brought up to accommodate them.
And in exactly the same way that in past times, people knew that the planets were supported
in the sky because they were embedded in spheres of crystal.
And if they weren't embedded in spheres of crystal, and of course you could see them
because you could see through them, they would fall down on the earth.
And now when astronomers finally suggested that there were no crystal spheres, people felt
unbelievably insecure.
See?
They had a terrible time assimilating this idea.
Now do you see what it involves to assimilate a really new idea?
You have to do quite a flip.
For example, there are some people whose number systems only account for quantities.
One, two, three, many.
So they don't have any concept of four corners to a table.
See, a table has many corners, and a pile of pebbles is, in that sense, equivalent in
manyness to the four corners of a table.
Now they have difficulty, you see, in beginning to assimilate the idea of counting through and
numbering all those corners or all those pebbles.
But we've done that, and so to us that is perfectly simple.
But imagine the kind of mentality, the kind of person to whom that is not simple at all.
Now in exactly the same way, there is here what I'm trying to explain, a new idea that
most people don't assimilate.
And that is the idea of the total interdependence of everything in the world.
The Buddhists in Japan call it Jijimuge, Jijimuge, between thing and thing, between event and
event there is no block.
And they represent this imagistically as a network.
Imagine a multidimensional spiderweb covered in dew in the morning.
And every single drop of dew on this web contains in it the reflections of all the other drops
of dew.
And of course, in turn, in every drop of dew that one drop reflects, there is the reflection
of all the others again.
And they use this image to represent the interdependence of everything in the world.
In other words, if we give this dew drop image, if we put it into a linguistic analogy, we
would say this.
Words have meaning only in context.
The meaning of any word depends upon the sentence or upon the paragraph in which it's found.
So that if I say this tree has no bark, that's one thing.
And if I say this dog has no bark, that's another thing.
So you see always that the meaning of the word is in relation to the context.
Now in exactly the same way, the meaning, as well as the existence of an individual
person, an organism, is in relation to the context.
You are what you are, sitting here at this moment, in your particular kind of clothes,
and with the particular colors of your faces and your particular personalities, your family
involvements, your business involvements, your neuroses and your everything.
You are that, precisely in relation to an extremely complex environment.
So much so, that if, let's take for example this piece of wood that forms a support to
the beam out here.
Now believe me, this is true.
You can see that has little nubbles on it and so on.
If it were not the way it is, you would not be the way you are.
The line of connection between what is, it is, and you are is very, very complicated.
Also we could say, if a given star that we observe didn't exist, you would be different
from what you are now.
I don't say you wouldn't exist, but you would exist differently.
But you might say the connection is very faint, is something that you don't ordinarily have
to think about, it's not important.
But basically it is important.
Only you say, I don't have to think about it, because it's there all the time.
See for example, the floor is underneath you all the time.
Some sort of floor, some sort of earth.
And you really don't have to think about it.
And so it's just always there, it's always around.
If you become insensitive, you stop thinking about it.
But there it is.
And so in the same way, our subtle interdependence with, mind you, it's not just our plain existence,
it's the kind of existence we have, is dependent upon all these things.
Also our plain existence, but that gets way down.
But the fundamental thing is, existence is relationship.
In other words, if my finger up here, is all alone, and the wind doesn't move, and nothing
touches it, it stops knowing that it's there.
But if something comes along and does ch-ch-ch-ch-ch immediately it's aware that it's there.
So, you see, it takes two.
We could have so much fun, but it takes more than one, and she don't want it.
But in this way, you see, what we call duality.
You can see, can't you, how duality is fundamental.
It takes two.
But duality is always secretly unity.
Take the contrast between the words we use, explicit and implicit.
It's very valuable words.
What is explicit, what's on the outside, let's say, how we come on publicly.
Explicitly, we are thus and so.
We have a fight.
We're in competition, say, in business, explicitly.
But implicitly, we've worked this out, that we've agreed in a secret way that nobody knows
about, that this competition is extremely valuable to both of us.
Take it politically, for example.
Let's take the situation of Russia versus the United States.
Explicitly, in public, this has to be a big fight.
These two ways of life, these two ideologies are opposed.
They say, brrrr, you know, we are...
But behind the scenes, it's all been carefully worked out.
You bet it has, that this opposition has to happen.
Because our economy depends on it, and their economy depends on it.
And everybody knows this, who's smart, but there are a lot of people who get taken in
by the propaganda, and they should be taken in, because that makes the thing work.
It's crazy.
But that's the way it goes.
And everything works this way.
There is, for example, when swans start to mate, they're not sure what they're supposed
to do.
And they begin to fight.
I had a long talk about this with C.G. Jung.
He lived on the edge of Lake Zurich, and he had a little summer house right on the water's
edge, and there were many swans there.
And I was getting up after, at the end of a conversation with him, and we were beginning
to walk back to the main house, and I said, isn't it true that swans are monogamous?
And he said, yes, they are.
He said, do you know, I have had most interesting relationships between these swans and many
of my female patients who thought they were homosexual.
I mean, Jung wasn't a sexual snob.
I mean, he understood all the legitimacy of all kinds of sexual variations.
But he said, it has been a point of departure for our discussions.
And he said, it's a very funny thing that when they begin to mate, they start fighting.
And they don't know what it's all about, and then suddenly the fight turns into lovemaking.
So that's what I mean.
Underneath opposition, there is love.
Underneath duality, there's unity.
That Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle.
So you see, here's that weaving principle.
The things hold together by over, under, under, over, over, under, under, over, over, under,
under, over.
And that creates a stuff, it creates a fabric, it creates clothing, it creates shelter.
It creates what we call matter.
Matter.
Mother.
And also the same word, maya.
Illusion.
Ha.
See?
The world as a marvelous illusion.
Now, we've got to go into this.
Look, look at another form of the thing.
You can play it not only by two as one, but you can play it by three as one.
You know the, uh, trademark for Ballantyne's ale, which is three interlocked rings.
Now, the way these rings are interlocked is such that they are joined only if the three
of them are present.
If you take one away, the other two fall apart.
It's a very interesting phenomenon, but it can be created physically with, uh, steel rings.
Their cohesion depends on all three of them being present.
Now, we have tried, scientifically, to understand the world and explain its mysteries by analyzing
the smallest, smallest particles of things that exist.
Inquiring down, down, down, what is this thing we call flesh or call steel or stone?
What is it made of?
Go down into the midst of it.
And that's given us a certain understanding.
But only half of the understanding.
What is very important is not what is the tiniest particle, but in what context is the
tiniest particle, you see?
In relation to what is it?
Just as the word bark, as I showed you, has different meanings in different sentences,
so cells, molecules, atoms, have different properties in different contexts.
So what, uh, the scientist equally needs to study is not simply what is anything when very, very
minutely analyzed, but where is it?
When is it?
That makes all the difference.
So do you see that a lot of people who get anxious when they hear that everything is relative
have no, no need to get that anxious.
Relativity isn't some kind of slippery morass in which all standards and all directions get
lost.
Relativity is really the soundest situation that there is.
See it's the, it's the one supporting the other.
It's this thing.
Do you know this?
This is wonderful.
X marks the spot.
Imagine this going on and on.
Supposing my finger were indefinitely long, both fingers, and they were doing this.
See, they're just crossing each other.
Now, on one side of it, it's a pair of scissors and it cuts.
What is it on the other side?
Why, it's opening female legs, saying, please come in.
It's utter softness, utter receptiveness.
On the other side it's .
But on this side it's, please, please, please, please, yes.
Welcome.
And everything's based on that.
See?
It's this way.
Sharpness, teeth, biting, spines, crab shells, all that kind of thing, you know.
On the other side it's the melting softness of life.
See?
They go together just like that.
And goodness knows what it is on these outer two sides.
I haven't thought about that yet.
So, if you see that, if you get that principle, you can feel yourself not sort of just rattling
around in the world as a kind of, you know, somebody who's been stuck down there.
But you can feel yourself going on in absolutely exact relationship with everything around you.
And this is very beautiful.
It isn't just that you are here looking at . . .
what's out there like you might be photographing it with your eyes it's that if that there wasn't
there you wouldn't be here the outside thing that you see and the inside thing that you are are poles
of the same magnet or back in front of the same coin and without one there isn't the other that
means of course then that we are living in the midst of a world of animals vegetables minerals
atmospheres astronomical bodies this highly intelligent its intelligence concentrated
crystallized in our brains that's where it comes out you see in any field let's say let's take any
field of forces we take a sort of chemical solution and at certain critical points in this chemical
solution the crystals start to form and so in the same way the total intelligence of this whole
universe crystallizes in human brains also in other kinds of brains but that's where it really comes
out but it's total intelligence of the whole field that does this so we go with the whole thing
interdepend with it we don't live in an environment which is just rock just air just atmosphere and so
on the environments only like that when we think about it analytically and try to explain it but when
we think of it isn't just rock and air see but those things go together when you see the
interconnectedness when you see in the simplest way how flowers go with bees and other insects they
don't live without them humans go with cattle they don't exist without them plants etc etc etc when you see
the intervals the significance of the relationships between these things it's only then when you see
that that you are aware of the melody go back to the illustration I gave of the person who can't hear
melody whose tone-deaf he hears only a succession of sounds because he's not aware of the intervals now
most people are brought up to be tone-deaf in respect to their own existence and the rest of the universe they
don't see the relationships they're not aware of the unity and so once you you spot that you spot how
everything goes with the thing but you are one end and that all out there is the other end and they
really go together then you may be said to be living a harmonious life this concludes session three of
out of your mind essential listening from the alan watts audio archives our program continues with
session four sounds true presents out of your mind essential listening from the alan watts audio archives
session four the web of life part two with alan watts sounds true presents out of your mind
essential listening from the alan watts audio archives session seven the world as just so with alan watts
old fairy boat in sausalito california we begin with a lecture on the nature of consciousness with author
philosopher and self-proclaimed spiritual entertainer alan watts in exploring the theme of the web of life
i have thus far discussed two principal topics first the web considered as selectivity experience considered as what we pay
attention to on the one hand and what we ignore on the other and i showed how the way in which we pay
attention to the world creates isolates i'm using that as a noun isolates that we call particular things events and
persons and they seem to be disconnected and to be alone because we ignore the connections between them
and i use the analogy of weaving where the threads go underneath and join on the back in a way that is not
seen on the front so you might say in the unconscious although i don't particularly like that word because
it makes it seem as if it was something rather dead but on the unconscious side of life as on the back of the
weaving or the back of the embroidery there are connections which are not published now in the second
part of the theme was the web as mutuality when i discussed the way the existence of a web the existence
of cloth or anything like that depends on a mutual support of the warp and the woof
and this miraculous thing occurs that when the things support each other uh being comes into
being cloth comes into being and so in exactly the same way our world is a manifestation of relativity
and this requires a balance a combination a relationship of opposites in every domain of life
and although these opposites are explicitly different and even antagonistic they are implicitly one and
that's the secret see these two secrets that we went into the connection between what are supposed to be
separate things and events and the mutual unity between what are manifestly that is to say openly
for purposes of publication opposites now this afternoon i'm going to take two other aspects of the web
the web is a trap like the spider's web is a trap for flies also the lovely embroideries are worn by women
as traps for men from a certain from a certain point of view and i want to consider the web as something
playful you see there are so many ways of looking at it and you will find that all these ways are are right
but what we need is the fullness of the view there are people for example who can see the web as a trap
and get stuck with that there are people to whom existence is simply hateful they see it as nothing but a ghastly
mistake the lord really erred when he created this world because he he arranged it in such a way
that everything lives by eating something else and what i'm doing is i'm describing a certain point of view
you see i'm not exactly philosophizing i'm describing a point of view you can look at life in such a way
that the whole thing is a is this ghastly mistake for example there is no such thing as genuine kindness
or love everybody is really pretending that they are loving other people in order to get some advantage
from them and indeed there is a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia where people
don't seem to be real they are mechanisms and you can think that out quite intensely with a good
deal of intelligence after all if you start from a good old darwinian or freudian basis and see that man
is a material machine and that the consciousness of man is simply a very involved and complicated form of
chemistry and that's it what it is you see well then this awful uh mechanical things these uh frankensteins
that everybody is they come around and they say well i'm alive i'm a human being i have a heart
i love i hate i have problems i i feel and you feel like saying come off it you're just a monster
and you put on the civilized act because really you're just a set of teeth on the end of a tube
and you've got a ganglion behind those teeth which you call your brain or your alleged mind and this
thing is really basically there for two purposes one to be cunning enough to get something to eat
to put down the tube and the other you know what mr freud's libido
and everything else you see can be construed as an elaborate subtle way of pretending that that's
not really what you want to do but you do but you put on a great show now some people according to this
view get mixed up they so repressed that what they really want to do is to eat and to screw
that they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities
and uh think that that's the real purpose of life and then they become what's called neurotic
and uh because they get involved in being pure camouflage so that's what's called escaping from
the facts not looking at life not looking at reality correctly now this is a very strange thing you see
that it is partly true that the universe so far as its biological aspect is concerned
is this weird system that lives by everybody eating everybody else
only what we do to maintain what is called order and civilization
is that very species make agreements as it were that they won't eat each other
they'll cooperate and so be an enormous gang which can uh beat down the others so the human being is
the most successful so far of this gangster arrangement we are the most predatory monsters on earth
and we have cooperated to assault the fish and the vegetables and the chickens and the cows
and everything you see only we do it by not letting our left hand know what our right hand doeth
in other words ladies and gentlemen unless gentlemen happen to be prone to going hunting as a sport
they don't see their food killed they don't see the slaughterhouse and so what you get in the butcher
in the market a steak you know is a thing in its own right it has nothing to do with a cow
a steak is a thing shaped thus and so and it looks as if it might be like a banana or something like
that you know and nobody worries and when a fish is served up it does indeed look like a fish but it's
not the squiggly squirmy fish that comes out on the end of the fisherman's line you know when you really
fish you realize that the fish doesn't like it very much now there is that absolutely extraordinary side
of things that is really terrifying and so let me repeat the illustration i used of the cross in the net
where one side of it is scissors that cut and eat teeth that chew and get this thing in and the opening
side of it is like james joyce's in ulysses the girl who says yes and i said yes yes yes she wants to
be absolutely ravaged by her man you see so it's open open open but now comes the the if we take the dark
view of things the horrible view excuse me if i go into some rather grisly details but have you ever
heard of a vagina dentata that is the idea that in the sexual organ of the woman there are teeth
and a lot of men have this fantasy and so are rendered impotent they don't make love
because they feel that the price of this blessed experience this creative experience this loving
experience is you're going to get trapped you're going to get emasculated you're going to lose your
precious member and this is a very ancient fantasy it appears throughout all known history
because this is simply the woman's come on where she attracts but she's out really to get you
she is basically a spider mother you see who is is selfish and uh doesn't really love you
not really but says she does and of course there are on the other side all the tricks of the men
so this is a view of the world as a system of mutual exploitation and of maximal selfishness
now it's a very profitable view to explore everybody should do in their lifetime sometime two things
one is to consider death to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go
to sleep and never wake up never that is the most is a very gloomy thing for contemplation but it's like
manure just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of
death is very highly generative of creative life you get wonderful things out of that and the other
thing to contemplate is to follow the possibility of the idea that you are totally selfish that you
don't have a good thing to be said for you at all you are a complete utter rascal
now the christians have avoided this because although they say in their episcopalian form of
confession that we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep and we have followed too much
the devices and desires of our own hearts too much you know uh we have offended against thy holy laws
we have left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which
we ought not to have done and there is no health in us but it ought to be different
and we're going to do our best to amend with the help of god's grace and that is a real con act because
if you equate health with genuine love and perfect unselfishness then in that sense there is no health
in us when we look at ourselves from this point of view now when you go deeply into the nature of
selfishness what do you discover you say i love myself i seek my own advantage now what is the self
that i love what do i want and that becomes an increasingly ever deepening puzzle now i've often
referred to this when you say to somebody else i love you it's always rather disconcerting to the
person to whom you say that if you imply that you love them with a pure disinterested and holy love
they automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony but if you say i love you so much i could eat you
that's an expression as a way of saying to a person you attract me so much that i can't help it
i'm absolutely bowled over by you i'm gone and people like that then they feel they're really being
loved that it's absolutely genuine but now i love you so much i could eat you now what the devil do i
want i certainly don't want to eat the girl in the sense of literally devouring her because then she'd
disappear but i love myself and what is me how do in what way do i know me when it suddenly occurs to
me that i know me only in terms of you see when i think of anything that i know and that i like
then it's always something that can be viewed as other than me i can never get to look at me real me
it's always behind it's always hidden and i really don't know it well enough to know whether i love it
or not maybe i don't maybe it's an appalling mess but certainly the things i do love and that i want
from a selfish point of view when i really think about them they're all something else that's in a way
outside me now we saw that there is a reciprocity a total mutual interdependence between what we call
the self and what we call the other that's the warp and the woof and so if you are perfectly honest
about loving yourself and you don't pull any punches you don't pretend that you are anything
other than exactly what you are you suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really
go into it is the universe you don't like all of it you're selective about it as we saw in the beginning
perception is selection but on the whole you love yourself in terms of what is other because it's only
in terms of what is other that you have a self at all so then i feel that the group one of the
very great things that cg jung contributed to mankind's understanding
was the concept of the shadow that everybody has a shadow and that the main task of the psychotherapist
is to do what he called to integrate the evil to as it were put the devil in us in its proper function
because you see it's always the devil the unacknowledged one the outcast the scapegoat
the bastard the bad guy you see the black sheep of the family
it's always from that point that which we could call the fly in the ointment you see
that generation comes in other words in the same way as in the drama
to have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain it's necessary to introduce a certain
element of trouble so in the whole scheme of life there has to be the shadow
the shadow because without the shadow there can't be the substance so this is why there is a very
strange association between crime and all naughty things and holiness you see holiness is way beyond
being good good people aren't necessarily holy people a holy person is one who is whole who has as it
were reconciled his opposites and so there's always something slightly scary about holy people
and other people react to them in very strange ways they can't make up their minds whether they're
saints or devils and so holy people have throughout history always created a great deal of trouble
along with their creative results take jesus for example trouble that jesus created is absolutely
incalculable think of the crusades the inquisition the heaven only knows what's gone on in the name of jesus
very remarkable freud's a big troublemaker as well as a great healer you see it all goes together
so the holy person is scary because he is like the earthquakes or better and still he's like the ocean
see the ocean on a lovely sunny day you can say oh isn't that gorgeous and you can go into it and
relax and float around but boy when the storm comes does that thing get mad and terrifying so there is in us
the ocean you see and jung felt that the whole point was to bring the two together
and uh by a kind of a fantastic honesty to penetrate one's own motivations to the depths
jung had a tremendous humor and he knew that nobody can be completely honest that you will try and you'll
have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark unconscious depths
but there will be a certain point at which you will say well i've had enough of that
you know do you see how in a strange way there's a certain sanity in that
when a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity of deception
there is something you all laughed when i said that there's something humorous about it
and this humor is very funny thing basically humor is an attitude of laughter about oneself
there is malicious humor or which is laughing at other people but real deep humor is laughter at oneself
now why fundamentally do you laugh about yourself what makes you laugh about yourself isn't it because
you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside
that if i hint you see that your inside is the opposite of your outside it makes people laugh
if i don't do it unkindly if i get up in the attitude of a preacher and say uh you're a bunch of
miserable sinners and you ought to be different nobody laughs
but if i say well after all boys will be boys and girls will be girls we all know then then then
people laugh now you see what's what's happening when we do that now i passed you around a lot of
embroidery to look at before we started and i'm perfectly sure that you've got the point
that there's a big difference between the front and the back
in some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front because people take
shortcuts in the front everything is orderly and it is supposed to be kind of messy on the back side
see which side will you wear you've got to be sure you get the front in the front have the back in
the back the back has all the little tricks in it all the shortcuts all the lowdown that people don't
acknowledge you see and it's exactly the same with the way we live you know like sweeping the dust
under the carpet in a hurry just before the guests come i mean we do ever so many things like that
and if you don't do it if you don't think you do it and you think well really i my embroidery is the
same on both sides see well you're deceiving yourself because what you're doing is you're taking
the shortcuts in another dimension which you're keeping out of consciousness
everybody takes the shortcuts everybody plays tricks everybody has in himself an element of
duplicity of deception because you see from this point of view that i'm discussing where the web is
the trap to be is to deceive think of camouflage the chameleon who changes its color think of the
butterfly pretending it has eyes think of the flower saying to the bee like my honey
bee says wow but then that means that the bee has to be and it has to go on living and all the
trouble it takes to go around collecting honey and raising other bees and organizing itself and doing
that dance which tells the other bees where there's more honey there's all that stuff to do
but the flower was deceptive now in the same way i've often said life is is a drama and a drama is a
deception it's a big act when you peel an onion and you don't really understand the nature of an onion
you might look for the pit in the center like any ordinary fruit has but the onion doesn't have a center
it's all skins so when you get right down there's nothing but a bunch of skins
you say well that was a kind of disappointing
but of course you have to understand that the skins were the part that you eat
well in rather the same way you see you find when you explore yourself
and your motivations and you go through and through and you try to find out that thing which
is really genuine that's why in zen discipline they give you koans which require a perfectly
genuine act an act of total and absolute sincerity and people knock themselves out trying to do this
thing but they always know that the master's going to catch them because he reads their thought you
know that story of um von kleist about the man who had a fight with a bear and the bear could read his
thoughts so that the only way of hitting the bear was to do so not on purpose because the bear would
know in advance so it's the same in working with a zen master you have to do the genuine act not on
purpose but since you're put in a situation where it's rather formal and you're supposed to do it on
purpose you're stuck you see so you explore the onion and you go in and in and in and then you find
well uh it's all a deception now then the question arises who's deceiving who who's fooling who
i'm fooling me what is fooling fooling is playing like you're there when you're not you know getting
somebody else to answer your name in the roll call so we're all you see this is the metaphysical basis
of it this is what the hindus mean by maya the world illusion the world is playing it's there when
it isn't and it's a trap and it sucks you in and you can't get out of it and it's a thorough big trap too
but always when you get an idea like this or a feeling like this follow it to its extreme don't
back out from it if you find you're selfish go to the extreme of what selfishness means confusion
largely results from not following feelings or ideas to their depth you know people think they
want to be immortal they'd like to live forever do you really want to do that think about it really go
into it what it would be like people say they want this that and the other they want this kind of car
they want this kind of dress or so on and this much money and so on it's always a good idea to think
it right through what it would involve to be in that situation to have those desires fulfilled
also when you form a relationship to another person think it through too you see how inconvenient would
they be
however attractive and always turn the embroidery around and look at the underside but don't get caught
doing it see that's something one does on the side in secret because otherwise you play the game that
everything is as it's supposed to be on the front but that makes you humorous and that makes you human
out of your mind now continues with the next lecture from the web of life lecture series now
now summing up we've discussed the web from three points of view as an analogy
of the selective operation of our senses and mind
whereby certain things in the world are picked out as significant according to certain game rules
the game that we are playing mostly is the survival game that is to say the game ought to go on only
the way we play the survival game has a a kind of element in it which makes it difficult because we tend
to say the first rule of this game is that it's serious and that messes the whole thing up so you have
to watch out in other words when you play for contradictory game rules
self-contradictory game rules because if you get mixed up into them the game ceases to be worth the
candle you start straining at doing something and it just isn't worth it then the second thing that we
observed was the web as an analogy of mutual interdependence we could call it the idea that
all existence is relative that all existence is transactional the transaction being typically
exemplified by say the operation of buying and selling in which there can be no buying without
somebody selling and there can be no selling without somebody else buying that kind of interdependence
of the inside going together with the outside what is in you going together with what is outside you
is absolutely fundamental to existence it is existence existence is relativity then we explored the web as a trap
the spider's web won't you come into my parlour said the spider to the fly and we saw what happens
if you look at all of life from the point of view that it is original selfishness and original hunger
and we found that if you take that point of view to its ultimate extreme
it dissolves and it isn't so bad after all there's a famous comment that r h blithe made on the passage in
macbeth where shakespeare says it is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing
and blithe says when it's put that way it doesn't seem so bad after all
i remember that i had a zen master friend who wrote a letter to a friend of mine which was passed on to me
saying that the greatest writers this friend of mine was aspiring to be a writer and he was trying to
write novels that would put across buddhism to people you know sugar the pill and my zen master friend
didn't approve of this at all he said don't write any story to people write it to the great sky
because all the real masters of literature especially novelists and storytellers are great masters of
nonsense think of lewis carroll you can uh use lewis carroll and he did use alice in wonderland as a zen
textbook because twas brillig and the slithy toves did guy and gimble in the wabe and that's uh that's zen
i had a discussion with a great master in japan on the last visit there and uh we were talking about
the various people who are working to translate the zen books into english and uh he said that's a
waste of time if you really understand zen he said you can use any book you could use the bible you could
use alice in wonderland you could use the dictionary because he said the sound of the rain needs no
translation so what does the rain say evening rain it is the banana leaf that speaks of it first you see that's the
point and all the talk in the world doesn't get it unless you listen to the talk in a new way the sound of
the rain needs no translation so you see there's something going on this web may be looked at as
a as pattern and the world is basically patterning what else do you do when you come to think of it
when you eat you uh are turning food into the pattern of your skeleton your muscles and your nervous
system that's a pattern and you say you see basically hooray for that pattern that's great it's terribly
interesting but then you want other patterns you like to look through a microscope and see the patterns
that exist in the small world you like to look through a kaleidoscope or a teleidoscope and see the
patterns you like to have paintings around and see the patterns you like to watch the water play you
want to watch the birds go and the clouds and all that fascinating patterns and that really does
doesn't it seem to be the point i mean what do you do when you're very rich and you want uh let's take
some rascal of ancient times who became very rich by all sorts of skullduggery and uh warfare and so on
he got himself a suit of armor a beautiful sword and he had the armorer
make the most intricate patterns arabesques of inlaid gold on the steel
why because it's as they say among the pennsylvania dutch it's for nice
it's a great thing to have all that jazz and that's what we go for what do people do most of
the time when they what would they like to do really what's your idea of heaven when people are
unoccupied as far as i can make out they get together and they sing and dance
or else watch somebody else do it nowadays we live in a non-participative culture and we don't do very
much singing and dancing we are lugubrious but we watch other people do it on television
what we really are interested in is to be able to spend all the time going
you know something like this and that's what our heart's doing that's what our lungs are doing
it's what our eyeballs are doing and it's what all these fantastic capillaries of the veins are
doing they're going just judy boo-dee hubba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-dee-dee-dee-dee you see
and that's the point now the thing is ought this to be allowed
you know a dare we admit it because we've been brought up you see in a cultural context
in which the universe is presided over by somebody serious and it's only very very occasional obscure
references in the jewish and christian scriptures to the idea that god dances
of course in hindus they know shiva dances and all the gods dance and they're represented in
in the dance but in our way of looking at things no back deep down in there is something that you
must respect with a very very you you mustn't you mustn't laugh in church especially if you got in
front of the throne of heaven everybody would be dead silent
wow you see i mean that's really serious here is the father almighty world without end
and you watch out don't you laugh why not because father almighty world without end is a very insecure
fellow and uh anybody laughed he might feel uneasy you know there was something uh something wrong
going on someone challenged his power so he he is a he's a funny fellow you see as we've mythologized
ultimate reality in the form of this cosmic uh grandpapa who is also a king and is
a king and is demanding above all things reverence and respect so it's difficult for us because of
that cultural heritage to accept to accommodate our common sense to the idea that the web
might basically be playful that it might be like somebody saying
won't you come and play with me a child and the other child has some little hesitation
i don't know that i ought to play with you you come from the wrong side of the tracks
or um i don't feel like playing today i feel serious i don't think play is important we ought to
do something real like uh wash the dishes for mother who incidentally has forgotten that the whole point
of washing the dishes is playful you know you don't wash the dishes for a serious reason you you like
the table to look nice you know you don't want to serve up the dishes for dinner with all the
leavings of breakfast still lying on them so why do you want the table to look nice well again it's for
nice you see it's uh it's you like the pattern on it that way people get terribly compulsive about doing
these things and they think that uh going on arranging the patterns of life is something that's a duty
that means a debt that you owe it to yourself or to your family or to someone or other you're in debt
see that's the trouble when a child comes into the world the parents play an awful game on it
instead of being honest they say we've made such great sacrifices for you here we are we've supported
you we've uh paid for your education and you're an ungrateful little bastard and uh the child feels
terribly guilty because what we do is we build into every human being the idea that existence is guilt
the existentialists make a big thing of this and you wash out for them because they're hoaxes and
they say that guilt is ontological if you're not feeling guilty you're not human and that was because
papa and mama said look at all the trouble you've caused us you shouldn't dare to exist you have no
rights but maybe we'll give you some out of the generosity of our heart so that you'll be permanently
indebted to us and so everybody goes around with that sort of thing in their in their background
unless they had different kinds of papas and mamas who didn't play that trick on them but so many
papas and mamas do do that and if they don't do it somebody else does it auntie comes around and says
you don't realize what your father and mother have done for you you think you know you can just stay
around here and goof off but they have sweated blood to give you your clothes and food and so on and you
you ought to be grateful for it but that's not the way to make people grateful they won't be grateful
that way they'll imitate gratefulness they'll go and put on a big show and say oh thank you so much i
feel so indebted to you and so on and so forth and they'll make it look good but isn't real because
actually one's father and mother had a great deal of fun bringing you into being or we hope they did
and they wanted to do that the worst way they have no reason to complain about all these things
and try and make the children feel guilty but you see it is an amazing thing in our culture everybody
is afflicted with ontological guilt for example if a policeman comes to the door
everybody is instantly frightened you wonder what on earth have i done and there are certain clergy who
are absolute experts in making you feel guilty they are really marvelous and they're a clergy of all
kinds for all classes and for all levels of intelligence and they can make you feel real guilty
only you have to watch always what games people are playing
now you see the thing is that really is a puzzle is that they don't admit they're playing games
and when a person is playing games and doesn't admit that they're playing games
then you have some kind of a of a trickster who um
isn't really being fair to you now of course the game that this game is not a game
has a certain kind of a fascinating quality to it how mixed up can we all get let's try
see that that is that certain possibility in that i i would like to go insane and be as insane as
anybody has ever been and be the farest out crazy nut in the world see that's a game but it's not a good game
it's a a game being played by a person who didn't really understand that everyday life was a game too
and i think the most important thing is to admit this
all really humane people admit that they're rascals that's you see on the side of the not respectable the selfish
but so also
all humane people should admit that they're jokers
that they're playing games and playing tricks
that i am doing it on you i am most ready to admit this
i hoaxed you all into coming here
to tell you what
this was a trap you see but i'm going to make it an entertaining trap
so that you won't feel so badly about it
now this is philosophy but i think philosophy is like music you go to a concert and you listen to
somebody play bach or mozart or beethoven and what's all that about you know it isn't about anything
except
you know that's what it's about and so in the same way
as i conceive my work as a philosopher i'm simply pointing out that existence
is the same kind of a thing as a bach invention
it's going this way and that way and hills and waters going all out there and the fish are going
around in it and uh breeding and the ducks are doing this that and the other and that's the same
thing as dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee see so uh if you can uh admit that
that that's what it's all about you have a little problem
because there's not only the threat that it really might be serious and that you shouldn't be laughing
about this but there's also a kind of opposite then are you saying it's merely just fiddling
around see i mean you're saying it's only a game is that all there is to it well now what do you
think you see this again is a question that everybody has to think things through what did
you want didn't you want a game did you want it to be serious in the end what i mean think about
the question what kind of a a thing would you like god to be what would you like to do for eternity
really here is uh jan van eyck who paints the eschatological picture of the last judgment
what a strange man he must have been for here is heaven above and hell below
and in heaven here's god the father god the son god the holy ghost all there together and the virgin
mary and the apostles and they're all sitting in committee and they have an aisle you know just
like in church and there they are facing each other and they're all sitting there very solemnly i don't
know what it's about but below right at the end of the aisle you see where all these apostles are
sitting is st michael a rather gorgeous figure in beautiful armor with wings and underneath him
is a bat-winged skull and beneath those bat wings though all horror is let loose michael is about to
slush that skull see with his sword but below there are nude bodies some of them pretty comely
and they're all squirming in there and they're being eaten by worms and they're eating the worms
and there's a kind of a mush it's like the sort of situation you find when you turn up a big rock and
there's all that going on underneath now there's no question whatever that van eyck the painter had
more fun painting that part of the picture than he did painting the top part so in the same way with
the great with hieronymus bosch and with bruegel they painted every kind of weird surrealistic deviltry
going on and they really loved it but they couldn't admit it now the only time when the holy people had a
ball was when for example the islamic artists made arabesques and the celtic artists made um
fantastically intricate lattices to decorate the margins of their gospels and missiles
they are unbelievably beautiful or take stained glass or something like that but what are they doing
what's it all about so when you ask the question then what will you do in heaven and the thing you
want to do of course is to get mixed up in this this little see like it's like the musician he likes to
take a melody and he likes to put another melody that fits in with it and another one that fits in
with both and then a fourth one and arrange them together and he invents an instrument like an organ
that he plays with two hands then he adds foot pedals so he can play with his two feet he get this hand
doing one rhythm this doing another this doing another and this doing another see that makes it
complicated and so when drummers get together and play somebody starts out with a certain rhythm
and then that rhythm has holes in it in other words it has certain silences and the next drummer fills those
silences in an interesting way he counts and picks out a pattern and what do you imagine dna is the
basic form of biological existence now dna is like a necklace like charlotte's wearing with different
kinds of beads in it and according to the order and the way those beads are arranged so you get genes
and so you get the particular form of life that emerges from those genes so what we're doing basic down
way down is saying she loves me she don't she'll have me she won't she would if she could but she can't
you see or tinker tail a solar sailor rich man poor man beggar man thief well this is the way life is
going on and as a result comes all this you see question is then you see in your heart of hearts
you can take the attitude that all this is terrible or that it's dreadfully serious you see you can play
comedies you can play tragedies farces histories and romances and all that kind of thing and you can
take these various attitudes to it but if you are awakened and as it were you've been let into the
secret which is what we've been talking about you see because the web is also the curtain you know
the veil the veil which hides the face of god from the angels you see there's always this veil
that's why we like a striptease because there's an implication of this you should never give the
show completely away there always should be a little bit of a veil left you see there always is because
even if you find the striptease artist gets completely naked there's really something hidden
what's the motivation what sort of a person is she would i really like to embrace her or would
she have bad breath you know or something and uh you you never really know you never really get to the
bottom that's why everybody all men poets say that women are basically mysterious and they ought to be
so are men basically mysterious from women's point of view although they play that they're not
see this is the way it goes men are supposed to be very open and they say well of a certain
situation this is the way it is after all it's perfectly rational it's a matter of practical
affairs and women say well they say i'm not quite as articulate as you are but i know there's something
you've left out but i can't explain it and by this means everything is kept going
so what i'm saying is i think this i'm trying to share with you
a certain style of life and an attitude to life and an insight where i've taken you on one side and said
listen kids things aren't what they seem don't be fooled there's a big deception going on
and you're involved in it but i just thought you ought to know it
and enjoy it
you
I'm terribly puzzled about the way people go out of their way to disenjoy themselves.
They take so much trouble about it.
Did you ever read H.L. Mencken's essay called A Libido for the Ugly?
And it describes a Pennsylvania mining town,
which isn't exactly totally impoverished.
I mean, they can build things and they have enough money to do this, that and the other.
But they, he describes how they made a church out of yellow stone
that's so awful that it looks like a Presbyterian with a grin.
And all around you have only to look and you see this perfect passion
for making the world look grisly.
And it isn't only job builders and garage owners who do this kind of thing,
it's also people who profess to be painters.
They're actually using excrements for painting in Paris today
on the theory that the world is shot to pieces,
and that since the artist is a representative of his times,
he ought to show the times as they really are, as a social critic.
And so he makes the most weird...
I mean, he paints Campbell's soup can,
and then he makes music that shrieks and screams in the most...
He just goes out of his way to make it sound as ugly as he possibly can manage.
And the ingenuity about that is endless.
Because that is the times, this is the critic, you see?
Instead of being somebody who reveals.
Now you see, let's take you the sort of the character of the Pied Piper.
The person who brings you an invitation to dance.
I would say then, you see, there is going to be a dance this evening,
and I would like you all to come, you know.
That's the spirit in which I invite you to a seminar.
I am not inviting you in the spirit of saying,
no, we're going to have to discuss some very grave matters,
and you ought to be awake to all these things,
and arouse your social conscience, and so on and so forth.
Because when you get through with all that, then what?
When you get through with feeding the hungry and clothing the naked,
and we are making great strides with automation and technology
in abolishing poverty totally, then what are we going to do?
Well, you see, if you've got all these people clothed and fed and so on,
and then they say, well, now what next?
If you've got a kind of Quakerish state of mind, you don't know what to do.
Well, feed and clothe somebody else, you see? Get busy.
But then, where is that leading?
So, you see, to spread joy, you have to have it.
To impart delight, you have to be more or less delightful.
And to be delightful is not some factor of trying to make yourself look delightful.
It is to do things that are delightful to you.
You become thereby delightful to others.
That's to say, people who are interesting are people who are interested.
Any person, for example, who is constantly thinking about all sorts of other things
and other people and so on, because they're fascinating, becomes a fascinating person.
But a person who doesn't think about anybody else,
and who's got very little going on inside their skull, is boring.
So, in other words, your engagement with the external world,
the more you are involved, the more your personality is enriched.
But if you try to enrich your personality by taking a course in how to win friends and influence people,
or how to be a real person, you'll become just a washout.
Because you will be in a kind of small circle.
You'll be, as it were, you'll be like somebody trying to get a good nutrition by biting his nails.
And then the fingers next.
You know, and then half an arm gone and so on.
And you're entirely nourishing yourself with yourself.
Now, of course, on a vast scale the universe does that.
It eats itself up.
That's why the symbol of the snake swallowing its tail is a very fundamental, archaic symbol of life.
But the way it's done is that the snake has in some part of the ring a place where it's not sensitive.
It's called the unconscious.
Where it doesn't know that what comes to it in the form of food is actually what left it in the form of excrement.
That thing is, don't mention it.
After all, as the Lord said at the beginning of the universe, you must draw the line somewhere.
And so, as a result of there always being a kind of gap.
That's the gap, you know, like where the electric spark jumps.
That's the thing behind your head, behind your eyes that you could never get to look at.
It's the gap.
And because of that little gap, the circle doesn't just revolve in a dull way.
It just go round and round and round like a boring thing.
It has rhythm.
See, if I say,
no rhythm.
See?
It's just one long sound.
After a while we say, oh, cut it off.
Or we just become insensitive to it.
But what we want to hear is a break in it, you see?
And we want to hear it go on and off and vanish and come back again and so on.
And it sets up a rhythm and that becomes interesting.
That's putting gaps between, you see?
We need those gaps.
So now you see it.
Now you don't.
Now you see it.
Now you don't.
Oh, that's pretty dull.
So what we're going to do is this.
We're going to have you see it three times.
And then with a regular not see it between them.
Then there's going to be a longer not see it after that one.
And then I'm going to do something very complicated after that so that you don't really know when it's going to come next.
So there's going to be a surprise.
You know how we all do that?
And interesting people are those who do this in very involved ways.
Dull people, sort of people who put their hats on absolutely straight, are the kind of people, for example, who have the same meal every day.
Exactly the same thing.
Always.
See?
Have no inventiveness.
They have the same routine.
They go to the same office.
They answer the same kind of letters and that's that.
See?
But then if they want to start up a more interesting kind of business and make more money,
then they have to figure out, take the people who make clothes.
They figure out fashion.
There's going to be a new thing for ladies, a new style this fall.
We're going to make them do long skirts instead of the short skirts.
Middle skirts.
And the skirts go like this.
Then finally they thought about having topless women.
They're going to play around with that and have an absolutely scandalous ball.
But that's the whole thing, you see?
It's this thing of rhythm.
And, yes, you ask, well, I see that.
What is doing this rhythm?
Who, after all, am I?
And as you explore deeper and deeper and deeper into the nature of yourself, you find
that you're a rhythm doing a rhythm.
And behind that there's another rhythm doing a rhythm.
Your vibrations.
And once again you meet our friend the onion.
And who, who is doing all this?
Why?
He disappeared.
He came around, there it was, and we were looking for him and he vanished.
And then just when we weren't looking for him again, there he is.
But every time we try to see, he isn't there.
Now do you see that?
That that situation is what's called life.
This concludes session four of Out of Your Mind.
Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives.
Our program continues with session five.
This seminar is about a very sticky problem.
The problem to which the Buddha primarily addressed himself, which is that of agony, suffering.
But before we get into that, we have to be clear about certain basics.
And these basics have to do not so much with concepts and ideas as they do with a state of mind.
You could call it also a state of feeling, a state of sensation, a state of consciousness.
And we need to understand that, even be in that, before we can really go very far.
And this is an extraordinarily difficult state of mind to talk about, even though in its nature it's extremely simple.
Because it is in a way like we were when we were babies, when we hadn't been told anything and didn't know anything other than what we felt, and we had no names for it.
Now, of course, as we grow older, we learn to differentiate one thing from another, one event from another, and above all, ourselves from everything else.
Well and good, provided you don't lose the foundations.
Just as mountains are differentiated, but they're all based on the earth.
So, the multiple things of this world are differentiated.
But, they have, as it were, a basis.
There is no word for that basis, not really.
Because words are only for distinction.
And so there can't really be a word, not even an idea, of the non-distinction.
We can feel it, but we can't think it.
But we don't feel it like an object.
You feel you're alive.
You feel you're conscious, but you don't know what consciousness is, because consciousness is present in every conceivable kind of experience.
It's like the space in which we live, which is everywhere.
It's like a fish being in water, and presumably a fish doesn't know it's in the water, because it never goes out.
A bird, presumably, knows nothing of the air.
And we really know nothing of consciousness.
And we pretend space isn't there.
So, however, when you grow up and become fascinated, which is really the right word, spellbound, enchanted, by all the things that adults wave at you, you forget the background.
And you come to think that all the distinctions which you've been learning are the supremely important things to be concerned with.
You become hypnotized, just in the same way as when the beak of a chicken is put to a chalk line.
It gets stuck on that line.
And so, when we are told to pay attention to what matters, we get stuck with it, and that's what, in Buddhism, is called attachment.
Attachment doesn't mean that you enjoy your dinner or that you enjoy sleeping or beauty.
Those are responses of our organism in its environment as natural as feeling hot near a fire or cold near ice.
So are certain responses of fear or of sorrow.
They are not attachment.
Attachment is exactly translated by the modern slang term hang-up.
It's a kind of stickiness, or what in psychology would be called blocking, when you are in a state of wobbly hesitation, not knowing how to flow on.
That's attachment, what is meant by the Sanskrit word klesha.
So, when the chicken has its beak put to the chalk line, it's got a hang-up.
It's stuck on that line.
And so, in the same way, we get a hang-up on all the various things that we are told as we grow up,
by our parents, our aunts and uncles, our teachers, and above all, by our peer group.
And the first thing that everybody wants to tell us is the difference between ourselves and the rest of the world.
And between those actions which are voluntary and those which are involuntary, what we do on the one hand,
and what happens to us on the other.
And this is, of course, immensely confusing to a small child, because it's told to do all sorts of things that are really supposed to happen,
like going to sleep, like having bowel movements, like loving people, like not blushing, stopping being anxious, and all sorts of things like that.
So, what happens is this. The child is told in some that we, your parents, elders and betters, command you to do what will please us only if you do it spontaneously.
And no wonder everybody's completely confused.
We go through life with that burden on us.
So, we therefore develop this curious thing. We develop a thing which is called an ego.
Now, I've got to be very clear to you what I mean by an ego.
An ego is not the same thing as a particular living organism.
For my philosophy, the particular living organism, which is inseparable from a particular environment,
that is to say, from the universe as centered here and now, there's something real.
It isn't a thing. I call it a feature of the universe.
But, what we call our ego is something abstract, which is to say, it has the same order and kind of reality
as an hour or an inch or a pound or a line of longitude.
It is for purposes of discussion. It is for convenience.
In other words, it is a social convention that we have what is called an ego.
But, the fallacy that all of us make is that we treat it as if it were a physical organ.
As if it were real in that sense.
When, in fact, it is composed, on the one hand, of our image of ourselves.
That is, our idea of ourselves.
As when we say to somebody, you must improve your image.
Now, this image of ourselves is obviously not ourselves.
Any more than an idea of a tree is a tree.
Any more than you can get wet in the word water.
And, to go on with, our image of ourselves is extremely inaccurate and incomplete.
Would that some god, the gifted, give us to see ourselves as others see us.
We don't.
So, my image of me is not at all your image of me.
And, my image of me is extremely incomplete in that it does not include any information to speak of
about the functioning of my nervous system, my circulation, my metabolism,
my subtle relationships with the entire surrounding human and non-human universe.
So, the image I have of myself is a caricature.
It is arrived at through, mainly, my interaction with other people
who tell me who I am in various ways, either directly or indirectly.
And, I play about with what their picture is of me.
And, they play something back to me so that we set up this conception.
And, this started very, very early in life.
And, I was told, you see, and you were told, that we must have a consistent image.
You must be you.
You have to find your identity in terms of image.
And, this is an awful red herring.
A lot of the current quest for identity among younger people is a search for an acceptable image.
What role can I play?
Who am I in the sense of what am I going to do in life?
And, so on.
Now, while that has a certain importance, if it's not backed up by deeper matters, it's extraordinarily misleading.
So, therefore, on the one hand there is this image, which is intellectual, emotional, imaginative, and so forth.
Now, we would say, I don't feel that I am only an image.
I feel there is something more real than that.
Because, I feel, I mean, I have a sense of there being a particular sort of, how do we say, a centre of something.
Some sort of sensitive core inside the skin.
And, that corresponds to the word I.
Let's take a look at this.
Because, the thing that we feel as being myself is certainly not the whole body.
Because, a lot of the body can be seen as an object.
In other words, if you stand, stretch yourself out, lie on the floor, and turn your head and look at yourself.
You know, you can see your feet, and your legs, and all this up to here.
And, finally, it all vanishes, only there's a sort of a vague nose in front.
And, you assume you have a head, because everybody else does.
And, you've looked in a mirror, and that told you you had a head, but you can never see it.
Just like you can't see your back.
So, you tend to put your ego on the side of the unseen part of the body.
The part you can't get at.
Because, that seems to be where it all comes from, and you feel it.
But, what is it that we feel?
Because, if I see clearly, and my eyes are in functioning order,
the eyes certainly are not conscious of themselves.
There are no spots in front of them.
No defects, in other words, in the lens, or in the retina, or in the optic nerves,
that give hallucinations.
So, also, therefore, if my ego, my consciousness, is working properly,
I ought not to be aware of it.
As something, sort of, there.
Being a nuisance, in a way, in the middle of things,
because your ego is awfully hard to take care of.
Well, what is it, then, that we feel?
Well, I think I've discovered what it is.
It's a chronic, habitual sense of muscular strain.
Which we were taught, in the whole process, of doing spontaneous things to order.
When you're taking off in a jet plane,
and the thing has gone rather further down the runway
than you think it should have without getting up in the air,
you start pulling at your seat belt.
Get this thing off the ground.
Perfectly useless.
So, in the same way, when our community tells us,
look carefully, now listen, pay attention,
we start using muscular strains around our eyes, ears, jaws, hands,
to try to use our muscles to make our nerves work.
Which is, of course, futile.
And, in fact, it gets in the way of the functioning of the nerves.
Try to concentrate.
And then, when we try to control our emotions,
we hold our breath, pull our stomachs in,
or tighten our rectal muscles to hold ourselves together.
Now, pull yourself together!
Immediately, what are you to do?
What does a child understand by that?
He does it muscularly.
Pulls himself together.
This is useless.
So, everybody, chronically, pulls themselves together.
So that, it's so funny,
if you get a person to just lie on the floor and relax,
there's the floor under you as firm as can be holding you up.
Nevertheless, you will detect that the person is making all sorts of tensions,
lest he should suddenly turn into a nasty jello on the floor.
So, that chronic tension, which in Sanskrit is called Sankocha,
which means contraction,
is the root of what we call the feeling of the ego.
So that, in other words, this feeling of tightness is the physical referent
for the psychological image of ourselves.
So that we get the ego as the marriage of an illusion to a futility.
Even though the idea of an I with a name, with a being, is naturally useful for social communication,
provided we know what we're doing and take it for what it is.
But we are so hung up on this concept that it confuses us even in the proposition that it might be possible for us to feel otherwise.
Because we ask the question, if we hear about people who have transcended the ego,
well, we ask, how do you do that?
Well, I say, what do you mean?
You, how do you do that?
Because the you you're talking about doesn't exist,
so you can't do anything about it,
any more than you can cut a cheese with a line of longitude.
Now, that sounds very discouraging, doesn't it?
But let's suppose now, you are babies again.
And you don't know anything.
Now, don't be frightened, because anything you know, you can get back later.
But for the time being, here is our awareness.
And let's suppose you have no information about this at all and no words for it.
And that my talking to you is just a noise.
Now, don't try to do anything about this.
Don't make any effort.
Because naturally, by force of habit, certain tensions remain inside you
and certain ideas and words drift all the time through your mind.
Just like the wind blows or clouds move across the sky.
Don't bother with them at all.
Don't try to get rid of them.
Just be aware of what's going on in your head like it was clouds in the sky.
Or the crackling of the fire.
There's no problem to this.
All you have to do, really, is look and listen without naming.
And if you are naming, never mind.
Just listen to that.
Now, that you can't force anything here, that you can't willfully stop thinking and stop naming,
is only telling you that the separate you doesn't exist.
It isn't a mark of defeat.
It isn't a sign of your lack of practice in meditation.
That it runs on all by itself simply means that the individual separate you is a figment of your imagination.
So you are aware at this point of a happening.
Remember, you don't know anything about the difference between you and it.
You haven't been told that.
You've no words for the difference between inside and outside, between here and there.
And nobody has taught you that what you see out in front of you is either near or far from your eyes.
Watch a baby put out a finger to touch the moon.
You don't know about that.
Just, therefore, here it is.
We'll just call it this.
And if you will feel it.
The going on, which includes absolutely everything you feel.
Well, whatever that is, it's what the Chinese call Tao, what Buddhists call suchness, or ta-ta-ta.
And it's a happening.
It doesn't happen to you, because where is that?
You, what you call you, is part of the happening, or an aspect of it.
It has no parts. It's not like a machine.
And it's a little scary, because we'd say, well, who's in control around here?
Why should there be anyone?
That's a very weird notion we have, that processes require something outside them to control them.
It never occurred to us that processes could be self-controlling,
even though we say to someone, control yourself.
We can always, in order to think about self-control, we've split a person in two.
So that there's a you separate from the self that's supposed to be controlled.
Well, how can that achieve anything?
How can a noun start a verb?
Yet it's a fundamental superstition that that can be done.
So you have this process, which is quite spontaneous, going on.
We call it life.
It's controlling itself.
It's aware of itself.
It's aware of itself through you.
You are an aperture through which the universe looks at itself.
And because of it, so the universe looking at itself through you,
there's always an aspect of itself that it can't see.
So it's just like that snake, you see, that is pursuing its tail.
Because the snake can't see its head, like you can't.
We always find, as we investigate the universe,
make the microscope bigger and bigger,
and we will find ever more minute things.
Make the telescope bigger and bigger and bigger,
and the universe expands because it's running away from itself.
It won't do that if you don't chase it.
So it's a game of hide-and-seek.
Really, when you ask the question,
who is doing the chasing,
you are still working onto the assumption
that every verb has to have a subject,
that when there is an action, there has to be a doer.
Well, that's what I will call a grammatical convention,
leading to what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,
like the famous it in It Is Rainy.
So when you say,
there cannot be knowing without a knower,
this is merely saying,
no more than there can't be a verb without a subject.
And that's a grammatical rule and not a law of nature.
Anything you can think of as a thing,
as a noun,
can be described by a verb.
And there are languages which do that.
It sounds awkward in English.
But, face it,
when you look for doers as distinct from deeds,
you can't find them.
Just as when you look for stuff
underlying the patterns of nature,
you can't find any stuff.
You just find more and more patterns.
There never was any stuff.
It's a ghost.
What we call stuff is simply patterns seen out of focus.
And it's fuzzy.
So we call it stuff.
It's not that K-pop.
So, you know,
we have these words,
energy,
matter,
being,
reality,
even Tao.
And we can never find them.
They always elude us entirely.
Although we do have the very strong intuition
that all this that we see is connected or related.
So we speak of a universe.
Although that word really means one term.
It's your turn now.
Or like you make one turn to look at yourself.
But you can't make two turns
and see what's looking.
So,
it's very simple, therefore.
You only have to understand
that you can't do anything about it.
And as they say in Zen,
you cannot take hold of it,
but you can't get rid of it.
And in not being able to get it,
you get it.
So all these trials
that gurus put their students through
have as their ultimate object
convincing you
that you can't do anything.
Only it's convincing you very thoroughly.
It's convincing you
in more than a theoretical way.
Now, perhaps,
I shouldn't tell you that.
But you see,
I'm not a guru
in that I don't
give individual spiritual direction to people.
And I give away the guru's tricks.
That may not be very good,
but on the other hand,
those tricks are only necessary
in the sense that
I would say to someone,
it's necessary for you to go to a psychiatrist
if you think you must.
And if you are not going to be satisfied
without going to Japan
and studying Zen Buddhism
from a Roshi,
okay, you better go.
It isn't necessary
unless you say it is.
If that's the only thing
that will satisfy you
and you feel that
deep down inside you.
If you've got that yen,
therefore you've got that yen.
But if on the other hand
you haven't,
you haven't.
And I'm not going to put you down
on that account,
you see.
The point is,
what do you want to do?
What is it in you to do?
But there it is.
That you can struggle
and struggle and struggle.
And indeed will do so
as long as you have
the feeling inside you
that you're missing something.
People, your friends,
all sorts of people
will do their utmost
to persuade you
that you're missing something.
Because they're missing something
and they think they're getting it
through a certain way.
And therefore,
to assure themselves
they'd like you to do it too.
So does this thing.
And you see,
a clever guru
beguiles his students
by letting them
have the feeling of success
and accomplishment
in certain directions.
A guru gives people
exercises,
A, that are difficult
but can be accomplished
and B,
that are impossible.
You'll always be hung up
on the impossible ones
but the possible ones
you will get a feeling
of making progress
so that you will double
your efforts
to solve the impossible exercises.
And then
they range things
in many, many ranks
and levels
through which you can advance.
This state of consciousness,
that state of consciousness,
or think of the degrees
of masonry
or so on.
Ranks in learning things,
the different belts
you get in judo
and all that kind of jazz.
You can do that.
And it gives people
the sense of competing
with themselves
or even with others.
Because of the feeling inside
that there is just
something I'm missing.
And of course,
if you are learning
any sort of skill
and you haven't
perfected the skill,
there is indeed
something you're missing.
But in this thing
that we're talking about,
that isn't true
because you,
as the Buddhists say,
are Buddhas
from the very beginning.
And all that searching
is like looking
for your own head,
which you can't see
and therefore might
conceivably
imagine that you're lost.
So,
that indeed is the point,
that we don't see
what looks
and therefore
we think we've lost it.
And so we're in search
of the self,
the Atman.
Well, that's the one thing
we can't find.
Because we have it.
We are it.
But we confuse it
with all these images.
So therefore,
if you understand
perfectly clearly
that you can't do anything
to find that
very, very important thing,
God,
enlightenment,
nirvana,
whatever,
then what?
Well,
I find, you know,
it's so stupid
because even if I tell myself,
well, there's nothing
I can do about it.
Why did I say that?
You see?
Why did I say that?
Why did I go out of my way
to tell myself
there's nothing
I can do about it?
Because in the back
of my mind
there was a funny
little feeling
that if I did tell myself
that,
something different
would happen.
See?
All right.
So even that doesn't work.
Nothing works.
Now when absolutely
nothing works,
where are you?
Well, here we are.
I mean,
there's this feeling
of something going on.
The world doesn't stop dead
when there's nothing
you can do.
There's something happening.
Now just there,
that's what I'm talking about.
There's the happening.
When you are not
doing anything about it,
you're not not doing
anything about it,
you just can't help it,
it goes on
despite anything you think
or worry about
or whatever.
Now,
there is the point.
Right there.
And remember,
although you will think
at first
that this is a kind
of determinism,
there are two reasons
why it isn't.
One,
there is nobody
being determined.
Now other people
think of determinism
as the direction
of what happens
by the past,
the causation
of what happens
by the past.
Now if you will use
your senses,
you will see
that that is a hallucination.
The present does not
come from the past.
If you listen
and only listen,
close your eyes,
where do the sounds
come from
according to your ears?
You hear them
coming out of silence.
The sounds come
and then they fade off.
They go
like echoes
or echoes
in the labyrinths
of your brain
which we call memories.
The sounds
don't come
from the past.
They come out
of now
and trail off.
You can do that
later with your eyes.
You can see
like when you're
watching television.
There's a vibration
coming out
from the screen
to your eyes
and it starts
from there somehow.
Because we see
the hands
and then they move
we think that
the movement
is caused
by the hands
and that the hands
were there before
and so can move
later.
We don't see
that our memory
of the hands
is an echo
of their always
being now.
They never were.
They never will be.
They're always now.
So is the motion.
And that
that is
recollected
is the trailing
off echo
like the wake
of a ship.
And so
just as the wake
doesn't move
the ship
the past
does not move
the present
unless you insist
that it does.
And if you say
well
naturally
I'm
always moved
by the past
that's an alibi
and it
completely
fails to explain
how you ever
learn anything new.
That's why
all the psychologists
who are mostly
behaviorists
are completely
bogged down
in trying to find
the theory of learning.
Because
according to the
theory of learning
that we have
everything new
that you assimilate
is really
only learned
when
translated
into terms
of what you
already know.
So
in that sense
learning becomes
like a library
which increases
only by the
addition of books
about books
already in it.
A lot of libraries
are indeed
like that.
So
that's what we
call scholasticism.
So then
you
become aware
that this
happening
isn't happening
to you
because you
are the happening.
The only you
there is
is what's going
on.
feel it
and disregard
these stupid
distinctions
that you've been
taught.
I mean
stupid
relatively speaking
and feel it
genuinely.
When you feel
genuinely
you get down
to rock bottom
all that
isn't there.
That's a game
that's been erected
on it
and it isn't
determined.
In other words
you get this
odd feeling
of a synthesis
between doing
and happening
in which
doing
is as much
happening
as happening
and happening
is as much
doing
as doing
and if you're
not very careful
at that point
you'll proclaim
yourself
God Almighty
in the Hebrew
Christian sense.
Like
Freud alleges
babies feel
that they're
omnipotent
and in a way
they are.
I am omnipotent
in so far
as I'm the universe
but I'm not
omnipotent
in the role
of Alan Watts
only cunning.
So now
then
this sensation
of the happening
is basic
to all we
want to explore.
With that
in mind
we can go on
now
to the question
of pain
and our
so-called
reactions to it.
And once again
you will see
that the problem
as posed
immediately
sets up
the duality
of the pain
and the one
who suffers it.
The one
who offers
resistance.
And therefore
reasoning from
that you can
quite easily
see
that a great
deal of the
energy of
pain
is derived
from the
resistance
offered to
it.
And that
resistance
takes very
many forms
not only
of attempts
to get
away from
a pain
which is
present.
Let's
suppose
you try
to run
away
from a
migraine
headache
as you
carry it
with you
you can't
get away
from it
and it
seems to
be
absolutely
in the
middle
of
everything
that you
are
so that
however
much
you
thresh
and resist
the pain
goes with
the threshing.
Other forms
of pain
are problematic
to a large
extent
because of
our
prior
anxiety
about them
and because
of the
valuations
that we
put on
them.
And we
may as
well start
from that
point.
And what
we very
largely
dislike
about
people in
pain
is the
noise
they make.
When I
challenged
R.H.
Blythe
and said
you're
a
vegetarian
but don't
you realize
that plants
have feelings.
He said
yes I do
but they
don't scream
so loudly.
And so
you say
in a
hospital
or any
place
like that
it is
taboo
to scream
because you
must understand
that hospitals
and any
institution
of that
kind
is run
for the
convenience
of the
staff.
All
institutions
are.
And so
everything
is done
in such
a way
as to
interiorize
localize
pain
because in
a way
that makes
it worse.
So we
have a
big big
social
problem
fundamental
right from
the beginning
about
our
reaction
to
anything
painful
and these
are very
odd
things.
Let's
take for
example
when a
child
has eaten
something
that doesn't
agree with
it and
it vomits
now you
well know
that when
you've
got a
bad
stomach
that
vomiting
is a
very
pleasant
release
from
that
but
because
when
mama
sees
the
vomit
or
somebody
else
does
they
say
ugh
you
are
taught
that
doing
it
is
socially
unacceptable
and
therefore
people
suppress
vomiting
and learn
from their
parents
that it's
nasty
just as they
learn that
excrement is
nasty
and just as
they learn to
worry about
disease and
death
now
there really
isn't anything
radically wrong
with being
sick
or with
dying
who said
you're supposed
to survive
who gave you
the idea
that it's a
gas to go
on and on
and on
and we
can't say
that it's a
good thing
for everything
to go on
living
from the
very simple
demonstration
that if we
enable everybody
to go on
living
we overcrowd
ourselves
that we're
like an
unpruned
tree
and
so therefore
one person
who dies
in a way
is honourable
because he's
making room
for others
and the
panic that
all life
everywhere
must be
saved
although
each one
of us
individually
will naturally
appreciate it
when anybody
saves our
life
if we
apply that
case
you see
all around
we can see
that it's
not workable
we can also
look further
into it
and see
that if
our death
could be
indefinitely
postponed
we would not
actually go on
postponing it
indefinitely
because after a
certain point
we would realise
that that isn't
the way in which
we wanted to
survive
why else
would we have
children
because children
arrange for us
to survive
in another way
by as it
were
passing on
a torch
so that
you don't
have to
carry it
all the
time
there comes
a point
where you
can give
it up
and say
now you
work
it's a far
more amusing
arrangement
for nature
to continue
the process
of life
through different
individuals
than it is
always with
the same
individual
because
as each
new
individual
approaches
the most
ordinary
everyday
things
are
to a
child
because
they
see
them
all
as
marvelous
because
they
see
them
all
in a way
that is
not
related
to
survival
and profit
value
and when
we get
to thinking
of everything
in terms
of survival
and profit
value
as we
do
then
the shapes
of scratches
on the floor
cease to have
magic
and most
things
in fact
cease to have
magic
so therefore
in the course
of nature
once we have
ceased to see
magic in the
world anymore
we are no
longer
fulfilling
nature's game
of being
aware of
itself
there's no
point in it
anymore
and so
we die
and so
something else
comes to
birth
which gets
an entirely
new view
and so
nature's
self-awareness
is a game
worth the candle
it is not
therefore
natural
for us
to wish
to prolong
life indefinitely
but we live
in a culture
where it has
been rubbed
into us
in every
conceivable
way
that to die
is a terrible
thing
and that is
a tremendous
disease
from which
our culture
in particular
suffers
and we notice
it firstly
in the way
in which
death
is swept
under the
carpet
this is
one of
the major
problems
in hospital
work
when a
family
conspires
with the
doctor
to keep
from grandmother
the knowledge
that she
is dying
grandmother
suspects
that she
is dying
but probably
doesn't really
want to know
for sure
and her
family talk
with her
in such a
way as
to say
well
it'll be
you'll
probably be
getting all
right in a
few weeks
and won't
it be nice
to be able
to do
this
that
and the
other
because they
have this
funny feeling
that it's
important to
build up
courage
and hope
and so they
become liars
and a mutual
mistrust develops
because once you
are playing the
game on that
level you tend
to play the
mistrust on
other levels
and so the
person is
left to
die alone
suddenly
unprepared
and doped
up to the
point where
death
hardly
happens
and there
is no
derivation
from it
of the
peculiar
spiritual
experience
that can
come with
death
back in
I was
in
Zurich
and there
met a
most
extraordinary
man
by the
name of
Karlfried
von
Dierkheim
he was
a
former
German
diplomat
who had
studied
Zen
in Japan
and when
he came
back
after the
war
he opened
a
meditation
school
and
retreat
in the
black
forest
and he
said
well
I tell
you what
a lot
of my
work
has to
do
with
people
who
went
through
spiritual
crises
during
the
war
and
he
said
you
know
we
all
know
that
when
a
person
is
in
an
absolutely
extreme
situation
and
they
accept
it
there
is
a
possibility
of a
natural
satori
and
that's
what
I
mean
when
I
was
explaining
that
when
one
gets
to
an
extreme
that
is
to
say
to
the
point
where
you
realize
that
there
is
nothing
you
can
do
about
life
nothing
you
could
not
do
about
life
then
you're
the
mosquito
biting
the
iron
bull
well
so
in the
same
way
he
said
look
you
heard
a
bomb
coming
at
you
could
hear
it
whistle
and you
knew
it
was
right
above
you
and
headed
straight
at
you
and
that
you
were
finished
and
you
accepted
it
and
suddenly
there
was a
strange
feeling
that
everything
is
absolutely
clear
you
suddenly
see
that
there
isn't
a
grain
of
dust
in
the
whole
universe
that's
in
the
wrong
place
that
you
understand
completely
absolutely
totally
what
it's
all
concentration
camp
you
been
there
so
long
that
you
gave
up
all
hope
whatsoever
ever
getting
out
you
were
just
going
through
this
miserable
boring
degrading
grind
week
after
week
after
week
no
Nobody paid the slightest attention to you as an individual.
You knew you would never get out, and you accepted it.
And suddenly, something changed, extraordinary feeling of freedom.
Or he said, you were a displaced refugee.
You had lost your family.
You didn't know whether they even existed.
You were miles from your home.
You didn't know whether it existed.
You had lost your job.
Your very identity.
You were absolutely nowhere, and you accepted it.
And suddenly, you were as light as a feather and free as the air.
Now he said, so many people have had those experiences, and they talk about them to their
families and friends, and they say, oh, well, you were under terrific pressure, and you probably
had some hallucination, you know?
Now he said, I am showing those people that so far from having a hallucination, those were
the few, few occasions in which they woke up.
So, you see, this is always the opportunity presented by death, that if one can go into death with
eyes open and have somebody help you, if necessary, to give up before you die, this extraordinary
thing can happen to you, so that from your standpoint in that position at that time, you would say,
I wouldn't have missed that opportunity for the world.
Now I understand why we die.
The reason we die is to give us the opportunity to understand what life's all about, by letting
go.
Because then we come to a situation that the ego can't deal with.
When we are no longer hypnotized by that, then our natural consciousness can see clearly
what all this universe is for.
So therefore, we have missed this golden opportunity by institutionalizing death out of the way, instead
of having a socially understood acceptance of death and rejoicing in death.
Now I could imagine that one person would want to rejoice in death in an entirely different
way from another, like, say, a wedding is a rite of passage.
There are certainly some forms of celebrating a wedding which I would find a total bore and
quite offensive.
The ways would be very good, I would enjoy it.
So everybody, in other words, I'm not saying that you've got to get mixed up with a lot
of people coming, laughing around you and giving you presents and cards and everything because
you're going to die.
But I'm only indicating a general thing, that the doctor, the ministers, the psychiatrists,
and above all us, really owe it to our friends to work out an entirely new approach to death.
Because what has happened, you see, from earliest childhood, the child learned that great uncle
was dying and saw the family put on long faces and say, oh, that's too bad.
Even Christians who think they're going to go to heaven, you know, they get absolutely
morbid, more so than anybody else about death, because heaven, as they all know, is a very
boring place.
And so this frightful thing, oh, he's dead.
One understands that for the living to lose someone you love, or even for a dying person
to worry about what on earth my wife, my children, my whatever going to do without me.
One can understand a certain worry in that.
But nobody is indispensable.
And there comes a point when you have to say, I'm sorry, but I am completely going to abandon
responsibility for anything.
Because there is no further way I can do it.
This is another way of that surrender.
And then the curious thing that occurs is the moment all that has dropped, suddenly it dawns
on you that to be important existence does not have to go on any longer than a moment.
So, it follows from that, you see, that if any one of us, without being shocked into it by
being bombed or put in a concentration camp, could at this moment be as one about to die
genuinely and honestly, we would understand the mystery of life.
Because death is the, in a certain sense, the source of life.
Just as we see in nature, when the leaves fall from the trees, they mould and rot.
And this supplies humus from which more plants can grow.
It's a cycle like that.
But in every way, symbolic and otherwise, human beings try to stop that cycle.
Unamuno said, human beings are the only species that hoard their dead.
And therefore, with the ghastly art of the mortician, we try to make the body unpalatable to the worms.
And so to stop life, as if to be eaten in due course were an indignity to the human being.
Whereas we eat everything else and we give nothing back.
So that is a kind of a social symptom of our profound disorientation with respect to death.
We think death is unnatural and furthermore, in our culture, we think birth is a disease
and send a mum onto the hospital for the most unnatural, weird kind of parturition.
In other words, more and more, one regards the healthy and inevitable and natural transformations
of the body as pathological.
I can imagine, you know, people having sexual intercourse on an operating table to be sure
that the whole thing is hygienic.
You know, everything about us like that is become over-interfered with by specialists.
And less and less the province of our own preferences.
It's very, very hard, indeed, to die in your own way without some blasted bunch of relatives
come fussing around and insisting that you go to a hospital, that you get fixed with the
tortures of being fed through tubes and things to keep you alive indefinitely and waste the
family savings.
It's even a crime to commit suicide.
Now, this is simply nonsense.
It's this perfect panic to survive at all costs.
Now, let this get practical.
You say, okay, I understand what you are saying theoretically, but I know that I would be terrified
if somebody was going to tell me that I'm going to die and that I would look frantically
around for some doctor, some sort of something, that this panic to live is in us in an uncontrollable
way.
And this is part of the reason why we say we have an instinct to survive.
The instinct is this panic.
So let's take another step now in the same way as I showed you steps about realizing that
you don't have an ego.
You say to yourself in the ordinary way, when you feel that panic, you feel a bit ashamed
of it, even though you've been taught that you should do everything possible to survive.
See what a bind you're in here.
So one feels, oh goodness, I must face this thing calmly and bravely and not be in this
panic.
But the point of the fact is you are in a panic and you can't stop it.
Now that's very important because this is another way of showing you the same thing that
death is showing you, that you can't do anything about it.
This is when you finally realize you can't do anything about the death.
You could have solved all that before by understanding you couldn't do anything about the panic.
But if you think all the time I'm supposed to stop this panic, then all that happens is you're
at cross purposes with yourself again.
The panic is, of course, put off in the ordinary way.
We all know we're going to die, but it's sufficiently far off so that we can put it out of our minds.
And anybody who does put it into our minds in the ordinary way is taken to be a skeleton
at the banquet, a Cassandra, and gloomy, so that the old-fashioned preacher of bygone days who
preached about death, and those monks who kept skulls on their desks and all that sort of thing
is regarded today as very morbid, why in the Baroque times there was a fashion for a while of making tombstones
with marvellous sculptures of skeletons and bones all over them.
And on the Via Veneto in Rome there is a Capuchin church, where down in the crypt there are chapels,
where the altar furnishings and everything are made entirely from the bones of departed monks.
Then we have among Tibetans and in Buddhists graveyard meditations, and they have trumpets in Tibetan Buddhism
made of human thigh bones, and they have cups, ritual cups made of the domes of human skulls,
richly worked in silver and turquoise.
And we say, all that is very morbid.
So, from this point of view, you can see, first of all, theoretically, how death can solve its own problem.
Now, if you say, I can only see it theoretically, and I can't go the whole way with you,
then I will ask you, what is blocking you?
Will you say, it gives me the heebie-jeebies and the horrors?
I say, all right, so death is not the problem, the heebie-jeebies is the problem.
So, let's deal with the heebie-jeebies in the same way as with death.
You cannot stop the heebie-jeebies, you think you should.
I say, don't. The heebie-jeebies are very valuable.
Not that they will stop you from dying, but because from them you will learn the same thing
as you would learn from dying.
But the social pressure on you to resist the heebie-jeebies is terrific.
Now, why must you do that?
Why is everybody saying,
these heebie-jeebies, these fears, etc., are not permissible?
You wonder about that, and the reasoning behind all that is not very clear, because it seems to be
saying, well, if you have all these fears and things like that, you won't be a very good soldier.
You won't be able to act competently in a crisis.
You'll get the heebie-jeebies instead, and you won't know what to do.
Well, nobody has ever really proved that.
Because, actually, people who we would call very courageous are, in fact, often quite frightened.
And courageous action is not necessarily a consequence of having no fear.
Sometimes it might be, but it isn't always so.
The real reason why the heebie-jeebies are suppressed has more to do with its orgiastic aspects.
Wherever the human organism gets into a certain kind of extreme,
it starts an oscillating process going, just as it does in sexual orgasm.
And that oscillating process will inspire in others
an emotion which they cannot identify either as disgust or as lust.
They don't know quite what it is.
All those extreme situations, terror, and, as we shall see more, response to pain,
have an orgiastic quality.
And they are, therefore, embarrassing,
because they conflict with our image of ourselves, as in control, composed, deported.
That's in the sense of deportment.
But, it would be shameful, in a way, you might not want to look at your own face
in a state of complete sexual rapture.
As a matter of fact, if you saw a photograph of your face,
you wouldn't be able to tell whether you were in pleasure or in pain.
It might be either.
Because then, you see, what has happened is that a tide, a vibration, a pulsation,
has taken over the whole being.
So that you are, as it were, in the possession of a god.
And that's something taboo.
So, we begin here to move into a very difficult area,
because a lot of people were beginning to say,
this conversation is getting out of line,
because we are moving into what are normally called perverse experiences.
And the two critical forms of perverse experience are sadism and masochism,
where there is the association of pain and ecstasy.
In sadism, the confusion of another person's suffering with that person's sexual orgasm.
In masochism, the identification, or if you want to say,
confusion of your own suffering with sexual orgasm.
Now, we say, well, that's pathological, that's absurd.
But it exists.
People do it all the time, both ways, and sometimes both together.
And although this is generally put under the heading of pathology,
the fact remains that we can still learn something from it.
There's an important principle in that.
Somehow, somewhere.
And perhaps in people who are sadists and masochists,
the phenomenon is somehow out of hand because they don't understand the principle.
Now, do you realize many sadists want nothing more than that their victim should enjoy the pain?
The combination sadist and masochist is perfect.
And many sadists would be quite reluctant if the victim really didn't like participating in this at all.
And so there's the joke of the masochist asking the sadists to beat him.
And he says, I won't.
But what happens here is that pain and the attendant convulsive behavior of the organism
is associated with the erotic.
A different value is given to the same symptoms as, say, it is common in France to get a young woman really aroused.
And she will say, kill me, kill me, kill me.
As if, you know, to go as far as you can in throwing yourself away to somebody else.
You know, do anything you want to.
And in that abandon, you see, there is the possibility that this, an undulation of feeling,
which is total orgiastic feeling, may take over.
And in that feeling, you see, you are one with what is happening completely.
And that's what everybody, as it were, finally aspires to.
So, therefore, the masochist in particular is a person who has learned throughout life
to defend himself against pain by eroticizing pain.
Now, do you understand how, therefore, different valuations can be put on one and the same vibration?
We see, don't we, all that we experience is understandable as a spectrum of vibrations.
There are different kinds of spectra.
There's the spectrum of light.
There's the spectrum of sound.
We can also think of spectra of smells, of tactile feelings, of emotions, and so on.
All down the line.
We are, as it were, living in the midst of a woven tapestry of many dimensions,
in which the warps and the woofs are all these different spectra of various kinds of vibrations.
And as, on the loom, the warp crosses the woof.
And if you didn't have one, you wouldn't have the other.
It takes two to reveal the pattern.
One, so see yourselves as patterns in a weaving system.
You wouldn't be here if it weren't for the interlocking of all these different spectra of dimensions.
So then, here they go, and these things are vibrating.
Now, when it reaches a certain point, you say, oh, that's too much.
When it reaches another point, you say, it's not enough.
Why, there's nothing here.
I don't feel a thing.
No, I'm going to go to sleep.
But on the other end, you say, no, no, no, no, no, you're going far enough.
If you go any further, that's going to tear things apart.
I can't withhold this tension, you see?
Now, so some people will say, all right, now relax, relax, relax.
Take it easy, take it easy.
But often, you see, the point is you can't do that.
So then, what I will say to the person who cannot relax, I will stress his tension.
Go the other way.
In other words, go with the line of least resistance.
Say, okay, you're tense about all this.
Now, let's say, really tense.
Let's scream, no, no, no, no, no, no.
So you get violent inside.
This is not to happen, you see?
But so that one way or the other, you see, it doesn't matter which you go,
you'll begin to get into this thing, which is what is happening,
when the boat of life begins really to rock.
Get rocking with it by whatever way is open.
But you are not going to force the issue here.
Instead of saying to you, you should be doing it another way than you're doing it,
I will be saying, now, find out the way you must do it and go that way.
Now, this is a general principle of an art.
And we will find there is a kind of limits to this art and how it can be used and so forth.
But once the general principles are clear, there aren't many serious problems left.
That if you begin to look at it in that way, you will begin to realize
that ecstasy, by one road or another, is inevitable.
That, indeed, ecstasy is, in a way, the nature of existence.
There is a universe for the simple reason that it's ecstatic.
What else is all this fireworks about?
It is just like music in this ecstatic thing going off.
And you have to be certainly careful in a little way here that any initiation
into a deep wisdom is apt at first to demotivate you.
You think, what the hell am I doing?
And all these projects, and building this up and that up,
or doing something to save the world, and so on and so forth.
Well, why, that whole thing is nonsense.
Yes.
If you stick there, that's what they call in Mahayana Buddhism, the Pratyeka Buddha.
That means the private Buddha, as distinct from Bodhisattva,
who comes back into everyday life, as they say, for the liberation of all other sentient beings.
Because when you know that all this is all right anyway,
and that the situation is inevitable ecstasy, I mean, you're going to get it one way or another.
And you say, well, what was all the fuss about, you know?
And the fact remains that a lot of people just don't know that, and are really hating life,
not knowing how to handle hate.
And if you are at a certain point, you know those other people are you.
They're like you had an extended body, and all these were nerve ends on the end of it, you see.
However, you know, also, that you can't really show them anything they don't already know,
and won't be able to show them anything else until they know it.
But then, the question, what shall I do, has now disappeared.
It should have disappeared in the beginning,
because there wasn't any real I, there was just the happening.
And so, that question brings us back again to the experience itself.
See?
And that's the only way that you can answer the question, is from the experience.
You could say, what would happen if?
The answer is only, you must feel it, then you'll know.
And the people who hear about this and say, well, wouldn't that,
I mean, wouldn't everybody become totally callous and impressive?
How can you assure me that that wouldn't happen?
I say, I can't.
But you must get into this state, then you'll find out.
There's just no you to get into it anyway.
This concludes session five of Out of Your Mind,
Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives.
Our program continues with session six.
I was making a basic comparison between the state of consciousness of a baby and that of a so-called mature adult,
respectively what we would call undifferentiated and differentiated.
The adult consciousness being highly selective and the baby consciousness being very open and hardly selective at all,
and therefore unable to distinguish what adults consider to be the important things,
which have to do with the conventions and rules that the positive aspects,
whether they be called good or pleasant or life-giving and so on,
must prevail over the negative aspects.
And I went on to show that this contrast between the two views of the world has another marked characteristic.
So thank you.
But in the case of the baby who hasn't been trained or told about the difference between
himself and all that is defined as other than himself, doesn't distinguish between voluntary
behavior and involuntary occurrence.
And of course, we think this is a very fundamental defect, but if we go back, you see, to a principle
that underlies the whole universe with a kind of mathematical exactitude.
We see that if we reduce things to the situation of primal simplicity and we have a primordial
self and other situation, that is to say two balls in space, there is absolutely no way
of telling when they move which one of them is moving or which one is still.
They must necessarily appear to move mutually.
There is no point of reference except each other to determine which is moving and which
is still.
Now, everything that goes on in the universe is simply a complication of that principle,
because the same thing holds true if you multiply the number of balls.
you will see that that primordial principle, that all movement is mutual, still applies.
And therefore, the baby's failure to distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary, the
I and the other, is in a way correct.
Psychologists, psychoanalysts in particular, make a great deal of this contrast and consider
that the baby's view is inferior to the adult's.
And if an adult should acquire that view, in psychoanalysis this would be called regression.
The point that is missed is that the two ways of looking at things need each other to balance
out.
And that one needs the baby's view as a basis for the adult view, because if you don't
have it, you take the adult view too seriously, get completely carried away by it.
And that would be analogous to a person who, in playing poker, loses his nerve, because he
doesn't realize it's only a game, and so he becomes a very bad player.
In exactly the same way, we in life are only playing a game.
But because we didn't keep the baby view, we can't see it.
So what we would call a Buddha view is one that knows both, and therefore is not taken
in by the adult games, although perfectly capable of playing them, but in so far as they are
not regarded as finally and absolutely serious, he's not captivated by them.
Now therefore, one asks the question, that sounds very interesting, but how do I recapture the
baby point of view?
And I showed that that was the wrong question, because it arises entirely and exclusively out
of the adult point of view.
Because the adult point of view involves the fiction that I exist as an agent, independently
of everything else that's going on.
And so I ask, how can I do this?
And the important thing is to realize that the feeling of there being this isolated I is
part of the game, and it has no fundamental reality, except as a convention.
And so long as that isn't clear, we're confused.
I reiterated the point that when we ask, to whom must it become clear, or to whom is it
not clear, that this too was all part of the illusion of the world that the adult presents
to the child.
So the only way in which the child's vision can come again is in the realization that the
I can't do anything about it at all, and can't even do nothing about it.
All possibilities of vision for what we call I myself are out.
And this, of course, is the same meaning that the Christian or the Islamic mystics would say,
that the mystical experience is the gift of God, and there's nothing you can do to get
it.
That's a clumsy way, really, of saying the same thing.
Because so long as you are trying or not trying, you are aggravating the sensation of the separate
ego.
Now, that in itself, you see, as I talk about it, presents a certain difficulty.
Or one thinks it's difficult.
There would be a second difficulty if we were to go on and say, it isn't only the illusion
of the ego, but the whole valuation system that we put on the complexity of vibrations we
call awareness of life.
All the various valuations that are put on this by the social game are maya.
That is to say, they are illusory, basically.
Because it's only in play, as it were, that we say this is good and this is bad, this is
advantageous, this is disadvantageous.
And so we would go on to say after this, but I cannot imagine anything more difficult than
overcoming that hypnosis.
I am so enchanted by this system that the idea of treating it as not really very serious seems
to me unthinkable.
Of course, you have to think that.
It's like a hypnotist working on somebody and saying, you are not going to remember any
of this conversation after you come to.
And so he's put the suggestion into you that you forget the whole thing.
So in the same way, the suggestion has been put into all of us that these rules that we
have learned are sacrosanct and that we, they don't say, you will not be able to think otherwise.
They say they are true.
They are the truth, you see.
And that is the same function as the hypnotic suggestion put into us ever since we were receptive
children.
So naturally, it's all part of the conspiracy which we are playing on ourselves.
We can't blame our parents for this because their parents played it on them.
And they bought it.
And don't forget that time goes backwards, you see.
You can't blame this on the past because now in the present you are creating the value,
the values of the past and you are buying them all along, you see.
So there's no, no out on this.
You see, in a way, psychoanalytically, one is given an out by saying, well, the parents
didn't bring up their children properly.
And American people are consumed with guilt about the way they bring up their children.
So we must abandon completely the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we're in
and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present, that now
is the creative point of life.
And so, you see, it's like the idea of forgiving somebody.
You change the meaning of the past by doing that.
It's like also when you watch the flow of music.
The melody as it is expressed is changed by notes that come later.
There's the meaning of a sentence, especially, say, take German or Latin, where there's the
convention of placing a verb at the end of a sentence.
You wait, in other words, till later to find out what the sentence means, according to our
way of feeling it.
So it is also in our language.
If I say I love you, you don't know, when I've said I, what I is doing.
I could say I hate you.
So we don't know until later.
So in other words, the word love or the word hate changes the function of the word I.
And then I was going to say, I love flowers, no, but I love you, you see.
And so the word later changes the meaning of those that go before.
The present is always changing the past.
So when you get the idea in your mind that the point of view I'm talking about is very
difficult indeed to acquire, that idea is one you are putting there to stop yourself
seeing the other point of view.
And above all, you must not take that seriously.
It is simply a method of postponing, seeing the point now.
So you have to see it now or never, because there is only now.
If you say, well, tomorrow, the next day, maybe in another dozen lifetimes, I'll be ready.
That means, simply and solely, I don't want to be bothered with it now.
I'm even not interested in it now, so I've got an excuse for putting it off.
Which is fine, that's perfectly okay.
You can put it off.
There is no reason, there is no compulsion why you should come out of this illusion.
That's why Oriental people do not tend, in the same way as Westerners, to be missionaries,
and saying it's very urgent that you be saved.
It isn't, unless you say so.
I mean, unless you are so disturbed by the suffering and the problem of suffering that
you've got to find some sort of escape.
But if you don't want to, you can stay there.
It's okay, there's lots of time.
And maybe you'll see through it when you die.
At least in the moment of death, you'll see that it was all a fake.
So don't be scared about the idea of the difficulty of it.
That's a red herring, and it's quite irrelevant, and I don't think that teachers should talk quite
so much about this as they do, and saying, oh, this is going to take a long, long time,
and a lot of practice in many years.
Maybe it will.
Maybe it won't.
But that's beside the point, because it distracts.
It's like telling somebody that this is a very difficult book to read, and it requires
immense powers of concentration.
Well, that immediately kills your interest in it.
I wonder if I would say, well, now, this is the most extraordinary book.
It's just so fascinating.
I've been working on it for years, and every time I just get so involved, I can't drop the
thing.
I mean, that's a far more encouraging attitude to a student than, well, it's going to be very
difficult.
Except to a very, very self-hating student who somehow perversely enjoy suffering through
it.
Now, I suppose that's, of course, a way too, but…
All right.
Now, if we can see the first part, which is that the ego is purely fictitious, that it is
a symbol or image of oneself plus a sensation of muscular strain occasioned by trying to
make this symbol an effective agent to control emotion, to concentrate, to direct the nervous
operations of the organism.
Then, immediately, it is clear that what we have called ourselves, what we have thought
of as ourselves, isn't able to do anything at all.
So, there follows this kind of silence in which there is nothing to do except watch what happens.
But what is happening is watching itself.
There is nobody apart from it watching it.
And so we get into the state of meditation, or as I prefer to call it, contemplation.
So then, the next problem that arises is, well, what about all the other illusions?
Although they are somehow integrated and centered upon the illusion of ego, nevertheless, the
whole value system of what is important, what is not important, what is good, what is bad,
what is pleasant, what is painful, has to be called in question.
Not in order to destroy the whole value system, but in order to see it for what it is.
And that's where we will object and say, well, surely, that's a colossally difficult task,
because we are so long habituated to it.
And we have been taught to believe that the longer we have been habituated to something,
the more difficult it is to change it.
And that is true if you believe it.
And if you don't, it isn't.
Well, that's why it's always emphasized, at any rate in Zen, that when anything is to
be done, it should be done immediately, without thinking it over in advance.
Act at once.
And you'll find that characteristic of people trained in Zen, they always act immediately.
They don't say, well, well, when should we do this sort of thing, they just do it.
Because that doesn't build up, it gives no time for the building up of all this reflection
of, well, I've done this way for a long time, and I really feel kind of draggy about doing
it another way.
It's like some people eat the same thing every day.
The idea of suddenly eating something else seems absolutely weird.
I remember when I used to have lunch in London, in the city of London.
I used to go to the rather fancy sandwich bar.
And there was a very square young man in a derby hat, who ordered exactly the same lunch
every day.
And so it came that the man who served the bar, the moment he saw him coming in at the
door, he had it there.
And he would have had a real qualm if somebody had suggested that instead of having a beef
sandwich, he should have a smoked salmon one.
Now then, we get to this.
What we are aware of is a complex of vibrations.
And we have been conditioned to call them, graduatedly, good, bad, pleasant, painful.
Whereas as a matter of fact, they are nothing but vibrations.
And if you look at any one of them by itself, you won't know where it is.
That is to say, if you only know red, you can't see that it's red.
You could only know that this is red by contrast with yellow and green and blue and violet.
So you don't know that the sound is loud unless you know soft sounds.
Or you don't know that it's soft unless you know loud.
And it is that comparison which gives us the feeling of the spectrum as being varied.
Otherwise we wouldn't know.
For example, when you watch television, you are actually seeing a single moving point moving
over the screen.
But it goes so fast that you see it in all these different places having different values of
light.
But let us supposing there was someone whose retina was not retentive in this way.
He would look at the screen and see the moving point of light and say to human beings, I don't
see what you see in this.
Now can we therefore get back not only to the situation where we see that the ego is a mere
construct, but also where we see that all the values we put on the vibrations are arbitrary.
And that we get to a position where we see the vibrations simply as the vibrations and we would
say that, well, surely all this is nonsense, which is correct.
The universe, I mean, is a kind of ba-do-dee-da, ba-do-dee-da, ba-do-dee-da, ba-do-dee-da,
ba-do-dee-da, ba-do-dee-da, going on in this fantastic way.
This is why music can be used as a meditative technique.
Because a lot of music is nonsense.
It doesn't mean anything, but it can be very interesting.
So can you get back again to recollecting from childhood your pleasure in events that from
your present point of view you would call entirely meaningless, that you could listen to a sound
like a twanging metal and it goes boing, boing, boing, boing, and that's fascinating, boing.
It's just boing.
And that's, that's all it is.
See?
Now, if you can really get with boing, see, you can see the whole universe in boing.
Really.
Because every vibration that's possible implies all the others.
And so, likewise, with a candle flame, with a reflection, with grain in wood, anything
can, from this child point of view, be completely fascinating.
Not because it means anything, but just for what it is that it is shaped so.
There was a joke in punch sometime ago, many years ago, I remember, of an army doctor interviewing
a private.
And the private says, every time I shake my leg like this, it hurts.
He said, God damn it, don't shake it.
But, you know, when one has something that hurts, there's a subtle temptation to keep worrying
it.
Like if you have a filling out of a tooth, your tongue plays with the empty hole.
And children will experiment with pain in this way.
It's like a dare.
Children are always playing the game of daring each other to do something forbidden.
Because the risk of disapproval involved, the calamity that may follow from it, it makes it so exciting.
And why on earth do people challenge disaster the way they do, doing all sorts of wildly adventurous
things?
Because, obviously, that gives a taste, a quality to a vibration that is extremely interesting.
Why the craving for speed, so on.
And it's only if you look very carefully at a vibration that you can see this point.
That's why meditative exercises often involve a repetition process.
Om, or saying a phrase, or doing an act like a mudra, over and over and over again.
After a while, it becomes meaningless.
You could say your own name, like the Sufis do.
And go on and on and on and on and on, and finally, it doesn't mean anything at all.
It's just a noise.
But it isn't just a noise, you see.
The attitude of saying that something is just a noise, or just a wiggle, is an adult attitude.
No wiggle to the child is just a wiggle.
To the child, the elemental thing going on is blah, you know?
I mean, it's just fantastic.
Now, do you see why this is what mystics call ineffable?
That is to say, you can't really talk about it.
The sound.
When I try to explain what I mean by digging a sound, I suddenly realize that I'm not really
saying anything.
And yet there are states of consciousness in which you can listen to sound and realize that
that is the whole point of being alive.
Just to go with this particular energy manifestation that is happening right at this moment.
To be it.
The whole world is the energy playing at doing all this, you see, like a kaleidoscope jazzing.
So if you watch that, and watch it that way, you will be accused, of course, by those who are guardians of the game,
of doing something very dangerous.
You're going completely crazy.
I mean, the number of theological texts I've read, which express in one way or another this horror
of everything becoming meaningless.
The meaningless life.
A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Those people, you see, have not dared to look at it.
Now, there's another way of looking at it, of course, where in states of acute depression,
people see it all as meaningless, but not really meaningless.
They see it all as a conspiracy of horror.
Let's imagine that everything is mechanical.
There are no living beings at all.
There are a lot of beings that are such good computers that you can't tell the difference
between them and what you thought were people.
But everything going on is simply clockwork.
And there's nobody home, although it puts on a convincing show that there is.
So you get the feeling that the entire world is enameled tin or patent leather or plastic.
And tasteless, hollow, vulgar, like a Wurlitzer jukebox.
That's a very common feeling of people who get into acute depression.
But you see, there is still here evaluation.
and there's a lot of people who got the pressure on the side.
That's all.
And there are many people who get into mind.
And there are some positive powers that have been done as well.
That's a very common feeling.
And there's only one way to ensure that they have to be involved.
And over time, you and the other people have to be involved.
You are associating the world with the mechanical as distinct from the organic.
And we have a tendency, you see, to put down the mechanical because obviously a plastic flower doesn't have the scent, doesn't have the soft feeling of a living flower.
We'll perfume plastic flowers soon.
But you know what it'll do.
It'll smell vaguely like soap.
And it won't smell like a flower.
So it'll be plastic smell.
Now we know that, you see, and so we contrast it with the organic.
In what we're doing now, we are getting to a feel of the world that is neither organic nor mechanical.
Simply what it is.
We don't, again, we don't know the contrast.
Just as we don't know the contrast voluntary-involuntary, we don't know the contrast organic-mechanical.
Neither.
So we get to what the Buddhists call tathata suchness.
Tathata, based on the word tat, that, da.
Fundamentally dada.
See?
Dada, dada, dada, dada, dada, dada.
That's what's going on.
Well, now this is what happens, you see, in the meditative state.
As you are in that, you see, everything is da.
Da.
And you're not saying anymore, well, that doesn't amount to anything.
Because you've learned that when people do take you to the place that does amount to something,
eventually it all collapses.
The price of being taken to the place seriously, you see, where it really does amount to something.
This, at last, is the real thing.
The price you pay for that, you see, is the horrors.
About its opposite.
And to the degree that you take that seriously, okay, you pay the price of the horrors.
Now that's, as a matter of fact, all.
So I'm not saying that you shouldn't take it seriously.
I mean, to be specific, you are tremendously in love with someone.
And you plan and plan and plan how possibly you can get this person to return your love.
And they do.
And this is the great event.
This is fantastic.
But that in the background of your mind is the thought of what if this person should be killed or some terrible thing happened.
That always lurks behind the triumph of getting itself, this intense, gorgeous feeling.
Now, if you know that this is, in a way, an illusion, you can allow yourself to take it quite seriously.
But always having a hintergedanka, a reservation, a thought, way back, this is the game.
And having that, as a matter of fact, you can take it seriously.
You can allow yourself to get involved in life to the most ridiculous degree.
Because you know it's all right.
It's just these vibrations.
And so, wowee, let's really get into it.
That is why a person who might be enlightened, a bodhisattva, does not always present a kind of detached and indifferent attitude.
But is perfectly free to allow emotions, attachments.
Why, R.H. Blythe, who was a great Zen man, wrote to me once and said,
How are you these days?
As for me, I have abandoned satori altogether.
And I'm trying to become as deeply attached as I can to as many people and things as possible.
So, what I'm pointing out to you is that this basic seeing that it's all da, da, da,
provides a possibility for you to become involved in it much more incautiously than you normally are.
To express feeling, to love, to throw yourself at the mercy of the goings-on completely, you see?
So that this very perception of the illusion makes it possible to live up the illusion.
And so, if someone, therefore, is always in his attitude to life detached and reserved,
it indicates, you see, that there's still a primordial fear of getting involved.
And I must say that, you see, I can't understand that very well.
I don't understand what people expect,
that a so-called enlightened person should not need this, that, and the other.
It might be beautiful surroundings.
It might be the love of the opposite sex.
It might be, uh, I don't know what.
You shouldn't need that.
In other words, you should scrub everything down to basic, basic.
And the end of that is, you know, let's scrub the planet.
Let's get all this disease called life off it and have a nice clean rock.
I believe in color.
I believe in, if you're going to do anything in the way of the illusory dance,
let's live it up.
Let's really do it.
And let's not be, take ourselves so damn seriously
that we have to be scrubbed all the time of any kind of ornamentation or frivolity.
Oh, hooray.
But you see what all this is dependent on.
All this is dependent upon.
Being able to get back to the point where it's da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
Now, that's what comes in meditation.
Now, don't misunderstand me if I say practice in meditation.
Don't be in a state of expectation,
working day after day to improve your meditation.
Meditation doesn't like that.
You just do it.
But it is true that as time goes on
and you are in that state of silence,
you will see this quality of the world.
Now, the most difficult pains and problems to deal with
are those that are monotonous.
Whereas you can see the possibility of a kind of ecstatic self-abandonment
in a catastrophic agony.
What really gets people down are those ones that drag on
day after day after day after day,
like having to lie with bedsores
in a very uncomfortable situation,
in traction or something of that kind,
or just a perennial difficulty that drips, drips, drips, drips like the water torture every day.
Now, this is the kind of situation in which meditation shows its value,
that you are increasingly in a state of consciousness
where the world is babbling.
Every one of us has something, you know, that we say we don't like to do.
Washing dishes, doing accounts.
But when you get into the meditation consciousness,
you see that nothing is more important than anything else,
or less important.
There is no way of wasting time,
because what is time for except to be wasted?
And you would be, furthermore, you're accustomed now to sitting and doing nothing.
I mean, meditation itself is the perfect waste of time.
Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture
from the Inevitable Ecstasy lecture series.
Now, I want to get down to the simplest possible nitty-gritty
of what we've been talking about,
and a very easy way to ask ourselves the question,
quite fundamentally,
what's all the trouble about?
In other words,
what is your state of mind
when you contemplate
the possibility
of everything becoming nothing?
All right, so the universe is a transitory system,
like a bubble, like smoke, like foam on the water.
And so, how easy?
Just go along with it.
Dissolve.
So, what's the problem?
Why don't we want to give up?
What do we think we're going to get
by holding on
and by resisting the dissolution?
Now, I'm not saying at the moment
that, as I'm a sort of preacher,
advocating giving up.
What I'm interested in
for you to feel
is what do you really feel like inside
at the prospect
of there being nothing,
of this whole thing being a bubble that dissolves?
You see, about death,
the reality of approaching death,
people are apt to feel chilly,
cold, lonely,
scared,
because it's an unknown.
The most frightening thing about death
is there might be something beyond it.
And you don't know what it is.
You remember,
facing the world as a child,
or at any time,
the world is full of threats,
mostly from other people.
And there are monsters.
There are all sorts of things which scare you,
but beyond every monster
is death.
Dissolution is the end of it all.
And by and large,
the art of government
is to fill that void beyond death
with threats
of a rather unspecified nature,
so that we can rule people
by saying,
if you don't do as I tell you,
I'll kill you.
Or you'll kill yourself.
And so long as we can be scared of that,
and so long as we can be made
to think of death as a bad thing,
we can be ruled.
And that is why
no government likes mystics.
Because if we define the mystic
as the person
who is no longer scared of death,
because the mystic
is in the simplest possible language
the person who understands
that you have to have nothing
to have something.
So,
you can't fundamentally
scare the mystic with death.
Because,
say,
well,
what end can it all come to?
What's all the trouble about?
The most it can come to is nothing.
I mean,
there may be some troubles
on the way
of resisting this,
basically resisting it.
I mean,
as you might say,
the very cells in your body
resist their dissolution.
And so,
in this resistance
there's an experience
called pain,
which we've been discussing.
But beyond pain
is this annihilation.
Or so it seems,
anyway.
What will it be like
to go to sleep
and never wake up?
Nobody can think about it.
But what is that state
when you're teased
out of thought?
See,
get with it.
Going to sleep
and never waking up.
this is not,
as you would fantasize it,
a state of being
in the dark forever.
It is not like
being buried alive.
Because,
then there's an experience
of darkness.
Now,
I remember
a little while ago
having at one of my seminars
a girl
who was born blind.
And I had the most
interesting discussion
with her.
because she doesn't know
what darkness is.
The word is absolutely
meaningless to her.
Because she's never
seen light.
Now,
so,
when you really think
about nothingness,
it becomes like
what I've often referred to
is
how your head looks
to your eyes.
And behind the eyes
you don't see darkness,
do you?
Right now.
You're not aware
of a contrast
of light here
and black there.
Behind the visual field
this way
you can't see darkness.
There is simply
nothing conceivable
at all.
Neither darkness
nor light.
See?
Alright.
So,
might one venture
to say almost
that that area
of blankness
we call death
is what lies
behind the eyes.
In other words,
it is what
we can't think about
that's what's watching.
In other words,
the farthest
we can go
in thinking about
nothing,
you see,
we get to the root
of the matter.
Let me put this
in another way.
The world is form.
Now,
you cannot look
for the origin
of form
in form.
Because what you
would get then
would be
a universe
where you
couldn't make out
any form at all
because there was
so much of it.
It would be like
writing a letter
on top of a newspaper
and then
putting a picture
over that
and then doing
something else
until there wasn't
a single
square millimeter
of paper left,
of blank paper.
nobody could read
anything.
But one can read,
one can see form,
one can see the world
simply because
there's always
emptiness behind it.
So you see,
in this way,
emptiness being
the mother of form.
And
you can always say,
yes,
only the form is there,
that's all that's real.
That is only saying,
it's all that is figure.
What about background?
It always has to be there.
So let's go on then
into our visualization,
our imagination.
Use your imagination
for all it's worth
to think yourself
into the fact that
this whole sense
of importance,
of vitality,
of aliveness,
of being
is simply
a sudden
experience
which was nothing
before it started
and will be nothing
after it's over.
That is the simplest
possible thing
you could believe in.
It requires
no intellectual effort,
nothing.
Supposing that's
the way it is.
Now I repeat,
what's your inside
feeling about that?
Supposing,
let's say,
you feel sorry.
For whom is this sorrow?
Who,
when it's all over
will there be
to feel sorry?
You say,
I regret now
that this thing
is going to come
to an end.
But when it's come
to an end,
nobody will either
regret or
be happy about it.
That will be there.
So in a way,
you can say,
well this feeling
of sorrow that I have
that it's going to come
to an end
is really rather irrelevant
because let me look
at the thing
from the other direction.
Supposing it never
would come to an end.
In other words,
here is this alternation
of joy and sorrow
and however happy
I am today,
I'm always going
to feel miserable
later on.
And then maybe happy
again,
but then after that
miserable.
And this is never,
never going to stop.
I just can't get rid
of the damn thing.
Well that's pretty
depressing,
isn't it?
I mean,
when you think it through.
So you say,
well,
let's make a compromise
between these two
possibilities.
One is that
this compromise
is,
in other words,
that it will
disappear altogether
but then it will
start again.
Because when it starts
again,
it will feel like
it does now,
which is that
it never happened
before.
So,
you're always
in the same place
just like you
feel now.
Let's supposing
that the Hindus
are right,
that the universe
lasts for
4,320,000 years
and then it
vanishes
and then it
starts and runs
for another
4,320,000 years
and then it
vanishes
and it does it
again.
And it does it
and does it
and there is
no end to this.
But fortunately,
because of the
forgettery,
every 4,320,000
years,
it doesn't
become a
totally
insufferable
bore.
There is
this blank
space,
this trough
between the
crests of
the waves.
You see?
Now,
the Hindus
thought about
that
and they
got tired
and they
thought about
the possibility
of moksha,
liberation
or nirvana
from the
everlasting
cycle of
appearing and
disappearing.
But then
when they
had thought
that through,
the Buddhists
for example,
having really
said,
now we've
got the
trick.
As the
Buddha said
after his
enlightenment,
now I
found you
out,
you who
build the
house.
I'm
going to
take the
house
apart.
The
roof
beam is
brought
down.
Desire
is the
builder
of the
house.
See,
I've
found
you.
Never
again
shall
you
build
it.
And the
Buddhists
thought
that one
over.
They
asked,
crazy,
we
found
a way
out of
samsara,
the
wheel of
birth and
death.
And
somebody
one day
said,
but,
isn't
that
rather
selfish?
You
get
yourself
out,
what
about
all the
other
people?
Don't
you
have
any
feeling
of
it?
And
they
said,
look,
if
nirvana
is
released
from
birth
and
death,
then
they're
opposed.
And so
nirvana
and birth
and death
go together
and they
will have
to
imply
one
another.
So
you're
only
really
released
if
you
see
that
nirvana
and birth
and death
are the
same
thing.
Now
I'm
going to
pull
a
fast
one
on
you.
So
every
time
an
incarnation
occurs
it
feels
like
this
one.
See
it
might
be
quite
different.
We
might
be
reincarnated
in
another
universe
as
beings
of
an
altogether
different
shape.
See
not
at
all
like
human
beings.
But
because
we
were
used
to
it
we
would
feel
that
was
the
human
shape.
We
would
say
well
that's
natural
obviously
that's
the way
things
are.
So
naturally
if
you
appeared
in
the
form
of
a
spider
you
would
look
around
at
other
spiders
and
say
well
yes
of
course
this
is
natural
shape
to
be
in
this
is
the
human
shape
something
that
is
not
us
looks
at
us
and
so
don't
you
see
that
in
every
world
that
comes
into
being
or
could
come
into
being
it
seems
just
like
it
seems
now
and
every
species
that
you
could
belong
to
would
seem
like
this
one
it
would
have
its
up
end
of
what
is
highly
intelligent
and
its
low
end
of
what
is
not
so
intelligent
you
would
be
aware
of
superior
forces
and
inferior
forces
otherwise
you
wouldn't
have
there
were
situations
you
couldn't
master
now
we
are
not
aware
of
species
of
beings
above
us
unless
you
cultivate
those
forms
of
psychic
awareness
where
you
think
you're
in
touch
with
angels
or
something
of
that
sort
but
the
things
that
appear
to
be
above
us
are
great
natural
processes
only
we
think
they're
rather
stupid
only
very
tough
too
strong
for
the
elements
also
some
little
ones
see
the
virus
is
a
very
troublesome
being
and
this
is
where
a
human
being
really
finds
himself
at
his
wit's
end
in
dealing
with
molecular
biology
so
you
know
if
the
monsters
don't
get
you
the
minsters
will
the
insects
you
see
but
at
any
rate
whatever
level
you're
on
it
always
appears
to
be
the
same
one
now
we
therefore
naturally
don't we
we feel
we're in
the middle
we feel
for example
with the
telescope
that there
is a
world
greater
than
us
that is
infinitely
greater
we feel
with the
microscope
there's a
world
below us
that's
infinitely
smaller
and we
seem
to
stand
in
the
middle
of
course
you
seem
to
stand
in
the
middle
every
creature
stands
in
the
middle
because
if
you
stand
on
a
boat
in
the
middle
of
the
ocean
and
you
turn
around
through
an
angle
of
degrees
you
will
see
the
same
distance
in
every
direction
that's
because
you
see
and
your
sensitivity
to sight
or the
intensity
of light
is the
same
in
every
direction
so
you're
in
the
middle
you're
always
in
the
middle
where
else
would
you
be
in
other
words
anything
that
perceives
anywhere
is
always
in
betwixt
and
between
and
the
middle
always
has
therefore
extremes
it
has
extremes
in
space
as far
west
and as
far
east
as
you
can
think
as
far
on
and
as
far
back
and
there's
always
a
beginning
and
there's
always
an
end
just
as
or
life
this
implies
another
state
called
isn't
or
illusion
or
unreality
or
nothingness
or
death
there
it
is
you
can't
know
one
without
the
other
and
so
as
to
make
life
poignant
it's
always
going
to
come
to
an
end
that
is
exactly
don't
you
see
what
makes
it
lively
liveliness
is
change
is
motion
and
like
this
see
you
gotta
fall
out
and
be
gone
so
you
see
you're
always
at
the
place
where
you
always
are
only
it
keeps
appearing
to
change
and
you
think
wowie
little
further
on
we'll
get
that
thing
I
hope
we
don't
go
further
down
so
that
we
lose
what
we
already
have
but
that
is
built
into
every
creature
situation
no matter
how
high
no
matter
how
low
so
in
this
sense
all
places
are
the
same
place
and
the
only
time
you
ever
notice
any
difference
is
in
the
moment
of
transition
when
you
go
up
a
bit
you
gain
when
you
go
down
a
bit
you
feel
disappointed
gloomy
lost
you
and
but
then
if
it
is
what
about
the
nothingness
that
was
before
you
started
so
don't
you
see
what
we've
left
out
of
our
logic
and
this
is
part
of
the
game
rule
of the
game
that
we
are
playing
the
way
we
hoodwink
ourselves
is
by
because
you
wouldn't
know
what
something
was
without
nothing
you
wouldn't
know
what
the
form
is
without
the
background
space
you
wouldn't
be
able
to
see
anything
unless
there
were
nothing
behind
your
eyes
now
imagine
yourself
with
a
spherical
eye
you
see
all
around
now
what's
in
the
middle
see
even
if I
have
all
this
behind
me
in
view
suddenly
I
middle
of
reality
like
now
there
seems
to
be
not
so
much
a
hole
but
a
wall
but
any
animal
which
had
eyes
in
of consciousness that talks in that way this is somebody saying something who
wants to make a point now what point does that sort of person want to make like
when you're dead you're dead see why that's one of the people who want to
rule the world it's frightening you about death death is real seed I mean
it's just don't indulge in wishful thinking all you people who dream of an
afterlife and heavens and gods and mystical experiences in eternity oh
you're just wishy-washy people you don't face the facts what facts how can I
face the fact of nothing which is by definition not a fact you see all this
is trouble from whichever way you look at it so if you really go the whole way
and see how you feel at the prospect of vanishing forever of all your
efforts and all your achievements and you're all your attainments turning
into dust and nothingness what is the feeling what happens to it's a curious
thing that in the world's poetry this is a very common theme the earthly hope men
set their hearts upon turns ashes or it prospers and anon like snow upon the
desert's dusty face lighting a little hour or two is gone all kinds of poetry
emphasizes the theme of transience and there's a kind of nostalgic beauty to it
a banquet hall deserted after the revelry all the guests have left and gone their
ways and the table with overturned glasses crumpled napkins breadcrumbs and dirty
knives and forks lies empty and the laughter echoes only in one's mind and then the
echo goes the memory the traces are all gone that's the end you see do you see in a
way how that is saying the most real state is the state of nothing that's what it's
going to all come to with these physicists who think of the energy of the universe
running down dissipating in radiation gradually gradually gradually gradually
until there's nothing at all left and for some reason or other we're supposed to
find this depressing but if somebody is going to argue that the basic reality is
nothingness where does all this come from obviously from nothingness once again you
get how it looks behind your eyes see so cheer up you see this is what is meant in buddhist
philosophy by saying we are all basically nothing when the sixth patriarch says the essence of
your mind that's how it is behind your eyes is intrinsically pure the pure doesn't mean a non-dirty
story state of mind as it is apt to mean in the word puritan pure means clear void so you know the story
when the sixth patriarch was given his office as successor because he was truly enlightened there was a
poetry contest and the losing one wrote the idea that the mind the consciousness was like a mirror which
had to be polished and constantly one I have to polish my mirror I have to purify my mind see so that I'm
detached and calm and clear-headed you know Buddha but the one who won the contest said there is no
mirror and the nature of the mind is intrinsically void so where is there anywhere for dust to collect
it see so in this way by seeing that nothingness is the fundamental reality and you see it's your
reality then how can anything contaminate you all the idea of your being scared and put out and worried
and so on is just nothing it's a dream because you're really nothing but this is the most incredible
nothing and the sixth patriarch likewise went on to contrast emptiness of indifference which is sort
of blank emptiness see if you think of this nothingness is mere blankness and you hold on to the idea of
blankness and kind of grizzly in about it you haven't understood it he said nothingness is really like the
nothingness of space which contains the whole universe all the Sun moon and stars and the mountains and
rivers and the good men and the bad men and the animals and the insects the whole bit all are
contained in void so out of this void comes everything and you're it what else could you be so what I'm
showing you is that all this hocus-pocus about the fear of nothingness is that truly speaking nothingness is
what we want to talk about when we talk about the spiritual only it's all been ignored it's all been
put down and say oh nothingness we haven't preserved us from that but that's where the secret lies and
obviously the secret always lies in the place you never think of looking for it in mythology this
comes again and again okay this is Christmas where is the Christ born in a palace no where
nobody would think of looking in pigsty although I have a Japanese friend who once said to me he
said you know the real difference between Christianity and Buddhism is that Christ was the son of a carpenter
and Buddha the son of a prince
I thought that was rather funny
well we don't know who the prince is without the carpenter do we
now it's in that sense
really that I could suggest to you
that you meditate on nothingness
I know you can't think about it but yet when it becomes perfectly clear to you that that's what you are
and what you were before you were born where can anybody stick a knife into you fundamentally you see
get it because this is really the secret of the whole thing
if you see that now we we want to go on
and be able to answer all the people who will come bug us about it
because whether you say anything about it to other people or not people are going to bug you about this
and say oh no no no no
you you you really are something you know you'll know it
oh wowee you know the life isn't the way you think
it can be awful see
i mean real
the uh they'll say oh you can where in such a philosophy as this is there any basis for the love of one's fellow man
for joy in children for
cultivating gardens for doing this and that and the other see
whereas there is no basis in it
that's the same way there is no basis in emptiness for form or so it seems
but only precisely to the degree that you have discovered the nothingness that you are
you find you're suddenly full of energy that is energy it's the source and origin of energy
so that when you know there's not there's a sort of nothing in your way
then you can do exactly what i was describing as having this glee for going into doing this that
and the other thing and being thoroughly creative
but you can't be creative
out of all just plain somethingness you need nothingness to be creative and that's what we are
and this too is is real nothingness and i think it's not darkness it's not like being buried alive
forever it's not like rest even when the catholics sing rest eternal grant unto them oh lord and let
light perpetual shine upon this isn't rest because it isn't motion neither motion nor rest what is it
nobody can imagine and it's at that point you see where the imagination completely runs out and stops
there we've hit the thing see there you are right at the fundamental mystical reality now
what this is we're talking about
is what mystics have quite often discussed this isn't read very much
it's a state called agnosia which means unknowing there's a book called the cloud of unknowing
written by an english monk in the 14th century but it's based on another book called theologia
mystica which was written in the sixth century by an unknown syrian monk who used the name of dionysius
the areopagite and absolutely fascinating very short little book which i translated long ago back in 1943
and i'm about to reissue it but this book ends up with a description of god which is all in negatives
not any kind of anything you can imagine at all not light not power not spirit not fatherhood not
sonship not this that and the other all the way down the line everything that anybody's ever said or
thought about god is denied because god is infinite and therefore beyond the reach of any conception at all
so he says that anybody who having a vision thought he saw god would not have seen god but some creature
that god has made that is less than god so again you approach
in a christian context said in such a way that even saint thomas aquinas bought it
that you can't impute heresy to it because everybody's got to agree that god is the witch
than which there is no witcher and this guy spells it out so in the same way you get nagarjuna
saying that the ultimate reality is shunyata voidness so shankara gets at it
where he says that which is the knower or the knowing in everything can never itself be an object
of its own knowledge for fire doesn't burn itself although it burns other things so we never know
what the brahman is just like the eyes don't ever see the head if you put something there you are
stopping short of nothing and you don't get the whole benefit of it that's all
if you insist that there is something there that there is the loving father at the end of the line
or the paradise garden you are really cheating yourself because it's only when you have thorough
emptiness and real downright nothingness at the end of the line that you get the full impact
no holds look mama no hands see
now i really think that's the simplest thing i could possibly tell you
i really don't know what else there is to be said
about this whole zen project or mysticism vedanta what have you it comes down to that and there are
infinitely many ways of evading but what i'm trying to point out to you you see is the way in which you
see the point by taking the line of least resistance by facing the facts by not super adding to truth
something you contribute to it your own business that you put up but saying if i follow what i
conceive or can see with my senses to be reality as far as we can look it seems that this is sort of the
inevitable conclusion which everybody has spent endless effort in arguing about and resisting
not realizing that if they went the whole way how splendid it would be and that's all you have to do
this concludes session six of out of your mind essential listening from the alan watts audio archives
our program continues with session seven a lecture on zen
is always something in the nature of a hoax because it really does deal with a domain of experience
that can't be talked about but one must remember at the same time that there's really nothing at all
that can be talked about adequately and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said
so every poet every artist feels when he gets to the end of his work that there's something absolutely
essential that was left out so zen has always described itself as a finger pointing at the moon
in the sanskrit saying tat tvamasi that art thou zen is concerned with that
that that of course is the word which is used for brahman the absolute reality in hindu philosophy
and you're it only in disguise and disguised so well that you've forgotten it
but unfortunately ideas like the ultimate ground of being the self brahman ultimate reality the great void
all that is very very abstract talk and zen is concerned with a much more direct way of coming to an
understanding of that or thatness as it's called tatata in sanskrit so zen has been summed up
in four statements a direct transmission
outside scriptures and apart from tradition no dependence on words and letters
direct pointing to the human mind and seeing into one's own nature and becoming buddha
that is becoming enlightened awakened from the normal hypnosis under which almost all of us
go round like somnambules it's extraordinary how much interest has existed in zen in the united states
especially in the years since the war with japan and naturally i've often meditated on the reasons for
this interest i think first of all the appeal of zen lies in its unusual quality
of humor religions aren't as a rule humorous in any way religions are serious
and when one looks at zen art and reads zen stories it is quite apparent that something is going on here
which isn't serious in the ordinary sense however sincere it may be
the next thing i think that has appealed to westerners is that zen
religion has no doctrines there is nothing you have to believe
and it doesn't moralize at you very much
it's not particularly concerned with morals at all
it's a field of inquiry rather like physics
and you don't expect a physicist
to discuss authoritatively about morals
even though as a human being he has moral interests and problems
but as a physicist he is not a moral authority
or if you go to an oculist
or ophthalmologist to have your eyes adjusted
that is so you can see clearly
and zen is spiritual ophthalmology
another thing that appeals very much
to western students about zen
is that they've read their zen
from suzuki
and from some of my writings
and from rh blithe
and these people present a rather different kind of zen
from that which you will find today in japan
they present what is essentially early chinese zen
from the old writings
ranging from about shortly before 700 a.d
to a thousand a.d
and that zen has a very different flavor from modern japanese zen
and so of course many of the people who go to study zen in japan
disapprove of dr suzuki thoroughly
and also naturally of my exposition of zen
because we don't make a great fetish
of studying zen by sitting
in japan today they sit and they sit and they sit
rh blithe asked the zen master
what would you do if you had only one half hour left to live
and he said i would do zazen
which means he would sit like the buddha here
and practice meditation
and blithe had given him several choices
would you like to listen to your favorite music
would you have a dinner would you get drunk would you like the company of a beautiful woman
would you take a walk what would you do
or would you just go on with your daily business as if nothing was going to happen
in other words would you wind up your watch
so he was very disappointed in this answer
and he said you know sitting is only one way of doing zen
buddhism speaks of the four dignities of man
walking standing sitting and lying
and so zazen is simply the japanese word for sitting zen
there must also be walking zen standing zen and lying zen
you should know for example how to sleep in a zen way
that means to sleep thoroughly
zen has been described as when hungry eat
when tired sleep
and when the student got that description
he said well doesn't everybody do that
and the master said they don't
when hungry they don't just eat but think of ten thousand things
when tired they don't just sleep but dream innumerable dreams
so in a sense this sounds like the old western truism
whatever you your hand finds to do do it with all your might
but that's not the same thing as zen
a lot of people like to see if they could sum up zen in that way
in the latin motto of the school i used to go to in england
agedum agis act when you act
or while you act
there's a famous story
which beautifully illustrates the
current relationships between east and west
paul reps
who wrote or rather drew a lovely book called zen telegrams
once asked a zen master to sum up buddhism in one phrase
and he said don't act but act
so reps was simply delighted
because he thought the master had said don't act but act
and that of course would be the taoist principle of wu wei
of action in the spirit of not being separate from the world
realizing so fully that you are the universe too
that your action on it is not an interference
but a an expression of the totality
but the master's english was very bad indeed
and paul reps had misunderstood him
he had said don't act bad act
and you know that is the sort of attitude that all clergy develop
over the centuries
you know how it is when you go to church
if you do
so often the sermon boils down to my dear people you ought to be good
and everybody knows that but hardly anybody knows how
or even what good is
the fascination of zen to the west
is that it promises a sudden insight
into something that is always supposed to take years and years and years
the psychoanalysts if you're mixed up they tell you
the troubles you've got yourself into over all these years can't be undone in a day
and therefore it will take many many sessions
maybe twice a week for several years for you to get straightened out
the christians say that if you embark on a path of spiritual discipline
you get yourself a spiritual director
and submit yourself to the will of god
but you may not get into the high states of contemplative prayer
for very many years
the hindus the vedanta society people the buddhists also say
will require many long years of meditation
very hard concentration
very difficult practice
and stern discipline
and then maybe you will make enough progress in this life
to become a monk in your next life
and then you'll make enough progress to enter some of the preliminary stages leading to buddhahood
but it's all likely to take you many many incarnations
but when this artist hasagawa was asked
how does one see into zen he said
it may take you three seconds
it may take you 30 years
i mean that
and so you see there is always the possibility
that it may take only three seconds
zen literature abounds with stories you see
in which
there's a dialogue
or what is called in japanese mondo
which means question answer
between a zen teacher and his student
and these dialogues are fascinatingly incomprehensible
but it always seems to be that the end of this swift interchange the student gets the point
sometimes he doesn't
i gave a book of these dialogues once to a friend of mine
who was deeply interested in eastern philosophy
he said i haven't understood a word of it but it's cheered me up enormously
so this book called the mumonkan which means the barrier with no gate
or the gateless gate contains such stories as the student
i say student rather than monk because zen students are not monks in our sense of the word monk
our monks take life vows of poverty chastity and obedience
and to make the grade you're expected to spend your whole life in the monastic state
but i call the zen monk a student because he's more like a student in a theological seminary
he may stay much longer than the usual three years he may stay 30 years or so
but it's always uh possible for him to leave with dignity
and to graduate
and to be going to lay life
or become a regular priest who keeps charge of a temple
can get married and have a family
and uh only very few graduates of a zen monastery
become roshi that roshi means simply old teacher
that is the man in charge of the spiritual development of the students
so one of these students in the book says to the master joshu
i have been here in this monastery for some time and i've had no instruction from you
the master said have you had breakfast
yes then go wash your bowl
and the monk was awakened
now you may think that the moral of this story
is uh do the work that's nearest though it's dull at wiles helping when you meet them lame dogs over styles
Or that the bowl might be a symbol of the great void, the all-containing universe.
And probably the monk had washed it already because they immediately, after eating in Japan and China, in a monastery,
they would take tea and pour it into the bowl and swill it around, wash it and wipe it out.
So maybe he had already washed the bowl.
And in that case, you might think that the master was saying,
don't gild the lily.
Don't, to use a real nice Zen phrase, don't put legs on a snake or a beard on a eunuch.
No, the point of that story is so clear that that's what's difficult about it.
And all these stories resemble jokes in this sense.
A joke is told to make you laugh.
When you get the point of a joke, you laugh spontaneously.
But if the point has to be explained to you, you don't laugh so well, you force a laugh.
There is some kind of sudden impact between the punchline and the laugh.
And so, in exactly the same way with these stories, there is expected to be something else than laughter,
which is sudden insight into the nature of being.
Nature of being, that sounds, again, very abstract.
But it was, go wash your bowl.
So, another story in this book concerns a master who said,
when a cow walks out of the enclosure, the corral,
the horns and head, the four legs and the body all get through, but not the tail.
How is it that the tail can't get through?
And nobody could answer this.
Another story tells of a certain master called Bai Zhang,
who was so good that he had hundreds of students and they couldn't all be housed in one monastery.
So, he had to find one of the students who could also be a master, and so he arranged a test.
He put down a pitcher in front of them all and said,
without making an assertion or without making a denial, tell me, what is this?
And the senior monk said, it couldn't be called a piece of wood.
And the teacher didn't accept this answer.
But the monastery cook came forward and kicked the pitcher over and walked away.
And he got the job.
And the commentator remarks, maybe he wasn't so smart after all,
for he gave up an easy job for a difficult one.
When an inquirer about Zen came to a master,
often, you know, they approach a Zen master with a kind of key question.
What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?
Or why did the bearded barbarian come from the West?
Because Zen is supposed to have been brought into China by a Hindu named Bodhidharma.
Bodhidharma is always represented as having a huge bushy beard and very fierce eyes.
Now, Bodhidharma always insisted that he had nothing to teach.
And so, why did he come?
That's one of the fundamental questions.
You might say to me, I've often said when I'm giving a lecture,
I'm not trying to improve you, I'm not trying to persuade you to a certain point of view.
That is to say, like a preacher would convert somebody.
In fact, I have nothing to tell you at all.
Because, were I to presume that I had something to tell you,
I would be like a person who picked your pocket and sold you your own watch.
So, you might say then, why do I talk?
You might ask the sky, why are you blue?
The clouds, why do you float around?
Birds, why do you sing?
And we've been busy trying to invent explanations for all this.
And so, there's this great Zen saying.
One of the old masters said,
When I was a young man and knew nothing of Buddhism,
mountains were mountains and waters were waters.
But when I began to understand a little Buddhism,
mountains were no longer mountains and waters no longer waters.
In other words, when one starts scientific and philosophical inquiries,
everything gets explained away,
in terms of its causes,
or other things that go with it.
Or, one sees that all the things in the world,
what we think are separate things,
are, as things, illusions.
There is nothing separate.
So, but he said at the end,
but when I had thoroughly understood mountains were mountains and waters are waters.
So, this is what's called direct pointing.
A Zen master was once talking with me,
and he said,
when water goes out of the wash basin,
down the drain,
does it go clockwise or anticlockwise?
And this was all phrased in the middle of a very ordinary conversation.
And, you know, it just seemed like a speculative question.
And I said, oh, it might go either.
He said, no!
Like this.
Now he said, which came the first?
There go hen.
I said,
Tuk, Tuk, Tuk, Tuk, Tuk, Tuk!
Now, he said, that's the point.
Now, it is saying too much,
I warn you,
to say that Zen is trying to point to
the physical universe,
so that you could look at it
without forming ideas about it.
That is saying too much,
but it is the general idea.
It's in the direction of being the right idea.
Zen people speak of the virtue of what they call Muxin,
which means no mind,
or Munen,
no thought.
That red lantern says Munen on it.
No thought.
This is not an anti-intellectual attitude.
The ordinary simple person
is just as bamboozled by thinking
as a university professor.
You can think intellectually
in a no-think way.
That's the art.
It doesn't mean not to have
any thoughts at all.
It means not to be fooled by thoughts,
not to be hypnotized by the forms of speech
and images that we have for the world,
not to be hypnotized by them
into thinking that that is the way the world really is.
So if I say this is a fan,
it isn't.
To begin with, fan is a noise.
And this doesn't make the noise fan,
but just whoosh.
But it can be many other things than a fan.
It could be a back scratcher.
Very well.
All sorts of things.
Don't let words limit the possibilities of life.
Actually, this fan has an inscription on it
written by a Zen master
who is a hundred years old.
And it says, I don't understand.
I don't know anything about it.
So that goes back to the story of Bodhidharma,
that when he first came to China,
sometime a little before 500 AD,
he was interviewed by the emperor Wu of Liang.
The emperor was a great patron of Buddhism and said,
we have caused many monasteries to be built,
monks and nuns to be ordained, and the scriptures
to be translated into Chinese.
What is the merit of this?
And Bodhidharma said, no merit whatever.
Well, that really set the emperor back because the popular understanding of Buddhism
is that you do good things like that, religious things, and you acquire merit.
And this leads you to better and better lives in the future so that you will eventually become liberated.
And so, he was completely set back.
So he said, well, what is the first principle of the holy doctrine?
And Bodhidharma said, vast emptiness and nothing holy.
Or in vast emptiness there is nothing holy.
So the emperor said, who is it then that stands before us?
The implication being, aren't you supposed to be a holy man?
And Bodhidharma said, I don't know.
So the poem says, plucking flowers to which the butterflies come,
Bodhidharma says, I don't know.
And another poem like it,
if you want to know where the flowers come from,
even the god of spring doesn't know.
So anybody who says that he knows what Zen is, is a fraud.
Nobody knows.
Just like you don't know who you are.
All this business about your name and your accomplishments, your certificates,
what your friends say about you,
you know very well that's not you.
But the problem to know who you are is the problem of smelling your own nose.
When the great Japanese master Dogen came back from China in about the year 1200 to bring
his school of Zen into Japan, they asked him, what did you learn in China?
He said, the eyes are horizontal, the nose is perpendicular.
This man went on to write a tremendous book about Zen.
They are so contradictory, these people.
Don't expect consistency out of a Zen master.
Big, big book called the Shobo Genzo.
I talked with the Zen master about this book in Japan and he said, oh, that's a terrible book.
It explains everything so clearly.
It gives the show away.
He said, you don't need any book for Zen.
So you see, it is this kind of way of going about things, this method of Zen, that is so fascinated
the West.
And everybody who reads about Zen wonders if somehow, you see, this understanding is right
under your nose.
You know how it is sometimes you get a crowd of people to come into a room and you put something
in the room that's absurd, like suppose there was a balloon floating on the ceiling.
People could come in and not notice it at all.
Or you know, somebody puts on something weird, some kind of a funny necktie or something.
And you say to a person, well, haven't you noticed?
A woman in a new dress, you know?
Haven't you noticed?
You say, well, what is it?
What is it?
It's right under your nose.
They're staring you in the face, but you don't see it.
And Zen is exactly like that.
It is very obvious.
The Master Bokoju was asked, we have to dress and eat every day, and how do we escape from
all that?
In other words, how do we get out of routine?
And he said, we dress, we eat.
He said, I don't understand.
Bokoju said, if you don't understand, put on your clothes and eat your food.
Another Zen master in quite recent times was interviewing a student.
You see, all these stories I'm telling you are connected, and what I want you to do is
to grasp intuitively the connection.
I was interviewing a Western student, and he said, get up and walk across the room.
He got up and walked and came back.
He said, where are your footprints?
Another monk asked Joshu, what is the way?
Tao, in Chinese.
The Tao.
He said, your everyday mind is the way.
How do you get into accord with it?
He said, when you try to accord, you deviate.
So, here is this extraordinary phenomenon.
Now let me say, having presented you with all these fireworks, let me say a few sober things
about Zen as a historical phenomenon.
Zen is a subdivision of Mahayana Buddhism.
And as you know, that is the school of Buddhism, which is concerned with realizing Buddha nature
in this world, not necessarily by going off to the mountains, or by renouncing family life,
everyday life, etc., etc., as if that were an entanglement, but realizing in the midst
of life the possibility of becoming a Buddha.
And so, the great ideal personality of Mahayana Buddhism is the Bodhisattva, a word now applied
to somebody who has attained nirvana, but instead of disappearing, comes back in many, many guises.
There is a famous painting of one of the Bodhisattvas in the form of a prostitute.
And Bodhisattvas in Zen art are often represented as bums.
There is the beautiful one over there, painted by Sengai, of the bum Hote, or Putai in Chinese,
who is always immensely fat, and he is saying, Buddha is dead.
Maitreya, who is supposed to be the next Buddha, hasn't come yet.
I had a wonderful sleep and didn't even dream about Confucius.
And he is just stretching and yawning as he wakes up.
So, Zen is Mahayana, Indian Mahayana Buddhism, translated into Chinese, and therefore deeply influenced by Taoism and Confucianism.
Zen monks brought Confucian ideas to Japan.
And the origins of Zen lie, actually, around the year 414, at which time a great Hindu scholar by the name of Kumara Jeeva was translating, with a group of assistants, the Buddhist sutras into Chinese.
One of his students taught that all beings whatsoever have the capacity to become Buddha, to become enlightened, even rocks and stones,
and that even heretics and evil doers have the Buddha nature or Buddha potentiality in them.
And everybody said he was a dreadful heretic.
But then, a text called the Nirvana Sutra came from India, which said precisely that.
So everybody had to admit that this man was right.
He also began to teach that awakening must be instantaneous.
It's a kind of all-or-nothing state.
I don't mean that there aren't degrees of its intensity.
But once you see the principle, you see the whole thing.
As they say, when the bottom falls out of the bucket, all the water goes together.
Those men then promulgated the way of sudden awakening.
Bodhidharma came later, and he is supposed in legend to have been followed by a line of six patriarchs, of which he was the first.
The second was named Eka, I'm using the Japanese pronunciation, who was formerly a general of the army.
Then the third was Sosan, who wrote the Shenzhen Mei, which is the most marvellous little summary of Buddhism in verse.
And so on till they came to Eino, the sixth patriarch.
You know, perhaps more familiarly, his Chinese name, Huenang.
He died in 715 A.D.
He's the real founder of Chinese Zen.
The man who synthesized the whole thing, and was the, at least his collected discourses, are contained in what is called the Platform Sutra.
And any student of Zen should read the Platform Sutra.
But Eino really fused Zen with the Chinese way of doing things.
And he emphasized very thoroughly, do not think you are going to attain Buddhahood by sitting down all day and keeping your mind blank.
Because a lot of those students who practiced Dhyana, which is the Sanskrit for Chan, which is the Chinese for Zen, which is in turn Japanese, means meditation.
Or contemplation, or contemplation perhaps would be better translation in English.
And everybody thought that the proper way to contemplate was to be as still as possible.
But according to Zen, that is to be a stone Buddha instead of a living Buddha.
Now I can knock a stone Buddha on the head, clunk, and it has no feelings.
And so it's a stone Buddha.
There was a famous Zen master called Thangka, who went to a little lonely temple on a freezing cold night.
And he took the Buddha image, one of the Buddha images off the altar, split it up and made a fire.
And when the attendant of the temple came in, in the morning, he was horrified.
Broke at the image, and Thangka took his stick, started raking in the ashes.
And the temple priest said, what are you looking for?
He said, I'm looking for the Sali, that is to say the jewels that are supposed to be found in the body of a genuine Buddha when he's cremated.
So the priest said, you couldn't expect to find Sali from a wooden Buddha.
In that case, said Thangka, let me have that other Buddha for my fire.
That's, you see, the difference between living Buddha and stone Buddha.
But a person who thinks that in order to be awakened, you have to be heartless, to have no emotions, no feelings,
that you couldn't possibly lose your temper or get angry or feel annoyed or depressed,
those people haven't got the right idea at all.
If that's your ideal, said Eino, you might just as well be a block of wood or a piece of stone.
What he wanted you to understand is that your real mind, while all those emotions are going on, is imperturbable.
Just like when you move your hand through the sky, you don't leave a track.
The birds don't stain the blue when they pass by.
And when the water reflects the image of the geese, the reflection doesn't stick there.
So, to be pure-minded in the Zen way, or clear-minded is a better way of translating it,
is not to have no thoughts, is not a question of not thinking about dirty things.
One great master of the Tang Dynasty, when asked, what is Buddha?
Believe it or not, answered, a dried turd.
So, it's not that kind of purity.
It is purity, clarity, in the sense that your mind isn't sticky.
You don't harbor grievances.
You don't be attached to the past.
You go with it, with life.
Life is flowing all the time.
That is the Tao, the flow of life.
You are going along with it whether you want to or not.
You're like people in a stream.
You can swim against the stream, but you'll still be moved along by it.
And all you'll do is wear yourself out in futility.
But if you swim with the stream, the whole strength of the stream is yours.
Of course, the difficulty that so many of us have is finding out which way the stream is going.
But suddenly, as it goes, all the past vanishes.
The future has not yet arrived.
And there is only one place to be, which is here and now.
And there is no way of being anywhere else, none whatever.
If you understand that thoroughly, your task is finished.
You then become instantaneous and also momentous.
So this was Aino's principle.
As I said, he died in 715.
And he left five very great disciples who taught substantially the same sort of thing.
But as things go, then these disciples had disciples and those disciples had disciples.
And there is a genealogy.
And Zen broke into what are called five houses.
And these, some of them didn't go on.
Zen went on in two main forms.
One is called by the Japanese Rinzai Zen, after the great master Rinzai who lived towards the end of the ninth century.
And the Soto school comes from another line.
And they have a slightly different emphasis.
Soto is more serene in its approach.
Rinzai more gutsy.
Rinzai people use the Koan method in Zen study.
Soto people don't, at least not in the same way.
But this period, between the death of the sixth patriarch, Aino, and about the year 1000, is the golden age of Zen.
These were the really formative years.
And after that, Zen began to decline in China.
It became mixed up with other forms of Buddhism.
And it suffered the fate of many, many forms of meditation type or yoga type discipline.
It got a little bit sidetracked into occult and psychic matters.
What are called in Buddhism Siddhi, or the development of supernormal powers.
For Zen, this is completely beside the point.
But it got involved with Chinese alchemy, with Taoistic alchemy, and all sorts of foolishness in that direction.
But a very strong strain of Zen went to Japan.
The first being, in about 1130, the monk Esai, and then about 1200, the monk I told you about Dogen, who founded the great, beautiful, gorgeous, galluptious monastery at Eheiji, which exists to this day.
Now, in this golden age of Chinese Zen, the main method of study was walking Zen, rather than sitting Zen.
All monks were great travelers, and they walked for miles and miles through fields and mountains, visiting temples, to see if they could find a master who would cause their spark to flash.
To get what is called in Mandarin, wu, or in Japanese, satori, or in Cantonese.
This always rather fascinates me, the way this character is written.
The word I, in Chinese, is sometimes represented by this right-hand side of the character alone.
Five mouths, five senses.
This one means your mind or heart, the heart-mind, shin.
Now, when we say something very surprising happened, my heart came into my mouth.
Here it comes into all five.
So this character means awakening.
It's the same, in a way, as the Sanskrit bodhi, awakening from the illusion of being a separate ego locked up in a bag of skin.
Discovering that you are the whole universe.
And, of course, if you do discover that, and you see into it all of a sudden, it's a shock, because
Because your whole common sense is turned directly inside out.
Everything is the same as you've always seen it, but completely different.
Because you know who you are, you know that, what the devil were you worrying about?
What was all that fuss?
What was all that to do?
Well, you see, it was part of the game.
Everything from one point of view is fuss.
And to do, to do, to do, what is there to do?
But when you wake up, you see, and discover that all this to do wasn't you, what you thought
was you, but was the entire works, which we could just call it, that you're it, and it
is it, and everything is it, and it does all things that are done, then that is a great
surprise.
But it sounds tasteless.
It sounds empty.
It sounds void.
Because if I say, well, you're all it, that is a statement without the slightest logical
sense.
Because we don't know what is it unless there's something that isn't it.
But if it's both all is's and all isn't's, then we can't think about it.
Nevertheless, it is highly possible to see that that's so, in a way that's so vivid it brings
your heart into all your five mouths.
Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture from the World As Just So lecture series.
In this morning's talk, I was going into some of the fundamental features of Zen, and today I want to concentrate on that aspect of Zen practice, which is called in Chinese, Mo Chiu Chiu, or Going Straight Ahead.
A master who was once asked, what is the Tao, the Way, replied, walk on.
Actually go, as we say, go man, go, go, go, go.
And it is this aspect of Zen, which is what is truly understood by detachment, or having
a mind that isn't sticky, and that isn't stopped at any point in its whole working.
To be stopped at a certain point is what is called having a doubt, as when one fumbles,
or wobbles, or hesitates about something, trying to find the right solution for the circumstances
by thinking it out in a situation where there really is no time to think it out.
So that when a Zen teacher asks his disciple a question, he expects an immediate answer,
as it were, without thought or premeditation.
They speak in Zen, they use a phrase, to have a mind of no deliberation, and they also speak
of a kind of person, a man who doesn't depend on anything.
That is to say, on a formula, on a theory, on a belief, to govern his action.
And this person, who doesn't stick anywhere, is like Dante's image at the end of the Paradiso,
where he says in the presence of the vision of God, but my volition now and my desires were
moved as a wheel revolving evenly by love that moves the sun and other stars.
And the image of the wheel, which is not too tight on its axle and not too loose, that is
really with the axle, is the Zen principle of not being attached, not being sticky.
It's very difficult for us to function in that way, because we've been brought up to believe
that there are two sides to ourselves.
One the animal side, and the other the human and civilized side.
And these are expressed in what Freud calls the pleasure principle, which he classifies with
the animal side, with the id, and the other the reality principle, which he puts on the side
of society and the superego.
And man is so split that he is in a constant fight between these two.
Theosophists sometimes speak of our having two selves, the higher self, which is spiritual,
and the lower self, which is merely psychic, the ego.
And therefore, the problem of life is to make the one self, the higher one, take charge of
the lower, as a rider takes charge of a horse.
But the problem that constantly arises is, how do you know that what you think is your
higher self isn't really your lower self in disguise?
When a thief is robbing a house, and the police enter on the ground floor, the thief goes up
to the second floor, and when the police follow up the stairs, he goes higher and higher until
at last he gets out to the rooftop.
And in the same way, when one really feels oneself to be the lower self, that is to say, to be
a separate ego, and then the moralists come along, they are, of course, the police, and say, you
ought not to be selfish, then the ego dissembles and tries to pretend that he's a good person,
after all.
And therefore, one of the ways of doing this is for the ego to say, I believe I have a higher
self.
And I would say, why do you believe that?
Do you know the higher self?
No, if I knew it, I would behave differently.
But I'm trying to get there.
Well, why are you trying to get there?
Well, then the police wouldn't come around.
When the moralists wouldn't preach at me, then I could feel that I was doing my duty, behaving
as a proper member of society.
But all this is a great phony front.
If you don't know that there is a higher self, and you believe that there is one, on
whose authority do you believe this?
You say, oh, such and such a teacher, Buddha, Jesus, Shankara, the Upanishads said that we
have a higher self.
And I believe it.
Catholics sometimes say they believe their religion because they're told to, and they
have to be obedient.
The catechism starts out, I mean the Baltimore catechism, it starts out, we are bound to believe
that there is but one God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, etc.
And they make jokes about the Protestants and say, they don't have real authority in Protestant
Church because everybody interprets the Bible according to his own opinion.
But we have an authoritative interpretation of the Bible.
But this always screens out the fact that it is fundamentally a matter of your own opinion
that you accept the authority of the Church to interpret the Bible.
You cannot escape, in all matters of belief, from opinion.
In other words, it must become clear to you that you yourself create all the authorities
you accept.
And if you create them, in order to dissimulate, in order to pretend that your motivations and
your character are different, that you would like them to be different, this is the same
old principle of the separate self, trying to improve itself so that it will live longer, or survive
in the spiritual world, or attain the riches and the progress of enlightenment.
And the whole thing is phony.
So in Zen, a duality between higher self and lower self is not made.
Because if you believe in the higher self, this is a simple trick of the lower self.
If you believe that there is no really lower self, that there is only the higher self, but
that somehow or other the higher self has to shine through, the very fact that you think
that it has to try to shine through still gives validity to the existence of a lower self.
If you think you have a lower self or an ego to get rid of, and then you fight against it,
nothing strengthens the delusion that it exists more than that.
So this tremendous schizophrenia in human beings of thinking that they are rider and horse, soul
in command of body, or will in command of passions, wrestling with them, all that kind of split thinking,
actually aggravates the problem.
And we get more and more split.
And so we have all sorts of people engaged in an interior conflict, which they will never,
never resolve.
Because the true self, either you know it or you don't.
If you do know it, then you know it's the only one.
And the other so-called lower self just ceases to be a problem.
It becomes something like a mirage.
And you don't go around hitting at mirages with a stick or trying to put reins on them.
You just know that they're mirages and walk straight through them.
But if you are brought up to believe yourself split, I remember my mother used to say to me
when I did naughty things, she said, Alan, that's not like you.
So I had, you know, some conception of what was like me in my better moments, that is to
say, in the moments when I remembered what my mother would like me to do.
And so that split is implanted in us all.
And because of our being split-minded, we are always dithering.
Is the choice that I am about to make of the higher self or of the lower self?
Is it of the spirit or is it of the flesh?
Is the word that I have received of the Lord or is it of the devil?
And nobody can decide.
Because if you knew how to choose, you wouldn't have to.
In the so-called moral rearmament movement, which is a very significant title, you test
your messages that you get from God in your quiet time by comparing them with standards
of absolute honesty, absolute purity, absolute love, and so on.
But, of course, if you knew what those things were, you wouldn't have to test.
You would know immediately.
And do you know what those things are?
The more one thinks about the question, what would absolute love be, supposing I could set
myself the ideal of being absolutely loving to everybody, what would that imply in terms
of conduct?
Well, you can think about that till all is blue, because you could never get to the answer.
The problems of life are so subtle that to try to solve them with vague principles, as if those
vague principles were specific instructions, is completely impossible.
It is important to overcome split-mindedness, but what is the way?
Where can you start from if you are already split?
I mean, who are you really?
Well, then he went into all sorts of abstractions about his being a particular human being, and
so on, who was a journalist, and so on, and the priest just laughed and said no.
Then the priest just tossed off the conversation, and a little later made a joke, and sergeant
laughed.
And he said, there you are!
There was an army officer who once came to a Zen master and said, I have heard a story
about a man who kept a goose in a bottle.
And it was growing very rapidly, and he didn't want to break the bottle, and he didn't want
to hurt the goose, so how would he get it out?
Zen master didn't answer the question at all, but simply changed the subject.
Finally the officer got up to leave, and he went over to the door, and suddenly the Zen
master called out, oh, officer?
And he turned around and said, yes.
The master said, there, it's out.
So in the same way, if I say to you, good morning, you say, good morning.
Nice day, isn't it?
Yes.
Or if I hit you, you know, boom, you say, ouch!
And you don't stop to hesitate to give these answers and these responses.
You don't think about it when I say, good morning, unless you're a psychiatrist.
What could I be meaning?
So you respond.
So in exactly the same way, that kind of response, which doesn't have to be a deliberate response,
a response of a no-deliberating mind is a response of a Buddha mind or an unattached mind.
But you must not imagine that this is necessarily a quick response, because if you get hung up
on the idea of responding quickly, the idea of quickness will be itself a form of obstruction.
Very often, when Dr. Suzuki is asked a question, a very complicated question by some philosophy
major at Columbia when he's giving lectures there, he's silent for a full minute and then
says, yes.
And this is exactly as spontaneous a response as it would be if he had answered immediately.
Because during the period of silence he is not fishing around to think of something to say.
He is not at all embarrassed at being silent or at not knowing the answer.
So if you don't know the answer, you can be silent.
If nobody asks a question, you can be silent.
There's no need to be embarrassed about it or to be stuck on it.
But you cannot overcome being stuck if you think that somehow you would be guilty if you were
stuck.
When you are perfectly free to feel stuck or not stuck, then you're unstuck.
Because actually nothing can stick on the real mind and you will find this out if you
watch the flow of your thoughts.
There is an expression in Chinese which means the flow of thoughts are what we call in literary
criticism, stream of consciousness.
And they put the character for thought three times, nian, nian, nian.
And so you will notice that thought follows thought follows thought when you are just ruminating.
And those thoughts arise and go like waves on the water.
All the time they come and go.
And when they go, they are as if they had never been here.
So actually this shows your mind doesn't stick, really.
You can get the illusion of it sticking by, for example, cycling the same succession of
thoughts over and over again.
And that gives a sense of permanence in the same way as when you revolve a cigarette butt
in the dark.
You get the illusion of there being a solid circle, although there is only the single
point of fire.
And it is from this connecting of thoughts that we get the sensation that behind our thoughts
there is a thinker who controls them and experiences them.
Although the notion that there is a thinker is just one member in the stream of thoughts.
For example, if you get a certain kind of rhythm that goes diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-boop, diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-boop,
diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-boop, diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-boop, the boop is part of the rhythm.
But it can be used as a cue.
So you get, in relation to diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-diggy-boop, you get thought-thought-thought-thought-thinker,
thought-thought-thought-thought-thinker.
But if this happens regularly enough and long enough, you get the illusion of there being
someone who thinks, apart from the stream of thoughts which come and go, the stream
of experiences.
And we use such absurd phrases, not only as thinking our thoughts, but feeling our feelings,
seeing sights and hearing sounds.
But you must understand it is perfectly obvious that seeing a sight is seeing, hearing a sound
is hearing.
Feeling a feeling is feeling.
So in the same way, thinking a thought is thinking.
But you get split-minded, you see, and so you get I and me and the I who ought to or must
control me as a sensation of some real entity that stands aside from thoughts and chooses
among them, controls them, regulates them, and so on.
Actually, this is a way to have one's thoughts not controlled.
The more there is this duality of the separate thinker standing aside from the thoughts, the
separate feeler watching or feeling the feelings, the more the stream of feelings is coaxed into
into self-protective activity, into getting more and more, like a stuck record, the purposes
of which are to protect and to aggrandize and enlarge the status of the supposed thinker.
Now, when Joshu, who was a Tang Dynasty Zen master, was asked, he had made some reference to the
enlightened mind being like a mind of a child, and he said, well, what is the mind of a child?
And he said, a ball in a mountain stream.
Why?
Thought follows thought instantaneously, without interruption.
So the saying, walk or sit as you will, but whatever you do, don't wobble.
Now, we can see this very clearly from confusions we can get into inactivity.
I have just said we can see this very clearly from confusions we get into inactivity.
What kind of a statement is that?
When I raise the question, what kind of a statement was it that I just made, I'm beginning to talk
about talking.
And one can do that, provided you don't try to do it while you're making the original statement.
If I want to say something about what I've just said, then I must do it later, mustn't
I?
But not at the same time.
I cannot say, you are a fool, and at the same time say, I'm giving you an insult, in
so many words.
I cannot say, or in mathematics, I cannot write down a certain equation.
And as I'm writing it down, simultaneously state what kind of an equation this is.
Unless, of course, I invent an exceedingly complex language, which talks about itself
as it goes along.
But in the ordinary way, people get completely mixed up by that.
In the middle of being about to say to somebody anything, you start to think about whether this
is the right thing to say.
And you start wobbling.
You get, in other words, too much feedback.
And too much feedback makes any mechanism go crazy.
So in the same way, when you are very, very aware of a difference between the deeds and
the doer, and the doer while doing the deeds is always sort of commenting on them, the doer
never really gets with it.
In other words, you are about to strike a nail, and you wonder, as you are about to hit it,
is this the right place to put it?
And so you probably hit your thumbnail instead of the nail, because you don't go right through
with hitting that nail.
This is not saying, let me mark this again, it is not saying that there should be no criticism
of thought, but if you criticize thought while thinking, as if there were a critic thinker
standing aside from the stream of thought, then you get all balled up.
And that is exactly what happens in the process of attachment, or what are called in Buddhist
klesha, which mean disturbing confusions of the mind.
And you see, this kind of confusion is something to which the human organism is peculiarly liable,
because the human organism has language, has, you see, thinking is silent language.
And I mean language in the most inclusive sense of the word, not only words, but also images
and numbers, notation.
Just because then we can talk about anything, we can talk about talking, we can talk about
thinking, we can talk about ourselves, as if we could stand aside and say, said I to myself,
said I, all we are actually doing is making a second thought, or thought stream, which comments
on the one that went before.
And then pretending that the second stream is a different stream than the first.
That's because there are built into our minds all kinds of phony images about memory.
We think, for example, of memory by analogy with engraving.
In order to remember something, we write it down.
And so we have a flat and stable piece of paper, and we make marks on it with a pencil.
And they stay there.
So we begin to think, is mental memory something of the same kind?
Is there something stable upon which the passage of thoughts makes an impression?
We say, he impressed me very much.
This was a lasting impression on my mind.
As if we were tablets.
Indeed, the philosopher Locke used the expression tabula rasa, or clean slate, to describe the
mind of a child.
This is a mind which has not yet collected any memories.
As if there were some sort of surface which accumulated these things, and preserved them,
and that's me.
But you see, this superstition is related to a much more ancient superstition.
That the world consists of two elements.
One of which is stuff, and the other of which is form.
This is a myth based on a model of the world, which is fundamentally ceramic.
God formed Adam out of the dust of the ground.
And so there is a stuff, and so there are forms engraved in it, or imposed on it, or stamped
on it, like a seal is stamped on wax.
What is stuff like apart from form?
What is form like apart from stuff?
All those problems, which have bothered people for centuries, are based on asking the question
in the wrong way.
On having used the wrong image for the process.
Actually, since nobody ever saw a piece of shapeless stuff, and nobody ever saw a piece
of stuffless shape, the whole thing really is saying that they are the same.
And there isn't any necessity even to think of a difference between them.
Even the contrasting words, form and substance, or form and matter, are a nuisance.
There is process.
There is the flow of thought.
The flow of thought doesn't have to happen to anyone.
Experience does not have to beat upon an experiencer.
There is all the time simply the one stream going on, and we are convinced that we stand aside
from it and observe it, because we've been brought up that way.
But you know, in your stream of thought and experience, I am an object, and a very fleeting and passing
one.
And consequently, also, in my stream of experience, you also are people who come and go.
So.
we are all you see living in the same world we think there is me and there is an external world
around me but I am in your external world and you are in my external world and if you think about
that you see we are all in one world going along together there isn't really the internal and the
external there is simply the process it's very important to get rid of that illusion of duality
between the thinker and the thought so find out who is the thinker behind the thoughts who is the
real genuine you and so one of the methods that is used is shouting the Zen master would say to a
student now I want to hear you I want to hear you say the word move and really mean it as I want to
hear not just the sound but the person who says it now produce for me that there's move and the Zen
teacher says no no not yet move and it says it's only coming from your throat I want to hear your
belly you know and always you see it will never come while the person is trying to make a
differentiation between a true move and a false move to act with confidence you just do it but since people
are not used to that it is necessary to set up protected situations in which it can be done if we just in
the ordinary way of social intercourse acted without deliberation we would get into amazing confusions as
when people say always speak the truth never tell a white lie and they say exactly what is true and what
they think about other people well they can raise a great deal of trouble but the experience of Zen has
been that there should be a kind of enclosure in which this kind of behavior can be done until the people are
expert in it and know how to apply it in all situations this concludes session seven of out of your mind
essential listening from the Alan Watts audio archives our program continues with session eight the function
of a Zen teacher is to put his students in all kinds of situations where in the normal course of social
relations they would get stuck by asking nonsensical questions by making absurd remarks by all ways of unhinging things
and above all keeping them stirred up with impossible demands to hear the sound of one hand to without moving
stop a ship sailing out on the water or to stop the sound of a train whistle in the distance magic to touch the ceiling
without getting up from one's chair to take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve to take Mount Fuji
out of a pillbox all these impossible questions are asked and in the ordinary way of interpreting these questions we think well now
gee how could we do that see that's very difficult question that's been asked and you have to think what would I do to do that
because we are caught up in a certain way of discourse which the language game that we play and the social games the production games and the survival games that we play are good games
but we take them so seriously that we think that that is the only important thing and this is to unstick us from that notion and realize that it would be just as good a game
to drop dead now as to go on living is a lightning flash bad because it lives for a second as compared with the sun that goes on for billions of years you can't make that sort of comparison because a world of lightning goes also with a world where there's a sun and vice versa so long-lived creatures and short-lived creatures go together that's the meaning of that saying
flowering flowering branches grow naturally some short some long so this then is a scene in in a Zen community where spontaneous behavior is encouraged within certain limits and as the student becomes more and more used to it those limits are expanded until eventually he can be trusted to go out on the street
and behave like a true Zen character and get by perfectly well you know what occasionally happens on the street when two people are walking down the sidewalk straight at each other and they both decide to move to the right together and then to the left together and they somehow get stuck and they can't pass each other Zen teachers will pull just exactly that sort of stunt when going down a path and meet one of their students to see if they can get him in a tangle and can he escape from it
and you will find in everyday life that there is a very clear distinction between people who always seem to be self-possessed and people who are dithering and nervous and don't quite know how to react in any given situation always getting embarrassed because they have their life too strongly programmed you said I mean this is a common marriage argument
and now you've changed your plan and now you've changed your plans not that they really the change of plans really caused any inconvenience but just the feeling that when you say you will do something at a certain time you ought to do it at that time come hell or high water
Well that's being very unadaptable that's being a stone kind of sticky thing if it after all doesn't matter when we do it and somebody is offended because the time has been changed that's simply because they are attached to punctuality as a fetish and this is one of the great problems this is causes many automobile accidents men rushing home to be on time for dinner
when they are going for a drink at some bar or when the girl feels that she has a fussy husband and she feels she has to have the dinner ready at exactly a certain moment she ruins the cooking you'd rather have a faithful wife and a bad cook
I hope I hope I'm not treading on any toes
so you see we spend an awful lot of energy trying to make our lives fit images of what life is or should be which they could never possibly fit
so Zen practice is in getting rid of these images
but it's it's so explosive socially to do that and it so worries people they get vertigo they get dizzy they don't know which end is up and this happens you know if you've ever been in one of those blab lab sessions
where they call them tea groups I think or something like that where the people gather together without any clear idea of what this gathering is about
they know it's somehow self-exploration but just how do you begin on that and so somebody starts to push his idea and then somebody else says well why are you trying to push your idea on us
and then they all get into an argument about the argument and the most amazing confusions come about but sometimes they all see what idiots they're being
and then they learn to live together in a really open and spontaneous way
there was a very interesting dinner party once where a Zen master was present and there was a geisha girl
who served so beautifully and had such style that he suspected she must have some Zen training
and after a while he when she paused to fill his sake cup he bowed to her and said I'd like to give you a present
and she said I would be most honored and he took the iron chopsticks that are used for the hibachi
the charcoal brazier moving the charcoal around he picked up a piece of red hot charcoal and gave it to her
well she instantly she had very long sleeves on her kimono she whirled the sleeves around her hands and took the hot charcoal
withdrew to the kitchen dumped it and changed her kimono because it was burnt through
then she came back into the room and after a suitable interval she stopped before the Zen master and bowed to him
and said I would like to give you sir a present and he said I would be very much honored
and of course he was wearing a kimono or something like this and so she picked up a piece of coal
and offered it to him he immediately produced a cigarette and said thank you that's just what I needed
now you know in the same way that we have this in our culture certain people who are comedians who know how to make jokes and gags
in a completely unprepared situation face them with anything and they somehow come through so that is exactly the same thing
in a special domain as Zen only the master of Zen does this in every life situation but the important thing is
to be able to do this this is the secret you must remember you can't make a mistake
now that's a very difficult thing to do because from childhood up we have had to conform to a certain social game
and if you're going to conform to this game you can make mistakes or not make mistakes
and so this thing has gone into us all the time you must do the right thing
there's certain conduct appropriate here there's certain conduct appropriate there
and that sticks in us and gives us a double self all our lives long because we never grow up
do you realize that the whole of life plays a game which is a childhood game
there are three kinds of people top people middle people and bottom people and there can't be any middle people
unless there are bottom people and top people there can't be any top people unless there are middle and bottom people
and so it goes and everybody's trying to be in a top set
well if they're going to be there there's got to be someone in the bottom set
and the people who do the right thing and the people who do the wrong thing
here in Sausalito we have this very very plainly
there are the right people the nice people who live up on the hill
then there are the nasty people who live down here on the waterfront
and they grow beards and they wear blue jeans and they smoke marijuana
and whereas the other people on the top of the hill drive Cadillacs and have wall to wall carpeting
and nicely mowed lawns and their particular kind of poison is alcohol
now the people who live on the top of the hill know that they're nice people
but they wouldn't know they were nice people unless they had some nasty people to compare themselves with
every in group requires an out group whereas the nasty people think they are the real far out people
whereas those people those hillbillies are squares
and they wouldn't be able to feel far out unless there were squares
see these things simply go together
but when that is not seen we play the games of getting on top of things all the time
and so we are in a constant state of competition
as to if it's not I'm stronger than you
it's I'm wiser than you
I'm more loving than you
I'm more tolerant than you
I'm more sophisticated than you
it doesn't matter what it is but this constant competition is going on
in terms of that competition we can of course lose place
and in that sense make mistakes
but what a Zen student is
is a person who is not involved in the status game
that's the real meaning of a monk
he is not keeping up with the Joneses
and to be a master he must get to the point
where he's not trying to be a master
the whole idea of your being better than anybody else
simply doesn't make any sense at all
it is totally meaningless
because you see everybody manifesting the marvel of the universe
in the same way as the stars do
and the water and the winds and the animals
and you see them all as being in their right places
and not being able really to make mistakes
although they may think they're making mistakes
or not making mistakes
and playing all these competitive games
but that's their game
now I only say if that game begins to bore you
and it begins to trouble you and give you ulcers
and all kinds of things
then you raise the problem of getting out of it
and therefore you start to become interested in things like Zen
that is simply a symptom of your growing in a certain direction
where you are tired of playing a certain kind of game
you are as naturally flowing in another direction
as if a tree were putting out a new branch
so because you say oh well we people are interested in higher things
you see that depends still on the differentiation of rank
between the superior and the inferior people
but when you begin to see through that and grow out of that
you don't think any more of this superior and inferior classification
you don't think we are spiritual people
who attend to higher things as distinct from these morons
who are only interested in beer and television
this is simply our particular form of life
like there are crabs and there are spiders and there are sharks
and there are sparrows and so on
the trouble with the human being is
like the trouble with certain animals
like the dinosaur
who evolved to the point where he was so big
that he had to have two brains
a higher self in the head and a lower self in the rump
and the difficulty was to get these two brains coordinated
but we have exactly the same trouble
and we are suffering from a kind of jitters
that comes from being too brained
now you see I'm not saying that that jitters is bad
it's a potential step in evolution
and an opportunity of growth
but remember in the process of growth
the oak is not better than the acorn
because what does it do?
it produces acorns
or you could say
just like I sometimes love to say
that a chicken is one egg's way of becoming others
so an oak is an acorn's way of becoming other acorns
where is the point of superiority?
the first verse of that poem I just quoted
the flowering branches grow naturally some short some long
the first verse is
in the landscape of spring
there is nothing superior and nothing inferior
the flowering branches are naturally some short some long
so that's the point of view of being an outcast
in the sense of being outside
the taking seriously
of being involved in the social game
and therefore being threatened by making mistakes
of doing the wrong thing
that is to say of carrying into adult life
one's childhood conditioning
where somebody is constantly yammering at you
to play the game
so therefore the preachers and the teachers
take the same attitude towards their adult congregations
that parents take to children
and lecture them
and tell them what they should do
and judges in courts feel also entitled
to give people lectures
because they say those criminal types haven't grown up
but neither have the judges
it takes two to make a quarrel
so one can begin to think in a new way
in the polarity thinking
instead of being stuck with
the competitive thinking of the good guys and the bad guys
the cops and the robbers
the capitalists and the communists
the all these things
which are simply childishness
now of course you recognize
that if i at the moment i say that
it's like talking in english
in order to show that the english language has limitations
and i am talking in a language that seems competitive
to show that the competitive game has limitations
as if i were saying to all you cats here
look i have something to tell you that is
and if you get this
you'll be at a better position than you were before you heard it
but i cannot speak
to this group or the society or this language speaking culture
without using the language
the gestures the customs etc that you have
the zen masters try to get around this
by doing things suddenly that
people just don't get
well what is this
therefore that is the reason why
this is the real reason why
zen cannot be explained
you have to make as it were a jump
from the valuation game of better people and worse people
in groups and out groups
and you can only make it
by seeing that they all are mutually interdependent
so if we take this situation
let's say i would be talking to you
and saying look i have some very special thing that you've got to take notice of
therefore i am the in group
and i am the teacher and you are the out group
i know perfectly well
that i cannot be the teacher unless you come here
and so that my status and my position is totally dependent on you
it isn't something you see therefore i have first
and then you get
these things arise mutually
so if you wouldn't come i wouldn't talk
i wouldn't know what to say
because i borrowed your language
so that is the insight that things go together
then
when you see that
and aren't in competition
then you don't make a mistake
because you don't dither
when i first learned the piano
and play these wretched scales
the teacher beside me
had a pencil in her hand
and she hit my fingers every time i made a wrong note
consequent was i never learned to read music
because i hesitated too long
to play the note on time
because i was always
is this pencil gonna land
see
and that gets built into your psyche
and so people are always
although they're adults
and nobody is clubbing them around
and screaming at them any longer
they hear the echoes of that screaming mama
or that bombinating papa
in the back of their heads all their life long
and so they adopt the same attitudes to their own children
and the farce continues
because there is no
i mean i don't say that you shouldn't
uh lay down the law to children
if you want them to play the social game
but if you lay down the law to your children
you must make provision later in life
for them to be liberated
to go through a process
of curing them
from the bad effects of education
but you can't do that unless you too grow up
you see
unless we grow up
says i including myself
so that is the thing
now therefore
in the zen scene
you would think that the master as we know him and as we read about him
is an extremely authoritarian figure
that's the way he deliberately comes on at the beginning
he puts up a terrific show of being an awful dragon
and this screens out
all sorts of people
who don't have somehow the nerve to get into the work
but once you are in
a very strange change takes place
the master becomes
the
brother
he becomes the affectionate
helper
of all those students
and they love him
as they would a brother
rather than respect him as they would a father
and therefore the students and masters they make jokes about each other
they
have a very curious
kind of social relationship
which
has all the outward trappings of the authoritarian
but everybody knows on the inside that that's a joke
liberated people have to be very cool
otherwise
in a society
which doesn't believe in equality
and cannot possibly practice it
they would be considered extremely subversive
and therefore great zen masters wear purple and gold
and carry scepters and seated thrones
and
all this is carried on
to cool it
the outside world knows that they're all right
they have discipline
they have order
they're perfectly fine
out of your mind
now continues
with the next lecture
from the world as just so
lecture series
having discussed basic principles of what zen is about
I'm passing on to
the more practical side of it
a zen monastery is not a monastery in the christian sense
it's more like a theological seminary
except that
it practices more than it teaches
a typical institution
consists of a campus
and on the campus there are
many buildings
first of all around the edges you will invariably find
independent temples
that were founded in times past by
noble families
because one of the things that the buddhists did
when they came to the far east
was they exploited ancestor worship
this was very clever of them
this being the great religion of china
the buddhist priests performed services
like requer masses
for the repose of the souls
or for good reincarnation
reincarnations
for one's ancestors
and they made quite a thing out of that
and so
they have memorial services for the departed
and that's one of the principal functions of temples in japan
people don't go to temple in the same way as westerners go to church
they make pilgrimages to temples
and say at a great temple like a heiji
you will find on a sunday morning or practically any morning
a swarm of about five hundred people attending
the four a.m. service of chanting
chanting the buddhist scriptures
but they are kind of in and out of their temples
they have special services
they have memorial services
weddings funerals or everything like that
but they don't have a parish
kind of church community
as we find it in the west
although when buddhism
through the japanese immigrants
exports itself to the united states
they immediately copy
the protestant church institution
and sing
buddha loves me this i know
for the sutra tells me so
it's terrible
And all the young men, Nisei, who have never been in Japan,
the one thing they can't stand is sutra chanting.
Because they don't know what it means,
and the priests don't know what it means a lot of the time.
And so, but it's beautiful to listen to,
and they haven't got an educated Western ear yet
to appreciate that kind of Oriental music.
Well now, aside from these many temples,
each of which is in charge of a priest with his family,
and some of them are having a hard time making a go of it these days,
so they've become restaurants for very elegant food,
or museums, and all sorts of things.
Now the central, the guts of a Zen temple,
is what's called the Sōdo.
So in Japanese is the Sankha,
the order of followers of the Buddha.
Do simply means hall.
So the Sangha hall, or Sōdo, is the center.
And this consists of a number of rooms,
but the main one, the actual Sōdo itself,
is a large, long, spacious room
with platforms on either side
and a wide passage down the center.
The platforms are six feet wide,
and each contains a number of tatami mats,
which are measure six by three.
And every monk is assigned to a mat.
And on a shelf behind the mat, against the wall,
he has all his possessions,
which are very simple.
And so the mat is his sleeping place
and his meditation place.
There is an image of the Bodhisattva Manjusri
in the hall,
more or less in the center of the passage
between the platforms.
Manjusri is a Bodhisattva,
they call him Manjusri in Japan,
who holds in his hand a sword.
And this sword is the sword of wisdom,
or prajna,
which cuts asunder all illusions.
That is the dwelling place
and the meditation place of the monks.
And then they have, of course,
kitchens and library,
and they have special temples
that the monks use
for various services.
Then aside from that,
there are the quarters
of the Kansho,
who is the abbot
or administrative head of the temple.
And then the quarters of the Roshi,
who is the spiritual teacher.
There isn't in the Zen,
not in the Rinzai Zen school at any rate,
exactly a hierarchy.
Every temple is independent.
There's no pope,
no archbishop.
But there is a fraternal relationship
between all the temples
of the Rinzai sect.
The Soto sect have a little bit
of a hierarchy,
but still, on the whole,
the Kansho,
or administrative head,
of the temple is the big boss.
The Roshi is the respected boss,
the man everybody's terrified of,
at least on the outside,
at any rate.
Now, if you want to get into
one of these institutions
and study,
they make it difficult.
It's so different
from the welcome attitude
you get when you go
into a Christian church.
Here they repel you.
Westerners, of course,
are treated with a certain amount
of courtesy
that is not ordinarily
accorded to Japanese.
But even then,
it's made difficult
because they realize
that a westerner
who's taken the trouble
to learn Japanese
and to get himself
over the oceans
and to live
under unfamiliar conditions
is certainly
pretty serious about it.
And there are a number
of Western Zen monks.
So funny,
there's one
who comes from San Francisco
and he's tremendously tall
and to see him
with all the others
is quite amusing.
Anyway,
the formal approach
is that
you arrive
in your traveling gear
at the gate
and the Zen monk's
traveling gear
is most picturesque.
He wears a great mushroom
on his head,
enormous straw hat
about so wide,
and then he has
a black robe
rather shorter
than a kimono
and he has
long white
tubby socks
underneath
and gaita
which are
the wooden sandals
with bridges on them
to keep you
high up a bit.
Or he may wear
just plain
waraji
which are straw sandals.
Then he carries
on the front
his little box
in which are
his eating bowls,
his razor,
his toothbrush
and such
necessities of life.
Well, when he arrives
he's told that
the monastery
is very poor
and they can't afford
to take on
any more students
and that the teacher
is getting old
and it might tax
his strength
and things like that.
So he has to sit
on the steps
and he puts
his traveling box
in front of him
he takes off
his big hat
and he lays his head
on the box
his forehead
and waits there
all day.
but he is invited
in for meals
to a special
little guest house
because no traveling monk
can be refused hospitality
and he is admitted
at night
into this special place
but he is expected
not to sleep
but to spend all night
in meditation.
In olden times
this went on
for at least a week
or ten days
to test this fellow out
then finally
the
assistant
to the Roshi
comes and tells him
that
the Roshi
maybe would have
a talk with him.
So
you must remember
the aspect of a Roshi
to this young monk
he's a formidable fellow
usually
an older man
who has about him
something that
is difficult
to put your finger on
there's a certain
fierceness
coupled with a kind
of tremendous
directness
a sense of somebody
who sees right
through you
and so
he really poses
to this young fellow
what do you want
why did you come here
but he said
I came to be
instructed in Zen
the teacher says
well we don't
teach anything here
there isn't anything
in Zen
to study
well the student
knows
or thinks he knows
that this
not anything
which is studied
in Zen
is the real thing
that's of course
as a Buddhist
he knows
that what isn't anything
is the universe
the great void
the Sunyata
and so
he isn't phased
by that
he says
well nevertheless
you do have people
who are
working here
and meditating
under your
instruction
and I'd like to join them
well
maybe
but strictly on probation
and then of course
all the details
are taken
and he pays
a ridiculously small fee
in modern Japan
at any rate
to be able to stay
in the monastery
it's very very inexpensive
now the teacher
comes back
and says
now you want to study Zen
why
well because
I'm oppressed
by the rounds
of birth and death
in other words
by the vicious circles
of life
in which I find myself
by suffering
by pain
and so on
and I want to be
emancipated
the teacher says
who is it that wants
to be emancipated
that's a stopper
there was a good old story
about one of these
preliminary interviews
the master asks
first of all
very casual questions
where's your hometown
what's your name
what did your father do
and where did you go to college
why is my hand so much like the Buddha's hand
and suddenly you know
in midstream of an ordinary conversation
clunk
the student is blocked
and so there is devised
the koan
k-o-a-n
in Chinese
kung an
and this means
literally the word koan
means a case
in exactly the same sense
as we talk about
a case in law
which functions as a precedent
for future cases
koan should be translated case
the koans are based on
stories
mondo
of the conversations
between the old masters
and their students
but you can make a koan
immediately
by such a question
why is my hand so much like the Buddha's hand
who are you
that asks this question
if the student tries to verbalize on that
and say
well I am so and so
he asks
who knows that you're so and so
how do you know that you know
who knows that you know
find out
in other words
the basic koan
is always
who are you
who is it that wants to escape from birth and death
and I won't take words for an answer
I want to see you
and all you are showing me at the moment is your mask
so then the student is sent back to the monk's quarters
the sodo
and the chief
of the sodo is called the jikijitsu
is then put in charge of him
and he teaches him how to behave what the rules are
how to eat
and how to meditate
in the Zen sect they sit on padded cushion
about the thickness of the San Francisco telephone directory which is an admirable substitute
and then with crossed legs in the lotus posture with the feet resting on the thighs
like you always see a Buddha
they sit for half hour periods
that's supposed to be the length of time it takes for a stick of incense to burn
and then
when wooden clappers are
knocked together they all get up
and they
walk
round and round the room
quite fast
at a kind of pace
and this keeps you awake
then at a given signal
they go back and meditate again
and constantly there is a monk
one on each side
carries a long flat stick
shaped almost like this fan
in the sense that it's thin at one end
and rounded at the other
and if this guy sees a monk
who is slouching or sleeping
or goofing off in some way
he very respectfully
bows before him
and the monk
rests his head on his knees
and this fellow takes the stick
and hits him vigorously on the shoulders
here like this
now most apologists for
zen say
this is not punishment
it's simply to keep you awake
don't you believe it
I've investigated this
and it's
it's the same as the
as the sort of um
British boys school
uh... only it isn't
it doesn't have the erotic
qualities that
the British floggings
uh... do
zen people are
cool about it
but it is
a kind of a fierce thing
anyway
the uh...
point of
the meditation
the zazen
is that perhaps at the beginning one does nothing more
than
count your breathing
so many breaths
in
counting in tens
just to
allow your
thoughts
to become still
zen people do not close their eyes
when they meditate
nor do they close their ears
they keep their eyes on the floor in front of them
and
they don't try
to force away any sounds that are going on
or any smell or any sensation whatever
only they don't think about it
and this can become
an extraordinarily pleasant occupation
all the little sounds
of
distant
traffic
of uh...
birds
of somebody carpentering somewhere
and a hammer going
dog barking
or especially
rain on the roof
gorgeous
they don't block that out
but as time goes on instead of counting breathing
they devote themselves to the koan problem
which the roshi has assigned
what is the sound of one hand
who were you before your father and mother conceived you
when joshu was asked does a dog have buddha nature
he replied no
what is the meaning of no
or move
all sorts of these problems
and so as time goes on every day
the student goes
to the teacher
for what is called san zen
san zen means studying zen
and he has to present
a satisfactory answer to the koan
now san zen is the moment in
the monastery
when no holds are barred
although there's a very formal approach to it
the monk has to stop outside the uh... masters quarters and uh... make this mokugyo
he does that three times
and at a signal from the master which is ringing a bell in reply
he goes in
and sits down in front of the master
and bows right down to the floor
and then sits up
and he repeats the koan that he's been given
and he's supposed to answer it
now the master if he's not satisfied with the answer may simply ring his bell
which means interview over
nothing doing
or if he's still not satisfied
he may try to do something
to
hint the student
as to which way to go
or puzzle him further
some sort of comment
but what happens is this
do you see what kind of a situation has been set up here
the student is really being asked
to be absolutely genuine
if i said to you now don't be self-conscious
i want you to be
perfectly sincere
and as a matter of fact i'm a mind reader
and i know whether you're being sincere or not
i can see right down to that last little wiggly guzzle in the back of your mind
and if you think i can
you see
i'm putting you in a double bind
i'm commanding you
to be genuine
how can you possibly do that
on command
especially when the person you're confronted with is a father figure
an authority figure
and in japan the sensei the teacher
is even a more
authoritative figure than one's father
which is saying a lot
but you are being asked in the presence of this tiger
to be completely spontaneous
or it isn't it isn't put in that way you see though i mean i'm describing this from the
standpoint of a psychologist observing what's going on here
no the thing you've got to do is you've got to hear the sound of one hand and
as your answers become more and more rejected you get more and more desperate and there is built up the state that is called the great doubt
the students do everything you know they've read all the old zen stories and they come in with the pieces of rock and wood and they try and hit the teacher they do everything they get and nothing nothing will do i remember i had a friend studying in Kyoto and uh...
on the way to the master's quarters who passed through a lovely garden with a pool and he saw a bullfrog in the garden and he grabbed this bullfrog they're very tame in japan and put it in the sleeve of his kimono and when he got in to give an answer to his koan he produced the
bullfrog and the master shook his head and said
too intellectual of course he meant not so much what we mean by intellectual but too contrived too premeditated you know you're just copying other people's zen antics and that's something you just can't get away with
well there does come a critical point of total desperation and when the student reaches that point the teacher really starts encouraging him he says now come on you're getting warm but you must die be ready to die for this
you must uh... students have even been put under uh... into the position that if they don't get it so many days they're going to commit suicide
and they have to stimulate this intense period a thing called Osseshin don't confuse the word session with the english session session means studying or observation of the shin the heart the mind the heart mind
Don't confuse the word session with the English session.
Session means studying or observation of the shin, the heart, the mind, the heart-mind.
And at this time, they only sleep four hours a night, and they meditate solidly all through
the day.
They go for the Sanzen interview twice a day, every one of them.
And it's a tremendous workout, and will last about five days, five or six days.
And in that period, the pressure is really on.
Everybody is worked into a pitch of this kind of psychic fury that they have to get this thing
answered.
There's a man in Japan today who has a five days in system, and he practically guarantees
that you will have satori in these five days.
I've just got a book about it written by a British, I haven't had a chance to read it
yet.
Well, I had someone I knew of who was over studying Zen on a Fulbright grant, and the grant was
winding up, and he still hadn't got the sound of one hand.
He said to the master, look, a grant's running out, and I can't stay here, and I've just
got to get this thing.
So just the day before he left, he suddenly realized that there was nothing to realize.
And that was it.
You know, here he had spent his whole life thinking that there's something deficient in
me.
See, there's something wrong.
Something I ought to find out to get this problem of life cleaned up.
Well, you know what you do, Rinzai, the old Chinese master said, Zen teaching is like
using an empty fist to deceive a child, or like trying to stop a child crying by giving
it a yellow leaf.
See, the child wants gold, and so you give it an autumn leaf and say, dear darling, there's
some gold.
Be all right.
Or with your closed fist, you say, what have I got here?
The child comes and tries to see and pull your fingers open, then you hide it behind
your back and under your leg and behind the chair.
The child gets absolutely fascinated.
The longer you keep this up, the more the child is sure there's something real goody inside
the hand.
And then at the end, nothing.
And that's Zen.
So there comes the time, you see, when the student can go in front of the master and not
give a damn, because he sees, he's seen the point.
There wasn't a problem.
He made up the problem himself.
He came and projected it on this master, who knew how to handle that kind of person, by making
him much more stupid than he was before, until he sees the essential stupidity of the human
situation where we are playing a game of one-upmanship on other people and on the universe.
How to get the better of life?
Well what makes you think you're separate from life so that you can get the better of it?
How can you beat the game?
What game?
Or who will beat it?
This illusion of beating the game, of finding the thing out, of catching it by the tail,
is therefore dissipated by the technique of the koan.
It's called, working on a koan is like a mosquito biting an iron bull.
It's the nature of the mosquito to bite.
It's the nature of an iron bull to be unbitten.
Or they say it's like swallowing a ball of molten lead.
You can't swallow it down.
You can't cough it up.
You can't get rid of this thing.
That's the great doubt, you see.
But this is an exaggerated form of what everybody is ordinarily trying to do, to beat the game.
So at that moment, the student has heard the sound of one hand, or discovered who he was
before father and mother conceived him, or what no means.
So the teacher says, good, now you have found the frontier gate to Zen.
You put your foot in at the door, and you're across the threshold.
But there's a long way to go.
And now you have found this priceless thing out.
You must redouble your efforts.
So he gives him another koan.
Now the student may be able to answer that one instantly, because it's simply a test koan.
See, there are five classes of koans.
The first class is what you call the Hinayana koans, and the other four are the Mahayana
koans.
Hinayana is to reach nirvana.
Mahayana is to come back and bring nirvana into the world as a bodhisattva.
So once you get the great void, you see, there's nothing to catch on to.
You are the universe.
It doesn't matter whether you live or die.
That's nirvana.
All clinging to life, everything like that.
You see, then, that it's hopeless.
And you give it up.
Not because you think you ought to give it up, because you know there is no way of catching
it.
There's nothing to catch hold of.
There's no safety in the cosmos.
So you just have to give up.
Then the next class of koans are such things as asking for miracles.
In that class comes take the four divisions of Tokyo out of your sleeve, or stop the booming
of a distant bell, blow out a candle in Timbuktu.
But as they go on in various ways they are concerned with all kinds of problems and how Zen understanding
deals with those problems.
Until we get in the end to the study of morality and rules of social and monastic life.
That's the last thing, and the Zen way of understanding it.
Now this may, this takes very, very differing periods of time.
Some people get through in as little as ten years, the whole thing.
There is a very brilliant Westerner by the name of Walter Novick, who has just about completed
the whole thing.
And he's a musician and a pianist.
And he'll come back to this country as the first accredited Zen master of the West.
And he'll set up his little Sodo on a farm and wait and see what happens.
The day of graduation comes.
And then everybody turns out and there's a great hullabaloo and they salute the departing
monk.
And he goes out.
He may just become a layman, as I said, or become a temple priest, or he may be himself
a Roshi.
The basis of all Indian philosophy, particularly the teaching of those books called the Upanishads,
which are really the distilled essence of Hindu thought, the basis is called the Self.
And this word in Sanskrit is Atman.
And that means Self in the vastest possible sense and the most inclusive sense of the word.
It means yourself and it means also Self as such, existence as such, the totality of all being.
And, of course, this is something that one cannot talk about in the sense of talking about it logically.
You can talk about it.
A poet can talk about anything.
And the Upanishad...
A poet can talk about anything.
are very largely poetry. Of course, everything in the world, knives and forks, tables and
chairs, trees and stones, are indescribable. Korzybski referred to the physical world as
the unspeakable world, which was really rather a funny name, because it has two edges. It's
of course something you can't say anything about, that is to say it is ineffable, but
it's unspeakable also in the sense of the word meaning something taboo. And we shall
see as we go on wherein that taboo consists. But from the standpoint of logic, we can't
say anything about everything, because in order to say something about something and state
it logically, you have to be able to put it in a class. Now, classes are intellectual
boxes. When you play games like animal, vegetable and mineral, you've got there three boxes.
And when you come to think of it, you don't know any one without another, because in order
to have a box, there must be what's inside the box and what's outside the box. And then
by this method of contrast, we can make a logical discussion about things. All words, therefore,
are labels on intellectual pigeonholes. But then, when you come to what fundamentally is,
then you're without a box, and you can't talk logically. Of course, you can distinguish
is from is not, but only in a very limited way. As I can say, I have a pen in my left hand,
I do not have a pen in my right hand. And from this, we abstract the idea of to be and not
to be, is and isn't. But when we consider being with a capital B, this includes not only
such ises as celestial bodies, but also such isn'ts as the space that encompasses them.
And these two go together, as we shall see in more detail as the time goes on. But now,
a perfectly logical person would therefore say that the notion of the Self, the Atman, as
the fundamental reality in which everything else exists is meaningless. And of course, from
a logical point of view, it is. But at the same time, just because something cannot be
put into a logical category does not indicate that it isn't real. The Self, you see, bears
somewhat the same relationship to the world as the diaphragm of the speaker in this radio
bears to the music you've just been hearing. None of the music was about the diaphragm, and
nobody said anything about there being a diaphragm. The diaphragm as such didn't come into the
picture, and yet it was everything in the picture. All those different noises were vibrations
of this thin film of metal. So also with your eardrum, so also with the apparatus of your
eyes. So, one might ask then, just as you say, well, what is it on? What is the music
on? Is it on tape? Is it on a speaker? Is it on a drum? Whatever the variations may be.
We can ask the question, what are you all on? What is all this on? And the Hindus answer,
it's on the self. Like we say, this one's on me. It isn't that there's only one self in the
sense that is taught in a philosophy called solipsism. Solipsism is the idea that you are the only
person who exists, and everybody else is your dream. Nobody can prove that this isn't so, except I'd
like to see a congress of solipsists arguing as to which one of them is really there. It isn't that.
It's more complex than that. It's saying that the self in each one of you is really at root one. Just in the
same way that you have all over your body millions of nerve ends, each one of those nerve ends is, as it were,
a little eye. Because all the senses are fundamentally one sense. There are various forms of touch. And the most delicate
of the forms of touch is, of course, the human eye. Then the ear, and so on down the list of the senses. Now imagine then
every little nerve end is a little eye. And it gets its impression of the world, but it sends it all back to the
central brain. Well, in a somewhat similar way, every person, every animal, every what the Hindus call sentient being,
and even rocks are regarded as sentient beings in a very, very primitive form, right down to the lowest. So all those forms
that we see may be looked upon as the eyes that look out of one central self. Only, of course, in the body, in the human body,
we can see the connections between the nerve ends and the brain. It's much more difficult to see the connection
between one individual and another. If they're married, that's a little bit closer. But just all us human beings
rattling around, we're not even rooted to the ground like trees. And therefore, it's very easy for us
to form the impression that I am only what is inside my bag of skin. And that myself is a different self
from yourself. And we're all, therefore, fundamentally disconnected. And so your apparent disconnection,
the fact that you are not tied to other people with umbilical cords, or some kind of, uh, wiring,
that gives you one mind. Nevertheless, we do have one mind. In the sense that, uh, for example,
all of us turn out to be approximately the same shape. Two eyes, two nostrils, a mouth, two hands, two legs,
and so on. A haiku poem, Japanese haiku, says a hundred gourds from the mind of one vine. And so it is
with people. And so it is with everything in the world. That's just from a purely physical point of view.
But going yet deeper, we find that it's somehow a necessity of thought. That there be some sort of a
something, which is the common ground of all these universes, all these galaxies. And that ground is the self,
as Hindus understand it, the Atman. Now that's quite startling point of view. Because what it's saying is, you see,
that you are basically the works. Now, the Hindus do say that the self, the great self, is consciousness. But of course,
that does not mean consciousness in the sense of our ordinary, everyday consciousness. Ordinary, everyday consciousness is, indeed, a form of this kind of consciousness.
Shall we say a manifestation of it? But then there's also consciousness which doesn't notice, but nevertheless is highly responsive. The way your heart beats, the way you breathe, the way you grow your hair, you're doing it, but you don't know how it's done. So, therefore, just in the same way that you're doing it, but you don't know how it's done.
So, therefore, just in the same way that conscious attention is not aware of all the other operations of the body, so, in just that way, we are not aware of our connection, indeed our identity, with the fundamental self.
With the fundamental self. When the leaves die, and fall off the trees, or the fruit drops, next year, more leaves, more fruit. So, in the same way, when you and I die, more babies later.
If the whole human race dies, you bet your life, there are all kinds of things that feel that they're human, scattered throughout the multiplicity of galaxies.
Because this universe is a peopling universe, just as an apple tree apples. But because we are unconscious of the intervals, we are not aware of the self with our conscious attention when conscious attention isn't operating.
But still, just as you don't notice what your pineal gland, say, is doing at the moment, so, in the same way, you don't notice the connections which tie us all together, not only here and now, but forever and ever and ever and ever.
The difficulty, and the basic reason why we don't notice the self, is that the self doesn't need to look at itself, a knife doesn't need to cut itself, fire doesn't need to burn itself, water doesn't need to quench itself, and a light doesn't need to shine on itself.
So, this is the fundamental problem of having some sort of awareness of the self.
Nevertheless, it is the whole contention of Indian philosophy, especially what we call Vedanta, that it is possible, in a certain way, to become aware of oneself in this deepest sense.
To know that you are the totality. And this experience is the real substance of Indian philosophy as a whole, both Hindu and Buddhist.
It is called moksha, which roughly means liberation. Liberation from the hallucination that you are just poor little me.
To wake up from that kind of hypnosis and discover that you are simply something, your organism, your physical body, your conscious attention, which is your ego.
That you are something being done by this vast, indescribable self, which is out of time, which has no beginning, no end, neither continues nor discontinues.
It is beyond all categorization whatsoever. And so the Upanishads say, all we can say of it, positively, is the negative.
Neti neti, it is not this, it is not that. Anything, therefore, you can formulate, imagine, picture, will not be the self.
So when you are trying to know the self, you have to get rid of every idea in your head.
It doesn't mean, as some people seem to think, that you have to get rid of every sense impression.
It isn't as if you had to go into a catatonic state of total absorption. Of course, that can be done. But the full moksha, the full liberation, is when you come back out of absorption and see this everyday world, just as it looks now.
But see, as clearly, as clearly can be, that it is all the self.
You can become aware of this tremendous interconnectedness of everything. And that is what somebody who is moksha, who is liberated, sees.
He sees, shall we say, that everything goes together. And that is, in a way, what we mean by relativity, because relativity means relatedness.
Just as fronts go with backs and tops with bottoms, insides with outsides, solids with spaces, so everything that there is goes together.
And it makes no difference whether it lasts a long time or whether it lasts a short time.
A galaxy goes together with all the universe just as much as a mosquito, which has a very short life.
From the standpoint of the self, time is completely relative.
You can have, if you scale it down, as much time between two of those very rapid drumbeats as you can in eons and eons and eons.
It's all a question of point of view. Or, to use a scientific expression, level of magnification.
Change your magnification and you see molecules. And we know, by other methods of observation, that it can get smaller and smaller and smaller.
And that the spaces between these minute units are so vast that they are comparable to the distances between the sun and the planets in scale.
So also with time. So in this sense, there could be vast, vast universes full of empires and battleships and palaces and brothels and restaurants and orchestras in the tip of your fingernail.
And on the other hand, we could be all going on in the tip of somebody else's fingernail.
It's very important to understand not only the relativity of size and of time, but also of what there is.
Now, as you know, the human senses respond only to a very small band of the known spectrum of vibrations.
We know through instruments of quite a vast spectrum, but we, as I say with our senses, see only a little of it.
If our senses were in some way altered, we would see a rather different looking world.
We can do this, of course. We can put on special lenses to enable us to see heat.
And then we see all the heat radiations coming out of people.
And we say, well, I never noticed that about you before.
But so in the same way, you see, there are infinitely many possibilities of vibration,
and of organs sensitive to those vibrations, so that there could be worlds within worlds within worlds,
spaces within spaces, just like the many, many wavelengths of radio and television,
going on forever and ever in all directions. The possibilities are infinite.
But having senses and noticing is a selective process. It picks out only certain ones, just as when you play the piano.
You don't take both arms and slam down all keys at once. You select.
And so perception is a kind of piano playing. It is picking out certain things as significant,
that is to say, as constituting patterns. And the whole universe seems to be a process of playing with different patterns.
But whatever it does, whatever it plays, in whatever dimension, on whatever scale of time or space,
it's all on the Self. The Self is also known in Sanskrit as Brahman.
This is a neuter word. Brahman is from the root, B-R-H, brh, which means to expand, to grow.
It isn't quite clear exactly why this word was chosen. Sometimes there's a still better word for the Self,
which I like, is the word tat, almost like tit for tat. Tat means that. We get our word that from the Sanskrit tat.
And so when the baby comes into being, first of all, the first thing it says is tat, tat.
The baby is pointing, tat, tat, tat. And it's saying that. Look, isn't that marvelous, that. You see?
You see? So that is the witch in which there is no witcher. And so you get the formula in this, uh,
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Tat, Tvam, Asi. Which means tat, that, Tvam, Latin, you know?
Uh, you, Asi, are. You are that. Or that thou art. That art thou. So, in this sense then,
every Self is modeled on, and is an expression of the One Self, because you all feel, individually,
that you're the center of the world. And everything else is seen in circles, circling out,
circling out, sphering out, from where you are. And that's, as it were, the, called the microcosm,
the little cosmos. But then, in the same way, the macrocosm has a central Self,
although this is not central, in the way we talk about centers in space. Do you see that?
Uh, a center of a circle is in the middle of the circle, and the circumference is away from it.
But you could say, you could use a phrase that the Christian theologians have used of God,
that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You could speak of Brahman that way.
It isn't in the middle of the universe, spatially speaking. You might ask the question, where is the universe?
Have you ever thought of that one? Where is it? Well, you can't say where, because every where has to be in relation to something.
There would have to be another universe to say where this one is. But then, since those two together would constitute the universe,
uh, we wouldn't still be able to say where it was. It isn't anywhere. And so, in that sense, the center isn't anywhere in space, locally.
And furthermore, the kind of space we are dealing with is only one possible kind of space.
It's the kind of space our physical organisms are attuned to. We are, you see, like the radio. We pick up what wavelength we are on.
So then, when inquirers used to come to that great modern Hindu saint, Sri Ramana Maharshi, and they'd ask him all sorts of silly questions.
Like, who was I in my last incarnation? What will I be in my next one? He would always reply, who is asking the question?
Who are you? Find out. Because that's the thing you need to know. As it were, dig down into the depths of your being and say,
What is this that I call I? That's one of the very fascinating questions. It's also, it teases us out of thought to think about death in the sense of going to sleep and never waking up.
Imagine that. And you find you can't. And yet, it's a thought that although you can't get to grips with it, it remains fascinating.
Also the question, how is it suddenly that you awakened into this world? Where were you before?
In Zen Buddhism they have the meditation problem, the koan.
Before your father and mother conceived you, what is your original nature?
And that's the same sort of weird question as what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up.
What was it like to wake up having not previously gone to sleep?
It's very mysterious.
But as you go on and plumb this question, you begin to develop the feeling that your existence is exceedingly odd.
In many ways odd.
Odd because it is here and it so easily might not have been.
After all, if your father hadn't met your mother, would you be here?
Now of course somebody would be here.
Because he might have met somebody else.
Would that be you?
Of course it would.
Don't you see?
You can only be you by being someone.
But every someone is you.
Every someone is I.
That's your name, you see.
It's me.
I am here.
And everybody feels that I in the same way.
It's the same feeling.
Just like blue everywhere is the same color.
So I-ness being, as it were, the most fundamental thing in man is also fundamental to the universe.
It too is I.
And our I is a special case of it.
Coming out from the, in quotes, central eye.
Like so many tits from the belly of a sow.
Or so many spines from a sea urchin.
So many legs from a spider.
And that is of course why the images of the Hindu gods are shown with many arms or many faces.
Because it is saying that all arms are the arms of the divinity.
All faces are its masks.
So you see, there's really nothing to worry about.
Because the important you is perfectly indestructible.
It's what there is.
Our comings and goings, our fortunes and misfortunes are a sort of mirage.
The more we know about them, the more we know about the world, the more diaphanous it seems.
And therefore everything in the world has the characteristics of smoke.
You know when you blow a cigarette or pipe or something and a cloud of smoke and you see it in the sunbeam.
And it's full of walls and designs and all kinds of marvellous things going on.
And then slowly it disappears.
Well everything is just like that.
Now there are two attitudes you can take to that state of affairs.
You can say sour grapes, it's all a lousy, wretched trap.
And I, here I am, I'm given all these feelings of love and attachment and joy of life.
And then I fall apart.
My teeth drop out, my eyes become feeble.
I get cancer or cirrhosis of the liver or something.
And then it all falls apart.
And it's too bad.
Therefore, therefore, don't become attached to things.
Don't enjoy life.
Treat it, holding it off like that.
Just like a very, very firm person who's been jilted and says never again will I get mixed up with love.
Because love hurts.
But on the other hand, a weaving of smoke can be very beautiful.
Provided you don't lean on it.
Provided you don't try to preserve it.
Catch hold of it.
Then you destroy it.
So exactly the same way.
There's nothing in the way of form that you can lean on.
That you can grasp.
And if you see that, then the world of form is very beautiful.
If you let it go.
To love people, you see, if you're husband and wife.
You must let each other go.
Otherwise the marriage is either going to break up or it's going to be hell.
If you love a person, you say to that person, look, I love you, whatever that may be.
I've seen quite a bit of it.
And I know there's lots that I haven't seen.
But still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be.
And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage.
You'd be a bird without song.
And they're likely to go on loving each other.
But if they wrap each other up with all sorts of ties and chains and documents and things, then they are not on a very safe basis.
The very firm words of those documents belie the situation because nobody curses and swears and kisses the Bible and all sorts of things like that if he means yes.
If there's some doubt that he means yes, then he's asked what they call this rituals of cursing and swearing and signing on dotted lines and putting a seal and something.
Indicates doubt right at once.
It just does fly in the argument from the beginning.
So when the Hindu and Buddhist philosophers speak of detachment from all this apparent world of separate beings, detachment means going with this whole thing and not resisting its change.
And you can afford to go with it. You can afford to get mixed up in life and to fall in love and to get involved with all sorts of things.
You could afford it if you know.
that it's an illusion.
But this is not illusion in a bad sense of the word.
Here's this Hindu word, crucial.
The world is called maya.
This word maya, yes it means illusion.
It means magic.
It means art.
It means delineation or measurement.
So from mantra we get meter.
We also get matter, material.
Isn't it funny that when we say material,
today we mean something very real.
Because the root of the word is illusion.
So you see, I mean measurement is kind of an illusion.
You don't find inches lying around.
You can't pick up an inch.
So in the same way that hours and inches and pounds
and dollars and so on are actually imaginary.
There are elaborate systems of cosmic bookkeeping
with their little scratches on paper,
little hairlines on dials.
So in exactly that way,
the distinction between things is maya, is imaginary.
But what an imagination!
In a way, to say that the world is maya,
is at the same time to say,
that what lies behind maya is immaterial.
Look at the reversal of the word.
Oh, it's immaterial.
Doesn't matter.
What matters?
It's all this.
But that gets us to a deeper point yet.
The self, the real self, doesn't matter.
Which is another way of saying,
it doesn't exist for any purpose.
It doesn't need to exist for any purpose.
What purpose would it exist for?
When it's what there is.
It doesn't need, won't find anything in the future,
has nothing in the past that it has to go back and remember.
Is now.
An eternal now.
And so in that way, it doesn't matter.
But therefore,
the most important thing in the universe,
is the one thing that doesn't matter.
The one thing that's totally and completely useless.
And that nobody can find anything for.
Once a Zen master was asked,
what is the most valuable thing in the world?
And he answered, the head of a dead cat.
Why?
Because no one can put a price on it.
So this self, the Brahman,
is like the head of a dead cat.
But you see,
if then you say,
hmm, I really ought to get that dead cat's head,
because there's something spiritual about it,
and it'd be very good for me.
After all, if I knew the self,
I might be a better person.
People might like me more.
I'd be more constructive in society.
I would, uh,
do this, that, and the other.
You see, that's putting the cart before the horse.
That's trying to make the tail wag the dog.
The knowledge of Brahman,
the self,
never does anybody any good
if they're trying to make it do them some good.
Only when
they're not concerned
with whether it does them any good or not,
does it do them any good.
It's like when you relax,
and you go out and play.
Americans, in particular,
don't know how to do this,
because they're always justified.
They always say,
it's good for me.
It's exercise.
It is to change from work,
and that'll be able to make me work better.
See?
Everything they do is done for some serious reason.
It's the Protestant conscience.
And so we never play,
except very exceptionally,
because play is that which is done just for itself,
for fun.
So the self,
the Atman, the Brahman,
exists for fun.
It has no reason to exist.
It's completely useless.
And it is, therefore,
Maya is linked with the word Lila.
And that means play.
Also, of course,
the word illusion,
in English,
is derived from the Latin luderi,
to play.
So the nature,
you might say,
of the self,
is that it does no work.
It only plays.
Work is something serious,
you know,
that you do for a purpose,
because you believe that you've got to go on living.
You work to survive,
because you think you have to survive.
That was one of the things they told you as a little child.
You've got to go on, man.
But you don't have to.
This thing doesn't have to go on.
That's why it does.
I know that sounds paradoxical,
but there's so many things in life that are like that.
If I'm trying to impress people,
I usually don't.
If you try too hard with anything,
you usually make a mess of it.
And so,
this basic thing, then,
is that the self,
the Brahman behind the world,
is engaged in play.
This, it is in this sense,
that the Hindu philosophers say,
Brahman does not actually become the world.
The meaning of that is,
he's playing at being it,
or it's playing at being it,
as distinct from working at it.
And so, in certain oriental countries,
when one refers to noble people of high birth,
it is often said,
so, so, Lord so and so has died.
The Japanese would say,
he's played at dying.
Or, will he play at taking a journey to Tokyo?
Also, remember this.
Although I've constantly used,
in this talk,
the word one,
to apply to the self,
and central.
The Hindus don't use this word,
except speaking poetically and loosely.
The self is not one.
The self is called non-dual.
Because, you see,
the idea of one has an opposite.
The opposite of one is many.
Or none.
But,
the which than which there is no witcher,
has no opposite.
There's nothing outside it.
So, you can't call it one.
Because one is an exclusive idea.
It excludes two.
So, they call it, instead of one,
they call it non-dual,
which is advaita.
This is from the word, you see,
deva is the root meaning two.
The V becomes you,
so we get dual.
And,
ah,
is the meaning in Sanskrit often non.
Non-dual.
Advaita.
And so,
it doesn't exclude anything.
One is an exclusive word.
Advaita is meant to be a totally inclusive kind of unity.
Now, of course,
this word itself,
when you look at it from a logical standpoint,
is a dualistic word,
just like one.
It's the opposite of dvaita.
Dvaita and advaita.
But the idea here in Indian philosophy
is to use this word in a certain way.
Now, you know that on a flat surface,
you can't draw three dimensions.
Anything you draw will be in two dimensions.
But, why do we see three dimensions?
Because of an artistic convention,
called one-pointed perspective,
which will give you the illusion of a third dimension.
Now, in other words,
a two-dimensional line
is being used
to imply a third dimension,
which can never be expressed on a flat surface.
So, in exactly the same way,
Advaita is a word used specially
to designate
what lies beyond all logical categories.
So,
you must remember, of course,
that the word play
play and the word game
have many levels of meaning.
We are accustomed to use the word play
in opposition to work
and to regard play as trivial
and work as serious.
Very largely, a game or a play
is something associated in our minds
with triviality.
You're only playing with me,
says a girl to a suitor.
You're not serious.
How serious do you have to be?
When does one get serious in a flirtation?
When do we say,
this is getting serious?
When you're holding hands,
playing footsies under the table,
kissing,
petting,
sleeping together,
married and babies.
Maybe that's serious.
But,
we also use the word play
in a non-trivial sense.
I went to hear Heifetz playing the violin.
Was that a trivial matter?
On the contrary.
The very highest kind of art form.
Still play.
I say too, when I do philosophy,
like I'm doing with you,
this is entertainment.
But in the sense,
perhaps, I hope,
of your listening to someone play
a musical classic.
I'm not being serious,
but I am being sincere.
The difference you see
between seriousness and sincerity
is that
seriousness
is
someone speaking
in the context
of the possibility
of tragedy.
that
there is a situation
where things might
go absolutely wrong.
And then I put on the expression
which is serious.
That's why soldiers
on parade
are always serious.
They don't laugh.
And when they salute the flag,
they put on a stern expression.
That's why
in courts of law
and in churches,
people don't normally laugh.
Because all that we deal with here
is very important,
a matter of life and death.
But the fundamental question
must be brought forth.
Is God serious?
And obviously,
the answer is no.
Because there's nothing
to be serious about.
I said also that the self
as conceived,
the Supreme Self
was quite useless.
That it was immaterial.
Doesn't matter.
because it transcends
all values
of what is better
or worse,
what is
upwards or downwards,
what is good and bad.
It so weaves the world
that the good and the bad
play together
like the black and white pieces
in the game of chess.
So,
play
is
deeply
the sort of thing
children like to do
with deep absorption
and fascination
to drop pebbles into the water
and watch the concentric circles
of waves.
Or mathematicians.
Mathematicians, you know,
especially what we call
higher Mathematicians,
are entirely lacking
in seriousness.
They couldn't give a hoot
in hell
as to whether
what they're doing
has any practical application.
They are working entirely
on interesting puzzles
and working out
what they call
elegant and beautiful
solutions
to these puzzles.
And they can go on and on
like that
in absorbed meditation,
spend their whole lives
doing it.
Or consider the musician
practicing,
working out interpretations.
What is he doing?
He's making series
of interesting noises
on instruments.
And what do people like to do
when they don't have to do anything?
Well, as far as I can make out,
as you look all over the world,
they like to get together
and do something rhythmic.
They may dance,
they may sing,
they may even play games
because, say,
in playing dice
there's a certain wonderful rhythm
to shaking the cup
and rolling the dice out
on the table.
Or dealing cards
,
you know?
All the things that people like to do
and think about these rhythms.
Or some people like to knit.
And this is,
this is a rhythmic thing, you see?
Others just like to breathe.
There are all sorts of ways
in which
we love to do this.
Now you see,
our very existence
is a rhythm
of waking and sleeping,
eating and moving,
and that's all we're doing.
And just consider
what we do every day.
What's it all about?
Does it really mean anything?
Does it go anywhere?
It's just because
we want to keep on
doing this
kind of a hoop-de-dah.
So you can get
a certain vision of life
where everything is seen
to be a complex pattern of rhythm.
Dances,
the human dance,
the flower dance,
the bee dance,
the giraffe dance.
And these are also
comparable to various games.
Poker,
bridge,
backgammon,
chess,
checkers,
etc.
Or to various musical forms.
Sonata,
fugue,
partita,
concerto,
symphony,
or whatever.
And that's what this all is.
It's jazz.
You see?
This is a big jazz, this world.
And what it's trying to do
is to see how jazzed up it can get.
How far out
this play of rhythm can go.
Because that's what
we all come down to.
You see?
We're going this
de-d-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de.
In every conceivable way.
So then that is why, you see,
this fundamental view that the world is play.
Now, let's examine the rules of this game.
The basic form of the cosmic game, according to the Hindu view,
is the game of hide and seek. Or you might call it
the game of lost and found. Or again,
now you see it, now you don't. In examining the nature of
vibration, we find a very peculiar thing.
If you represent
vibration as a wave motion, you will notice
that there is no such manifestation
as half a wave. We do not find in nature
crests without troughs or troughs without crests.
No sound is produced unless
there is both. Both the
the beat, as it were, and the interval
between. Now,
this wave phenomenon
is happening
on ever so many scales.
There is the very, very
fast wave of light.
The slower wave of sound.
Then, there are all sorts of other
wave processes.
The beat of the heart.
The rhythm of the breath.
Waking and sleeping.
The peak of human life from birth
to maturity,
and down again to death.
And the slower the wave goes,
the more difficult it is to see
that the crest and the trough
are inseparable.
So that we become persuaded in the game of hide and seek
that it is possible
for the trough
to go down and down and down forever
and never rise again into a crest.
Forgetting
that trough implies crest
just as crest implies trough.
There is no such thing, you see,
as pure sound.
Sound is sound silence.
Light
is light darkness.
Light is pulsation.
And between
every light pulse
there is the dark pulse.
And so the Hindu image is that the self
eternally plays a game
of hide and seek with itself.
Hindus calculate time
in Kalpa units.
And the Kalpa
is 4,320,000 years.
And so they say that
for a period of a Kalpa
the worlds are manifested.
Or any particular universe.
Not all universes.
But let's say
any particular galaxy
or whatever it may be.
World order of some kind.
Don't take this too literally.
Don't take these figures
as being some sort of divine revelation
as to making predictions
and prophecies.
They're symbolic figures.
So
for
one Kalpa
the world is manifested.
And that period
is called in Sanskrit
a Manvantara.
And during that time
the Brahman
plays
hide.
And
he hides
it hides
in all of us.
Pretending
that it's us.
And then
at the end of the Kalpa
there comes the period
called
Pralaya.
And that also
is a Kalpa long.
And in that period
the Brahman
as it were
comes out of the act
and returns to itself
in peace
and bliss.
This is a very logical idea.
What would you do
if you were God?
Isn't the whole fun of things
as every child knows
to go on adventures?
To
make believe.
To
create illusions.
That is to say
patterns.
And so
for some ways of talking
in Hindu thought
this world is the dream
of the Godhead.
The Godhead is of course
represented
as in a way
two-faced.
With one face
he dreams
and is absorbed
in the dream world.
With the other face
he is liberated.
In other words
what you have to understand
correctly
is that from the standpoint
of the self
the Supreme Self
the Pralaya
and the Manvantara
are simultaneous.
But put into mythological form
for human consumption
they are represented
as being
in sequence
following each other.
But they really happen
at the same time.
So that
one doesn't realize
union with the self
after death
later
than a certain time.
All references
to the hereafter
should correctly be
understood
as the herein.
As a domain
deeper than
egocentric consciousness.
that is to say
when you get down
to the bottom
of the egocentric consciousness
you get to its limit
which is figuratively
its death.
Then you go on inwards
the self
deeper than the
conscious attention.
And in that way
you go inwards
to eternity
you don't go onwards
to eternity.
To go onwards
is to find only time
and time
and more time
in which things go round
and round and round
forever.
But to go in
is to go to eternity.
But in the ordinary way
when we are talking
about this graphically
and vividly
in imagistic terms
we can talk about
the everlasting game
of hide and seek
which the self
plays with itself.
It forgets who it is
and then creeps up
behind itself
and says boom!
And that's a great thrill.
It pretends
that things are getting serious.
Just as a great actor
on the stage
although the audience
know that what they are
seeing is only a play
the skill of the actor
is to take the audience in
and to have them all
sitting in anxiety
on the edges of their seats
or to be weeping
or laughing
or utterly involved
in what they really know
is only a play.
So you would imagine
that if there were
a very great actor
with absolutely
superb technique
he would take himself in
and he you see
would feel
that the play
was real.
Well that's their idea
of what we are doing
here and now.
We are all
the brahman
acting
our own parts
being human
playing the human game
so beautifully
that he is enchanted.
Do you see what enchanted means?
Under the influence
of a chant
hypnotized
spellbound
fascinated
and that fascination
is maya.
Now then this works
on a little plan.
Let us consider
the breakdown
of
a single kalpa.
It consists of
four yugas
Yuga
that means an epoch.
Number one
is called
Krita
or sometimes
Satya
and these names
are based on
the Hindu game of dice.
there are
four throws
in their game
and Krita
means the perfect throw
the throw of four.
Number two
is Tretta
the throw of three.
Number three
is Dvapara
the throw of two
and number four
is Kali
that's the worst throw
the throw of value one.
Now
you will see
that these
yugas
divide up
a period
of 4,320,000 years.
I never remember
numbers too well.
So
the first yuga
is
1,780,000 years long.
The second
is 1,296,000 years.
The third
the Dvapara
is
864,000
and
the
Kali yuga
is
432,000.
Now you see
what's happening here.
What
when
when the manifestation
starts
it's as good as possible.
Everything is just
glorious
because you know well
that if you were dreaming
anything you wanted to dream
you would start out
by having the most luscious
dreams imaginable.
Now
when we get you see
to the Tretta yuga
something is a little bit wrong.
Krita
is four square.
Everything's perfect
like the symbol of the square
is an ancient symbol of perfection.
Tretta is the triangle.
Something's missing.
There's a little bit
of uncertainty
and danger
now enters.
By the time we get to Dvapara
the forces of light
and darkness
are equal.
Duality.
The pair.
But
when we get to Kali
the force of darkness
overcomes.
But
now you see what happens
is
if you take
one third
of the Tretta yuga
as being
on the bad side
half of the Dvapara yuga
as being on the bad side
and all of the Kali yuga
and you add those figures up
you will get the bad side
occupying
only one third
of the total time.
So what's going on here?
It is not quite a situation
you see
it's not a view of the cosmos
in which good and evil
are so evenly balanced
that nothing happens.
Evil is just
troublesome enough
to give good a run
for its money.
It's as
the game that is being played here
is playing order
against chaos.
But you've got to have some chaos
in order to play the game of order
against it.
But if order wins
there's no further game.
if chaos wins there's no further game.
If they're equally balanced it's a stalemate.
So what happens is this
order is
chaos is always losing
but is never defeated.
It's the good loser.
The good loser.
that is a game that is worth the candle let's take playing chess if you get an
opponent who can always defeat you you start playing with him if you get an
opponent whom you can always defeat you stop playing with them but so long as
there is a certain uncertainty of outcome and you win some of the time
then it's a good game and this is simply a sim a number symbolism as I said
again not to be taken literally literally of the way this thing works so the
mythology says that we are now in the Kali Yuga which started a little before
three thousand BC so we got a long way to go to the end of it if you go to take
this literally but of course people have a way of always being in the Kali Yuga we
can go back to Egyptian inscriptions from six thousand BC which say is that
the world is going hopelessly to the dogs that's always been a complaint but
according to this mythology there are the the you have to realize the the Lord the
Brahman in three aspects one is Brahma the creative principle two is Vishnu the
preserving principle and three is Shiva the destroying principle and Shiva is very
important here Shiva is always represented in Hindu imagery as a yogi he is the destroyer
in the sense of being the liberator the cracker of shells so that chickens can come forth the breakout
up of mothers so that their children can be unsmothered the liberative destruction the bonfire that's why devotees of Shiva like to do their
meditations along the banks of the Ganges where they burn dead bodies because through
destruction life is constantly renewed Shiva has a paramour and her name is Kali but that is a different word the
this Kali you mustn't confuse the two and Kali is much worse than Shiva she is black and she has a long long tongue and her eye teeth are like fangs but she's very beautiful otherwise
there's a lovely figure but she's black and in one hand her right hand she carries a scimitar and in her left she carries a severed head hanging by the hair and Kali who is Shiva's you see Shiva is normally considered wedded all the gods have their paramours and they're all examples of the one central self
one central self she's called Parvati but that's her bright aspect but her dark aspect is Kali and Kali is the awful awful the thing above all that men most dread Kali is outer darkness Kali is the end she may be represented as a blood sucking octopus as a spider
mother that eats its spouse and Kali is the principal of total night and yet there are those in India like Sri Ramakrishna for whom Kali is the supreme mother goddess because she is two faced she is playful and terrifying loving and devouring destroyer and savior
destroyer and savior and the cult of Kali has its importance helping one to see the light principle in the very depth of darkness I have some suggestions for meditation on Kali which you can all practice very easily you go to the aquarium and you find out there the monsters of
the deep that make you feel most uncomfortable and you study so in this way Kali is studied by her devotees and if you meditate on those this will be like putting manure on the soil and out of all this apparently morbid and dismal thinking bright things will begin to arise
the most far out the most far out act that the supreme self can put on the symbol of complete alienation from itself so what happens you see is this in the process of the game of hide and seek the supreme self tries to see how far out it can get just like children like to sit around and have a competition as to who can make the most hideous face
so this gets worse and worse as the time cycle goes on until at the end of the Kali Yuga Shiva puts in an appearance and he's all black and he has ten arms and he dances a dance called the Tandava and in dancing the Tandava the whole universe is destroyed in fire
and it starts again
well now you see this involves certain ideas that are quite alien to the west one the idea of the world as play our lord god in the west tends to be over serious and no great christian artist has ever painted a laughing christ
nothing that i've seen of any of the great masters always this figure is tragic and has that sort of look in the eye which says one of these days you and i have got to get together for a very serious talk so you see there is some difficulty about the notion of the world as dramatic play
for us there's another difficult notion here and that is cyclic time see most of us live in linear time this originated with saint augustine and his interpretation of the bible now i don't know how true this really is but it's certainly a big fashion in modern scholarship to say that it was judaism that gave us the idea of history
indus have no interest in history whatsoever or not until recent times to the total exasperation of historians there is no way of finding textual evidence of the age of most of the hindu scriptures because they aren't interested in history as such they are only interested in human events as archetypal occurrences as
as repetitions of the great mythological themes over and over again so if in a document started out that a certain adventure happened to king so and so whom everybody knew at the time in the next generation they changed the name of that king to the current king because the story was typical anyway they just wanted to say a king everybody knew they altered things in that way and so they know no kind of chronology
what kind of chronology and if you ask even quite intelligent asians about this they have difficulty in understanding what kind of a question you're asking what is this history thing whereas on the other hand according to our scholars the jews were historically minded because they remembered the story of their descent from adam and abraham the great event of the liberation from egypt
the triumphant reign of king david and then things go sliding down hill as other political forces become stronger and stronger and so they get fixed on the idea that one day is going to be the day of the lord and the messiah will come and put an end to history and there will be the restoration of paradise
but this is linear they don't think of the world having been created many many times before and come to an end many many times before it's one clear ascent from start to finish from alpha to omega
well when saint augustine was thinking about this he thought if time is cyclic jesus would have to be crucified for the salvation of the world once in every cycle but for some reason he had it firmly fixed into his head that there was only one historical crucifixion in time what they call the one full
sacrifice oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world once is enough now of course he got his hierarchies confused it's true there is one sacrifice but that's on the plane of eternity on the plane of time eternal things can be repeated again and again and again but so as a result of that we are handed down not a greek the greeks also had cyclic time like the hindus
that we have been handed down linear time and therefore we are always thinking of a progression that will take us steadily steadily steadily steadily faster and faster to a more and more perfect world and it will get better and better and better and better all the way along if we keep our heads now this
this shows i think a rather naive view of human nature human beings tend to smash what they create and say let's do it again there is that in man which is also in the child rub it out what fun and so it isn't really too realistic
and better and better and better and better and better and better and better because they'll soon get tired of it they say let's be as awful as possible
see there was that element in nazism how awful can you get how brutal can you be how destructive and that uh it isn't just germans you know who have that see we are converting all the living world around us into excrement
pretending it doesn't happen that way and we are the most marvelous vortices
in this stream of food which whirls around as us and then disappears into
excrements which again fertilize the soil and we keep on at it so you see
there is that thing in us which is represented by Shiva Kali and it's
always there the Hindu looks at the world with very very hard-boiled realism in this
way and sees terror and magnificence love and fury as two faces of the same
thing and you could say well is there any peace possible after you've looked at
this picture for a long long time you've conceived the endless endless cycles
because this thing goes on always and always and always per omnia secular secularum
world without end and the Hindu sometimes feels oh Brahma don't you ever get tired
of it no because Brahma doesn't have to remember anything and you only get tired
of things you remember that's why from the standpoint of Brahma there's no time only
an eternal now so the secret of waking up from the drama the endless cycles is the
realization that the only time that there is is the present and when you become awake to that boredom
is at an end and you are delivered from the cycles not in the sense that they disappear that you
no longer go through them you do go through them but you know you realize that they're not going anywhere
now then supposing you liken the rhythm of these cycles to music why surely you don't hurry it up
you don't say let's get to the end faster you know how to listen to music only when you slow down time
and sit back and let that be and so in the same way you can see every little detail of life
in a new way you say oh my look at that and so our one's eyes are opened in astonishment
by being living totally here and now this concludes session nine of out of your mind essential listening
from the alan watts audio archives our program continues with session 10. i started out yesterday
to discuss what the self means in hindu philosophy the principle tat tvam asi that art thou meaning that
the self is the basis of all being and being is not something into which we come but out of which we proceed
in popular language we say i came into this world as if you came from somewhere else altogether from
outside but you don't you come out of this world just in the same way as the leaves come from the tree
and so in that way you are an expression of it and the self meaning itself self meaning identity
basis ground is what everybody fundamentally is then i went on to discuss the world as the self in the sense
of the the cosmos as the self the great cycles of time in which according to hindu philosophy and mythology
the world is manifested and then again withdrawn and now i want to go on to discuss the human world
as the self well now there have in the known history of mankind been about three types of culture
we'll call them hunting cultures agrarian cultures and industrial cultures
the hunting culture seems to have been the earliest and agrarian cultures arose when
hunters learned to farm and therefore had to settle in certain places
and it was then that men built cities and when we pass from the hunting to the agrarian culture
we notice two very important changes occur in the hunting culture every man
is expert in the whole culture that's because he spends a good deal of time alone
in the forests or on the hills
and so he has to know how to make clothes how to cook how to build how to fight ride and all those things
but as soon as people become settled in cities
we get a division of labor because it's obviously more practical when you're all living together
for some people to specialize in some things and some in others the other important difference
is the difference of religion between the hunting culture and the agrarian culture
the religious man of the hunting culture is generally known as a shaman
s-a-h-a-m-a-n
and a shaman
is a kind of weird individual and i mean weird in the ancient sense of the word
not queer
but weird in the sense of magic
he is a person of a peculiar type of sensitivity
who finds initiation into the shaman role
by going off by himself for a long time
into the depths of the forest or the heights of the mountains
and in that isolation
he comes in touch with a
domain of consciousness
which is known by all sorts of names
the spirit world
the ancestors
the gods
or whatever
and his knowledge of that world is supposed to give him a peculiar powers
of healing
of prophecy
of magic in general
the thing that you must note though about a shaman
is that his initiation
is found by himself
he does not receive initiation
from
an order
or a guru
on the other hand the religious man of the agrarian community
is a priest
and a priest
is almost invariably an ordained person
he receives his power
from
a community of priests
or from
a guru
in other words from tradition
tradition is all important
in the agrarian community
now then
reasonably enough
the first communities
are staccaded enclosures
they are made of palings
and so we speak of people being within the pale
and beyond the pale
and because the word
paling we still use in fencing
and you know that the spanish for a tree is palo
so here is a primitive stockaded community
and
and as often as not
this community will settle
at a crossroads
for obvious reasons
where roads cross
that's where people meet
and so it's liable to have
four gates
and these crossing main streets
and that immediately establishes four divisions of the city
and so oddly enough
in hindu society
there are four castes
based on the four fundamental divisions of labor
and number one
is the caste of priests
and they're called brahmana
number two
is the caste of warriors
and also rulers
and they're called kshatriya
number three
is the caste of merchants
and tradesmen
and they're called vaishya
and number four
are laborers
and they are called shudras
so those are
the four principal roles
in
the world of settled humanity
it's interesting i said people settled in cities because they had to plant
and there are many legends to the effect
that what they were mostly concerned with planting were grapes for wine
and they cultivated vineyards
and it's said of noah that after the flood in the bible the first thing he did was to plant a vineyard
he knew which side was up
so now then those are the roles
those are you might say
masks
as it were
of the brahman
in this game called the social game
now then
when you enter society you are born into a caste
and this is very understandable in a community
where you don't have
a generalized system of education
you don't go to school
and therefore you learn
what to do in life from your parents and your family
so if you grow up
as a carpenter's son
it never occurs to you to do anything else but carpentry
why would you
you might become a better carpenter than your father
but still that would be the natural thing to do
it's only when
one is exposed to school
and then the people begin to talk about well what do you want to be in life
that people get the idea that they might be anything
so if the
if this sort of way of life is natural to you
you don't find it particularly objectionable
of course
all kinds of weird
complications and rituals and prohibitions grow up in the course of time
that can make this system very cumbersome
as it has been until quite recently in india
then what happens is this
you go through an evolution in your development in this community
which has first of all the stage called brahmacharya
you go through an evolution in this community
after that you enter the stage of grihasta
meaning householder
and a householder has two duties
one is called artha
a-r-t-h-a
and the other karma k-a-m-a
artha means
the duties of citizenship
partaking in the
political life of the community
karma k-a-m-a
means
the cultivation of the senses
of aesthetic and sensual beauty
and therefore karma
includes the art of love
the arts of beautification
of dress
of cooking
and all that kind of thing
so that the karma sutra
is the scripture about love
karma in a sense means passion
and is the great hindu manual
of how
to behave sexually
it's a book that every child ought to read on
gaining puberty
so that he would get some sense
of how to make love without being
a mere baboon
then there is also the artha shastra
and that is the scripture about rulers
and the the way of the kshatriya caste
now
so you've got these stages now
brahmacharya
which is studentship
artha and karma
they go together
and they constitute the duties
of grihasta
of a householder
beyond that there is the duty of dharma
d-h-a-r-m-a
and dharma has many many meanings in sanskrit
it can mean something like law
or justice
could even mean slightly righteousness
but not as we have come to understand that word
in common speech today
perhaps rightness would be better than righteousness
but dharma has a primary meaning of method
so when we speak of the dharma of the buddha
the buddha's doctrine
it is the buddha's method
not law
and that's why
that's why
you
So a citizen also has to conform to Dharma, and that is to say to ritual and ethical and
moral game rules for the community.
But now, when in the course of time he has established his household, he has taught his
oldest son to take over the governorship of the household, the father, or for that matter
mother, may enter into a new stage of life altogether, which is not grihasta, but is
called vanaprastha, and that means forest dweller, as distinct from householder.
Now you see what's happened.
We've gone full cycle.
We came out of the forest as a hunter, we settled in a community, and indulged in what is called
in Sanskrit, loka sangraha, sangraha means upholding, loka, the world, upholding the world game,
and that is everybody's dharma, or duty, dharma can also be translated duty.
And svadharma, S-V-A in front of dharma, means your own duty, or better, your own function,
which we would translate into English as vocation.
So everybody's caste work is his svadharma, and of course these castes are subdivided into various
other kinds of specializations.
When you have fulfilled your svadharma, you go into the vanaprastha stage, now anciently
that meant that you actually did go out into the forest, and you became, of all things,
it's called a shramana in Sanskrit, S-R-A-M-A-N-A. And it is thought that that is the word shramana.
You see, what happens is this then, that an individual who all his life long has played
the social game, is then says, well now I've done that. I've assumed this role, I've become
identified with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, whatever it was. But now who am I, really?
In order to find that out, I have to go off by myself. Why? Because you have a role conception,
a mask conception of yourself, because other people tell you who you are.
We are constantly, in every social interchange, in the most common remarks, telling other people
who they are. Everything leads up to that. The way I act towards you, the way you act towards
me. Tells me who I am, and tells you who you are. For example, you come and sit here and listen
to me talk. You are, by doing that, telling me I'm some kind of a teacher. And you're telling
yourselves that you're some kind of students. And that's only one thing, you see, one little
incident. In business, every day, in your housework, and everything you do, everybody around
you, is telling you what you are, and who you are, by expecting certain behavior from
you, which if you're a reasonable and socially inclined person, you perform, because that's
what's expected of you. So you are told who you are. So when we come, we'd have enough
of that, you see, because it's not listening to all this anymore. That's why the Shramana,
or the Vana Prastha, one of the first things he practices is silence. It's called Mauna, M-A-U-N-A.
And he may take a vow, not to speak for a month, or a year. And after about a month of Mauna,
you don't only stop talking, but you stop thinking in words. And that's a very curious
experience when it happens, because all the senses take on a tremendous intensity. You see
things which you've never seen before, because you stop codifying and classifying the world
by thinking. Sunsets appear incredibly more vivid, and flowers are enchanting. The whole world
comes alive to the Mauni. The only danger is this, the Mauni has to be careful, because
he loses all moral discrimination. In other words, if a Mauni gets involved in a riot, he
joins the riot. Because that's just the way things are going, you see. And so he has to
be careful. And that's why, in this state of Vana Prastha, the new man in the game will
seek out a guru, a teacher, who has been through the whole discipline of yoga, or whatever it
is, that is practiced by a Vana Prastha, and will help him out and see that he doesn't get
into trouble. That's why a guru, when he accepts a student, is always said to become responsible
for that individual's karma. Karma, you know, means activity, and also the results of activity.
So you see what's happened. This man, who goes into the Vana Prastha stage of life, takes
off every sign that would identify him as someone. He does away with his name. He does away with
the usual clothes he would wear, and puts on, usually a yellow or some kind of a robe, or
he may more often than that be really naked, and maybe have a loincloth, or not even that.
And often these people cover themselves with ashes, and their hair is matted, and they don't
take care of themselves that way anymore, because they are outside the pale. You see, they are outcasts,
but they are upper outcasts. Below them are the lower outcasts, known as the, today, the Harijan,
the name that Gandhi gave them, the untouchables. And the untouchables were the aboriginal peoples
of India. When the Aryan invasion occurred, at a rather vague date, but shortly after 2000 BC,
the Aryans formed these castes, and the people who were originally in the land, like the Indians
here, were considered to be outcasts. They were beyond the pale. So, you have here a marvellous
microcosm. You have a political and social analogue of the manifestation and withdrawal of the worlds,
of the Lord playing the game, or the self playing the game of being all of us. And then, as each
individual reaches moksha, the self realizes, in terms of an individual life, that it is the self.
So, exactly in this way, the child, representing the self on the way in, comes into this world, plays around for a while. There are four casts, just as there are four yugas to the
kalpa cycle, you remember? And then out it goes. Back to the forest. We would say back to nature. But you see, the outgoing stage of vanaprastha, is a much higher
state, in the course of evolution, than the hunting society person, who is primitive. He isn't simply going back to where he came from. He's spiralled. He's come round to an equivalent position, but at a higher level. And what he has gained in the interim is self-awareness. I mean that too in the ordinary sense.
when we speak of self-consciousness. See, it's not much fun to be happy and not know it. We need a certain resonance. Self-consciousness is an echo in our heads. An echo of what we do, but wouldn't be aware of doing it if there wasn't an echo.
When you see yourself in a mirror, that mirror is a visual echo of your face. And that's why, in a room such as this, it's a very comfortable room for me to talk in, because it has resonance. And so, self-consciousness is neuro-consciousness.
Now, you know how troublesome resonance can get if it's not properly worked out. You can get echoes that just won't stop. So you go into a great cave somewhere and you say, hi!
say hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi all up in the distance see that's very confusing now that's the
sort of snarl that self-consciousness can get into and we call it anxiety when I keep keep keep
thinking did I do the right thing in the course of some performance if I'm constantly aware of
myself in a kind of anxious critical way my resonance becomes too high and so I get confused
and jittery but if you learn that self-consciousness has limits that self-awareness cannot possibly
enable you to be free of making mistakes you could learn to be spontaneous in spite of being
self-aware and enjoy the echo so what happens that having developed self-consciousness through
education through work with other people having developed all the disciplines of the culture the
vanaprastha then becomes again as a child but then you see he has what Freud says the child has from
the beginning Freud called it the oceanic feeling and the oceanic feeling is the sensation of being
one with the universe the vanaprastha gets that back but it's not a child's oceanic feeling it's an
adult's oceanic feeling something which the psychoanalysts don't discuss because according to them all oceanic
feelings are aggressive but if there is a mature oceanic feeling as contrasted with the immature oceanic
feeling of the child which is as different as the oak is from the acorn and so you can have this sensation you
see of total unity with the cosmos of the shall I call it expansion to infinity or contraction to
infinity of your identity without forgetting society's game rules with regard to you in other
words it doesn't mean that you forget your address telephone number social security number and the name
you were given you remember all that and you can play that game when necessary but you know it's a game so there is no way as a matter of fact of
escaping from playing these games and the only thing is that when you find out you see that you are thoroughly selfish you inquire what is it what is the self that I love what is this thing?
find out you see that you are thoroughly selfish you inquire what is it what is the self that I love what is this thing that I'm so interested in advancing and in protecting and you look very closely in to what you feel when you think you feel yourself and you know what you find out that yourself is everything that you thought was someone else
there is no knowledge of yourself you see except in relation to others self and other are as inseparable as back and front there is no knowledge of self without the knowledge of otherness there is no knowledge of the voluntary without the knowledge of the involuntary of can without can't so they go together and that going together of self and other is non-duality that's advaita that is the self with a capital S
true self one finds deliverance from self and so finally we come to the last consideration which is the question in what way and by what means can an individual who is under the impression that he is a separate individual limited by and enclosed in his bag of skin how can such a person
effectively realize that he is deep down the universal self effectively realize that he is deep down the universal self the brahman this of course is a curious question it proposes a journey to the place where you already are now it's true that you may not know that you are there but you are
and if you take a journey to the place where you are and if you take a journey to the place where you are you will visit many other places than the place where you are and perhaps when you find through some long experience that all the places you go to are not the place you wanted to find
it may occur to you that you were already there in the beginning and that is the dharma or method as i translated that word which all gurus teachers of spiritual development use fundamentally they are all of them tricksters but in the most beneficent sense of the word trickster
why trickster why trickster because do you know it's terribly difficult in fact it's impossible to surprise yourself on purpose and yet to be surprised is a great thing but you can't plan a surprise for yourself somebody else can do it for you
and that is why so often a guru or teacher is necessary in this process but let me say right from the start that a guru there are many kinds of gurus first of all among human gurus there are square gurus and there are beat gurus
gurus there are gurus like well let's say a great zen master today let's take Oda Roshi at Daitokoji who is a square guru and a very good one but you go through regular channels then there is a guru like Mr. Gurdjieff who is a rascal guru who leads you in by means that are very very strange indeed
then there are gurus then there are gurus then there are gurus that are not people gurus may be situations a certain kind of problem or encounter even a book can to some extent be a guru a friend can be a guru I have often thought of writing a story about a man who is some sort of guru seeker and a potential yogi who goes one day into an automat
and sits down at a table where there is another fellow and he sort of thinks that this man looks wise and he projects onto him the idea that he is a guru and he says I feel there is something special about you and the man says oh really actually there is nothing special about me I happen to be an insurance salesman
and then I want to develop this story step by step they keep meeting each other because they both eat at the same automat regularly for lunch and although the fellow really is an insurance salesman and doesn't know a thing about these things it in the end results in the enlightenment of the person who projected this image upon him
so there are as I say many kinds of guru but the problem of the guru is to show the inquirer in some effective way that he already has what he is looking for
now in Hindu traditions the realization of who you really are is called basically sadhana and sadhana means the discipline the way of life that is necessary to follow in order to escape from the illusion that you are merely a skin encapsulated ego
and sadhana comprises yoga from the root yug which means to join and so from that in latin we get jungari to join and in english junction and also yoke and junction is also the word union you see
yoke all this derives from the Sanskrit root yoke yoke a yoke.yoke is also a discipline when you yoke oxen that is a kind of a discipline now strictly speaking in the very strictest sense yoga means the state of union the state in which the individual
The Jivatman, Jivatman is approximately translatable as ego.
Jivatman finds that it is ultimately Atman which equals Brahman, the Supreme Self.
So yoga is the state, the strictest meaning of yoga is the state of union,
and a yogi means one who has realized that union.
But we find that the word is not normally used in that way, in that strict sense.
Yoga in the normal way of use means the practice of meditation
whereby one comes into the state of union,
and the yogi means one who is a traveler, a seeker, who is on the way to that point.
But again, strictly speaking, there is no method to arrive at the place where you are,
and no amount of searching will uncover the self,
because all searching implies the absence of the self, the big self, the self with a capital S.
So that to seek it is to thrust it away,
and to practice a discipline to attain it is to postpone realizing.
There is a famous Zen story told of a monk who was sitting in meditation,
and the master came along and said, what are you doing?
He said, I'm meditating to become a Buddha.
Whereupon the master picked up a brick that was lying nearby and started polishing it, rubbing it.
And the monk said, what are you doing?
He said, I'm rubbing this brick to make it a mirror.
He said, by no amount of rubbing could you ever make a brick into a mirror.
The master replied, by no amount of Zazen could you become a Buddha.
Zazen means sitting meditation.
They react very badly to this story in modern day Japan.
Anyway, what is important, you see, quite radically here,
supposing that I say to you, each one of you is really the great self, you know, the Brahman.
And you say, well, all you've said up till now makes me fairly sympathetic to this intellectually.
But I don't really feel it.
What must I do to feel it really?
My answer to you is this.
You ask me that question because you don't want to feel it really.
You're frightened of it.
And therefore what you're going to do is you're going to get a method of practice so that you can put it off.
So that I can say, well, I can be a long time on the way getting this thing.
And then maybe I'll be worthy of it after I have suffered enough.
See, because we are brought up in a social scheme whereby we have to deserve what we get.
And the price that one pays for all good things is suffering.
But all of that is precisely postponement because one is afraid here and now to see it.
If you had the nerve, you know, real nerve, you would see it right away.
Only that would be when one feels you should have nerve like that.
Why, that would be awful. That wouldn't do at all.
Because after all, I'm supposed to be poor little me.
And I'm not really much of a muchness.
And I'm playing the role of being poor little me.
And therefore, in order to be something great like a Buddha or a Jeevan Mukta,
one liberated in this life, I ought to suffer for it.
So you can suffer for it.
There are all kinds of ways invented for you to do this.
And you can discipline yourself and you can gain control of your mind.
And you can do all sorts of extraordinary things.
I mean, you can drink water in through your rectum and do the most fantastic things.
But that's just like being able to run the hundred yards in nine seconds,
or push a peanut up Mount Tamalpais with your nose,
or any other kind of accomplishment you want to engage in.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the realization of the self.
The realization of the self fundamentally depends on coming off it.
You know, the sort of, when we say to people who put on some kind of an act,
we say, oh, come off it.
And some people can come off it.
They laugh and say they suddenly realize, you know, they were making fools of themselves,
and they laugh at themselves and they come off it.
So in exactly the same way, the guru, the teacher, is trying to make you come off it.
Now, if he finds he can't make you come off it, he's going to put you through all these exercises.
So that you, at the last time, when you've got enough discipline,
and enough suffering, and enough frustration,
you'll give it all up and realize you were there for the beginning
and there was nothing to realize.
But the guru is very clever.
He says, alright, if this is the way you have to go, this is the way you have to go.
You asked for it.
You came to me.
I didn't invite you, you see, the guru says.
You came to me and he said, I want to learn yoga.
Well, he said, yoga is union.
You're Tattva Masa, you know, you're that.
Well, now you say, I'm sorry, I don't understand that,
because I only get it intellectually, I don't feel it.
Oh, he says, you're one of those.
So, see, I've got to satisfy you, the customer is always right.
No?
I've got to give you all this work to do,
because you can't see directly that this is so.
But he's looking at you in a funny way, you see.
The guru is always saying to you, you know, what are you, what are you doing?
What's your game?
Imagine, for example, a father confessor, and you feel terribly guilty,
that you've committed murders and robberies and adulteries and fornications
and all kinds of arson and injury to people and financial shenanigans.
And you go to this man and say, I am a terrible sinner.
He says, really?
He says, I have murdered somebody.
He says, how many times?
And you think, oh, good Lord.
This man doesn't realize how awful I am.
And you recite all these things, he's perfectly calm.
And then you say to him, well, you don't seem to be very shocked.
Well, he said, you haven't confessed any serious sins.
He says, what are you?
He said, what are you doing?
mean by serious it well said what do you think well no I I just feel wrong I just feel there's
something in the basis of me that it feels that tells me that I am not what I ought to be could
it be that I'm spiritually proud that I'm egocentric this is no that's not very usual this is quite
ordinary sin but he says you you you are guilty of something something really terrible and what could
that be no idea now he says come on come on go deeper what is the real sin you think what me I
little me you could do something worse than murder the worse than spiritual pride just little me I mean
I'm a reasonably well-intentioned person what could that be and he looks at you in a funny way you know
you know cuts a kind of a Kafkaesque situation where you're accused of a crime that's not specified and
and yet the job the accuser says you jolly well know what you've done of course we can't mention it
because no it's like the there's laws that are on the books in the state of California and several
other states where people are accused of the abominable crime against nature nobody knows what
it can't be mentioned it's too dreadful to be talked about so this guy does the same thing but it's in a
different dimension you've done it now what what did you do see the real crime is that you won't admit
you're God that's false modesty so the Guru challenges you see he challenges you if you raise the
person he doesn't go out and preach in the streets say come on everybody you ought to be converted he
sits down under a tree and waits and people start coming around and they offer him propositions he
answers back and he challenges you in any way that he thinks is appropriate to your situation now if
you've got a thin shell and your mask is easily dispatched with he simply uses what we might call an
easy method he says listen Shiva come off it don't pretend you're this guy here I know who you are and the
guy sort of twinkles a bit and says well I guess you're right but the people aren't like that they have
very thick shells and so he has to invent ways of cracking them so here is how it goes to understand
yoga you need to get hold of a good translation of Patanjali the Yoga Sutra I don't know which is the
best translation there are so many of them it says it starts out now yoga is explained first verse and the
commentators say now has a special meaning because it follows from something else that you're supposed
to know beforehand that you're supposed to be in other words a civilized human being before you start
out on yoga we don't teach yoga to baboons and so you're supposed to have been disciplined in Artha
karma and Dharma in politics sensuality and Dharma justice and then you can start yoga then the next
verse is yogas citta brittini roda which means yoga is the cessation of revolutions of the mind in other words
words you can interpret that at many levels citta meaning consciousness like a pool like water like a
reflecting pool if there are waves on that it doesn't reflect it breaks up all the reflections so stop the
waves on the mind and it will reflect reality clearly get a perfectly calm mind that's one meaning of it
or another meaning of it is stop thinking eliminate all contents from the mind all thoughts all feelings
all sensations everything how will you do that well it goes on to say you do it by certain steps first of
all pranayama which means the control of the breath pratyahara which means preliminary concentration
parana a more intense form of concentration dhyana which is the same dhyana the Sanskrit for Zen and that
means profound union between subject and object and finally Samadhi which is way out now what's happening
control your mind first of all by breathing breathing is a very strange thing because breathing can be
viewed both as an involuntary and as a voluntary action you can feel I breathe and yet you can feel it
breathes me and they have all sorts of fancy breathing ways in yoga they are very amusing to practice because you
can get very high on them so they set you at these tricks and of course if you are bright you may begin to
realize some things at that point if you are not very bright then you'll have to go on and so next they
really get to work on concentration concentrate the mind on one point now this can be an absolutely
fascinating undertaking I suggest that you try it this way if you want to make experiments select a highlight
on some bright some polished surface copper or glass or something where there's a little tiny reflection
save a candle or an electric light bulb look at it and put your eyes out of focus so that the bright spot
appears to be fuzzy a fuzzy circle now look very carefully at the design in the fuzzy circle and see if
you can make it up there is a definite pattern of blur and you can have a wonderful time looking at that then go
back get your eyes into focus and look at intense light and you can go into it and into it and into it
like you know you're falling down a funnel and at the end of that funnel is this intense light
and go down go in in in in in in it's the most thrilling experience then suddenly the guru wakes
you up and says what are you doing that for well because I want realization why because we live in a
world of if we identify ourselves with the ego we get into trouble we suffer we are in a mess he says you
afraid of that yes so then all that you're doing to practice yoga is based on fear you're just escaping
you're running away how do you think you can get realization through fear there's one to think about so
you think well now I've got to go on with my yoga practice my concentrations my exercises but not
for a fearful motive and you know that guru you know he's watching you and he's a very very sensitive
man and he knows when you're doing no always knows what your motive is so he puts you onto the kick of
getting a pure motive and that means very deep control of the emotions I mustn't have impure thoughts all
right so you go along and you manage to repress as many impure thoughts as possible and then one
day he asks you why are you repressing these thoughts what's your motive for trying to have a pure mind
and you find out that you had an impure motive for trying to have a pure mind that you did it for the
same old reason you started out the thing in the beginning because you were afraid because you
wanted to play get one up on the universe and so eventually you find out you see that your mind is
what is called in sanskrit muda muda which means crazy because it can only go in vicious circles
everything it does to get out of a trap puts it more securely in the trap every step in the direction of
liberation is a new tie-up so that you started you know with molasses in one hand and feathers in the
other that was the original situation of man the guru made you put them together see like that and
said now pick the feathers off and the more it is the more of a mess the whole thing gets so you get
involved and involved and involved by this process and he in the meantime you see has been telling you
yes you made a little attainment today but it was only the eighth stage and there are 64 altogether
and you've got to get that 64th stage and he knows how to spin it out and drag it all out because you
are ever hopeful that you will get that thing just as you might win a prize or win a special job or a
great distinction and be somebody that's the motivation all along only it's very spiritual here
it's not for worldly recognition you want to be recognized by the gods and the angels it's the same
story on a higher level so he keeps holding out these baits and as long as the pupil falls for them
he holds out more baits until after a while the pupil gets the realization that what he's doing is running
faster and faster in a squirrel cage that he's making an enormous amount of progress and getting
nowhere like in Alice through the Looking Glass when the Queen says here you have to have run faster
faster to stay where you are and so he impresses this upon you by these methods very thoroughly
and at last you find out that you as an ego as what you ordinarily call your mind are a mess that you
you just can't do this thing you can't do it by any of the means that have been held out to you
you can concentrate yes you've acquired a considerable power of concentration by doing all this but you
find you're doing it for the wrong reason and there's no way of doing it for the right reason see
Krishnamurti does this he's a very very clever guru Krishnamurti says to people now look there is
nothing you can do to be liberated because all your efforts in the direction of liberation are phony
they are based on your desire to boost and continue your ego and that will never lead to liberation all
you can do he says is to be aware of yourself as you are without judgment see what is but then
if you can do that you have no further problem but if you try to do it you're in the same mess all over
again Gurdjieff played the same game in a different way he said the most important thing is self-remembering
always at every moment be aware of what you're doing watch yourself constantly and never never be
absent-minded so all day when you know you pick up the piece of paper you realize i'm picking up this
piece of paper and i'm opening living inside and uh i know i'm doing it this way so i'm not asleep
ordinary people you know pick up the piece of paper
and in this way we're really picking up the piece of paper and so all these people are doing this you
know watch it where do they land up i've told this story millions of times really excuse me but it's
very important when they teach you in uh japanese zen how to use a sword the first thing that the teacher
says to the student is now you you if you're going to be a good soldier you've got to be alert constantly
because you never know where the attack's going to come from now you know what happens to you when
you try to be on the alert you think about being alert and then you're a hopeless prey to the enemy
because you're not you're not alert you're thinking about being alert you must be simply awake and
relaxed and then all your nerve ends are working and wherever the attack comes from you're ready
they liken this to a barrel of water the water is just sitting there in the barrel but the minute
you make a hole in the barrel the water immediately is ready to come out of that hole so in the same
way the mind when it is in the proper state is ready to respond in any direction from which the attack
may come so this man is no longer alert in the sense of taught and anxious see he's sitting there like a cat
sits there and the minute anything happens it's right there because it didn't have to overcome
any set in a direction opposite to that from which the attack comes
if you are set for the attack to come from there and it comes from here you have to pull back from
there and go there but that's too late so you sit in the middle and you don't expect the attack from
any particular direction so in the same way all this applies to yoga you can be watchful you can be
concentrated you can be alert but all that will ever teach you is what not to do how not to use the mind
because it will get you into deeper and deeper and deeper binds you have to let it happen just like
you have to let yourself go to sleep you can't try to go to sleep you have to let yourself digest your food
you can't try to digest it and so in the same way you have to let yourself wake up become liberated and
when you find out you see that there isn't any way of forcing it that for most people is the only way of
getting them to stop forcing it because they won't believe when you tell them in the first instance you've
got to do this without forcing it they'll say well that it won't work it won't happen because i'm very
unevolved i'm just an ordinary human being i'm just poor little me and if i don't force it nothing will
happen i people who think that if they uh don't struggle and strain they won't have a bowel movement
or uh whatever it is they think they've got to do that work
in order to make it happen in other words all that is based on lack of faith not trusting life
and to get people to trust life who don't trust it you have to trick them they won't jump into the water
so you have to throw them in and if they are very unwilling to be thrown in they're going to take
diving lessons you see in which they're going to go all through they're going to read books about diving
they're going to do all the preliminary exercises for diving they're going to stand on the edge of the
diving board and inquire whether there's the right posture until somebody comes up his side and kicks
them in the butt and they're in the water and it's also with this it really is so now the most amazing
gamesmanship goes on in the whole domain of yoga and spiritual practice you would be astounded so i
mean one of the games in all this is to find a little flaw in you see everybody has a place where
they can be jiggled a bit something they're a bit ashamed of and so you think does this person really
know my secret he's not saying anything because he's polite but does he really see through me
and know that somewhere are the awful awfuls and that i'm a little bit upsetable this is all part of
religious competition if you go to the roman catholics and you've studied you've been
psychoanalyzed you see they'll say well that's fine but of course it's not nearly enough i mean that's
all very well so far as it goes but
but or if you're a roman catholic and you go to a buddhist uh outfit that's on a missionary basis
they'll say yes of course through your catholicism you've learned some of the basic virtues but of
course catholicism doesn't go anywhere near the heart of things in this it doesn't have an elaborate
system of meditation like we have then you go over to uh the hindu school and they say yes the
buddhists go to a certain point they do attain a very very high stage of realization but there is
nevertheless something higher than that which they don't quite get and you'll find this all round
the world everybody claiming to have that little special extra essence which the others don't have
now why are they doing that are they all frauds are they all all out to get you into their society
sometimes yes but sometimes they're trying to see whether you fall for this testing you out this
is upaya skillful method and if you become falling for that little extra special thing that's just
supposed to be around the corner no then they've got you or rather you've got yourself in the mix
and you have to work at that and work at that and work at that until you find out
that you were being made a monkey of but you were being made a monkey of because you could be
made a monkey of you hadn't really arrived where you are you didn't have the nerve
to be you that is to say to be the self and so you had always to feel that there was something
beyond that the stage higher see so that's why for example masonry is such a success it has 33 degrees
and you know you can go up that ladder and get higher and higher status the more degrees the merrier
there have been things that have vented hundreds of degrees and they're an immense success because you
can postpone it longer and longer like achilles overtaking the tortoise he doesn't overtake it in the
problem because we keep dividing and dividing the space between achilles and the tortoise as he approaches
the tortoise what delays achilles overtaking the tortoise is not achilles but our calculations about
how he approaches it we make the calculations more and more complicated as he gets nearer and nearer to
the tortoise it's only the calculations that put it off achilles in fact runs right by
so in the same way you can calculate yourself out of liberation you can put it off indefinitely by
inventing new degrees and new stages but actually when you get it you don't get it
you suddenly see it it happens instantly it happens instantly whether you put in 30 years practice
or whether you put in three minutes it's the same suddenly it dawns on you that that's the way things
things are tattva masi medieval society in the west comparable to hindu society allowed people
to check out of the game it revered and encouraged hermits monks nuns
are various types of discipline there's this difference you see for the west and india
you couldn't join the brahmana caste the priest caste from some other caste but in the european caste system
by becoming a priest or a cleric of any kind you see a cleric means simply a literate person you
could familiarize with any other caste once you're in that one and so it was a wonderful way of rising
in society you could from being a serf go to being a priest to being an archbishop and consort with the
nobility it was the only way open to cross castes you see and because they were the literate people
it was through literacy and through universities founded by clerics that our caste system began to break
and we got the idea of choosing your own vocation and not simply following what your parents did
now i want to make an observation here about checking out of the game this is not encouraged in
contemporary society because the catholic church and the say the episcopalian church are very powerful
minorities they can still support monasteries and even hermits but you can't be one on your own
without great difficulty firstly because you're a poor consumer see around here there we have a number
of hermits there's a guy out there building that boat and he's essentially a non-joiner a poor
consumer and uh the community they live a lot along here and they're mostly they're not um working class
people they are people who dropped out of college because they saw it was stupid and they're that
sort of people we would call them perhaps beatniks uh but you see the city doesn't like it because
they aren't owning the right sort of cars and therefore the local car salesman isn't doing business
through them they don't have lawns and so nobody can sell them lawn mowers they hardly use dishwashers
appliances of that kind they don't need them and also they wear blue jeans and things like that and
so the local dress shops feel that they put out having these people around and they are very very
simply well there you mustn't do that you've got to live in a complicated way you've got to have the
kind of car you know that identifies you as a person of substance and status and all that so there's a
great problem here in our society now why is there this problem there's always a very inconsiderable
minority of these non-joiners or people who check out of the game but you will find that insecure
societies are the most intolerant of those who are non-joiners they are so unsure of the validity of
their game rules that they say everyone must play now that's a double bind you can't say to a person
you must play because what you're saying is you are required to do something which will be acceptable
only if you do it voluntarily you see so everyone must play is the rule in the united states and it's the
rule in almost all
Republican governments. I mean Republican in the sense of Democratic because
they're very uneasy because everybody is responsible. You mean you may try not to
be and avoid it and say oh let the senators take care of it or the
president but theoretically everyone's responsible. Now that's terrifying. See
it's all right when you know what's right there is an aristocracy there is the
clergy and they know what should be done and they're used to ruling you see. But
now it's in your hands you say well what are we going to do? Well I think
this way and you think that way and he thinks the other way and so we're all
unsettled and therefore we become more and more conformist. Individualism, rugged
individualism always leads to conformism because people get scared and so they
herd together and it compounded with industrial society, mass production, etc.
They all wear the same clothes and they're sensible clothes that don't show the dirt
too much and we get duller and drabber and with the exception of the
Californian revolution. So what the reason for this is in a way that democracy as we
have tried it started out on the wrong foot. You see in the scriptures, the Christian
scriptures, it says everybody is equal in the sight of God. Now that's a mystical
utterance. That means that from the standpoint of God all people are divine and are playing
their true function. And that is something that is true on a certain plane of
consciousness. But come down a step and try to apply the mystical insight in the
practical affairs of everyday life and what do you get? You get a parody of
mysticism. You get the idea not that everybody is equal in the sight of God but
that all people are equally inferior. And that's why all bureaucracies are rude, why
the police are rude, and why you are made to wait in lines and are obstreperous
incontacts individuals and all that sort of person. Because everybody is a crook.
Everybody is equally inferior. See that becomes the parody of democracy. And that kind
of society watch out for it. It turns in a quick click into fascism because of its terror of the
outsider. Now a free and easy society loves outsiders. In fact it's a little bad for the
outsider's integrity because he becomes a holy man. See? And people make salams and give him food and all that.
They really take care of the outsider. Because they know that man is doing for us what we haven't got
the guts to do. That outsider who lives up there in the mountain is at the highest peak of human
evolution. His consciousness is one with the divine. And great. Just there is someone like that around.
It makes you feel a little better. He is realized. He knows what it's all about. And so we need a number of
those people. Even though they don't join our game, they tell us, you see, what you're doing is only a game.
It's okay. I'm not going to condemn you. But it is only a game. And we up on that mountain top are watching
you. We love you. We have compassion for you. And, uh, but excuse please, we aren't going to join.
So that gives the community great strength because it tells the government in no uncertain terms that
there's something more than government. That's why wise kings kept not only priests but court fools.
the court fool is much more effective than the priest to remind the king that after all he's human.
And, uh, you know how in Richard II where the fool is called the Antic, the king says,
within the hollow crown that rounds the mortal temples of the king keeps death his watch.
And there the Antic sits, scoffing at his state and grinning at his pomp, allowing him a little time
to monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks. And then at last comes death. And with a pin,
bores through his castle wall. And farewell, king. See, always this reminder of the priest or of the
Antic to the royalty, to the government. You are going to die. You are mortal. Don't give yourself
heirs and graces as if you were a god as king. You are only a representative of god. And there is
a force. There are domains, uh, way, way beyond yours and way, way higher. But it's very difficult
for a republican government to realize that because it's insecure. And therefore, in our present world,
you cannot abandon nationality without the greatest difficulty. People who try to abandon nationality
get constantly deported from one place to another.
You must belong to this thing, as Thoreau put it. However far into the forests you may go,
men will pursue you and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.
This concludes session 10 of Out of Your Mind, essential listening from the Alan Watts audio
archives. Our program continues with session 11. This particular weekend seminar is devoted to Buddhism,
and it should be said first that there is a sense in which Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export.
Last week when I discussed Hinduism, I discussed many things to do with the organization of Hindu society.
Because Hinduism is not merely what we call a religion. It's a whole culture.
It's a legal system. It's a social system. It's a system of etiquette. And it includes everything.
It includes housing. It includes food. It includes art. Because the Hindus and many other ancient peoples
do not make, as we do, a division between religion and everything else. Religion is not a department of life.
It is something that enters into the whole of it. But you see, when a religion and a culture are
inseparable, it's very difficult to export a culture because it comes into conflict with the established
traditions, manners and customs of other people. So the question arises, what are the essentials of
Hinduism that could be exported? And when you answer that, approximately, you'll get Buddhism.
As I explained, the essential of Hinduism, the real deep root, isn't any kind of doctrine.
It isn't really any special kind of discipline. Although, of course, disciplines are involved.
The center of Hinduism is an experience called moksha, liberation, in which, through the dissipation
of the illusion that each man and each woman is a separate thing in a world consisting of nothing but
a collection of separate things. You discover that you are on one level an illusion, but on another level
you are what they call the self, the one self, which is all that there is. The universe is the game
of the self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. When it plays hide, it plays it so well,
hides so cleverly, that it pretends to be all of us and all things whatsoever, and we don't know it
because it's playing hide. But when it plays seek, it enters onto a path of yoga
yoga, and through following this path, it wakes up, and the scales fall from one's eyes.
Now, in just the same way, the center of Buddhism, and the only really important thing about Buddhism,
is the experience which they call awakening.
Buddha is a title and not a proper name. It comes from a Sanskrit root, buddha.
And that sometimes means to know, but better, waking. And so you get from this root, bodhi,
that is the state of being awakened, and so Buddha, the awakened one, the awakened person.
And so there can, of course, in Buddhist ideas be very many Buddhas. The person called the Buddha
Buddha is only one of myriads, because they, like the Hindus, are quite sure that our world is only one
among billions, and that Buddhas come and go in all the worlds. But sometimes, you see, there comes into
the world what you might call a big Buddha, a very important one. And such a one is said to have been
Gautama, the son of a prince, living in northern India, in the part of the world we now call Nepal,
living shortly after 600 BC. All dates in Indian history are vague, and so I never try to get you
to remember any precise date, like 564, which some people think it was. But just after 600 BC is probably
right. Most of you, I'm sure, know the story of his life. But the point is that when in India a man was
called a Buddha, or the Buddha, this is a title of a very exalted nature. It is first of all necessary
for a Buddha to be human. He can't be any other kind of being, whether in the Hindu scale of beings,
he's above the human state or below it. He is superior to all gods, because according to Indian ideas,
gods and angels, or angels would probably be a better name for them than gods, all those exalted
beings are still in the wheel of becoming, still in the chains of karma, that is action,
which requires the need for more action to complete it and goes on requiring the need for more action.
They are still, according to popular ideas, going round the wheel from life after life after life
after life, because they still have the thirst for existence, or to put it in a Hindu way,
in them the self is still playing the game of not being itself. But the Buddha's doctrine, based on his own
experience of awakening, which occurred after seven years of attempts to study with the various yogis of the time,
all of whom used the method of extreme asceticism, fasting, doing all sorts of exercises, lying on beds
of nails, sleeping on broken rocks, any kind of thing to break down egocentricity, to become unselfish,
to become detached, to exterminate desire for life. But Buddha found that all that was futile.
That was not the way.
And one day he broke his ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup from a girl
who was looking after cattle. And suddenly, in this tremendous relaxation,
he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted. He saw completely that what he had been
doing was on the wrong track. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. And no amount of effort
will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish. So long as you think
and feel that you are a somewhat contained in your bag of skin, and that's all, there is no way
whatsoever of your behaving unselfishly. Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all
sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness. But you're still tied to the wheel of becoming
by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron
chains of their misbehaviors. You know how people are when they get spiritually proud. They belong to
some kind of a church group or an occult group and say, we are the ones who have, of course, the right
teaching. We're the in-group, we are the elect, and everybody else outside is really off the track.
But then comes along someone who one-ups them by saying, well, in our circles we are very tolerant,
and we accept all religions and all ways as leading to the one. But what they're doing is they're
playing the game called, we are more tolerant than you are. You see, and in this way, the egocentric
being is always in his own trap. So Buddha saw that all his yoga exercises and ascetic disciplines had
just been ways of trying to get himself out of the trap in order to save his own skin,
in order to find peace for himself. And he realized that that is an impossible thing to do
because the motivation ruins the project. He found out then, you see, that there was no trap to get
out of except himself. Trap and trapped are one. And when you understand that, there isn't any trap left.
I'm going to explain that, of course, more carefully. So as a result of this experience, he formulated
what he calls the Dharma. That is the Sanskrit word for method. You will get a certain confusion when
you read books on Buddhism because they switch between Sanskrit and Pali words.
The earliest Buddhist scriptures that we know of are written in the Pali language, and Pali is a
softened form of Sanskrit. So that, for example, whereas the doctrine of the Buddha is called in
Sanskrit the Dharma. But in Pali, and in many books of Buddhism, you'll find the Buddha's doctrine
described as the Dharma. And so in the same way, karma, in Sanskrit, becomes in Pali, kama. Buddha remains
the same. The Dharma then is the method. Now the method of Buddhism, and this is absolutely important
to remember, is dialectic. That is to say, it doesn't teach a doctrine. You cannot find anywhere
what Buddhism teaches, as you can find out what Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam,
teaches. Because all Buddhism is a discourse. And what most people suppose to be its teachings are only
the opening stages of the dialogue. So the concern of Buddha as a young man, the problem he wanted to
solve, was the problem of human suffering. And so he formulated his teaching in a very easy way to
remember. All those Buddhist scriptures are full of what you might call mnemonic tricks, numbering
things in such a way that they're easy to remember. And so he proposed, he summed up his teaching in the
form of what are called the Four Noble Truths. And the first one, which because it was his main concern,
was the truth about dukkha. Dukkha, suffering, pain, frustration, chronic dis-ease. It is the opposite of sukha,
which means sweet, pleasure, etc. So insofar as the problem posed in Buddhism
is dukkha. I don't want to suffer, and I want to find someone or something that can cure me of suffering.
That's the problem. Now, then if there's a person who solved the problem, a Buddha, people come to him
and say, Master, how do we get out of this problem? So what he does is to propose certain things to them.
First of all, he points out that with dukkha go two other things. These are respectively called
Anitya. Anitya. Anitya means permanent. So impermanence, flux, change, is characteristic of everything whatsoever.
Anitya. There isn't anything at all in the whole world, in the material world, in the psychic world,
in the spiritual world, there is nothing you can catch hold of and hang on to for safety. None.
Not only is there nothing you can hang on to, but by the teaching of anatman, there is no you to hang
on to it. In other words, all clinging to life is an illusory hand grasping at smoke. If you can get
that into your head and see that that is so, nobody needs to tell you that you ought not to grasp,
because you see you can't. See, Buddhism is not essentially moralistic. The moralist is the person
who tells people that they ought to be unselfish, when they still feel like egos. And his efforts are
always and invariably futile, because what happens is he simply sweeps the dust under the carpet
and comes back again somehow. But in this case, it involves a complete realization
realization that this is the case. So that's what the teacher puts across to begin with.
The next thing that comes up, the second of the noble truths, is about the cause of suffering.
And this in Sanskrit is called Trishna. Trishna is related to our word thirst. It's very often translated
desire. That will do. Better, perhaps, is craving, clinging, grasping, or even, to use our modern
psychological word, blocking. When, for example, somebody is blocked and dithers and hesitates
and doesn't know what to do, he is, in the strictest Buddhist sense, attached. He's stuck. But
a Buddha can't be stuck. He cannot be phased. He always flows, just as water always flows, even if you
damn it. The river just keeps on getting higher and higher and higher until it flows over the dam.
It's unstoppable. Now, Buddha said then, Dukkha comes from Trishna.
You all suffer because you cling to the world, and you don't recognize that the world is Anitya
and Anatman. So then, try, if you can, not to grasp. Well, do you see that that immediately poses a
problem? Because the student, who has started off this dialogue with the Buddha, then makes various efforts
to give up desire, upon which he very rapidly discovers that he is desiring not to desire.
And he takes that back to the teacher, who says, well, well, well. He said, of course,
you are desiring not to desire, and that's, of course, excessive. All I want you to do
is to give up desiring as much as you can. Don't want to go beyond the point of which you're capable.
And for this reason, Buddhism is called the middle way. Not only is it the middle way between the
extremes of ascetic discipline and pleasure seeking, but it's also the middle way in a very
subtle sense. Yes, don't desire to give up more desire than you can. And if you find that a problem,
don't desire to be successful in giving up more desire than you can. You see what's happening?
At every time he's returned to the middle way, he is moved out of an extreme situation. Now then,
we'll go on. We'll cut out what happens in the pursuit of that method until a little later. The next
truth in the list is concerned with the nature of release from Dukkha. And so number three is Nirvana.
Nirvana is the goal of Buddhism. It's the state of liberation corresponding to what the Hindus call
Moksha. The word means blowout. And it comes from the root Nivritti. Now, some people think that what it
means is blowing out the flame of desire. I don't believe this. I believe that it means breathe out
rather than blowout. Because if you try to hold your breath, and in Indian thought, prana,
breath is the life principle. If you try to hold on to life, you lose it.
You can't hold your breath and stay alive. It becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold on to your
breath. And so in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time
holding on to life. What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it's a drag?
But you see, that's what people do. They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard
of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs,
and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You've got to get out and mow the damn thing all
the time. And you buy expensive this, that, and soon you're all involved in mortgages. And
instead of being able to walk out in the garden and enjoy it, you sit at your desk looking at all the
books and filling out this, that, and the other, and paying bills and answering letters. What a lot of rot!
But you see, that is holding on to life.
So, translated into colloquial American, nirvana is...
Because if you let your breath go, it'll come back.
So, nirvana is not annihilation.
It's not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void.
Nirvana is the state of being let go.
It is a state of consciousness and a state of, you might call it, being here and now in this life.
We now come to the most complicated of all.
Number four, Marga.
Marga in Sanskrit means path.
And the Buddha taught an eight-fold path for the realization of nirvana.
This always reminds me of a story about Dr. Suzuki, who was a...
Who is a very, very great Buddhist scholar.
And many years ago, he was giving a fundamental lecture on Buddhism at the University of Hawaii.
And he got to...
He'd been going through these four truths.
And he said,
The fourth noble truth is called a noble eight-fold path.
The first step of a noble eight-fold path is called Shoken.
Shoken in Japanese means right view.
For Buddhism, fundamentally, is right view.
Right way of viewing this world.
Second step of noble eight-fold path is...
Oh, I forget second step.
You look it up in the book.
Well, I'm going to do rather the same thing.
What is important is this.
The eight-fold path is really got three divisions in it.
The first are concerned with understanding.
The second division is concerned with conduct.
And the third division is concerned with meditation.
And every step in the path is preceded by the Sanskrit word Samyak.
In which Sam is the key word.
In Pali, Samma.
And so, the first step Samyak Drishti.
Which means...
Drishti means a view.
A way of looking at things.
A vision.
An attitude.
Something like that.
But this word Samyak is, in ordinary texts on Buddhism,
almost invariably translated right.
This is a very bad translation.
It does, of course, the word is used in certain contexts in Sanskrit to mean right.
Correct.
But it has other and wider meanings.
Some means, like our word some, which is derived from it.
Complete.
Total.
All-embracing.
It also has the meaning of middle-wade.
Representing, as it were, the fulcrum, the center.
The point of balance in a totality.
Middle-wade way of looking at things.
Middle-wade way of understanding the Dharma.
Middle-wade way of speech.
Of conduct.
Of livelihood.
And so on.
Now, this is particularly cogent when it comes to Buddhist ideas of behavior.
Every Buddhist in all the world, practically, as a layman, if he's not a monk,
undertakes what are called pancha sila, the five good conducts.
Sila, S-I-L-A, is sometimes translated precept.
But it's not a precept because it's not a commandment.
The formula, when a Buddhist, you know, these priests, they chant the precepts, you know.
They're like, Pana-tipata-veramani-sikha-padang-samadhyami.
And that means, Pana-tipata.
Pana is in Pali, this thing.
Prana, life.
Tipata, taking away.
I promise to abstain from.
So, the first is that one undertakes not to destroy life.
Second, not to take what is not given.
Third, oh, this is usually translated, not to commit adultery.
It doesn't say anything of the kind.
In Sanskrit, kamisu mityahara, veramani-sikha-padang-samadhyami.
Kamisu mityahara means, I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting my passions.
Buddhism has no doctrine about adultery. You may have as many wives as you like.
But the point is this.
When you're feeling blue and bored, it's not a good idea to have a drink.
Because you may become dependent on alcohol whenever you feel unhappy.
So, in the same way, when you're feeling blue and bored, it's not a good idea to say, let's go out and get some chicks and have some sex fun.
That's exploiting the passions.
But it's not exploiting the passions, you see.
When drinking, say, expresses the conviviality and friendship of a group sitting around the dinner table.
Or when sex expresses the spontaneous delight of two people in each other.
Then, the fourth precept, musavadha, to abstain from false speech.
This doesn't simply mean lying.
It means abusing people.
It means using speech in a phony way.
Like saying, all niggers are thus and so.
Or, the attitude of America to this situation is thus and thus.
You see, that's phony kind of talking.
Anybody who studies general semantics will be helped in avoiding musavadha, false speech.
The final precept is a very complicated one and nobody's quite sure exactly what it means.
It mentions three kinds of drugs and drinks.
Sura, meriya, maja, pamatatana.
We don't know what they are.
But at any rate, it's generally classed that narcotics and liquors.
Now, there are two ways of translating this precept.
One says, to abstain from narcotics and liquors.
The other liberal translation, favored by the great scholar Dr. Malala Sekera,
is I abstain from being intoxicated by these things.
So, if you drink and don't get intoxicated, it's okay.
You see?
You don't have to be a teetotaler to be a Buddhist.
This is especially true in Japan and China.
My goodness, how they throw it down.
Once a scholar, a Chinese, said to me,
You know, before you start meditating, just have a couple of martinis,
because it increases your progress by about six months.
Well, now you see, these are, as I say,
they are not commandments, they are vows.
Buddhism has no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver.
And the reason why these precepts are undertaken is not for a sentimental reason.
It is not that you're going to make you into a good person.
It is that for anybody interested in the experiments necessary for liberation,
these ways of life are expedient.
First of all, if you go around killing, you're going to make enemies.
And you're going to have to spend a lot of time defending yourself,
which will distract you from your yoga.
If you go around stealing, likewise, you're going to acquire a heap of stuff,
and you're going to, again, make enemies.
If you exploit your passions, you're going to get a big thrill.
But it doesn't last.
When you begin to get older, you realize,
well, that was fun while we had it, but I haven't really learned very much from it.
And now what?
Same with speech.
Nothing is more confusing to the mind than taking words too seriously.
We've seen so many examples of that.
And finally, to get intoxicated or narcotized.
A narcotic is anything like alcohol or opium, which makes you sleepy.
The word narcosis in Greek means narcs, is sleep.
So, if you want to pass your life seeing things through a dim haze,
this is not exactly awakening.
So, then, that's so much for the conduct side of Buddhism.
We come, then, to the final parts of the Eightfold Path.
There are two concluding steps, which are called...
Well, I explained the word samadhi, but I'll write it here again.
Shmriti, Samyak Shmriti, and Samyak Samadhi.
Shmriti means recollection, memory,
present-mindedness.
It seems rather funny that the same word can mean recollection or memory,
and present-mindedness.
But Shmriti is exactly what that wonderful old rascal, Gurdjieff,
meant by self-awareness or self-remembering.
Shmriti is to have a complete presence of mind.
So, there is a wonderful meditation called the House that Jack built meditation,
at least that's what I call it, that the Southern Buddhists practice.
He walks, and he says to himself, there is a lifting of the foot.
There is a lifting of the foot.
Next thing he says, there is a perception of the lifting of the foot.
And then next he says, there is a tendency towards the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.
And so, with everything that he does, he knows that he does it.
He is self-aware.
This is tricky.
Of course, it's not easy to do.
But, as you practice this,
I'm going to let the cat out of the bag, which I suppose I shouldn't do.
But, you will find that there are so many things to be aware of,
at any given moment in what you're doing,
that, at best, you only ever pick out one or two of them.
That's the first thing you'll find out.
Ordinary conscious awareness is seeing the world with blinkers on.
As we say, you can think only of one thing at a time.
That's because ordinary consciousness is narrowed consciousness.
That's being narrow-minded in the true sense of the word.
Looking at things that way.
Then you find out that, as in the course of going around,
being aware of what you're doing all the time,
what are you doing when you remember?
Or when you think about the future?
I'm aware that I'm remembering.
I'm aware that I'm thinking about the future.
But you see, what eventually happens is you discover
that there isn't any way of being absent-minded.
All thoughts are in the present and of the present.
And when you discover that, you approach samadhi.
Samadhi is the complete state, the fulfilled state of mind.
And you will find many, many different ideas among the sects of Buddhists and Hindus
as to what samadhi is.
Some people call it a trance.
Some people call it a state of consciousness without anything in it.
Knowing with no object of knowledge.
Some people say that it is the unification of the knower and the known.
All these are varying opinions.
I had a friend who was a Zen master and he used to talk about samadhi.
And he said a very fine example of samadhi is a fine horse rider.
When you watch a good cowboy, he is one being with the horse.
So an excellent driver in a car.
Makes the car his own body.
And he absolutely is with it.
So also a fine pair of dancers.
They don't have to shove each other to get one to do what the other wants him or her to do.
They have a way of understanding each other, of moving together as if they were Siamese twins.
That's samadhi.
On the physical, ordinary, everyday level.
The samadhi of which Buddha speaks is the state which is, as it were, the gateway to Nirvana.
The state in which the illusion of the ego as a separate thing disintegrates.
Now, when we get to that point in Buddhism, Buddhists do a funny thing, which is going to occupy our attention for a good deal of this seminar.
They don't fall down and worship.
They don't really have any name for what it is that is, really and basically.
The idea of anatman, of non-self, is applied in Buddhism, not only to the individual ego, but also to the notion that there is a self of the universe.
A kind of impersonal or personal god.
And so it is generally supposed that Buddhism is atheistic.
It's true, depending on what you mean by atheism.
Common or garden atheism is a form of belief.
Namely, I believe there is no god.
The atheist positively denies the existence of any god.
All right.
Now, there is such an atheist, if you put a dash between the a and theist, or speak about something called an atheos.
Theos in Greek means God.
But what is a non-god?
A non-god is an inconceivable something or other.
I love the story about a debate in the houses of parliament in England, when, as you know, the Church of England is established and therefore under the control of the government.
And the high ecclesiastics had petitioned parliament to let them have a new prayer book.
And somebody got up and said, it's perfectly ridiculous that parliament should decide upon this because, as we well know, there are quite a number of atheists in these benches.
And somebody got up and he said, oh, I don't think there are really any atheists here. We all believe in some sort of a something somewhere.
Now, again, of course, it isn't that Buddhism believes in some sort of a something somewhere.
That is to say, in vagueness.
Here is the point.
If you believe, if you have certain propositions that you want to assert about the ultimate reality, or what Paul Tillich calls the ultimate ground of being, you're talking nonsense.
Because you can't say something specific about everything.
You see, supposing you wanted to say God has a shape.
But if God is all that there is, then God doesn't have any outside, so he can't have a shape.
You have to have an outside and space outside it to have a shape.
So that's why the Hebrews, too, are against people making images of God.
But nonetheless, Jews and Christians persistently make images of God, not necessarily in pictures and statues,
but they make images in their minds.
And those are much more insidious images.
Buddhism is not saying that the Self, capital S, the great Atman, or what not.
It isn't denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable.
What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things,
you're liable to become attached to them.
You're liable to start believing instead of knowing.
So they say in Zen Buddhism, the doctrine of Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon.
Do not mistake the finger for the moon.
Or so we might say in the West, the idea of God is a finger pointing at God.
But what most people do is instead of following the finger, they suck it for comfort.
And so Buddha chopped off the finger and undermined all metaphysical beliefs.
There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the Buddha into a metaphysical position.
Is the world eternal?
The Buddha says nothing.
Is the world not eternal?
And he answered nothing.
Is the world both eternal and not eternal?
And he don't say nothing.
Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?
And still he don't say nothing.
He maintains what is called the noble silence.
Sometimes later called the thunderous silence.
Because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void.
It is very powerful.
The silence is the open window through which you can see.
Not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods.
But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol and you misdirect people.
It's better to destroy people's beliefs than to give them beliefs.
I know it hurts, but it is the way.
That is what cracks the eggshell and lets out the chick.
Of course, if you want to stay in the eggshell, you can, but you'll get addled.
This then, you see, is why Buddhism is in dialogue form.
The truth cannot be told.
It can be suggested, it can be indicated.
And a method of interchange between teacher and student can be arranged whereby the teacher
constantly pricks the student's bubbles.
And that's what it's all about.
And because that's the way it is, we find that in the course of history, Buddhism keeps changing.
It develops.
It grows.
As people make all these explorations that the original Buddha suggested, they find out all kinds of new things.
They explore the mind.
They find out all the tricks of the mind.
They, oh, they find out ever so many things.
And they begin to teach these things.
Talk about them.
And some people, influenced by, in modern Asia, influenced by Protestantism, say,
Let's go back to the simple original teachings of the Buddha.
See, like people say, let's get back to the simple teachings of Jesus.
Well, the simple teachings of Jesus are as lost as lost can get.
Nobody can read the New Testament with a clean mind today.
Because whenever you look at the Bible, don't you hear some preacher's voice in your childhood reading those words?
Hasn't your culture taught you to interpret these words in certain ways?
You can't get back.
And nobody can get back to Buddha.
You can only go on to Buddha.
So that's why in Zen, they just burn the books up.
I mean, occasionally.
Because to burn up books, you've got to have some books to burn up.
But when, you know, you can say that the teaching of the founder is the thing.
This is terrible.
It's like the oak suddenly saying one day,
Hey, we oughtn't have all these leaves around here.
We oughtn't be just that simple little acorn.
Now, a living tradition grows.
And what it does is this.
As it grows, say it grew from the seed, an acorn,
keeps dropping off new acorns.
You don't go back to the old acorn, you get a new one.
And that becomes a new seed for another tree.
This is fine.
Now, let me just warn you.
The scholarly study of Buddhism is a magnum opus beyond belief.
There are two collections of Buddhist canonical scriptures.
One is in Pali.
The other was originally in Sanskrit,
but we don't have a complete collection of it in Sanskrit.
We have these collections in Tibetan and Chinese.
Bigger than the Encyclopedia Britannica, as a matter of fact.
So it's a formidable enterprise to get into the Buddhist scriptures.
And what's more, most of them are unbelievably boring.
They were written by monks with plenty of time to pass on wet afternoons during the monsoon.
And they repeat, and they elaborate, and they are full of kind of preparatory.
You know how in the silly trick in radio they have of giving a fanfare to introduce the program.
So in the same way these scriptures have fanfares in which all sorts of Buddhas are introduced,
and beings, and they're all described, and where they were assembled,
and how many of them there were, and where they were sitting,
and what kind of bows they made, and all this jazz.
And then finally a few pearls of wisdom are dropped by the Buddha.
Or else they sometimes go on for pages and pages of actually very, very subtle,
and very profound discourse that is not dull if you have a penchant for that kind of thing.
But I warn you, don't try too hard to read the Buddhist scriptures.
It's all right to read the Dhammapada, which are sayings of the Buddha.
It's all right to read the Diamond Sutra.
It's all right even to read the Surangama Sutra or the Lankavatara.
But when you get mixed up with the larger Prajnaparamita and all those things,
you're in deep water.
So you see from time to time, Buddhists get tired of the scriptures.
Actually they keep them in a revolving bookcase in some monasteries.
Think about so high, so wide, it revolves.
And instead of reading all the stuff, you're supposed to be able to acquire as much merit
as you would from reading it all by twirling the bookcase round once.
In Zen monasteries, they have an annual ceremony for reading the scriptures.
But they are...
are printed like an accordion.
In other words, the pages are connected to each other zigzag.
And then they have board on the back and the front,
so that you can pick one up and go like that, you know?
Like a slinky moves.
And so each monk is assigned a pile of the volumes.
This happens once a year.
And they all chant sections of the scripture.
But very often, each monk chants a different one.
And while they're doing this, they pick up a volume and go
and put it down on the other side.
Pick up the different one.
And this is the annual reading of the scriptures.
There's a wonderful picture of this being done in Suzuki's book,
The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk.
So you see, Buddhists are funny about scriptures.
They don't treat them the way Christians treat the Bible.
They respect them.
They occasionally read them.
But they feel that the writing, the written word,
is purely incidental.
It is not the point.
And indeed, it can be a very serious obstacle.
Zhuangzi, a Taoist sage, once said,
just as a dog is not considered a good dog just for being a good barker,
a man is not considered a good man just for being a good talker.
So we have to watch out for the traps of words.
Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture
from the World as Emptiness lecture series.
You must understand, as one of the fundamental points of Buddhism,
the idea of the world as being in flux.
I gave you the Sanskrit word, anitya, as one of the characteristics of being emphasized
by the Buddha, along with anatman, the unreality of a permanent self,
and dukkha, the sense of frustration.
Dukha really arises from a person's failure to accept the other two characteristics,
lack of permanent self, and change.
You see, in Buddhism, the feeling that we have of an enduring organism,
I meet you today, and I see you, and then tomorrow I meet you again,
and you look pretty much as you looked yesterday,
and so I consider that you're the same person.
But you aren't.
It's not really.
When I watch a whirlpool in a stream,
there's the stream flowing along,
and there's always a whirlpool, like the one at Niagara.
But that whirlpool never, never really holds any water.
The water is all the time rushing through it.
In the same way, a university, the University of California.
What is it?
The students change at least every four years.
The faculty changes at a somewhat slower rate.
The building changes.
They knock them down and put up new ones.
The administration changes.
So what is the University of California?
It's a pattern.
A doing of a particular kind.
And so in just precisely that way,
every one of us is a whirlpool in the tide of existence.
And we are in every cell in our body,
every molecule, every atom is in constant flux,
and nothing can be pinned down.
You know, you can put bands on pigeons or migrating birds
and identify them and follow them and find out where they go.
But you can't tag atoms, much less electrons.
They have a curious way of appearing and disappearing.
And one of the great puzzles is, in physics,
what are electrons doing when we're not looking at them?
Because our observation of them has to modify their behavior.
We can't see an electron without putting it in an experimental situation
where our examination of it, in some way, changes it.
What we would like to know is what it's doing when we're not looking at it.
Does the light in the refrigerator really go off when we close the door?
And this is fundamental, you see, to Buddhistic philosophy.
The philosophy of change.
From one point of view, change is just too bad.
Everything flows away.
And there's a kind of sadness in that, a kind of nostalgia,
and there may be even a rage.
Go not gently into that good night, but rage, rage at the dying of the light.
But there's something curious.
There can be a very fundamental change in one's attitude
to the question of the world as fading.
On the one hand, resentment, and on the other, delight.
If you resist change, of course you must to some extent.
When you meet another person, you don't want to be thoroughly rejected,
but you love to feel a little resistance.
Don't you?
You know you have a beautiful girl, and you touch her.
You don't want her to go, bleh.
But so round, so firm, so fully packed.
A little bit of resistance, you see, is great.
So there must always be resistance in change, otherwise there couldn't be even change.
There'd just be a, a, a, a, the world would go, bleh, and that'd be, that'd be the end
of it.
But because there's always some resistance to change, there is a wonderful manifestation
of form.
There is a dance of life.
Now, the human mind, as distinct from most animal minds, is terribly aware of time.
And so we think a great deal about the future.
And we know that every visible form is going to disappear and be replaced by so-called others.
Are these others, others, or are they the same forms returning?
Of course, that's a great puzzle.
Are next year's leaves, that come from a tree, going to be the same as this year's leaves?
What do you mean by the same?
They'll be the same shape, they'll have the same botanical characteristics, but you'll be
able to pick up a shriveled leaf from last autumn and say, look at the difference.
This is last year's leaf, this is this year's leaf, and in that sense they're not the same.
What happens when any great musician plays a certain piece of music?
He plays it today, and then he plays it again tomorrow.
Is it the same piece of music, or is it another?
In the Pali language they say, na ca so, na ca anno, which means not the same, and yet
not another.
So, in this way the Buddhist is able to speak of reincarnation of beings without having to
believe in some kind of soul entity that is reincarnated, some kind of Atman, some kind
of fixed self, ego principle, soul principle that moves from one life to another.
And this is as true in our lives as they go on now from moment to moment, as it would be
true of our lives as they appear and reappear again over millions of years.
It doesn't make the slightest difference.
Except that there are long intervals and short intervals, high vibrations and low vibrations.
When you hear a high sound, high note in the musical scale, you can't see any holes in it.
It's going too fast.
And it sounds completely continuous.
But when you get the lowest audible notes that one can hear on an organ, you feel the
shaking.
You feel the vibration.
You hear that music going dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun, on and off.
So in the same way, as we live now from day to day, we experience ourselves living at a high
rate of vibration and we appear to be continuous, although there is the rhythm of waking and sleeping.
But the rhythm that runs from generation to generation and from life to life is much slower.
And so we notice the gaps.
We don't notice the gaps when the rhythm is fast.
So we are living, as it were, on many, many levels of rhythm.
This is the nature of change.
If you resist it, you have dukkha, you have frustration and suffering.
But on the other hand, if you understand change, you don't cling to it and you let it flow, then
it's no problem.
It becomes positively beautiful.
Which is why, in poetry, the theme of the evanescence of the world is beautiful.
When Shelley says, the one remains, the many change and pass.
Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly.
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity until death shatters
it to fragments.
Now what's beautiful in that?
Is it heaven's light that shines forever?
Or is it rather the dome of many-colored glass which shatters?
See, it's always the image of change that really makes the poem.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps on life's petty pace from day to day.
Somehow, you know, the poet has got the intuition.
The fact that things are always running out, that things are always disappearing, has some
hidden marvel in it.
The Japanese have a word, yugen, y-u-g-e-n, which has no English equivalent whatsoever.
And yugen is, in a way, digging change.
It's described poetically.
You have the feeling of yugen when you see out in the distant water some ships hidden behind
the far-off island.
You have the feeling of yugen when you watch wild geese suddenly seen and then lost in
the clouds.
You have the feeling of yugen when you look across Mount Tamalpice, and you've never been
to the other side, and you see the sky beyond.
You don't go over there to look and see what's on the other side.
That wouldn't be yugen.
You let the other side be the other side.
And it evokes something in your imagination, but you don't attempt to define it, to pin
it down, yugen.
So in the same way, the coming and going of things in the world is marvelous.
They go.
Where do they go?
Don't answer, because that would spoil the mystery.
They vanish into the mystery.
But if you try to pursue them, you've destroyed yugen.
That's a very curious thing.
But that idea of yugen, which in Chinese characters means, as it were, kind of the deep mystery
of the valley, there's a poem in Chinese which says, the wind drops but the petals keep falling.
The bird calls and the mountain becomes more mysterious.
Isn't that strange?
There's no wind anymore, and yet petals are dropping.
And a bird in the canyon cries, and that one sound in the mountains brings out the silence
with a wallop.
Like I remember in the, when I was almost a child in the Pyrenees in the southwest of France,
we went way up in this gorgeous silence of the mountains, but in the distance we could
hear the bells on the cows clanking.
And somehow those tiny sounds brought out the silence.
And so, in the same way, slight permanences bring out change, and they give you this very
strange sense, yugen, the mystery of change.
You know, in Eliot's poem, The Four Quartets, where he says, the dark, dark, dark, they all
go into the dark.
Distinguished families, members of the book of the director of directors, everybody, they
all go into the dark.
Life is life, you see, because, just because, it's always disappearing.
Supposing suddenly, by some kind of diabolical magic, I could say, zzzzzz, and every one of
you would stay the same age forever.
You'd be like Madame Tussaud's waxworks, you'd be awful.
In a thousand years from now, what beautiful hags you would be.
So, the trouble is, that we have one-sided minds, and we notice the wave of life when
it is at its peak or crest.
We don't notice it when it's at the trough.
Not in the ordinary way.
It's the peaks that count.
Take a buzz saw.
What seems important to us is the tips of the teeth.
They seem to do the cutting, not the valleys between the teeth.
But do you see, you couldn't have tips of teeth without valleys between them.
Therefore the saw wouldn't cut without both tips and v-shaped valleys.
But we ignore that.
We don't notice the valleys so much as we notice the mountains.
Valleys point down.
Mountains point up.
And we prefer things that point up, because up is good and down is bad.
But seriously, we don't praise the peaks for being high and blame the valleys for being
low.
But it is so, you see, that we ignore the valley aspect of things.
And so all wisdom begins by emphasizing the valley aspect as distinct from the peak aspect.
We pay plenty of attention to the peak aspect.
That's what captures our attention.
But we somehow screen out the valley aspect.
But that makes us very uncomfortable.
It seems that we want and get pleasure from looking at the peaks.
But actually this denies our pleasure.
Because secretly we know that every peak is followed by a valley, the valley of the shadow of death.
And we are always afraid because we are not used to looking at valleys, because we are not
used to living with them.
They represent to us a strange and threatening unknown.
Maybe we are afraid the principle of the valley will conquer and the peaks will be overwhelmed.
Maybe death is stronger than life.
Because life always seems to require an effort.
Death is something into which you slide effortlessly.
Maybe nothing will overcome something in the end.
Wouldn't that be awful?
And so we resist change, ignorant of the fact that change is life and that nothing is invariably
the obverse face of something.
That people are afraid of space.
They ignore it and they think space is nothing.
Space and solid are two ways of talking about the same thing.
Space solid.
You don't find space without solid.
You don't find solids without space.
If I say there's a universe in which there isn't anything but space, you're going to say space between what?
Space is relationship.
And it always goes together with solid, like back goes with front.
But the divisive mind ignores space.
And it thinks that it's the solids that do the whole job.
That they're the only thing that's real.
That is to put it in other words, conscious attention ignores intervals.
Because it thinks they're unimportant.
Let's consider music.
When you hear music, what you really hear when you hear melody is the interval between one
tone and another.
The steps, as it were, on the scale.
It's the interval that is the important thing.
So in the same way, in the intervals between this year's leaves, last year's leaves, this generation of people and that generation,
the interval is in some ways just as important, some ways more important than what it's between.
Actually they go together.
And I say the interval is sometimes more important because we under-emphasize it.
So I'm going to over-emphasize it as a correction.
So space, night, death, darkness, not being there, is an essential component of being there.
You don't have the one without the other, just as your buzzsaw has no teeth without having valleys
between the tips of them.
That's the way being is made up.
In Buddhism, change is emphasized first to unsettle people who think that they can achieve permanence
by hanging on to life.
And it seems that the preacher is wagging his finger at them and saying, you know, like the
Scotch preacher, one day saying to Sunday congregation, preaching on the text, the vanity of vanities,
all is vanity.
And what about the rich food you put into your mouths?
Tis vanity.
And the fine arraignment you put on your box?
Tis vanity.
And all you're playing around going to golf instead of coming to the Kirkh or the Sabbath?
Tis vanity.
And you'll be spending all your lives devoted to vanity.
And the last day will come, the day of your death.
And because you've devoted your life to vanity, you'll go down to the burning, fiery brimstone pits of hell.
And there you'll look up and say unto the Lord, oh Lord, I didn't know it.
Oh Lord, I wouldn't have devoted my life to vanity if I'd known it.
Oh Lord.
And the Lord, he'll look down and he'll say unto you, out of his infinite mercy, well, you know it now.
So all the preachers together, you should say, don't cling to this thing.
So then, as a result of that, and I'm going to speak in strictly Buddhist terms, the follower of the way of Buddha seeks deliverance from attachment to the world of change.
He seeks nirvana, the state beyond change, which the Buddha called the unborn, the unoriginated, the uncreated, and the unformed.
But then you see, what he finds out is that in seeking a state beyond change, seeking nirvana as something away from samsara, which is the name for the wheel,
he is still seeking something permanent.
And so there are, as Buddhism went on, they thought about this a great deal.
And this very point was the point of division between the two great schools of Buddhism, which in the south were Theravada, the doctrine of the Thera, the elders, sometimes known disrespectfully as the Hinayana.
Yana means a vehicle, a conveyance, a diligence, or a ferryboat.
This is a yana.
And I live on a ferryboat because that's my job.
Then there is the other school of Buddhism called the Mahayana.
Maha means great.
Hina, little.
The great vehicle and the little vehicle.
Now, what is this?
The Mahayanists say, your little vehicle just gets a few people who are very, very tough ascetics and takes them across the other shore to nirvana.
But the great vehicle shows people that nirvana is not different from ordinary life.
So that when you have reached nirvana, if you think, now I have attained it.
Now I have succeeded.
Now I have caught the secret of the universe, and I am at peace.
You have only a false peace.
You have become a stone Buddha.
You have a new illusion of the changeless.
So, it is said that such a person is a Pratyeka Buddha.
That means private Buddha.
I've got it all for myself.
And in contrast with this kind of Pratyeka Buddha, who gains nirvana and stays there, the Mahayanists use the word
The Mahayanists use the word.
Here we go.
The Mahayanists use the Boatwright to be a domain for the creator.
Bodhisattva. Sattva means essential principle, Bodhi, awakening. A person whose essential
being is awakened. The word used to mean junior Buddha, someone on the way to becoming
a Buddha. But in the course of time, it came to mean someone who had attained Buddhahood,
who had reached nirvana, but who returns into everyday life to deliver all other beings.
This is the popular idea of a Bodhisattva, a savior. And so in the popular Buddhism of Tibet
and China and Japan, people worship the Bodhisattvas, the great Bodhisattvas, as saviors.
Say, the hermaphroditic Kuan Yin. People love Kuan Yin because she, he, she, she, he could be a Buddha,
but has come back into the world to save all beings. The Japanese call he, she, kanon. And they have in Kyoto
an image of kanon with one thousand arms, radiating like a great aureole, all around this great golden figure.
And these one thousand arms are one thousand different ways of rescuing beings from ignorance.
Kanon is a funny thing. I remember one night when I suddenly realized that kanon was incarnate in the whole city of Kyoto,
that this whole city was kanon. That the police department, the taxi drivers, the fire department, the mayor and corporation, the shopkeepers,
insofar as this whole city was a collaborate effort to sustain human life. However bumbling, however inefficient, however corrupt,
it was still a manifestation of kanon, with its thousand arms, all working independently, and yet one.
So they revere those Bodhisattvas as the saviors who have come back into the world to deliver all beings.
But there is a more esoteric interpretation of this. The Bodhisattva returns into the world. That means he has discovered
that you don't have to go anywhere to find nirvana. Nirvana is where you are, provided you don't object to it.
Change, and everything is changed, nothing can be held onto. To the degree that you go with a stream, you see, you are still.
You are flowing with it. But to the degree you resist the stream, then you notice that the current is rushing past you and fighting with you.
So swim with it. Go with it. And you are there. You are at rest. And this is, of course, particularly true when it comes to those moments
when life really seems to be going to take us away. And the stream of change is going to swallow us completely.
The moment of death. And we think, oh, oh, this is it. This is the end. And so, at death, we withdraw.
Say, no, no, no, no. Not that. Not, not, not yet. Please. But, actually, the whole problem is that it really is no other problem for human beings
than to go over that waterfall when it comes. Just as you go over any other waterfall. Just as you go on from day to day. Just as you go to sleep at night.
Be absolutely willing to die. Now, I'm not preaching. I'm not saying you ought to be willing to die and that you should, um, muscle up your courage and somehow put on a good front when the terrible thing comes.
That's not the idea at all. Point is that you can only die well if you understand this system of waves. If you understand that your disappearance as the form in which you think you are you, your disappearance as this particular organism is simply seasonal,
that you are just as much the dark space beyond death as you are the light interval called life. These are just two sides of you. Because you is the total wave. See, you can't have half a wave. Nobody ever saw waves which just had crests, no troughs.
So you can't have half a human being who is born but doesn't die. Half a thing. That would be only half a thing. But the propagation of vibrations, and life is vibration, it simply goes on and on, but its cycles are long cycles and short cycles. Space, you see, is not just nothing.
If I could magnify my hand. If I could magnify my hand to an enormous degree so that you could see all the molecules in it. I don't know how far apart they would be, but it seems to me they would be something like tennis balls, uh, in a very, very large space.
And you would look when I move my hand like this and say, for God's sake, look at all those tennis balls, they're all going together. Crazy! And there are no strings tying them together. Isn't that queer? No, but there's space going with them.
And space is a function of, or it's an inseparable aspect of, whatever solids are in the space. That is the clue probably to what we mean by gravity. We don't know yet.
So, in the same way, when those marvellous sandpipers come around here, the little ones, while they're in the air flying, they have one mind. They move all together.
When they alight on the mud, they become individuals and they go picking around for worms or something.
But one click of the fingers and all those things are going, zzzzzz, into the air. They don't seem to have a leader.
Because they don't follow when they turn, they all turn together and go off in another direction. Amazing. But they're like the molecules in my hand.
So then, you see, here's the principle. When you don't resist change, I mean over-resist, I don't mean being flabby.
When you don't resist change, you see that the changing world, which disappears like smoke, is no different from the nirvana world.
Nirvana, as I said, means breathe out. Let go of the breath. So in the same way, don't resist change. It's all the same principle.
So the bodhisattva saves all beings. Not by preaching sermons to them, but by showing them that they are delivered, they are liberated, by the very fact of not being able to stop changing.
You can't hang on to yourself. You don't have to try not to hang on to yourself. It can't be done. And that is salvation.
Memento mori. Be mindful of death. Gurdjieff says in one of his books that the most important thing for anyone to realize is that you and all you, every person you see, will soon be dead.
See, it sounds so gloomy to us. Because we have devised a culture fundamentally resisting death.
I love the story of a conversation at an English country house at a dinner party where the hostess started up the question of death and asked the various guests what they thought was going to happen to them when they die.
And some thought about reincarnation and others thought about various kinds of different planes of being and others thought they were going to be annihilated.
But none of the guests had answered except Sir Roderick, who was a kind of a military type, but a very devout pillar of the Church of England.
He was the churchwarden, chief of the vestry in the local country parish.
And the lady said, Sir Roderick, you haven't said a word. What do you think is going to happen to you when you die?
Oh, he said, I am perfectly certain that I shall go to heaven and enjoy everlasting bliss, but I wish you would indulge in such a depressing conversation.
That's true, isn't it?
Uh, death in the Western world is a real problem. We hush it up. We pretend it hasn't happened.
Our morticians, who are very smart commercial operators, know exactly what's expected of them.
And they make death just awful by pretending it doesn't happen. See what happens.
You go to a hospital and you're at the end. You've got terminal cancer.
And all your friends come around and they wear false smiles and they say, cheer up, you'll be alright.
Uh, in a few days from now you'll be back home and we'll, we'll go out for a picnic again.
The doctors have their bedside mount. You see a doctor is absolutely helpless with a terminal case.
Because he's a doctor's, by social definition, a healer. And he's not allowed to help you die. He's out of role.
Even though, I mean, he may sneak behind the rules and do it. But he's definitely, he's got to heal you.
So he's going to keep you indefinitely on the end of tubes and all kinds of things.
While there's a certain grave demeanor to all this and all the nurses are so pleasant and so totally distant.
Because they know this is death. And they may be frank with you. That's why they feel distant.
It's not that they're not concerned. It's not that they're heartless people.
But that they just don't know how to be frank. Like lots of people when they meet a drunk.
They don't know what to do with a drunk. Uh, because, uh, he's not, he's not behaving, not behaving right.
And so...
When you're dying, you're not behaving right. You're supposed to live.
See, so we don't know what to do with a dying person.
We don't get around that person and say, listen now, listen man, listen, I've got the news for you.
You're going to die.
And this is going to be great.
Look, no more responsibilities.
Don't have to pay those bills anymore.
Don't have to worry about anything.
You're going to just die.
And let's go out with a bang.
Let's have a party, see.
We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll put some, some of that morphine in you so that you won't hurt too much.
But we were going to prop you up in bed and we're going to bring all our friends around.
And we're going to have champagne.
And you're going to, you're going to die at the end of it, see.
And it's going to be just marvelous.
Just like being born, see.
When we had birth problems, see, all women used to think that birth had to be painful.
It was good for them.
It was one of the things you had to suffer because you'd been, you'd been screwing around with people.
And therefore you, you had to have a child and it's got to hurt.
And then the doctors got together and they scratched their heads and the man called Grantly Dick Reed said,
No, birth doesn't hurt.
It's natural.
All we've got to do is to talk these women into the idea that it doesn't hurt,
that all these so-called pains are just tensions.
And that birth is great.
It's not a disease.
It's not really something you ought to go to hospital for.
Because you associate hospitals with diseases and sickness.
Birth isn't sickness.
All right.
Now let's do some new thinking.
What about death?
Is death sickness?
Or is it a healthy natural event like being gone?
Of course it is.
So, I mean, a little change in social attitude about this will fortify everybody else.
I mean, if I'm alone and all my relatives are going,
and pretending to me, it's going to be hard for me.
I've got to challenge the whole bunch of them and get my dander up and say,
Listen, damn you.
I don't want all this thing around here.
You've got to take a different attitude about my death.
Well, that's hard.
But if everybody helps me, and we do, we're all one body.
If they all come around and say, Congratulations, you're going to die.
Liberation.
Liberation now, you see.
Because just before you die, I mean, look.
I know very well a skillful priest handling a person dying can do this for them.
But he has to talk very, very, very straight.
And he has to say, Listen, these doctors, don't you pay any attention to them.
They're trying to amuse you and deceive you.
You're going to die.
This isn't terrible.
But it's just going to be the end of you, as a system of memories.
And so, you've got a great chance right now, before it happens, to let go of everything.
Because you know it's going to go, and it is going to help you.
It's going to help you let go of everything.
So, if you have any possessions left, give them away.
Give everything away.
And if you have anything to say, that is, you felt that you ought to say before you die,
and that you're kind of hanging on to, and it's bothering you, say it.
I mean, I don't mean necessarily a last confession.
But say it said that Adlai Stevenson, shortly before he died, said that he'd been making a monkey of himself
because he didn't agree with the government's policy about something or other.
You know, he had to get that off his chest, because he had a little thought in the back of his mind
that things were catching up with him.
You see?
So the moment comes when this thing called death has to be taken completely.
Not as some ghastly accident.
Something that, oh, your friends are going to stay away because you're awful.
I mean, sometimes people, when they die, are in a very unpleasant physical condition.
They don't smell good, they don't look good, and so on.
But an enormous amount can be done with scientific methods to make things reasonably tidy
from a purely sensory point of view.
But the main thing is the attitude.
That death is as positive as birth, and should be a matter for rejoicing,
because death is the symbol of the liberation.
There is a wonderful saying that Ananda Kumaraswamy used to quote,
I pray that death will not come and find me still unannihilate.
In other words, that man dies happy if there is no one to die.
In other words, if the ego has disappeared before death caught up with it.
But you see, the knowledge of death helps the ego to disappear,
because it tells you you can't hang on.
So what we need, if we're going to have a good religion around,
that's one of the places where it can start.
Having, I don't know what, nowadays I suppose they'd call it the institution for creative dying.
But something like that.
And you can have, you can have one department where you can have champagne cocktail party to die with,
another department where you can have glorious religious rituals and priests and things like that,
another department where you can have psychedelic drugs,
another department where you can have special kinds of music, anything, you know.
All these arrangements will be provided for in a hospital for delightful dying.
But that's the thing, to go out with a bang instead of a whimper.
Out of Your Mind now continues with the next lecture from the World as Emptiness lecture series.
I was talking a great deal yesterday afternoon about the Buddhist attitude to change,
to death, to the transience of the world.
And we're showing that preachers of all kinds stir people up in the beginning by alarming them about change.
That's like somebody, you know, actually raising an alarm, just in the same way as if I want to pay you a visit,
I ring the doorbell.
And then we can come in and I don't need to raise an alarm anymore.
So, in the same way, it sounds terrible, you see, that everything is going to die and pass away,
and here you are, thinking that happiness, sanity, and security,
consist in clinging on to things which can't be clung to,
and in any case there isn't anybody to cling to them.
And the whole thing is a weaving of smoke.
So, that's the initial standpoint.
But, as soon as you really discover this, and you stop clinging to change,
then everything is quite different.
It becomes amazing.
And not only do all your senses become more wide awake,
not only do you feel almost that you're walking on air,
but you see, finally, that there is no duality, no difference,
between the ordinary world and the nirvana world.
They're the same world, but what makes the difference is the point of view.
And, of course, if you keep identifying yourself with some sort of stable entity
that sits and watches the world go by,
you don't acknowledge your union,
your inseparability from everything else that there is.
You go by with all the rest of the things,
but if you insist on trying to take a permanent stand,
on trying to be a permanent witness of the flux,
then it grates against you,
and you feel very uncomfortable.
But it is a fundamental feeling in most of us
that we are such witnesses.
We feel that behind the stream of our thoughts,
of our feelings, and our experiences,
there is something which is the thinker, the feeler, and the experiencer.
Not recognizing that that is itself a thought, feeling, or experience,
and it belongs within and not outside the changing panorama of experience.
It's what you call a cue signal.
In other words, when you telephone,
and your telephone conversation is being tape recorded,
it's the law that there shall be a beep every so many seconds.
And that beep cues you in to the fact that this conversation is recorded.
So, in a very similar way, in our everyday experience, there is a beep,
which tells us this is a continuous experience, which is mine.
Beep!
In the same way, for example, it is a cue signal,
when a composer arranges some music,
and he keeps in it a recurrent theme,
but he makes many variations on it.
Or, more subtle still,
he keeps within it a consistent style.
So, you know that it's Mozart all the way along,
because it sounds like Mozart.
But there isn't, as it were, a constant noise,
going all the way through to tell you it's continuous,
although, in Hindu music, they do have something called the drone.
There is, behind all the drums and every kind of singing,
something that goes,
and it always sounds the note which is the tonic of the scale being used.
But in Hindu music, that drone represents the eternal self,
the Brahman, behind all the changing forms of nature.
But that's only a symbol.
And to find out what is eternal,
you can't make an image of it, you can't hold onto it,
and so it's psychologically more conducive to liberation,
to remember that the thinker, or the feeler, or the experiencer,
and the experiences are all together, they're all one.
But if out of anxiety, you try to stabilize, keep permanent,
the separate observer, you are in for conflict.
Of course, the separate observer, the thinker of the thoughts,
is an abstraction which we create out of memory.
We think of the self, the ego, rather, as a repository of memories,
a kind of safety deposit box, or record, or filing cabinet place,
where all our experiences are stored.
Now, that's not a very good idea.
It's more that memory is a dynamic system, not a storage system.
It's a repetition of rhythms.
And these rhythms are all part and parcel of the ongoing flow of present experience.
In other words, first of all, how do you distinguish between something known now and a memory?
Actually, you don't know anything at all until you remember it.
Because if something happens that is purely instantaneous,
if a light flashes, or to be more accurate,
if there is a flash lasting only one millionth of a second,
you probably wouldn't really experience it.
Because it wouldn't give you enough time to remember it.
We say in customary speech,
well, it has to make an impression.
So, in a way, all present knowledge is memory.
Because you look at something,
and for a while, the rods and cones in your retina respond to that,
and they go, they do their stuff, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle.
It's all vibration.
And so, as you look at things,
they set up a series of echoes in your brain.
And these echoes keep reverberating,
because the brain is very complicated.
First of all, everything you know is remembered.
But there is a way in which we distinguish
between seeing somebody here now,
and the memory of having seen somebody else who is not here now,
but whom you did see in the past,
and you know perfectly well,
when you remember that other person's face,
it's not an experience of the person being here.
How is this?
Because memory signals have a different cue attached to them
than present time signals.
They come on a different kind of vibration.
Sometimes, however, the wiring gets mixed up,
and present experiences come to us with a memory cue attached to them.
And then we have what is called a déjà vu experience.
We are quite sure we've experienced this thing before.
But the problem that we don't see,
and don't ordinarily recognize,
is that although memory is a series of signals
with a special kind of cue attached to them
so that we don't confuse them with present experience,
they are actually all part of the same thing as present experience.
They are all part of the same thing as present.
all part of this constantly flowing life process and there is no separate witness standing
aside from the process, watching it go by.
You're all involved in it.
Now accepting that, you see, going with that, although at first it sounds like the knell
of doom, is if you don't clutch it anymore, splendid.
That's why I said that death should be an occasion for a great celebration.
That people should say happy death to you and always surround death with joyous rites
because this is the opportunity for the greatest of all experiences when you can finally let
go because you know there's nothing else to do.
There was a kamikaze pilot who escaped because his plane that he was flying at an American
aircraft carrier went wrong.
And he landed in the water instead of hitting the plane.
So he survived.
But he said afterwards that he had the most extraordinary state of exaltation.
It wasn't a kind of patriotic ecstasy.
But the very thought that in a moment he would cease to exist, that he would just be gone for
some mysterious reason that he couldn't understand made him feel absolutely like a god.
Until then, in Buddhist philosophy, this sort of annihilation of oneself, this acceptance of
change is the doctrine of the world as the void.
This doctrine did not emerge very clearly, very prominently in Buddhism until quite a while
after Gotama the Buddha had lived.
We begin to find this though becoming prominent about the year 100 B.C.
And by 200 A.D. it had reached its peak.
And it was developed by the Mahayana Buddhists and it is the doctrine of a whole class of literature
which goes by this complex name, Prajnaparamita.
Now, Prajnaparamita means wisdom, Paramita for crossing over, for going beyond.
There is a small Prajnaparamita Sutra, a big Prajnaparamita Sutra, and then there is a little
short summary of the whole thing called the Hridaya, or Heart Sutra.
And that is recited by Buddhists all over northern Asia, Tibet, China, and Japan.
And it contains the saying, that which is void is precisely the world of form, that which
is form is precisely the void.
Form is emptiness, emptiness is form, so on.
And it elaborates on this theme.
It's very short, but it's always chanted at important Buddhist ceremonies.
And so it is supposed by scholars of all kinds who have a missionary background that the Buddhists
are nihilists.
That they teach that the world is really nothing.
There isn't anything.
And that there seems to be something is purely an illusion.
But of course this philosophy is much more subtle than that.
The main person who was responsible for developing and maturing this philosophy was Nagarjuna.
And he lived about 200 AD.
One of the most astonishing minds that the human race has ever produced.
And the name of Nagarjuna's school of thought is Madhyamika, which means really the doctrine
of the middle way.
But it's sometimes also called the doctrine of emptiness, or Sunyavada, from the basic word
Sunya, or sometimes Sunya has Ta added on the end.
And that Ta means-ness, emptiness.
Well then, emptiness means essentially transience.
That's the first thing it means.
Nothing to grasp.
Nothing permanent.
Nothing to hold onto.
But it means this with special reference to ideas of reality.
Ideas of God, ideas of the Self, the Brahman, anything you like.
What it means is that reality escapes all concepts.
If you say there is a God, that's a concept.
If you say there is no God, that's a concept.
And Nagarjuna is saying that always your concepts will prove to be attempts to catch water in a sieve,
or wrap it up in a parcel.
So he invented a method of teaching Buddhism which was an extension of the dialectic method
that the Buddha himself first used.
And this became the great way of studying, especially at the University of Nalanda,
which has been re-established in modern times, but of course it was destroyed by the Muslims
when they invaded India.
The University of Nalanda, where the dialectic method of enlightenment was taught.
The dialectic method is perfectly simple.
It can be done with an individual student and a teacher, or with a group of students
and a teacher.
And you would be amazed how effective it is when it involves precious little more than
discussion.
Some of you, no doubt, have attended tea groups, blablabs, in which people are there,
and they don't know quite why they're there, and there's some sort of a so-called resource
person to disturb them.
And after a while they get the most incredible emotions, and somebody tries to dominate the
discussion of the group, say, and then the group kind of goes into the question of why
he's trying to dominate it, and so on and so forth.
Well these were the original blablabs, and they have been repeated in modern times with the
most startling effects.
That is to say, the teacher gradually elicits from his participant students what are their
basic premises of life.
What is your metaphysic, in the sense?
I'm not using metaphysic in a kind of a spiritual sense, but what are your basic assumptions?
What real ideas do you operate on as to what is right and what is wrong, what is the good
life and what is not?
What arguments are you going to argue strongest?
Where do you take your stand?
The teacher soon finds this out for each individual concerned, and then he demolishes it.
He absolutely takes away that person's compass.
And so they start getting very frightened.
And say to the teacher, all right, I see now, of course, I can't depend on this, but what
should I depend on?
And unfortunately the teacher doesn't offer any alternative suggestions, but simply goes
on to examine the question, why do you think you have to have something to depend on?
Now this is kept up over quite a period, and the only thing that keeps the students from going
insane is the presence of a teacher who seems to be perfectly happy, but is not proposing
any ideas.
He's only demolishing them.
And so we get finally, not quite finally, to the void, the shunya.
And what then?
When you get to the void, there is an enormous and unbelievable sense of relief.
That's nirvana.
Phew!
Because I gave a proper English translation of nirvana.
Ah!
Great.
So they are liberated.
And yet they can't quite say why or what it is that they found out.
So they call it the void.
But Nagarjuna went on to say, you mustn't cling to the void.
You have to void the void.
And so the void of non-void is the great state, as it were, of Nagarjuna's Buddhism.
But you must remember that all that has been voided, all that has been denied, are those
concepts in which one has hitherto attempted to pin down what is real.
In Zen Buddhist texts they say, you cannot nail a peg into the sky.
And so to be a man of the sky, a man of the void, is also called a man not depending on anything.
And when you're not hung on anything, you are the only thing that isn't hung on anything,
which is the universe, which doesn't hang, you see.
Where would it hang?
It has no place to fall on, even though it may be dropping.
There will never be the crash of it landing on concrete floor somewhere.
But the reason for that is that it won't crash below because it doesn't hang above.
And so there is a poem in Chinese which speaks of such a person as having above not
a tile to cover the head, below not an inch of ground on which to stand.
And you see this which to people like us who are accustomed to rich imageries of the divine,
the loving Father in heaven who has laid down the eternal laws, O word of God incarnate,
O wisdom from above, O truth unchanged unchanging, O light of life and love, the wisdom which from
the hallowed page, a lantern for our footsteps, shines out from age to age.
See, so that's very nice.
We feel we know where we are and that it's all been written down and that in heaven the
Lord God is resplendent with glory, with all the colors of the rainbow, with all the saints
and angels around and everything like that.
So we feel that it's positive, that we've got a real rip-roaring gutsy religion full of
color and so on, but it doesn't work that way.
The more clear your image of God, the less powerful it is because you're clinging to it.
The more it's an idol.
But voiding it completely isn't going to turn it into what you think of as void.
What would you think of as void?
Being lost in a fog so that it's white all around and you can't see in any direction.
Being in the darkness or the color of your head as perceived by your eyes.
That's probably the best illustration that we would think of as the void because it isn't
black and it isn't white, it isn't anything.
But that's still not the void.
Take the lesson from the head.
How does your head look to your eyes?
Well I tell you, it looks like what you see out in front of you because all that you see
out in front of you is how you feel inside your head.
So it's the same with this.
And so for this reason the great sixth patriarch, Huinang in China, said that it was a great mistake
for those who are practicing Buddhist meditation to try to make their minds empty.
And a lot of people tried to do that.
They sat down and tried to have no thoughts whatever in their minds.
Not only no thoughts but no sense experiences.
So they'd close their eyes, they'd plug up their ears and generally go in for sensory deprivation.
Well sensory deprivation, if you know how to handle it, can be quite interesting.
It'll have the same sort of results as taking LSD or something like that.
And there are special labs made nowadays where you can be sensory deprived to an amazing degree.
But if you're a sort of a good yogi, this doesn't bother you at all, send some people crazy.
But if you dig this world, you can have a marvelous time in a sensory deprivation scene.
Also especially if they get you into a condition of weightlessness.
Skin divers going down below a certain number of feet, I don't know exactly how far it is,
but get a sense of weightlessness.
And at the same time this deprives them of every sense of responsibility.
They become alarmingly happy.
And they have been known to simply take off their masks and offer them to a fish.
And of course they then drown.
So if you skin dive and you keep, you have to keep your eye on the time, you have to have
a water watch or a friend who's got a string attached to you, if you go down that far,
and at a certain specific time you know you have got to get back, however happy you feel,
and however much inclined to say, survival, survival, what the hell's the point of that?
And this is happening to the men who go out into space.
They will increasingly find that they have to have automatic controls to bring them back.
Quite aside that they can't change in any way from the spaceship.
Now isn't that interesting?
Can you become weightless here?
I said a little while ago that the person who really accepts transience begins to feel
weightless.
When Suzuki was asked what is it like to have experienced Satori, enlightenment, he said it's
just like ordinary everyday experience but about two inches off the ground.
Zhuangzi, the Taoist, said it is easy enough to stand still.
The difficulty is to walk without touching the ground.
Why do you feel so heavy?
It isn't just a matter of gravitation and weight.
It is that you feel that you are carrying your body around.
So there is a koan in Zen Buddhism.
Who is it that carries this corpse around?
So when you feel it, common speech expresses this all the time, life is a drag.
I feel I'm just dragging myself around.
My body is a burden to me.
To whom?
That's the question.
You see?
And when there is nobody left for whom the body can be a burden, the body isn't a burden.
But so long as you fight it, it is.
So then, when there is nobody left to resist the thing that we call change, which is simply
another word for life.
And when we dispel the illusion that we think our thoughts, instead of being just a stream
of thoughts, and that we feel our feelings instead of being just feelings, it's like saying, you
know, to feel the feelings, is a redundant expression.
It's like saying, actually, I hear sounds, for there are no sounds which are not heard.
Hearing is sound.
Seeing is sight.
You don't see sights, sightseeing is a ridiculous word.
You could just say either sighting or seeing, one or the other, but sightseeing is nonsense.
So we keep doubling our words, and this doubling is comparable to oscillation.
In an electrical system, where there's too much feedback, where, you remember, in the
old-fashioned telephone, where the receiver was separate from the mouthpiece, the transmitter.
If you wanted to annoy someone who was abusing you on the telephone, you could make them listen
to themselves by putting the receiver to the mouthpiece.
But it actually didn't have that effect.
It set up oscillation.
It started to howl.
It could be very, very hard on the ears.
The same way, if you turn a television camera at the monitor, that is to say, the television
set in the studio, the whole thing will start to jiggle.
The visual picture will be of oscillation, like that.
And the same thing happens here.
When you get to think that you think your thoughts, the you standing aside the thoughts, has the
same sort of consequence as seeing double.
And then you think, can I observe the thinker thinking the thoughts?
Or, I am worried, and I ought not to worry, but because I can't stop worrying, I'm worried
because I worry.
And you see where that could lead to.
It leads to exactly the same situation that happens in the telephone.
And that is what we call anxiety, trembling.
But this discipline that we're talking about, of Nagarjunus, abolishes anxiety.
Because you discover that no amount of anxiety makes any difference to anything that's going
to happen.
In other words, from the first standpoint, the worst is going to happen.
You're all going to die.
And don't just put it off in the back of your mind and say, I'll consider that later.
It's the most important thing to consider now.
Because it enables you, it is the mercy of nature.
Because it's going to enable you to let go.
And not defend yourself all the time.
Waste all energies in self-defense.
So this doctrine of the void is really the basis of the whole Mahayana movement in Buddhism.
It's marvelous.
The void, of course, is in Buddhist imagery symbolized by a mirror.
Because a mirror has no color, and yet reflects all colors.
When this man I talked to you of, Huenang, said that you shouldn't just try to cultivate
a blank mind.
What he said was this.
The void, Shunyata, is like space.
Now, space contains everything.
The mountains, the oceans, the stars, the good people and the bad people, the plants,
the animals, everything.
Now, the mind in us, the true mind, is like that.
You will find that when Buddhists use the word mind, they've several words for mind, but
I'm not going into the technicality at the moment.
They mean space.
See, space is your mind.
It's very difficult for us to see that because we think we're in space and look out at it.
There are various kinds of space.
There's visual space, distance.
There is audible space, silence.
There is temporal space, as we say, between times.
There is musical space, so-called distance between intervals, or the intervals between
tones, rather.
It's quite a different kind of space than temporal or visual space.
There's tangible space, but all these spaces, you see, are the mind.
They are the dimensions of consciousness.
And so, this great space, which every one of us apprehends from a slightly different point
of view, in which the universe moves, this is the mind.
So it's represented by a mirror, because although the mirror has no color, it is for that reason
able to receive all the different colors.
Meister Eckhart said, in order to see color, my eye has to be free from color.
So in the same way, in order not only to see, but also to hear, to think, to feel, you have
to have an empty head.
And the reason why you are not aware of your brain cells, unless you're only aware of your
brain cells if you get a tumor or something in the brain, when it gets sick.
But in the ordinary way, you are totally unconscious of your brain cells, they are void.
And for that reason, you see everything else.
So that's the central principle of the Mahayana.
And it works in such a way, you see, that it releases people from the notion that Buddhism
is clinging to the void.
This was very important when Buddhism went into China.
The Chinese really dug this.
Because Chinese are a very practical people.
And when they found these Hindu Buddhist monks, trying to empty their minds, and to sit perfectly
still, and not to engage in any family activities, they were celibates.
Chinese thought they were crazy.
Why do that?
And so the Chinese reformed Buddhism.
And they allowed Buddhist priests to marry.
And in fact, what they especially enjoyed was a sutra that came from India, in which a layman,
who was a wealthy merchant called Vimalakirti, out-argued all the other disciples of Buddha.
And of course, you know, if in these, these are these dialectic arguments that are very,
very intense things, if you win the argument, everybody else has to be your disciple.
So Vimalakirti, the layman, won the debate.
Even with Manjusri, who is the bodhisattva of supreme wisdom, they all had to see a contest
to define the void.
And all of them gave their definitions.
Finally, Manjusri gave his.
And Vimalakirti was asked then for his definition, and he said nothing.
And so he won the whole argument.
The thunderous silence.
This concludes Out of Your Mind, essential listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives.
Music by Stephen McNamara.
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