...with part two of Reality, Art, and Illusion.
Well, now you know that one of the great problems
that has arisen out of the Western study of Indian philosophy,
as well as out of the tradition of Western philosophy
in relation to the whole problem of illusion,
is the question of what is called in the technical jargon of Western philosophy,
subjective idealism.
This is the theory that all reality is mental.
And we have to start by making a clear distinction
between subjective idealism and solipsism.
Solipsism is the doctrine that you are the only person who exists.
And everybody else is your dream.
And you can see there's a certain analogy between that
and the Hindu idea that all this cosmos is the dream of the Godhead.
But the difference here is that in the solipsistic doctrine,
it is just you, as you more or less know yourself from a conscious standpoint,
as a finite individual,
and not much more than that,
having this dream that all these other people exist.
There's no way of really producing an argument against solipsism,
because you can always say to a solipsist,
what evidence, if someone could produce it,
would you regard as disproving your idea?
That's a very disconcerting question to ask anybody,
and I give it to you if ever you get involved in philosophical one-upmanship.
Ask a Freudian,
what evidence, if it could be brought forward,
would you consider to disprove the Oedipus complex theory?
You'll find he can't think of anything at all.
Or ask a theologian,
what evidence would you find conclusive as disproving the existence of God?
And he can't think of any.
Whereas,
other people, if you ask them that question,
will suggest an experiment,
and say, all right, if this experiment is negative,
then we'll accept the evidence.
And one of the classic experiments of this nature
is the Michelson-Morley experiment,
which disproved the existence of the ether,
as at any rate, in the form that people had conceived ether.
And it's been generally accepted.
Somebody thought out
what would happen if there were really ether.
So, this is always one of the problems of solipsism,
and we're going to see it's one of the problems of subjective idealism.
But the difference between solipsism and subjective idealism
is contained in the famous double limerick.
There was a young man who said,
God, I find it exceedingly odd
that a tree as a tree simply ceases to be
when there's no one around in the quad.
And the reply,
young man, your astonishment's odd.
I'm always around in the quad,
so the tree as a tree never ceases to be
since observed by yours faithfully, God.
And the great subjective idealists in the tradition of Western philosophy
are, of course, Berkeley,
the bishop,
and Bradley,
A.F. Bradley.
And, uh,
it's in some ways difficult to make out exactly what they were saying
when they said that everything is in the mind
because they could never say clearly what they meant by the mind.
But if you will be a little naive for a moment
and seem at least to understand what you mean
when you use the word mind,
they will pitch the argument in the following way.
You do not know anything except in your own mind.
The whole existence of an external world
is something known to you in your mind.
The distance of other people and other objects from you
is a distance that exists in the mind.
You cannot possibly conceive
any world existing
unless it be
an experience.
How could there be an unexperienced world
that would not be a world for anyone or anything
therefore it would not be at all
because being is always being for something.
It is, in other words, relational.
The sun is light for eyes.
Eyes are organs of vision for a mind.
If there are no eyes,
the sun gives forth no light.
If there are no nerve ends,
it gives forth no heat.
If there are no muscles,
nothing is heavy.
And if there are no soft skins,
nothing is hard.
Because it is only in relation
to a certain softness
that something hard can be said to be hard.
Only in relation to a certain
degree of measurement
performed by the neurons
that things can be said to be relatively hot or cold.
Hot and cold are the impact
of energies
on a nervous system.
Energies at all
are recognized as energies
by their impact on something.
So the Zen poem says,
the tree
manifests the spiritual power
of the wind,
the water
the miraculous energy
of the moon.
So the tree
is waving.
And we wouldn't know
there was any wind around,
you see,
unless there were a tree
or something like it
to wave in it.
And in the same way
as the moon,
when the water
ripples,
breaks up into
a thousand fragments
and shimmers all over the place,
you see,
we wouldn't know
that the moon
had this miraculous power
to duplicate itself,
to triplicate,
quadruplicate,
multimillionaire itself
were it not for the water.
So these are the
the foundations
of the idealist
theory.
You must distinguish
between philosophical idealism
and ethical idealism.
They're two totally
unrelated ideas.
Philosophical idealism
means that
only the ideal world
is the real world.
That is to say,
the world
in the mind.
Now,
the theory
is incredibly plausible.
As it has been stated
by people like
Berkeley and Bradley
and the Western idealists,
but today
it is about
the most unfashionable
philosophical theory
in the academic world
that you could follow.
because Western philosophy
has undergone
a great revolution
since about 1914.
In that year,
there was published
Wittgenstein's Tractatus
and Wittgenstein
came from the
so-called Vienna School
or was influenced
by the Vienna School
of people who
call themselves
scientific empiricists,
sometimes logical
analysts,
sometimes logical
positivists.
And they said
only statements
that are
empirically verifiable
have meaning.
They never verified
that statement.
But that
was their point
of departure.
That's their
basic assumption.
Everybody
has a metaphysical
assumption
which you can't prove.
Watch out for it.
It's basic
to all thought.
For example,
you must be consistent.
Try it.
But at any rate,
this school
has had immense
influence
in the 20th century
and it argues
basically
that
in order to say
something meaningful
he's having fun
you must be able
to verify it.
That is to say
you verify things
by prophecy.
If you make a prediction
based on your statement
and it comes true
you verified it.
If it doesn't come true
you haven't verified it.
You de-verified it.
The statement
a statement
which was de-verified
shown to be untrue
might be meaningful
but untrue.
But a statement
that you can't think
any way of verifying it
is in this theory
meaningless.
Now so you say
the world is ruled by God.
Everything that happens
happens under the governance
of God.
So the logical analyst says
you've made a statement now
that says
everything is
affected by X
God.
Suggest a way
of verifying this.
what difference
would it make
if it weren't so?
Would it make any difference
to the way things
are going on
if they weren't
governed by God?
This is a problem
because it's just the same
as if you had said
all bodies
whatsoever
in the universe
that includes
all stars
all galaxies
all planets
are moving
in a certain direction.
Now there's no way
of verifying this
because you can only
verify
movement in a certain
direction
by comparison
with something
that's relatively still.
But there will not be
any still body
with reference to which
all the other bodies
move
because you said
in the beginning
all bodies in the universe
are moving
in such and such
a direction.
So you could only say
everything in the universe
is governed by God
if you made an exception.
But there are certain
things that are not.
You see?
Then, according to
logical analysis
you could have made
a meaningful statement.
But when you start
making statements
about everything
there's nothing
you can do about it.
You can't prove it
you can't disprove it.
And so they say
although you think
you have said something
you haven't really
said anything at all.
You made a statement
that was actually
as nonsensical
as asking
why is a mouse
when it spins?
But this statement
about God
doing or ruling
all things
sounded meaningful
because we're used to it
but is really
pure nonsense.
This has been
so persuasive
in the climate
of academic philosophy
today
that
idealism
of all kinds
is as I said
extremely unfashionable.
But there are
considerations
that might cause us
to reflect on this
more carefully
because we can think
of situations
analogous to
the idea that
all things are ruled
by God
or all things
exist only
in the mind.
There are situations
analogous to that
in our everyday
experience.
Only
we can be aware
of these situations
because we stand
outside them.
Now first of all
consider a mirror.
A mirror
will reflect
all kinds of shapes
and colors.
And when you look
at the mirror
the mirror itself
will be the ground
or the underlying
element common
to all those shapes
and colors.
And it is not
meaningless to say
that they are all
reflections in a mirror
because the mirror
has an edge
and you can see
other things
around the mirror
which behave
in a different way
from the reflections.
You can't put
your hand out
and pull the necktie
of a reflection
in the mirror.
But you can
reach your hand out
and pull the necktie
of somebody
standing beside
the mirror.
You see?
But nevertheless
within the context
of the mirror
all the things
that are there
are reflected in it.
And if the mirror
weren't there
they wouldn't be there.
Those reflections.
Now supposing
similarly
everything that exists
has its being
in a mirror
called the mind.
Only
there is no way
of seeing the edge
of this mirror.
Does that
is that meaningful?
Is that possible?
The positivist
the logical analyst
will say no
because
the statement
makes no difference
to anything.
It makes no difference
to anything
in this thing
you call the mind
that it's in the mind.
It makes no difference
to anything
in the mirror
that it's in the mirror.
For example
your face
is not immediately
changed
by being reflected
in a mirror.
The mirror
doesn't exercise
influences
or so they say
upon the reflections
but it very well could.
Let's consider
what we were discussing
last night.
Lenses
in cameras
influence
the kind of world
they photograph.
A convex lens
will give you one thing.
a concave lens
will give you another thing.
And one can think
of all sorts
of wonky lenses
prismatic lenses
bent lenses
squirrely lenses.
Now you see
if the lenses
of your eyes
could be said
to distort
the physical world
you would take
that distortion
as normal
because there
would be no way
of
setting up a standard
and saying
by that standard
my eyes are wrong
unless you simply
took some other
kind of a lens
and said
this is right
and the eyes
distort it.
you would have
always seen
things that way.
So
nevertheless
whether
the eyes
are distorted
or not distorted
is impossible
to decide.
So
according to
this way of logic
that is a
meaningless question.
There is no way
of deciding
the answer
and it makes
no difference
whether it is
or whether it isn't
or so they say.
But I think
that they have
neglected
certain kinds
of difference
that these things
do make.
First of all
there is
a difference
of feeling
and very often
a difference
in behavior
between a person
who is
aware of
an underlying
ground
or continuum
for every
experience
and every
reality
and a person
who is not
aware of it.
The person
who is aware
of it
feels at home
in his surroundings
the person
who is not
aware of it
doesn't.
The first
belongs
and the second
doesn't feel
he belongs.
He feels
he is engaged
in a contest.
Furthermore
one of the
difficult ideas
to get across
and express
well
in any
language
which wants
to be
to assert
a pluralistic
universe
in which
there is
no unifying
ground
any language
based on
that assumption
is going to
have difficulty
talking about
relationships.
Let's go back
in the history
of philosophy
and look
at former
instances of
this difficulty.
The thing
that really
bogged Descartes
down and
that puzzled
him
he never
could answer
was the
relationship
of mind
and matter
or spirit
and matter.
he had
inherited
from
Platonism
and from
Christianity
the theory
of the
two worlds
the natural
and the
supernatural
the material
and the
mental
the real
and the
ideal
and what
never could
be explained
by the
philosophies
of the people
who believe
that way
was how
the one
influenced
the other.
How does
the spiritual
world
influence
the material
as is well
known
all ghosts
all good
well behaved
ghosts walk
straight through
walls without
budging a brick.
Now if my
mind is my
ghost within
me how on
earth does
it lift my
arm when
a ghost
doesn't budge
a brick when
it walks
through a
wall.
See this
is the real
problem.
It all sunk
on this.
They couldn't
explain that.
And you
see
in just
the same
way as
the Cartesian
cannot explain
the influence
of mind
on matter
so a
person who
works
according
to
the theories
of logical
analysis
can't really
explain
relationship
between
so-called
things.
If he's
going to
take a
pluralistic
theory of
the universe
in which
there is
no
unifying
continuum
but there
are just
these events
you see
there are
these things
we can
talk about
in a
scientific
descriptive
manner.
How are
they related?
They obviously
are related.
They obviously
influence each
other.
But how?
Put it in
another way
of historic
philosophical
problem.
How does a
cause influence
an effect?
kind of amazing
that they do.
We say there
are causes
and effects.
But how
does a cause
lead to
an effect?
Is it
something like
a row of
dominoes
that stand
on their
end and
you flip
down the
first one
and they
go clickety
clickety
and all
knock each
other down?
Or a row
of billiard
balls?
That was
the idea
of Newtonian
physics
of course.
And the
atoms
were things
like billiard
balls and
they banged
each other
around.
And so
you've got
results.
But this
really won't
do.
For very
many reasons.
One is of
course that
things influence
each other
backwards.
A future
event can
change a
past event.
A lot of
people aren't
aware of that
but it can.
If I say
the bark of
the dog
and the bark
of the tree
what happens
to bark
the former
event
is very
seriously
influenced by
the later
event
dog or
tree.
Although
the word
sounds the
same and
is spelled
the same
it has a
different
meaning
according to
what happens
later.
So in
the same
way in
music
what is
happening
at this
moment
may be
changed
altogether
by something
happening
later.
A note
has one
meaning
in one
context
another
meaning
in another
context.
So what
is the
cause-effect
relationship
between
them
when
apparently
the
earlier
event
seems
to
be
causally
affected
by the
later
event.
You see
how puzzling
all that
is.
things
but it's
very easily
illustrated by
certain
phenomena
of music.
When a
person is
tone deaf
that is to
say he
cannot hear
melodies
he only
hears noise
and he
can't
understand
why other
people find
music
attractive.
What is
his
deficiency?
Where is
he blind?
His
blindness
is that he
cannot hear
relationships
or rather
in musical
language he
doesn't hear
intervals.
If you
are musically
sensitive
what you
hear in a
melody is
not a
string of
notes.
You hear
the steps
between them.
You recognize
the major
scale of
C as
ascending.
Why do we
think of that
as up?
What does
it mean
that one
sound is
higher than
another?
That's
nonsense to
a person
who is
tone deaf.
There are
just different
sounds.
There are
boomy
sounds and
squeaky
sounds but
they don't
rise.
You see
he hears
no motion
in them
because
each note
is static
and he
doesn't hear
the lead
from one
to the
other
of the
step.
Also
a person
who is
a logical
positive
is a
tone deaf
philosopher.
See?
And you
can't explain
there's
nothing you
can do
to a
tone deaf
person to
explain how
you hear
music just
as there's
absolutely
no way
of making
a congenitally
blind person
understand
color.
Or we
may find
out one
eventually
when we
find out
a lot
more about
our senses
but in
the ordinary
way he
just
can't
get it.
And so
in exactly
that same
way there
are people
who cannot
get certain
things.
We say
of such
people
you know
all the
words
but you
don't
know
the music
and you
may as
not waste
your
energies
trying to
convince
but there
are
alas
these
poor
afflicted
souls
who just
aren't
functioning
on a
certain
waveband.
But now
I don't
want to
say
you know
make a
kind
of a
esoteric
scene
out of
this.
effect
you know
what
the
relationship
is
it's
very
simple
they're
the
same
event
only
divided
into
two
parts
if
you
see
a
cat
walk
by
a
very
narrow
window
you
see
first
the
head
and
a
little
later
the
tail
if
you
speak
in
cumbersome
philosophical
language
you're
going to
start
talking
about
the
event
head
being
so
when
you
see
causes
and
effects
what
you're
saying
is
this
aha
I
realize
at
last
my
perception
is
limited
and
when
I
saw
one
thing
that's
invariably
followed
by
something
else
what
I
hadn't
noticed
is
that
they're
continuous
with
each
other
so
that
when
one
part
of
this
pattern
arises
I
thing
that
is
an
action
and
a
response
to
that
action
an
action
and
a
reaction
they're
a
single
action
that's
why
they're
related
in
this
organism
and
the
environment
it's
becoming
plainer
and
plainer
that
they
are
one
now
what
this
goes
back
to
again
we're
looking
at
philosophical
history
is
the
western
debate
between
the
two
schools
of
thought
called
the
nominalist
and
the
realists
and
the
modern
logical
philosophers
are
nominalists
now
their
fight
is
as
at
all
it's
quite
different
the
realist
says
there
are
in
reality
substances
which
could be
called
matter
or
spirit
or
humanity
just to
take
an
example
every
individual
human
being
is
an
instance
of
something
called
mankind
and
mankind
is a
real
entity
to
the
would say, too, the United States of America is a real entity, and all these individual
examples of it are, as it were, members of a body constituted by the real mankind, or
the state, or the society, or the church, or the whatever.
In contradistinction, the nominalist says, all your so-called real natures are abstractions.
There is no such thing as mankind, there are simply these individual people, and calling
them all men is a way of identifying them, but there is no such thing as mankind.
In the same way, there is no such thing as the United States.
There are all these people living here, who imagine that they're the United States and
call themselves that.
But the United States as such has no physical existence, because when you say the policy
of the United States towards Russia is thus and so, you don't mean the policy of the geographical
territory.
And nominalism, you see, is a very big thing for the followers of Korzybski, and for all
logical analysts, and so on.
Because they take the point of view, the whole thing in Korzybski is that you mustn't just
go around calling things dogs, but you must recognize there is Fido sub one, Fido sub two,
and Fido sub three.
And so this helps you, as the song says, to see each doggy differently.
So the idea in semantics is this tremendous precise accuracy of getting the details clear,
seeing that not every colored man is a nigger, not every Chinese is a chink, not every Italian
as a whop.
You see?
Now, of course, yes, there's the richness of detail.
But these are philosophical fashions that go back and forth between the prickly-minded
people and the gooey-minded people.
The prickly-minded people are the nominalists, and they like to emphasize the details, the atomic
discontinuous structure of things.
The gooey-minded people like to emphasize the great connected generalities, the way
things form into bodies.
But you see very clearly what happens if you press nominalism to its logical conclusion.
The answer is there are no people.
There are only amalgamations of cells.
What you really are are these cells, although you want to go further, say what you are is
only these electrons.
That's all there is, you see?
And this idea that they add up in some way to a person is just an abstraction.
You're not really there, you see, they're just all that.
Now wait a minute, Mr. Nominalist.
Suddenly you are beginning to turn into a believer in Maya.
What's your step, you see?
If you push anybody far enough philosophically, they all arrive at the same place.
You suddenly tell me you don't believe human beings really exist.
There are only these atoms.
Well, well, well.
So I suppose we can argue the same thing about connections in time.
Melody is then an illusion.
There are only the individual notes.
After all, if you're going to be a nominalist, then melody is something that just doesn't
exist at all.
Okay.
That's almost what the Buddhists say.
When I was explaining to you this morning, the moment, moment, moment, and you don't connect
the moments.
One moment, you know, the thing.
Well, that's the same, the same thing the same way.
I'm saying that all the connections are an illusion.
So the only, you push your nominalist right into the corner, you say, the only things that
exist are the multiplicity of atoms.
And actually they only exist now.
See?
Because...
Only...
You can't even say it.
Only this moment is real.
The ultimate hairline.
You see?
That's why the precisionist is making watches that have hairlines narrower and narrower and
narrower and narrower, so they can only be seen by amazing microscopes.
Exactly.
When does that thing cross that thing?
Boing!
See?
So, eventually, they're going to get down and down and down.
And the universe has no time to exist it, therefore it doesn't exist, therefore it's
an illusion.
That was what, what bugged Zeno when he got the paradox of motion.
Now, either an arrow is somewhere or it isn't.
If it's moving, it isn't anywhere, but it's obvious if it isn't anywhere, it couldn't exist.
You know, it's the same problem as Achilles and the tortoise.
Manifestly, the Achilles in a race overtakes the tortoise, but you can talk about this race
in such a way that he can't.
Well, how do you do the trick?
What you do is this.
Although Achilles in the physical world overtakes the tortoise, in the intellectual world, which
you are using to measure the process, you measure his approach to the tortoise by a
narrower and narrower scale as he approaches the tortoise.
Although he runs right by it, your measuring process gets more and more minute.
You take longer and longer to think about it, because you're counting more units, so that
you can indefinitely subdivide the distances he is passing in his approach to the tortoise.
And you can go on talking about their subdivisions forever.
So that in terms of your talking, he never gets by the tortoise, because you're drawing
the lines finer and finer and finer and finer and finer.
So now who's making the abstractions?
The nominalist was telling the realist, you're making the abstractions.
You're talking about these vast generalities called humanity and America.
But now who's making the abstractions?
I thought you were the prickly fellow who was so precise and said only these specific, particular
details exist, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you see?
But he disappears into abstraction.
So the pot calls the kettle black.
Now you see, that fight goes out the window.
Because they both, if you push them far enough, they come back to each other.
Push a realist far enough, and he comes into a nominalist.
Push a nominalist far enough, and he turns into a realist.
What does that mean?
Well it means the same thing as if you investigate matter thoroughly, you turn up with mind.
If you investigate mind thoroughly, you turn up with matter.
If you exist, if you investigate yourself, what do you mean by you?
How do you know you exist?
In terms of what?
What do you discover?
If you push that.
Why, you discover everything else that you thought wasn't you.
You only know you exist, uh, because you've got things to feel and other people to talk
to, and because you go, ya-ya-ya, you reflect the external world.
So investigate you and you get the external world.
Now what happens if you investigate the external world?
Well you get you.
Uh, that's what happens, you see, when finally the physicists wanted to know, how are things
like when we're not looking at them?
That's the great question, you see, in order to see how electrons behave, I've got to put
them in a process which influences their behavior.
I'm really bombarding electrons with electrons.
Now what is the electron doing when I'm not looking at it?
See, does the light really go off in the refrigerator when you close the door?
So you find, you see, that knowing, the act of knowing, changes what you are knowing.
Knowledge of something is the same as action upon it.
You do not know that a ball is rubber until you bounce it.
And that acts upon the ball.
And that's so with everything.
All knowing is not something you merely are a passive spectator.
All knowing is the result of experiments on things.
Only in the most trivial instances are you ever, and even then if you go into the neurology
of it, the electronics of it, you're not a passive spectator.
You may just observe things and write them down.
Although when you do, it's pretty trivial.
The really good knowledge is always accumulated by an action upon the world to see what changes
that action makes.
So for example, we take certain fields of science.
Let's take medicine and antibiotics.
Now antibiotics are something, first of all, done in very carefully restricted experiments.
They were found very useful, and so they were spread over the social world so that almost
everybody has had antibiotics by now.
But the problem now arises is this, that the people as we studied them before they ever had
antibiotics were different from the people we are studying now who have had them.
What we knew about people before antibiotics has a little less value.
We've got to restudy them every time, because we've changed them.
And the insects, you see, or the germs, also adapt to this.
They say, you know, these human beings throwing down all this jazz and confusing us and killing
us off, we've got to do something about that.
And so they change themselves, so they have to be studied again to know how to attack them
the next time.
Once upon a time, a spaceship arrived on a strange planet.
And they came down, and there didn't seem to be anything living on it.
And they put a lot of stores in.
And finally they found that some little bugs were eating the grain that they had stored.
So they got insecticides and fixed those bugs.
And later they found they had mice.
And they were nibbling up things, so they got some cats sent on the next spaceship from
Earth.
And the cats took care of the mice.
Then lo and behold, dogs turned up, started making trouble for the cats.
So they decided that they'd better shoot the dogs.
And they did.
And one day they saw suddenly a man coming over the horizon with a gun.
And they said to the chief, look at that, there are people on this planet after all, and he's
got a gun.
Shall we shoot him?
And he said, no, because I have no way of knowing what it will turn up as the next time.
Well now look here.
What I've been trying to show is that you cannot use the language of illusion.
That is to say, the language of accurate, separative description, too far, without getting into
confusion.
Push your nominalism, and it becomes realism.
Push your scientific materialism, and it turns into mysticism.
I love doing this, I've had great fun.
I gave a lecture at Harvard some time ago, on B.F Skinner.
And B.F Skinner is the arch-behaviourist.
He is Mr. Mechanist Psychology.
And I took many, many passages from his works and said, now just see what he's really saying
is so and so and so and so.
He's a mystic.
He really believes in the unity of the universe and all that jazz, you see, that the individual
organism is a function of the cosmos.
And if I say that, you see, I say he's a mystic, does this ruin his scientific reputation?
What does it do?
But that's, you see, that's the great game to play.
You just push it along its logical lines, and you arrive up in that predicament.
One way or the other, and it really doesn't matter which way you do it.
You either show that nothing exists at all on their terms, or else that it's all one.
So in this way, then, we have to resolve the problem of mind and matter by what I referred
to this morning as looking at these as dimensions of each other, or as different languages for
talking about the behaviour of the same thing.
What the thing is that's doing this behaviour, or the behaviour is that has no thing doing
it, really no one can say.
And you can't say what it is for exactly the same reason that you cannot touch the tip of
this finger with this finger.
To the tip of this finger, the tip of this finger is always inaccessible to its own touch,
you see.
And that's the problem of every nerve end.
The nerve end can tickle another nerve end and say, Hi, are you there?
Am I here?
And it says, Yes, you're here.
Oh.
But it needs another to do it.
Now, the whole universe hasn't got another to rub itself against.
So it can't define itself.
So the basic self in you can't define itself.
That's why the highest attainment in Zen is no attainment.
I know it involves no idea.
Why Buddha, when he talked in the Diamond Sutra to Subuti, says, Subuti, when I attained
complete and unexcelled awakening, I didn't attain anything at all.
But you can see, I think, that this nothing at all is a statement of the same kind as when
a logical positivist says, in making your metaphysical assertion, you said nothing at all.
And if you are Zen, you say, Correct.
I entirely agree with you.
And yet, you see, that nothing at all was all in all.
That was the thing.
That was the big thing.
You know, you lost everything and gained everything in one fell swoop as having nothing but possessing
all things.
Because obviously, you see, if the mirror weren't there, the images wouldn't be.
And there'd be no connection between them.
They couldn't, they couldn't jostle together.
If the water weren't there, how would the fishes get, get around?
If the air weren't there, how would the birds fly?
If consciousness weren't there, how would experiences occur, you see?
If being weren't there, how could there be beings?
So there are, in Buddhist philosophy, what are called the four inconceivables.
Water to the fish, air to the bird, consciousness to man, and enlightenment to the ignorant.
That is to say, to the ignorant in the sense that melody is inconceivable to the tone deaf
person, in the same way that color is inconceivable to the blind man, sound to the deaf man.
This is KPFK Los Angeles.
We just heard Alan Watts with part two of the four-part seminar, Reality, Art, and Illusion.
Now here is Alan Watts with part three of Reality, Art, and Illusion.
I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of illusion.
The question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not.
That is to say, whether the plot is comic or tragic.
And if it's tragic, you see, is it, must we say that it's ultimately tragic?
The question of who are you?
And are we to say that I myself, right down at root, am just a little kind of, that really
has nothing to do with this cosmos, but just arises in it, and is here on sufferance for
a short period, and then absolutely nothing follows, you see?
Or, the alternative to that, is what I really am, as the whole thing, that is, the works,
the it, or whatever you want to call it, Rahman, God, the Tao, the great void, the Buddha
nature, I don't care, the self, anything, any name you want.
And whereas that attitude, you can look at it from various points of view in judging it,
you can say, it's wishful thinking, you can say that it's insufferable pride, but the point
of the matter is, as I tried to show, any other way of looking at things is kind of schizoid.
It looks at human beings as if they arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches
of a barren tree. They just got settled there, you know, they don't belong. The sense of being
strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Well, where is this other domain?
And how does it relate to this one? Are they separate? I showed you that even when we say
that two domains are the poles apart, the very fact that they're poles shows that they have
a hidden connection. And the hidden connection is the big thing in life. All you junkies know
that. And so, in other words, we get a pattern of organization that is radial, that are out of
the infinite waste of space, and sort of began to... Whereas the other pattern, which is so much
more sensible... And I showed you how the crystals, and the stars, and the octopuses, and even
the human beings, are all radial structures. Of course, we don't see our radial relationship
to the totality of the universe, because it isn't obvious. It's obvious that a tree is an arm
of the earth reaching up and waving at the sky. And a mountain is another kind of radiation from
the earth. And so is a leg from a body, and hair, and things like that. But what makes
human beings, as the highest of the mammals, so conscious of being independent, is that
they are topologically an enclosed surface, you see, which wanders around independently of
the ground. What we don't notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all. That
wandering around is something that is entirely related to there being some ground. In other
words, when you run up a hill, the hill also runs you up it. The hill rises and lifts you,
as you run, you see. And if you understand that, you don't take a hostile attitude to mountains
and hills. You're grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air, because that's presumably
why you went up. But the thing was high. It was lifted up. You wanted to be lifted up.
It lifted you up. You had to cooperate, of course. I always like the illustration that
I've used before, perhaps you haven't heard it, of the thistle-down. The thistle-down too
comes moving through the sky. I once was playing with the thing, you know, and it just came out
of the blue sky and it caught it like that. Pulled it under my nose and it started to pull,
to get away. See? Looks as if it were a butterfly or something that pulls away when you catch
it by the leg. And I thought, oh no, of course, that's not the thistle-down, it's the wind.
Well, which was it? You know, in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen,
there were two monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind, whether it was the wind
or the flag that was moving. And he said, it's neither, it's the mind. And so, in a way,
the same thing was true about the thistle-down. The mind is the moving thing because which point
of view will you take? Which attitude of mind will you take towards this? Is it the wind moving
the thistle-down? Or is it the thistle-down that is moving itself with the wind? After all,
when you see a sailing boat and there's a man in the sailing boat, who is moving the boat? Is it
the wind moving the boat? Or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a
sail? Much smarter way of getting around than rowing. You don't have to work. It's intelligence,
you see, the mind that moves the boat. And so, in the same way, I thought, you know,
this thistle-down has some kind of intelligence. It's radial, it's organized, it's beautiful. And
it's used that to sail itself with the wind, to enable itself to pull like a little organism playing
with the wind. And so, in just the same way, each one of us uses the universe to get around.
And the universe uses us to play with, and to make games and patterns, and to do its stuff.
So, because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin, that is a very deceptive
thing, because the skin is not really the boundary of man. You'll notice that in various periods of
art, human beings have been shaped in different ways, and have been more or less transparent at
some times, at other times opaque. And sometimes, the emphasis has been on the state of mind, which
this human being is in. At other times, the emphasis is on the bodily conformations, and so on. In the
work of painters today, one sees images that, at first sight, one doesn't recognize as being human.
There was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, some years ago, called The New Image
of Man. And these things didn't look like human beings at all. Some of them did, but that's because,
what does a human being look like? That depends on your point of view. You see, if you are prejudiced
that a human being is only what is inside his skin, then you think that when anybody paints the human
being beyond those boundaries, that he's lost the image of man. He hasn't necessarily lost it at all.
You see, there's an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man.
I don't know if you've ever heard that said. That man is the microcosm, and that the universe as a whole
is the macrocosm. Now, as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically,
it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that, at first sight, seem utterly remote.
How could they have anything to do with us? They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way,
when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body, you come across all kinds of funny
little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image.
Look at a spermatozoan under a microscope, that little tadpole. And how can that have any
connection with a grown human being? It's so unlike, you see. It's foreign feeling. And you get
the creeps sometimes, the foreign feeling about yourself, if you feel your own pulse. Or if you're
able to look at an x-ray, in some way, of your inner organs working. See, they're all strangers to us,
we don't know about them. And they give us the creeps, as if they were, you know, coming across
some weird insects in the dark. And that sort of feeling. But what we will always find out in the
end, you see, when we meet the very strange thing, and we look into the distant reaches of space,
there will one day be the dawning recognition. That's me. Why, that's me. And the, the whole game of
the universe, you see, is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can. That's how one keeps
variety going. That's how one keeps wonder going. And all kinds of exciting developments. How different
can you get? In the beginning, the Lord said, get lost to himself, you see. So, uh, we, we shall find,
for example, that space that you see all around you and containing you. And you can, in, feel space
in many ways. Space is not only something that comes through the eyes. The movement of your arms,
if with closed eyes, if for a blind person, is his way of knowing space. And you can hear space
audibly. Lots of, uh, sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces.
And, uh, silence that goes with sound corresponds to space.
And even St. Thomas Aquinas, that old Catholic theologian, said
that good derives its virtue from evil, just as it is the silent pause that gives sweetness to the
chant. So, but space, you see, that seems to contain. Space is one's mind. This was common sense to people
living, uh, in the early Renaissance, for example, at the time of Dante. There are many references in
Dante's poetry to the identity of mind and space. And in, likewise, in a eighth century text in China,
the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, he likens the nature of mind to the nature of space. He says,
just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the universe,
people in the mountains and the forests so the nature of mind the nature of
consciousness the nature of oneself contains all these things so you see
that if you think that way you have an image of man that is global that is very
different from the image in which man is defined as bounded by his skin that
that's a prejudice we think now for example I have my own private thoughts
nobody has private thoughts because one thinks in images and words and these
words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in
which you live we think thoughts the domain of mind is very similar to the
grid structure of an electric power supply system you know what happens is
there's a network of power stations and transformers so arranged that if one of
them gives out and fails to supply a certain area immediately the grid
connects them with other sources of power well in rather a similar way our minds are
connected let's take one very obvious example of it what Northrop Frye calls the
order of words the order of words is all existing literature both rhetoric what
is spoken of course and what is written down now it's his theory that as a scholar
of literature and the history of literature he can take any piece of
writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was written because everything
that is written and said is inescapably related to the whole order of words and
it's amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away because he
can say well obviously he has read this thinking say of a particular novelist or
poet so it must come after the date when that novel was published but he
couldn't possibly use an expression like that say for example that it was a
capital day he would never he would never use that expression living say in
contemporary 20th century America that's a Victorianism or as an Edwardian
way of talking and so in by all sorts of little clues like that the scholar can
pin down a piece of writing to when it was written you see that is because every
individual piece of writing is a function of all writing that's being done well now
that's a very specific and almost crude illustration of something that's going
on in a far more complicated way than that it isn't only all writing all thinking
is being done in relation to the total order of thought and in a still more
subtle way all living is being done in relation to the total order of life to what the
chardin calls the biosphere and it goes way beyond that because of the vast
interplay of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields which
embrace everything that there is that is why even the ancients when a person was
born cast his horoscope that was a map of the universe at the time of that
person's birth and therefore it was a drawing of his soul because the soul is
not inside the body the body is inside the soul the soul your soul is the whole
universe as it is focused upon your organism now of course astrology is a very
primitive science and it interpreted the influence of the universe upon the
individual in very crude ways and it works mostly by good guesswork on the
part of the astrologer if you know how to tell fortunes at a fair you will find out a
great deal about how all these predictive psychic sciences work because the client
invariably gives himself away either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his
anxiety to conceal it they work equally well now but but there is you see
underneath the astrological notion a sound idea that the true map of the soul is the
picture of the universe surrounding the individual it isn't necessarily the your
soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born you
see it goes along all the time you live because the whole thing expresses itself
through you and therefore in that sense the the map of the stars the horoscope
etc was a image of man in just the same way as we regard a picture of the human body as an image of
man and it's an image from a different point of view it's a bigger image it shows in
other words that your mind is very largely outside your body after all it's inside too
it's simultaneous you see I cannot think I can't have a mind without seeing feeling and relating to
other people without all the social institutions not only language but the laws the customs the
gestures the rituals by which we relate to each other all those things compose the mind for the
mind is a huge network of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity mind and
matter are of course polar they go together there are two ways of thinking about the same thing or shall
we say two dimensions of the same thing just like length and breadth or just shall we say like shape and color
you see nobody ever saw a shape that wasn't colored nobody ever saw a color that wasn't shaped and yet we
can see there's a very clear difference between color and shape but they always go together they're
always found together well it's the same sort of relationship between mind and matter and the
difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other and saying well the world is only
material or saying on the other hand that it's only mental is the same difference you would have in
trying to reduce all shapes to colors or all colors for shapes shape and color are made for each other like a
marriage made in heaven they go together so perfectly and yet stay so marvelously different that's why the
buddhist say difference is identity identity is difference it sounds goofy but it makes a great deal of
sense because what it's saying in is a relational thing that you don't know what identity is unless you know
what difference is and you don't know what difference is unless you know what identity is that relationship
between so-called opposites is called in the Chinese technical Taoist vocabulary mutual arising so they say to be and
not to be arise mutually high and low are mutually posited long and short are mutually delineated and so on now what we see then is the
totality of the cosmos focused at each point, you see, gives rise to the illusion of the
independence of the point from the whole. Just as the human being by virtue of having
an enclosed epidermis and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground
presents the illusion of being separate. And so that's why I asked Vada to do these
demonstrations last night because he showed visually the interdependence of the
figure and the background and how the two play together, how you can switch from
paying attention to one to paying attention to the other and in each case
it's significant. That is an art that we have lost in our day-to-day perception of
life and it leads, practically speaking, to the serious problem of ecological
blindness. That is to say, to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer
from, especially in our culture, that they are inseparably related to their
physical environment. It looks as if we aren't. It looks as if we can go out with
bulldozers and insecticides and every kind of a gadget and make over our
physical environment as it suits our whims. But then we discover to our
consternation that we've upset all sorts of balances. That the house we made such a
nice flat lot for on the hillside suddenly slides down the hill when there's a
rainstorm because we took away all the shrubbery that was binding the hill
together. And, you know, this happens in Hollywood every day. And nobody ever seems to
learn. And that's, you see, this immense importance of overcoming the illusion of
separateness. But people are afraid of that because they think it's communistic. They
think that, uh, the West, the, the grand style, the great thing about Western
civilization, is its stress on individual personality and its value. And that we have
created the ideal of personal integrity. That is to say that the most important thing
in the world is the individual. All collectivities, corporations, states, and so on, exist as servants
of the individual. And if they get in his way and they interfere with his private
enterprise, whatever that may be, uh, it's a bad thing. Man, the individual, is the crown
of creation from this point of view. And therefore, when anybody suggests that individual man is not
what you thought was an individual, but is in some way, um, united with, grounded in the totality,
then if you're of this kind of rugged individualist, you mix up your vocabulary and you call the totality
the collective. Now, the collective and the totality are two completely different things. The idea of
collectivism is based on individualism. It's the idea that the society of mankind and the physical
environment beyond it is a collection with nothing of the kind. That's a, that's the, that's the idea
of cosmic flotsam and jetsam that all floated together into a collection. And that's the odverse
of individualism. You know, American individualism is the same philosophy as Marxist collectivism, seen
from the other side. Because they're both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality.
Now, what people don't understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter of being
isolated. It's a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one's relationship to the whole
surrounding cosmos. Let's suppose that I'm preparing to make a date with some lady and she's such an
individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself. She never thinks about anything that isn't
herself. Well, she's an awful bore. She has nothing to say. She's not interested in any books, in any
landscapes, in any works of art, in any literature, in any other people. She's a total bore. But the more,
on the other hand, she would be interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself,
the more of a colourful personality she becomes. So, the rule is to get away, you see, from these ideas
of the individual, as finding his individuality and uniqueness through independence, but rather finding
his individuality and uniqueness through being related. Because, you see, that's what makes us look at, look at
the word relation from another point of view, when we talk about our friends and relations. Supposing I come across some
individual who I can't make out what kind of a thing he is. I can't make out where he came from. His accent isn't
American. It isn't British. It isn't particularly Middle Western. It certainly doesn't have the overtones of New York or
New England. He just talks flat. And as to his style of clothing, it's utterly nondescript. Well, I think this is
pretty much of a bore. What I like to see in an individuality, in a physical individual, is ways that I can relate
him to his ancestry. That he has this little subtle accent, or this mannerism, or this eccentricity, or whatever
it is, that connects him with a great background. You see? But it's his connection with his background that makes
him so significant. If I can't see that connection, he becomes uninteresting. So, there is no thought in this
approach to devalue the individual. What really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or
political philosophy that overstresses his isolation. And this is something that Californians, in particular,
need to take note of. And because many, many people feel, you see, that the development of technology, and of
centralized government, is a direct threat to the value of personality. Well, in some ways it is. But that is only
because technology is being developed by personalities who don't understand what personality is. They're working on the
old individualist-collectivist point of view. They're the same. So then, you see, this is then the illusion created. That the
individual is operating all by himself. That actions and thoughts and deeds proceed solely from inside his skin, so that we can say,
there's where it started. You see? Well, that's the game of praising and blaming. The game of who started it, who can we
give candy to, who can we bang on the head. In other words, somebody has to be it. As in the farmer in the dell, you know, and
finally get the end, the cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone. I heard the dairy over cheese stands alone.
Well, why? Who started it? The group. Well, another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility, if they see through the illusion of separateness.
The truth of the matter is, actually, that no philosophy of history has really succeeded in making anybody more or less responsible. In other
words, let's say that you are a Christian, a Catholic, of the old-fashioned medieval type, who believes that you've got an
individual soul with free will, and that you're under responsibility to God, to obey his law, and that if you don't, the most
disastrous consequences imaginable will befall you. You'll fry in hell forever. There's no evidence whatsoever that believing in that
made people any more virtuous than they are today. None at all. Indeed, clergy who believed in all this, owned whorehouses, and, uh, are all
all kinds of things, uh, uh, they were just as contemptuous of law and order as anybody could be now. And part of the reason
was, of course, that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty, like the H-bomb. Uh, it's just too big to think about, and really brings
justice into disrespect, because it uses such crude and clumsy methods. You know, it's like, uh, using a-a steam hammer to drive in tax.
Responsibility is a thing like a nice face, which you either have or haven't. Uh, certain backgrounds, certain interests, certain
certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings. And, uh, they-they live that way, not because
they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible. It's because
they're intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all round.
That's all there is to it. And, uh, of course, that's all is a big all, but, you-you won't, in other-what I'm saying is, the people who are
frightened that people will-other people will abandon responsibility, never did have any way of thinking that would guarantee that
people would be responsible. There is no such guarantee. If there were, we should be automata.
Now, I want to switch to another aspect of illusion. The quickness of the hand to seize the eye. And that is, of course,
the great illusion of what we call matter. Density. Impenetrability. Opacity. I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter,
because I'm a materialist. That is to say, I like material. And though I may seem to you to be quite self-contradictory.
For example, a wine should have body. Pure alcohol doesn't. And it's terribly important in human character
for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism between sensuality and spirituality. You see,
people who are purely sensuous and materialistic get very boring. You can fill your lives with all good things. With, uh,
alpha-romeos and hi-fis and wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and, uh, criss-crafts and, uh,
dry martinis and Chanel No. 5, you know. And after a while, if that's all you've got, it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the martinis taste like medicine.
And somehow, uh, you get a distaste for life. And even for mountains and trees and waters. And then on the other hand, the purely spiritual approach to things is, uh, too rarefied. Too earnest. Too abstract. Too, uh, purely Euclidean. And, uh, the, the people who are intensely spiritual and don't have any sense of the
spirituality are always desperately serious. Colorless. Lacking in humor. And never are able to meet one as man to man with a kind of a friendly leer in the eye.
That's terribly important. They live at a level of frantic intensity. I see that these two extremes need each other. They're, say, spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp. And sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars. You know, to wonder about.
The sensualist as such, the materialist as such has no wonder. And the mystic, the pure mystic, has no body. He's pure. So, if then one should say that material is an illusion, this seems to be selling out to the spirit people and to the mystics.
And so, Christian scientists are generally speaking as personalities totally lacking in materialism. And they're prissy and, uh, lacking in color. And their churches are very, very disagreeable.
They're all reading desks. And they're too bookish. And they, they have no ritual, no ceremonies, no, no verb. You see? It's all cerebral. And, uh, likewise, um, when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism, they go into the same ultra mysticism.
Ultra mysticism. They start disbelieving in all material pleasures as crutches. And it's very bad to have crutches, you see?
Uh, you shouldn't take aspirin when you've got a headache. Uh, you shouldn't wear glasses. Uh, you shouldn't, um, show dependence on anything.
You mustn't like your food too much, because that's becoming, uh, gluttonous. So you eat very plain food, which is not spiced, and you eat it out of a sense of duty.
That is to keep the body functioning. Uh, you drink only water, because other drinks might cause certain dependencies and give you too much pleasure.
And because the idea is, you see, you've got to control your mind and keep it absolutely calm and still, so that you are not dependent on matter.
And that's altogether the wrong approach, because, uh, well, I mean, it is a game you can play. It is one of these possible things.
I mean, you can play the Jehovah's Witness game. You can play the Three Seed and the Spirit Baptist game.
All these are various things which you can play, just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or, uh, fishing or something like that.
But, uh, what happens is, you see, that the, the, the notion that the material world is an illusion is turned into a judgment of value.
If it's an illusion, therefore, it's bad. I ought not to be under this illusion.
Well, the reality of the matter is, that if you see that the material world is an illusion, you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn't.
A true materialist, therefore, is one who knows that material is an illusion.
Then he's not afraid of it. Then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest.
Because, you see, if you're a false and a fake materialist, what's happened?
You've borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac, an impressive house, a ranch style with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool.
And you've bought, uh, a lot of stock and you somehow wangled the money and borrowed it.
And you keep lying away at night wondering if you're going to make the payments.
Well, there's no point in that at all.
Well, how can you possibly enjoy all this jazz?
If that's the kind of jazz you want to enjoy, you've got to worry about whether you pay for it or not.
And you get hopelessly involved, you get commitments here, commitments there, and finally you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself.
The only way to enjoy material is to disbelieve in it.
Just as one can disbelieve in money.
Uh, then you, you can have zest for it. You see?
Otherwise it's much better to be poor.
I mean, if you, if you have no taste for the, this kind of life and, uh, no real interest in it, but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons, it's much better to stay poor.
Not have any of that stuff at all.
So, then this is the important thing I'm trying to say.
Material is an illusion, but a great illusion.
And the point is to swing it and not to run away from it on the one hand or to get stuck on it in the other.
Then you can play with it.
Just like a wheel going round.
The wheel is too loose on the axle that wobbles all over the place.
If it's too tight, it won't revolve.
But you kind of sit loose, you see, to this thing.
Not too loose though.
Now, in what way then is the material world an illusion?
Well, we know a lot about this now from our physics.
And we know that what we call solidity is force.
Contained force.
The agitation of particles or wavicles or whatever they are at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations.
So that when I put my foot on the floor, the reason it doesn't go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can penetrate.
Like an airplane propeller, you can't put your head through it without...
getting it chopped off only that if it were going far faster still it wouldn't
even cut your head off it would just be like banging your head against the brick
wall and it has to be going fast to within an extraordinarily small and
restricted space the airplane propeller is whizzing around through a
considerable space in relation to the size of the head but if it were going
much faster but through much smaller spaces you see then it would be like
banging your head against the brick wall so what we've got in our so-called
physical objective world is a behavior of energy where the where matter arises from
it through its behavior in restricted spaces density is a quality of space
rather than a quality of matter you see what I mean I gave the illustration of
the airplane propeller to try and show that so that are all this is an
electronic diathomous world very similar to
other creations of electronic patterns the dance of forms on the TV screen the
rainbow the aurora borealis it's all fundamentally like that only we are of
the same kind of jazz you see our bodies are this dance too and therefore the
the physical world feels real to us in other words it feels solid because we are
something of the same time if we were on a different wavelength we'd walk right
through it in the same way as radio waves come right through the house they are of
such a nature that they can penetrate the in the spaces the interstices or in some
way jazz signals through and we are on the same wavelength you see as the wall and so
don't go through it but nevertheless the whole cosmos is therefore a function of
energy or you could say of light something like light and therefore we and it are
all diaphanous now it's easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren't
so dense there's only one other creature as intelligent as man and this lives in a
medium that is less dense and this is the dolphin the dolphin is a mammal and many
millions of years ago it seems the dolphins were living on the land but they are
very clever and they decided that the land was no place to live because getting
food was difficult and you have to lug yourself around and there were many many
bad shows about the land it had very curious changes of temperature it became
unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot and you had in fact to work and no
sensible person ever works I never work I get played for playing and everybody
should do that that's the the mark of an educated man is that eventually he gets a
job where he's paid for playing and a worker or a proletarian isn't necessarily a
poor man lots of put them in a poor man like say say Lee Morgan Roth or Eric Barker
around here they're not proletarians proletarian is a person who is fettered to
the process of work that is to say to doing chores every day that he really
doesn't like and that aren't in the least interesting in order to go on living so the
port the the dolphins decided this is ridiculous this land existence and they
went back to the water and it's pretty easy to fish you see there are plenty of
fish in the water and things to eat as we know the ocean is the greatest food
supply in the world and when they've eaten a few fish or whatever they need they
decided just to have a ball so the dolphin can get abreast of a ship get one of the
the wakes coming out on the side can set its tail at an angle of 26 degrees no and
be pushed along by the ship and it's not going anywhere there's no reason to go
along there as you know as if it had to get to another part of the sea is pretty
much the same all through but they're just going and they chatter and dance and
they're they're they're really highly civilized beings and so please don't
anybody ever kill dolphins or be unkind to dolphin because they're exemplary
high-minded creatures and we shall soon discover this as soon as we can set up
communication with them they will tell us all about it and we will then invent new
style of civilization based on frolic
but you see that they they they dance in the in the mode of water now human
beings as Toynbee has pointed out as their civilization progresses they begin to lose
their roots and they are less and less tied to the land they go into the air and
what's going to happen as if man develops without blowing himself to bits he can get
over the hurdle you see that dangerous point is that gradually all roads are
going to disappear and the earth will have centers of human habitation you see
but no roads they'll be as obsolete as railroad tracks because everybody will
fly and once you're in the the medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of
water and as we fly you see on the land your values are all values of
permanent solidity firmness they're architectonic in the sense of our great
stone structures pyramids and things like that but in the air and on the water all
values are fluid and what you have to know to be a good airman is of course
stars like white throats and other migrating birds migrate by the stars imagine but once
you start relating yourself to the stars you realize that you're living in a
universe where directions are all relative and you become a being capable of
existing in non-solidity and that's why Buckminster Fuller you know believed that
all techniques and really all culture came from the sea the men who first learned to
sail with the wise men he has a fantastic idea that there were initiates great
priests who were ships captains and that although some of their humble seamen didn't
know all the secrets these priests were the first people who knew that the world
was round and that that gives one an entirely different theology you see and if
you believe that the world is flat and so from the the priests of the ocean the
landsmen learned how to use cranes blocks and tackles how to build how what a good house an
overturned ship made and so to this day a cathedral has a nave as its central auditorium nave from
latin navis ship showing the connections between ships and the first temples so fuller goes on to say
now if you're a good architect as the ancient architects learn from the ocean first thing you
should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane
factory and understand the beautiful thing that man has made in a fine fine airplane you see which
is as great as a bird in its own way because that's the architecture of insecurity and that
he really lives with insecurity
this is kpfk los angeles we've just heard alan watts
part three of the four-part seminar
reality art and illusion
just a short resume about this morning
i was discussing the various meanings of the word maya which in sanskrit means illusion
or at least that's the way it's generally translated
now i was trying to explain that it doesn't necessarily mean illusion in a bad sense
when we say a person is suffering from delusions hallucinations
and so on it's always a put-down word
but maya is not so necessary
so i showed you how
it has
the meanings of measurement
as when we pretend
that the world is divisible actually into feet or inches
or seconds
or degrees
and divide
things from each other
by these measurements that is to say
by
the cutting power of thought
thought from in the latin skio
means to cut
and so thought is
you see that what you have to understand is that everything
is really a think
a thing is a unit of thought in the same way as an inch is a unit of measurement
we divide
the wiggly
continuous
wobbly
wild
rorschach
blot of the physical universe
into things
so that we can think about it
and one thinks by
a process which is essentially the calculus
calculate
calculates what was it originally
so the word calculus means a pebble
originally
so i can't i remember something one two three four times four pebbles
like using your fingers
rosaries have been used for this purpose
and so later the abacus
as a kind of amazing rosary
uh... that's calculation you see
pretending that the world is a collection of bits
but the world isn't the collection of bits
the world is continuous in the sense that
every bit of it is interrelated as much as a human body
and you realize
you know
if you magnify the human body
to an enormous degree so that you are looking at its individual molecules
one molecule of our body is
the size of my fist
say you know
magnified to that size
the next one would be the other side of the room
now what joins them together
i move my hand all those vastly separated molecules all move together
they haven't any strings tied between them
and it's the same way when the little birds fly
in my boat in Sausalito we have a lot of little tiny tiny sandpipers
and they fly having one mind
they become a total organism when they fly
and they change direction instantly
i mean it isn't that they turn like this and follow the leader
they're going like that and then they go like that
and they're only individuals when they start pecking on the mud
then they wander around all over the place
but the slightest movement
they're all in the air again
and going as one mind
now that's how your molecules move in your hand
so
but so calculus
pretends that the molecules are separate
they're not
they're related to each other by the space between them
and space is relationship
space is order
i remember this one's very vivid illustration
i had a friend who was giving a lecture
and she wanted us to use her studio
for the lecture
and she had some
those canvas chairs that you pull open like that
and they have arms
canvas back and canvas seat
you know movie directors chairs
and she got them all lined up across the room
this way
and she said i can't possibly get all the people in here
i said wait a minute
space is order
you say you don't have enough space
you do
so i put the speaker at that side of the room
and i arranged all the chairs
round
and coming across like that
then the next row
and the next row
and there are far more seats in there than they had before
you see
so space is order
space is terribly important
but the maya that i pointed out you see
is that
we ignore it
so maya is measurement
singing
chopping things into bits so as to count them
number two maya
is play
that is to say
it's um
it's a game
it's hide and seek
the universe is playing peekaboo with itself
now you see it
now you don't
and the basis of that is the throb
of vibration
up
and then down
up and then down
which is male
female
positive negative
light
darkness
this side
that side
see
everything is going
and it's going so fast
that it seems to be
continuous
but now you see it
now you don't
see solid space
here and gone
everything is
is that
see if i put my
your my hand on your knee
and uh you
leave it there
you cease to remember i'm there
but if i do this
you know i'm there all the time
because each time it's renewed
so
it's play
maya is also magic
and i gave the illustration of the theater
of creating the illusion
that the drama is reality
all the illusory possibilities of the theatrical art
then i meant specifically maya is art
maya is skill
in
creating something
and i showed how the artist
can give us
all kinds of different visions of the universe
from the vision of
let's say
jato
with its amazing transparency
to
rembrandt
with its density
to the great
great flemish painters
like
van eyck
who begin
photographic realism
onto
the
similar painters
of the 19th century
and then through
picasso
and so on to
splatters
like jackson pollard
enabling us to see the world in different ways
by their revelation
and so the possibilities of artistry
are infinite
more and more artists will come and notice the world in different ways
and there are probably infinitely many ways in which the world can be noticed
only the human mind has works at a certain pace
it seems incapable of bringing
uh...
more than a few at a time
don't assimilate them
and then i discussed the final question
does that mean that the world is nothing but our imagination
that is to say
going back to the analogy of the rorschach blot
we say in testing a person on a rorschach blot
that uh... he projects a story or a picture into the blot
and that reveals not something about the nature of the blot but about the
condition of his psychological structure
are we going to have to say that in the same way
all scientific knowledge about the universe
is a projection
you see that's been very cogently argued
it's argued for example that laws of nature
do not exist in nature
but are methods of
measuring nature
in other words
to say that
uh... stones always fall
downwards to the center of the earth
we invent for that the law of gravity
now
is that a law
is there something called the law of gravity
which stones obey
well many scientists would say no
if the stone didn't fall to the ground it would be a balloon
uh...
it obeys no law it does that
and we make a law out of it simply because it happens regularly
if i regularly do what you tell me to
that becomes in human affairs a law
but nobody tells the stone that it's got to fall down
it does so
because that's part of the definition of being a stone
if it didn't it would be a balloon
or a feather in the wind
so laws of nature are regarded by some scientists
as tools
invented by human beings
and to say that there is a law of gravity
is neither more nor less true than saying there are three feet in a yard
because we arranged it that way
although twenty-four hours in a day
laws are simply
observed regularities
and we make these regularities by the way we look at things
we might not even notice that stones fell to the ground unless it was significant to us
but
the difficulty of pushing that theory too far
is that it makes the human mind ridiculously independent of the physical world
say that everything is a projection
out of the human mind
would be to say that the human mind isn't really part of the world
but it is
our being is continuous with the being of the whole universe as i explained
each one of us is something
just as every wave is something that the sea is doing
and well we are waves of the universe and it's waving and saying
you i'm here
and i'm called alan watts right now
but it's called so and so and so and so and so and so and so all around the room
but it's all the same thing doing this jazz
and i explained how we have been taught to ignore that
and to be under the illusion that we're all
now that was what we were talking about this morning
now i i want to press one aspect of this theme particularly this afternoon which is the aspect of play
the distinction uh the the you see the whole point is
that a man who's who knows
a woman
is it objectionable to you that we have to use man as the general word for human beings
anyway that the person who knows
that this is maya
is as i said somewhat disconcerting because we know that he doesn't take life seriously
that is to say he doesn't take it absolutely seriously
he takes it seriously up to a point
but as we might say when it really comes down to it he doesn't
now you might think that such a person
would be extremely undependable
and therefore he's ethically suspect
if he knows that all the distinctions between good and evil
and between life and death
between uh the valuable and the non-valuable
if he knows that all those distinctions are illusory
would he not be
we're afraid a very dangerous person
would he fail to keep his contract
heal when he felt like it
would he bump somebody off when it suited his convenience
isn't it more trustworthy
for human beings to believe that there are absolute laws
that it matters absolutely
that you never kill anybody
et cetera
now this is a very
fascinating question
and i want to suggest to you first of all
that
a person who believes
in absolute laws
is liable to be quite dangerous
because
he puts
rigid structures
in a place of higher honor
than
oh such a good old word
that no longer used
inwit
i-n-w-i-t
inwit
and what is inwit?
the Chinese word
which uh
has to be
the gift and the essential virtue of a good judge
good judge in the law courts
and this word
uh
like this
you know
um
is pronounced li
there are several kinds of li in Chinese
but this one means an innate sense of fair play
of equity
which can't be written down in laws
it can't be formulated
they also have a word for laws that can be formulated
which is
looks like that
because
their character
was originally this
and they had picture writing
and that's a picture
of a
bronze cauldron
with a knife beside it
because
in very ancient times
when people brought sacrifices
to the sacrificial cauldrons
a-
the rulers caused the laws
to be engraved on the cauldrons
so that they would read them
and the sages said
that is a bad idea
because the moment the people know what the laws are
in literal terms
they will develop a litigious spirit
and they will start haggling over words
so
although there has to be the tse
the formulated law
a good judge must know a lot more than the written law
he must have a sense of equity
because every case that comes to his attention is really different
there is no way of describing exhaustively all the possible relationships between man and man
and so a judge has to have this sort of rule of thumb like a good gardener has to have a green thumb
which is something beyond anything you can read in a book
so uh...
belief
is the sense of justice
tse
would be belief
in absolutes
in that you must never do so and so
or you must always do so and so
thou shalt thou shalt not
so a person who holds to absolute rules
will be an inflexible fool
when it comes to the test
he is reliable up to a point
but this is what you get in bureaucracy
i'm sorry to say it but there is a specially
offensive kind of
usually female secretary
of some government department
who is utterly unreasonable
totally goes by the book
and will not under any circumstances do anything one way or the other beyond the letter
well
people like that have a certain use
but they have the same sort of uses machinery
machinery which is foolproof which does the same everything every time and can't be changed
but there must always be some boss over this kind of person
who can consider the case from a different point of view
and say well obviously in this case the rules are unreasonable and they have to be altered
so you see a person who takes the laws absolutely seriously becomes inflexible
and therefore mechanical and therefore inhuman
now it's like the roman catholics
when they get on this bit about birth control or
divorce or something like that
they get utterly inflexible and they seem to enjoy being inflexible
because they think it's a mark of tough mindedness
you know i've been most endless theological controversies going on these days
i don't know if you know it perhaps some of you don't read these things
but i have a certain interest in uh... christianity
and uh...
i love reading the theological controversies
well there's a character called the bishop of woolwich in england
who's written a book that stirred everybody up
and there's not really anything new in it but he's just suggesting that god
isn't an old gentleman with a beard
and uh...
it seems to have created a terrific turmoil
and uh...
people though who are standing the opposition to all this
want to say
all this liberal thinking is vague
and therefore wishy-washy and gutless
to prove that you have guts you've got to believe something absurd
and stick to it
see come hell or high water you believe that the virgin mary was sucked up bodily into heaven
no and it really went up
see and brrrr
all these other people are weak-minded
because they reduce these eternal dogmatic truths to mere myths and symbols
see
and they they they get a sense of masculinity out of this
just in the same way as some people get a sense of masculinity out of being fascists
do they believe we've got a real tough political theory
colonel damn it shoot them all used to call them in england
and uh... they they they stick to this and they think that now i feel like a man
you see
or i feel like a real businesswoman like ayn rand or you know
they they they they like to be
they they they like to be
i'm an individual you see
like that
but these people are inflexible fools
because they they they have no give
they don't know when to give
and the whole art is to
have a certain rigidity in life
but always to know when to give
see
that's judo
so in the same way
person who takes life absolutely seriously doesn't know when to give
and he has this idea you see that life is a contest
and that we got to win
and we've got to win
now if you go into a battle
with the idea that
you've got to win
you get nervous
like walking across a wall
with a big drop on one side
feeling that you've got to stay steady
you start worrying
And, like someone once told me when I was a boy, that there was a certain examination and I simply must not fail it.
It just, I had to get it, you know, I got absolutely nonplussed by the whole situation.
Because, you see, you've got to have a certain flexibility.
So that when you know it doesn't matter whether you win or lose, then you can really play.
This is the secret of all gamesmanship.
To play golf, you know, stop caring.
You've got to learn some technique first, whatever it is, but then stop worrying.
How do you think you drive a car?
You learn the things to do and then you go zooming along.
It's terribly dangerous to drive a car, much more unsafe than taking a ride in a plane.
And yet we all do it.
Nobody seems to worry much about it.
Well, that's how to drive.
But if you get nervous on the road, you react too fast and you're all over the place, you're a mess and a nuisance.
So you mustn't take it quite seriously.
So then the fellow who regards life as fundamentally an illusion would on the whole then be more reliable than the person who is in dead earnest.
Because he has basically at his heart the most valuable human trait, which is the ability to come off it.
You know, you say to someone, oh, drop it, you know.
And in the end, you see, a man who can come off it, who may make a terrific case for some point of view, but has a certain twinkle in his eye.
You see, this is a true human being and has what Confucius would call Run, spelled J-E-N for some reason.
This is human heartedness.
And that is human heartedness because it is at the heart of the nature of things and the nature of things is play.
Now, we contrast here, you see, the two fundamental views of life as set forward in the drama.
You remember the comic and the tragic masks.
The tragic view of the world is that the world is a... you can take it from two points of view.
They really come to the same thing.
But one of the points of view is in the tragic idea.
The world contains the possibility of an irremediable disaster.
Things can go wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the most vivid representation of the tragic view in all history is, of course, Christianity.
Orthodox, old-fashioned Christianity in which there is the possibility of eternal damnation.
See, that is things going wrong always.
It isn't the king that is not just a failure that you die and cease, but that you are tortured forever, without hope of respite, forever and ever and ever and ever.
That's the maximum tragic view of the world.
So, in that view of the cosmos, things are very serious indeed.
Because that might happen to you.
And you must not let it happen.
That's absolutely necessary to be avoided.
Now, on the other hand, you see, although the Hindu and Buddhist mythologies have their various purgatories rather than hells.
There's one called Avicii, which is the deepest of all these purgatories.
And the souls that get lost in Avicii are there for an unendurably long time.
Many kalpas, and a kalpa is 4,320,000 years.
But in the end, they get out.
In other words, when they've paid for their bad karma that gets from there, they get out and begin again.
So, it isn't quite serious.
It's very serious, but not absolutely serious.
You see?
And that's the difference.
So, in this Hindu view, the Lord, in his Maya creation of the world, creates terribly serious situations.
He scares himself out of his own wits by playing that he's all of us.
And imagining, forgetting who he is, you see, or what he is.
And imagining that he's us.
And he is terrified, or thinks he is, by all the situations of life.
And, nevertheless, in the end, it turns out it was all a game.
It was all hide and seek.
Now, what about that?
You see?
When we think of that as a point of view, let's not ask whether or not it's true.
No serious philosopher asks anymore whether things are true or not.
He only asks whether they're plausible.
We can say no more.
It would be arrogance to say more.
Truth is a dimension where we stop talking, you know.
We know things in another way than words.
But, it is plausible, because we could say, well, does a thing have to be absolute to be important?
It is important that we make a distinction between good and bad.
It's not good to murder people, generally speaking.
You see?
That's important.
But, to make it important, do we really have to make it absolutely important?
See, I tell you, the religious mentality, or not only the religious mentality,
but the kind of mentality you find around.
What's the real secret of it is it loves to have something to condemn.
One of the most, one of the biggest kicks a person can have is to feel righteous indignation.
And also, people who go to church love to be lectured and scolded.
A real scoldy sermon from a Baptist preacher is a big, big bang.
They come out feeling so satisfactory.
So, supposing then we say, well, in the end, all the sinners and the dreadful people who lived in the world
will realize that they were manifestations of God like everybody else.
Some people stop and think about that and say, oh dear, a very dangerous doctrine.
What they are really worrying about is that they are not going to have the satisfaction
of seeing those people they don't like writhing in torment forever and ever.
Now who ought to be fried in hell? You know?
And so this is saying, you see, that if a thing is not important,
when it's not eternal,
say there was no point in singing a song because it came to an end.
No, there was no point in marrying this girl because she eventually died.
There was no point in anything that's finite in time, you see.
That's the argument.
But it obviously is important that a song be sung, even though it ends,
that a person live, even though they die,
because that's the rhythm of life.
People who take this point of view
that what isn't ultimately serious isn't serious at all
are simply crude in their thinking.
They just plainly lack judgment.
They're like children who have to believe that two and two are always and invariably four
because they might say one day they were five.
These children are a little whimsical.
So then, the idea of Maya suggests two things, really,
which are very difficult things for most of us to accept
because they're so outrageous in comparison with our accustomed viewpoints.
The one side of what it suggests is that life is not ultimately serious.
If you fall far enough, you'll find there's no concrete to hit
because you are one with a free-floating universe that has nothing outside it.
I sometimes say, you know, that when God created the world, what he really did,
I gave you one other version of it this morning, but he said,
have a ball.
See, what are you going to do with this ball?
There's nowhere to put it.
It can't get lost.
There it is.
It's the ball of being, you see.
Have a ball, you see.
So, the thought that all this life which is so intensely involved and tragic and struggle
is really diathomous.
It's like a dream.
Would you dare believe that?
This is a test of nerve.
The other side to the doctrine is that you, in your heart of hearts, are really the Lord,
playing but being you.
Will you dare believe that?
I mean, we often say that's the touchstone of madness in our culture.
A person who thinks he's God is really out of his wits.
Only, of course, it depends what kind of a God you're thinking about.
If you're thinking about Mr. Know-It-All, who can explain how everything's done,
that would be one story, you'd be pretty much of a megalomaniac.
But God, as the Hindus and Buddhists think of God,
it's really wrong to use the word God, perhaps, for this being,
or both neither being or non-being.
But, in their idea, you see, the Lord doesn't have to know how things are done.
He just doesn't.
The same way you grow your hair without knowing how to.
And so, a person who realizes he is the Lord in disguise,
does not therefore claim to know all the answers to all possible scientific questions.
But the conviction, you see, that you are somehow within the inmost depth of your being,
the works, the reality of everything that there is, you see.
You are it.
Tatva Masi, it said in Sanskrit, that art thou.
Now, is that...
See, these two things.
It isn't serious, and you are it.
We react in our cultural background against these things
because they seem to be haughty.
They seem to be fantasy, fantastic, claiming too much, getting too big for one's boots.
Because we are used to feeling that we are right if we cringe.
The moment we start talking ourselves down and saying,
well, I am just a little fragment of dust.
I come into being, I disappear, I am a mess, I am imperfect,
I don't know anything, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We feel safe when we do that.
It's like feeling that you are right when you hurt.
Oh, I bless the good Lord for my boils, for my mental and bodily pains,
for without them my faith all congeals, and I am doomed to hell's near-ending pains.
How very good it is for me to hurt so much.
See?
We have been brought up to feel that way.
And also, to be very careful about letting anyone know we are happy.
The gods might overhear.
It's not good for you to be happy.
You might get uppish.
You might have hybris, pride, and start boasting to the heavens.
And then the old gentleman would get annoyed,
because the old gentleman is pretty insecure.
And he doesn't like the children rushing around and stamping their feet.
Something might happen.
They might go too far.
You see?
So...
To you.
So then if we can...
Oh, but I...
Excuse me.
Pardon me for having the disgusting effrontery to exist.
But you see, this is fake.
It's as fake as it can be.
It's phony.
It's another kind of pride.
How good I am at being humble.
Hmm?
And it's terribly dishonest.
And, uh...
It is something that our cultural attitudes take very seriously.
And the trouble is that having taken this seriously,
and having felt for so long through literature,
through schooling, through attitudes of teachers and preachers and parents,
that it's good for us to be humble.
When we revolt against it, we go make the opposite mistake, you see,
of being unnecessarily cocky.
Because that's compensation.
There is no need, you see, to take on the universe and say,
I'm man, I'm the works, I'm the Lord in disguise, and all this can get lost.
You don't need to do that.
If you really know, you see, as I said at the end of this morning's talk,
to believe that you are the disguised Lord is unnecessary.
It's a form of doubt.
So, in the same way, to assert it in a kind of defiant way
is also a form of doubt.
Although, please, remember, you're perfectly free to do that.
Don't get caught in it by feeling that you oughtn't to.
You know, I remember when I was a child,
we used to read that the sin against the Holy Ghost was unforgivable.
Just wonder what the sin against the Holy Ghost was.
And there'd be a little thing in the back of your mind, whispering,
Damn the Holy Ghost!
How are the Holy Ghost, you know?
You're just, you know, you're absolutely sucked into it by the very prohibition,
the kind of vertigo where a person looks so repressive,
feels he's got to throw himself down.
It's a funny thing in human psychology.
So, in many forms of symbolism that you find in the Orient,
there is the idea of the liberated man, who he is,
as a man who can't be phased.
You know, for example, that Bodhidharma,
who's supposed to have brought Zen to China,
is made into a toy in Japan.
which is like a shmoo,
only it's this shape.
And it's weighted so that you can't knock it over.
Push it down, but it always springs up.
And this is the sort of figure of this.
It says a poem,
Seven times down and eight times up, such is life.
Or it may be the image in Hindu literature of the tightrope walker.
The man walking the path of the razor's edge.
It's the balance again, you see.
But the Bodhidharma is in a way more flexible.
He can be pushed right to the floor, but the minute you let go, he's back up.
Or the Taoist image of water.
You can squeeze it, you can jump on it, you can cut it, but you can't hurt it.
It always comes together again.
Look, for example, I gave the illustration this morning of a human being as something like a whirlpool in water.
Constantly changing, but always the same.
Now what happens if you chop up a whirlpool?
You know, you can smash it, you can put your fist through it.
And you can make it disappear for a while.
But after a while, there's the pattern again.
See?
So in the same way we think we can solve problems with violence.
We think we can...
Look, killing people is an answer to a problem.
It's only temporary.
As if you knock out, say, a Hitler.
Another one comes up.
Because you haven't understood the problem of this sort of manifestation.
Anything that's destroyed with violence eventually recurs again.
Because the persistence of life in its continuity is a persistence of patterns.
So long as the...
For example, the principles of surface tension hold true.
Or the principles of crystallization.
You're going to get crystals everywhere.
Anywhere in the universe you're liable to get a crystal of something or other.
Well, life is the same kind of thing.
It's a pattern.
Which is going to keep cropping up.
It doesn't matter how long it has to wait.
A million years is nothing.
You blot it out here, it'll turn up somewhere else.
It's only a matter of time.
Because it's in the nature of the patterns.
So in this sense then,
let's review these two ideas.
Sincerely speaking, I should say.
Is it demoralizing to believe that it's all play?
That at the last minute...
No, when the screaming memes are right on.
And everything is awful.
At the very last minute,
will you wake up and find it's a dream?
You could say, I hope so.
I hope so.
But life sometimes gets so black
that it's impossible to hope so.
You know it's the end.
Now, I remember once a marvelous conversation
with Count von Durkheim
who is a kind of German Zen master.
And he said, you know,
during the war,
people have the most utterly soul-searing experiences.
So then, the three general kinds of experience.
Of course in the air raids,
when you heard the whistling bomb
right above you,
and you knew that was the end.
But sometimes it was a dud.
And it didn't go off.
But you resigned yourself
as you heard that scream.
And completely accepted the fact
that you were about to cease to exist.
Or else you were in a concentration camp.
And you saw absolutely no hope
of ever getting out alive.
Absolutely none whatever.
And you gave up.
Or, he said, you were displaced.
The town where you worked
and you had your occupation was erased.
And you were a person
with absolutely no background,
no career, no future, nothing.
And you accepted it.
Now, he said, so often in all these cases
the individual concerned
had the most extraordinary experience.
They had, in other words,
the cosmic consciousness.
Satori.
they woke up.
They realized suddenly
that there was
worry about it all.
That I,
the real I,
not the superficial ego,
the real I,
is the whole cosmos.
Then he said their friends,
they tried to explain this
to their friends afterwards.
And their friends said,
Oh, you're crazy.
You were under such strain
that you got a little touched.
And so they would try to forget it
and put down this experience.
He said, most of my work
is in reviving this
and telling people
that this is an authentic experience.
So that's what I mean
that the gamble
that it isn't really serious.
If you don't,
at the last moment,
you see,
as it were,
call in the police.
If you don't scream for help.
I'm using that as a metaphor.
To accept,
well,
I'm going to die.
See?
That's it.
There's nothing to hold on to,
you see?
The moment you really
stop holding on to anything
because you see
there is nothing to hold on to,
what happens?
You become the ball.
Now the ball,
it has nowhere to bounce,
you see?
You become the ball
with nothing to hold on to.
But you can only see that
when you're not holding on
to anything anymore.
When you've given up.
Resignation,
or whatever it is.
In other words,
that urgency
to succeed,
to be something,
to get there,
to make it,
to, er,
be right.
When you see
you can't
and you give up,
you get reborn.
Because that's
with death.
The real meaning
of going to heaven
after death
has nothing to do
with literal death.
It has to do
with this death.
Now the other side
of the picture.
What about
the notion that
you're it,
that Tlamasic?
Not only that it
isn't serious,
but that fundamentally,
right at the root
of things,
you are
the ultimate reality.
Not you,
as I repeat,
as this apparently separate ego,
that is a kind of
phantom,
like the equator,
a social institution.
But the you,
which,
as I say,
grows the hair,
and, er,
blues the,
or browns the eyes,
and, er,
so on.
Now the,
the difficulty
for our common sense,
and it does present
a difficulty to our common sense,
is that we've all
been brought up
to feel alienated
from the world.
In the sense that
it is something we came into,
and it is something
that we confront.
a meeting,
we face it.
So we face facts,
we face reality.
We encounter,
Martin Buber's emphasis
on dialogue,
on I,
thou,
the confrontation.
See?
This is a silly notion.
At least,
it's silly if it doesn't
have something
undergirding it.
In other words,
you can't have a relationship
without an underlying unity.
You can't have a battle,
even,
between the tiger
and the shark,
because they have
no common ground.
And Tweedledum
and Tweedledee
agreed to have a battle.
So underlying
all conflict in nature
is common ground.
Unity.
Because,
even when we say
that two things
are the poles apart,
that's a way of saying
they're connected.
Because,
the whole earth
joins the two poles.
The whole magnet
joins the north
and the south poles.
So,
just as we
have been taught
to ignore
the background
behind the figure,
the space
behind the solid,
so also,
we've been taught
to ignore
the joining link
between the two poles.
the poles.
I once said that,
the way most of us think,
somebody asks for a banana,
he ought to be satisfied
with just the two ends
of the banana.
See?
When you can go so fast
from San Francisco
to New York
that the intervening
United States
is abolished,
San Francisco
and New York
become the same place.
So there's no point
in going to New York.
but just if there's a distance
between them,
there's some difficulty
in getting from one place
to the other,
so that not everybody
in New York
can go to San Francisco,
not everybody in San Francisco
can go to New York,
then they're different places
and it's worth going there.
So also,
for the two ends
of the banana
to have any significance,
you've got to have the banana
of which the two ends
are ends.
So in the same way,
each individual
isn't something
that comes into the world
from nowhere
and confronts it
or from somewhere else
altogether
and the universe
is not a kind of
heap of flotsam
and jetsam
that happen to collect
in space
like a bunch of old
rubber tires
and broken logs
in some
little nook
on the San Francisco Bay.
Because there was the bay
underneath the whole thing,
you see, actually.
so in the same way,
to think...
See, the Christians
and the Jews
to some extent
have gone over this idea
that we are
created out of nothing.
Now, of course,
there's an esoteric sense
to that.
In a way,
a Maya,
an illusion,
is a creation out of nothing.
Suddenly,
the magician
makes a phantasm
to appear
in the empty room.
In a way,
that's a creation
out of nothing,
see.
He does it, say,
by hypnosis.
Magic.
But this idea
of being created
out of nothing
has certain
psychological
and moral overtones
or undertones
in which
you are supposed
to be
nothing
down to the marrow
and core
of your existence.
See,
what that means
is psychologically
that there's
someone wagging
his finger at you
and saying,
never forget
that you
are really a jerk.
you see, that you're a little worm. You don't deserve anything. You exist entirely by the
grace and pleasure of another. And the sooner you grovel suitably to acknowledge this, the
better. Because the consequences of saying this and the meaning of saying this is what's
going to be done about it. So there's the choice, you see, in your thinking, in your myth-making,
in your imagination. Do you want to settle for a completely schizoid universe in which
there is a gulf between the Lord and the illusion, the Brahma and the Maya, so total that forever
and ever the one is not the other? Or would you rather have a unified, integrated universe
in which the Maya is something that the Lord is doing? It's his act, his play. Or its act,
if you don't like the masculine personal pronoun. The Great Mother. And it seems to me that these
two views are sort of like this, you see, with a diagram. See, one person is looking at the
universe this way. Here's the domain of existence. Being. And everything comes into it thus, from
nowhere. See? That's one way of looking at things. How this ever got together, you can't
even think. You have to turn your mind inside out and get this kind of collective flotsam and
some idea. The other diagram is this. Here again is the domain of being. But it's like a star.
It radiates. The whole of it radiates each individual point of focus. You see? Now there you've got
an integrated situation. And that's what things look like. Stars look like that. Crystals look
like that. Crystals look like that. Octopuses look like that. Spiders look like that. Human
beings stick out like that. It all works that way. Because underneath the differences, there
are the differences all the way around, is the unity. If you don't know unity, you don't know
you're different. They go together. This is KPFK Los Angeles. We've just heard Alan Watts with
part four, concluding the seminar, Reality, Art, and Illusion.