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So I’m afraid, you see, for the God-is-dead theology, that it will sort of drift off into secular do-goodery in the name of Jesus. And this is, I think, where we can be strongly revivified and stimulated by the introduction into our spiritual life of certain things that are Oriental. Now, you see, it must be understood that the crux of the Hindu and Buddhist disciplines is an experience, not a theory.
Not a belief. If we say that religion is a combination of creed, code, and cult—in other words, this is true of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; and if they are religions, Buddhism is not—because the creed is a revelation, a revealed the symbolism, of what the universe is about, and you are commanded to believe in it on the divine authority. The code is the revealed will of God for man which you are commanded to obey.
And the cult is the divinely revealed form of worship which you must practice. Commandment—because God is boss. He’s ruler.
King of kings and Lord of lords. But the disciplines—say, of yoga in Hinduism, or of the various forms of Buddhist meditation—do not require you to believe anything. And they have no commandments in them.
They do indeed have precepts, but they are really vows which you undertake on your own responsibility, not in obedience to anybody. They are experimental techniques for changing consciousness. And the thing they are mainly concerned with is helping human beings to get rid of the hallucination that each one of us is a skin-encapsulated ego.
You know, a little source, a little man inside your head, located between the ears and behind the eyes who is the source of conscious attention and voluntary behavior. Most people, you know, don’t really think that they’re anything but that and that the body is a thing you have. “Mommy, who would have been if my father had been someone else?” See, the parents give you the body and you pop the soul into it at some period—conception or parturition; nobody could ever decide.
And this attitude stays with us: that we are something in a body; that we have a body and we are not it. So we experience the beating of the heart as something that happens to me, whereas talking or walking is something that I do. Don’t you beat your heart?
Our language won’t allow you to think that. It’s not customary to say so. How do you think?
How do you manage to be conscious? You don’t know. How do you open and close your hand?
Do you know? If you’re a physiologist you may be able to say, but that doesn’t help you to open and close your hand any better than I do. See, I know how to do it, but I can’t put it into words.
In the same way, the Hindu god knows how he creates this whole universe because he does it—but he wouldn’t explain it, that would be stupid! You might as well try to drink the Pacific Ocean with a fork. So when a Hindu gets enlightened and he recovers from the hallucination of being a skin-encapsulated ego, and finds out that central to his own self is the eternal Self of the universe, and you go up to him and say, “Well, how do you do all this?” he says, “Well, just like you open and close your hand.
And because we’re all it.” Whenever a questioner used to come to Sri Ramana, the great Hindu sage who died a few years ago, they said to him, “Master, was I living before in a previous incarnation? And if so, who was I?” And he would say, “Who is asking the question?” Who are you? And a spiritual teacher in both Hinduism and Buddhism is a kind of—well, what he does to awaken you, to get you over the hallucination of being the skin-encapsulated ego: he bugs you in a certain way.
He has a funny look in his eyes as if to say, “Come off it, Shiva! I know what you’re doing!” And you say, “What, me?” He looks at you in a funny way. And finally you get the feeling that he sees all the way through you, and therefore that all your selfish and evil thoughts and nastiness is transparent to this gaze.
And then you have to try and alter them. He suggests, you see, that you practice the control of the mind, that you become desireless. You give up selfish desires so as to cease to be a skin-encapsulated self.
And then you may have some success in quieting your mind and in concentrating, but then after that he’ll throw a curve at you, which is, “But aren’t you still desiring not to desire? Why are you trying to be unselfish?” Well, the answer is: I want to be on the side of the big battalions. I think it’s going to pay better to be unselfish than to be selfish.
Well, Luther saw that. Augustine saw that. But there it is.
Because what he’s done, you see: he’s beginning to make you see the unreality; the hallucinatory quality of a separate self. This has merely conventional reality in the same sense as lines of latitude and longitude, the measurements of the clock. That’s why one of the meanings of māyā, illusion, is “measurement.” Things, for example, are measurements: they are units of thought like inches are units of measurement.
There are no things in physical nature. How many things is a thing? It’s any number you want.
Because a thing is a think: a unit of thought. It’s as much of reality as you can catch hold of in one idea. So when this realization of the hallucination of the separate self comes about, it comes about through discovering that your alleged separate self can’t do anything.
It can’t improve itself—either by doing something about it or by doing nothing about it. Both ways are based on illusion. You see, this is what you have to do to get people out of hallucinations: you make them act consistently on the suppositions of the hallucination.
People who believe that the Earth is flat cannot possibly be talked into seeing that it’s round because they know it’s flat. Because, can’t you see? So what you do is this: you say, “Let’s go and look over the edge.
Wouldn’t that be fun?” But, you see, to be sure that we do get to the edge we must be very careful not to walk in circles. So you perform a discipline. You go steadily and rigorously westwards—along latitude forty or something—and then, when you get back to the place where you started, he is convinced that the world is at least cylindrical.
By experiment. By reductio ad absurdum of his premises. And so, in the same way, the guru (whether Hindu or Buddhist) performs a reductio ad absurdum on the premise of the skin-encapsulated ego.
Well, what happens then? You might imagine —from garbled accounts of eastern mysticism—that one thereupon disappears forever into an infinite sea of faintly mauve Jello, and become so lost to the world and entranced that you forget your name, address, telephone number, and function in life. And nothing of the kind happens.
The state of mystical illumination—although it may, in its sudden onset, be accompanied by a sensation tremendous luminescence and transparency—as you get used to it, it’s just like everyday life. Here are the things that you formerly thought were separate individuals, and here is you who you formerly thought was merely confronting these other people. When the great Dr D. T. Suzuki was asked, “What is it like to be enlightened?” he said, “It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.” Because what is altered is not the way your senses perceive.
What is altered is what you think about it, your definitions of what you see, your evaluation of it. So when you don’t cling to it, when you have no longer a hostile attitude to the world because you know the world is you—it is! I mean, let’s take it from the point of view of biology: if I describe the behavior of a living organism, I cannot possibly describe that behavior without simultaneously describing the behavior of the environment.
So that I discover that I don’t describe organisms in environments, I describe a unified field of behavior called an organism-environment. It’s an awkward word, but there it is. The environment doesn’t push the organism around, the organism doesn’t push the environment around.
They are two aspects, or poles, of the same process. And so you have to understand that this attitude towards nature—seeing the fundamental unity of the Self which manifests it all—is not an attitude, as missionaries are apt to suppose, which denies the value of differentiation. You must understand the principle of what are called identical differences.
Take a coin: the head side is a different side from the tail side, and yet the two are inseparable. Take the operation of buying and selling: selling is a different operation from buying, but you can’t buy unless somebody sells at the same time, and vice versa. This is what is meant by the underlying unity of opposites, what is called in Hinduism advaita, or “nonduality.” Or when the Chinese use the word Tao to designate “The Way” of operation of the positive and negative principles, the yang and the yin.
It is not a unity that annihilates differences, but a unity which is manifested by the very differentiations that we perceive. Just as—it’s all polar. It’s like the two poles of a magnet: different, but yet one magnet.
So when we say oriental monism is a point of view towards life which merges everything into a kind of sickening goo, this is terribly unfair. It just isn’t so. If you argue that the sort of doctrine that everybody is really the Godhead destroys the possibility of real love between individuals, because you have to be definitively other than I if I am to love you—otherwise it’s all self-love—well, that argument collapses in view of the doctrine of the Trinity.
If the three persons are one God then they can’t love each other, by the same argument. Hinduism simply uses the idea which is in the Christian Trinity, only it makes it a multi-Trinity instead of a three one. That’s all.
Of course, the thorn in the flesh is always (in approaching a doctrine which seems to be monistic or pantheistic): what about evil? Are we to make the Ground of Being responsible for evil? And we don’t want to do that because we want to keep God’s skirts clean.
In spite of the fact that our own Hebrew Bible says, “I am the Lord, there is none else. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil.
I, the Lord, do all these things.” And haven’t you heard the story about the yetzer hara? That, according to Jewish theology, the lord God implanted in Adam at the beginning of time a thing called the yetzer hara. It means “the wayward spirit.” I call it the element of irreducible rascality.
And it’s very necessary to have this in order to be human. You see, how it was done was: this prohibition not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That was the one sure way of getting it eaten.
But of course, when the Lord God accused Adam and said, “You have been eating of that tree I told you not to eat.” And he passed the buck to Eve said, “This woman that thou gavest me, she tempted me and I did eat.” He looked at Eve: “Now, what about it?” She said, “Well, it was the serpent.” He looked at the serpent. The serpent didn’t say anything. Because he knew too much and he wasn’t going to give away the show.
Who is it that sits at the left hand of God? We know who sits at the right hand. But it’s hushed up.
Because that’s the side where the district attorney sits. And in the Book of Job, of course, you know, Satan is the district attorney at the court of heaven. He’s the prosecutor.
He’s a faithful servant of the court. Because, you see, the whole problem is: it would be very bad indeed if God were the author of evil and we were his victims. That is to say, if we keep the model of the king of the universe, and the creatures are all subjects of the king, then a God who is responsible for evil is being very unkind to other people.
But in this theory, God is not another person. There are no victims of God. He’s never anything but his own victim.
You are responsible. And if you want to stay in the state of illusion, stay in it. But you can always wake up.
Now, the subject of this seminar is Self and Other, and this is therefore to be an exploration into the subject that interests me most, which is the problem of personal identity, man’s relationship to the universe, and all the things that are connected with that. It is—for our culture, at this time in history—an extremely urgent problem because of our technological power. In known history, nobody has had such capacity for altering the universe than the people of the United States of America.
And nobody has gone about it in quite such an aggressive way. I think, sometimes, that the two symbols of our present kind of technological culture are the rocketship and the bulldozer. The rocket as a very, very phallic symbol (as compensation for the sexually inadequate male), and the bulldozer (which ruthlessly pushes down hills and forests and alters the shape of the landscape): these are two symbols of the negative aspect of our technology.
I’m not going to take the position that technology is a mistake. I think there could be a new kind of technology, using a new attitude. But the trouble is that a great deal of our power is wielded by men who I would call “two o’clock types.” Maybe you saw an article I wrote in Playboy magazine called The Circle of Sex, and it suggested there were at least a dozen sexual types rather than two, and that the men who are at two o’clock on the dial, like a clock, are men who are ambisexterous—named after Julius Caesar, because Julius Caesar was an ambisexterous man, and he equally made love to all his friends’ wives and to his good-looking officers.
And he had no sense of guilt about this at all. Now, that type of male, in this culture, has a terrible sense of guilt that he might be homosexual, and is scared to death of being one, and therefore he has to overcompensate for his masculinity. And so he comes on as a police officer, marine sergeant, bouncer, bookie, general—tough, cigar-chewing, real masculine type who is never able to form a relationship to a woman.
They’re just dames as far as he’s concerned. But he—just like an ace Air Force pilot puts a little mark on his plane every time he shoots down an enemy—so this kind of man, every time he makes a dame, he chalks up one. Because that reassures him that he is, after all, a male.
And he’s a terrible nuisance. The trouble is that the culture doesn’t permit him to recognize and accept his ambisexterity. And so he’s a trouble spot.
But that kind of spirit of knocking the world around is something that is causing serious danger here. It arises, you see, because this tremendous technological power has been evolved in a culture which inherits a sense of personality that is, frankly, a hallucination. And we get this sense of personality from a long, long tradition of Jewish and Christian and Greek ideas which have caused man to feel that the universe of nature—the physical world, in other words—is not himself.
You may think that that’s a very odd thing to say, because one always assumes that oneself is one’s own body, or at least something inside one’s body (like a soul), and that, naturally, everything outside is not one’s self. But this is (as I’ve said many, many times) a hallucination. Let’s think: here we are in the middle of New York City.
And you know what happens when New York City goes wrong—when there’s a subway strike, or when the power fails, or when the sewers back up, your life is in danger. Because you are not only constituted by the bloodstream of your veins and the communications network of your nervous system. An extension of your bloodstream, and of your alimentary canal, and of your nervous system, is all the communication systems of this city.
In other words, as you know well: every night, streams of trucks pour into this city, carrying food. I understand there is even a kind of a big drain pipe which brings milk in. You consume three million pounds of fish a week.
You then also have to have the exit end of this, and the sewers are very complicated. The water system and all its pipes, the telephone systems, the electric light systems, the air conditioning things, the traffic streams. All these things going on are essential extensions of your own inner tubing.
And therefore, you have to be aware, more and more, that the city is an extended body for every person living in it. And not only, of course, the city, because the city depends on untold acres of fields (where farm products are grown, cattle are raised), on lakes and underground water sources, on the constitution of the atmosphere, and finally on the location of the Earth in this propitious spot rather close to the sun, where we have our basic heating system working. And all that is not a world into which you arrived from somewhere else altogether, it is a complex system of relationships out of which you grew in exactly the same way that fruit grows on a tree, or a flower on a stem.
Just as these blossoms, here, are symptomatic of the plant, and you identify the plant by looking at the blossoms—here are these little oranges, you see—we know that this is an orange tree. Now, in exactly that way, you are all growing in this world, and so we know that this world is a “human-ing” system. And therefore it has a certain kind of innate intelligence, just as this tree, with its roots, has the innate intelligence which comes out in these oranges.
So the cosmos in which we live is a network of communications. You don’t need to think of it in an authoritarian pattern—namely, that there is God the father who makes it all work—because that doesn’t really answer anything. That’s just applying to the world an explanation derived from the political systems of the ancient Near East.
You realize that? The great political systems of the Chaldeans and of the Egyptians, where there was an enormous father figure in charge of everything, became the model for the idea of monotheism. And as these great kings (like Hammurabi and Amenhotep IV) laid down legal systems, so man thought of a prince—a “king of kings,” a “lord of lords,” in the words of the Book of Common Prayer.
“King of kings, Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon Earth”—it’s a political idea. And I often wonder how citizens of a republic, and who have to curse and swear that they think that this is the best form of government, can put up with a monarchical conception of nature. Very funny.
You know: a republic, and it says, “In God We Trust.” And most people, by “God,” mean: a king of the universe. Very strange. Now, I suppose if we looked at ourselves from that microscopic point of view, all these funny creatures that are running around us that don’t look like people would (if you got used to them) seem like people.
And they would be having their problems: they’ve got all sorts of fights going on, and collaborations and conspiracies, and so on. But if they weren’t doing that, we wouldn’t be healthy. If the various corpuscles and cells in our bloodstream weren’t fighting each other, we would drop dead.
And that’s a sobering thought: that war at one level of being can be peace and health at another. So we are (inside us, each individual body) an enormous ecological system. And what we have to recognize is that that interconnected system which constitutes the beauty of a human organism—that sort of interconnection is going on outside us.
Do you remember—in early science fiction that was published in the 1920s by people like Olaf Stapledon and some of the early writers—they pictured the men of the future as having huge heads to contain very big brains. It was expected, in other words, that the future evolution of mankind would be an evolution of the mind and of the brain, and so bigger brains. But what has happened instead of that is that, instead of evolving bigness of brain, we are evolving an electronic network in which our brains are very swiftly being plugged into computer systems.
Now, some very awkward things about this are arising, and we’ve got to watch out for it, because what has increasingly happened is this: nobody is having any private life left. The invasion of ordinary privacy by the telephone, by your watching television (which is, after all, looking at somebody else’s life going on), by people watching you (all the people with bugging systems and snoopers), and credit agents, and everybody knows everything about you. Even in California, all the houses are built with picture windows looking at other picture windows.
And if you draw the curtain, somebody thinks you’re snooty. Like, if you build a fence in most Midwestern communities, they think, “Who the hell do you think you are, building a fence to keep everybody else out?” See? You’re not democratic.
But the reason for all this is: imagine the situation when the original neurons all became linked in with the central nervous system. They said, “Well, we’re losing our privacy.” So it’s a very serious question as to how we’re going to be linked in with other people. I feel—it may be old fashioned of me—but I feel very strongly that privacy should be maintained as much as possible.
But the reason being that human beings, in my experience, are a combination of two worlds—the private world and the public world—such that a person with a very strong and different and unique personality is not an isolated person, but a person extremely aware of his identity with the rest of the universe. Whereas people with nondescript, mass-produced personalities tend to be unaware of this. They tend to be the kind of person who is taken in by the system.
So what I think we could aim for in the way of human civilization and culture would be a system in which we are all highly aware of our existing interconnection and unity with the whole domain of nature, and therefore do not have to go to all sorts of wild extremes to find that union. In other words, look at the number of people we know who are terrified of silence, and who have to have something going the whole time; some noise streaming into their ears. They’re doing that because of their intense sense of loneliness.
And so when they feel silent, they feel lonely and they want to escape from it. Or people who just want to get together—as we say, they want to escape from themselves. More people spend more time running away from themselves.
Well, isn’t that wretched? What a definition. What an experience of selfhood if it’s always something you’ve got to be running away from and forgetting.
Say you read a mystery story—why? To forget yourself. You join a religion—why?
To forget yourself. You get absorbed in a political movement—why? To forget yourself.
Well, it must be a pretty miserable kind of self if you have to forget it like that, you see? Now, for a person who doesn’t have an isolated sense of self, he has no need to run away from it, because he knows. Let’s take hermits.
People today think that being a hermit is a very unhealthy thing to do. It’s very antisocial, doesn’t contribute anything to everybody else—because, of course, everybody else is busy contributing like blazes, and a few people have to run off and get out of the way. But I’ll tell you what hermits realize.
If you go off into a far, far forest and get very quiet, you come to understand that you’re connected with everything. That every little insect who comes buzzing around you is a messenger. And that little insect is connected with human beings everywhere else.
You can hear: you become incredibly sensitive in your ears and you hear far-off sounds. And just by the very nature of isolating yourself and getting quiet, you become intensely aware of your relatedness to everything else that’s going on. So if you really want to find out how related you are, try a little solitude off somewhere, and let it begin to tell you how everything is interdependent in the form of what the Japanese Buddhists call jiji muge (事事无碍), meaning: ji means a “thing-event,” so it means “between thing-event and thing-event, there is no block.” Every thing in the world, every event, is like a dewdrop on a multidimensional spider’s web, and every dewdrop contains the reflection of all the other dewdrops.
But, you see, the hermit finds this out through his solitude. And so, also, human beings can acquire a certain solitude, even in the middle of New York City. It’s rather easier, as a matter of fact, to find solitude in New York City than it is in Des Moines, Iowa.
But the point is that a human represents a certain kind of development wherein a maximal sense of his oneness with the whole universe goes hand in hand with the maximum development of his personality as somebody unique and different. Whereas the people who are, of course, trying to develop their unique personality directly, and take a Dale Carnegie course on how to win friends and influence people, or how to become successful in some way—all those people come out as if they came from the same cookie cutter. They don’t have any personality.
Now then, it therefore becomes the great enterprise of our time—from this point of view, so that this technology shall not go awry, and that it shall not be a war with the cosmos—that we acquire a new sense of identity. It isn’t just a theoretical thing that we know about (as ecologists, for example, know about the identity of the organism with its environment), but becomes something which we actually experience. And I feel that this is not at all beyond the bounds of possibility for an enormous number of people—for a simple reason.
Let me draw a historical analogy. Several hundred years ago, it seemed absolutely incomprehensible to most people that the world could be round, or that the planets and stars should be up in the sky unsupported, or even that the Earth itself should be floating freely in space. The Earth is falling through space, but it seems stable, and therefore it was supposed in ancient mythologies that the Earth rested on a giant turtle.
Nobody asked too carefully what the turtle rested on, but just so that there was some sense of solidity under things. So, in the same way, that the stars were supposed to be suspended in crystal spheres. And just as people know that the Earth is flat (because you look at it and see that it is), so people looked into the sky and they could see the crystal spheres.
Of course there were crystal spheres: you could see right through them! So when astronomers cast doubts on the existence of crystal spheres, everybody felt threatened that the stars were going to fall on their heads. Just as when they talked about a round Earth, people felt a danger of if you went ’round to the other side, you’d drop off, or feel funny and upside-down, a rush of brains to the head, and all sorts of uncomfortable feelings.
But since then we have got quite used to the idea that the stars float freely in space in gravitational fields, that you can go ’round the Earth without falling off, and now everybody realizes this and feels comfortable with it. Likewise, in our own day, when Einstein propounded the theories of relativity, people said they couldn’t understand it. It used to be something at a cocktail party to be introduced to somebody who understands Einstein.
Now, every young person understands Einstein and knows what it’s about. You, say, got even one year of college, you know what relativity is. And you know it not only in an intellectual way, you gave this as a feeling, just as you have a feeling of the roundness of the world—especially if you travel a lot on jet planes.
So I feel that, in just that way—within I don’t know how many years, but not too long a time—it’s going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe. You see, the point is that an enormous number of things are going on inside us of which we are not conscious. We make a very, very arbitrary distinction between what we do voluntarily and what we do involuntarily, and we define all those things which we do involuntarily as things that happen to us rather than things that we do.
In other words, we don’t assume any responsibility for the fact that our heart beats, or that our bones have such and such a shape. You can say to a beautiful girl, “Gee, you’re gorgeous,” and she says, “How like a man! All you think about is bodies.
My body was given to me by my parents, and I’m not responsible for it, and I would like to be admired for myself and not for my chassis.” And so I’d tell her, “You poor little chauffeur. You’ve disowned your own being and identified yourself as not associated with your body.” I agree that if she had a terrible body with a lousy figure, she might want to feel that way. But if she is a fine-looking human being, she should get with it and not disown herself.
But this happens again and again. So, you see, if you become aware of the fact that you are all of your own body, and that the beating of your heart is not just something that happens to you, but something you’re doing, then you become aware, also—in the same moment and at the same time—that you’re not only beating your heart, but that you are shining the sun. Why?
Because the process of your bodily existence and its rhythms is a process, an energy system, which is continuous with the shining of the sun. Just like the East River, here, is a continuous energy system, and all the waves in it are activities of the whole East River. And that’s continuous with the Atlantic Ocean, and that’s all one energy system.
And finally, the Atlantic Ocean gets around to being the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean, et cetera. And so all the waters of the Earth are a continuous energy system. It isn’t just that the East River is part of it.
You can’t draw any line and say, “Look, this is where the East River ends and the rest of it begins,” as if you can in the parts of an automobile, where you say, “Well, this is very definitely the generator, here, and this over here is a spark plug.” There’s not that kind of isolation between the elements of nature. So your body knows that its energy system is one with and continuous with the whole energy system, and that if it’s in any sense true to say that I am my body, and that I beat my heart, and that I think by growing a brain—you know, where do you draw the line between what you think and the power to think? Do you think with your brain in the same way that you carve wood with a knife?
You know, it’s an instrument that you pick up and use. I don’t think our bodies are just instrumental in that way. They’re something we are doing, only we don’t think about it—in the sense that we don’t have to consider, when we get up in the morning, as an act of voluntary behavior, how to connect all of the switches in our brain as to get us ready for the day.
They come on automatically. But this automatic—or I would rather call it spontaneous—functioning of the brain is what is called in Chinese zìrán (自然) (or in Japanese: shizen), that is to say: the spontaneity of nature. It does all this.
And what we perform consciously is simply a small fragment of our total activity of which we happen to be aware in a special way. We are far more than that. And it isn’t only that, say, the sun is light because we have eyes and optical nerves which translate the energy of the sun into an experience called light.
It is also that that very central fire of the sun is something that you are doing just as much as you are generating temperature in your body. In other words, let’s suppose that those cosmologists and astronomers are right, who believe that this universe started out with an original big bang which flung all those galaxies out into space. Well, you know what that would be like.
It’s like taking a bottle of ink and flinging it hard at a white wall, and it makes a great splash. And you know how the nature of a splash is: in the middle of it, it’s dense, and as it gets to the outside of the splash, there are all kinds of little curlicues. But it’s a continuous energy system.
In other words, the bang in the beginning cannot really be separated from the little curlicues at the end. So, supposing there was an original cosmic explosion which went FOOM, we—sitting around in this room now—are little curlicues on the end of it, you see? We are—actually, every one of us is—incredibly ancient.
The energy which is now manifested as your body is the same energy that was there in the beginning. If anything at all is old, this hand is as old as anything there is. Incredibly ancient!
I mean, the energy keeps changing shapes, doing all sorts of things, but there it all is. It’s one continuous SPAT. Now, if you just want to define yourself as a little curlicue on the end of the thing and say, “That’s all of me there is,” then you’ve got to be a puppet and you’ve got to say, “Well, I’ve been pushed around by this whole system.” It’s like a juvenile delinquent who knows a little Freud and says, “Well, I can’t help what I’m doing, because it was my mother.
She was terribly mixed up, and she didn’t bring me up properly. And my father was a mess. He was an alcoholic and he never paid any attention to me.
So I’m a juvenile delinquent.” And so the social worker says, “Yes, I’m afraid that’s so,” and then eventually some journalist gets hold of it and says, “Well, we should punish the parents instead of the kids.” So they go around to the parents, and the mother says, “Yes, I admit I’m a mess,” and the father says, “Of course I’m an alcoholic, but it was our parents who brought us up wrong, and we had all that trouble.” Well, they can’t find them because they’re dead. And so you can go passing the buck way back, and you get to some characters called Adam and Eve. And when they were told they were responsible, they passed it again to the snake.