===== Philosophy And Society - 01 - The Veil Of Thoughts =====

It's curious how, past the middle of the 20th century, there's a very strong evidence of a revival in Western philosophy of what used to be called idealism, not in the moral sense, but in the metaphysical sense.
That is to say, of the feeling that the external world is in some way a creation of the mind. Only we come to this point of view with very different assumptions than were held by people like Hegel or Berkeley or Bradley, great idealists of the European metaphysical tradition, and probably rather more akin to
similar trends in Buddhist philosophy, emerging from India about 400 AD. The difference of approach, the difference of the way in which today this thing arises, and the way in which it arose in the thought of a man like Bishop Berkeley, is that the new idealism has a kind of curiously physical basis.
When, one would argue, everything you know is in your mind, and the distance, the feeling of externality between you and other objects and people, is also a content of consciousness.
And therefore, it's all, it's all your consciousness. This, of course, created all sorts of weird feelings. Are things there when I'm not witnessing them? Or, is there anybody else there? Or are you all my personal dream?
And one has only to imagine a conference of solipsists, those who believe that they alone exist, arguing as to which one of them is really there, to make the whole idea rather laughable?
And furthermore, there seemed to be no clarity in such philosophical thinking, as to what the term mind or consciousness meant.
It had long associations with the miasmic and the gaseous, by way of images.
Mind and soul and spirit were always vague and formless. And matter, by contrast, was very rugged, craggly.
And how these two ever influenced each other, nobody ever could decide.
Because all properly behaved ghosts walk straight through brick walls without disturbing either the bricks or the ghost.
And so, how can a mind incarnate in a material body move that body in any way? This was always a puzzle.
So, people began to think that the differentiation between mind and matter was of no use.
Because, actually, what happens in making such a differentiation is that you impoverish both sides of it.
When you try to think of matter as mindless or mind as immaterial, you get a kind of a mess on both sides.
It's the same way when you get a mystic who's not a bit of a sensualist. And a sensualist is no wit of a mystic.
Such a sensualist is boring. Such a mystic is a fanatic. Too spiritual.
It's the same when we divide the medical profession from the priesthood. Both are losers.
Not just because they lose their so-called opposite half.
But the problem is when you separate a doctor from a priest, you do more than create a specialization out of what was originally one field.
You create two specializations. Because a priest physician is more than a priest plus a physician.
By having, as it were, the binocular vision from medicine and from religion.
He just doesn't see two added areas. He sees the area in three dimensions.
By, as a result of this combination. Well, in a similar way, when we have the concepts of mind and matter working separately, both are impoverished.
Mind becomes vague kind of gas, psychic gas. And matter becomes mere stuff.
But you see, what has enabled us to make a transition is, first of all, above all, I would say, two sciences, biology and neurology.
Because through biology, and to some extent physics, the method of physics has shown us.
That the idea that man can be an objective observer of an external world, that is not himself, so that, as it were, he can stand back from it and look at it and say, what is out there?
We see that this cannot be done. We can approximately do it. But we cannot really and fully do it.
For the simple, for two reasons. One, the most important reason, is that the biologist will show us very clearly.
There is no way of definitively separating a human organism from its external environment.
The two are a single field of behavior. And then, furthermore, to observe something.
Either simply by looking at it. Or, more so, by making experiments. By doing science on it.
You alter what you're looking at. You cannot carry out an observation without, in some way, interfering with what you observe.
It is this that we try, when we're watching, say, the habits of birds, to be sure that the birds don't notice us that we're watching.
To watch something, it must not know you're looking. And, of course, what you ultimately want to do, is to be able to watch yourself without knowing that you're looking.
Then you can really catch yourself, not on your best behavior, and see yourself as you really are.
But this can never be done. And likewise, the physicist cannot simultaneously establish the position and the velocity of very minute particles or wavicles.
And this is in part because the experiment of observing nuclear behavior alters and affects what you're looking at.
This is one side of it. The inseparability of man and his world, which deflates the myth of the objective observer standing aside and observing a world that is merely mechanical.
A thing that operates like a machine out there. The second is from the science of neurology, where we understand so clearly now that the kind of world we see is relative to the structure of the sense organ.
That, in other words, what used to be called the qualities of the external world, its qualities of weight or color, texture and so on, are possessed by it only in relation to a perceiving organism.
The very structure of our optical system confers light and color upon outside energy.
And in this sense then, especially if you want to read a very easily digestible account of this thing, you get the book by J. Z. Young called Doubt and Certainty in Science.
But you see here, from a new basis altogether, we have a new answer to the old riddle.
If a tree falls in the forest when nobody is listening, does it make a noise?
The answer in terms of modern science is perfectly clear.
That the falling tree creates vibrations in the air, and these become noise if and only if they relate to an eardrum and to an auditory nervous system.
Just as in ordinary drums, however hard you hit, the drum will make no sound if it has no skin.
Because sound is not something that exists in the external world.
Sound is a relationship between vibrating air and certain kinds of biological organisms.
And therefore it is these organisms which confer what we call sound upon a vibration which in an earless world would make no noise.
Now you see that is perfectly clear and straightforward.
But now we can, dare we take certain steps from that?
Could we say for example, that before any organisms existed, there was no world.
And what we are talking about when we talk about a world prior to the existence of organisms is what is called an extrapolation.
Let me explain extrapolation for a moment.
Suppose you have a map of Kansas and you want from the evidence contained in the map to guess at what kind of territory lies beyond its edges.
Well naturally, you will extend those straight line roads off and off and off.
That's the only basis you've got to go on.
Nothing in the map of Kansas would warn you that a little way west you will encounter the Rocky Mountains.
The roads will have to wiggle.
And still less will warn you that you're going to encounter the Pacific Ocean way out beyond.
Where you can't build any roads.
So naturally, you see, extrapolation, we extrapolate from what we know to the unknown.
And so, one might say then, is the existence of a universe, before there were any living organisms, an extrapolation?
All we are saying is, this is how things would have been, if we had been around.
But we weren't, so it wasn't.
That is a possible argument.
Although, in the climate of opinion today, it is one that is not fashionable.
You must watch out, above all, for fashion in philosophy, fashion in science.
There are completely irrational functions that govern what is or what is not a respectable scientific opinion.
And although there is very careful work done, very valuable and thoughtful experimentation,
always in the background of this work, there are these irrational fashions of what is believable and what is not.
Many things that we accept today were completely unbelievable.
We are always coming across this.
Authoritative pronouncements.
That no one will ever reach the moon because of uncontrovertible evidence about this, that and the other.
But nowadays, we have swung over, perhaps, to be a little bit too uncritical.
And as Norbert Wiener warned in his book, The Human Use of Human Beings, we must not take science as a sort of fairy godmother.
And say, well, we have all these problems of overpopulation and lack of water and so on.
But science will solve it, don't worry.
See, that's the other extreme.
But there are these fashions.
If I can possibly realize that the way the world is, is evoked by the structure of my organism.
It is that way.
All mountains and suns and moons and stars are the inhabitants of a strictly human world.
Perhaps insects, with their different sense organs, have a very different universe, and that is an insect universe.
This is, again, it seems to be a recrudescence of what used to be called the pathetic fallacy,
which was the attribution of human qualities and emotions to natural phenomena.
The wind sighs in the trees.
And my heart is sad.
And somebody comes along and says, it isn't the wind that's sighing, it's you.
True and not true.
Because you wouldn't be able to sigh if there were no wind.
And you, sighing and wind blowing, go with each other.
We've invented this new word, go with, G-O-W-I-T-H, or goes with.
It is to replace the idea of causality.
Certain things go with each other.
And sighing wind goes with a same world in which there are human hearts and human emotions.
And if there were not a world with human hearts and emotions, there would be no wind.
And if there were no wind, air, there would be no human hearts and emotions.
It's a transaction.
It's a reciprocity.
Every event, then, in the external world, is as dependent on the observer for its happening, as, for example, is a rainbow.
The sun is shining, and there's moisture in the atmosphere.
And the sun being at the right angle to the moisture makes a rainbow.
And if somebody is there, they see the rainbow.
That is a mythology, a way of putting things that is acceptable to us in the current climate of philosophical and scientific fashion.
But I want to put it in another way.
The sun is shining.
And that, as a person standing, if there were moisture in the atmosphere, there would be a rainbow.
But there isn't.
So there is no rainbow.
If you want to be fair, there is no rainbow if nobody is watching it, you see.
And what applies to the tenuous, filmy, luminescent rainbow applies equally well to the hardest rocks, the solidest mountains, and the hottest fires.
Because all existence is a relationship.
It's like the skin of the drum.
If it's not there, no amount of hitting a non-existent skin will produce any noise.
So, you see, energy is...
We can see this. Energy is relationship.
We can see the falling fist and the skin of the drum.
Boing! Like that.
And if there isn't both the falling fist and the skin, no noise. No existence.
But existence is not only the impact of rocks upon each other.
Existence requires.
Always, as its third, you can get the rocks knocking.
The sun and the moisture.
The tree crashing to the ground.
The sun pouring out electrical energy.
But none of these things constitute existence until related with the neurological complex.
But then you have to look backwards and say at the same time, the neurological complex belongs to the same world as the sun.
It's a physical pattern, physical behavior, physical energy.
But it takes this complexity of pattern to evoke the world.
You see, this idea is unfamiliar.
And that's the difficulty of understanding. That's all.
It's a very simple idea.
But it's an unfamiliar one, and it's an unfashionable one.
Although, as I say, this sort of thinking is coming back to us at this time.
One gets the perfectly uncanny feeling of the world and oneself as simply two phases of a single process.
Well, as the rainbow metaphor illustrated, we arbitrarily favor an explanation of the triangle.
The impact of energies in the external world.
And an observer of this impact, which, as it were, energizes or realizes them, makes them real.
The difficulty that we have in our prejudice, that it's the two forces out there that are real.
And the observer is irrelevant to the reality of the situation.
It's what we're really saying.
It goes back to the whole notion that man himself is irrelevant.
Man is conceived as something, therefore, that is irrelevant in various ways.
He could be said to be irrelevant because he is a spiritual visitor from another world altogether.
He could be said to be irrelevant because he's unimportant.
He makes very little difference to the total universe. He's very small.
But when you get this kind of thinking, you want to go back and ask, why do people want to believe that man is irrelevant?
When you hear today people's comments on that old myth of man as the head of nature,
they come back in a very funny way.
They say, oh, that's the most conceited point of view.
Man is part of nature.
Yes.
But why is it that the naturalists who think that man is part of nature are always fighting nature?
Because they don't understand what it means to be the head of nature.
Every creature is the head of nature in its turn.
And we all take turns because it's taking turns that makes the world go round.
Every creature in its turn is the head of nature.
Because each creature creates the world in its own image.
And so each creature as a creator of the world is man.
Man simply means the middle position.
This is the whole idea of man.
The middle, the middle way, the mean.
And so wherever is the central point, that is the point called man.
Just as you are the center of your universe.
And as the astrologers explained, that when you wanted to draw the map of the soul,
you took the center point occupied by the individual organism.
In other words, a date and a time.
And that gave you a latitude and a longitude.
And so in relation to that date and time, how was the universe arranged shows the map of the individual soul?
Because the individual is the whole universe considered from this point of view.
Or focused at this point of view.
So in like way, the cosmic situation of a bee, or a mouse,
puts that mouse in the position of man when the mouse is considered the center of the universe.
Now, every point in a curved space-time continuum is the center of the universe.
You can see it, although this is only a metaphor and is not quite the right mathematical and physical description.
But when you consider the surface of a ball, of a sphere,
any point on that surface can be the center.
Just rotate it to what appears to be the front as you look at it,
and it's the center of the surface of the sphere.
Any point.
So in that kind of, if our space is curved like the surface of a sphere,
then any point on it may legitimately be considered the center.
And so, considered as the center, that is the point called man.
Although, as I say, it may be mouse, it may be ant, it may be insect, anything, you know.
But this becomes inconceivable and unimaginable to individuals who have no experience of themselves as center.
And people who insist on the idea of being an objective observer, of standing outside,
and watching the individual, the world, as a kind of television screen, or movie screen,
upon which there is a distant panorama of passing events.
That person, by adopting that position, has excluded himself from the feeling of centrality.
In fact, he rather looks down on the feeling of centrality.
He says that is the egotistic situation.
You think you're the center of everything.
But you know, you may call it all sorts of bad names.
You may call it the egocentric predicament.
But that's the way it is.
When we see that the degree to which individual behavior is a factor of the whole environmental scene,
we tend to try and understand that in terms of determinism.
That the individual organism is helplessly pushed around by and responding to environmental forces.
But on the other hand, if the relationship between the organism and its environment is transactional,
it won't be that one-sided.
If the relationship is transactional, it will be true simultaneously.
That the individual organism behaves in accordance with the environment,
and the environment behaves in accordance with the individual organism.
So if we put that in startling practical terms,
if you got into a mess, that was what you wanted.
Will you say, I didn't know I wanted it.
I certainly didn't think I wanted it.
No, because that will be true.
You didn't want it.
So long as you refer to yourself only in terms of the conscious spotlight,
which scans experience bit by bit, and which thinks about it.
To the degree you identify your own functioning with that alone,
then you will say of what happens to you.
Well, I didn't ask for this.
It has nothing to do with me.
I wasn't responsible.
Children don't think that they are responsible for being born.
They blame their parents.
Not realizing that they can't really separate themselves from their parents.
That in the measure that, for example, I have sexual desires,
I can really understand my father's predicament.
And I couldn't possibly blame him because actually I was the evil gleam in his eye
when he approached my mother.
You know, I asked for it.
I did not want to blame him with a fierce man to do it.
I thought, well, if I can add something to him,
the man, you know the girl, you know the girl has a great friend.
That's right.
I mean, I think it's very difficult.
If it's a good friend, don't be the one,
you know, I mean, not a man.
I think, you know, not a man.
The answer was no question.
What was the answer that I didn't understand,
but I really enjoyed the question.
I've always had to get a hand.
It's been a long time.
I don't do that.
No, I don't do that.
It's been a memory of a year old.
It's a script.


===== Philosophy And Society - 02 - We As Organism =====

I wonder if it's ever struck you how curious a thing it is that most of the things that we experience we regard as things that happen to us, which we ourselves do not originate, which are events expressing some sort of power or activity that is external to ourselves.
And if you consider that, you realize that what you mean by yourself is rather narrowly circumscribed.
Even events that go on in our own bodies are put in the category of things that happen to us in the same way as things that go on in the world outside our skins.
If there's a thunderstorm or an earthquake, well it happens to, you're not responsible for it.
But so in the same way when you have hiccups, you didn't plan on it.
If you have belly rumbles, you had no intention of doing it.
And as to the catastrophic act of getting born, well you had nothing to do with that.
And you can spend all your life blaming your parents for putting you in the situation in which you find yourself.
And this way of looking at the world in this sort of passive mood as something that happens to you goes right down to our general feeling about life.
It goes down to the way in which, as Westerners, we have been accustomed to look at human existence as a precarious event in the cosmos that on the whole is depicted as being completely unsympathetic and alien to our existence.
In other words, if you are reared with a 20th century or shall we say an early 20th century common sense, which is based on the philosophy of science of the 19th century, with its rejection of Christianity and Judaism,
that you regard yourself as an accident, a biological accident, in a stupid universe, which is mechanical but has no feelings, no finer feelings, a vast, pointless gyration of radioactive rocks and gas in which you happen to occur.
Of course, if you don't have that point of view and you are more traditional, you look upon yourself as a child of God and therefore under authority.
In other words, there is a big boss on top of all this, who allowed you, at his pleasure, to deign to have the disgusting effrontery to exist.
And you better watch your P's and Q's because that Almighty is looking after you with the attitude of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you.
And when you look at the world in that image, or in the other image, that it's a stupid mechanism, either point of view you take, you don't really belong.
You are not really part of all this. And I could use a stronger word than part, only we don't have it in English.
We have to say something like connected with it, essential to it, or to put it in the strongest possible way.
It is quite alien to Western thought to conceive that the external world, which is defined as something that happens to you, and your body itself as something that you got caught up with.
It is quite alien to our thought to consider all that as you yourself.
Because, you see, we have such a myopic view of what one's self is.
It's as if, in other words, we selected how much experience is really to be regarded as me.
As if you focused your attention on certain restricted areas of the whole panorama of things that you experience.
And say, I will take sides with that much of it.
Now, we come here, right at the start, to an extremely important principle,
which is the different points of view you get when you change your level of magnification.
That is to say, you can look at something with a microscope and see it a certain way.
You can look at it with a naked eye and see it in a certain way.
You look at it with a telescope and you see it in another way.
Now, which level of magnification is the correct one?
Well, obviously, they're all correct.
But they're just different points of view.
You can, for example, look at a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass.
And where with the naked eye you will see a human face,
with the magnifying glass you will just see a profusion of dots rather meaninglessly scattered.
But as you stand away from that connection of dots, which all seem to be separate and apart from each other,
they suddenly arrange themselves into a pattern.
And you see that these individual dots add up to some kind of sense.
Now, you'll see at once from this illustration that maybe you, when you take a myopic view of yourself, as most of us do,
but you may add up to some kind of sense that is not apparent to you in your ordinary consciousness.
When we examine our blood streams under a microscope, we see there's one hell of a fight going on.
All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up.
And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own blood streams in the microscope, we should start taking sides.
Which would be fatal.
Because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle.
What is, in other words, conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level.
Now, could it possibly be, therefore, that we, with all our problems, conflicts, neuroses, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures,
and everything that goes on in human life, are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony?
Well, it is claimed, you see, that some human beings have broken through to that vision.
That they've slipped, somehow or other, into states of consciousness,
where they see the apparent disintegration and disorganization of everyday life
as the functioning of a totality, which at its level is completely harmonious.
And you can say, Aha! At last, I see, I got the point. I've seen how all this makes sense.
But what this insight depended upon was your overcoming the illusion that space separates things.
That is to say, the space, the interval between your body and mine.
The interval created by birth at one end and death at the other.
And then after somebody's death, then somebody else's birth.
These are events with intervals between them.
And normally we regard these intervals in time and these intervals in space
as having no importance, no function.
We tend to see the universe itself as really consisting in all the stars and galaxies.
That's what it is. That's what we notice.
But the space in which all this happens is sort of written off as something that isn't really there.
But what one has to realize is that the space is an essential function of the things in the space.
After all, you can't have separate stars unless there is a space around them.
Eliminate the space and you will see you couldn't have this phenomenon at all.
And vice versa. You couldn't have the space.
They wouldn't be there in any sense whatsoever if there weren't the bodies in it.
So the bodies in the space and the space are two aspects of a single continuum.
They're related together in exactly the same way as a back and a front.
And you just don't get one without the other.
So the moment you see that intervals, that space is connective,
you can understand at once how you are not just to be exclusively defined
as a flash of consciousness that occurs between two eternal darknesses.
Which is the popular common sense view which Western man has of his own life.
That you consider that in the darkness that comes before your birth, there was no you.
And in the eternal darkness that follows your death, there is likewise no you.
And I'm going to discuss these matters not by appealing to any special spooky knowledge
as if I had been travelling on the higher planes and knew all my previous incarnations
and therefore could tell you authoritatively that you are much more than this individuality.
I'm going to do it on a basis of complete common sense that everybody has access to the facts.
And that just what you have to realise is that life is a pattern of immense complexity.
And what you call yourself as a living organism, say, I am my whole body at the very least.
Now what is that body?
That body is recognisable and I recognise my friends when I meet them again with luck
and you recognise me.
Although the last time any of you saw me, I was absolutely something entirely different from what I am now.
Just as the flame of a candle is never a constant.
A flame of a candle is a stream of hot gas.
Only you say the flame of the candle as if it were a constant.
Well it is a recognisably constant pattern.
The spear-shaped outline of the flame and its colouration is a constant pattern.
But in exactly the same way we are all constant patterns.
And that's all we are. The only thing constant about us at all is the doing rather than the being.
It's the way we behave. The way we dance.
Only there's no we that dances. There's just the dancing.
Just as the flame is the streaming of hot gas.
Just as a whirlpool in a river is a whirling of streaming water.
There is no thing that whirlpools.
There is the whirlpool.
And in the same way each one of us is a very, very delightfully complex undulation of the energy of the whole universe.
Only by our process of miseducation we've been deprived of the knowledge of that fact.
Not as if there was someone to blame for this.
Because it's always with our own tacit consent.
Because life is basically a game of hide and seek.
Because life is pulsation.
On and off.
Here it is and now it isn't.
And by being this pulsation we know it's there.
See, you don't know what you mean by on unless you know what you mean by off.
That's why when we want to awaken someone we knock at the door.
It's not enough to slam the door once with your fist.
And make this big noise.
But you keep up a pulsation.
Because that by its on and off-ness attracts attention.
All life, you see, is this flickering in and out.
Only there are enormous rhythms in it.
There are very fast flickering ins and outs like the reaction of light upon our eyes.
Such that if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark and I spin it, you will see a circle of fire.
Because the reflection of that cigarette tip on your retina lasts.
It endures.
Just in the same way as on a radar screen.
An image stays a little while until it's revivified by another round.
So in that way, you see, you notice continuity.
And in the same way then you notice the continuity of a light.
Because although, let's say, with an arc lamp, an arc lamp is actually a flickering light.
And that's why they don't allow arc lights to be used in any shop where there's a circular saw moving.
Because sometimes the flickering speed of the arc light so synchronizes with the turning speed of the teeth on the blade
that the teeth look as if they're not moving.
And so anybody who might put his hand on the blade would have it chopped off thinking it was a still one.
So in this way, very fast impulses are looked upon us as constant.
And we see where there are fast impulses, a solid thing.
When you look at the blade of a propeller or an electric fan, the separated four or three blades become a solid disc.
And you cannot throw an egg through it.
Well, so in exactly the same way, you can't put your finger through a rock.
Because the rock is moving too fast for your finger to go through.
That's the meaning of the whole phenomenon of hardness.
Hardness in nature is immense energy.
But acting in a very concentrated space, restricted space, but going to beat hell.
That's why you can't get through it.
Now, from those very tiny fast rhythms which give us the impression of continuity, there are also in this universe immensely slow rhythms.
And these are very difficult for us to keep track of.
And they impress us and depress us as our own life and death.
As our coming and going, which goes for what is, to us, such a slow pace that we can't possibly believe that it is really a rhythm.
We think of it as our birth, as something quite unique, that could never occur again.
Because we are so close to it, you see, and it's moving so slowly.
And so, with that point of view, we are, like Marshall McLuhan said, he borrowed a metaphor from me, which is that we are driving a car looking at the rear vision mirror.
That means that the environment in which you believe yourself to exist is always a past one.
It isn't the one you are actually in.
The process of growth, the basic process of biology, is one in which lower orders are always being superseded by higher orders.
But the lower order can never figure out, or only very rarely figure out, what the higher order is that's taking over.
And they see it as a terrible threat, as total disaster, as the very end.
But, therefore, can never be aware that the principle of growth always has, and always will, continue.
Because that's what's going on.
But you never know what the next step is going to be.
Because if you did know, you wouldn't take it.
Because it would already be past.
Do you understand this?
That any certainly known future is an event of which we can say, you've had it.
And in that sense it's past.
When we play games, and we say in chess or in a bridge or whatever game you're playing, the outcome of the game becomes certain.
We at that point cancel the game and begin a new one.
Because the whole zest of the thing, which takes me back to the idea that this whole thing is a hide-and-seek game, is that you don't know what the next order coming up is.
But one thing you can be sure of, it will be in order, and it will comprehend you.
At the moment we stand at a time in history where we're beginning to think of a great countdown on the end of the human race.
Terrifying possibility that through atomic energy, we may obliterate this planet and turn the whole globe into a star.
Maybe that's the way all the stars started.
Imagine, you know, this great thing coming up.
The countdown on the end.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Where have you heard that before?
You sit on the seashore.
And you hear the waves going in and out.
And you don't stop to think.
That's what you're doing.
That's what the whole business is doing.
And there are places where the wave mounts and mounts and it gets too big for its boots or whatever, and it spills and breaks.
We could do just that.
But, very important to realize that that's what you're doing, because then you don't get panicky about it.
And the person who's going to press that button is the person who's going to be in panic.
So, if you realize that that's what it is, and that it doesn't really matter if the whole human race blows itself up, then there's a chance that it won't do it.
That's the only chance we have.
Not to do this thing which attracts us like a kind of vertigo, like a person who looks over a precipice and is all set to throw himself over.
Or a person who jumps out of a plane when they're skydiving and forgets to pull the parachute ring because he gets fascinated with a target.
It's called target fascination. He just goes straight at it, you see.
So we can get absolutely fascinated with disaster, with doom.
Or, you know, all the news in the newspapers is invariably bad news.
There is no good news in the newspapers. People wouldn't buy a newspaper consisting of good news.
Even the free press is full of terrible news.
Except the San Francisco Oracle.
And the fascination, you see, for this doom might be neutralized.
If we would say, well, why bother about that?
It's just another fluctuation in this huge, marvelous, endless chain of our own selves and our own energy going on.
See, here's the problem now.
Because of our myopia, because of our, the way we've, as it were, restricted consciousness to focus upon just that certain little area of experience that we call voluntary action.
That's us.
And everything else happens to us.
Now, that's obviously absurd.
Let's suppose you take in your hand one of those toys, a gyroscopic top.
And you suddenly notice, the minute you get this in your hand, that it has a kind of vitality to it.
It seems to resist you.
It starts pushing you in a certain way.
See?
And sometimes you're with it.
And following it.
And then sometimes you see it.
It's just as if you held a living animal in your hand.
You know, you pick up a hamster.
You know? Or a guinea pig.
And you hold this little thing in your hand.
It's always trying to escape.
So the gyroscope always seems to be trying to escape your hold.
Now, in exactly the same way, what you're experiencing all the time, all sorts of things are getting out of control and doing things you don't expect.
It's trying to escape your hold.
All right, then don't grab it so hard.
And you discover that this living thing that you're feeling, like the gyroscope top, it's your own life.
Because you can see, very simply, that you would not understand the experience that you call voluntary action and decision being in control and being yourself.
Unless, in opposition to that, there was something else.
You couldn't realize self and control and will unless there was something other, out of control, and instead of will, won't.
It's the two together only that produces the sensation that you call having a personal identity.
Only, there is a funny thing about human consciousness, which has been worked out very carefully in Gestalt psychology, which is that our attention is captured by the figure rather than the background.
By the relatively enclosed area rather than the diffuse area, and by something moving rather than what is relatively still.
And to all those phenomena that in this way attract our attention, we attribute a higher degree of reality than the ones we don't notice.
That's only because, for the moment, those are more important to us.
Consciousness, you see, is a radar that is scanning the environment to look out for trouble, just in the same way as a ship's radar is looking for rocks or other ships.
And the radar, therefore, does not notice the vast areas of space where there are no rocks, no other ships.
So, in the same way, our eyes, or rather the selective consciousness behind the eyes, only pays attention to what we think is important.
I am at this moment aware of all of you in this room, of every single detail of your clothing, of your faces and so on, but I am not noticing it all.
And therefore, I will not be able to remember tomorrow exactly how each one of you looked and what you were wearing.
Because what I notice is restricted to things that I think are particularly important.
If I notice some particularly beautiful girl in the audience, then I might notice also what she is wearing.
And that would be memorable.
But, by and large, you see, we scan things over, but we pay attention only to what our set of values tells us we ought to pay attention to.
But, quite obviously, you, as a complete individual, are much more than the scanning system.
You are in relationships with the external world that, on the whole, are incredibly harmonious.


===== Philosophy And Society - 03 - What Is Reality =====

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 now for example a myth in in a way is a metaphor if you want to
explain electricity to someone who doesn't know anything about electricity you say
well you talk about an electric current now the word current is borrowed from rivers
it's borrowed from hydraulics and so you explain electricity in terms of water
now electricity is not water it behaves actually in a different way but there are
some ways in which the behavior of water is like the behavior of electricity and so
you explain it in terms of water or if you're an astronomer and you want to
explain to people what you mean by an expanding universe and curved space you
say well it's as if you had a black balloon and there are white dots on the
black balloon and those dots represent galaxies and as you blow the balloon up
uniformly all of them grow and grow farther apart but you're using an analogy the
the actual universe is not a balloon with white dots on it so in the same way we
use these sort of images to try and make sense of the world and we are 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 two thousand 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 derived 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 parts are made of clay
now clay by itself has no intelligence clay does not of itself become a pot although a
good potter may think otherwise because if you were a really good potter you don't
impose your will on the clay you ask any given lump of clay what it wants to become
and you help it to do that and then you become a genius but the ordinary idea i'm talking about
is that simply clay is unintelligent it's just stuff 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 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 the 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 but we have thought historically you see of the world as something made in the in the
the idea being trees for example are constructions just as tables and houses are constructions
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 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 dust 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 the woman 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's succeeded in crime the other people are pushed aside because they
the criminals the people we lock up in jail are simply the people who who didn't make it
so naturally uh 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 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 uh there the altar is the throne and
the priest is the chief vizier of the court and he is making abasance 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 basilis 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 a 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 the box for that
and those are the pews in an ordinary kind of colonial type protestant church
so both these uh 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 has sense in this uh 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 uh 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
its small the smallest shapes of it that you can see
do you see what happens you look say at a piece of stone and you want to say well what is this piece
of stone made of well you take your microscope and you look at it and instead of just this uh block of
stuff you see ever so many tinier shapes little crystals so you say fine so far so good now what
are these crystals made of and you take a more powerful instrument and you find that they are made
of molecules and then you take still more powerful instruments to find out what the molecules are
made of and you begin to describe atoms electrons protons mesons all sorts of sub nuclear particles
but you never never arrive at the basic stuff because there isn't them 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 but when you want to change the
level of magnification and go in closer and closer and closer you get fuzzy again before you get clear
so every time you get fuzzy you go through a a thinking there's some kind of stuff there
but when you get clear you see a shape and so all that we can talk about is patterns
we never never can talk about the stuff of which these patterns is supposed to be made because you
don't really have to suppose that there is any it's enough to talk about the world in terms of pattern
it describes anything that can be described and you don't really then have to suppose that there
is some stuff which constitutes the essence of the pattern in the same way that clay constitutes the
essence of pots clay then and so for this reason you don't really have to suppose that the world
is some kind of helpless passive unintelligent junk which an outside agency has to
form and make it into intelligent shapes 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 uh 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 the law of god which is also the law of nature
it's called the logos and uh 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
nor does it 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 they what they did was they got rid of the law maker 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 you every
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 the metaphysics of
ernst haeckel and th huxley the world is basically nothing but uh energy 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 uh 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
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 in in especially in the wasp culture of the united states we define
manliness in terms of aggression you see because we are not 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 uh it's completely unnecessary
you know if you have what it takes you don't need to put on that show and uh 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
be symptom doesn't appear going to be symptom so we are not symptomatical it is symptomatic of the kind
of the kind of universe we live in you as a human being you grow out of this physical universe in just
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 as a world of peoples
and so the existence of people is symptomatic of the kind of universe we live in just as spots on
somebody's skin is symptomatic of chickenpox just as hair on a head is symptomatic of what's
going on in the organism 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 center of consciousness
which looks out at this thing and what the hell is it going to do to me you see I recognize 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 maybe perhaps you're all right some of you are anyway
if you've got the right color 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 unpeople so 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 and other astronomers there's a two great theories
going on in astronomy about the origination of the universe one is called the explosion theory and the
other is called a steady state theory the steady state people say there never was a time when the world
began it's always expanding yes but always as a result of free hydrogen in space with the free hydrogen
coagulates and makes new galaxies but the other people 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. 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.
You're not something that is a sort of puppet 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, the one of the, 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 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. It's something like this. Maybe that's a cloud. The clouds, mountains,
trees, people, are all wiggly. And, uh, 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, 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, when you, uh, 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 a fish? You use a net. And so,
the, 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. You see? Now what's
going to happen? A net is something regular. 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 singed. 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 you, at me with you.
And saying, uh, 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'd be awful.
We've got a mythology going now, which as, uh, 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 hope they 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.
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, then you feel terrible
after that. Because, uh, 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, 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, uh, 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, 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, uh, 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 are the
end product of evolution and, uh, 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 the way of flattering yourself. And so, uh, 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. And 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, this, this, this whole
idea that the universe is just nothing at all but, uh, unintelligent force playing around, not even
enjoying it, is a put down theory of the world. People who had a, 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. Uh, that just won't do. Uh, we've had it. Because if, 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, a mechanism, it's electronic and neurological, uh, 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, uh, that gets cancer, that gets, uh, uh, the great Siberian itch. And, uh, 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 don't
because they're really, after all, there might be eternal damnation in the back of the thing. If I
did that, or, uh, then I identify with my children or something. And I think of them going on and
without me and, uh, 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, uh, what 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. Um, 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 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
and 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 behavior 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 behavior, I have to describe your behavior and the behavior of the environment, it means that we've
really got one system of behavior. 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 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're not separate. We define each other. We're 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. Or, you know,
that Ballantyne beer trademark, also the symbol of the Holy Trinity, where there are three,
three interlocked rings. If you pull one out, the other two separate. They interdependent.
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, uh, to such an
extent that 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.
All right? Here is a flow of water and it 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 is just flowing 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, uh, all right, supposing we do, uh, well that will be that, and it'll be life making
experiments on other galaxies. Uh, maybe they'll find a better game.


===== Philosophy And Society - 04 - Mysticism And Morals =====

I'm referring to a kind of experience, a kind of, shall we say, state of consciousness, which seems to be as prevalent among human beings as measles.
It's something that simply happens, and we don't know why it happens, and although there are all sorts of techniques which claim to be able to promote it, and which are more or less successful in doing so, and sometimes rather less than more, nevertheless there is this peculiar thing that happens to people.
And it's been recorded as far back in time as we have any recording at all, and that is coming over people the peculiarly convincing sensation that their ordinary sense of individuality, of personal identity, is transcended.
And the individual suddenly feels an experience that actually it could be described from a number of quite different points of view, but we could add up these dominant characteristics.
That instead of the ordinary feeling that I, as an individual, confront a world that is foreign to me, that is not me, in this kind of experience, I find myself to be of one and the same nature or identity as the world outside me.
In other words, I suddenly feel no longer a stranger in the world, but as if the external world were my own body.
The next aspect of the feeling is even more difficult to assimilate to our ordinary practical intelligence.
But a very overwhelming feeling that everything that happens, everything I have ever done, everything anybody else has ever done, was part of our harmonious design.
That there is no error at all, and that's the sort of thing I'm referring to.
Now, you see, I'm not talking about a philosophy, I'm not talking about a rationalization, some sort of theory that somebody cooked up in order to explain the world and make it seem a tolerable place to live in.
Now, I'm talking about a rather whimsical, unpredictable experience that suddenly hits people, and it includes this element of feeling the total harmoniousness of everything.
Now, I realize that those words can carry with them a sort of sentimental feeling, a sort of Pollyanna feeling.
There are various religions in our society today which try to inculcate in you the belief that everything is a harmonious unity.
You know, things like Christian science or the unity movement and so on, they want to make a kind of propaganda for one to believe, and through believing to feel, that everything is harmonious.
Now, to my mind, that is a kind of pseudo-mysticism, because it's an attempt to make the tail wag the dog, to make the effect produce the cause.
Because this sensation of things being harmonious, somehow never brought about by insisting to yourself that that is so, because when you do that, when you would say to yourself,
all things are light, all things are God, all things are beautiful, etc., actually, by doing that, you're implying that they're not.
Because you wouldn't be saying all this stuff, if you really knew it to be true.
So, this thing, the sensation of a kind of universal harmony, cannot come to us when it is sought, when we look for it as something to be an escape from the way we actually feel, or to compensate for the way we actually feel.
It's a thing that comes out of the blue, and when it comes out of the blue, just like hiccups come out of the blue, or something like that, it's overwhelmingly convincing.
And it stands as, actually, the foundation for most of mankind's profound philosophical, mystical, metaphysical, and religious ideas.
Someone, someone, in other words, to whom this sort of thing has happened, and as I said before, it strikes us as measles may strike us.
Someone to whom this sort of thing has happened, can't restrain himself when it has happened, and he has to get up and tell everybody about it.
And, alas, he becomes the founder of a religion.
Because people say, look at that man, how happy he is.
What conviction he has. He has no doubts. He seems to be sure in everything he does.
You see, that's the wonderful thing about a great human being. He's like an animal or a flower.
See, when a flower buds, and the bud goes pop and opens, it has no hesitation or doubts about it.
But when a young woman appears in society as a debutant, you know, she's not quite sure if she's going to come off.
And she appears on the stage of society with some doubts in her mind.
Therefore, all appearances of this kind are a rather sickly nature.
But when the bird sings, or the chicken's egg breaks, or the flower buds, there's no doubt about it at all.
It comes forth.
And so, in the same way, when somebody has an experience of this kind, he just has to tell everybody about it.
Because, you see, he sees everybody around him looking dreadfully serious.
Looking as if they had a problem.
Looking as if the act of living were extremely difficult.
But from his standpoint, the person who's had this experience, he feels that they look funny.
That they don't understand.
That they...
There isn't any problem at all.
That he has seen, from where he stands, you see,
That the meaning of being alive, is just being alive.
That is to say, I look at the color of your hair, and the shape of your eyebrow,
And I understand that that is the point.
That's what we're all here for.
And it's so plain, and it's so obvious, and so simple.
And yet, here is everybody, rushing around in a great panic.
As if it were necessary for them to achieve something beyond all that.
And the funny thing is, they're not quite sure what it is.
But they are devilishly intent upon it.
After that thing.
And so, to the person in the state of consciousness, which I call mystical,
That all seems very weird.
Very absurd.
But it's not something that you criticize in an unkindly way.
You don't say, those damn fools.
Those idiots.
You say, it's such a pity that they don't see it.
Because, although they are going around in this wildly ignorant pursuit,
One of the funny things about it is, that they don't realize,
That there is a dimension, a sense in which their pursuit is magnificent.
It's to give an obverse sense, to the saying,
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
Turn that into its opposite.
Not forgive them, but give them a blessing.
Because they don't know what they do.
Give them an honor.
In other words, the intensely serious preoccupations and anxieties of mankind,
Appear from this standpoint.
Not to be foolishness, but to be a kind of marvel.
In the same way, perhaps, as you could say,
That the protective coloring of a butterfly,
Who has somehow contrived to make its wings look like enormous eyes.
So that when a bird, who is about to devour this beast,
Is confronted by these staring eyes,
The bird is a little hesitating,
As when you stare at somebody, they're always taken a little bit of back.
And so the butterfly appears to stare at the bird.
And perhaps you see this phenomenon of the marvel of staring wings of the butterfly,
Is in some way a result of anxiety.
The anxiety to survive all the problems and struggles of natural selection.
Nevertheless, in this intense struggle,
We are unknowing poets.
You see, one of the greatest ideas in the world,
That has ever been produced,
Is, for my thinking,
The Hindu idea,
That the world is a drama,
In which the central and supreme self
Behind all existence
Gets lost
And involved
And
Pretends,
Plays
That he or it
Or he, she
Or whatever you want to call it
Is all the creatures that there are
And gets totally involved
And thus you see
The more involved
The more
Anxious
The more finite
The more limited
The infinite
Manages to feel itself to be
The greater
The artistry
The greater the depth of the illusion
Which is created
For you see, all art
Is in a way illusion
The art of the magician
Is the art of illusion
The art of misdirecting attention
So that a magic
Seems to appear
And so in this way
The more there
Is anxiety
The more there is uncertainty
To that degree
The play has succeeded
In the same way as when
You are watching an actual play
Or reading a novel
Or a movie
The more the author
Or the actors
Manage to grip you
And to persuade you
Just for a moment
That you are actually
Involved in reality
The more they have succeeded
As artists
You may have a faint recognition
In the back of your mind
That this is after all
Only a play
When you sit on the edge
Of your seat
And you are sweating
And your hands clutch
The arms of the chair
The scene so grips you
That is magnificent acting
And so the Hindus feel
That the whole arrangement
Of the cosmos
Is something exactly like that
That when in the reality
Of actual life
You are sweating it out
And you are wondering
Whether this surgeon
Who's got to operate on you
In a matter of life and death
Is a competent man
Or a charlatan
Or whether the investment
That you made
Is a good thing
Or whether it's going to
Make you lose your shirt
You see
All those matters
Of terrific crisis
Are exactly the same
As when you're sitting
In the theatre
Sweating it out there
But now
A far more convincing theatre
Has been arranged
Because
As the Hindus would say
That in you
Which is it
The basis of you
The thing
That is real in you
And that connects you
Under the surface
With every other being
That is alive
This is the player
Of the parts
This is the maker
Of the illusion
This is the player
Of the game
Which has got you
Involved in this mess
And is living it up
In the same way
As those actors
On the stage
Are living it up
To convince you
That this is a real situation
And this is very
Understandable
Because basically
Everybody loves
To play
This game
The game
Of hide and seek
The game
Of scaring oneself
Running up
Behind yourself
In the dark
And saying
Boom
All children
Like to do this
And this is
The most human thing
That's why
We go
To the play
To the movie
And why we read novels
And our so called
Real life
Is
From the position
Of the mystic
An extension
Of the same thing
Because you see
He is the person
Who suddenly
Has realized
That the game
Is a game
And that behind
All
You see
If the game
Is hide and seek
Or if the game
Is lost and found
Everything
To do with
The hide side
Or the lost side
Is connected with
Where we
As individuals
Feel
Lonely
Impotent
Put down
And so on
All
The negative side
Of existence
I have
Tried to show
You at various times
That there's really
One simple principle
That underlies
Everything
And it's so simple
It's funny
The principle is
All insides
Have outsides
Because you see
You don't know
That the inside
Is inside
Unless there's an outside
And you don't know
That the outside
Is outside
Unless there's an inside
Okay
Then you
As you ordinarily
Feel yourself
Are the inside
You are
The animate
Sensitive being
Inside the skin
That the inside
Of the skin
Goes with the outside
Of the skin
If there weren't
The outside
Of the skin
There wouldn't
Be no inside
And the outside
Of the skin
Is the whole
Down cosmos
Galaxy
Beyond galaxy
And everything
You see
And that goes
With the outside
In the same way
That front
Goes with back
So that if you
Wake up
And understand
That
You find
That the two
Are one
And the same
Identity
One and the same
Self
One and the same
Life
So that's
The mystic's
Point of view
He finds
That out
Now if I may
Switch
What is morals
In the sense
In which I am
Using the term
Morality
Or morals
It's a set
Of rules
Analogous
To the rules
Of language
Now it's
Perfectly obvious
Isn't it
That we can
Talk to each
Other
In English
Only if there
Is mutual
Agreement among
Ourselves
As to how
To use
The language
What words
Refer
To what
Experiences
And what
Ways of
Stringing words
Together
To be meaningful
Are to be used
And it's
Very much
Of interest
That
We don't
Have too much
Trouble
In coming
To this
Agreement
About language
We don't
Find that
The police
Have to
Enforce
Grammar
The school
Teacher
Yes
For little
Children
The school
Teacher
Does sometimes
Have to
Enforce
Grammar
And say
In an
Authoritative
Way
And in the
Old fashioned
Schools
With the
Aid of some
Implement of
Corporal
Punishment
That
You know
You use
The correct
Grammatical
Forms
But when
We grow up
Into adult
Life
We use
These grammatical
Forms
Without much
Difficulty
And very
Rarely
Do the
Police
Have to
Enforce
It
But it
Is otherwise
With other
Arrangements
That we have
To make
In common
Because just
As we have
To agree
In order
To communicate
About language
We have
To agree
About say
The rules
Of driving
On the
Highway
The rules
Of doing
Business
The rules
Of doing
Banking
And so
On and
So on
The rules
Of family
Arrangements
And what
Not
And these
Are actually
Rules
Of the same
Kind
As the
Rules
Of grammar
But alas
This is not
Very often
Recognized
Because
The
Authority
The sanctions
The power
Behind these
Rules
Is
Different
From
The authority
Behind grammar
What I mean
Is this
If you
Transgress
The rules
Of grammar
People will
Shrug their
Shoulders
And say
Well
He doesn't
Make sense
They won't
Summon
The police
But if
You transgress
The rules
Of driving
On the
Highway
Or the
Rules
Of finances
Someone is
Likely to
Summon
The police
And so
One sees
The authority
Of the
State
As standing
Behind those
Rules
And there
So that
If you
Transgress
Those rules
You're
In danger
Not simply
Of going
To jail
But
According to
Your religious
Persuasion
Of frying
Forever
In hell
Or on the
Other hand
Of failing
Lamentably
To be a
Real person
Now
The problem
Is this
Where the
Domain of
Mysticism
And the
Domain of
Morals
Come into
Conflict
You see
Throughout the
All known
History of
Religion
The mystics
Have been
Suspect
In so far
As religions
Have been
The upholders
Of moral
Rules
The
As it
Were
The
Guardians
The
Authorities
In the
Same way
For example
As the
Lexicographers
Of the
Grammarians
Guard
The rules
Of grammar
And expound
Upon them
So in the
Same way
The priesthoods
And the
Lawyers
Guard
The rules
Of social
Behavior
But when
Into the
Domain of
Religion
There appears
The mystical
Experience
Then the
Priests
Are very
Very
Disturbed
Now you
All know
That in
Recent months
In the
In California
There has
Been a
Very strange
Outbreak
In the
Most respectable
Of all
Churches
The
Episcopal
Church
Various
Congregations
Of the
Episcopal
Church
Have had
A phenomenon
Called
Glossolalia
And this
Means
Speaking
With
To any
Negro
Revival
Meeting
On a
Sunday
Night
You will
Hear
Glossolalia
That is
To say
When the
Preacher
Starts
Talking
Sensibly
But the
Congregation
Gets
More and
More
Enthusiastic
And says
I hear
You
Amen
Yes
Lord
And so
On
And it
Works up
The
Preacher
So that
By the
Time
He's
Through
He's
Not
Talking
Sense
Anymore
He's
Just
Lalling
He's
Going
Through
Glorious
Nonsense
In
Other
Words
He's
Become
All
The
Dry
Theological
Categories
Have
Turned
Into
Not
Only
Poetry
But
Beyond
Poetry
Into
Music
And he's
Just
Saying
You
See
He's
Just
Going
Like
That
And
The
Congregation
Is
Behind
Him
And
It's
Wonderful
You
See
He's
Become
At
That
Moment
One
In
They're
Not
Making
Sense
See
They're
Making
A
Colossal
Display
Of
Fireworks
In
The
Sky
See
They're
Going
Like
Well
It
So
Happened
That
In
Recent
Months
Various
Congregations
Of
The
Episcopal
Church
Had
Outbreaks
Of
This
The
Bishop
Of
California
When
All
This
Happened
Bishop
Pike
Wrote
An
Encyclical
Letter
To
His
Pastors
And
Said
With
All
Due
Regard
For
Everything
You
Know
We
Must
Not
Be
Too
Dogmatic
We
Must
Recognize
Always
That
The
Spirit
Of
God
May
Work
In
Mysterious
Ways
That
Cannot
Be
Foreseen
And
We
Should
Keep
An
Open
Mind
About
All
These
Matters
This
Was
Said
In
With
Tongues
In
Effect
This
Must
Not
Happen
In
The
Episcopal
Church
I
Mean
In
Effect
This
Is
What
Was
Said
It
Was
Said
You
Know
The
Iron
Hand
Was
In
A
Velvet
Glove
But
This
Mustn't
Happen
You're
Listening
To
WFMU
East
Orange
WXHD
Mount
Hope
Heard
Worldwide
On
The
Can
Write
For
Schedule
Here
Send
A
Self
Address
Stamped
Envelope
To
WFMU
Care
Of
Allen
Watts
P.O.
Box
Jersey
City
New
Mystic
From
Go
Team
Which
We're
Going
To
For
A
Little
Bit
And
Return
Back
To
The
Allen
Watts
Lecture
Mysticism
And
Morals
This
Is
Characteristically
Through
The
Ages
Being
The
Attitude
Of
Priesthood
Of
The
Guardians
Of
Law
And
Order
Or
As
State
Of
The
Spontaneous
Manifestations
Of
The
Spirit
And
Not
Only
Of
Things
Like
Mysticism
But
Also
Of
Things
Like
Falling
In
Love
They
Are
Very
Dangerous
Happenings
And
So
Here
Is
An
Absolutely
Astounding
Paradox
Comes
About
And
It
Goes
Like
This
We
Know
On
The
One
Hand
That
This
Is
True
Whether
It
Be
The
Love
Of
Man
Or
Whether
It
Be
The
Love
Of
God
We
Are
Always
Looking
For
The
Genuine
Article
You
See
We don't want someone to love us because they are forcing it.
We want them to love us because they really do in their heart.
Now you see, when you go back to the study of the history of the Hebrew religion
underlying the history of Christianity,
you will find this problem in this way.
That you've got two traditions constantly compensating one against the other,
playing each other off in the history of the Hebrew religion.
The priestly tradition and the prophetic tradition.
The priesthood is always concerned with the external observance of the laws.
But the prophetic tradition is always concerned with,
do you really mean what you do?
They constantly condemn as a hypocrite.
And you see, in this sense, Jesus is the greatest of the prophets.
They constantly condemn as a hypocrite the person who obeys the law without meaning it.
Maybe this man does not commit adultery.
But the prophet says, if he has looked at a woman to lust after her,
he has already committed adultery in his heart.
So that if you really obey the law,
you obey it with your feelings and not just outwardly.
For as Jeremiah says,
The day will come when no man shall any more say to his brother,
Know God.
That is to say, know the law of God.
But they shall all know me.
For I will write my law in their inward parts.
The ideal, in other words,
is people who do not simply obey and do the right things,
but who want to do the right things,
whose desires are transformed for the heart.
To write the law in the heart means to change one's desire.
So you see, what this comes to then is a peculiarly paradoxical situation.
That you are required by law to be completely honest.
And more than that, you are required by law to be loving.
And honestly loving.
You must love God and love your neighbor honestly.
Not forcing it.
Not pretending to it.
Not being a hypocrite.
You must really feel it.
Now that, you see, is where the astonishing conflict occurs.
Between the mystic and the moralist.
For the moralist knows that he has to be more than a legalist.
He has to be more than one who insists that the outward observance of the law be kept to.
Luther said that the law which requires that inward compliance is the most terrible thing.
He based a great deal of his philosophy on an attack on the idea that one's own inner feeling could be commanded.
Because, you see, the moment you subscribe to the idea that your inner feeling should be commanded.
You let yourself in completely for hypocrisy.
If, you see, you tell another person that you love them, because you know you're supposed to love them, and in fact in your heart you don't love them, you're a liar.
And therefore, the more you insist on that lie, the more you feel it's your duty to make your feelings over and to love that other person, the more you get yourself deeper and deeper and deeper into trouble.
Because, here, if anywhere, the truth will out.
You will not be able to sustain the pretense.
You will not have sufficient energy to go on pretending and making a kind of mock of the feeling of love.
And you have, at last, then, if you're honest, to say, I don't.
It doesn't matter whether this is to some other human being, or whether, in a religious situation, you have to sit back and look at the Lord, and say, Lord, I don't love you.
I think you're a bore.
You're demanding, you're authoritarian, you're domineering.
And probably I ought to love you, but I'm sorry I don't.
Now, we think, you see, that an honest expression of our feelings would be disruptive of law and order.
It wouldn't.
Not in the least.
Actually, it would be contributive to it.
Because, if I say to somebody, look, I'm not doing this for you because I love you or because I like you.
I'm doing it for you because the book says I must.
Now, that puts it up to the other person, who has to look within himself and say, honestly, ought I to accept this favor from this person?
Or ought I to go about seeing how I could provide myself with these conveniences?
He may say, I understand you don't like doing this, but excuse me, I'm in a terrible jam.
And I will be most beholden to you if for a little while yet you will go against your feelings and help me out.
See, that's a nice way of doing things.
That's the kind of real understanding that we have to have.
I was associated once with somebody, in a business way, who was a complicated person, who pretended always that he was a great idealist.
And that he was doing whatever he did for the benefit of mankind, for the furtherance of mutual understanding, for unselfishness and love between human beings.
Actually, his dealings were ethically a very shady character.
And I couldn't get on with him because he wouldn't come clean.
If he had said, look, I'm in a kind of a jam.
And in order to get around this problem, we have to manipulate things thus and so.
And I know this isn't very ethical, but that's what we have to do.
I would have said, well, I'm entirely in agreement with you.
But then he wouldn't have come on with this sort of pious line that was so sickening and offensive.
He would have come on in a human way and we would have understood each other.
You see, now, how real honesty is a genuine basis of morals.
Real honesty is always not pretending that your feelings are other than they are.
We know, as we deal with situations practically, that we may have to do things that go against our feelings.
And it's the same with helping people when you have to, whom you don't like, you don't want to help, but on the whole, it's rather necessary to do so.
But don't ever be dishonest in playing that your feelings are not what they are.
Now, from this standpoint, we can perhaps understand something about the deep relationship between morals and mysticism.
If we go back, you see, to the experience that I described as mystical, we see that it is the vision.
I tried to put it fumblingly in the sense of the rightness, the harmoniousness of everything that you are from one moment to another.
That, in other words, human behavior, its ups and its downs, is no different in principle from the behavior of the clouds or of the wind or of dancing flames in the fireplace.
As you watch the pattern of the dancing flames, they never do anything vulgar.
Their artistry is always perfect.
Ultimately, it is the same with human beings.
We are just as much a part of the natural order as flames in the fire or stars in the sky.
But this is only apparent to the person who is honest in the sense in which I have spoken.
In other words, the person who is tied up with trying to pretend that his feelings are other than what they actually are.
He can never see this.
And he is always a troublemaker.
He is the original hypocrite.
The person who is unbelievably destructive is the person who pretends that he is a model of love and rectitude and justice.
And, in fact, isn't.
Because nobody really can be.
But then, superior, altogether, is what the kind of person I would call the loving cynic.
Who knows, of course, that everybody has his weakness and his price and so on.
But isn't contemptuous for that reason.
Incidentally, may I be so bold as to recommend a book.
The book, Memories, Dreams and Reflections by C.G. Jung.
Jung's autobiography.
The life story of a man who, in my opinion, was a superb human being in this particular sense.
Of thoroughly knowing his own limitations.
And of having a certain humor about them.
A man who understood how to integrate into his whole being the devil in himself and the monkey in himself.
So then, in the metaphysical sphere, the mystic is the one who feels that everything that happens is in some way harmonious, is in some way right, is in some way an integral part of the universe.
Now, when we transplant or translate that into the moral sphere, the sphere of human conduct, the equivalent is this.
There are no wrong feelings.
There may be wrong actions in the sense of actions contrary to the rules of human communication.
But the way you feel towards other people, loving, hating, etc., etc., aren't any wrong feelings.
And so, to try and force one's feelings to be other than what they are, is absurd.
And furthermore, dishonest.
But you see, the idea that there are no wrong feelings, is an immensely threatening idea to people who are afraid to feel in any case.
And this is one of the peculiar problems of our culture.
That we are terrified of our feelings.
Because they take off on their own.
And we think that if we give them any scope, and if we don't immediately beat them down, they will lead us into all kinds of chaotic and destructive action.
It's so funny that we, in our Western culture today, say that kind of thing.
We, who do more chaotic and reckless kind of action than anybody ever did.
But if, for a change, we would allow our feelings, and look upon their comings and goings, as something as beautiful and as natural and necessary as changes in the weather, the going of night and day, and of the four seasons.
We would be at peace with ourselves.
Because what is problematic for Western man, is not so much his struggles with other people, and their needs and their problems, as his struggle with his own feelings.
With what he will allow himself to feel, and what he won't allow himself to feel.
The, he's ashamed to feel really profoundly sad.
So much so that he could cry.
It is not manly to cry.
He's ashamed to loathe somebody, because you are not supposed to hate people.
He's ashamed to be so overcome with the beauty of something, whether it be a natural landscape, or a member of the opposite sex, that he goes out of his mind with this duty.
Because all that kind of thing is not being in control, old boy.
Not kind of having your hand on the wheel.
But it is because, you see, we don't go with that, that we are not in control.
That we try to pretend that our inner life is different.
So I think this is the most releasing thing that anybody can possibly understand.
That your inner feeling is never wrong.
That's to say, what you feel, it's never wrong that you feel that way.
It may not be a right guide to what you should do.
In other words, if you feel that you hate someone intensely.
It isn't necessarily the right way of dealing with that feeling to go out and cut his throat.
But it is right that you should have the feeling of hating.
Or of being sad.
Or of what, frightened, terrified, whatever it is.
For you see, when a person comes to himself, he comes to be one with his own feeling.
And that is the only way of being in a position to control it.
It is in exactly this way that the sailor always keeps the wind in his sails.
Whether he wants to sail with the wind or whether he wants to sail against the wind.
He always uses the wind.
He never denies the wind.
Well, in exactly that same sense.
That a person has to keep going with his own feeling.
Whether he wants to act as the feeling obviously suggests.
Or act in a different way.
He has to keep the feeling with him.
Because that's his own essential self.
But when he attempts simply to sail against the wind, he's lost himself.
He's become just a kind of empty mask.
Which hasn't got any real life behind it.
And all its protestations of love and goodwill are hollow.
So you see, it is in the most basic, simple situation.
A mother has a child.
She got it by accident.
You know?
And she thinks, oh heavens.
Now I'm all tied up.
Full of responsibility and so on.
I can't stand it.
So I really didn't want to have it.
And I...
Oh, oh, oh.
No, I mustn't think that thought.
All good mothers naturally love their babies.
And so when she gets the baby, she says,
Darling, I love you.
But her milk is sour.
And the baby gets the other message.
And the baby's mixed up.
And it would be much better if that mother said to the baby,
Listen, you're a pest and you're a nuisance.
And I didn't want to have you around.
Well, then they understand each other.
And everything's clear.
There's no confusion.
There's nothing mixed up here.
And two, when you feel somebody is a pest and a nuisance and you really let it go and you tell them so.
You're apt in a while to get a sense of a kind of humorous feeling about it.
That you can begin from telling them that they're a damn nuisance and I wish you would just disappear and get lost.
After a while you say,
Yeah, you old bastard.
You know.
And it begins to have a kind of affectionate feeling to it.
So, to sum up.
What the mystic primarily feels is the divinity, the glory of whatever is.
And when we apply that to the moral sphere, what is, is what one feels genuinely.
And this must always be admitted.
Always allowed.
It doesn't mean to say, let me emphasize this.
It doesn't mean that we always are therefore compelled to act upon the basis of what we feel.
That is to say, to kill the person we hate.
Hatred does not necessarily lead to violence.
It is unacknowledged hatred that leads to violence.
Honest hatred can be expressed in much simpler ways.
But the expression, the recognition, the acceptance of what is honestly felt
is the moral equivalent of the vision that whatever exists is a manifestation of the divine.


===== Philosophy And Society - 05 - On Being God Whole Thing =====

Between Western psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy and the so-called religions
of Asia, there is common ground because both are interested in changing states of human
consciousness.
Whereas institutional Western religion, Christianity, Judaism and even Islam are relatively less
interested in this matter.
Western religions are more concerned with behaviour, doctrine and belief than with any
transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world.
But this matter concerns psychiatry and psychology very much.
Only those states of consciousness which are not normal are usually treated in Western psychology
as being in some way sick.
There are of course exceptions to this.
And there have increasingly been exceptions.
In the work of Jung and to some extent even of Groddick, of Prinzhorn, of more modern people,
Rogers and Ronald Lang, changing consciousness is often looked upon as a form of therapy.
But in general, different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness.
And therefore official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality.
And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning.
In this official doctrine, I might even say dogma, of what reality is.
Because after all we know that our science, such as it is of psychology, is founded in the scientific naturalism of the nineteenth century.
And the metaphysical and mythological assumptions of that science still underlie a great deal of psychological thinking in behaviorism eminently,
but also to a large extent in official psychoanalysis.
Indeed one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and in fact could be called psychohydraulics.
Not that that analogy is altogether inappropriate, because there are certainly respects in which our psychic life flows and exhibits the dynamics of water.
But of course we want to know what kind of water, and for the scientific naturalism of the nineteenth century,
the basic energies of nature were considered to be very much inferior to human consciousness in quality.
Ernst Haeckel, a biologist of that time, would think of the energy of the universe as blind energy.
And correspondingly it seems to me that Freud thought of the libido as essentially blind unconscious energy embodying only a kind of formless unstructured and insatiable lust.
This is a generalization, some modification in that thinking is of course possible.
But the tendency is to regard all that which lies below the surface of human consciousness as being less evolved,
because you must remember that this was also the time of Darwin's theories of evolution,
of seeing the human mind as a fortuitous development from much more primitive forms of life,
coming forth by purely mechanical processes, by natural selection and by the survival of the fittest.
And therefore man was in general seen as a fluke of nature, an embodiment of reason, emotion and values,
for which the more basic processes of nature had no sympathy and about which they did not care.
If therefore the human race is to flourish, we must take charge of evolution.
It is left to spontaneous process, but must be directed by human ingenuity, despite the fact that although our brains are capable of dealing with a colossal number of variables at once,
our conscious attention is not.
Most people cannot consider more than three variables at the same time without using a pencil.
And this shows that in many ways the scanning process of man's conscious attention is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables,
the multidimensional processes of the natural universe.
However, a serious attempt has been made, and scientific naturalism issued in a fantastic fight with nature,
in this whole notion of the conquest and subordination of nature, which has as a matter of fact very ancient non-scientific and biblical origins,
with the idea of man as the head and chief and ruler of nature in the image of God.
And the time has now dawned upon us all when our attempts to beat nature into submission are having alarming results.
Because we see that it's very dangerous to mess around with processes that we don't understand, that have enormous numbers of variables,
and we begin to wonder whether we hadn't better let well enough alone.
At the same time, although I said that Western psychology had more in common or more common interest with Oriental religion than it does with Western religion,
there is a sense in which psychiatry and psychotherapy are becoming the religion of the West.
Psychoanalysis has much in common with the forms and procedures of institutional religion.
There is, for example, apostolic succession, the passing down of mana, of qualified power to practice therapy,
from the father founder, Sigmund Freud, through his immediate apostles, to an enormous company of archbishops and bishops,
among whom there are, of course, as there were with Christianity, heresiarchs, such as Jung and Grodek and Rank and Reich,
and the heresiarchs are duly excommunicated and anathematized.
There are rituals, as there are also rituals with religion.
There is the sacrament of the couch.
There is the spiritual discipline of free association.
There is the mystic knowledge of the interpretation of dreams.
And there are also the two great symbolic fetishes, the long one and the round one.
Now, it's extraordinarily easy to make fun of all this.
And we must not forget that we owe a tremendous debt to Freud,
if for nothing else than pointing out that that much of ourselves, of which we are aware in terms of the conscious ego,
is not really ourselves.
It is something superficial.
However we find its nature, it is superficial.
And the realities of human life are not under the gaze of its scanning process,
at least not in the ordinary way.
And that was a tremendous revelation.
There's no question about that.
But one sees troublesome signs when the doctrines and processes of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and so forth become officialized.
And I think Thomas Sass, in his books, The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness,
is pointing out something extremely important to us.
Which is that, in effect, the psychological official of today is the priest.
And that he is beginning to exercise the same sort of controls over human life as were exercised by the Church in the Middle Ages.
So that a professor of psychiatry at Columbia or Harvard or Yale medical schools has today the same sort of intellectual respectability and authority
as the professor of theology at the University of Toledo or Padua would have had in the year 1400.
Now you must realize that the theologians of those days not simply believed in their cosmology and the theology.
They almost knew it was true in the same way that our scientists know certain things to be true.
Despite the fact that they change their opinions very often, while they hold them,
they have in effect the force of dogma as witness the anathematization of Velikovsky for his uncomfortable ideas.
And therefore there are heresies existing today which are persecuted in the same way as heresies were persecuted by the Holy Inquisition.
They are persecuted out of kindness in exactly the same way that the Holy Inquisition persecuted heresy out of kindness and deep concern for human beings.
That is unimaginable to us, but it was so.
For after all, if you seriously believed that someone who did not hold the Catholic faith and who voluntarily rejected it would be tortured physically and spiritually forever and ever and ever in hell,
you would resort to almost any means to preserve a fellow human being from such a fate.
Especially if the complaint or disease of heresy from which he suffered was infectious.
You would first of all reason with him.
And if he was not responsive to reason, you would resort to abuse and to forceful argument.
And if he was not responsive to that, you would give him shock treatment and bang him about.
If that didn't work, the thumb screw and the rack and the iron maiden.
And if that didn't work as a last desperate resort, you would burn him at the stake in the pious hope that in the midst of those searing fires,
he would think better and make a last act of perfect contrition and so be rescued from everlasting damnation.
And you did all this in the spirit of this is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you.
In the spirit of a surgeon who is very, very sorry indeed that he has to make you undergo this extremely painful operation.
But it is in your best interests and there really is at least a 50-50 chance that you may survive.
And so therefore, in perfectly scientific, medical spirit, people may be very arbitrarily and without due process deprived of their civil rights,
incarcerated in prisons that are in many cases much worse than prisons for criminals,
and generally left to rot, be neglected and ignored and when bumptious, given shock treatment or put in solitary confinement.
For what? Because they have unorthodox and heretical states of consciousness.
A lot of these people are not dangerous until provoked into being dangerous by being ignored, by being treated as machines and in generally defined as non-human.
And if you are defined as non-human, there's precious little you can do about it.
Because everything you say that sounds human will be taken as a kind of utterance of a mechanical man, as imitating humanness out of lunatic cunning.
You will be suspicious. Everything you say will be listened to in a different way and with different ears.
And you will have one hell of a time talking yourself out of it.
Because there really are no rules as to what one must do when incarcerated for having unorthodox consciousness.
There is no clear road to repentance.
And this is found likewise in jails, where people are incarcerated on one to ten year sentences, as in places like Vacaville, California.
Where, when I visited such prisons, young men have come to me in perfect desperation, saying,
I don't know what's happened to me, because I want to live like a decent citizen.
I know I've done things that are wrong, but I simply don't know what is expected of me here.
If I try to do what's expected, they say I'm compliant.
And that seems to be some sort of a sickness.
Thomas Sasse drew attention to this when he quoted a discussion of the types of school children who may very well need therapy.
There were overachieving children. There were underachieving children.
There were children who exhibited erratic patterns.
There were children who were sort of dully mediocre.
In fact, every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior, which sounds sick.
As Jung once suggested, life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis.
It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.
And I submit that in our present knowledge of the human mind, such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous.
For I would suggest that today we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
And that while there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy, it is the sheerest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so.
We do not know how it is done.
Just as we do not know, really, how musical, artistic and literary genius is done.
You cannot really teach it.
You can put the tools for doing these things into people's hands and you can show them how to use the tools.
But whether they will use those tools with genius is quite unpredictable.
And this is above all true of the art of psychotherapy.
We don't know how it's done.
We've got some vague ideas.
There probably are some people who by reason of their mental derangement are probably not qualified to perform it.
Because they are maybe out just to make other people into messes.
But to say that there are certain standards and certain examinations that can be passed, and certificates that could be issued,
which do indeed qualify people for this work, is, I think, pernicious nonsense.
And is used, of course, out of economic self-interest, when those who consider themselves official therapists run into competition.
The same was done by religion.
I was talking, imagine it, to a Buddhist priest in Thailand some years ago.
I was looking at some books in a book shop in the precincts of a Buddhist temple.
And I was wandering over, and I noticed a book on a certain form of Buddhist meditation.
And I murmured, hmm, Satipatthana, which is the name of a certain kind of Buddhist meditation.
And a voice suddenly said to me, you practice Satipatthana?
I looked up, and there was a skinny Buddhist monk in a yellow robe with rather red eyes looking at me.
I said, not exactly Satipatthana, I used a different method, it's called Zen.
Oh, Satipatthana, not Zen.
I said, oh, well, it's something like it, isn't it?
No.
Well, it's rather like yoga, I said, isn't it?
Not yoga.
No.
Satipatthana, different.
Only right way.
Well, look, I said to him.
I have a lot of Roman Catholic friends who tell me that their way is the only right way.
Who am I to believe?
You know, I said, you're like someone who's got a ferry boat for crossing the river.
I use the Buddhist simile.
And another fellow down the stream has opened up ferry business.
And you go to the government and say, he's not authorized to operate a ferry boat because
he's competition to you.
Let all operate ferry boats who will.
And if you haven't got the sense to get off, to stay off one that sinks, it's your fault.
And after all, I could say to him, you believe that everything that happens to you is your own karma.
So why worry?
But now, it's so interesting that since official psychiatry, and I underline that word official
because I hope those of you in this audience who are therapists will regard yourselves as unofficial.
At least that'll give you an out.
But nevertheless, official psychiatry has curious things in common with Western religion as well as with Eastern.
With Eastern, I said, only in so far as it has an interest in states of consciousness
and inclines to regard other states of consciousness than the ordinary as sick.
But it has one very important feature in common with Western religion.
And to that, we have to go a little bit into Western religious history
and ask ourselves what in Western religion and especially in Christianity
and this goes also for Judaism and Islam.
What is the great heresy?
Curiously enough, the great heresy was first in the West committed by no lesser person than Jesus Christ,
believed himself to be God.
This, of course, will be unquestionably true if you think that the Gospel of St. John has historical value.
It's a little vaguer in the Synoptic Gospels, but if you read the Gospel of St. John, there is absolutely no doubt about it.
For he said, I and the Father are one.
He who has seen me has seen the Father.
Before Abraham was, I am.
I am the way, the truth, and the life.
I am the resurrection and the life.
He said all that according to this Gospel.
And that is something that in the Western world you are not supposed to say.
Especially you are not supposed to believe it.
And actually it was very difficult for Jesus because he was saying all this in the context of the Hebrew culture.
And he tried to find language in the Hebrew scriptures with which to express his state of consciousness.
Because he had an unusual state of consciousness.
As I read it, he had cosmic consciousness.
Otherwise known as mystical experience.
Otherwise known as moksha.
Nirvana.
Bodhi.
Satori.
Phana Elphana, or what you will.
And that happens to people.
It has happened as far back as we know.
It happens all over the world and in all cultures.
We don't know very much about it.
We don't really know ways in which to make it happen.
Because it seems to be of the nature of it that it is a spontaneous surprise.
But it unquestionably happens.
And most people keep their mouths shut about it when it does.
I had a friend who in the middle of having a stroke had this illumination.
And he said to me,
I fear to speak to my friends of this.
But it was the most beautiful experience.
I shall never be afraid of death.
In fact, I recommend everyone to have a stroke.
This was my friend Jean Varda.
Lately deceased Greek painter.
But Jesus certainly had this transformation of consciousness.
And he was crucified for it.
Why?
Because he had committed an act of insubordination and treason against the cosmic government.
Because if you believe that God is a monarch.
An absolute omniscient and omnipotent authority.
Shall we say a sort of cosmic ego.
Then to claim to be that is to introduce democracy into the kingdom of heaven.
To usurp divine authority and to speak in its name without proper authorization.
And they asked Jesus, by what authority do you speak?
Of heaven or of men?
And he was tricky about answering that one.
He said, by what authority did John the Baptist speak?
And they were nervous about answering that one.
He could have asked, by what authority did Isaiah speak?
Etc.
Or Moses.
But Moses became official authority.
And if you could wangle it that what you said was simply an extension of what Moses said.
Because Rabbi so and so said it.
Who got it from Rabbi so and so.
Who got it from Moses.
Then it's okay.
That to be an authority today in the academic world depends on documentation.
It's not enough to say, for I say unto you, you must put in your footnotes.
And the more the footnotes, the more the authority, obviously.
So, our dissertations tend to be books about books, about books, about books.
And our libraries multiply by mitosis.
So, when somebody speaks as an authority, that means speaks as the author.
That's all it means.
It's a statement of which you are the author and therefore for which you assume responsibility.
That is to speak with authority.
And to be original is likewise not to be freaky.
But to speak from the origin.
That is what Christians mean when they say to speak in the spirit.
To have your mouth possessed by the Holy Spirit.
As they believe the mouth of Jesus was possessed by the Holy Spirit.
So, the Gospel of Jesus, which of course was hushed up from its inception.
Was that, wake up everybody and find out who you are.
Asking that, again in the Gospel of Saint John, they, pointing to his disciples, may be one.
Even as you, Father, and I are one.
And when he was accused of blasphemy, the Jews took up stones to stone him, you know.
And he said, many good works have I shown you from the Father.
And from which of these do you stone me?
And they said, for a good work we don't stone you, but for blasphemy.
Because you, being a man, make yourself God.
Now listen to the reply.
He said, is it not written in your law, I have said ye are gods?
And if that is what the scripture says, it can't be denied.
So why do you tell me I blaspheme?
Because I say, I am a son of God.
No answer.
Because I said, I am a son of God.
It doesn't say that in your King James translation.
It says, I am the son of God.
And you'll see the the italicized.
And you will think that that is for emphasis if you don't realize that passages in italics
in the King James Bible are interpolations by the translators.
In Greek, leaving out the definite article is equivalent of having the indefinite article.
Wios tuthiu is a son of God, not oios tuthiu.
So son of, in Hebrew and in Arabic, means of the nature of.
When we call someone a son of a bitch, we mean bitchy.
And so if you call someone a son of God, you mean divine.
Of the nature of God.
As the Nicene Creed subsequently defined it,
he is of one substance with the Father.
But what happened was that this being blasphemy for the Jews,
it became blasphemy for the Christians,
for anyone else than Jesus to say it.
They said, OK, baby, it was so with you, but there it stops.
No more of this business.
And as a result of that, Jesus was made irrelevant by pedestalization,
by being kicked upstairs,
in spite of the fact that he said,
greater works than these that I do shall you do.
Oh, no. Upstairs with you, baby.
Because we just can't have that sort of thing going on in a monarchical universe.
We are not going to have democracy in the kingdom of heaven.
So, this is why the gospel is impossible.
Because we are supposed to follow the example of Christ.
Where he says, for example, be not anxious for the morrow.
Do not worry about what you shall eat,
what you shall drink, and what you shall wear.
God will take care of you.
Doesn't he take care of the birds?
Don't the flowers grow?
They're wonderful.
They're crazy.
They're great.
What are you worrying about?
I've never heard a sermon preached on that.
Never.
Because it's totally subversive.
The economy would crash.
So, they say,
Oh, yes, that's all very well,
but he was the boss's son.
See, he had that colossal advantage.
Take up your cross and follow him.
Hey, but wait a minute.
I don't know I'm going to be resurrected three days later.
I can't do all those miracles.
He had an unfair advantage.
So, how could you ask us to follow the example of Christ?
But supposing he didn't have an unfair advantage.
Supposing that what was true about Jesus as a son of God is true of us.
Only, only a few of us know it.
But, and we are pretty careful to be quiet about it,
lest the same thing happen to us as happen to Jesus.
And, indeed, it often does.
And, you know, you get these people from Arkansas or Texas or anywhere in the Bible Belt
who never heard of the Upanishads,
and they have this cosmic consciousness experience,
and they realize that that's what happened to Jesus.
They say, I'm Jesus. Come back.
Well, everybody says to them, you aren't Jesus.
It's pretty obvious you're not Jesus.
You're just Joe Dokes.
Well, they say, he says, that's what they said about Jesus.
He has a perfect argument, except they say, you're not much of a Jesus.
They say, all right, if you're Jesus,
command that these stones be made bread.
And he says, a wicked and deceitful generation seeketh for a sign,
and there shall no sign be given.
Now, why talk about this?
Is it interesting?
Is it important for the human being
to realize that in some sense of the word, whatever it means,
he is God or one with God?
As is plainly taught by the Hindus,
hinted at by the Buddhists,
only they don't like to put it out as a concept,
in case people will use the concept as an idol to hang on to.
They want you to find out for yourself and not believe in it.
And certainly the Daoists understand it,
the Sufis understand it,
a lot of people understand it.
But so what?
Well, the importance of it is this,
that to know that you are God
is another way of saying that you feel
completely with this universe.
You feel profoundly rooted in it and connected with it.
You feel, in other words,
that the whole energy which expresses itself in the galaxies
is intimate.
It is not something to which you are a stranger,
but it is that with which you,
whatever that is,
are intimately bound up.
That in your seeing, your hearing,
your talking, your thinking, your moving,
you express that which it is
which moves the sun and other stars.
And if you don't know that,
if you don't feel that,
well, naturally, you feel alien.
You feel a stranger in the world.
And if you feel a stranger,
you feel hostile.
And therefore,
you start to bulldoze things about,
to beat it up,
and to try and make the world submit to your will.
And you become a real troublemaker.
So I feel also one reason why you become hostile
is that feeling that you were just brought into this place,
that your father and mother went up to some monkey business
that they probably shouldn't have done,
or it was bad rubber goods,
and as a result of this,
here you are,
and you didn't ask to be here.
Well, you always feel you can turn around and blame them.
You can blame somebody.
You can blame the government.
You can blame the rascals.
You can blame the cheaters.
Always supposing you yourself aren't a rascal,
which is a long odds.
You always can blame someone
and say,
I didn't ask for it.
Take it away.
And yet,
and yet,
very few people
are all too ready to take it away.
Camus said that the only serious philosophical problem
is whether or not to commit suicide.
And if you don't,
if you don't say,
take it away,
what are you going to do?
You've really got to assume responsibility for it.
You've got to say yes
to what happens.
It's my karma.
And that doesn't mean merely,
there are many misinterpretations
of the doctrine of karma.
It's usually unpopularly understood
that what happens to you,
either fortunate or unfortunate,
is the result of good or bad deeds
in a previous life.
Well, that's popular superstition.
The real meaning of karma,
the word in Sanskrit means simply doing.
And if I say of an event,
it is your karma,
it is saying,
it is your doing.
So the exposition,
a book which would expound karma,
would be not so much a whodunit
as a you-dunit.
But that seems fantastic.
Now, therefore,
what I propose we do
is that we,
instead of just
ideologizing,
we have a clinical experience.
You know,
in psychiatric school,
in medical school,
it's very usual for a doctor
to bring a patient
out in front of the students
and talk with the patient
as a kind of demonstration.
He says,
I want you
to recognize the difference
between
a psychopath
that had a manic-depressive
or a schizophrenic
or something.
They don't know
what all these things mean.
And especially
the schizophrenia.
And
so,
he has a dialogue
with the patient
right there.
So,
let us suppose
that I'm the patient
and you
are the students
and the doctors.
And I
suffer from
what you would call
the delusion
that I'm God.
And therefore,
you might want to do
something about me
or with me
or humor me
or ask me questions.
And so,
I'm perfectly willing
to
submit to your examination
and your treatment
and
invite you
to help yourselves.
Would you become God?
Now.
Will you marry me?
No.
Yes.
Sleeping
is like politics.
One sleeps
on the right side
and then
when you're tired
of that
you sleep
on the left.
When you're tired
of that
you sleep
on your back
and when you're
tired of that
you sleep
on your stomach.
And it is thus
that the world
goes round.
What now?
What were you
yesterday?
Now.
You don't become God.
Yes.
Remember the same person?
No.
Remember three persons
but one God.
Could I tell you
a little bit
about Satan?
Yes.
Although the matter
is a little esoteric
but I
told you all about it
in the book of Job
where you will see
that in the court
of heaven
Satan is the
district attorney.
He is not
as Christians imagine
the enemy of heaven
and the enemy
of mankind.
He is merely
the person
who sees the bad
side of things
and carries out
the dirty work.
And therefore
he saw Job
and wondered
whether Job
really was
as great a guy
as he seemed to be
and suggested
that God
should appoint
a committee
of investigation
to find out.
And the committee
did its work
very thoroughly
but the case
went against Satan
because it was proved
in the end
that Job was
an honourable man.
Now you notice
that although we
pay the salary
of the district attorney
whenever there is
a great criminal case
before the public eye
people begin
to take the side
of the underdog.
And the prosecutor
always has
less public sympathy
than the defence
except in political trials.
On the right hand
of God
and you know
the defence
is always on the right hand
of the judge in court
is our only mediator
and advocate
which is the phrase
referring to
Jesus Christ our Lord.
So there is the defence
and there is the prosecution
and it is the function
of Satan
to be the prosecutor.
There is a good deal
more to it than that
because before
all this started
lies in a stage play
there was an arrangement
in the green room
before coming on stage
in which
certain things
were understood
but that are only
to be revealed
when the curtain
goes down
at the end of the play.
Yes, but he doesn't know it.
Why do you hide?
It's for the same reason
you're hiding.
Yes.
Who else?
What?
Man has free will
to the extent
that he knows
who he is.
Not otherwise.
Where I got it from.
Yes.
To the extent
that she knows
who she is.
Yes.
You know just what he is
and you are no more
than any God
in this room.
That is correct.
I'm no more God
than any of you.
And you only have
the power
to know who you are.
Well that is
saying quite a bit
yes.
What is not God?
There is nothing
that is not God.
It's like
waking up
from a dream.
After a while
one's experience
begins to have
what I would call
a haven't we been here
before feeling.
Going round
and round
and then you begin
wondering
where am I going
and to answer
that question
you have to
try and find out
what you want.
And so I went
into that very thoroughly.
What do I want
to happen?
And of course
as soon as you ask
yourself that
you begin to fantasize.
And our amazing
technology is
of course
an expression
of human desire
desire for power
for what we want
to achieve.
So I simply
set myself
to thinking through
how far we could go.
And so I soon
found myself
at a great
push button place
where I had
a fantastic
mechanism
with buttons
available
for every conceivable
thing I could wish.
So I spent
quite a bit of time
playing with those.
And science fiction
wasn't it.
you know
you go
going like that
and here is
Cleopatra
and so on
you know
and then
press this button
symphonic music
in
four channel sound
sixteen channel sound
anything
you know
all possible
pleasures
are available
and when
you know
you're like
everybody's dream
of the sultan
in the palace
you suddenly notice
there's a button
labeled surprise
you push that
and here we are
yes
boredom is of course
the problem
boredom
is
the other side
of creativity
and the energy
of creation
has as its
that is the yang
the yin side
of that energy
is called boredom
everything of course
is fundamentally
yang and yin
if you understand
that you really
don't need to
understand anything
else
as god
what responsibility
do you feel
to ameliorate
evil in the world
as god
what responsibility
do i feel
to ameliorate
evil in the world
i begin with
the
point
that i am
responsible
for the way
the world is
if i
couldn't feel
that i'd have
to blame
somebody else
i'm not
willing to do
that
because i know
that under
various changing
circumstances
it might be
appropriate for me
to be as big
a rascal as
rascals have
been
now as to
improving the
world
the world is
always improving
it may look to
some people
slow
but
it's improving
even when it
is declining
because the
world works in
an undulatory
process
goes down
it goes up
and it goes
down
and it
couldn't go up
all the time
because if it
did we wouldn't
know that that
was up
so it goes down
some of the time
so that we can
know when it
goes up
because if we
didn't know
when it went
up it would
like
it would be
like being in
a space
where everything
was light
there'd be
nothing to
write home
about
there would
be no black
marks on the
space
and so it
would be like
a piece of
perfectly empty
paper
to be in
a completely
black space
would also
be a kind
of unconsciousness
with nothing
to write home
about
because there'd
be nothing
would make
any difference
so therefore
if you're going
to have
black
you won't
know that
it's black
unless you
have some
white
and if you're
going to
have white
you won't
know that
it's white
unless you
have some
black
correct
but that's
not a
teaching
it's a
koan
a koan
is a
japanese word
for a
spiritual
problem
used in
zen
buddhism
such as
what is
the sound
of one
hand
and these
problems
are given
to those
who ask
questions
concerning
their
spiritual
development
and sometimes
as
saint paul
pointed out
commandments
are given
not in
the expectation
that they
will be
obeyed
but in
the expectation
that they
will reveal
something
to those
who hear
them
that was
saint paul's
comment on
the whole
mosaic law
yes sir
what
yes
the hereafter
is of course
now
because if you
will examine
it closely
there is no
when else
than now
and if you
want to make
hell of it
you can make
hell of it
if you want
to make heaven
of it
you can make
heaven of it
purgatory
it's all
here
always was
always will
be
what is
death
death is
an undulation
in consciousness
how would you
know you were
alive unless
you'd once
been dead
yes
your god
why was it
unnecessary for him
to have material
possessions
and necessary
for you
it wasn't
unnecessary for him
to have material
possessions
they said
of saint john
the baptist
that he was
an ascetic
but of jesus
this man
consorts with
gluttoners
and wine
bibbers
and comes
eating
and drinking
and when
the lady
mary
poured
precious
ointment
on his
feet
and anointed
him
they said
the same
thing
that the
members
of the
vestry
say to
the minister
today
why this
great expense
couldn't it
all have been
sold
for much
money
and given
to the
poor
it is a
problem
sure
but you
see
in many
ways
when you
get down
to these
very deep
ethical
problems
where there
sure is
no easy
decision
one way
or the
other
you
must look
at the
problem
from the
point of
view
of an
artist
which way
of doing
this
is in
some sense
greater
it may be
better to
go off
with a
bang
than
with a
whimper
you
can
you
can
you
can
you
can
you
can
do
it