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And when that snake was asked about it, he passed the buck back to God, and God said, “I disown you, because I don’t let my right hand know what my left hand doeth.” And you know who the left hand of God is. The right hand is Jesus Christ, the left is the Devil—only, it mustn’t be admitted. Not on your life!
But that’s the whole thing, you see, in a nutshell. That once you define yourself as the puppet, you say, “I’m just poor little me, and I got mixed up in this world. I didn’t ask to be born.
My father and mother gave me a body which is a system of tubes into which I got somehow mixed up, and it’s a maze and a tunnel and I don’t understand a way around it. It needs all these engineers and doctors and so on to fix it, educators to tell it how to work and keep going, and I’m mixed up in it. Poor little me!” Well, this is nonsense!
You aren’t mixed up in it—it’s you! And everybody’s being a blushing violet, and saying, “I’m not responsible for this universe, I merely came into it.” And the whole function of every great guru is to kid you out of that, and look at you and say, “Don’t give me that line of bull!” But you have to be tactful, you have to be effective. You can’t just tell people this.
You can’t talk people out of an illusion. It’s a curious thing. There’s a whole debate going on now, as you all know, about whether God exists.
And they’re going to do a cover story on God in Time magazine! And they sent a reporter around to me—yes! They sent reporters to all sort of prominent theologians and philosophers.
Well, this is the problem. I said, “I have a photograph of God which you must put on the cover.” It’s this gorgeous photograph of a Mexican statue made by Dick [???]. Beautiful God the Father with a triple crown like the Pope.
Well, they said they were going to use something by Tintoretto. This photograph is lovely. You know, a real genuine Mexican Indian thing.
Simple people think this is what God looks like. Very handsome man. Anyway, they’re going to do a cover story on God because the theologians [are] now arguing about a new kind of Christianity which says there is no God and Jesus Christ is his only son.
But what these people want to do is: they desperately want to keep the church in Christianity because it pays off—that’s the minister’s job. And though they feel very embarrassed about God, but what they’re doing is they want the Bible and Jesus to keep this sort of authority going. How you can do that, I don’t know.
But at any rate, the point is that God is what nobody admits to being, and everybody really is. You don’t look out there for God, something in the sky; you look in you. In other words, underneath the surface of the consciousness that you have and the individual role that you’re playing and identifying yourself with, you are the works.
Just as you are beating your heart, so in the same way you’re shining the sun, and you’re responsible. But in our culture you mayn’t admit this, because if you come on that you’re God, they’ll put you in the nuthouse. Because our idea of God is based (as I said) on Near Eastern politics.
And so if you’re God, then you are the ruler, the governor—“Oh Lord our governor!” And so if you’re the governor, you know all the answers—if that’s what you claim to be. So when anybody in our culture says, “I’m God,” we say, “Well, well, why don’t you turn this shoe into a rabbit and just show me that you’re God.” But, of course, in Oriental cultures they don’t think of God as an autocrat. God is the fundamental energy of the world which performs all this world without having to think about it.
Just in the same way that you open and close your hand without being able to say in words how you do it. You do it. You say, “I can open and close my hand.” But how?
You don’t know. That only means, though, that you don’t know in words. You do know, in fact, because you do it!
So, in the same way, you know how to beat your heart, because you do it—but you can’t explain it in words. You know how to shine the sun, because you do it—but you can’t explain it in words, unless you’re a very fancy physicist, and he’s just finding out. All the physicist is doing is translating what he’s been doing all along into a code called mathematics.
Then he says he knows how it’s done. He means he can put it into the code. And that’s what the academic world is: it’s translating what happens into certain codes called words, numbers, algebras, et cetera.
And that helps us repair things when they go wrong. So the discovery of our inseparability from everything else is something that I don’t think will have to come by the primitive methods of difficult yoga meditations, or even through the use of psychedelic chemicals. I think it’s something that is within the reach of very many people’s simple comprehension—once you get the point.
Just in the same way as we could understand that the world was round and experience it as such. You could call this a kind of guyana yoga in Hindu terms, but I don’t think it’s going to be necessary for our culture to get this point by staring at its navel, or by spending hours practicing zazen—not that I’ve anything against it. Because, after all, to sit still can be an extraordinarily pleasant thing to do, and it is important for us to have more quiet.
But I think this is essentially a matter of a sort of intuitive comprehension that will dawn upon us and suddenly hit us all of a heap, and you suddenly see that this is totally commonsensical, and that your present feeling of how you are is a hoax. You know how Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote a book called How to be a Real Person? Translated into its original terms, that means “How to be a Genuine Fake.” Because the person is the mask, the persona, worn by actors in Greco-Roman drama.
They put a mask on their face which had a megaphone-shaped mouth which projected the sound in an open-air theater. So the dramatis personae at the beginning of a play is the list of masks. And the word “person,” which meant “mask,” has come to mean the “real you.” How to be a real person—imagine it!
But I think we’ll get over it and discover again the thing that we simply don’t let our children in on; we don’t let ourselves in on. In other words, let me just emphasize this point again. It is not, at the moment, commonsensical and not plausible because of our conditioning.
But we can very simply come to see that you are not some kind of accident that pops up for a while and then vanishes, but that deep inwards, you are what there is and all that there is—which is eternal, and that which there is no whicher. The ground of being, as Tillich and Eckhart called it. That’s you.
Now, you don’t have to remember that all the time, just as you don’t have to remember how to beat your heart. You could die and forget everything you ever knew in this lifetime, because it’s not necessary to remember it. You’re going to pop up as somebody else later on, just like you did before, without knowing who you were.
It’s as simple as that. If you got born once, you can get born again. If there was a cosmic explosion once that blew everything into existence and it’s going to fizzle out—well, if it happened once, it can happen again.
And it goes on. It’s a kind of undulatory system of vibrations. Everything’s a system of vibrations.
Everything is on/off; now you see it, now you don’t. Light itself is going nyooee yooee yooee yooee yooee yooee yooee, but it’s happening so fast that the retina doesn’t register it. Everything in the sun is like an arc lamp, only it’s a very fast one.
It goes on and off. Sound does. And the reason you can’t put your finger through the floor is the same reason you can’t, without serious problems, push it through an electric fan.
The floor is going so fast—even faster than a fan. The fan is going slow enough to cut your finger if you put it into it. But the floor is going so fast, you can’t even get in.
But that’s the only reason. It’s coming into existence and going out of existence at a terrific clip. So everything is on/off.
So with our life. You can die, say, “Well, I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know anything.” Just like, in the same way, you don’t know what’s going on inside your nervous system; how the nervous system links together or anything like that.
You don’t need to know. And if you had to find it all out, you’d get so confused with the information that you wouldn’t be able to operate. It’d be just too much to think about with a one-pointed ordinary attention consciousness, which is a scanning system, like radar.
You don’t need to know how it all works in order to work it. That’s the real meaning of omnipotence. This morning I was discussing the problem of technological civilization’s urgent need of a new sense of human existence in which the human being no longer discovers himself as an alien oddity, somehow trapped and caught up in a system of tubes called the body, confronting an external world which is not himself.
The urgency of realizing that, just as this city is an extension of you, so is everything out to the farthest galaxies that we have any knowledge of, and beyond. Of regaining a sense of responsibility and identity with the basic functioning of yourself as a complete physical organism, and that beyond that, your own organism, in a certain sense, knows its identity with its whole environment. In other words, the human body belongs in a continuous energy system which is co-extensive with the universe.
And instead of making out that this is something you got caught up in, and for which you are not responsible, and in which you are just a victim, and if you’re lucky, you beat the game for a while and win, until death destroys you and you lose everything. You know? You can’t take it with you.
That reminds me of a funny—Gary Snyder is a great friend of mine. He’s a poet from the west coast, and he’s a very good Zen student. He’s studying at Daitoku-ji under Oda-Rōshi.
And he suggested one day that we found a Null and Void Title and Guarantee Trust Company, with its slogan: “Register your absence with us.” And what you do is: you give your fortune to this, and we guarantee to transport it to you in the next life. Anyway, this situation I was suggesting is one that can be overcome reasonably simply, if you can just get the idea straight. A lot of people say, you know, “I understand what you say intellectually, but that’s not enough.
I don’t really understand it.” But I often think that when people say that, they don’t fully understand it intellectually. If you can get something quite clear—really clear—in your head, I don’t think that our mind is compartmentalized so that the intellect’s over here, and the feelings are over here, and the intuition is over there, and the sensations are over there. I don’t think Jung meant that when he made this fourfold classification.
I think every faculty of the mind is continuous with all the others. And so what you’re saying when you say, “I understand it intellectually, but I don’t get it intuitively,” or “I don’t feel it in my bones,” is that you understand it in the sense of being able to repeat a form of words. Now, it’s true that there are lots of debates and problems that are purely verbal.
A great deal of what goes on as theological or philosophical discussion is absolutely nothing except a war of words. And a logical positivist, for example, can show conclusively that all metaphysical statements are meaningless. But so what?
That’s just talk. People have, on the other hand, experienced, say, mystical states, and these experiences are quite as real as the experience of swimming in water, or lying in the sun, or eating a steak, or dying. And you can’t talk them away.
They’re there, in a very concrete sense. But there is a very close connection between your conceptual understanding of the world and how you actually see the world. In other words, let’s take for example this problem: there are people who don’t have number systems going beyond three.
They count: one, two, three, many. So anything above three is a “heap,” or “many.” Now, those people cannot know that a square table has four corners. It has many corners.
But once you’re able to count beyond four, and you can extend your counting system indefinitely, you have a different feeling about nature. It’s not only you know more, but you feel more. You feel more clearly.
So my point is simply that the intellect is not something just cut off from every other kind of experience, existing in a sort of abstract vacuum which has nothing to do with anything else. The intellect is part and parcel of the whole fabric of life. It goes along with your fingers, it goes along with being able to do this, and touch.
After all, what an intellectual thing, in a way, the human hand is! It can do things that other hands can’t do. No other mammal can do this—have thumb-finger contact.
The monkey can do this, you see, but it doesn’t achieve this thing. So the hand is intellectual. So, as a matter of fact, a plant is intellectual.
This thing is a gorgeous pattern. If you look into it and realize how this is designed to absorb light and moisture and so on, and to expose itself in different ways and to propagate its species, that it is in alliance with bees and other insects so that the bees and the plants—since they go together and are found together—they’re all one continuous form of life. This doesn’t exist except in a world where bees are floating around.
I mean, you can bring it into an apartment, but you don’t expect this plant to propagate beyond that point. It’s decorative here. But in its natural habitat, this goes with there being bees, and bees go with there being something else.
So this form that you see here is inseparable from all kinds of other forms which must exist if this is to exist. And the bees have language—if you’ve read von Frisch’s book about bees and their marvelous intelligence. But you see that the intelligence of the plant is the same as the pattern of the plant.
You shouldn’t think I would say the plant is the result of intelligence. The shape of it is the same as its intelligence. So the shape of your brain, the shape of your face, the whole structure of the culture you live in, the human interrelationships that go on—it is that pattern which is intelligence.
Now, what I’m trying to talk about is a deeper understanding of the pattern in which we live. And if you understand that, it suddenly hits you, so that you feel, right in your guts, this new kind of existence that is not yourself alone facing an alien world, but yourself as an expression of the world in the same way as the wave is the expression of the ocean. Now, then, the most important shift that one has to make in intelligence and understanding this is to be able to think in a polar way.
We sometimes say of things that we want to describe as being opposed to each other, as being in conflict, that they are “the poles apart.” People who belong to different schools of thought, people who belong to nations in opposition with each other, people who are in flat, outright conflict—we say they are the poles apart. But that’s a very funny phrase. Because things that are the poles apart happen to be very deeply connected.
The north and the south pole are the poles of one Earth. So try and imagine a situation in which there is an encounter between opposites that have no connection with each other at all. Where will they come from?
How will they meet each other? You think from the opposite ends of space? But what is space?
For space to have opposite ends, there has to be a continuum between the ends. And so to think in a polar way is to realize the intimate connection between processes or events or things, which language describes as if they were unconnected and opposed. Let’s take, first of all, two very fundamental poles.
We’ll call them, respectively, “solid” and “space.” If you want, “existence” and “non-existence,” because we tend to treat space as something that is not there. That’s simply because we don’t see it; we ignore it. We treat it as if it had no effective function whatsoever.
And thus, when our astronomers begin to talk about curved space, expanding space, properties of space, and so on, we think: what are they talking about? How can space have a shape? How can there be a structure in space?
Because space is nothing. But it isn’t so. You see, this is something we completely ignore.
Why? Because we have specialized in a form of attention to the world which concentrates on certain features as important. We call this conscious attention, and therefore it ignores or screens out everything which doesn’t fit into its particular scheme.
And one of the things that doesn’t fit into our scheme is space. So we come into a room like this, and we notice all the people in the room, and the furniture, and the flowers and the ornaments, and think that everything else just isn’t there. I mean, what about this interval that is between me sitting here and the inner circle of people who are arranged around the floor?
What a mess we would be in if there wasn’t that interval! You know, I would be blowing down your throat to talk to you. Now, intervals of this spatial kind are tremendously important, and let me demonstrate this to you in a musical way.
When you listen to a melody, la la la la laaa la la la la la laaa la la la la laaa laa, what is the difference between hearing that melody and hearing a series of noises? The answer is that you heard the intervals. You heard the musical spaces between the series of tones.
If you didn’t hear that, you heard no melody, and you would be what’s called tone deaf. But what you actually hear is the steps between the levels of sound—the levels of vibration—that constitute the different tones. Now, those weren’t stated.
They were tacit. Only the tones were stated, but you heard the interval. And so it made all the difference whether you heard the interval or not.
So, in exactly the same way, the intervals between us, seated around here, constitute many important things. They constitute the dignity of us all. They constitute the fact that my face isn’t all mushed up in your face, and that we have, therefore, individual faces, and that need space around us.
In a country like Japan, space is the most valuable commodity because it’s a small island that’s heavily overpopulated. And so an apartment in Japan costs you a lot of money. In Hong Kong it’s sky-high.
But they have mastered the control of space in a fantastic way. And one of the ways in which they control space is through politeness. You can live with other people so that you live in a house where you’re so close together that you can hear every belly rumble of your neighbor, and you know exactly what’s going on.
But you learn to hear without listening, and to see without looking. There’s a courtesy, you see? A respect for privacy which puts an interval between one individual and another.
And it’s by reason of that interval that you are defined as you and I’m defined as I. So, you see the various kinds of space, various kinds of interval? The pauses when a person plays the drum and they go [drums]?
It’s those intervals between—otherwise it would just be [drums], which is of no interest. It’s the intervals that make the thing valuable. The space, then, is as real as the solid.
This is the principle of polarity. Space and solid, in other words, which are formally opposed things. And you think, “Well, where there is a solid, there is something, and where there is space, there is nothing.” They are actually as mutually supportive as back and front.
They go together. Nobody ever found a space without a solid, and nobody ever found a solid without a space. But we’ve been trained to fix our attention on the solid and disregard the space.
Well then, obviously you haven’t been given the news—you haven’t been let in on what the secret of life is. It is that the space is as important as the solid. And if you see that, you have the clue.
Now, in the same way, exactly, all other kinds of supposedly opposed entities and forces imply and involve each other. And this is the key to getting a different kind of consciousness of one’s self, because you wouldn’t know who you are unless you knew what you have defined as other than yourself. Self and other define each other mutually.
Now, Let’s consider this, first of all, in a kind of a funny social way. In every town in the United States, there are a group of people who consider themselves to be the nice people. They live on the right side of the tracks.
Where I live in Sausalito, California, they live up on the hill. And down on the waterfront there live all kinds of beatniks and bums, and we live in boats and shacks of all kinds. Some of these shacks are elegant inside, but that’s a secret.
We call the boat I live on the Oyster, because you know how an oyster’s shell on the outside is very rough and crude, but there’s pearls on the inside. Well anyway, the people up on the hill say—what do they talk about? When they get together for cocktails and dinner or whatever, and they have their social occasions, what’s the topic of conversation?
It’s how the people are awful down below. And they’re encroaching, and the town is going to the dogs, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. By this means they preserve their collective ego.
Meanwhile, the people down below, what do they talk about at their parties? They talk about the squares up on the hill who are engaged in business which is ridiculous because it’s nothing but a rat race, and they buy Cadillacs and other phony objects, and they deride them. But in the same way, those beatniks are enhancing their collective ego.
And they don’t realize that they need each other. That the symbiosis between the nice people and the nasty people, the in-group and the out-group, is as much a symbiosis as between the bees and the flowers. Because you wouldn’t know who you were unless there was an outside.
In exactly the same way, politically speaking, our economy is at present dependent on the Cold War, which mustn’t be allowed to become hot. Because if there weren’t an enemy—defined as communism—nobody would be disturbed, and nobody would be worried, and therefore they wouldn’t put all this energy and money and taxes into a certain kind of productivity. Likewise, on the other side, if those people in China and Russia couldn’t be afraid of and worried about the dirty capitalists, they wouldn’t have any means of stirring up their people to do something.
Everybody would presumably just loaf around. So because you define your position in opposition to another position, then you know who you are courtesy of the outsider. And so you can say to the outsider—if this suddenly strikes you, you start laughing.
Because you realize that you’re indebted to the outsider whom you defined as awful. Because you know where he is, you know where you are. Well, now, it’s the same thing in philosophy and religion.
There are all sorts of schools of thought, and they disagree with each other. They debate with each other. But so far as I’m concerned, I wouldn’t know what I thought unless there were people who had different opinions than mine.
Therefore, instead of saying to those people, “You ought to agree with me,” I’d say to them, “Thank you so much for disagreeing, because now I know where I am.” I wouldn’t know otherwise. In other words, the in goes with the out, the solid with the space. This is a very funny thing.
Take any highly organized system of life. Take the way a garden exists. It’s full of, in a sense, competitive species: snails and thrushes and various insects that are supposed to be at war with each other.
And because their fights keep going on, the life of the garden as a whole is maintained. And so I can’t say, “All snails in this garden should be abolished, so that the lettuces should thrive,” because if there aren’t some snails around there, the birds won’t come around, because they like the snails. And the birds do all sorts of things for my garden, not to mention supplying it with manure and all kinds of things.
So I need them around. So the price of having birds is snails that eat your lettuces. And so on.
I mean, this is merely an instance, an example of this. The funny thing is, though, that when you realize this, and you suddenly see for the first time that you and your point of view—and everything that you stand for and believe in, and you think, “Boy, I’m going to stand for that and I’m going to fight for that!”—that it depends on its opposite. When you get that, it starts giving you the giggles.
And you begin to laugh at yourself. And this is one of the most amazing forces in life. The most creative force is humor.
Because when you are in a state of anxiety and you are afraid that black may win over white, that darkness may conquer light, that non-being may conquer being, you haven’t seen this point. When it strikes you that the two go together, the trembling emotional feeling which we call anxiety is given a different value, and it’s called laughter. Now let’s take the phenomenon of an electric bell.
When you turn on an electric bell, you set up a system in which yes implies no. That is to say, here’s the bell, and beneath it there’s an electromagnet. And that magnet, when it’s switched on, magnetizes an armature which comes and hits the bell.
But the moment it does that it turns off the current, so that the magnet releases it. And because the armature has a spring on it, it goes back. That turns the current on.
So it comes back—that turns the current off. So yes equals no, no equals yes. And so the bell vibrates, which is what you want it to do.
Now, how do you interpret your own vibrating, your alternation between yes and no? You can interpret this as an awful thing—oh oh oh oh oh oh oh—of doubt, and then you say you were anxious. But if you see that the one implies the other, it becomes ha ha ha ha ha!
It becomes a laugh. So the transformation of anxiety into laughter comes about through realizing the polarity of yes and no, of to be and not to be. But the important thing for our purposes is the polarity between the self and the other.
Let’s consider, for example, when you say you love yourself. “I love me.” Let’s be very egotistic and very selfish indeed. What do you love when you love yourself?
Think about it. Say you were going to live a completely dissolute, self-interested life, and other people can go hang. Now consider: what is it that you’re interested in?
“Well,” you say, “for example, I like eating.” Okay. Do you eat yourself? “No.