===== Way Beyond The West - 01 - The Constitution Of Nature =====

Then thirdly, there is the organic view, characteristic of China.
In this, there is no real thought of there being a divine creator or a divine actor behind the world.
But rather, the world is thought of as being self-moving and self-creating.
The word for nature in Chinese means what is of itself so.
So, when in the West, a child asks its mother, who made me?
And she replies, darling, God made you.
And the child asks, but who made God?
She has to say, nobody made God.
And that is a great puzzle to the child, who thinks of the world as a construct.
And it may be explained to the child, if you like, that God makes himself.
He exists of himself because he is existence.
To put it in more theological language, he has the attribute called arseity, from the Latin, arse, by himself.
Perhaps some kind of enfant terrible would ask the question,
well, if that's true of God, why couldn't it be true of the world in the first place?
Why did you have to make that additional step?
If he did so, he would be thinking more or less in the Chinese way,
which does not think of the world either as an artifact of some maker or as a mask or appearance worn by some sort of deeper reality.
He doesn't, in other words, have a two-level view of nature as an appearance,
underneath which there is something else to explain it.
He sees it all rather as self-evident,
as being something which regulates itself and indeed orders itself.
There is a certain sense, you see, in which the Chinese view is fundamentally,
or you could almost call it anarchical,
or if you don't like that word, you could call it democratic.
A world which is self-governing,
not even through a president,
but self-governing in every way,
a great and colossal anarchism,
which moves itself in the same way as you and I move our fingers
without directing them in the sense that we know exactly what we are doing and how we move them.
We don't.
Now, I've said that the Western view
is probably what made it possible
for us to develop our highly advanced technology.
By thinking about the world as a construct,
we could think about the laws
or principles or plans or regularities
upon which it was based.
We could think, for example, of the calculus, of number,
as the basic characteristic of the law
upon which nature is based.
By doing that,
we caught on to the idea
of thinking of all things
as reducible to atoms,
to parts,
to bits.
And then by thinking of bits,
we found that we could measure
the world very accurately,
describe its regularities very accurately.
And that gave us an astonishing degree of control over it.
This is a point of view which is successful
to a certain degree.
It goes well up to a certain level
after which it begins to develop complications.
For one thing,
you could say it has complications
which are psychological on the one hand
and practical and technical on another.
From the psychological point of view,
its complication is that
when it becomes commonsensical to us
to look at the world as a mechanism,
we begin as humans,
as people capable of feeling and love,
to feel the external world
rather alien to us.
Yes, it's a machine.
It's a great, big, automatic,
mechanical arrangement
which, in essence,
is simply stupid energy.
We thereupon feel
that it has nothing in common
with ourselves.
And perhaps even though we try
to give the same sort of account
of ourselves
and try to reduce our brains and emotions
to some kind of neurological computer mechanism,
that makes us, in a way, hate ourselves.
For as soon as we start thinking of ourselves
as automata,
we begin ethically, psychologically,
treating ourselves as automata.
We lose respect for ourselves.
Thereupon feel
that what is central to us,
the feeling center, the person,
is trapped
in a cosmos
that is a mechanical nightmare,
foreign and strange.
We can see ourselves
as a kind of ghastly accident.
I don't wonder that this
engenders
certain kinds of suicidal tendencies
in our culture.
So much for the psychological point of view.
From the technical point of view,
the analogy of nature
with mechanism
develops its own disadvantages
after a certain point.
That is to say,
the disadvantage
of trying
to manage
the physical universe
as if it were, indeed,
an assemblage
of separate parts
or separable parts.
for the first sort of person
to notice this mistake
would be
the extreme surgical
or medical specialist
who knows, for example,
all about hearts
or about stomachs,
but very little
about brains
or lungs
or glands,
and who treats
one organ at a time
and becomes unaware
of the imbalances
inflicted upon other organs
by what he's done
to the organ
in which he specializes.
Also, in the same way,
the specialist
always tends
to see
the units of nature
and to be unaware
of their connections
or relationships,
which are, after all,
inseparable relationships
with all the other parts.
There is, you might say,
also another technical disadvantage,
again, which develops only
in the course of time
to this particular
mechanical analogy,
and that is
that when you begin
to rely more and more
upon minute
and careful description
of the world
for dealing with it,
and that, of course,
involves the reduction
of the world
to describable units,
the world then becomes
terribly complicated,
and it becomes
increasingly difficult
to keep track
of all the minute units
that you've described.
Hence, the difficulty
of specialists
in the various sciences
communicating with each other
and the difficulty
of the scientific specialist
in communicating
with the layman.
The whole thing becomes
much too complicated
to manage.
This, then,
means that
is left.
Okay,
.


===== Way Beyond The West - 02 - The Game Of Yes & No =====

Now, it has been announced that I would speak this evening about the Yijing. I should just say then, briefly, that the Book of Changes is thought to be the oldest of the great Chinese classics, and to date from, perhaps, as early as 1300 B.C.
Although, perhaps, the figures, of which this classic is a discussion, may be much earlier than that, they may go back to the earliest phases of human thought, because the Yijing really is the ground plan of the way in which the Chinese think, and not only the Chinese.
It is almost a mapping of the thinking processes of man. It may surprise you to know that the system of arithmetic, which is used by digital computers, came from the Yijing.
We have a binary system of arithmetic, in which all numbers may be represented by zero and one, in various arrangements, is, you, is, or is, you, ain't.
So, there is a sudden, unexpected link between the most sophisticated mathematical machinery, and a book originating at least 1300 B.C.
But what the Yijing really goes into, is this question of, is you, is, or is you, ain't.
It sounds terribly simple. Black or white.
And we keep saying to people, you know, life isn't just black and white, or black or white.
There are many shades of grey.
But, against some backgrounds, grey is dark.
In another context, grey is light.
And really, all colours, in fact, all information whatsoever, can be translated into terms of yang and yin.
For example, when you look at colour television, the signals are broadcast to your set as a stream of pulses.
They could be put on magnetic tape, in terms of an arrangement of pulses, indicating either yes or no.
This technique has reached such sophistication that, with the aid of laser beams, we can translate a physical object, let's take a complicated one, let's take a dandelion flower gun to seed, a dandelion clock.
You take a dandelion clock about so big, it can be turned into a formula, passed through channels, enlarged to any size, say this big, and with laser beams cut in solid plastic, in a matter of moments.
So you can get this reproduction of a three-dimensional object, but the transition between the two was handled simply in terms of pulses.
So, likewise, the nervous system is so constituted that the neuron carrying a message either fires or does not fire.
If it is fired, if it fires, or if it is activated, that registers as a yes.
If it is not fired, the absence of firing is represented as a no.
And so you could say that all your perceptions, in all their variety and in all their color, are made up of a vast composite of little yeses and little noes, in every conceivable variation.
So, out of these two come everything.
Yang means the positive, and yin, the negative.
Yang is identified with the south or sunny side of a mountain.
Yin with the north or shady side.
And note, at this moment, that you cannot have a one-sided mountain.
Imagine it.
And this, then, is the crucial thing that one must understand about the Yang-Yin philosophy.
And it is represented in the symbol of a circle crossed with an S-curve, one side of which is black and the other side is white.
And so they are like two fishes.
And in the head of the black fish is a white eye.
And in the head of the white fish, there is a black eye.
These two sides are interdependent because the black one is outlined by the white one, and the white one is outlined by the black one.
And they chase each other in the form which is really the double helix, the pattern of the spiral nebulae, and also the pattern of lovemaking between many, many kinds of creatures.
The spiral folding into itself.
Black chasing white, and white chasing black.
Now, obviously, white and black are as different as different can be.
When we say of someone that he's an awful liar and a con man, you say why he could prove to you that black was white.
But strangely enough, black is white in a certain sense, and white is black.
If you take the copulating word is to mean implies, because black implies white, and white implies black,
or positive implies negative, and negative implies positive.
Because you can't have the one without the other.
So, to put this into clear words, we can say, explicitly, black and white are different.
But implicitly, that is to say, by implication, they are one.
So, exoterically, outwardly, the positive and the negative of life are very different.
Life is different from death, and good is different from evil.
But, esoterically, the secret is, that they are one.
As God says through the prophet Isaiah,
I am the Lord, and there is none else.
I form the light, and create the darkness.
I make peace, and create evil.
I, the Lord, do all these things.
But that information is not normally handed out from the book.
So, we have to begin, then, seriously considering, yang and yin, black and white.
First of all, if I have a black background, somehow I am tempted to make a white mark on it.
If I have a white background, I am tempted to put a black mark on it.
Because, if there were nothing to see but black, that would be tantamount to being blind.
Because, there would be no difference.
Nothing would matter.
Nothing would make a difference.
So, there wouldn't be anything.
Likewise, if everything were white, it would be as good as being blind.
For, there would be no difference.
It is only by contrast, when black and white are put together, that we know black as black, and white as white.
However, now, when I look at a small white circle, or disc on a black background,
or, a small black disc on a white background,
I once get this in my thought.
Which is positive, and which is negative?
Does black represent the negative, because it's dark?
But, when I look at the black dot, on the white background,
I think, the black dot is the thing there.
So, that must be positive.
It was put on.
And, therefore, the white represents negative, because it suggests nothing.
No mark.
Like white paper behind the print.
Blank.
Blanche.
The English blank, and the French blanche, which means white, it's the same.
Blank.
Negative.
Isn't this mysterious, you see, that both white and black can play the negative role?
But then, let's think of white as light, and it's playing the positive role.
And, when we think of black as the thing, the mark, then it's playing the positive role.
See?
Both can play the negative, and both can play the positive.
But, still, you can't have one without the other.
I look at the black with the white dot, and I say,
Is that a white glowing sun in the night?
Or, is it a hole through a wall?
In which case, the black will be the thing, and the white the absence.
I look at the black dot on the white background, and say,
Yes, obviously, the black dot is the thing, but on the other hand,
it may be a picture of a white box with a hole in it.
You see?
They're reversible.
Therefore, some reflections about these.
It isn't easy, for a human being, the way we've been trained,
to notice that you can't have one without the other.
Because our attention has difficulty in seeing both sides at once.
You know that gestalt image, where you get two faces in profile,
and they are drawn as black silhouette.
So you get two faces, in profile, about to kiss.
But then look again, and you notice the white ground between them,
and it is a cup, like a chalice.
What have we got here?
Kissing faces, or chalice?
People have difficulty in seeing both together.
You must have one or the other.
Either will do, but make your choice.
It's like, are you going to be a boy or a girl?
Either will do, but you have to choose one of them.
And yet, bodhisattvas are always represented as hermaphrodite,
as being, as it were, bisexual, transcending sexual differentiation.
Because, after all, everybody who exists is the result of a boy and a girl.
Boys can't be boys without girls, and girls can't be girls without boys.
They are very different.
But, by nature, by reason of their interdependence, they are one.
Talking of the bees and the flowers, where there are bees, there must be flowers.
And where there are flowers, there must be bees, or some sort of insect equivalent.
And this implies that the bee and the flower are really one organism.
The head of the body looks very different from the feet, just as the bee looks different from the flower.
But a complete body requires both head and feet.
So the head and the foot are obviously one organism.
It's less obvious with the bee and the flower, but they are one organism.
What is very difficult for us to see, however,
is that solids are all of a piece with spaces.
Now, here comes the thing you see.
Take a situation in which we say, of a given figure-ground relationship,
that the black is the thing.
The black letter on the white page.
We say, yes, it's the black letter that's important.
That's the thing.
But supposing it's a white letter on a black page.
Still, we say the letter's the thing.
That's important.
All right.
So we say, we look out in the sky at night and we see the stars and the planets.
We say, that's what's there.
That's the thing.
Around them is darkness and nothingness,
corresponding to the area of the magnetic tape which isn't magnetized,
which delivers no message and therefore the message is zero.
But that, you see, does deliver a message.
Absence speaks.
Nothingness is important.
But we are brought up.
We are so brainwashed.
We are so baboozled.
We are so hypnotized that we don't know that.
That's the whole trick that we've played on ourselves.
We don't know that nothing is something.
And it's important.
Lao Tzu put it this way.
The usefulness of a vessel is not so much in the clay surround,
but in the empty space in which something can be carried.
The usefulness of a window is not so much in the frame as in the empty space through which light can be seen.
It sounds odd and paradoxical and almost a little contradictory,
but nevertheless, there it is.
The space is, after all, not nothing.
I had an argument with Buckminster Fuller about this,
and he had to grant me that I was theoretically correct,
because he said, so far as I'm concerned, space is just negative event.
Just negative event.
The fallacy wasn't in the word negative event.
That's a beautiful phrase.
It was in the word just, only.
As if space could be dismissed.
And so in exactly the same way.
When we don't recognize that side of life,
people can play all kinds of tricks on us.
The main trick is, I can scare you with death.
You won't be, see?
I can remove you.
You're going to get removed anyway one of these days,
and you just won't be.
Oh, that'd be awful.
That'd be just terrible.
You know, supposing you won't be.
You'll be nobody to realize how terrible it is.
But this is the thing, that this is one of the great tricks of life,
and you have to be watching for this,
as people use it, because they've all been taught to use it.
It's really the fall of man.
It was not to recognize the other side.
So everything that we think of as nothing.
Space, empty space, death, sleep, dissolution, decay, any sort of weakness.
Anything that goes against structure, that is, against the thing.
Anything that we think is bad, bad, bad, bad.
And we're trying to get a world where that side of things is rendered impotent.
Nothingness must no longer constitute a threat to somethingness.
In other words, we want to play black and white.
And if we'll call white the light and the positive,
white must win.
That's the game we're trying to play.
Not realizing that there cannot be winning without losing.
If white must win, black must lose.
But if black loses,
we can congratulate black for having helped white to win.
Because unless black loses, white won't win.
We can translate this into the difficult and thorny question of race relations.
How would you know you were free, white, and 21?
How could you be proud of being a white man?
Unless you were black men.
You wouldn't know you were living on the right side of the tracks.
Unless you were people living on the left side of the tracks.
You know, there's an IQ thing that says,
up is to down,
as blank is to left.
Or left is to blank.
You're supposed to fill in.
I would put taken.
Anyway, taken and left.
Right and left.
Right and wrong.
These opposites get tricky.
But the point is,
people are afraid of the negative one.
Don't be negative.
Power of positive thinking.
All nonsense.
The negative is the source of the positive.
This is absolutely fundamental to the I Ching.
This is why in the hexagrams of which the I Ching is about,
64 combinations of six black and white symbols.
Actually, they use an unbroken line for the positive and a broken line for the negative.
Six such lines.
There are 64 combinations of groups of six, or hexagrams.
And in all those, there is not one bad one.
There is no sign of the I Ching,
which you can draw,
and the oracle tell you,
this is just plain bad.
Because you can get to the very end of the night,
that black is pitch black,
and it is precisely at that moment that the Yang,
the positive element, is reborn.
As you see,
it is recognizing that energy is waves,
energy is pulsation.
You can't have a pulse without a vibration.
It sounds, if I go,
something without a nothing.
But actually,
if you listen very closely to that sound,
you'll hear,
you'll hear pulse.
Because without that little chunk,
which is a pulse,
nothing happens.
So this table,
which is level and solid,
and philosophers learn it,
are always talking about tables,
because they always have tables in front of them in classrooms.
But here is some solid,
but this thing is going,
at a terrific clip inside it.
Howie, look at that.
And we find that there are
cellular structure in wood.
Realize that,
molecules.
And when we find to our amazement,
if you take a molecule out of this table,
and it's about the size of my fist,
blow it up to that,
the next molecule will be,
why, way over the other side of the room,
at that level of magnification.
Say, what's in the molecules?
Take an atom the size of my fist.
Well, the next one will be,
somewhere in Los Angeles.
You know,
I was talking fancy shapes and figures.
Anyway,
a long way away.
What's inside the atom?
Ooh,
electrons,
protons,
mesons,
et cetera.
And they,
at the size of my fist,
we don't even know if they're particles or waves,
so it's difficult to talk about this,
but they are a long,
long way from each other,
so we suddenly find that in this solid table,
there's more space than there is anything solid.
It means a little bit of solid,
but as you ferret it out,
and you go step,
step down,
it's like approaching a limit,
in mathematics,
when you have a curve,
who's sweeping towards an axis,
supposing it's an asymptotic curve,
it's always getting nearer and nearer and nearer to that axis,
but never actually collides with it.
So we get nearer and nearer as we study substance.
We get nearer and nearer to finally,
what is the shell round the emptiness?
We get nearer,
we never quite catch it.
Solid disappears,
turns into space,
as at this level of magnification,
the space has disappeared into the solid.
See,
if I just have one finger,
or a better illustration,
if I take a lighted cigarette in the dark,
I've just got one point,
but I whizz it around,
and you see a continuous circle.
That's how you see a solid table.
Because everything's going,
so fast,
that your eye can't catch the spaces between.
Too little,
too quick.
Looking at things from one point of view,
we find a lot of emptiness.
Looking at them from another point of view,
we find a lot of solid.
But what you have to realize is,
that the solid is based on the emptiness,
just as much as the emptiness is based on the solid.
So don't be afraid of nothing.
It can't bite you.
It's only something that can bite you.
There's nothing to be afraid of in nothing.
And yet, mysteriously,
nothing is the source of something.
It's like the womb and the seed.
Yang and yin go together.
Through not seeing this,
and the whole of our life is, as I said,
geared to the thought that we might be able
to make the yang side win,
to have white without black.
And so,
in every sort of human enterprise,
we are trying,
connects with what I was trying to get across this afternoon,
when you talk about improving the world,
you are meaning, presumably,
that you want it more white than black.
Or whichever one you call the good one.
Maybe you think the black is the good.
That side makes sense.
It makes the slightest difference.
You know,
which side are you going to take in the game of chess,
the black or the white?
It doesn't make much difference,
except white gets first move.
Well, I'll always wait to see what you're going to do.
Could we get rid of it?
It never works.
You think now,
I'll do the other one.
Now, as you know,
in all matters of practical living,
I never know whether,
you know,
there's going to be sickness.
I've been miserable all this time,
because I haven't had enough money.
I never know whether I can make the payments on the car.
And in the transition,
from one stage to the other,
whoops,
you feel very elated.
Of course, you feel elated.
You're going,
if only I had a little more money,
I'd really feel great.
So you get it.
Bring up.
$5,000 a year,
say.
It makes a difference.
When you've gone up,
then, of course,
you're on the level again.
And no longer do you have to worry about
making the payments.
But you get a new worry.
Supposing I get sick
and die of it.
Supposing
someone robs me,
takes it away from me.
Worry about that.
You say,
oh, I'd feel so much happier
if I had a medical examination.
You go to a fancy doctor.
He says,
I can't find anything wrong with you.
Then always there might be burglars.
So you get an alarm system
and new locks.
And finally you go to the homeless patrol
and get a private guard to watch you.
And that makes you feel better for a while.
Except then he begins to nag you.
See, if I have that homeless patrol man out there,
they'll know I've got something.
Maybe I'd better have two men.
So,
it grows.
You worry.
Because you found out
that you didn't get yang without yin.
You've got a new yang,
a bigger yang,
instead of the former little one you have,
but you've got a big yin with it.
It's no joke getting rich.
It implies a great deal of responsibility.
And you've got more to worry about.
Don't envy rich people.
Don't envy anyone.
So, in the same way,
Joanza puts it thus.
He's Laoza's successor.
Peace is correlative wrong.
Do not understand the basic principles of the universe.
One might just as well speak,
people who speak
of having good government
without its correlatives,
misrule,
or right without it
of having yang without yin.
And such people must be
either knaves or fools.
Of course,
how would we know we were wise
unless there were knaves and fools?
But here it is, you see. You cannot beat the game.
You can have the temporary illusion of winning,
but by compensation you will ever so often have the temporary illusion of losing.
When you go down a step from yang to yin you'll feel I've lost something.
When you go up a step from yin to yang you'll feel I've gained something.
How would you know game without loss?
How would you have the sensation of more and less in relation to the sensation less?
For sensation is simply awareness of contrast.
That's what life is.
Now if we realize that we get the same feeling of frustration as I wanted to give you this afternoon
in trying to make it clear that so far as the improvement of ourselves and of the world is concerned
there's absolutely nothing we can do about it.
And this is simply another way of saying the same thing.
You cannot have more yang than yin.
You cannot play a game which is win and no lose or a game in which everyone wins.
If we recognize that, applying yang and yin to all the possible situations of life,
we get this awful feeling of so what's the use?
You're stuck with it.
Now, in just the same way, I mean, what do you expect me to do?
Jump into the river and drown?
Do we get the feeling of oh what's the use?
Simply because we've found that our favorite game won't work.
And we think that is the only thing for which there is any use,
is the game in which whitelists win.
But why not, um, change them around?
Isn't that a good game?
Because you go boing boing boing boing boing boing boing boing, like this.
Goes in and out. It's the undulation of a wave, the crest and the trough.
Every kid likes a rollercoaster ride.
It's great.
It's the game.
See, it's no game.
What we think is the game isn't a game at all.
To win all the time.
Win, win, win.
That's no game.
Because the game is always the highest.
And the whole idea of drama is to make it seem to the audience
that the villain absolutely must win.
Doesn't seek.
Now you see.
Now you don't.
The game is the story in which the villain might win.
There's no way out.
And then suddenly, for who?
The secret, uh, thing is revealed and the hero wins.
Or if you want vitality.
Unless there's that negative element.
The villain, the devil, the nothing, the death,
a good cry, have a tragedy, and the villain wins.
But don't you see?
There is no way out.
You've lost.
Finish.
See, if that's not there, then the other one isn't there.
And you're always winning.
The person you know, you sit at home with your wife
and you play cribbage.
Lots of married couples try to forget holy deadlock
by playing games at once.
The game ceases to be of interest.
And if one partner, be it wife or husband, always wins at cribbage,
tells every good player likes a sprightly opponent who sometimes wins.
He wins just a little bit less than me, mind you,
but he wins a great deal of the time.
Yes, it's okay.
See, just a little bit.
No?
So, if you don't have the unknown space, death, dark mind to make white win,
you didn't sit down and weep because it's negative, you don't have the light.
But the art of life consists rather in something else than when somebody tells you you can't make white win
all the time, forever and always, so that black doesn't exist.
Well, the very fact that it doesn't exist is its power.
Non-existence is the necessary...
because black vibes very nature is darkness and it doesn't exist.
You're trying to make it not exist.
It's a condition for existence.
It's just like you have to have a front before you can have a back.
Or a back before you can have a front.
They come into being together.
So do existence and non-existence.
So what are you afraid of in trying to get rid of nothing,
which is already gotten rid of?
So we think, hmm.
But surely this is rather monotonous.
It goes up and down, up and down, up and down, seesaw.
Life, death, life, death, life, death.
Or birth, death, birth, death, birth, death.
Isn't there some way of...
I mean, must we play this game?
It's like the game of one-upmanship I showed you earlier this afternoon.
You can't get out of it.
You're always playing it.
If you say I won't play it means I've got a more interesting game than yours.
Which is just the same game all over again.
Would there be a way somehow to transcend black and white?
So we've got black and we've got white.
That makes it even.
A tertium quid.
A new, new possibility.
So that we can have a three basis instead of a two basis.
And somebody comes up and says,
Huh.
Alright, you're black and white.
A and B.
You constitute the two ends of the base of a triangle.
And I'm the apex.
How about that?
And they say, that's odd.
Because it's odd because the first two were even.
I mean, when something happens, that's one.
And that's odd.
See, it's odd that anything should have happened.
Very odd.
It's queer.
Would it have been easier for them to be nothing?
But then something happens.
And then they say, that's odd.
Then they recognize there's something and nothing.
And then they say, alright, that's right.
We're even.
So the third fellow comes along and says,
Now, what about it?
And they say, you're odd.
Oh, wait a minute.
You stand over against us.
That makes two.
We're even.
And you're odd.
Alright, so that makes two out of three.
Three equals two.
Because we're together.
We're two.
We recognize that we're black and white.
You can't have one without the other.
So we're together.
And you say you want to be different.
That makes black and white different from whatever you say you are.
So we've got the new yang and yin.
You can't get out of it.
Make four.
And it's the same all over again.
Make five.
It's the same all over again.
This was how Leibniz reasoned.
An arithmetic that could represent any number using nearly zero and one.
Can't we get out of this?
Hey, what would it be if you were allowed five minutes with God.
And you're allowed to ask one question.
What do you want to know?
Because you know.
You've thought this over now.
You know about the opposites.
About the yang and the yin.
And you know you can't ask God and say,
Hey big daddy, will you give me a tip to beat the game?
It won't work.
And what shall I ask God?
It seems to think, of all the things you might ask for.
An electric guitar and a million dollars.
And you know that wouldn't be the answer.
Because that would be yang.
There would be a big yin along with it somewhere.
Maybe I don't know what to ask.
So you go in and say,
God, beyond positive and negative, what is reality?
And God says,
My childhood question has no meaning.
Oh dear, you thought, there it's gone.
My one chance lost.
What do you think?
You get a friend of yours and say,
Hey, look, you go in.
And tell me what he says.
You ask him, what question should I ask you?
He goes and says,
Oh God, what question should I ask you?
And God says, so you do want a problem.
Well, you've got one.
You thought it out.
You wanted the game in which white only wins.
There's your problem.
You made it up.
You have to have that problem.
Because otherwise, if you don't have a problem,
you wouldn't know you were here.
It's like, you can't be yourself without something you call other.
How will you know you were you unless somebody else is somebody else altogether?
In other words, the sensation that I hear, living, sensitive, the lie, peeking out, beady-eyed out of my skin,
entirely is with reference to something over there, which isn't me.
I don't know what it is, but it works all by itself.
And this is pretty scared of it.
And there it is.
But I can't have this feeling without that feeling.
There's the same hocus-pocus going on here.
If I can't feel me without having other, that's the exoteric.
Esoteric means I am the other.
They're inseparable.
How can you have self without other?
How can there be other without self?
You other on me and self on yourself.
I self on me and other on you.
But you can't, as it says, you can't have one without the other.
Yang and Yin.
So in the same way, I say, well, this other, I'd like to manage it.
I'd like to control it.
Now, I know all these people around messing up my life.
I don't want them to be that much other.
I'm going to fix you.
Then I get on a power kick.
And there are all kinds of power kicks, let me warn you.
It's not just politics and economics and business.
The worst power kicks are spiritual.
Like astrology.
Would you like to know the future?
Would you really?
It's a power kick to know the future so that you can control it.
No surprise.
If you know the future, it's already past.
But if you want to know something and have knowledge,
then there must be the unknown.
Just as if you want self, you must have other.
So the future is always the unknown.
The past is the known.
And what we witness, as our present,
is the magical appearance of the known from the unknown.
You know what's going to happen the next second.
I mean, there might be another big earthquake right underneath us.
See?
Any minute now.
Or the Russians might decide to release the A-bomb.
You have a heart attack.
Drop dead.
Watch.
Watch this thing happen.
It's incredible.
Just watch it.
You, it.
The self, other.
It's this vibration going on.
You, you, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.
And you think also now, wait a minute.
Self and other.
That means voluntary versus involuntary.
What I do and what happens to me?
What do I do?
Well, I walk.
I think.
I talk.
I move my hands.
I can be nice to you or nasty to you.
I would regard both as my doing.
But what about my, um, blood circulation?
I normally think that that happens to me.
I mean, if my heart would have stopped, I wouldn't say I'd done it.
I would have said that it happened to me.
But Buddhists will say, your heart stopped, that was your karma.
And karma means nothing else except doing.
It's your doing that your heart stopped.
You know, that doesn't mean, don't take it literally in a superstitious way that because
you, um, spat in someone's face in a past life, you're having heart failure as a punishment
for it this time around.
The universe is not geared to be a kind of judicial system.
I mean, a lot of priests figure it that way in order to frighten people.
But karma means simply, if you die in a plane crash or have a heart attack, it's your
doing.
And that simply means you've got to rethink what you mean by doing.
Now, I've already proved to you that black is white.
So now I'm going on to prove to you that what you do is what happens to you.
And what happens to you is what you do.
Because you can't tell the difference between doing.
You can't tell what you mean by doing unless something happens to you, to contrast it with
and vice versa.
You can't tell something that happens to you unless it feels different from something
you do.
Now let's take a look at our breath.
Are you doing it or does it happen to you?
If you do breathing exercise, you can feel I'm doing it.
Just I'm breathing in just as I might raise my hand.
But after a while I breathe out.
And I feel I'm breathing out.
And I forget all about it and it goes on.
And it happens to me.
That's why in yoga, which means, yoga means union, joining.
Same as the Latin, ungere.
While in yoga you breathe.
Breathing is the main thing in yoga.
That is to teach you that there's no difference between what you do and what happens to you.
You learn that through breathing.
You can make the very best breath.
We'll get into Christian terms here.
The Holy Spirit.
Spirit means breath.
See?
Spiritus in Latin.
Mathema in Greek.
Roach in Hebrew.
Now there's ordinary breath.
Yeah, most people's normal breathing.
Forced breath.
Or, you know, when people try to sing and their voice is forced.
But then the next breath is called Holy Spirit.
Holy breath.
That's when the breath is no longer forced.
It happens.
When it's nirvana breath.
Blow out.
Same thing as Holy Spirit.
And then that, you see.
The unforced one.
Go on and on.
When monks chant.
Or devotees of any kind chant.
They have the idea that I am a flute.
And the breath, the prana, the spiritus of the divine flows through it.
That's what chanting is all about.
Make yourself a tube for the divine wind.
But that also means realize the unity of the voluntary and the involuntary.
That's really what's meant by doing the will of God.
Do the will.
It's one reason why we get confused in English.
As to whether we mean will or whether we mean shall.
I will drown and no one shall save me.
So, think.
Behind what you call voluntary.
You decide.
Having reviewed the evidence, I've decided it would be best to buy this brand of detergent.
How did you make a decision?
Well, I reviewed the evidence.
I ended up the price.
I came to the computer.
Yeah, I know all that.
How did you work the machinery?
The computer in your head.
You know, you pushed all these buttons.
But what's underneath the buttons?
Oh, I don't know.
I never looked.
So, you see, that involuntary growth called the brain underlies your voluntary decision.
Because when you decide, you don't first decide to decide and decide to decide to decide.
You just decide.
That means there's something else behind it.
Well, you think that's terrible because if what I do happens to me and it isn't really
doing at all, then I'm in a fatalistic scene.
I'm in a fatalistic scene.
Yes, but I said, on the other hand, what happens to you is what you do.
It was equally that way.
You know, you have an earthquake and the thoughts in your head drift about like clouds in the sky.
Well, you can't do anything.
So, in the same way, this whole strain, the futility of the strain to make white wind and to improve the world.
That entire futility.
The frustration of it is what you mean by I.
Now it goes.
It won't work.
And the I collapses.
Everybody is terrified of this happening.
Suddenly finding out that you don't have an ego.
Heaven preserve me from that because I've been building up this personality of mine all these years.
I've been very carefully nurtured this personality.
You tell me it doesn't exist.
No, because your personality is a phantom even more insubstantial than your body.
Personality is a work of art.
It's like music, which vanishes as soon as it's played.


===== Way Beyond The West - 03 - Buddhist Fundamentals Entire =====

I'm continuing this program with talks on some of the fundamental ideas of oriental philosophy.
But before going on, I want to refer back to something that I said in the last program
in which I was talking about Hinduism, which may possibly have been misunderstood.
At the end of the program, I was referring to certain trends in modern Hinduism,
which I described as being of a somewhat namby-pamby nature.
Perhaps that wasn't quite the right phrase, because that suggests weakness.
What I really wanted to suggest was bloodlessness, lack of earthiness, or excessive spirituality.
And I think this arises in certain schools of thought
from a wrong interpretation of the great commentator Shankara.
Shankara and Ramanuja are probably the two of the greatest medieval Indian commentators
on the Upanishads and the traditional scriptures.
And the way some people interpret this is somewhat as follows,
that there is but one reality, which is Brahman,
which is without form, without any quality that the mind can imagine,
following the usual method of description by negation.
And that this being so,
it excludes there being any reality whatsoever
to the seeming multiplicity of the physical world.
In other words, the physical world that we perceive with our senses
is in reality simply not there.
And there is even no cause within reality for it seeming to be there.
I mean, this is rather like the Christian science doctrine of mortal mind
producing the error of suffering and physical existence,
that it has no reality at all.
And our seeing of it,
its seeming to be real,
again, has no basis within the divine reality,
which is the sole thing that exists.
Now, this is an interpretation of Shankara,
which I believe to be fundamentally wrong.
I don't believe that Shankara can correctly be interpreted as saying
that the world of sense experience,
which this, to my mind,
wrong interpretation of his school identifies with maya,
I don't believe that this is the way he ought to be understood.
Maya, I can think of passages in Shankara
where maya is given a much more positive sense,
where the world is not to be considered identical with Brahman
in the sense that it's not really there
and Brahman is the only reality which exists,
but rather that the world is maya or is illusory
only in the sense that we do not see it to be one with Brahman
just as it is.
The seeing of its oneness with Brahman
does not involve its disappearance.
And if it does,
then we've got not a non-dualistic doctrine at all,
we've got an extremely dualistic doctrine.
Because, after all,
if there is the seeing of an illusion,
supposing you say what you see as the illusion
isn't really there,
but you can't deny the fact that you see it.
And then if that seeing of it has no basis in reality,
if that in turn is an illusion,
and the illusion that one sees an illusion is an illusion,
then you've got a principle
that is fundamentally distinct from the supreme reality
and in a way stands against it,
is not explained by it,
is not grounded in it.
And therefore this is a highly dualistic form of thought.
And as a result,
all fundamental dualisms lead to
consequences in feeling and in conduct
which are world-hating.
And this seems to me
why there are trends in modern Hinduism
to be excessively spiritual.
to regard
all sense knowledge
as basically evil
in the sense of being fundamentally
and I mean fundamentally unreal.
And this, in other words,
is what I wanted to indicate
about these trends in modern Hinduism
which I do not feel
are representative at all
of either Shankara's doctrine
or the doctrine of the Upanishads.
upon which the whole tradition of Hinduism is based.
Now then, today,
I want to go on to the subject of Buddhism.
Buddhism originates in India
somewhere between 6 and 500 BC.
There is always some conjecture about the exact dating of individuals at this time.
But it was during this period that there lived a man called Gotama.
And Gotama was the son of a king or perhaps tribal chieftain
who lived very close to modern Nepal in the north of India.
And Buddha is a title given to this man.
It wasn't his proper name, just as Christ is not, as it were, the surname of Jesus.
As when we say Jesus Christ, we should correctly say Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Anointed One.
And in the same way, one should say not Gotama Buddha, but Gotama the Buddha.
For Buddha means an awakened one.
A man who woke up, who, in other words, you must understand this term within the whole Hindu tradition,
a man who is no longer spellbound by Maya,
by the seeming separateness of all the things in this world.
That's one of the forms of Maya.
And so, a Buddha is not a unique historical character.
There can be, and it is supposed that there have been, innumerable Buddhas.
But the idea of a Buddha is related to the Hindu idea of an avatar,
which means an incarnation of the Godhead in human form.
Buddhists don't think of a Buddha as an incarnation of the Godhead,
because they, although not rejecting the idea of God or gods,
relegate all gods to the world of Maya, to the world of relative reality.
And in this sense, a Buddha is felt in some way to be superior even to the gods.
Let's put it in this way. Perhaps some of you have seen what is a sort of fundamental illustration of the principles of Buddhism,
a diagram or map-like thing called the Wheel of Life.
And in Tibetan versions of the Wheel of Life, you will notice that the Wheel is divided into six realms.
And these six realms include human beings, gods, or perhaps angels would be a better term for devas,
spirits of wrath called Ashuras, personifications of the destructive forces of nature,
animals, then what are called Naraka or purgatories,
pretta or tormented, frustrated spirits with tiny mouths and immense bellies,
having, in other words, immense appetite but very little means of satisfying it.
And then again, humans.
And the basic idea of Buddhism is that awakening, Buddhahood, can be attained only from the human state,
deliverance from the vicious circle which the wheel represents,
life considered as a vicious circle.
The gods are too powerful and too happy to concern themselves to be delivered.
At the opposite extreme, the people in the Narakas, the tormented souls in purgatory, as it were, are too miserable,
the animals too dumb, the Ashuras too angry, the pretas too frustrated.
You can take this wheel, as a matter of fact, not as referring to any actual worlds other than ours of ghosts or gods and purgatories,
but you can take these six realms as representing states of the human mind,
and the human state as representing even-mindedness, what is called in Sanskrit Upeksha, equanimity.
Now, when it is said then that one can become a Buddha only from the human state,
it means, you see, that a Buddha stands above the gods as being released from the wheel.
In very popular Buddhism, of course, as in popular Hinduism,
the idea of the wheel is taken rather literally.
It is, in other words, believed that the individual passes from life to life.
And it's rather funny that although Buddhism actually denies the existence of an individual soul as an enduring reality,
nevertheless, in Buddhist countries it is popularly believed that some sort of equivalent of the soul
passes from life to life, and that if your present life is miserable, it is a result of foolish actions in the former life.
But if in this life you act wisely, your birth in the next life is to be more fortunate,
and you may get up, of course, to the heaven worlds, the world of the gods.
But human birth is the thing that is always regarded as most fortunate.
Because you can be tied to the wheel not only by chains of iron, that is to say, by acting wrongly,
you can also be bound by chains of gold, that is, by acting wisely so as to inherit good fruits.
Now, of course, very sophisticated Buddhists, not only in modern times but in ancient times,
did not take this idea of reincarnation literally.
They looked upon it in quite a different way,
and just as they regarded the six worlds as states of the human mind,
so they regarded reincarnation as something happening in this life.
Those of you who've read T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets will remember the passage, perhaps, where he says
that those who have just left the platform of a station on a railway train are not those who will arrive at any destination.
Those who, in other words, walked in at the door of the room and are now sitting down in chairs
are not the same people as those who stepped in at the door.
We are, in other words, constantly changing.
Just as we know, physiologically speaking, that our bodies are in all their molecular structure
completely changed every seven years or so, so that we are, as it were, not enduring entities
but rather something like a university where the faculty and the students and the very buildings themselves
may change completely within a span of years, and yet somehow the university or something by way of a pattern goes on.
And so, in this sense, freedom from reincarnation would be, by very sophisticated Buddhists, interpreted as freedom from the illusion
that the person who came in at the door is the same one now sitting in a chair.
And that, in its turn, signifies freedom from an emotional habit, the habit of grasping at one's own life,
at seeking for continuity.
And, you see, the idea of continuity in Buddhist philosophy is that we desire continuity in order to perpetuate our past.
In our past, in other words, we have accumulated various things, experiences, material goods, knowledge, virtues, power, so on.
The desire for continuity is the desire for the perpetuation of a past self or string of selves with which we identify ourselves.
Buddhist insight involves the recognition that the past is perpetually vanishing.
There really is no past to continue.
And, therefore, to cling to it, to identify oneself with it, is to perpetuate an illusion resulting in incessant frustration,
resulting indeed in that very vicious circle which the symbol of the wheel represents.
Now, Gotama made it very easy to summarize his teaching.
He was really quite an adept in what we call mnemonics,
in putting things in simple forms so that they could easily be remembered.
And he summed up the whole of his doctrine in what is called the Fourfold Noble Truths.
And, although it becomes sometimes awfully boring to read fundamental texts on Buddhism,
which just go over these things again and again,
I think it's only boring if one goes over them in a very formal way that these texts adopt.
Really, it's a very skillful outline of the nature of Buddhism.
And it's based on an old medical formula.
In ancient India, as in almost all ancient cultures,
every activity was ceremonialized.
And when a physician came to pay his call, he gave his diagnosis in a ceremonial way.
He made four pronouncements.
The first pronouncement was the name of the disease.
The second, the cause of the disease.
The third, the curability of the disease.
Can it be cured? Yes or no.
And if it can be cured, the fourth pronouncement is the giving of the prescription.
And that's exactly the form of Gotama's summary of his doctrine.
He said, in other words, the first principle is that mankind, and indeed all forms of life, suffer from a disease,
which is called in Sanskrit, Dukha.
And the most general translation of that word is suffering.
Dukha means suffering in all its forms.
Moral, physical, spiritual.
But Western interpreters of Buddhism have sometimes represented him as saying that life is suffering, period.
In other words, of enunciating a highly pessimistic and world-hating doctrine.
That to be alive is to suffer.
And that, in other words, the amount of joy, of positive pleasure in life, is after all so negligible that the game is not worth the candle.
Now, if one studies the method of teaching of sages in ancient India,
you have to realize that one of their fundamental pedagogical gambits is to arrive at the point of view they wish to inculcate by a zigzag method.
When we walk, you know, we put down maybe first the left foot, then we shift to the right foot, then the left foot, then the right foot.
And in this way we go along, neither to the left nor to the right, but straight ahead.
And you find, too, that in thought, that the human mind tends to go from position to position,
but it always, when it settles on any fixed position, we can always point out that that position is an extreme.
For example, in scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages, when St. Thomas Aquinas fastened on the idea that God is fundamentally ends or being,
a Buddhist philosopher would point out that he had settled upon an extreme that has an opposite, non-being.
And that, therefore, his position needs to be corrected by the opposite position.
Somebody else should get up and say, no, no, God is not being, God is non-being.
And from this facing of opposites with each other, we arrive at what Buddhism is sometimes called the middle way.
It doesn't mean the compromise position.
The middle way is the doctrine of relativity, of showing that all positions or experiences which we can formulate must always be perceived or known by contrast with their opposites.
So, in other words, Buddha's doctrine that life is fundamentally dukkha or suffering is an antithesis directed towards those people who believe that the object of life is to attain sukha or sweetness.
He is saying, in other words, you cannot experience pleasure except in reference to non-pleasure.
And therefore, the more you pursue pleasure, the more non-pleasure will arise to frustrate you.
The more you pursue permanence, the more you will feel the impermanence of things.
And so it is, for after all, when we are bent on enjoying ourselves, we become, at that very moment, curiously aware of how rapidly time is slipping by.
When, on the other hand, we are not enjoying ourselves, we become curiously aware of how time is dragging.
So then, dukkha, arising from an exaggerated pursuit of sukha its opposite, becomes the basic characteristic of life.
And he goes on to say, in his second principle, that the cause of this is krishna or grasping, sometimes translated desire.
And indeed, I believe the word krishna does underlie etymologically the English word thirst.
Krishna is not quite desire.
For example, one's appetite.
When you haven't eaten for some time and you get hungry, this is not krishna.
It's a perfectly natural occurrence.
Krishna is based, in turn, on avidya, which means, on wisdom,
which is the way the Tibetan scholar around here, Alex Wayman, likes to translate it.
It's a good translation, on wisdom, or simply lack of insight, lack of consciousness, lack of, well, a special sense of ignorance,
not the ordinary sense of ignorance, of not being informed, but ignorance.
Action based on ignoring something.
And ignorance is not realizing the relativity of experiences, not realizing the inseparability of pleasure and pain, existence and non-existence, life and death, up and down, good and bad.
So that, as a result of such ignorance or unwisdom, people try to separate these opposites from each other,
to corral, to gain the good ones, and to exclude and annihilate the bad ones.
And as a result of that, because these opposites exist mutually, they go round in circles.
And that mutual existence of these opposites is really, seems to me, the basic meaning of the doctrine of karma, which is involved in Buddhism.
The doctrine of conditioned action, which Buddha epitomized in the phrase, this arises, that becomes.
In other words, without this on the one hand, or this on the one hand always implies that on the other.
Good on the one hand implies bad on the other, and so on.
And so, if a person becomes involved in karma, involved in conditioned action leading to a vicious circle,
if he is ignorant of the interdependence of all states of experience.
So then the third truth, the cure of this dukkha, or suffering, is the truth about nirvana.
Nirvana is the most grossly mistranslated word in all foreign languages, probably.
Because we are early scholars of Buddhism translated it as annihilation, and nowadays nirvana means a state of being doped up to most people.
It's popularly used as being in ecstasy, or in a kind of dreamy bliss.
And nirvana doesn't mean that at all.
It's a state of being very, very wide awake.
A state of being completely aware.
But the etymology of the word is disputed.
There are several etymologies that you can offer, and so I just choose the one I like.
And that is to blow out.
As when, having tried to hold one's breath, you discover that you can't hold it.
You lose your breath by holding it.
Therefore, you expire.
You despirate.
And so, you heave a sigh of relief.
And so nirvana is the sigh of relief.
The expiration or despiration.
In other words, the giving up of the attempt to clutch at life, to hold it in a fixed form, to resist change,
to separate the good side of things from the bad side and annihilate the bad side.
It is the giving up of that fundamentally contradictory, self-contradictory kind of conduct.
And so then in the fourth truth, there is set out the Noble Eightfold Path, Buddha's prescription for Dukva.
And the Noble Eightfold Path is really in three divisions.
One of which concerns itself with understanding.
I might almost say intellectual understanding of the doctrine.
The one is concerned with conduct.
And the third part of it is concerned with state of consciousness or meditation.
To summarize them briefly, one, the first stages of the path such as a right view,
or I prefer to translate the word samyak, not so much as right,
but as perfect in the Greek sense of telos or complete.
And thus, to have a complete view is a view which does not take sides,
which takes the middle path, which in other words does not go off to extremes, and so on.
The part of the Eightfold Path that is concerned with conduct.
Buddhism is often represented as having a very exalted ethical system.
And this is true in a way it does.
But also one must recognize that the difference between Buddhism and Christianity,
as at any rate as Christianity is ordinarily taught,
is that these ethical ideas are not commandments.
They are really forms of expedient conduct.
The Buddha counseled his followers to take upon themselves certain obligations,
say of not killing, of not stealing, of not exploiting the senses,
of not getting drunk or intoxicated with poisons, not lying.
Because, not because these were against the will of God,
or against the fundamental laws of the universe,
but because they are inexpedient forms of conduct for a person who wants to wake up.
For if you get thoroughly doped up,
you are not liable to be very wide awake.
And then, finally, the end of the path,
the last stages of it are concerned with one's state of consciousness,
with being the process of what is sometimes called meditation,
or of bringing one's mind to its maximum awareness through clear recollection.
And then, finally, the attainment of what is called samadhi,
which means integrated consciousness.
Consciousness no longer under the influence of abhidya,
no longer bamboozled and fooled by the apparent separateness of things,
which are really inseparably interlinked.
And thus, samadhi could be called integrated,
a unified consciousness in which it is seen that the subject, the knower,
is inseparable from the object, the known,
that man is inseparable from the totality of life,
and so on and so forth.
So that samadhi, at the end of the Eightfold Path,
might be described as being the entry to or realization,
the making real of the state of Nirvana,
which constitutes, in turn, being a Buddha.
And that was Alan Watts with a program called The Fund.


===== Way Beyond The West - 04 - Buddhist Mysticism =====

Just this month a new book has been published by Dr. D.T. Suzuki
called Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist.
I'm not intending to devote this program to a review of this book as such,
but I call attention to it.
Incidentally, it's published by Harper's in New York for $3.50.
But I rather want to call attention to a particular theme
which the book deals with,
the theme of a peculiar type of Japanese mysticism, I suppose you'd call it,
associated primarily with the type of Buddhism which is called Shinshu.
Shinshu, or to know it by another name, Jodo, or pure land Buddhism,
is one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in the Far East,
spreading over China, Japan, down in Tibet,
originally had some following in India,
but has undergone a very marked and special type of development in Japan.
And what makes it so popular
is that in contrast,
or apparent contrast, I should say, with other forms of Buddhism,
it stands as a kind of easy way,
as distinct from a difficult way.
In Japanese technical terms,
the two types of Buddhism are respectively called Jiriki and Tariki.
Now, Ji means one's own, or self,
and Ta means other,
and Riki means power.
And so the schools of Buddhism which call themselves Jiriki,
ways of deliverance,
which one follows by one's own will,
one's own power, one's own strength.
Whereas on the other hand,
the type of Buddhism called Tariki,
is where you rely on the power of another.
And this other is, usually speaking,
if I may put it in somewhat mythological terms,
a great supramundane Buddha
known as Amitabha,
or in Japanese as Amida.
And the story goes that in incalculable ages
in the most distant past,
this great Buddha made a vow
that he would not enter into the state of complete Buddhahood
until any human being upon the face of the earth
who pronounced his name in faith
would, after his death,
be reborn in the Western paradise
over which Amitabha presides.
And find therein
far greater ease of spiritual development,
of awakening, of becoming a Buddha,
than is to be found on the face of this difficult earth.
And all this, of course, derives from the ancient Indian idea
that the present epoch of the world's unfoldment
is the darkest of dark ages,
called the Kali Yuga.
And in the Kali Yuga,
or the Mapo, as Buddhists call it,
it is peculiarly difficult
to advance towards any kind of spiritual development
because it's an age of decadence,
the end of which will witness the total destruction of the world
prior to its remanifestation in some future time.
And therefore, the story goes on to say
that this great Buddha, Amitabha,
did in course of time attain to complete Buddhahood,
signifying the fact that his vow is fulfilled
and that anyone who simply repeats the formula,
Namo Amitabhaya in Sanskrit or in Japanese,
Namo Amidabhutsu,
which is roughly translatable in English
as the name of Amitabha Buddha,
or Namo is used in Sanskrit or Japanese,
somewhat as the French say,
where they just say name,
meaning hail, I suppose, in English.
We have no real equivalent of it.
But the idea is that anybody
who repeats the name of the Buddha,
Amitabha,
in perfect faith,
will without any other effort,
any other kind of spiritual endeavor
on his own part,
however evil,
however depraved he may be,
he will be reborn after death
in this spiritual state
in which the task of becoming a Buddha
is rendered so easy
as to be, as we should say,
a perfect cinch.
And of course,
all commentators on Buddhism say,
well, this of course
is how religions degenerate.
They become popular,
high-in-the-sky selling organizations
where absolutely nothing
is required of the faithful
except an occasional contribution.
And the easier you make it
in contrast to the other sects
which make it more difficult,
the more people will flock
to your following,
the fatter the contributions will be,
and it all ends up
with a prayer wheel
where all you have to do
is make the thing revolve,
you don't even have to think about it,
and incalculable supernatural merits
are stored up on your behalf.
But it's very dangerous
to jump to conclusions of this kind
about this type of religious
or spiritual manifestation
because in practice
the Shin school of Buddhism
has had some of the most remarkable adherents
and produces a type of personality
which is known in Japan
as a myokonin.
Literally translated myokonin
means a wonderful, fine man.
That's just a literal translation
which doesn't at all convey
the sense of this kind of personality,
the myokonin.
But the myokonin,
a man like Shinran himself
founded the Shin school of Buddhism
in Japan
is a man
who has in a way
understood the profounder meaning
of the doctrine of this school.
And perhaps before I talk
about the personal characteristics
of the myokonin
I should try and indicate
what may underlie,
what may be the deeper meaning
of this seemingly decadent,
highly popular
and easy form of Buddhism.
Perhaps the best way to do this
is by means of the critique
which this particular school
uses against those
who follow the other way,
who follow the way of jiriki
or self-power.
The followers of the Shin school
would say
that a person who attempts
to make spiritual progress
by his own efforts
is battling against
the worst possible obstacle
to any progress at all.
And that is that
in thinking that he can do it himself,
he's like a person
trying to lift himself up
by his own bootstraps.
Or to put it in another way,
he suffers from the pride
of imagining
that his own will,
his own energy
is sufficient
to change himself.
After all,
if he needs changing at all,
it is precisely
the character
and the motivation
of his own will
and his own energy
that needs changing.
And how is this change
going to be achieved
by that very will
which so stands
in need of change?
To put it in the
more usual language
of this school of thought,
they say that
the average human being
is so weighted down
by karma,
that is,
if we put it
into more modern terminology
we would say,
he is so fundamentally conditioned
by his upbringing,
by his social environment,
by the temptations
of the world,
the flesh and the devil,
that there's really
nothing he can do
to make himself any better.
And everything
that he does do
is simply a manifestation
of the same conditioning,
masquerading like a wolf
in sheep's clothing.
Therefore,
if the human being
cannot transform himself,
if he is to be
transformed at all,
he must rely
on some power
greater than his own.
Now, of course,
this other power
may be represented,
figuratively speaking,
like we represent God
in the Christian tradition
as a spiritual entity
or force
or intelligence
quite other than
and apart from man,
or it may be represented
on the other hand
as other than us
in just the same way
that the functioning
of our own bodies,
the beating of the heart
and the operation
of the lungs
goes on
quite independently
of the conscious will
and is other
in that sense,
although in another sense
those unconscious
and automatic
or spontaneous
functionings
of our organism
could be understood
as more fundamentally
and truly ourselves
than the things
that go on
in our rather
superficial consciousness.
And if you interpret it
in that latter way,
the idea of
kariki
or reliance
on the power
of another
is really
reliance
on something
deeper
in yourself
than your surface
consciousness.
and that I think
is the sense
in which the
profounder followers
of the school
of Buddhistic thought
understand the doctrine.
So the Myokonin
or as I said
literally
the wonderful
fine fellow
is the kind
of personality
which
this doctrine
engenders.
Now what is he?
He's the kind
of person
who
has realized
through and through
the fallibility
of his own humanity.
He's the kind
of person
who knows himself
thoroughly
who has
a rather
wry and humorous
view
of his own
oh shall we say
his own
high motivations
and ideals.
He knows himself
thoroughly
for the rascal
that he is
and doesn't pretend
to be anything else.
And this
if that were
all the word to it
is a very likable
former fellow
from my point
of view
I always feel
uncomfortable
with people
who don't have
this realization
of their own
inherent rascality.
The people
who have
pretensions
to holiness
and righteousness
who are so
deceived
as not to know
that in their
heart of hearts
they are after all
rapacious
and selfish
human beings.
But the Myokonin
makes no bones
about this.
He knows
that's what he is
and he knows
that by the exercise
of his own will
and of his own
intention
and his own
conscious effort
he can't be
anything else.
And so there is
in him
a kind of
fundamental
honesty and
sincerity
from the start.
What he goes
on to be
beyond this
is
something a little
different
because Myokonin
is called
a marvelous
fine fellow
because somehow
or other
he does seem
to transcend
the ordinary
kind of human
rascality
to become
a truly
unselfish
a truly
human being
loving others
understanding
others
sympathizing
with others
a wonderful
compassionate
man
because he
has been
enabled
to love
himself
to accept
himself
in the
profoundest
possible
way.
For if you
translate
into
more modern
and less
symbolic
language
this idea
that
by the mere
repetition
of a formula
by the mere
act of faith
in the power
of a transcendent
divine being
one is able
to be saved
or made
a Buddha
or perfected
just as you
are by an
act of magic
which lifts
you up
and transfers
you to another
realm.
If you
translate that
as I said
into a more
contemporary
way of talking
it would be
to say
something like
this
that the
intent
of the
symbology
is to
say
that the
condition
of growing
psychologically
and spiritually
is to let
yourself alone
and not to
fight against
what you are.
The more
you try
to make
yourself great
to make
yourself
unselfish
to make
yourself
loving
you are
simply
tying yourself
psychically
into a knot
a kind
of paralyzed
state
which makes
it impossible
for you to
be anything
except as we
might say
all fall
up
but if
on the
other hand
you let
go of
yourself
and do
not try
to change
yourself
you relieve
yourself
from this
inattention
you as it
were unblock
the conduits
of psychic
energy
within yourself
by not
straining
on them
and are
therefore
enabled
to grow
naturally
like a tree
or a plant
and this
is exactly
the attitude
of the
I think
that one
of the
most
fascinating
of these
characters
is one
who
as a matter
of fact
did not
actually
belong
to the
Shin
school
of Buddhism
although he
has in many
ways
entirely the
same
spirit
because at
root
there is not
so much
difference
between this
profounder
understanding
of the
Shin
school
and other
types
of Buddhism
such as
Zen
is ordinarily
understood
to represent
the extreme
of the
Jiriki
way
of
fighting
along
by one's
own
strength
but the
intent
of the
Jiriki
emphasis
of Zen
the self
power
the
willful
striving
sense
is something
like this
to
exert
one's
will
to the
utmost
in order
to realize
its
futility
to make
the most
desperate
attempts
to change
one's
motivation
and one's
conditioning
in order
to discover
that in
the last
analysis
it can't
be done
and that
it is
merely
a futile
struggle
to lift
yourself
up by
your own
bootstraps
and so
as a result
of this
the Jiriki
form of
Buddhism
produces
very often
the same
type of
personality
as
the
Tariki
and one
of the
most
marvelous
examples
of this
spirit
is a
monk
or
I'd rather
call him
a hermit
and poet
by the name
of Ryokan
who lived
between
and 1831
a man
who is
extraordinary
in all
the annals
of
sagehood
and sanctity
for the
reason that
everybody
loved him
I don't
think he
had any
enemies
at all
and this
is really
a very
remarkable
achievement
after all
it's so
easy to
be so
holy
that you
are
a
challenge
to the
world
and that
everybody
feels
uncomfortable
in your
presence
feels
accused
by your
sanctity
and given
a bad
conscience
and the
result
of that
you get
loathed
you make
all sorts
of enemies
and finally
you get
crucified
but it's
really a
very remarkable
achievement
indeed
to be
all that
and lovable
too
to be
without enemies
the friend
of everybody
and yet
involving
absolutely
no compromise
with one's
integrity
and honesty
such a man
was Ryokan
really marvelous
and many
many stories
are told
about him
and I think
these anecdotes
about him
describe his
personality
more delightfully
than anything
I could say
by way of
a character
analysis
or comment
in that fashion
first of all
it must be
understood
that the
myokonimora
type of person
like Ryokan
is one who
has truly
become again
as a child
he's not
senile
he's not
in second
childhood
in that sense
but a person
who is
really full
of a genuine
wonderful life
who has
so accepted
himself
so let go
of himself
is so
not pretending
and gives himself
no airs and graces
that he can relax
and be perfectly
natural
and so the story
is told
that one day
Ryokan was
going along
baking his food
and he met a friend
who invited him
to spend the night
at his home
well in the room
where he stayed
there was a picture
of a tiger
hanging on the wall
and Ryokan
looked for a long
time at the picture
and was so
intrigued by it
that after a while
he came to feel
that he himself
was a tiger
he fell to the floor
and all
running around
on all fours
he growled
at the tiger
in the picture
he said
and the tiger
seemed to look
at him
and answer him
Ryokan again
shouted
and the tiger
seemed to answer
and appeared
to be going
to approach him
and Ryokan
getting a great deal
of fun out
of this game
repeated it
many times
but just then
a maid
of the house
appeared
and was
quite astonished
when she saw
the priest
on the floor
for a moment
she didn't understand
what had happened
and was very frightened
and then she
recognized him
oh Ryokan
Sama
so it is you
who frightened me
so much
what are you
doing there
startled by her voice
Ryokan
stopped his game
of imitation
and shamefacedly
spoke to her
on his knees
did you see
what I was doing
he asked
you did
oh that annoys
me very much
but good mate
please keep it a secret
otherwise
I won't know
what to do
for people
will think
I'm crazy
and then
there's another story
which tells
of
servant boy
who came
to the little
hermitage
where he lived
in the mountain
bringing a letter
from one of his
friends
and just at that
moment
Ryokan
was absorbed
in trying
to juggle
his begging bowl
on the top
of the pole
when the messenger
called out
and delivered
his letter
Ryokan
stopped his juggling
for a brief interval
glanced over the letter
and wrote his answer
the bearer
made his departure
and Ryokan
resumed his play
his bowl
time after time
slipped down
to the floor
but
again and again
he had set it up
on top of the pole
many hundred times
did he struggle
to accomplish this feat
and after some time
the messenger returned
Ryokan
was so engrossed
in his play
that he felt annoyed
at this interruption
and did not pay
any attention
to his visitor
while the boy
waited for some time
and finally called out
in a loud voice
Ryokan
look here
what does this answer mean
my master
is angry with me
and has ordered me
to ask you
to take back
the letter you wrote
before
and give me
your real answer
please do so
Ryokan
then had
taken the intruder
and opened the letter
he had written
only a short time before
and what was his surprise
when he read
the bowl
turns round and round
he broke into laughter
oh dear me
excuse me
I've made a mistake
he exclaimed
he then wrote
another letter
but as his mind
was filled with thoughts
of the bowl
and its play
the answer didn't come easily
the great delight
of Ryokan
was playing with children
in the village
where he went down
to bake his food
and one fine autumn day
when he was going
quietly through the village
he was suddenly disturbed
by the sound of a voice
apparently coming
from a persillin tree
and turning his eyes
to the place
where the sound came from
he discovered a boy
clinging in great fright
to the topmost branches
and crying for help
oh wait a moment
my boy
he said
I'll help you down
and then I'll pick
some of the fruit
for you
Ryokan
brought the boy
safely to the ground
and then began
to pick the coveted fruit
he plucked one persimmon
and was about
to hand it to the child
when he decided
that it would be well
to taste it first
in order to give away
the very best
the first persimmon
was therefore
thrust into his own mouth
mmm
how sweet
he exclaimed
he picked another
and again stuffed it
into his mouth
mmm
good
again and again
persimmons found their way
into his mouth
accompanied by the exclamation
mmm
sweet
how sweet
to himself
oh dear me
he said
pardon me
do forgive me
I shall pick the best
for you now
the very best of all
and as many as you like
saying this
Ryokan
dropped persimmons
to the boy
one by one
all red
and very sweet
and then there was
once someone
who told him
that
if you picked up
money on the road
it made you feel
very happy
so one day
as he was traveling
back to his hermitage
he thought he would try
to see what it was like
accordingly
he took some of the coins
which he had begged
from the villagers
and let them drop to the ground
he then picked them up
one by one
but though he did this
many times
he didn't experience
any particular feeling
of joy
I can't understand it
he said
they tell me
that it is pleasant
surely they wouldn't
deceive me
he tried it again
and again
but always without
any result
in the process
of dropping
and picking up
his money
he gradually lost
all he had
in the grass
for a long time
he had to search
for the money
but he found it at last
and then with a cry
of joy
he exclaimed
ah
I understand now
to find money
is certainly a delight
and once
when he was invited
to stay
in the home
of some friends
they had to go out
and they asked him
to watch the house
and he got kind of sleepy
that the cat
was going to sleep
on his lap
and suddenly
he heard a funny noise
he thought it was the cat
but there was the cat
asleep on his lap
what was that sound
he stole quietly
to the paper screen
which separated
the veranda
from his room
and peeped through it
with childish curiosity
and there in his room
he saw a shabbily
dressed man
searching in a chest
of drawers
and taking clothes
out of it
uh oh
he's a sneak thief
thought Ryokan
of course Ryokan
didn't want a thief
to take clothes
from his friend's house
so he made up his mind
to frighten the robber
and drive him away
he therefore crept
into the room
and stood behind
the thief
and the robber
utterly ignorant of this
went out of the room
with a package of clothes
and hastened into another room
to look for more
and Ryokan
followed stealthily
stepping always about
ten feet behind him
and when the robber
turned to the left
he also quickly
went to the left
and if the thief
turned to the right
Ryokan did the same
always just behind him
another slight turn
brought the robber
almost in Ryokan's direction
but the priest
was so quick
that the thief
didn't see him
it seemed to Ryokan
as if he were playing
a game of blind man's buff
so absorbed
did he become in the game
that before he knew it
the thief had slipped away
with a stolen package
the priest
suddenly came to himself
and realized
what a serious mistake
he had made
but his concern
was not so much
over the lost things
his heart was full
of pity for the thief
as he thought
of his shabby clothes
and his sad face
late in the evening
when the family returned
and were full of dismay
when they saw
what had happened
Ryokan just sat in silence
and smiled as usual
among his written effects
was found this curious
little document
it just said
favorite things
cotton cap
towel
paper
fan
money
ball
and marbles
necessities
bamboo hat
gloves
stick
bell
things for travel
some clothes
an oil paper cape
a bowl
and a bag
don't forget to read this
before starting
otherwise you will suffer
from want
he liked to smoke too
he was very fond
of tobacco
and he always had
a shabby old skin
tobacco pouch
which he kept
his tobacco in
very often it was empty
then he would go out
on the streets
with his tobacco pouch
tied at the end
of a long string
down his back
people knew at once
what he meant
when they saw
the pouch dangling
behind him
and would hasten
to fill it with tobacco
among other things
Ryokan was very famous
as a calligrapher
his handwriting
was greatly prized
and there was a barber
to whom he used to go
to be shaved
who very much
wanted a specimen
in his writing
to hang on a kakemono
a hanging scroll
on his wall
but Ryokan just
wouldn't give it to him
well one day
in the middle
of shaving his head
the barber stopped
and left him half shaved
and said
now I won't go on
and finish shaving
unless you give me
the piece of writing
I want
so immediately
Ryokan wrote it for him
and then the barber
finished shaving him
the barber couldn't read
and some days later
when somebody
who could read
came into his shop
said why
this inscription is incomplete
there's a word missing
so next time
Ryokan came by
the barber said
but you didn't write
the full inscription
oh no I know
he said
I didn't write
the full inscription
because you didn't
shave all of my head
the missing word
you will find
I've written
the same inscription
but put the missing word
in twice
at the home
of an old widow
who always gives me
extra bean curd
when I need it
such
by anecdotes
is the temper
of a man
who is
profoundly at home
in the world
difficult to think about
difficult to talk about
because to praise
such a character
is to tempt one
to imitate him
and one can only
imitate him
by not doing so
at all
but by being
just completely
one's self
that was
Alan Watts
with a discussion
of Buddhist
mysticism
from the
Philosophy
East and West
series
a discussion
of Buddhist
mysticism
for information
on the Alan Watts
radio series
and also
some
um


===== Way Beyond The West - 05 - Return To The Forest =====

Electronic University presents Return to the Forest with Alan Watts.
During the past few months, I have been studying an extraordinarily interesting paper written by Joseph Campbell,
whose name will be familiar to many of you as the author of a book on mythology called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Joseph Campbell is also the editor of the posthumous works of Heinrich Zimmer,
which have been published by the Bollingen Foundation.
And as a matter of fact, an extraordinary amount of those works is his own original writing,
since they were compiled from Heinrich Zimmer's notes.
But the particular paper I mention now was presented, I think, in 1957 in August
at the Aronofs Conference in Ascona in Switzerland,
a meeting of scholars and philosophers and psychologists and scientists,
which gathers every year under the auspices of a lady who has for a long time been interested in the work of C.G. Jung.
And the particular paper which Joseph Campbell presented at this conference was called The Symbol Without Meaning.
It isn't published in this country as yet,
and only appears in the Aronof Jahrbuch for 1957, which is published in Switzerland.
And I expect it will shortly be forthcoming in the excerpts from the papers delivered at those conferences,
which are published by the Bollingen Foundation.
Now this particular paper, The Symbol Without Meaning,
is an exploration of an extraordinary phenomenon in the history of religions,
which you might call the beginning, the development, and the dissolution of cosmologies,
of great views of the world under religio-philosophical auspices,
which are the, as it were, languages about the universe devised by various cultures.
Now he distinguishes two great phases in man's religious history,
which he equates with two styles of culture,
which predate our own technological style of culture.
And these are, respectively, the hunting cultures and the agrarian cultures.
He points out that the kind of religion which is characteristic of a hunting culture
is what now generally goes by the name of shamanism.
Although this particular word is distinctive of Mongolian styles of so-called primitive religion,
nevertheless, the phenomenon known as shamanism is found distributed all over the planet.
Shamanism is characterized by the fact that it's a very individualistic type of religiousness.
That is to say, the religious experience of the shaman
is not something which he gets from an authoritative priesthood.
It's not something handed down from generation to generation
for which he goes to a human teacher.
The shaman is a solitary
medicine man,
man of power,
who invariably has to find his experience for himself.
Usually it is by
going alone into
the dangers of the forests or jungles,
or
holding himself up
for some days in his own hut.
and undergoing some kind of ordeal,
not necessarily on the physical level,
so much as on the psychic level.
Going through an adventure
in
the psychic world,
the world of spirits.
And when he comes through the ordeal,
he comes out
and initiates
of power.
The reason why
one must attach so much importance
to the individual character
of this experience
is that it goes along
with the general style of a hunting culture
in which
every individual man
contains the whole culture.
That is to say,
it's not the kind of culture
in which specialized functions are needed,
in which there is a division of labor.
The hunter
spends much of his time
on his own,
and he has to learn
to take care of himself
in the forests
without any
other human aid.
And although there are
societies
and social groups,
they are composed of men
with their women and children,
men who are
equals
because of the type of
life that they follow.
Now, an entirely different
state of affairs
arises
when we get a settled
agrarian culture.
Here,
because the style of life
is more complex,
the division of labor
is required.
And you begin to get
not only a separation
of human beings
into various
castes
and various functions,
but also the necessity
of devising
far more complex
complex languages
and institutions
to provide communication
between them.
And this always involves
a very, very powerful
socialization
of the individual.
Spending his time
more and more
in a settled place
and therefore having
greater intercourse
with other people,
he has to learn
to think in accordance
with common patterns,
whether these patterns
be based on
language
or on
the
type of work,
the geographical
features
of the
area
which he inhabits,
whatever they may be.
Each individual
has to subordinate
himself
more and more
to
a socially
implanted
view of life
because only
under these conditions
is communication
between the individuals
possible.
And so it comes about
that the style
of religiousness
which one associates
with an agrarian
as distinct
from a hunting culture
is a traditional
and authoritative
style of religion
in which the individual
derives his experience
from a tradition
usually embodied
in a priesthood.
And Campbell
goes on to point out
that the first
historical
instances
of the
appearance
of the
familiar
circle symbol
which is called
in Sanskrit
the
mandala
is associated
with
the agrarian
cultures.
No example
of this kind
of symbol
is found
archaeologically
prior to
the
development
of
an agrarian
community.
I might say
something about
the mandala
as a
world
mythological symbol
although anybody
who's studied
the works
of C.G.
Jung
is very familiar
with it.
The mandala
is essentially
a circle
usually divided
into four quarters
or multiples
of four
and has in it
as it were
the general theme
of the integration
of
a community.
It is not
unlike
for example
a stockaded
village
or city
a ring
of defense
around the
center
and
Campbell
shows
that
the
symbol
represents
the formation
of the kind
of society
we're talking
divided into
four
groups
just as
in medieval
European society
we had
the spiritual
power
the priesthood
the temporal
power
the nobility
the commons
and the
serfs
so in
ancient
Indian society
we had
the
Pramana
caste
the priesthood
the Kshatriya
caste
rulers
and soldiers
the Vaishya
caste
the commons
or merchants
and the
Shudra caste
the laborers
so these
four
castes
represented
as it were
represented
by the
four
divisions
of the
mandala
the
common
integrated
encircled
community
the important
point that he
makes about
its religiousness
is as I
said
that it
was an
experience
carried
down by
tradition
an
experience
in which
a priestly
caste
was the
authority
and
which
had to
be
a
common
experience
just because
the whole
style of
life in a
community
of this
kind
depended
upon
communication
and
we can
communicate
with each
other
by virtue
not only
of sharing
a common
language
but also
more importantly
by sharing
a common
view of
the world
a common
type of
sensuous
experience
which is of
course why
those who
have
the type
of sensuous
experiences
which we
call
hallucinations
and illusions
do not fit
easily into
a community
but every
so often
his paper
goes on
to show
social
cosmologies
views of
the world
held in
common
by societies
tend to
break up
and
actually
he starts
the paper
in the
15th century
when through
the expansion
of the
western world
through
not only
exploration
of the
surface
of the
globe
but greater
knowledge
of astronomy
begins to
break up
the
geocentric
view
of
the
Ptolemaic
universe
the view
of the
world
under which
Christianity
itself
had come
to birth
and this
he looks
upon as
a breaking
up
of the
mandala
a breaking
up
of
the
communal
agreed
stable
picture of
the world
by means
of which
men were
able to
communicate
with each
other
and a
breaking
up
therefore
which
involves
a
disruption
of all
our
means
of
communication
and a
throwing
of
culture
into
fundamental
confusion
it is
perhaps
if this
be true
just
because
of the
breaking
up
of the
unified
world
view
and an
entry
into the
confused
world
of the
relativistic
world
of modern
thought
that
the
western
peoples
have
become
interested
in
other
and
former
attempts
to deal
with
life
as it
must be
lived
when
the
mandala
as it
were
breaks
up
for
after
all
the
idea
of
going
beyond
the
communal
view
of the
world
and
somehow
managing
to get
along
even
still
in
modern
Indian
society
that
when
a man
has
done
his
work
in
society
and
is
able
to
hand
over
his
caste
duties
whether
they
be
priestly
or
political
or
professional
to his
son
or
sons
that
as I
think
you all
know
he
as it
were
abandons
the
world
and
gives
up
we
speak
of that
usually
as
holy
man
or
hermit
or
spiritual
devotee
of some
kind
but what
is of
particular
interest
in this
connection
is that
the
abandonment
of caste
is also
called
entering
into the
state
of
vanaprastha
in Sanskrit
means a
forest
dweller
and in
this
sense
the man
who gives
upcast
goes
back
as it
were
to
the
style
of
life
that
predates
the
agrarian
culture
he
goes
as it
were
back
to
shamanism
and
this
is true
not only
in
Indian
culture
but
also
in
Chinese
for
whereas
the
Confucian
way of
life
represents
the
community
delten
shan
that is
what
the
mandala
corresponds
to
the
enclosed
nice
little
tight
little
world
in
which
we
feel
we
understand
each
other
and
understand
our
environment
in
China
the
Taoist
philosophy
is
the
philosophy
corresponding
to
the
Indian
search
for
liberation
or
moksha
liberation
that is
to say
from
the
socially
conditioned
view
of the
world
and
there
is
evidence
to
show
that
the
Taoist
solitary
sage
has
some
sort
of
ancestral
connection
with the
shaman
and it
is possible
that the
words
shramana
in Sanskrit
and
shaman
in Chinese
both have
their origin
in the
term
shaman
and the
shramana
indicates
the
sannyasin
the man
who has
given up
social
life
in the
world
and
likewise
the
shaman
in
Chinese
is
the
lonely
sage
in quest
of
immortality
who has
gone by
himself
into the
mountains
and the
forests
of course
we should
not suppose
that the
entry into
the stage
of
Vana
Prastha
or the
return to
the
forest
by the
Taoist
sage
is in
the
strict
sense
of the
word
a
regression
it's
no more
a regression
than when
we speak
of
a wise
man
as one
who has
become
again
as a
child
we don't
mean that
he has
literally
become
childish
that he
has forgotten
how to
think and
speak and
behave in
human
society
and in
exactly the
same way
the person
who enters
in the
stage of
Vana
Prastha
does not
as it
were
become a
wolf
man
a
sort
of
wild
savage
who runs
around in
the jungle
naked and
wears no
clothes and
eats his food
off the ground
with his teeth
he doesn't do
anything of the
kind
but there's some
sort of analogy
in other words
between
going back to the
shaman's religion
going back to the
life of the hunter
and at the same
time going
beyond
the place
where we find
ourselves in a
society
where the
worldview
is a
conditioned
social
pattern
now in
what sense
and in
just what
way
is this
going
beyond
and
likewise
how does
it apply
to our
own
situation
where we
are not
as it
were
going
voluntarily
beyond
a
nice
clear
authoritative
and comfortable
view of the
world
but rather
being forced
beyond it
by the
very pressure
of events
by the
uncertainty
of our
times
and by
the
confusion
and
instability
of
modern
thought
which offers
us no
secure
and
humanly
comfortable
picture of
the
universe
well first
of all
it must be
obvious
that
one of the
things that
is principally
involved
by
a social
system
of
is a
form
of
what
Korzybski
has
called
time
binding
the
whole
possibility
of
thought
and
language
involves
a
codification
of
experience
it
involves
a
form
of
thinking
about
life
which is
basically
after all
description
now
description
is
a way
of
coding
putting
into
symbols
the
events
that
go
by
us
and
as
we
begin
to
be
able
to
put
events
into
symbols
we
develop
most
peculiar
powers
of
memory
it
becomes
much
easier
to
recollect
and
to
formalize
what
has
happened
to
us
and
along
with
this
naturally
there's
the
ability
to
project
our
recollection
into
thoughts
about
the
future
course
of
events
and
this
apparently
is
something
which
primitive
very
primitive
types
of
human
beings
which
animals
do
not
do
to
any
great
extent
but
the
price
that
is
always
paid
for
this
ability
to
describe
and
to
prefigure
what
is
going
to
happen
to
us
is
that
by
being
able
to
think
about
all
sorts
of
future
possibilities
to
experience
the
emotions
appropriate
to
those
possibilities
as if
they
were
present
happenings
in
other
words
the
civilized
man
tends
to be
in a
state
of
chronic
worry
and
fear
and
anxiety
because
he's
always
confronted
not
with
the
simple
actuality
of
what
is
happening
before
him
but
with
the
innumerable
possibilities
of
what
might
happen
and
since
because
of
this
his
emotional
existence
tends
to be
in a
chronic
state
of
anxiety
and
tension
he
loses
increasingly
the
ability
to
relate
to
the
concrete
world
as
it
manifests
itself
to
him
in
the
actual
present
in
which
he
lives
he
becomes
so tied
up
inside
that
as
it
were
the
channels
of
his
sensibility
become
blocked
he
gets
a
kind
of
neurological
sclerosis
the
kind
of
inability
to
give
himself
to
be
spontaneous
to
be
alive
with
full
joyous
abandon
thus
the
more
civilized
we
become
the
more
stuffy
we
get
and
therefore
the
various
ways
of
liberating
oneself
from
society
of
entering
what the
Indians
call
Vana
Prastha
the
life
of
forest
dweller
going
back
to
the
forest
when a
person
reaches a
certain
point in
life
when he
says
now look
here
I've had
enough
of all
this
I'm
simply
tired
of
making
life
not
in the
least
bit
worth
living
by
going
through
the
horrors
as to
what
might
happen
of
going
through
all
this
in the
name
of
efficiency
and
membership
in the
community
let me
for a
while
get away
from it
all
and find
out
what the
score
is
for
myself
I'm
tired
of being
told
what I
ought
to
believe
I'm
tired
of being
told
how I
ought
to
see
how I
ought
to
behave
how I
ought
and so
these
institutions
of going
back
as it
were
to
the
shaman
state
of
religion
of
getting
away
from
the
community
interpretation
of
how
one
ought
to
think
and
feel
arise
in
very
many
great
cultures
of
the
past
now
they
arise
therefore
again
today
and
it's
perhaps
impossible
and
misleading
to
try
and
have
what I
would
call
authoritative
attitude
about
this
phase
of
man's
spiritual
exploration
sometimes
for example
when a
person
wants to
find out
who he
really
is
he
goes
to
a
psychiatrist
and
occasionally
he
will
find
the
kind
of
psychiatrist
who
does
not
have
an
authoritative
view
of what
human
health
is
and
who
simply
helps
the
individual
to
psychotherapists
who
think
they
know
what
an
integrated
healthy
and
normal
human
being
is
and
who
have
a
whole
theoretic
pattern
of
what
is
believed
to be
the
actual
fact
or
what
are
believed
to be
the
actual
facts
of
human
nature
the
actual
design
of
the
psyche
and
they
attempt
consciously
or
subconsciously
to
wangle
the
patient
into
accounts
books
about
authorities
about
their
ways
of
liberation
which
in
many
cases
however
have
tended
to
harden
into
an
orthodoxy
and to
present a
traditional
spiritual
experience
just as if
they were
the kind
of spiritual
experiences
which it
is the
function of
that social
officer
the priest
to impart
and thus
when we
get
swamis
representing
an
orthodox
interpretation
of
Indian
moksha
or
liberation
or
when we
get
even
zen
masters
representing
perhaps
an
orthodox
buddhist
experience
or
seeming to
represent
one
we
should
be
suspicious
because
these
are the
kind
of
experiences
which
cannot
be
transmitted
which
for
their
very
nature
are
something
which
one
finds
out
for
oneself
and
which
if
they
could
be
transmitted
would
not
be
the
very
thing
which
they
are
intended
to
be
because
they
are
discoverers
of
something
authentic
of
something
genuine
of
something
which is
first-hand
between
oneself
and
one's
universe
and
thus
it's
in the
nature
of
things
that
they
can't
be
codified
they
can't
be
made
a
factor
in
social
communication
and
so
it
is
that
it
is
in a
way
fortunate
that
we
here
in
the
western
world
do
enlightenment
more
and
more
of
us
I
think
tend
to
feel
that
we
are
all
alone
together
whistling
in the
dark
that
we
haven't
a
saviour
there
is
no
statesman
clever enough
to
understand
the
frightful
tangle
of
international
affairs
or really
to do
anything
very much
about
it
there
is
our
own
resources
and
this
seems
to
me
to
be
a
perfectly
excellent
state
of
affairs
so
that
we
become
in a
symbolic
sense
back
in the
forest
like
the
hunter
of
old
who
was
nobody
around
him
to
tell
him
how
he
ought
to
feel
and
how
he
ought
to
use
his
senses
and
must
therefore
make
his
own
exploration
and
find
out
for
himself
but
you
know
when
you
study
the
records
of
these
self
discoveries
the
fascinating
thing
is
that
there
seems
to
be
such
a
common
measure
of
agreement
between
all
those
who
find
out
for
themselves
and
yet
always
the
way
in which
he
has
to
find
out
is
his
own
secret
place
and
asks
for
direct
encounter
with
the
world
and
no
longer
as it
were
looks
out
of
the
corner
of
his
eyes
to
see
if
everybody
else
is
doing
the
same
thing
getting
the
same
results
it
is
in
this
sense
that
the
person
becomes
in
the
truest
sense
of
the
authoritative
source
of
life
as
distinct
from
a
person
in
its
original
sense
a
mask
a
role
that
he
is
playing
in
a
society


===== Way Beyond The West - 06 - Talks With Mrs. Huxley =====

So we're going to start out with Alan Watts.
You're going to hear This Timeless Moment, one of my favorites.
Alan Watts talks with Laura Huxley about her biography of her husband, Aldous Huxley.
And this interview was recorded by KPFA at the home of Alan Watts in Sausalito.
Laura, I've been reading your book, This Timeless Moment, with extraordinary fascination.
I don't think I've ever read a biography quite like that.
Because it's not a complete biography.
It's the story of the last days, in a way, or the last years of Aldous Huxley.
But I can't think of anybody else who has been written about by his widow.
And a case where the book was so very largely concerned with the process of death.
And with a highly intelligent form of dying.
There is this, I remember, a story which is supposed to have been told of Goethe.
That when he was dying, somebody called, wanted to see him.
But the maid answering the door said,
But the master is busy dying.
And our culture is one in which death is invariably something swept under the carpet.
We pretend it doesn't really happen.
Yes.
And, therefore, there is no realization that dying is an art.
And it's an adventure, too, you know.
It's maybe, I don't know, but maybe it's the only chance that we have that one.
We don't know.
It is.
And I think, as you tell the story, you acted as a marvelous high priestess in helping someone through this adventure.
Well, Aldous had done the same thing for his first wife, Maria, you see.
And that, of course, gave me the inspiration.
And he spoke very often of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which I haven't read completely, but, I mean, I know the basic assumption.
And, I mean, throughout his work, he spoke about this fact of paying attention.
You remember, in Ireland.
Well, the minor birds call out here and now, boys, attention.
You know, I love so much your seminar, your tapes, and that book is the best presentation of that book that I could help to hear.
Yes, I think that was a very great book, Ireland.
The problem is that I found in giving lectures, if I announce a title for a lecture, and then give a lecture on a different subject,
even though it may be a perfectly good lecture, people are somehow discombobulated.
I think you always give a lecture on a different subject, Ireland, you always do that.
I can talk about the same thing in ever so many different ways.
But the point is, when Aldous put out Ireland, he put it out in the form of a novel.
That's right.
And people have very fixed ideas of what a novel is supposed to be, and they had identified Aldous to a great extent as a novelist.
And then, when it so turned out that Ireland was a sociological textbook, almost, a sociological blueprint in the form of a novel,
they said, well, he's really sermonizing with a few entertaining bits added just because of the novel form.
Yes, I mean, it would have really, I think, been better if he would have written it straight as a manual for living and loving and dying,
because then it wouldn't have, the public would not have expected a novel, which apparently, as a novel, it's not this very best.
No. No, but that's ridiculous. It's quite obvious to anyone who reads it that it wasn't really intended to be a novel.
Well, it's why it's obvious to you, Ireland. It's different, you know.
And, I mean, in conclusion, very few people have read it.
And there are so many sequences, there are so many methods which are so practical for here and now.
It would be wonderful if we could apply only a few of them, we would all feel better.
But, you know, I have really sort of a crusade against useless suffering.
And in that book, there is so much about suffering which is not necessary, it's not creative, it's just, just nothing.
It doesn't bring any enlightenment, any compassion.
A great number of young people are reading this book today.
Yes, yes.
And it has become a sort of inspiration for many of them for experiments in forming new kinds of family.
Yes.
New communities, intentional communities.
But I heard a story where Aldous was challenged about this book and said,
now, did you mean this seriously?
And he said, oh, no, it was purely an intellectual exercise.
Did he say that?
Well, he's supposed to have said that.
I didn't say that.
But what do you think about that?
You were with him while he was reading.
Well, I have to think exactly the contrary.
I don't think it was an intellectual exercise.
I mean, he might have said that as a joke.
Yes.
But he really, every sequence in that book, every method, every recipe, if you like to call it that way,
is something that most of them, at least, he experimented himself in his own life.
And he, I don't know, it was not an intellectual exercise.
The part of the novel, the writing of the novel, it was probably an intellectual exercise because he had to fit it.
Now, I realize that.
Yes, but.
Aldous also once said, when you are with savages, don't fool them with them because you will end up in the cooking pot.
And therefore, he used to know how to be very perspicacious and tactful about his public relations.
But, you know, a thing that has often occurred to me is that Aldous Huxley was one of the most highly educated men I ever ran into.
When you study the field of his interests, the scope of his interests, especially as revealed in his essays,
in, uh, he knew a great deal about the history of art.
Oh, yes.
An enormous amount about the history of science and technology.
He was fond of the theater.
He, uh, he knew about music.
He, he had an encyclopedic mind.
And he carried all this with a lovely urbanity.
So much so that I think a great many people simply didn't know how to understand him because they weren't well educated enough.
That's right.
The frame of reference was enormous.
But, for instance, I can tell you about music.
I am a violinist.
I've been trained as a violinist.
It has been the major work in my life.
And one time he mentioned a concerto.
A Vioti concerto that no one knows except violinists who had to study it, you know, to, to, to work the technique and so on.
And he knew this Vioti concerto was absolutely extraordinary.
He had, he knew as much as specialists, really, in their field.
And then, of course, he could, uh, correlate all of this.
And in this utopia, in this island, he wanted to put everything in, you know, all the chemical study, all the progress in pharmacology and make it into a concrete mysticism.
Well, I think he, uh, well, I think he, uh, along with that, you see, had the difficulty of living in a country where that sort of highly-cultured intellectuality is envied.
And because it's envied, it's put down.
People used to circulate stories, for example, that before going to a party, Aldous would read in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Oh, no, please.
Uh, everything that he'd had to say on the letter P, the origins of that.
And then he would subtly move the conversation around to where the letter P in some way became important.
And then would proceed to be completely encyclopedic upon the subject.
Well, they tell me, before going to a party, Aldous only discussed what I was going to wear and how he liked it and this and that.
Well, I think that sort of story expresses the envy and the resentment which people feel for such high culture.
But I don't think he was aware of that, really.
No.
It would have been very amusing.
I never saw, in all that I knew of him, any kind of awkward self-consciousness about these things.
He had a kind of reserve, which is very natural to Englishmen of his upbringing.
A lot of people, for example, I had a rather similar upbringing and a lot of people think that I'm a bit isolated and difficult to reach.
When it isn't that at all.
It's really consideration for other people, fundamentally, which makes English people reserved.
We don't want to, you know, throw ourselves at everyone.
Yeah.
And so it's very difficult to transplant yourself to the United States, where that's more or less what you're expected to do.
Yes, and yet, with the upbringing, you know, he would live very much in the American way and enjoy it.
You know, we, as I said in the book, we were married in a drive-in chapel.
Well, now, less English than that and less Italian than that.
You can find it.
And he enjoyed it and I enjoyed it very much.
And he did all the things that were done in America, you know.
He didn't try to transplant his own way of living here.
Yes, but of course, there is still a fundamental style of life.
Oh, a style of life, an inner style, yes.
An inner style, exactly.
Oh, yes, very much so.
But, I mean, he would, if I was not there for lunch or something, he would make his own lunch very well.
And this is rather more American.
You mean he was a good cook?
Oh, yes, he was a very nice cook.
He particularly liked to make soups.
We had a whole, he once even thought of writing a little book about making soups.
Well, I never...
How is your own book going on?
Oh, I tell you, I have abandoned that for the time being because I felt that writing about gourmet cookery at this moment would be like fiddling while Rome burns.
Well, so what are you doing about Rome?
I'm writing a book instead about ethics called The Rules of the Game.
And I think that's an extremely important subject for young people.
Oh, yes.
And as you see, in the same way, you could say from a certain point of view that as his life went on, all of Aldous' books became more serious, or I would prefer to say sincere, and concerned with profound matters.
And this is what you're doing.
But, you know, there's a... critics have tended to say about the later work of Aldous Huxley, which begins with a book called Ends and Means.
I remember reading an article by Charles Savage in the Sewanee Review some years ago, discussing the change in his work, and saying that we are really seeing two different sides of the same man.
He pointed out that Aldous is at his best when he is destroying, when he is satirizing, when he is poking fun and contempt at various things.
And so, in all his early satirical novels, he proved himself to be a master of this.
Now, said Savage, he shifts to a certain kind of mysticism.
But the message of this mysticism is really the same as that of his earlier novels.
Namely, that the human world, the world of personalities, the world of differentiation, the world of multiplicity, of nature, is really fundamentally contemptible.
And should all be dissolved in the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum, in the Brahman, in the Ungrund, in the what have you, you know?
Oh, goodness, interpreting, it's a terrible thing, isn't it? It should be one of the great crimes.
Isn't it? Because I was astounded when I read this.
Really? I mean, how can one come to such a conclusion after all that he tries in every paragraph, you know, to say the importance of each person, of each thing in nature, even of things as such?
But he saw that, but these people can't see that he saw it.
You see, I had met Aldous just about the time, just a little before I read that review, and that was back in, oh, 1947.
And he had then written Grey Eminence and the Perennial Philosophy.
And in Grey Eminence, I feel that at that time, Aldous was somewhat under the influence of Gerald Heard's more ascetic period.
Possibly, yes.
That was when Gerald Heard was running the co-educational monastery at Tribuco, and they were trying to take the Kingdom of Heaven by storm, and they were all very much, in a way, mystically uptight.
And I felt a little reflection of that in Aldous at the time.
Of that, yeah, maybe, yes.
But then, when his attitude began to change, he became less and less the Manichaean, and more and more, what I would call a tantric type.
Yes, concrete type.
You wrote me a wonderful letter when he died about that, how you have felt this development in Aldous, especially in the later years, in Aldous's way of being, even of dressing.
I mean, the outer signs, of course, there can be many.
Well, to tell you the truth, Laura, when I first met him, it was in Hollywood, and he came out in the most decrepit old pants and a run-down shirt.
And, of course, he was vastly entertaining, but he was looking pretty shabby.
And I met him again after he married you, and suddenly he was nattily dressed.
He was wearing a beautiful tweed jacket with a handkerchief in the breast pocket just so.
He was beautifully groomed, and I thought, my goodness, something has changed.
I had a wonderful collection of ties, you know.
I must send you one, but you don't wear ties, because it was a magnificent collection, and they would be called psychedelic ties.
Well, I wear ties when the occasion requires.
You must remember, I'm a sort of joker or comedian who adopts the guy suitable for the occasion.
Oh, I know.
Just fair, I know.
But, no, I always had the impression, you see, that this criticism of savages was absolutely ridiculous, because I never met a man who had so many interests.
In other words, he was profoundly interested in all the diversities.
Yes, and he was so curious, and in everything, really, timeless moment.
I mean, it's true, he was living moment by moment.
And he had, I suppose, disciplined himself to that, or maybe that was why he enjoyed life so much.
Yes.
That was, he was, another thing, I mean, people think sometimes that he was a depressed man.
He was hardly ever a depressed man.
Very, very seldom.
He was preoccupied, but they always tried to do something about this preoccupation, you know, the state of the world and all that.
But I think all writers tend to get moods of preoccupation.
You get completely fascinated with writing, and then you may suddenly have to have a meal, and you'll turn up and sit down and eat.
And you can't get off, your mind, off the various ideas or themes you're playing with.
Then your wife may say to you, what's the matter with you?
Can't you make any conversation?
Are you angry with me?
Or something of that kind.
No, that really only happened with Aldous, when he was writing Ireland, because of this contrast, you know, of the novel and the essay.
Otherwise, his writing, yes, he fascinated him, but he was very ready to change, you know, to change the course of his thought.
But with Ireland, two or three times, he was like that.
And then, of course, when he was ill at the end, because there were so many things still that he wanted to do.
And he wondered, you know, how much, how long would he, how long a time would he have, how much energy.
There was a period there like that.
And, yes.
It took a long time to write Ireland, didn't it?
Yes, he wrote it in two or three periods.
He left it sometimes and then went back again.
Of course, that's the hardest thing to do.
In a way, it's easy to write Brave New World, because there the point of view is in a way critical.
But in Ireland, where you want to paint the vision of what you really believe in and what you would like to happen, that's the hardest thing to do.
Yes, and then, as you said, who is it that said that the, the mauvais, the bad sentiment make good novels?
Yes, bad sentiments make good novels.
Yes, yes.
Because when everything is fine and nice and everybody is good and happy, it's very difficult to write about it.
Yes, and in the same way, I think that the, the imagery of Paradise in the history of Western art has been artistically inferior to the imagery of Hell.
If you take, for example, Gustave Doré's illustrations to the Divina Commedia.
Yes.
Those for Hell and Purgatory are fascinating.
But the illustrations for the Paradiso are just these streams of angels in white nighties flying around the sky, and they're very uninspiring.
I know, well, because that's right, but then he should have seen that in different ways, you see.
Now there is all kind of different illustration, because the photography, for instance, photography, there is in your book, the joyous, the joyous cosmology, and the photography of flowers or things of nature.
It is so magnificent that I think that maybe this is changed now, don't you think?
Yes, I think so. I think we are seeing the re-emergence in Western art of sheer glory.
Yes, absolutely.
Which we haven't seen since the stained glass and the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages.
Yes, and it is the same thing. It's the mystical experience which brings this expression about.
I think that the best illustrations of Paradise are to be found in Persian miniatures.
Ah, yes.
Was Aldous interested in those?
Yes. Yeah, we had, well, we had some books, yes. He was always looking with the enlarging glass, you know, to look at the details of this.
Now, I must, to some extent, attribute the change in his attitude and also in Gerald Hurd's attitude to the time when they first encountered LSD.
It seemed to me that in both of them there was a marked shift of attitude.
I suppose that those who would be unfavorable to all this would say, well, that's the time they got their brains damaged.
Yes.
But it was highly interesting damage for both of them because I felt that the attitudes of both of them became somehow enriched.
Oh, yes. Well, of course, I knew Aldous very little before that. In fact, I only met him a few times.
But when I saw him after that experience, which was in Rome, it was this tremendous vitality and this tremendous interest in looking and seeing and experimenting.
Of course, he didn't do this experimenting so often as people thought, you know. It was done very, very rarely and very seriously.
Oh, well, that's what, that's the way I think in any intelligent use of this kind of thing.
Yes.
A single experience gives you so much that it takes several months to digest it.
Yes, exactly.
And, you know, to go on week after week or worse day after day with this sort of thing is to give yourself a mystical indigestion.
Yes.
Yes, and all this had not happened, you see, by the time that Aldous died was just beginning in 1963.
I remember in the last few months or even weeks of his life, he began to hear about abuses.
And so I think it would be horrified to see what, I wonder what he would have done, you know, to prevent this, of course, he would have done all that he could.
And I wonder how much he could have accomplished in preventing this misuse and abuse and the sensation.
There is so much sensation about this thing.
Well, all that kind of thing seems to me to be inevitable in a world where there are no secrets.
In other words, scientific knowledge has to be public knowledge because the community of scientists has to know all about it in order to work.
And therefore there are no secrets and therefore everything gets broadcast around.
And I felt that when Aldous had let the cat out of the bag with the doors of perception and later with heaven and hell, that I ought to write something about it too.
I was reserved about writing anything about it much before, but I felt that he had let the cat out of the bag and that more needed to be said.
Now, of course, the cat would have been let out of the bag eventually, there's no doubt about it.
Well, I think so and probably not as well in such a good manner.
But now, when was it approximately that he first experimented with LSD?
In 1953.
In 1953?
In 1953.
That's right.
And doors of perception came out then in 54.
That's right.
As early as 54?
Oh yes, doors of perception is in 1954.
Oh, I had no idea it was that early.
Wait a second, I was going to Italy and I read it on the plane.
No, it came out in 1955.
55?
Yes, that might be.
No, no, no, 54.
54?
It was in the summer of 54 that I read it.
Because you see, I didn't run into this until 1958.
I think that we met here in San Francisco one time, yes.
Yes, that's right, at the Tokyo Skiaki restaurant.
That's right, yes, yes.
That's right.
But I hadn't encountered it until that time.
You got married in what year?
In 1956.
Well, anyway, I felt that this had fully opened his eyes to see that the mystical world,
or the mystical dimension of unity behind the whole cosmos, was no longer something that
required for its vision, a turning away from the diversity of the material world.
But you could see this unity, this underlying unity, right in the, in the multiplicity of
the material world.
Yes.
And he seemed to be feeling that more and more strongly as time went on.
Yes, yes, yes.
I remember he was writing to me that summer, the summer before we were married, he was
in New York, and he wrote to me that he went to see a musical comedy.
And it was a very poor and vulgar thing.
And he said, yet, even there, if one would look with attention and look deeply, one could
find some kind of essence of beauty.
Well, I had exactly the same experience in listening to a terrible Baptist preacher on the radio.
Well, that's the same thing.
And it was really awful.
Yes.
And it was as phony as it could be.
Yes.
And it was concerned with money.
Send in your dollar.
You know, if you want to copy this address, be sure to send in your dollar.
But as I listened deeply into that voice, it sounded like someone saying, well, I'm just
alive and I got to eat too.
And it was a little baby calling for its mother in the dark.
Uh-huh.
And, but it was coming on like, you know, all this God and Jesus and salvation and everything
and, uh, saying it, uh, as if it knew all about it.
But you could see this was a big front on quaking terror underneath.
Yes.
Well, the same thing, you see, there was nothing that, uh, Aldous really was a very fine musician
and musical comedy for him was not his type of music.
And particularly this one, I don't know which one it was, but it was particularly bad.
And yet, and yet, you know, if you listen, he said, he would find something in it.
Did he ever discuss these experiences with Krishnamurti?
He did.
Uh, he told me that, uh, the very first time that he had it, uh, with Maria
and Dr. Osman, you remember?
Uh-huh.
And then he went up to Hawaii and, uh, spoke about it to Krishnaji.
And, uh, Krishnaji was very familiar with the whole thing.
He said, oh, yes, yes.
He said, oh, yes, that's right.
That's all.
He was, he knew exactly what Aldous was speaking about.
Uh-huh.
I have a feeling that Krishnaji is there all the time, except when he has to come back
and talk a little bit.
And I think that that is the merit of, uh, Krishna Murthy to, to do this, uh, speaking
to people, because probably he would have a much better time not to.
Would, would you say that Aldous was greatly influenced by Krishnaji?
Yes, I would, I would say that he was influenced by Krishnaji, probably more than by any other
single religious man.
Well, I, uh, in a way could say the same thing.
Only, uh, one is always very hesitant in acknowledging any debt to Krishnaji because he
so hates the idea of having any disciples.
Yes.
But I, for my part, feel that he is, uh, one of the most original and profound thinkers
in the world, because, uh, he's always in a bit, a bit unexpected.
He's never in the ordinary ruts of, uh, religious or psychotherapeutic thinking.
Well, the trouble is that he, uh, I mean, the trouble is not the trouble.
And the point is that, uh, that is what he is.
But, uh, he does not give any way to get there.
And that is the great thing, you see.
People say, well, why, how am I going to do that?
And, you know, that he really was, uh, very, very angry at me when I wrote, uh, that book,
you know, you are not the target with, uh, recipes of techniques.
Yes.
He was very innocent, and I told him about it with a great pleasure.
And, uh, oh, he was quite violent about it.
Oh, you tell that story in your book, don't you?
Yes, he was there.
Yes.
And, um, yes, because, uh, I was, I spoke about this, uh, during lunch.
And then we were alone, and he looked at me very, very intensely.
And he said, you know, all these people that go around helping other people, I think they
are a curse, looking at me, you see.
I was so shaken, but after a few seconds, uh, I found myself, and I said, well, what do
you think you are doing?
And this answer was so delightful.
He said, oh, but I don't do it on purpose.
And that was something that Aldous just adored, this thing, I don't do it on purpose.
You know, it was so, so clear to Aldous what he meant.
But it's not clear to everyone because it's not easy, really.
That was the conversation, wasn't it, that, uh, again, it's reported in your book, where
he ends up on this extraordinary note that the state of consciousness that he's trying
to describe as in himself is one which has no center.
No center, that's right.
And it is just the opposite of what we find.
You know, we always try to find the central core of ourselves.
Yes.
And, uh, go to the center, find it, be the center.
And he said, no center.
Yes, that was very strange.
Very strange.
One can feel, uh, that, for him, it's all so natural.
For Krishnamurti, all this is so natural, so obvious, that it seems to him preposterous
even to have to say these things.
But I must say it's not, uh, natural and easy for many people that I know.
It's not easy for me, certainly.
Did Krishnaji in any way disapprove of Aldous's use of psychedelics to see these things?
Well, uh, this I don't know.
He never told me that.
And I don't think that he ever said anything like that to Aldous.
Uh, no, I think, uh, the two men were so nice together.
I don't know.
They didn't speak much.
You know, we once, uh, visited Krishnaji in India for three days.
And I don't think that they ever thought very much about all this deep, uh, philosophies
or modes of existence.
They just were very nice together.
One felt a tremendous liking for each other.
It was a very special atmosphere when they were together.
But I don't know that he criticized that.
He told him, you know, directly you shouldn't do this or anything.
In other words, when they got together, uh, they didn't discuss deep matters, but just
enjoyed themselves.
That's right.
As a matter of fact, I must tell you about this three days because we were living in the
house of this great mystic and, uh, he had a marvelous cook.
And we always look forward to the next meal.
It was the most refined food that you could imagine without any animal.
food, you know, completely vegetarian, and the variety of tastes and the delicacy, I
mean, the great refinement really of the way that Krishnaji lives. He said in a way he
could have been, maybe he is an hedonist, you see, because he appreciates all the things
of perception.
We say hedonist.
Hedonist.
Yes.
I remember him once speaking about materials, and everything, his perceptions are so cleansed,
you know, the laws of his perception are very, very clear. And it was marvelous who was waiting
for the next meal.
You see, this is fascinating, because this doesn't come out in Krishnamurti's lectures.
No, I know, I know.
Nor does humor come out.
No, and he has a great deal of humor, although he's very, very preoccupied about the world.
He was, I haven't seen him lately. He was preoccupied about the world because the world had so many
churches and priests and psychologists, you know. That was, which probably he equates in
a way with politicians and all the rest of it, you know. People that are being followed,
that have followed. He has that. But do you think that, that one can be without leaders?
Do you really think so?
Well, I suppose you could argue that the presence of churches and priests and psychologists were
like the presence of spots on a person who has chicken pox.
Of course, these spots are, in a way, letting off infections inside the body, and therefore
they fulfill some sort of function. But they go with a diseased condition. After all, if
we were living in harmony with the way of nature, the Tao, as the Chinese call it, we wouldn't
need churches and priests and psychotherapists.
I know, but we don't live in the Tao.
No. And, but, but perhaps, um, well, I think, you know, uh, this is a bit off the subject,
but, uh, when you get into a real jam and you realize it's useless to call the psychiatrist,
you're undergoing a very creative experience.
Yes, if you, if you go to the, all the way to the end of it.
Yes, yes, and you don't call the psychiatrist, you see.
I have a kind of terror of calling a psychiatrist into any situation because I know what it might
lead to. And so I always try to leave it alone. And, uh, I don't want to offend my psychiatric
friends by saying this, but, uh, I mean, some of them know how to handle things and some
of them, I just was just talking to one the other day who wouldn't dream of getting one
of these patients into a mental hospital. And, uh, you would not dream. No, he wouldn't
dream of it. He does everything in his power to avoid that sort of a solution or non-solution.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
But, I, I think in a way, uh, this is Krishnaji's attitude to all the people who are trying
to help others is that, uh, a lot of people are doing that kind of work to try and help
other people. But, uh, I know in my own case, I'm not really trying to help the world.
And I think that's what Krishnaji is saying when he doesn't do this on purpose, when he
says he doesn't do it on purpose. Uh, and I think that, uh, Aldous had a very similar
attitude that he was writing about mysticism and, uh, philosophy and religion, not because
he was, or he was even writing about the alarming state of the world. But you never felt in him
the fanatic. No. He was so extraordinarily interested in what was going on, that that seems to me
the primary reason why he wrote. Oh, yes. Well, that is, was his, his life, was his way
of living, you know. Yes. But I ask Aldous, uh, when, uh, when Krishnaji told me that, you
know, and so violently, I said, but, uh, what do you think? Should I do this? And he said, no,
everything should be done. What Krishnaji does is, uh, marvelous, but, uh, what you do, uh,
given tools and given the recipes, that is also necessary. I mean, he included everything.
Yes. He didn't think that, uh, you know, only one thing, that there was only one panacea that is,
of course, was completely different from his way of being. He couldn't have been, uh, so restricted.
But why did you, what did you say just a minute ago about yourself, that you...
Well, I often say, half-chokingly, when I'm asked in a student audience,
why do you go around lecturing on these things? I say, because I'm a philosophical entertainer.
After all, when you, not all entertainment is frivolous. You do pay entertainment's tax when
you go to a concert by a pianist who's going to play Mozart and Beethoven sonatas. You could
hardly call that frivolous. And so there can be philosophical entertainment in the same spirit.
Yes. And then also, I mean, everybody has to express himself, uh,
the best way. And it seems to me you are such a marvelous virtuoso of words, like all these words.
Naturally, you must use your virtuosity. It would be bad for you and for everybody else if you wouldn't.
Now, here, here's the thing that's fascinating. You see, I, in, in using words,
I've been accused of being a word man.
Well, of course you would, I mean, but, I mean, that is, that is beside the point. You can be accused of everything.
Well, of course you can. But, you know, people in, in, especially when you get into the,
this whole new domain of emphasis upon the experiential.
Oh, yes.
Not ideas, not theories, but getting down to the nitty-gritty, the real experience. And so this
is true with the encounter groups, with the tea groups, with the, all that kind of thing. And, uh,
I remember once Fritz Pearl saying to me, he said, uh, the trouble with you is your whole words.
Well, if you are a dancer, you, you, you dance around with words. And I said, now, listen,
Fritz, don't you put down words.
No.
Words are a pattern of life, just like a fern, just like a snow crystal, just like a cloud.
And if I play with that kind of a pattern,
am I any really less experiential than the fern that plays with the chlorophyll and, uh,
such things to become a fern?
In fact, it's marvelous when you think of words. If you just take any one word,
and not just thinking about how it came about in the expression, but just what your mouth does
to, to pronounce that word is the most fascinating thing that you find.
Oh, yes. I love to write nonsense, you know, where the words don't have any meaning.
Yes, but they are just the fact.
But it's just, um, I went to get the bucket of ducks, bucket of ducks, bucket of ducks.
I went to get the bucket of ducks, all on a summer's day.
Caluckity bucket, lickity bucket, snippity snappity snickity bucket, cluppity flippity
flippity bucket, all in the same old way. You know, things like that.
Wonderful. You see, what your tongue and your mouth and your lips had to do to that is a miracle,
you know, it's absolutely a miracle.
But I know, I think that the only people that can do without words are people like yourself and
Aldous. You know, Aldous began to speak about non-verbal education and gave it an enormous
importance. And it's just like, you know, like a millionaire that can say, well, money is not
important because there is so much of it. And you can say it, and Aldous could say it, but for the rest
of us, I think that we have to have the appropriate words. I know how difficult it is for me, you see,
because words is not my mean of expression, you know, I like other things. And I know that it's
very good to have them. And I believe that I notice very many young people here, they get in so much
trouble just because they don't express themselves right. They say the wrong word, you know.
They just have never had either the thought of the opportunity, I don't know which, you know,
but they want to say something not very nice, like to say, you know, I would like to go away,
I would like not to do this. And they say, drop dead. Well, people don't like to hear that, you see.
Yes, I've been astounded at the inarticulateness of many young people today. And also, it goes with
a kind of strange, slightly dead sounding quality of voice, which I can immediately detect on the
telephone. Yes, yes. Somebody calls and says, like Mr. Watts, I was just wondering if there's any chance of
your being so that I could come and rap with you, you know, and there's a sort of dead voice. And,
you know, at once I'm inclined to reject such an encounter. Well, those are the people that must see
you. You must see them. That is a very signal. Because, I mean, you might inspire them to get a
little bit more alive. I think there are many people that are not quite alive. Do you find that?
Oh, sure. Zombies. Yes, but, I mean, also among the people that have taken drugs and so on,
that you expect them to be more here and now. Yes, but they didn't bring anything to it.
You see, that experience with LSD doesn't really do much for anyone who doesn't bring something to it.
But if you bring a lot to it, it enlivens all that you have. The people who have the best LSD experiences
are those who say before they take it, oh, but I don't need that kind of thing. What you're telling
me about is the state of consciousness I'm in all the time. And they have the best results of it.
That is very true, but those people sometimes are put in a mental hospital too, you know,
because they see too much. Maybe. Yes, you can see too much. Yes. Well, the impression might be
so overwhelming. I mean, I'm getting here in your house, here in the boat, I'm almost getting in that
place, you know, because this water and these hills and the light changing. It's so beautiful.
Do you work here right on this window? No, I do sometimes. No, I usually work where the books are.
Yes, because here it's very inducing to just... Well, you should see the changing quality of light
when the dawn hits that mountain, Tamalpais. Even those Air Force radar domes are transformed and
they look like the domes of a mosque. I see. And I feel I'm in some strange Oriental world and the way
the house lights up all these houseboats across here. I mean, the sun lights up all these houseboats.
They become rich and golden and bejeweled. And people would say, well, this is a dirty old slum,
but you should see it at dawn. It's a paradise. Yes.
Well, you see it. And this transformation is really the keynote, isn't it, to our living,
to be able to transform the mind. Yes. Well, it's that sentence which
Aldous Huxley uses for the doors of perception from Blake. Oh, yes.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, we should see everything as it is, infinite.
Infinite, yes. Tell me, what was Aldous's attitude in
the whole process of delight in words? I mean, could you, would you feel while he was working
on something that he was completely delighted with the whole sort of triumph of being able to get
some extremely subtle emotion or some personal attitude in a character that he got just the
Mojist, the right word for it. Yes, the Mojist. Yes, yes. Oh, yes. He was delighted in that way.
And he was delighted with words of others. You know, that he read, he read poetry aloud. I have
a lot of tips, beautiful tips, where he read poetry aloud in English and Italian and in French,
just for the pleasure of hearing these words back again. Yes. Oh, yes. He had this thing of the
word. And then when he helped me writing, you are not the target, you know, I would read to him. He had
such patience, you just have no idea. I would read to him these recipes. And once, if he ever changed the
paragraph, my editor would reject decimal. He evidently said it was too good, you know, it was a different
style. And so that we never went to the book. But one word here and one word there, one word there. He would
just get that word and or a quotation. The quotation was very extraordinary. Yes, well, he had this
enjoyment of words and words in the same time. He thought that one should let them go, you know,
they are not so important. What did he say? Words are good servants but bad masters. That was his attitude.
Well, he had an astounding facility in getting the flavor of human character. This is a thing that I
admire enormously because I would never be able to write a good novel. I think people who write novels
are absolute geniuses. He felt himself not to be a very good novelist. Especially in delineating the
characters of women. Oh, yes. It's so easy to make a rather stereotype of women when writing and it's
very bad. I think that's why I liked D. H. Lawrence so much, I suppose, because he does that so well.
But he could get, by a curious turn of phrase, he could get the sort of feeling about another person
where you say, now, I want to tell you what this kind of, what the kind of person this is. But I,
I just somehow, they're very distinct. They're a very particular kind of person. I wish I could give you
the flavor but I just can't find the word to pin down the kind of individual that is. Like the story
in which somebody was saying, well, I don't know how to tell you what sort of person she is, but she's
the sort of person who would say serviette instead of napkin. And somebody said some other lady person,
well, I always say serviette instead of napkin. And he said, well, you must know just the sort of person
I mean. But in the, in the, the final stages of his life, he was, he was, wasn't he, about to begin
another novel and had written some of it? Yes, he wanted to write a sort of autobiographical,
semi-autobiographical novel. That's what I gathered, yes, from reading as much as you published.
And because he felt that there was so much inter, intermingling, you know, intermingling his own
life with the events of the century. It was so extraordinary what had happened since he was an
adolescent or a child that thought it would be a very, well, it would have been a very big work,
you know, because that was starting, that novel started in 19, in 1900, the first chapter that is
in my book. Yes. And about himself as a child, I think that he was very much like that child that he
describes there. Remember he speaks, also in his lecture, he spoke about Queen Victoria riding on a
carriage about two or three miles an hour. And now similar ladies of similar dignity and age go
around the carnage or in the highways here at 70 miles an hour. He used that to show how we can really
develop our potentialities in so many different ways, in so many different directions. That was one of
his constant thoughts, the development of human potentials. Of course his lifetime spans the most
startling change of the speed of human history that has ever existed. And he, he, he simply, his
lifetime bridges it. Yes, exactly. Because he's got one foot in the Victorian era and one in the 1960s.
That's right, that's right. That's what he wanted to do. Yes. I don't think any of,
any other people at any time have spanned such enormous change.
And he was so much with it all the time, all these changes in different fields.
Well, the critical period of change, you see, was just before the Second World War.
Before? Yes, just before the Second World War. Because, you see, he published Ends and Means
just before he left England, didn't he? That book comes about the same time as Isles in Gaza.
And that was when he knew Gerald Hurd first. Now, what prompted him to move to the United States?
Well, he was traveling, you remember. He was, uh, first of all, he lived in Italy a long time.
And then in Italy, the, the fascist, uh, regime came about. And, uh, Gerald Hurd moved
to America. And, uh, somehow this whole group of Englishmen moved here. And then, uh, he was here,
naturally for his eyesight. It was, he found a teacher that, uh, helped him a great deal.
Yes. In overcoming this blindness.
And the climb, and then they went to live in the desert. But, um, I think that Gerald Hurd was quite,
was, uh, did give the incentive to move here and leave Europe.
So it was primarily just his interest in Gerald Hurd and the, and the group around him?
Yes, you know, and then what was happening in Italy and in Germany and so on, that, uh, made him,
and in England he couldn't leave because of the climate. He would get the, uh, uh, bronchitis just like that.
Oh, really?
Oh, yes.
That's interesting. Uh, I couldn't live in England because I couldn't make a living.
Well, he lived there, you know, I remember when he was a, a critic on some newspaper as a young man,
but he never really wanted to live there. As soon as he could, he moved into Italy and then in France,
and then here. He always went back. He liked to go there for a month or two every year.
Well, I do the same thing. The trouble with England is that it pays very little for books and nothing
at all for lectures. Whereas the United States is quite different. I remember all the saying to me
once, uh, shortly after I came out to the west coast, which was the bin in about 1952.
And, uh, he said, um, we were making an appointment and he said, yes, we're all so busy these days.
He said, it's simply appalling. He said, because nowadays it costs you 12,000 dollars a year simply
to breathe. And if you want to do something more than that, it costs about 18,000.
Yes.
But, uh, why did he settle on Southern California? Do you know?
Well, I think that the first they went up, uh, he and Maria went up to the desert because Maria
had the touch of TB. I think that they thought, they thought that she might,
uh, she might have TB. And then they went up there and they liked the desert and they lived
in the desert for several years and then it became too difficult to live there and they came down to
Los Angeles. Well, I was expecting in a way your answer to be because, uh, California is the nearest
thing in the United States to the Mediterranean. Well, I think California is everything, you know.
Yes, I know. But if you're looking, if you're looking for sun and for cypress and for, uh, palm trees
and, uh, there's a Sutton and also, of course, in the Spanish flavor, it still lingers.
And then he liked to walk. He took every day long walks and this is a wonderful place.
You see, that kind of thing has a fascination for some kind of Englishman. There's a saying,
you know, that an Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate. And this was originally said about, um,
Frederick Corvo, who wrote, uh, Hadrian VII. And, uh, uh, Aldous having spent many years in Italy
has the same feeling, you see, for that, uh, magic of the Southland of the Mediterranean that I have
myself. And, uh, so the reason I came here was that I could sort of mix both worlds and have a
Mediterranean climate with, uh, a standard of living that I couldn't possibly maintain in Italy since,
um, well, I don't speak Italian. I could learn that, uh, it wouldn't be the sort of place I could
flourish economically without depending on outside things. No, we thought about moving back to Italy,
but, uh, we, we went almost every year. And then, uh, the way that we lived here was very, very good
because it was very free on top of a hill, uh, where there are deers and all kind of natural life.
And yet, if you wanted to go to university or to go to New York, it's so simple and so easy.
It's a very convenient place to live from any point of view. Well, uh, again, you know, those Europeans
don't pay for lectures. Yes, again, yes, oh yes, sure. The economy of an author. Now, it's a very
curious thing about Aldous Huxley because when I first knew him, he couldn't lecture for love or money.
Well, that's... He used to put his nose in a manuscript and mumble. Goodness, I never,
I've never seen him do that. But this is something you must be responsible for because after he married
you, he turned into a fantastic lecturer. Fantastic lecturer. But I don't know that I was connected in
any way with that, but it was a fantastic lecturer. But it's incredible. It's incredible. Because what
happened was that, um, right when I first, uh, was out in California, let's see, this was in 1951,
at that time, Felix Green arranged for him to give a lecture at a high school auditorium in Palo Alto,
and he was still in the mumbling stage. Then, uh, after Maria's death, he married you. I went down to
Santa Barbara, and there was a concert being given, in which Stravinsky was interested, of, um,
Yes, yes, yes, yes. And in the intermission, he gave an extremely amusing talk. Yes, and he loved it. I
mean, he really enjoyed doing that. Well, now, what had happened was that always he had been a
fantastic conversationalist. Yes. Even though he was apt to sort of take over the conversation,
nevertheless, he was invariably fascinating. And he used to fill his conversation with the most
amazing anecdotes. Uh, he was particularly fond of kind of horrendous happenings and details.
You remember that time we were talking about when we had lunch at, uh, the Tokyo Skiyaki restaurant?
Uh, there were four of us sitting at the table, and all the neighboring tables stopped talking.
Stopped talking, listening, because... And they listened in because he was talking about subliminal
advertising. Yes, oh, yes. Oh, that really impressed him. How you could, uh, look at President Eisenhower,
but it really was Marilyn Monroe. Yes, yes, exactly. So you associated the beautiful girl
for General Eisenhower with General Eisenhower or with somebody's toothpaste. Yes, yes. And, uh,
he was going on and enlarging on the horrendous possibilities of this. Yes. And I remember
once the conversation going on at great length about the appalling nature of fashion in medicine.
Oh, yes. So that you would never really know at the present time whether it was as ephemeral as an
operation he once described where they removed the long intestine. The long intestine, yes. And he
said it, uh, it's completely disappeared that nobody ever had such an operation. You see, the only
trouble about it was people used to have to go to the bathroom like birds every 20 minutes. But then, you
see, he started to get the idea of lecturing in just exactly the same tone of voice and spirit as he
carried on ordinary conversation. It was absolutely like a conversation. I never saw it. And suddenly,
he got released from the manuscript. Yes. And, uh, well, he said to me, he said,
well, I just decided that, uh, what I was saying was really not so important after all, you know,
the world was not going to be changed by my lecturing. And so it was, uh, I mean, I've been with him,
you know, before the lecture. And usually, before someone goes on the stage, there is all kind of
little ritual and things. He never had anything like that. No, all that's a nuisance. Yes. Yes.
All that's a nuisance. He just would be at dinner with other people and then walk out on the stage.
Yes. He would go sometimes and mumble, and somebody's here, may I go to the man's room before he could.
That was all that he asked. No, well, it was a very strange transformation, especially for somebody
at that time of life. Yes, but he was changing all the time. I mean, after, after the fire, you know,
we went to live with this friend of ours. When the house was burned down. Yes.
Yes. Uh, we went to live with this friend of ours who had two children and two little children. And
it's a completely different, uh, ambience, you know, when there are two children. He never, he never
seemed to mind or to make an effort or to, to, to, to exercise patience. And one does need patience,
you know, for the children. But it was a natural thing for him, I guess, or maybe a training thing,
to take things, uh, as they, uh, as they came, moment by moment without, uh, sort of referring to
old experiences. I think that that he had probably more than anyone else, this, uh, paradox, you see,
where he had this terrific amount of information, information and memory. And then it was freedom
of emotional, uh, uh, conditioning from the past. How so? Well, because the emotion of the past did not
interfere with his present. In other words, he, with his present, he, he responded to the present with, uh,
new reaction. I mean, he reacted to, to the present with fresh reaction and not with a conditioned reaction
from the past. Do you think he was in some respect helped by that, by the fire? After all, all his
past, all the records of his past, practically, were wiped out. Yes, everything, yes. No, I don't think
that the fire did that for him. I think more his meditation and his work with psychedelic and his
constant vigilance in that sense. He was really very, very aware that that should be stopped, you know,
that one should stop this, uh, reacting to the present in terms of the past. Yes. That was very much,
uh, in his consciousness all the time. Well, of course, that's central to Krishnamurti's whole
presentation. Yes. But that fire, uh, I, I had a friend who underwent the same sort of experience,
where she had luckily built herself a new smaller house. And just after she'd moved into it, she'd
kept a lot of records in the old house and it was burned down. And there were all these souvenirs
and letters and photographs and paintings and books, uh, which are suddenly wiped out. And they're
ordinarily things you cling onto and you feel you really can't do without that. And then suddenly
it all goes. Oh, yes. We had, uh, really several throngs of this thing. And so we went. But, uh, he did rescue,
didn't he, the manuscript of Ireland? Yes, he rescued Ireland and the three best suits, the suits that we had made in Italy.
And three suits? Yes. Ah. He said, don't you think we should take some suits? I was, I was in a completely
useless state because the fire had so fascinated me that I was just looking at the fire all the time
and I would not even have thought of that. And all of a sudden they said, oh, I must take Ireland.
So he went upstairs and took Ireland. And then he said, shouldn't we take some suits? So I said, yes, we'll take some suits.
But did he sort of risk his life doing this? No, no, no. Because our, uh, our house was not in fire yet,
but all around. Oh, I see. The fire was approaching at the time. Yes, it was approaching. Oh, yes, I saw it approach.
I saw it approach from the garden. In fact, the walls were illuminated so beautifully. You have no idea.
It was just the right, the right illumination. But, uh, and I was looking so much that I would not even
take in the suit, you see. Well, that's certainly not reacting to the present in terms of the past.
No, that's right, we won't pass. It's just, I was just, uh, not reacting at all. It was just so beautiful, you know.
Yes, it's so fascinating how in moments of crisis we do tend to become much saner than we are normally.
Well, maybe that was sane, I don't know. I mean, people have started to accomplish the most, we, we can become geniuses in crisis.
Yes, but I didn't accomplish anything, you see. I just looked.
Oh, well, I know, but you were contemplative instead of inactive.
Yes.
Exactly the contrary of my nature. Absolutely the contrary. I'm very active.
And there it was, this fire all around.
But who said that the fire, I remember Aldous saying in his lecture and visionary experience,
that is it Plotinus that says the fire is the most beautiful thing in the world.
Yes.
In connection with precious jewels, you know, which contain the fire.
Christians still worship fire because for many people the most important time in a church service
is watching the final extinction of the candles after the service is over.
And they'll all wait on their knees until that's been done.
Yes, it's like seeing the sun going down.
Yes, watching the sunset.
Are there any materials of Aldous left over which will yet see the light of publication?
Well, the letters. Oh, that is going to be a marvelous volume, yes.
It's coming out next year.
It's coming out next year and there are letters since the age of 14 to the last days, you see.
And there are really, it's a marvelous biography there.
You see all the passage in this man's life.
So he wrote a great deal of letters.
Oh, yes.
Was this true all through his life?
Was it true after you got married?
Oh, yes.
He wrote, he answered mail once a week and he wrote an enormous amount of letters.
He's doing, he's writing letters and I always use the telephone.