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It’s the idea that the society of mankind and the physical environment beyond it is a collection. Well, it’s nothing of the kind! That’s the idea of cosmic flotsam and jetsam that all floated together into a collection.
And that’s the obverse of individualism. You know, American individualism is the same philosophy as Marxist collectivism seen from the other side, because they’re both based on the same erroneous sensation of individuality. Now, what people don’t understand is that a complex and interesting personality is not a matter of being isolated, it’s a matter of being deeply connected with and aware of one’s relationship to the whole surrounding cosmos.
Let’s suppose that I’m preparing to make a date with some lady, and she’s such an individualist that her thoughts are only occupied with herself. She never thinks about anything that isn’t herself. Well, she’s an awful bore.
She has nothing to say, she’s not interested in any books, in any landscapes, in any works of art, in any literature, in any other people. She’s a total bore. But the more, on the other hand, she would be interested in all those things that are supposed to be not herself, the more of a colorful personality she becomes.
So the rule is to get away, you see, from these ideas of the individual as finding his individuality and uniqueness through independence, but rather finding his individuality and uniqueness through being related. Because, you see, that’s what makes a—look at the word “relation” from another point of view: when we talk about our friends and relations. Supposing I come across some individual who I can’t make out what kind of a thing he is.
I can’t make out where he came from. His accent isn’t American, it isn’t British, it isn’t particularly Midwestern, it certainly doesn’t have the overtones of New York or New England, he just talks flat. And as to his style of clothing, it’s utterly nondescript.
Well, I think this is pretty much a bore. What I like to see in an individuality, in a physical individual, is ways that I can relate him to his ancestry. That he has this subtle little accent, or this mannerism, or this eccentricity, or whatever it is that connects him with the great background, you see?
But it’s his connections with his background that makes him so significant. If I can’t see that connection he becomes uninteresting. So there is no thought in this approach to devalue the individual.
What really does devalue the individual is any kind of religious or political philosophy that overstresses his isolation. And this is something that Californians in particular need to take note of. Because many people feel, you see, that the development of technology and of centralized government is a direct threat to the value of personality.
Well, in some ways it is. But that is only because technology is being developed by personalities who don’t understand what personality is. You know, working on the old individualist–collectivist point of view.
They’re the same. So then, you see, this is then the illusion created that the individual is operating all by himself, that actions and thoughts and deeds proceed solely from inside his skin, so that we can say: there’s where it started. You see?
Well, that’s the game of praising and blaming, the game of who started it, who can we give candy to, who can we bang on the head? In other words, somebody has to be “it,” as in The Farmer in the Dell, you know, and find you get at the end “the cheese stands alone, the cheese stands alone, hi-ho, the derry-o, the cheese stands alone.” Well, why? Who started it?
The group. Well, another fear about this is that it absolves people of responsibility if they see through the illusion of separateness. The truth of the matter is, actually, that no philosophy of history has really succeeded in making anybody more or less responsible.
In other words, let’s say that you are a Christian, a Catholic of the old-fashioned medieval type, who believes that you’ve got an individual soul with free will, and that you’re under responsibility to God, to obey his law, and that if you don’t, the most disastrous consequences will befall you; you’ll fry in hell forever. There’s no evidence whatsoever that believing in that made people any more virtuous than they are today. None at all.
Indeed, clergy who believed in all this owned whore houses and all kinds of things. They were just as discontemptuous of law and order as anybody could be now. And part of the reason was, of course, that the threat of hell was an unimaginable penalty like the H-bomb.
It’s just too big to think about, and really brings justice into disrespect. Because it uses such crude and clumsy methods. You know, it’s like using a steam hammer to drive in tacks.
Responsibility is a thing like a nice face, which you either have or haven’t. Certain backgrounds, certain interests, certain awarenesses of relationship create responsibility in some human beings. And they live that way not because they are giving themselves sermons and telling themselves all the time that they ought to be responsible.
It’s because they’re intelligent enough to see that being responsible makes things very much easier for everybody all around. That’s all there is to it. And, of course, that’s all a big all, but you won’t, in other—what I’m saying is: the people who are frightened that other people will abandon responsibility never did have any way of thinking that would guarantee that people would be responsible.
There is no such guarantee. If there were, we should be automata. Now, I want to switch of another aspect of illusion.
The quickness of the hand deceives the eye. And that is, of course, the great illusion of what we call matter and density, impenetrability, opacity. I find it hard to talk about the illusion of matter because I’m a materialist—that is to say, I like material.
And so I may seem to you to be quite self-contradictory. For example, a wine should have body. Pure alcohol doesn’t.
And it’s terribly important in human character for there to be a blend of materialism and mysticism, between sensuality and spirituality. You see, people who are purely sensuous and materialistic get very boring. You can fill your lives with all good things—with Alfa Romeos and hi-fis and wonderful cameras and girls with beautiful bodies and crisscrafts and dry martinis and Chanel &numero 5, you know?
And after a while, if that’s all you’ve got, it gets sickening and the bottoms begin to feel like plastic and the martinis taste like medicine, and… and it’s somehow bleagh. You get a distaste for life, and even for mountains and trees and waters. And then, on the other hand, the purely spiritual approach to things is too rarefied, too earnest, too abstract, too purely euclidean.
And the people who are intensely spiritual and don’t have any sensuality are always desperately serious, colorless, lacking in humor, and never are able to meet one as man to man with a kind of a friendly leer in the eye. That’s terribly important! They live at a level of frantic intensity.
Now, you see, these two extremes need each other. Say, spirituality needs a beer and a loud burp, and sensuality needs a rough blanket and a hard bed and a cold night with the stars to wonder about. The sensualist as such, the materialist as such, has no wonder.
And the mystic, the pure mystic, has no body. He’s pure alcohol; spirit. So if, then, one should say that material is an illusion, this seems to be selling out to the spirit people and to the mystics.
And so Christian scientists are—generally speaking, as personalities—totally lacking in materialism. They’re prissy and lacking in color, and their churches are very, very disagreeable. They’re all reading desks and they’re too bookish, and they have no ritual, no ceremonies, no verve, you see?
It’s all cerebral. And likewise, when people get the wrong idea about Hinduism or Buddhism, they go in for this same ultra-mysticism. They start disbelieving in all material pleasures as crutches, and it’s very bad to have crutches, you see?
You shouldn’t take aspirin when you’ve got a headache. You shouldn’t wear glasses. You shouldn’t show dependence on anything.
You mustn’t like your food too much, because that’s becoming gluttonous. So you eat very plain food which is not spiced, and you eat it out of a sense of duty—that is, to keep the body functioning. You drink only water because other drinks might cause certain dependencies and give you too much pleasure.
Because the idea is, you see, you’ve got to control your mind and keep it absolutely calm and still so that you are not dependent on matter. And that’s altogether the wrong approach, because—well, I mean, it is a game you can play. It is one of these possible things.
I mean, you can play the Jehovah’s witness game, you can play the Three-Seed-in-the-Spirit Baptist game. All these are various things which you can play just as you can take up a hobby for bridge or fishing or something like that. But what happens is, you see, that the notion that the material world is an illusion is turned into a judgment of value.
It’s an illusion, therefore it’s bad. I ought not to be under this illusion. Well, the reality of the matter is that, if you see the material world is an illusion, you can enjoy it a great deal better than if you think it isn’t.
A true materialist, therefore, is one who knows that material is an illusion. Then he’s not afraid of it. Then he can enter into the dance of material with real zest.
Because, you see, if you’re a false and a fake materialist—what’s happened? You’ve borrowed money to buy yourself a Cadillac, an impressive house, ranch style with a picture window and a patio and a swimming pool, and you’ve bought a lot of stock, and you’ve somehow wangled the money and borrowed it. And you keep lying awake nights wondering if you’re going to make the payments.
Well, there’s no point in that at all! How can you possibly enjoy all this jazz—if that’s the kind of jazz you want to enjoy—if you’ve got to worry about whether you’ve paid for it or not? And you get hopelessly involved; you’ll get commitments here, commitments there.
And finally you have a nervous breakdown and shoot yourself. The only way to enjoy material is to disbelieve in it, just as one can disbelieve in money. Then you can have zest for it, you see?
Otherwise it’s much better to be poor. I mean, if you have no tastes for this kind of life and no real interest in it, but feel that somehow you ought to have it for status reasons, it’s much better to stay poor and not have any of that stuff at all. So then, this is the important thing I’m trying to say: material is an illusion, but a great illusion, and the point is to swing it and not to run away from it on the one hand, or to get stuck on it on the other.
Then you can play with it. It’s just like a wheel going ’round: if the wheel too loose on the axle, it wobbles all over the place; if it’s too tight, it won’t revolve. But you kind of sit loose, you see, to this thing—not too loose, though.
Now, in what way, then, is the material world an illusion? Well, we know a lot about this now from our physics. And we know that what we call solidity is force; contained force.
The agitation of particles—or wavicles, or whatever they are—at such an immense speed that they become impenetrable to other agitations. So that when I put my foot on the floor, the reason it doesn’t go through the floor is that the floor is coming into existence and going out of existence so rapidly that there is no interval through which my foot can penetrate. Like an airplane propeller: you can’t put your head through it without getting it chopped off.
Only, if it were going faster still, it wouldn’t even cut your head off. It’d just be like banging your head against a brick wall. And it has to be going fast, too, within an extraordinarily small and restricted space.
The airplane propeller is whizzing around through a considerable space in relation to the size of a head. But if it were going much faster, but through much smaller spaces, you see, then it would be like banging your head against a brick wall. So what we’ve got in our so-called physical objective world is a behavior of energy where matter arises from it through its behavior in restricted spaces.
Density is a quality of space rather than a quality of matter. You see what I mean? I gave the illustration of the airplane propeller to try and show that.
So that all this is an electronic, diaphanous world, very similar to other creations of electronic patters—the dance of forms on the TV screen, the rainbow, the aurora borealis. It’s all fundamentally like that. Only, we are of the same kind of jazz, you see?
Our bodies are this dance, too, and therefore the physical world feels real to us—in other words, it feels solid—because we’re something of the same kind. If we were on a different wavelength, we’d walk right through it in the same way as radio waves come right through the house. They are of such a nature that they can penetrate the spaces, the interstices, or in some way jazz signals through.
But we are on the same wavelength, you see, as the wall, and so don’t go through it. But nevertheless, the whole cosmos is therefore a function of energy—or you could say of light; something like light—and therefore we and it are all diaphanous. Now, it’s easier to see that if you live in a medium where things aren’t so dense.
There’s only one other creature as intelligent as man, and this lives in a medium that is less dense, and this is the dolphin. The dolphin is a mammal, and many millions of years ago it seems that dolphins were living on the land. But they are very clever.
And they decided that the land was no place to live. Because getting food was difficult, and you had to lug yourself around, and there were many, many bad shows about the land. It had very curious changes of temperature, it became unspeakably cold and unspeakably hot.
And you had, in fact, to work. Well, no sensible person ever works! I never work.
I get paid for playing. And everybody should do that. That’s the mark of an educated man—is that eventually he gets a job where he’s paid for playing.
And a worker, or a proletarian, isn’t necessarily a poor man. A poor man like, say, Selig Bogenrath [?] or Eric Barker around here, they’re not proletarians.
A proletarian is a person who is fettered to the process of work. That is to say, to doing chores every day that he really doesn’t like and that aren’t in the least interesting, in order to go on living. So the dolphins decided this is ridiculous, this land existence, and they went back to the water.
And it’s pretty easy to fish, you see? There are plenty of fish in the water and things to eat. As we know, the ocean is the greatest food supply of the world.
And when they’ve eaten a few fish, or whatever they need, they decided just to have a ball. So the dolphin can get abreast of a ship, get one of the wakes coming out of the side, can set its tail at an angle of 26 degrees, you know, and be pushed along by the ship. And it’s not going anywhere.
There’s no reason to go along there, as if it had to get to another part of the sea. The sea is pretty much the same all through. But they’re just going wlllbbllp!
and wheeee! and poooom! And they chatter and dance, and they’re really highly civilized beings.
And so please don’t anybody ever kill any dolphins or be unkind to dolphins, because they’re exemplary, high-minded creatures. And we shall soon discover this. As soon as we can set up communication with them they will tell us all about it, and we will then invent a new style of civilization based on frolic.
But, you see, they dance in the mode of water. Now, human beings, as Toynbee has pointed out, as their civilization progresses, they begin to lose their roots. And they are less and less tied to the land.
They go into the air. And what’s going to happen if man develops without blowing himself to bits—he can get over the hurdle, you see, that dangerous point—is that, gradually, all roads are going to disappear. And the Earth will have centers of human habitation, you see, but no roads.
They’ll be as obsolete as railroad tracks. Because everybody will fly. And once—the medium of air is much more fluid than the medium of water.
And as we fly, you see, on the land, your values are all values of permanence, solidity, firmness. They’re architectonic in the sense of our great stone structures, pyramids, and things like that. But in the air and on the water, all values are fluid.
And what you have to know to be a good airman is, of course, stars. Like, whitethroats and other migrating birds migrate by the stars. Imagine!
But once you start relating yourself to the stars, you realize that you’re living in a universe where directions are all relative. And you become a being capable of existing in non-solidity. And that’s why Buckminster Fuller, you know, believed that all technics and really all culture came from the sea.
The men who first learned to sail were the wise men. He has a fantastic idea that there were initiates, great priests who were ship’s captains. And although some of their seamen didn’t know all the secrets, but these priests were the first people who knew that the world was round.
And that gives one an entirely different theology, you see, than if you believed that the world is flat. And so, from the priests of the ocean the landsmen learned how to use cranes, blocks and tackles, how to build, what a good house an overturned ship made. And so to this day a cathedral has showing the connection between ships and the first temples.
And so Fuller goes on to say: now, if you’re a good architect, as the ancient architects learned from the ocean, the first thing you should do when you get through architectural school is go and work in an airplane factory, and understand the beautiful thing that man has made in a fine, fine airplane, you see, which is as great as a bird in its own way. Because that’s the architecture of insecurity, and that really lives with insecurity. Just a short résumé about this morning.
I was discussing the various meanings of the word māyā, which in Sanskrit means “illusion,” or at least that’s the way it’s generally translated. And I was trying to explain that it doesn’t necessarily mean illusion in a bad sense. When we say a person is suffering from delusions, hallucinations, and so on, it’s always a put-down word.
But māyā is not so necessarily. So I showed you how it has the meanings of “measurement,” as when we pretend that the world is divisible, actually, into feet or inches or hours or seconds or degrees, and divide things from each other by these measurements—that is to say: by the cutting power of thought. Thought, from the Latin scio, means “to cut.” And so thought is—you see, what you have to understand is that every thing is really a think.
A thing is a unit of thought in the same way as an inch is a unit of measurement. We divide the wiggly, continuous, wobbly, wild, Rorschach blot of the physical universe into things so that we can think about it. And one thinks by a process which is essentially the calculus.
Calculate. Calculus—what was it originally? Using pebbles to count.
So the word calculus means “a pebble,” originally. So I count, I remember something, one, two, three, four times. Four pebbles.
Like using your fingers. Rosaries have been used for this purpose. And so, later, the abacus is a kind of amazing rosary.
That’s calculation, you see: pretending that the world is a collection of bits. But the world isn’t a collection of bits. The world is continuous in the sense that every bit of it is interrelated as much as a human body.
You realize, you know, if you magnify the human body to an enormous degree so that you are looking at its individual molecules—one molecule of our body is the size of my fist, say; you know, magnified to that size—the next one would be on the other side of the room. Now, what joins them together? I move my hand, all those vastly separated molecules all move together.
They haven’t any strings tied between them. And it’s the same way when the little birds fly. In my boat in Sausalito we have a lot of little, tiny sandpipers, and they fly having one mind.
They become a total organism when they fly, and they change direction instantly. I mean, it isn’t that they turn like this and follow the leader. They’re going like that and then they go like that.
And they’re only individuals when they start pecking on the mud. Then they wander around all over the place and ticketty-ticketty-ticketty-ticketty. But the slightest movement and BAO!
they’re all in the air again and going as one mind. Now, that’s how your molecules move in your hand. But so, calculus pretends that the molecules are separate.
They’re not. They’re related to each other by the space between them. Space is relationship.
Space is order. I remember this once very vivid illustration. I had a friend who was giving a lecture, and she wanted to use her studio for the lecture, and she had those canvas chairs that you pull open like that, and they have arms, canvas back and canvas seat.
You know, movie director’s chairs. And she’d got them all lined up across the room this way, zhht, zhht, zhht, zhht, zhht, and she said, “I can’t possibly get all the people in here.” I said, “Wait a minute. Space is order.
You say don’t have enough space. You do.” So I put the speaker at that side of the room, and I arranged all the chairs around the wall like that, coming across like that. Then the next row, then the next row, and the next row.
And there were far more seats in there than they had before, you see? So space is order. And space is terribly important to it.
But the māyā that I pointed out, you see—we ignore it. So māyā is “measurement.” Thinging. Chopping things into bits so as to count them.
Number two: māyā is “play.” That is to say, it’s a game. It’s hide and seek. The universe is playing peek-a-boo with itself: now you see it, now you don’t.
And the basis of that is the throb or vibration. Up and then down, up and then down. Male, female.
Positive, negative. Light, darkness. This side, that side.
See? Everything is going nyooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing-ooing, and it’s going so fast that it seems to be continuous. But now you see it, now you don’t.
See? Solid, space. Here and gone.
Everything is that. See, if I put my hand on your knee and you leave it there, you cease to remember I’m there. But if I do this, you know I’m there all the time.
Because each time it’s renewed. So it’s play. Māyā is also “magic.” And I gave the illustration of the theater: of creating the illusion that the drama is reality.
All the illusory possibilities of the theatrical art. Then I meant, specifically: māyā is “art,” māyā is “skill” in creating something. And I showed how the artist can give us all kinds of different visions of the universe—from the vision of, let’s say, Giotto with its amazing transparency, to Rembrandt with its density, to the great Flemish painters like van Eyck, who begin photographic realism, on to the similar painters of the 19th century, and then through Picasso and so on to splatterers like Jackson Pollock, who are all enabling us to see the world in different ways by their revelation.
And so the possibilities of artistry are infinite. More and more artists will come and notice the world in different ways. And there are probably infinitely ways in which the world can be noticed.
Only, the human mind works at a certain pace. It seems incapable of bringing in more than a few at a time. It doesn’t assimilate them.
And then I discussed the final question: does that mean that the world is nothing but our imagination? That is to say, going back to the analogy of the Rorschach blot: we say, in testing a person on a Rorschach blot, that he projects a story or a picture into the blot, and that reveals not something about the nature of the blot, but about the condition of his psychological structure. Are we going to have to say that, in the same way, all scientific knowledge about the universe is a projection?
You see, that’s been very cogently argued. It’s argued, for example, that laws of nature do not exist in nature, but are methods of measuring nature. In other words, to say that stones always fall downwards to the center of the Earth, we invent for that the law of gravity.
Now, is that a law? Is there something called the law of gravity which stones obey? Well, many scientists would say no.
If the stone didn’t fall to the ground, it would be a balloon. It obeys no law, it does that. And we make a law out of it simply because it happens regularly.
If I regularly do what you tell me to, that becomes—in human affairs—a law. But nobody tells the stone it’s got to fall down, it just does so because that’s part of the definition of being a stone. If it didn’t, it’d be a balloon, you see?