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I like eating fish, oysters, radishes, filet de boeuf, mushrooms.” All these are things that are (formally speaking) not me, and yet these are what I say I like. Well, could you say, “What I really like about them is the state they put me in when they impinge on me?” In other words, when I put the mushroom sauce into my mouth, that does something to my mouth and my body, and it’s that that I like rather than the mushrooms as such? Well, that isn’t the truth.
If that’s all, you can’t cook properly. I can tell instantly, when I taste something that’s been cooked, what state of mind the cook was in. Now let me tell you a secret.
You cannot possibly be a good cook unless you like to pick up an onion in your hands, and look it over, and say, “Oh, isn’t that lovely!” Or feel an egg—I think an egg is one of the most beautiful shapes on Earth—and you take it up, and although it’s an opaque shell, it has a kind of subtle, luminous transparency to it, especially when you see the variations between white eggs and brown eggs. And you look at those things and you just love them. Now, unless you have that feeling, you can’t cook.
You may follow recipes, you may have had a training course, you may have had everything. But everything you’re going to cook, unless you have that feeling, is going to taste as though it’s been washed in detergents. And you can tell.
It may be that they used no fancy sauces, they roasted a piece of meat. Look, let’s take the Chinese way of cooking a chicken. You take a chicken, and you put in boiling water for ten minutes, with salt and a little sherry.
You turn it off, and you leave it there for half an hour. Then you take it out and chill it. and that can be the most succulent chicken imaginable.
But somehow it doesn’t quite come off if this was just a formula. Same way when you strike a note on the piano, it isn’t simply a matter of so much pressure which could be measured on some kind of mechanical instrument. Because if that were so, all we have to do is get those player pianos which hit the notes regularly in accordance with the formula—and they all sound terrible.
Because there’s a thing in touching that’s called follow-through. When you hit a golf ball, it’s not enough to hit the ball with a certain volume, you have to have a swing that goes beyond it, you see? And so, in the same way with striking notes, there has to be a thing called follow-through: that you go beyond the actual hitting of the note.
And that is a thing that’s hard to measure, but is very important and makes all the difference. So then, the relationship of self to other is the complete realization that loving yourself is impossible without loving everything defined as other than yourself. In fact, the more you try to think about what your self is, the more you discover that you can only think about yourself in terms of things that you thought were other than yourself.
If you search for yourself—this is one of the great kōan problems in Zen: produce you, find out who you are. When, for example, Sri Ramana Maharshi, that great Hindu sage of modern times—people used to come to him and say, “Who was I in my previous incarnation?” You know, this sort of stupid question. He would say, “Who wants to know?
Who are you? Find out who you are.” And you can search for you endlessly and never find out. Never!
Everything that you get a kind of sensation of as being yourself will, upon examination, turn out to be something else; something other. And now let’s work on the other direction. Just go exactly the opposite way.
What do you mean by something other? Let’s find something other than me and search for that. Well, I say, “Alright.
I can touch the ground here.” This is something other than me. And yet, I realize that my sensation of this soft carpet with something firm underneath it is a state of my nerve endings in the hands and my muscles which report to me that this is a softly covered hardness, and that everything I feel about this carpet and the floor is a condition of my brain. In other words, when I feel this so-called external thing, I feel it only as it is, as it were, translated into states of my own body.
All of you I see with your various shapes and colors, when I look out here, I am actually having an experience of how it feels inside my head. That’s the place where I know you. And you know me in your heads.
So that I really do not have any sensations of anything other than myself, because whatever I do know, I have to translate it into a state of my own body in order to know it at all. But do you see now what I’ve done? I carried in one direction the argument: where do I find my self?
And it all turned out to be something other. Then I followed the question: how do I find something other? And it all turned out to be me.
The same thing happens, for example, when you get into the old debates about fate and free will. When you discover that everything you do is completely determined, then you suddenly have to wake up to the fact that the only real you is whatever it is that’s determining what you do. I mean, if you say, for example, “All that I do here and now is a result of the past.
There have been processes in the past, going back and back and back. And my sitting here in this room and talking to you is simply the necessary effect of all that ever happened before.” Do you know what that’s saying? It’s saying that here in your presence talking to you is everything that ever happened before.
That’s me. Wowee! And so, of course, with you being here, if you want to figure it that way.
Because all this problem about causality is completely phony. It’s all based on this: that in order to talk about the world and think about it, we had to chop it up into bits. And we called those bits things and events.
In the same way, if you want to eat chicken, you can’t swallow a whole chicken unless you’ve got a huge mouth. So you cut it up into pieces and—say you got a cut-up fryer from the store, but you don’t get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. Chicken comes whole out of the egg.
So, in the same way, the universe of nature doesn’t come in bits or bites. It comes all of a piece. But to digest it, to (in other words) absorb it into your mind, you have to cut it into bits and take it in, as we say, one thing at a time.
But that chopping of the world into these separate bits is like chopping up the chicken, or carving the slices off the beef, or taking water out cupful by cupful. You can handle it that way, but that’s not the way it is. So you have to see that the whole notion of there being particular, separate events, and particular and separate things, is nothing more than a calculus.
A calculus. Calculus means “pebbles.” Pebbles used for counting. You know?
And you put one, two, three, four, five, six, et cetera. So when we measure curves, we pretend as if they were a series of points. And the position of these points can be expressed in an arithmetical way, say, by tracing a curve across a piece of finely calibrated graph paper.
That’s the basis of the calculus. So that a curve swings so many points across, so many down, et cetera, and so you feel you have control of the curve that way. You measure it, you know where it really goes.
But where it really goes—you have set up this “really” in terms of your other criss-cross system, and you said, “That’s for real.” All it means is: you’ve meshed two different systems, one on top of the other, and you’re saying, “What I mean by ‘reality’ is the systems of measurements that I’ve invented. The system of weights and measures. This thing is really”—and you feel a great sense of confidence—“exactly two pounds.
That’s what it weighs.” Simply because you’ve made the two pounds of apples correspond with the weighing machine, which is a constant. Two pounds of apples, two pounds of grapes; different number of apples, different number of grapes in each case. But you say, “That’s really two pounds.” But so, in just the same way, we say, “There are really different people.
There are really different events.” But actually there aren’t. I’m not saying that if we were to see the world in its truth, all of you different people would disappear, that your outlines would suddenly become vague and you would turn into a solid lump of gelatinous goo. A lot of people think that that’s the way mystics see things.
That’s not at all what would happen. The thing I’m saying is this: we are all different, but we are as interrelated and indispensable to each other as the different organs in our body—stomach, heart, glands, bones, et cetera. Now, you see, you can argue that the stomach is fundamental: eating is the big thing.
And therefore we grew brains as extensions of the stomach to get it more food. So that you say, “The brain is the servant of the stomach.” But you can argue equally that the brain is primary, and it has all these thinking games to play, and it needs a stomach as an appendage to supply it with energy. Or you can argue that the sex organs are primary, and that they need the brain and the stomach to keep that ecstasy going.
But the brain and the stomach can equally argue that they wouldn’t find it worthwhile going on unless they had the sex organ appendage to give them solace. The truth of the matter is that nobody comes first. Nobody pushes the other one around.
You don’t find brains without stomachs and sex organs. They all go together. And this is the fallacy of Freud in saying, for example, that the sexual apparatus and urge is primary.
It just goes along with the others. So that you don’t have a universe in which a series or a collection of separate events and things are banging each other around like an enormous mass of billiard balls. You have a situation which is quite different from that, where what have hitherto been called causally related events—to say that certain events are causally related is a very clumsy way of saying that these certain specific events (which you have isolated as being causally related) were in fact really all parts of the same event.
In the previous session I was discussing polarity, and polar thinking as the key to understanding that our identity is more than the skin-encapsulated ego. Polar thinking is the crux (the essential tool) for making the jump from feeling yourself to be something merely in this universe on the one hand, to the state of feeling, on the other hand, that you are this universe, focused and acting in that particular way that we call the human individual. So this principle is explained in the sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch.
You know, the famous Platform Sūtra of Huìnéng, where he gives a long instruction on how to answer people’s questions about Zen. And he says, “If they ask you a question about something sacred, give them an answer in terms of the secular. If they ask about something secular, give them an answer in terms of the sacred.” So if somebody says, “What is Buddha?” you say, “This saucepan holds about a quart.” If they ask you about a saucepan, you say, “Why is my hand so much like the Buddha’s hand?” And so that’s the secret of understanding funny stories in Zen.
That it’s the same thing that… it’s polarity. All these paradoxes are polarity thinking. Because what makes the difference between a person who has this type of cosmic or mystical consciousness—I don’t like these words, but we haven’t got a good word for this state of mind.
Well, we’ll have to put our heads together and invent something better. In academic circles, I call it “ecological awareness,” because “mysticism” is a dirty word around the academy. And so “ecological awareness” does fairly well—except, again, you always have to explain to people what ecology is; they don’t know yet.
So ecology is the science which deals with the relationships between organisms and their environments. That’s “ecology.” Just as “economics:” in Greek, ecos (or sometimes pronounced oikos; modern Greek pronounces it ecos) is the “home.” And so economics: ecosnomos is the law of the home. And ecologos is the logic of the home.
And so the ecos, the home of man, is the world. And so ecology is man’s relationship to the world, or the relationship of a plant to its environment. All that kind of relationship—the study of the bee and flower bit—is ecology.
So the thing that is so characteristic, then, of this new or different kind of consciousness is that it starts from or has its foundation in awareness of relationship; of “go-withness.” That the inside of a situation “goeswith” the outside, and although you may think from the point of view of ordinary consciousness that they work independently of each other, in this state of consciousness you see that they don’t. In other words, it’s slowly beginning to penetrate our ordinary consciousness that what any individual does—and we ascribe to him as his behavior, and praise him for it or blame him for it—everything that he does goeswith what happens outside him. The behavior of the environment and the behavior of that organism in that environment is one behavior.
You mustn’t think of this deterministically—that is to say, as if the organism were something merely subservient to the environment. Nor must you think the opposite way, that the environment is something that can be pushed around by the organism. When an organism starts looking as if it was pushing its environment around, it simply means that the environment-organism, the total field, is changing itself.
So just as we are organized that way, as organisms, so also we are—although not aware of it—organized that way collectively as individuals relating to each other and relating to the other forms of life, and to the geology, and the meteorological and astronomical phenomena around us. Only, we haven’t come to notice it. Our attention has been so fixed upon some of the details of this relationship that we have created a system of details as if it were a separate physical system.
You understand—I’ve mentioned this, I’m sure, to many of you before—that human beings have for at least 3,000 years specialized in one kind of attention only that is what we call conscious attention. And that is a form of scanning the physical environment as if we were looking at it with a spotlight. And therefore, the nature of scanning is this: that it takes in the whole scene in series, bit by bit.
Even if you don’t go in a straight line, and you scan like this, looking around you, you have a series of, shall I say, glimpses or glances piled up. And that gives you the history, the linear time, of your existence. Because it’s one experience of attention after another.
Now, in just the same way with all of us in this room exist totally together here and now—with all our innumerable physical organs, and every single one of our hairs, all present here—nevertheless, we notice all this in series. And we come to imagine, therefore, that we live in time instead of in eternity. And so I have to resort to funny little tricks like I was discussing yesterday to show how the past is influenced by the future, because we screen that possibility out by the way we pay attention to things.
We are absolutely befuddled with words. Because, you see, words follow the same linear pattern because words are a notation. Conscious observation of the world by the spotlight always is accompanied by a notation.
That is to say, the notation of language, the notation of written letters, the notation of numbers, the notation of algebraical symbols, any kind of notation you want to think of. Musical notes—they do the same thing. And you notice what you can notate, and that is what is notable, noteworthy: because we observe and become aware consciously only of those things that we consider important.
And what do you consider important? Well, that depends on your hobby. For which, for most people, is survival.
But when you get relaxed, if you get into the contemplative state, and you sit quietly—you know, you should try tea ceremony for this—this is a way of noticing everything. I mean, of suddenly realizing that what people consider important is that most of them are absolutely out of their minds. They are rushing around with piercing eyes looking into the future, trying to make livings.
And then, when they make the living, they don’t know what to do with it because they’ve no time to enjoy it. I mean, after all, if you’ve got a business in which you’re fleecing the public by putting out an inferior product and making scads of money doing this, then when you’ve made your money all you have to buy is the inferior products of your competitors, and you’ve cheated yourself because you didn’t know how to live. I’m getting ready to do a new television series on the contributions of Asia to the leisurely life and the good life.
It’s going to be about things like Chinese and Indian cooking, Japanese bathtubs (how to install one in the American home), how to do Japanese massage, how to make up your wife like a Hindu dancing girl, how to dress (what Asia has to contribute to comfortable clothes), all kinds of things like that. How to be civilized, yes. Because we’re gently twitting the American public that it is the richest people in the world and they don’t know how to enjoy themselves.
Really, the things that we are told are enjoyable aren’t very. It will discuss, for example, things like the snow treatment, which is for couples—or for anybody, for that matter—it’s where an evening is set aside for one person to serve the other, wait on them hand and foot, and deliver them a glorious evening of dining, dancing, hot tubs, massage, lovemaking, everything, you see? And you just really knock yourself out to do something beautiful for another person.
But people don’t do that sort of thing. I don’t know why not, it’s tremendous fun for both parties involved. “Snow” is slang for heroin.
And it is used in this case as a joke; that this is the ultimate pleasure. And so we say to “snow” someone is to give them an absolutely royal time. But this incapacity for—well, we could call it an incapacity for pleasure—and this tremendous preoccupation with time and with rush and with getting there is a result of overspecialization in linear consciousness.
Now, linear consciousness is indeed remarkable, but it is something, in a way, aggressive. Just as the sword, the cutting edge, is an aggressive instrument as distinct from the total skin, you see? With the total skin you can feel all over, and in this way you embrace life.
When you get into a hot tub, it goes all over your skin, you see? And it’s a type of diffused thing; what Freud called polymorphous erotic feeling. All over.
Whereas conscious awareness is like the point of a pencil: it jabs, and it writes down precisely what. And so those people who are all conscious attention are sort of intellectual porcupines. They’re all prickles into things.
And that gives them an essentially hostile attitude toward life, because, of course, conscious attention is a troubleshooter. It’s the radar in the human organism to watch out for changes in the environment, just as the radar of a ship is watching out for icebergs, and an aeroplane’s radar is watching out for thunderclouds. And so, in the same way, our thing is going around like this, and it’s serving a very valuable function.
But if you identify yourself, all entire, with that part-function, then you define yourself as being in trouble and looking for trouble, and you become unaware of your generalized relationship with the external world. So then, you don’t see that other things are important besides those things which are “practical.” Nobody takes time off to look at these things. Nan-sen, the Zen master, said: “most people look at these flowers as if they were in a dream.” That is to say, as if they were not awake, not looking at it at all.
And people think, “Well, they’re pretty. They decorate the room. They have green leaves, and that’s nice.” And once you get them to draw what they think it looks like, it doesn’t look anything like it.
You know, you draw a leaf, you make an outline like this, and fill it up with green paint. But these leaves aren’t green. They’re every color of the rainbow.
If you look at any single leaf of this kind, and you look deeply enough, you will see the reflection of every color in the room in it. And you will begin to realize, if you contemplate long enough on the leaf of the flower, that it involves the whole universe. You should watch for things like this; it’s fascinating.
Don’t dismiss reflections as things that aren’t there. When you walk into a room, you can see that not only do the windowpanes—and polished furniture, and people’s spectacles, and people’s eyeballs—not only do they reflect everything going on around you, but also, things pick up color. What color is the carpet?
It depends on the light. You say, “Well, it’s a white carpet.” That’s only because the windows aren’t colored. If the windows were blue, it would be a blue carpet.
But you say the transparent window is of course a truer and more correct window than a blue one. But is it? Why should it be?
Why should so-called white glass be more real somehow than blue glass? Nobody ever answered that. So it’s just that white glass is what we use most of the time, and so we say that’s more real than what we would only use occasionally.
But then, in a dark room, the color of the carpet changes. When it’s got shadows on it in a certain way, any painter can say, and he can watch the shadows of your feet and say that’s no longer a white carpet. What color are these shadows?
I don’t know. Some of them look gold. So then you begin to realize through reflection that, in a way, everything is reflection.
That’s quite a thought. We all feel that there are substantial things. The feeling of hardness I get when I shove my fist against something is exactly like the feeling of light when I meet something with my eyes.
The point is that the eyes are so sensitive that they can realize the concreteness of light. The ears are so sensitive that they can realize the concreteness of air vibrations and turn them into sound. The fingers are less sensitive, and they realize concreteness—that is, reality—in terms of touch, in terms of hardness.
But all these things are reflections. That is to say… well, let’s ask the question: is a rainbow real? Well, it fulfills all the categories for being there because it’s a matter of public observation.
And it isn’t the hallucination of just one observer, because you can stand beside me and see the rainbow, too. But you just try to get a hold of that rainbow, approach it. I remember, as a little boy, I’d ride my bicycle around chasing rainbow ends, and believe that there might be a pot of gold at the end of it.
But the irritating thing was: you could never catch up with the rainbow. Well, was it there, or wasn’t it? Well, everybody saw it.
But, you see, it depends on a kind of triangulation between you and the sun and the moisture in the atmosphere. And if that triangulation doesn’t exist, and those three functions don’t exist, there isn’t any rainbow. Just like, I got a drum here, and I pound the hell out of it with no skin on the drum, it won’t make any noise.
In other words, for a drum to beat, it needs both skin and a fist. If there’s no skin, the drum doesn’t make any noise. If there’s no fist, the drum doesn’t make any noise.
So, in the same way, exactly, the hard floor made of stone is like a rainbow. It is there only if certain conditions of relationship are fulfilled. Now, we like to think, you see, that houses and things go on existing in their natural state when we’re not around looking at them or feeling them.
But what about the rainbow? Supposing that there was nobody to see it. Would it be there?
Or let me put it in another way: we’re supporting the myth that the external world exists without us, but let’s ask the question in another way. Supposing I was there, capable of seeing a rainbow, but there wasn’t any sun out. It wouldn’t be there, would it?
Let’s put it another way. Let’s suppose the sun was out and I was there to see it, but there wasn’t any moisture in the atmosphere. It wouldn’t be there, would it?
So, equally, it wouldn’t be there if there was no one there to see it. It just as much depends on somebody to see it as it depends on the sun and as it depends on the moisture. But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us.
That’s the whole myth of the independent observer, of man coming into a world to which he doesn’t really belong, and that it’s all going in there and he has nothing to do with it, but he just arrives in here and sees it as it always was. But that’s a joke! People could only think that way if they felt completely alienated and did not feel that the external world was continuous with their own organism.
You bet you the external world is so continuous with your own organism that the whole world is human, because it’s human-ing. There was a superstition in the 19th century to think of it some other way. Because, for example, when it was found out that the Earth was not the center of the cosmos, but that we were a small planet in a rather insignificant solar system, way out on the edge of a galaxy that certainly wasn’t the biggest galaxy there was in all space, and people began to say, “Oh, dear me!
Man is nothing. He’s just a little fungus on this rock that goes ’round the sun, and nature couldn’t care less.” And so all the poets of the new 19th century philosophy of science said, “Man is nothing.” Man is just pshht, see? But, at the same time, man was saying he was the spearhead of evolution, the farthest that life had progressed, and he was going to conquer nature.
Because he’s just a poor little accident, and if he’s going to make his way of life successful, he’s got to fight all this nonsense around him, all these other creatures that aren’t even civilized, and beat them into submission so they’ll be civilized. Well, that’s a big story; that’s a fairly tale. You could equally say man is a mighty atom: tiny, way off in some funny corner of the universe.
But don’t forget: the universe has no corners. Everywhere in it is the middle or can be regarded as such, just as I pointed out to you that any point on a sphere can be seen as the center of the surface of the sphere. So, in the same way, anything in curved space can be seen as the middle of it all.
And here, in the middle of it all, once again, the Earth has become the center of the cosmos. The infinitely mobile central point of all possible orbits. That was a joke phrase invented by Franz Werfel in his book Star of the Unborn.
But it really is. You can regard anywhere as central. So here, in the center, is this extraordinary little being whose importance is not in his size—that’s no criterion of value—but in his complexity, in his sensitivity, in the fact that these little germs, these tiny, tiny creatures we call people are (each one of them) essential to the existence of the whole cosmos.
That’s the sort of relation we have here between the great and the small, the macrocosm and the microcosm. But, you see, we don’t think about it, because of a way—we are all brought up within social forms which denied us. “Little children should be seen and not heard.” When children come into this world, we put them down.
You get used to that in infancy, and all your life through you feel vaguely put down by reality. Government gives itself airs and graces, even in a democracy. The police are superbly rude to everybody else, just because they happen to be the instruments of the law.
Incidentally, there’s a very amusing article in a periodical called the East Village Other on policemanship, and what to do if you’re detained by one of these officers of the law; how to behave. You must be respectful, that’s the main point. You see, that attitude—that you are here on probation, on sufferance, that you don’t matter, that you’re not important to this whole thing at all, and that you could be wiped out any time and no one would miss you—is very, very deeply pushed into us by social institutions.
Because we’re afraid that if we taught people otherwise, they would get too big for their boots. Well, of course, they might. Because they would be reacting against the old way of doing things.
If you tell a person who’s been put down all his life that he is in fact the lord God, he’s liable to go off his rocker. But the problem is that we have got a certain criterion of what to experience, and what to look at, and what to regard as important, as a result of specialization of conscious attention alone. And with that goes the idea that the most important virtue in a living organism is aggression, you see?
We’re terribly anxious if our kids aren’t brought up to be aggressive. You know? You get a report about your boy from the school teacher, and it says Johnny’s not aggressive enough.
Well, you thought he was supposed to be integrated with the group—that’s what they were talking about some while ago—and now they say he doesn’t show aggression. Because the culture is aggressive. For example, you can look at our taboos: we have no taboo against pictures of people being tortured and murdered, which are very unpleasant, but we do have a taboo against pictures of people making love.
Why? We have the feeling, you see, that everything to do with the glowing, flowing, glorious, warm participation with life is slightly sickening. Whereas where life is not participated in, but where there’s a kind of a sharp contact—why, that’s real.
See, a lot of people don’t really know they’re here unless they hurt. And if you have any doubts in your conscience as to whether you’re alright, so long as you’re in pain you can be sure you are. Suffering is so good for you because it builds character and, above all, it tells you that you’re here.
I know people who like going to the dentist because they get a great sense of reality from going to the dentist. But in the history of mankind there have been all kinds of perfectly viable and successful cultures which didn’t buy that story. The famous matriarchal or matrist cultures were always different in their attitude.
They weren’t afraid of pleasure. They wouldn’t say that ecstasy was enfeebling. This is a system of values based on people for whom the object of existence is survival and conquest.