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So you’ve pushed your nominalist right into the corner. You say the only things that exist are the multiplicity of atoms. And actually, they only exist now.
See? Because only the wi-no-egh—can’t even say it! Only this moment is real.
The ultimate hairline, you see? Zhhwwwt! That’s why the precisionist is making watches that have hairlines narrower and narrower and narrower and narrower, so they can only be seen by amazing microscopes.
Exactly they want to know when does that thing cross that thing? Boing! See?
So eventually they’re going to get down and down and down, and the universe has no time to exist in. Therefore it doesn’t exist. Therefore it’s an illusion.
That’s what bugged Zeno when he got the paradox of motion. Now, either an arrow is somewhere or it isn’t. If it’s moving, it isn’t anywhere.
But it’s obvious: if it isn’t anywhere, it couldn’t exist, you know? It’s the same problem as Achilles and the tortoise. Manifestly, Achilles, in a race, overtakes the tortoise.
But you can talk about this race in such a way that he can’t. Well, how do you do the trick? What you do is this: although Achilles in the physical world overtakes the tortoise, in the intellectual world which you are using to measure the process, you measure his approach to the tortoise by a narrower and narrower scale as he approaches the tortoise.
Although he runs right by it, your measuring process gets more and more minute. You take longer and longer to think about it because you’re counting more units. So that you can indefinitely subdivide the distances he is passing in his approach to the tortoise.
And you can go on talking about their subdivisions forever. So that in terms of your talking, he never gets by the tortoise because you’re drawing the lines finer and finer and finer and finer and finer. So now who’s making the abstractions?
The nominalist was telling the realist: you’re making the abstractions. You’re talking about these vast generalities called humanity and America. Now who’s making the abstractions?
I thought you were the prickly fellow who was so precise and said only these specific, particular details exist. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, you see? But he disappears into abstraction.
So the pot calls the kettle black. So, you see, that fight goes out the window. Because they’ve both, if you push them far enough, they come back to each other.
Push a realist far enough and he comes into a nominalist, push a nominalist far enough and he turns into a realist. What does that mean? Well, it means the same thing as if you investigate matter thoroughly, you turn up with mind.
If we investigate mind thoroughly, you turn up with matter. If you investigate yourself: what do you mean by “you?” How do you know you exist? In terms of what?
What do you discover if you push that? Why, you discover everything else that you thought wasn’t you. You only know you exist because you’ve got things to feel and other people to talk to, and because you’re going yooee-yooee-yoooingg.
You reflect the external world. So investigate “you” and you get the “external world.” Now what happens when you investigate the external world? Well, you get you.
That’s what happens, you see, when finally the physicists wanted to know: how are things like when we’re not looking at them? That’s the great question. You see, in order to see how electrons behave, I’ve got to put them in a process which influences their behavior.
I’m really bombarding electrons with electrons. Now, what is the electron doing when I’m not looking at it? See?
Does the light really go off in the refrigerator if you close the door? So you find, you see, that knowing—the act of knowing—changes what you are knowing. Knowledge of something is the same as action upon it.
You do not know that a ball is rubber until you bounce it, and that acts upon the ball. And that’s so with everything; all knowing. It’s not [that] you merely are a passive spectator.
All knowing is the result of experiments on things. Only in the most trivial instances are you ever—and even then, if you go into the neurology of it, the electronics of it, you’re not a passive spectator. You may just observe things and write them down, although when you do it’s pretty trivial.
The really good knowledge is always accumulated by an action upon the world to see what changes that action makes. So, for example, we take certain fields of science—let’s take medicine and antibiotics. Now, antibiotics are something, first of all, done in very carefully restricted experiments.
They were found very useful, and so they were spread over the social world so that almost everybody has had antibiotics by now. But the problem now arises is this: that the people as we studied them before they ever had antibiotics are different from the people we are studying now who’ve had them. What we knew about people before antibiotics has a little less value.
We’ve got to re-study them every time because we’ve changed them. And the insects, you see, the germs, also adapt to this. They say: these human beings are throwing down all this jazz, and confusing us, and killing us off—we’ve got to do something about that.
And so they changed themselves. So they have to be studied again to know how to attack them the next time. Once upon a time, a spaceship arrived on a strange planet, and they came down and there didn’t seem to be anything living on it.
And they put a lot of stores in, and finally they found that some little bugs were eating the grain that they had stored. So they got insecticides and fixed those bugs. Later they found they had mice, and they were nibbling up some things, so they got some cats sent on the next big ship from Earth, and the cats took care of the mice.
Well, lo and behold, dogs turned up, started making trouble for the cats. So they decided that they’d better shoot the dogs, and they did. And one day they saw, suddenly, a man coming over the horizon with a gun, and they said to the chief, “Look at that!
There are people on this planet after all. And he’s got a gun. Should we shoot him?” And he said, “No, because I have no way of knowing what it will turn up as the next time.” Well, now look here.
What I’ve been trying to show is that you cannot use the language of illusion—that is to say, the language of accurate, separative description—too far without getting into confusion. Push your nominalism and it becomes realism. Push your scientific materialism and it turns into mysticism.
I love doing this. I’ve had great fun. I gave a lecture at Harvard some time ago on B. F. Skinner.
And B. F. Skinner is the arch behaviorist. He is Mr. Mechanist-Psychology. And I took many, many passages from his works and said, “Now just see what he’s really saying is so and so and so—he’s a mystic.” He really believes in the unity of the universe and all that jazz, you see?
The individual organism is a function of the cosmos. And if I say that—you see, I say that he’s a mystic—does this ruin his scientific reputation? What does it do?
But, you see, that’s the great game to play. Just push it along its logical lines, and you arrive up in that predicament. One way or the other, and it really doesn’t matter which way you do it.
You either show that nothing exists at all on their terms, or else that it’s all one. So, in this way, then, we have to resolve the problem of mind and matter by what I referred to this morning as looking at these as dimensions of each other, or as different languages for talking about the behavior of the same thing. What the thing is that’s doing this behavior, or the behavior that has no thing doing it, really, no one can say.
You can’t say what it is for exactly the same reason that you cannot touch the tip of this finger with this finger. To the tip of this finger, the tip of this finger is always inaccessible; to its own touch, you see? And that’s the problem of every nerve end.
A nerve end can tickle another nerve end and say, “Hi, are you there? Am I here?” And it says, “Yes, you’re here.” “Oh.” But it needs another to do it. Now, the whole universe hasn’t got another to rub itself against, so it can’t define itself.
So the basic self in you can’t define itself. That’s why the highest attainment in Zen is no attainment, why it involves no idea, why Buddha, when he talked in the Diamond Sutra to Subhūti—he says, “Subhūti, when I attained complete and unexcelled awakening, I didn’t attain anything at all.” But you can see, I think, that this “nothing at all” is a statement of the same kind as when a logical positivist says, “In making your metaphysical assertion you said nothing at all.” And if you’re Zen you say, “Correct. I entirely agree with you.” And yet, you see, that “nothing at all” was all in all.
That was the thing. That was the big thing. You know, you lost everything and gained everything in one fell swoop.
As having nothing, but possessing all things. Because obviously, you see, if the mirror weren’t there, the images wouldn’t be, and there’d be no connection between them. They couldn’t jostle together.
If the water weren’t there, how would the fishes get around? If the air weren’t there, how would the birds fly? If consciousness weren’t there, how would experiences occur?
You see? If being weren’t there, how could there be beings? So there are in Buddhist philosophy what are called the four inconceivables: water to the fish, air to the bird, consciousness to man, and enlightenment to the ignorant—that is to say, to the ignorant in the sense that a melody is inconceivable to the tone deaf person; in the same way that color is inconceivable to the blind man, sound to the deaf man.
I was discussing the plausibility of two essential features of the philosophy of illusion. The question that we have to decide whether to take life seriously or not—that is to say, whether the plot is comic or tragic. And if it’s tragic, you see, must we say that it’s ultimately tragic?
And the question of: who are you? And are we to say that I, myself, right down at root, am just a little kind of jerk of some kind that really has nothing to do with this cosmos, but just arises in it, and is here on sufferance for a short period, and then absolutely nothing follows, you see? Or, the alternative to that: is what I really am the same as the whole thing—that is, the works, the It, or whatever you want to call It: Brahman, God, the Tao, the great void, the Buddha nature, I don’t care, the Self.
Anything, any name you want. And whereas that attitude—you can look at it from various points of view in judging it. You can say it’s wishful thinking, you can say that it’s insufferable pride, but the point of the matter is—as I tried to show—any other way of looking at things is kind of schizoid.
It looks at human beings as if they’ve arrived in this world like a bunch of birds on the branches of a barren tree. And they just got settled there, you know? They don’t belong.
The sense of being strangers and pilgrims from another domain altogether. Where is this other domain? And how does it relate to this one?
Are they separate? I showed you that even when we say that two domains are the poles apart, the very fact that they’re poles shows that they have a hidden connection. And the hidden connection is the big thing in life.
All you junkies know that! And so, in other words, we get a pattern of organization that is radial rather than an assemblage, as if the universe were really a multiverse: a lot of things that got collected together out of the infinite wastes of space and sort of began to maunder around each other. Whereas the other pattern, which is so much more sensible, is central and radial, and I showed you how the crystals and the stars and the octopuses and even the human beings are all radial structures.
Of course, we don’t see our radial relationship to the totality of the universe because it isn’t obvious. It’s obvious that a tree is an arm of the Earth reaching up and waving at the sky. And a mountain is another kind of radiation from the Earth.
And so is a leg from a body, and hair, and things like that. But what makes human beings, as the highest of the mammals, so conscious of being independent is that they are topologically an enclosed surface, you see, which wanders around independently of the ground. What we don’t notice is that we are not independent of the ground at all; that wandering around is something that is entirely related to there being some ground.
In other words, when you run up a hill, the hill also runs you up it. The hill rises and lifts you as you run, you see? And if you understand that you don’t take a hostile attitude to mountains and hills, you are grateful to them for lifting you up so high in the air—because that’s presumably why you went up: that the thing was high.
It was lifted up. You wanted to be lifted up. It lifted you up.
You had to cooperate, of course. I always like the illustration that I’ve used before—perhaps you haven’t heard it—of the thistledown. The thistledown comes moving through the sky.
I once was playing with the thing, you know? It just came out of the blue sky and I caught it, like that. Pulled it under my nose.
And it started to pull, to get away, see? Looked as if it were a butterfly or something that pulls away when you catch it by the leg. And I thought, “Oh no, of course that’s not the thistledown.
It’s the wind.” Well, which was it? You know, in a famous debate that was settled by the sixth patriarch of Zen, there were two monks arguing when a flag was flapping in the wind whether it was the wind or the flag that was moving. And he said, “It’s neither.
It’s the mind.” And so, in a way, the same thing was true about the thistledown. The mind is the moving thing, because which point of view will you take? Which attitude will you take towards this?
Is it the wind moving the thistledown? Or is it the thistledown that is moving itself with the wind? After all, when you see a sailing boat, and there’s a man in the sailing boat, who is moving the boat?
Is it the wind moving the boat, or is it the man moving the boat because he was smart enough to put up a sail? Much smarter way of getting around than rowing! You don’t have to work.
It’s intelligence, you see: the mind that moves the boat. And so in the same way I thought, you know, this thistledown has some kind of intelligence. It’s radial, it’s organized, it’s beautiful.
And it’s used that to sail itself with the wind, to enable itself to pull like a little organism playing with the wind. And so, in just the same way, each one of us uses the universe to get around, and the universe uses us to play with, and to make games and patterns, and to do its stuff. So because we seem to be disconnected and entirely sealed within our skin, that is a very deceptive thing because the skin is not really the boundary of man.
You will notice that, in various periods of art, human beings have been shaped in different ways and have been more or less transparent at some times, at other times opaque, and at some times the emphasis has been on the state of mind which this human being is in, at other times the emphasis is on the bodily confirmations, and so on. In the work of painters today, one sees images that at first sight one doesn’t recognize as being human. There was an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York some years ago called The New Image of Man, and these things didn’t look like human beings at all.
Some of them did. But that’s because, what does a human being look like—that depends on your point of view. You see, if you are prejudiced that a human being is only what is inside his skin, then you think that when anybody paints the human being beyond those boundaries that he’s lost the image of man.
He hasn’t necessarily lost it at all. You see, there’s an old feeling that the shape of the universe is the shape of man. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that said.
That man is the microcosm, and that the universe as a whole is the macrocosm. Now, as you plumb out into the universe and explore it astronomically, it gets very strange. You begin to see things in the depths that at first sight seem utterly remote.
How could they have anything to do with us? They are so far off and so unlikely. And in the same way, when you start probing into the inner workings of the human body, you come across all kinds of funny little monsters and wiggly things that bear no resemblance to what we recognize as the human image.
Look at a spermatozoan under a microscope; that little tadpole. And how can that have any connection with a grown human being? It’s so unlike, you see?
It’s foreign-feeling. And you get the creeps sometimes about yourself if you feel your own pulse, or if you’re able to look at an x-ray of some way of your inner organs working. See?
They’re all strangers to us. We don’t know about them. And they give us the creeps as if they were… you know, coming across some weird insects in the dark.
That sort of feeling. But what we will always find out in the end, you see, when we meet the very strange thing, and we look into the distant reaches of space, there will one day be the dawning recognition: that’s me! Why, that’s me!
And the whole game of the universe, you see, is to appear as strange to itself as it possibly can. That’s hone how keeps variety going, that’s how one keeps wonder going, and all kinds of exciting developments. How different can you get?
In the beginning the Lord said “get lost” to himself, see? So we shall find, for example, that space that you see all around you and containing you—and you can feel space in many ways. Space is not only something that comes through the eyes, the movement of your arms; if the clothes [???]
for a blind person is his way of knowing space. And you can hear space audibly. Lots of sounds appear to be in restricted spaces or ample spaces.
And the silence that goes with sound corresponds to space. And even Saint Thomas Aquinas, that old Catholic theologian, said that good derives its virtue from evil, just as it is the silent pause that gives sweetness to the chant. But space, you see, that seems to contain—space is one’s mind.
This was common sense to people living in the early Renaissance, for example, at the time of Dante. There are many references in Dante’s poetry to the identity of mind and space. And likewise, in the 8th century texts in China, the Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: he likens the nature of mind to the nature of space.
He says, “Just as space contains all the sun and the moon and the stars and the people and the mountains and the forests, so the nature of mind, the nature of consciousness, the nature of one’s self contains all these things.” So you see that if you think that way, you have an image of man that is global. That is very different from the image in which man is defined as bounded by his skin—that’s a prejudice. We think now, for example: “I have my own private thoughts.” Well, nobody has private thoughts, because one thinks in images and words, and these words and images are derived from the whole thought structure of the society in which you live.
We think thoughts, the domain of mind, is very similar to the grid structure of an electric power supply system. You know what happens is: there’s a network of power stations and transformers so arranged that, if one of them gives out and fails to supply a certain area, immediately the grid connects them with other sources of power. Well, in rather a similar way our minds are connected.
Let’s take one very obvious example of it; what Northrop Frye calls the order of words. The order of words is all existing literature, both rhetoric (what is spoken, of course) and what is written down. Now, it’s his theory that, as a scholar of literature and a history of literature, he can take any piece of writing of a reasonable length and tell you when it was written.
Because everything that is written and said is inescapably related to the whole order of words. And it’s amazing what little things you might not notice would give you away. Because he can say, “Well, obviously, he has read this”—thinking, say, of a particular novelist or poet—“so it must come after the date when that novel was published.” But he couldn’t possibly use an expression like that to say—for example, that “it was a capital day”—he would never use that expression living, say, in contemporary 20th century America.
That’s a Victorianism, or is an Edwardian way of talking. And so, by all sorts of little clues like that the scholar can pin down a piece of writing to when it was written, you see? That is because every individual piece of writing is a function of all writing that’s being done.
Well, now, that’s a very specific and almost crude illustration of something that’s going on in a far more complicated way than that. It isn’t only all writing—all thinking is being done in relation to the total order of thought. And in a still more subtle way, all living is being done in relation to the total order of life; to what de Chardin calls the biosphere.
And it goes way beyond that because of the vast interplay of what we now call gravitational and electrical fields, which embrace everything that there is. That is why the ancients, when a person was born, cast his horoscope. That was a map of the universe at the time of that person’s birth, and therefore it was a drawing of his soul.
Because the soul is not inside the body, the body is inside the soul. The soul, your soul, is the whole universe as it is focused upon your organism. Now, of course, astrology is a very primitive science, and it interpreted the influence of the universe upon the individual in very crude ways, and it works mostly by good guesswork on the part of the astrologer.
If you know how to tell fortunes at a fair you will find out a great deal about how all these predictive psychic sciences work. Because the client invariably gives himself away either by his anxiety to be told the truth or by his anxiety to conceal it. They work equally well.
Now—but there is, you see, underneath the astrological notion, a sound idea: that the true map of the soul is the picture of the universe surrounding the individual. It isn’t necessarily your soul is not the picture of the universe just at the moment when you were born, you see. It goes along all the time you live.
Because the whole thing expresses itself through you. And therefore, in that sense, the map of the stars, the horoscope, et cetera, was an image of man in just the same way as we regard a picture of a human body as an image of man. And it’s an image from a different point of view.
It’s a bigger image. It shows, in other words, that your mind is very largely outside your body. After all—it’s inside, too.
It’s simultaneous. You see, I cannot think, I can’t have a mind, without seeing, feeling, and relating to other people without all the social institutions—not only language, but the laws, the customs, the gestures, the rituals—by which we relate to each other. All those things compose the mind, for the mind is a huge network of relationships and interconnections at a high level of sensitivity.
Mind and matter are, of course, polar. They go together, they’re two ways of thinking about the same thing—or, shall we say, two dimensions of the same thing, just like length and breadth, or just, shall we say, as shape and color. You see, nobody ever saw a shape that wasn’t colored.
Nobody ever saw a color that wasn’t shaped. And yet, we can see there’s a very clear difference between color and shape. But they always go together.
They are always found together. Well, that’s the same sort of relationship between mind and matter. And the difficulty that people have in trying to reduce one to the other, and saying, well, the world is only material, or saying on the other hand that it’s only mental, is the same difference you would have in trying to reduce all shapes to colors or all colors to shapes.
And shape and color are made for each other like a marriage made in heaven. They go together so perfectly, and yet stay so marvelously different. That’s why the Buddhists say difference is identity, identity is difference.
It sounds goofy, but it makes a great deal of sense, because what it’s saying is a relational thing: that you don’t know what identity is unless you know what difference is, and you don’t know what difference is unless you know what identity is. That relationship between so-called opposites is called in the Chinese technical Taoist vocabulary “mutual arising.” So they say “to be” and “not to be” arise mutually, “high” and “low” are mutually posited, “long” and “short” are mutually delineated, and so on. Now, what we see, then, is the totality of the cosmos focused at each point, you see, gives rise to the illusion of the independence of the point from the whole.
Just as the human being, by virtue of having an enclosed epidermis, and to be able to walk instead of having to be rooted to the ground, presents the illusion of being separate. And so that’s why I asked Varda to do these demonstrations last night: because he showed visually the interdependence of the figure and the background, and how the two play together, how you can switch from paying attention to one to paying attention to the other, and in each case it’s significant. That is an art that we have lost in our day to day perception of life, and it leads (practically speaking) to the serious problem of ecological blindness—that is to say, to the ignorance which most human beings seem to suffer from, especially in our culture: that they are inseparably related to their physical environment.
It looks as if we aren’t. It looks as if we can go out with bulldozers and insecticides and every kind of a gadget and make over our physical environment as it suits our whims. But then we discover to our consternation that we’ve upset all sorts of balances.
That the house we made such a nice, flat lot for on the hillside suddenly slides down the hill when there’s a rainstorm, because we took away all the shrubbery that was binding the hill together. And, you know, this happens in Hollywood every day! And nobody ever seems to learn.
That’s, you see, this immense importance of overcoming the illusion of separateness. But people are afraid of that because they think it’s communistic. They think that—the grand style, the great thing about Western civilization is its stress on individual personality and its value, and that we have created the ideal of personal integrity.
That is to say that the most important thing in the world is the individual. All collectivities—corporations, states, and so on—exist as servants of the individual. And if they get in his way and they interfere with his private enterprise (whatever that may be), it’s a bad thing.
Man, the individual, is the crown of creation from this point of view, and therefore, when anybody suggests that individual man is not what you thought was an individual, but is in some way united with, grounded in the totality, then, if you’re of this kind of rugged individualist, you mix up your vocabulary and you call the totality the collective. Now, the collective and the totality are two completely different things. The idea of collectivism is based on individualism.