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And as you get to the end of the out-breath, do it with the same sort of feeling that you have when you let your body drop into a very comfortable bed. You drop out. Let go.
Fall. Let weight do it. And then, after a while, the breath will return.
Don’t pull, let it fall back in, and drop in until you had enough. And then let it drop out again. It’s a good idea in this to breathe in through the nostrils and out through the lips.
Allowing there to be a slight sensation of moving air on your lips so that you know you’re breathing and that you’re not just straining your muscles. But never force anything. Just have the feeling of it going that way by virtue of weight.
And then, as you let the breath fall outwards, you simply float a sound on it. Think of a sound that pleases you; a note that seems agreeable to your voice. And as you breathe out heavily, imagine that sound to yourself; whatever you feel like.
Hum it out loud. [Humming] You keep it going. [Humming] Now, you know, you’re still a little short-winded and uneasy about a thing like this.
You can—as well as allowing the sound to hum and happen with breath that is falling out—you can, as it were, simply request it to increase the volume without forcing. And you can keep a sound humming as a whole group of people, together, by when your sound ends, bring it in again quite softly and then allow the volume to rise, and then you will get a more or less continuous production of sound by a group. But it’s important to have the sound running continuously.
Try it again, picking your own note once more. [Humming] Now ask it to increase its volume. [Humming] Will you listen a moment?
What we’re working into is the completely liberated but soft and gentle letting of sound happen through us without the slightest sense of strain, so that you are not singing it, but it is singing with your voice. Don’t premeditate a tune, but let it come. So that it’s as if, almost, you were talking nonsense.
I mean, you know, I can talk nonsense at the drop of the hat. I can give you a whole lecture in a completely nonexistent language. But what you’re doing is: you’re doing this gently with voice, and you’re simply preoccupied with it like easy humming to yourself.
[Humming] Now, when you have got absorbed in sound, where were you? This would be called a state of consciousness where we have a primitive form of samadhi. That is to say, we are happily absorbed in what we are doing and we have forgotten about ourselves.
You can’t very well do that and worry or think anything serious. And you’ll notice that there’s a special way of doing it. Because, I mean, we can go crazy, and we can do kind of wild Indian chants, but in this UGH you are sort of straining too much as a rule, you see?
If you keep it down to a soft thing like this and get a floating feeling of the voice, instantly you feel any sound is uncomfortable, avoid it. Slip down if you’re going too high, slip up if you’re going too low. If your voice tends to change, follow its change.
So that you’re just swinging along with it. This is the point why, from ancient times, people discovered humming and singing, and everybody used to sing while they worked. But you will notice that today very few people sing at all.
You have to make a thing of it. People are afraid of their voices—their melodic voice as distinct from their spoken voice. I know an enormous number of people who never sing at all.
Why is it that when the scriptures, the Upanishads, the Sūtras are read, they are invariably chanted? Because an extra dimension is added to the voice as soon as you bring a note into it. That’s the divine element, you see?
The note-sound, the seen-sound—symbolically speaking. So this is a form of what I would call free mantra chanting, like we did then, which isn’t used much. But it does give you, as you do it, a very good idea of what the meditative state is.
Because it isn’t just a letting happen only of things going on around, it’s inside you as well. As distinct from the prescribed mantra—like oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ, or oṃ ah hūṃ, or om ram sri ram jai jai ram hari krishna hari krishna krishna krishna hari hari, et cetera. Each one of them has a different feeling to it.
The Tibetan monks go down to an extraordinarily deep sound. They go as deep as you can get. There is a reason for this—it’s very difficult to explain, because you have to do it.
But when you go down into sound as deeply as you can get, you’re going to an extreme of the vibration. And everybody feels, naturally, that what is deep is sort of the underpinnings, the foundation. And when they go into that deep sound, they are literally exploring the depths of sound.
As we say: go into it deeply. But you can very readily see, once you get into that, that you’re in another state of consciousness altogether. You’re not anymore in your fidgety, chattering to your skull everyday consciousness—what I call normal restlessness.
But in this way, always, you get a sensuous feeling of the breath; that it’s very enjoyable to breathe. And then you will find this will help in the quality of the sound you produce. And we, of course, have to get away from some of our musical prejudices when we do this.
Now, I know—I’m sorry—but everybody thinks that to spend a lot of time gently humming nonsense to yourself is a waste of time. What are you going to do with the time that you save, you know? But the point, though, is with all this: the first we have to understand is what I will call deep listening.
And very few people ever really listen. Because instead of receiving the sound, they make comments on it all the time. They’re thinking about it.
And so the sound is never fully heard. You just have to let it take over. Let it take you over completely.
Then you get the samadhi state of becoming it. And it also means that you abandon your socially nervous personality. One of the reasons why people don’t sing is that they hear so many masters on records, and they’re ashamed of their own voices and think there’s no point singing unless I’m good at it.
Well, that’s like saying there’s no point in my doing anything at all unless I’m particularly gifted at it, which is ridiculous. But singing is, of course, very good for you, but we won’t mention that because it brings in too much purposiveness into it. But it’s like a child will make noises because of the absorbing interest of making noises.
A child will make all sorts of bleeaaah wllllooooeaaagh ooooeaghh bleeeeeaaah bllwwbllwwbllwwbllw bleeeeah neeeaaah reeaaoww, see, to explore the possibilities of what you can do with a voice. See? You don’t see adults going around doing this, they’re all too shy!
You just go blwwwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee bweee booo bweee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwopp. Blweee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee blwoo blwee, see? Tremendous fun!
But all this is perfectly incorporable within meditation. It embarrasses the hell out of some people. They say, “What are you laughing at?
I don’t see any point in laughing unless there’s something funny.” I had a friend who was a theological student, and he was very fat. And he used to sit on the elevated train that went from Evanston into Chicago where the seats run right down the side of the train. So that he’d sit in the middle of one side, and everybody in the car could see him.
This fat fellow. And he’d get on at Evanston, he’d sit there kind of vacant, and he’d start to chuckle to himself. And slowly he’d work it out, and he’d start with all his flesh vibrating, and by the time they got into Chicago the whole car was in hysterics!
This morning I was giving you a talk on the fundamental basic attitudes expressed in Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. And the title of the book, “Tao Te Ching,” introduces now the second word in the title. I’ve been dwelling this morning on the first word, which is “Tao,” and so comes up this second word, “Te.” And this word, again, faces us with some serious problems of translation.
Ordinarily translated “virtue,” but virtue as we understand it today isn’t at all appropriate. The nearest kind of… when we speak of the “healing virtues of a plant,” that’s nearer to the meaning of this word “Te.” The Japanese pronounce it toku (徳), the Cantonese duk, and the Northern Mandarins approximately te. And in the section of the Lao Tzu where this is really introduced, the text says something like this: “The superior virtue not virtue, thus it has virtue.
Inferior virtue can’t let go of virtue, thus not virtue.” And we more or less paraphrase that by translating: “Superior virtue is not conscious of itself as virtue, and therefore it is virtue. But inferior virtue is so hooked up with being virtuous (or hooked on being virtuous) that it’s not virtue.” Now then, therefore, this word is a connection of “virtue” and “magic.” It means “the excellence of things,” in the sense that a tree excels at being a tree and nobody really knows how it does it. There is no way of imitating a tree, except the only thing is to be one.
And so, in the same way, when a human being shows extraordinary skill at something, it seems that it comes natural to him. It seems that he doesn’t achieve it by any kind of artificiality. If there is some discipline in it, it’s concealed.
So excelling in something naturally, and yet it’s something that is so difficult to understand that it seems that it has been done by magic, is the meaning of this word. So what “Te” is, is: the state of affairs, a way of talking about (particularly) a human being, who has learned to live in harmony with the Tao. Now, of course, everything is fundamentally in harmony with the Tao.
In the book called the Zhongyong, or “The Unwobbling Pivot,” it is said “the Tao is that from which nothing can depart, that from which things can depart is not the Tao.” Fundamentally, you see, you can’t get away from it. It’s like a situation in which we are all floating in a tremendous river, and the river carries you along, anyhow. Now, some of the people in the river are swimming against it, but they’re still being carried along.
Others have learned that the art of the of the thing is to swim with it. And they are carried along, too—but they know it, you see? They know they are carried along, whereas the people who are swimming against it think they’re going in the opposite direction.
But they’re not really. So that was the sort of discussion we were having this morning, when I find—invariably, whenever I talk about these things—Americans raise moral issues. Because we are a people incredibly bamboozled by preachers.
And so this always comes up. Bamboozled. By preachers.
Yes! And have chronic guilty consciences, and so those questions are always raised. But this, you see, explains part of this situation that you have to flow with the river.
There is no other way. But you can swim against it and pretend not to be flowing with it, but you still are. But a person who is not making that pretense anymore—who knows that you have to go with the river and swim with it—suddenly he acquires (behind everything that he does) the power of the river.
The person swimming against the river, you see, does not (by his action) express the force of the river. The person swimming with it—he goes along and he has that whole river behind him, but he’s subtly directing it. Because you can change direction in the course of the river: you can go to the left or to the right, as a ship can use a rudder and still go along with the current.
Or, more skillful still, as a sailboat can tack: because when a sailboat tacks and goes in a direction contrary to the wind, it still is using the wind to blow it along. Now that is the most highly skillful art of all. That is Taoism in perfection.
The art of sailing. Very intelligent! I remember once I was looking in the open air, and one of those glorious little thistledown things came.
And I picked it up, like that, and brought it down. And it looked as if it was struggling to get away just as if you caught an insect by one leg—like a daddy longlegs or something of that kind. It seemed to be struggling to get away.
And first I thought, “Well, it’s not doing that. That’s just the wind blowing.” Then I thought again. “Really?
Only the wind blowing?” Surely, it is the structure of this thing which, in cooperation with the existence of wind, enables it to move like an animal—but using the wind’s effort, not its own. It is a more intelligent being than an insect, in a way, because an insect uses effort. Like a person who rows a boat uses effort, but the man who puts up a sail is using magic: he lets nature do it for him with the intelligence to use a sail.
You see? So in just this way, the meaning of “Te” is that kind of intelligence which, without your using very much effort, gets everything to cooperate with you. You, for example, never force other people to agree with you, but you give them the notion that the idea you wanted them to have was their own.
This is a feminine art, preeminently. A woman who really wants a lover does not pursue him, because then most men feel that she’s aggressive—and if she’s aggressive she obviously is a woman who has had difficulty in finding lovers, and therefore there must be some undesirably secret thing about her. But if she, as it were, makes a void, then (and this is slightly difficult to get) people get excited.
They know she is a highly prized object, and so they pursue. The same way when you want to teach a baby to swim: a thing you can do is to put the baby in the water and then move backwards in the water and create a vacuum. And this pulls the baby along.
It helps it to learn the feel of the water and how to swim. It’s the same principle. So also, clever difficult-to-get-ness is one of the very best means of acquiring immense publicity.
Take the case of T. E. Lawrence, who published the Seven Pillars of Wisdom in a limited edition. And this became an extraordinarily celebrated book. It cost hundreds of dollars a copy to find one on the market.
And they waited and waited, and built this up and built this up and built this up. And finally they published a general edition, and it was a knockout because the first one had been sort of secret and difficult to find. If you have patience, you see, you can always do this.
So the whole art of the ruler—you see, the Tao Te Ching is a book written for several purposes. You may take it as a guide to mystical understanding of the universe. You may take it as a dissertation on the principles of nature; almost a handbook of natural law, we would say.
Or you may also take it as a political book: a book of wisdom for governors. And the principle which it advocates, basically, is the virtue of governing by not ruling. Look at it in this way: supposing the president of the United States were as unknown to you by name as the local sanitary inspector; the man who looks after the drains and the sewage disposal and all that kind of thing.
This is not a glamorous figure, you see. But for that very reason he probably does his job more efficiently than the president. Because the president wastes an enormous amount of time in interviewing various groups from the Elks and the Girl Scouts, and conferring honors, and all this kind of thing.
The poor man’s life must be an utter torment, because he’s so well known and therefore has absolutely no time to give to the government of the country. I mean, think of his mail and all the people who have to be employed sifting that out, and assessing it! So that, if he were someone quite anonymous and that we didn’t have to think about, he would be a very very good ruler.
In just the same way, for example, you don’t have to attend (unless you’re sick) to the government of your own body. It happens automatically. This is this expression zìrán (自然), “of itself,” and it goes on day after day after day.
And the better it is, the less you have to think about it. When you see well, you do not see your eyes. If there is something wrong with your eyes, you start seeing spots, and those spots are spots in your eyes.
When you hear well, you never hear your ears. But when they start singing—you know?—then you are starting to hear your ears, and your ears are getting in the way of their own hearing. So on the deepest level, a person, as a whole, can get in the way of his own existence by becoming too aware of himself.
And then he lacks this quality “Te.” Now, the Taoists then propose that there be something to help people get back to Tao and to be able to be in a state of “Te” so that they wouldn’t get in their own way. And this is connected with the idea of being empty. Emptiness, being somehow vacant, was the secret of the thing.
The highest kind of knowledge is not know-how, but no-how: to be able to do it no-how, without any method. To achieve this, something is practiced which is called “fasting the heart.” The heart, in Chinese, is a word which doesn’t mean “heart” in the physiological sense. You see, it’s part of the “Te” character.
Xīn (心). It’s usually located about here. And it means “heart-mind.” It’s equivalently translated as “mind,” and in all the Zen texts where the word “mind” is used—no mind, mushin—it is this character.
The psychic center. Now, the best kind of heart is absence of heart. In English, the word “heartless” has a very bad connotation, as does the word “mindless.” A heartless person is an inconsiderate, unfeeling person.
A mindless person is an idiot. But a person who has mushin, or no mind or no heart in Chinese, is a very high order of person. It means that his psychic center doesn’t get in its own way.
It operates as if it wasn’t there. Zhuang Zhou says that the highest form of man uses his xīn like a mirror: it grasps nothing, it refuses nothing, it receives but does not keep. And the poem says when the geese fly over the water and they are reflected in the water, that the geese do not intend to cast their reflection and the water has no mind to retain their image.
So the whole thing is, you see, to operate in the world as if you were absent. Now, this is built into us physiologically, fundamentally. Let me ask you simply: what is the color of your head from the standpoint of your eyes?
Your eyes don’t see your head, do they? You look all around, you see everything else. But your head you don’t see.
Do you feel that your head is black? No. It hasn’t any color at all.
Outside, you see, your field of vision is an oval—two eyes, and this creates sort of two centers of an ellipse. So there’s this whole field of vision. Now, experiment: what is beyond the field of vision?
What color is it where you can’t see? It isn’t black. This is an important point!
It’s no color at all beyond there. And in this way you can get an idea of what is meant by that character that I discussed this morning (xuan (玄)) which, although it formally has a meaning of “darkness”—this one—although it formally has the meaning of “darkness,” and the “deep,” and the “obscure,” it actually refers to this kind of “no color,” which is the color of your head so far as your eyes are concerned. So in this sense, the invisibility of one’s head—almost the not having of any head at all—is the secret of being alive.
To be headless, you might say. To have no head, in just the sense I’m talking about, is our way of talking about the Chinese expression mushin, “no-mind.” Now, as a matter of fact, if you want to see the inside of your head, all you have to do is keep your eyes open. Because everything that you’re experiencing in the external visual field is a state of your brain.
All these colors and shapes are the way in which the brain nerves translate the electrical impulses in the external world; being in the world outside the envelope of skin. So they translate all what is going on outside into impulses which are, to us, shape and color. But shape and color are states of the nerves, so what you see when your eyes are open is how it feels inside your head.
You think your head is a blank. But actually, it’s being a blank. You don’t see your brain as an external, undulating, corrugated structure.
You see your brain as everything outside. So, in this way, the emptiness of one’s head is the condition of seeing. The transparency of the eye lens is the condition of seeing colors.
It has no color itself. Eckhart said this: because my eye has no color it is able to discern color. This is in Germany in the 13th century.
This is a fundamental Taoist idea of being absent as a condition of being present: being not there. So Zhuang Zhou says: when your belt is comfortable, you don’t feel it. When your shoes are comfortable, it is as if you weren’t wearing any.
Likewise, your clothes, you see? The more you are aware of these things, the less properly they are made, or the less properly they fit. But we raise an objection to this.
A very simple objection. If I don’t know I’m there, I seem to be missing everything. We want to know that we know.
If we’re happy and we don’t know we’re happy, we might just as well not be happy. To be happy and to know that you’re happy is really the overflowing of the cup of life. Of course, the penalty for that is to be miserable and to know that you’re miserable.
Some people are miserable without knowing it. But you know my limerick, And this is the great human predicament: the development of self-consciousness, the development of the possibility of reflecting upon one’s own knowledge. And this is simultaneously a blessing and a curse.
And Taoism does not escape this problem. I mean, it doesn’t avoid this problem, it deals with it. But it doesn’t deal with it obviously.
So we get back to this fundamental verse about the nature of “Te.” What is highly virtuous is a virtue that is not conscious of itself as virtue. The moment it’s conscious of itself as such, you see, it fails. So in this way, we love to see a child dancing all by itself, lost in the dance and not performing for an audience.
And we say, “Oh, if only I could dance like that! If only I could become like a child again. Innocent!” But then, soon, you know, when parents notice how beautifully a child dances, and they all approve of it and say to this child, “Dance for us,” the child begins to lose this power and it puts on airs.
It knows it’s noticed. And we don’t like that. We say that’s affectation.
That’s showing off. That’s phony. What we want you to do is to dance as if you had no audience, not even yourself—which, of course, puts the child in a double bind because it says to the child: we require you to do something that will be acceptable only if you do it as if it wasn’t required.
We do that all the time to our children and to each other. “You must love me.” After all, you promised to do so when we got married, didn’t you? And so on.
So this is the difficulty. But somehow, a very great artist in the maturity of his life somehow is able at least to give the impression that he does what he does without playing to the gallery, without self-consciousness. It seems perfectly natural.
So how does he get there? There was a Taoist sage later than Lao Tzu. His name was Liezi.
We Romanize that as L-I-E-H. And he had a reputation for being able to ride on the wind. So light. Zhuang Zhou says in one place: it’s easy enough to stand still, the difficulty is to walk without touching the ground.
Because in the state of being in accord with the Tao, there is a certain feeling of weightlessness, parallel to the weightlessness that people feel when they get into outer space or when they go deep into the ocean. This is, of course, connected with the sensation that you’re not carrying your body around. I described this morning the sensation that an expert driver has when he really is with it in a car: that the hill lifts him up and drops him down the other side, that he and the road are all one process.
And that’s equivalent to the sense of weightlessness. And so this is connected. This is inner meaning of Liezi riding on the wind.
When Suzuki was asked, “What is it like to have satori?” he said, “It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.” And so we say in our own songs, “Walking on air, never a care. Something is making me sing. Tra-la-la-la, tra-la-la-la, like a little bird in spring.” What is this, then; weightlessness?
It means, partly, that you’re not moving around in constant opposition to yourself. Most people move in constant opposition to themselves because they are afraid that, if they don’t oppose themselves all the time, something awful will happen. See, it’s so easy to bend your arm.
No problem at all. But supposing you make a fight about it and you take these antagonistic muscles, as they’re called, and fight them against each other so that you have to bend your arm like that, you see? Well, how ridiculous!
But if you somehow felt that, in bending your arm, you might make a mistake—you know, instead of bending it you might hit yourself—then these two muscles get nervous and they fight each other to be sure that everything happens alright. That’s anxiety, you see? So when the human being developed the power to be aware of himself, to know that he knows—in other words, when the cortex was formed over the original brain—he fell from grace.
That was the fall of man. Because when he felt he had the sensation of being in charge, of being in control of himself—and you can only have that sensation when you are aware of what you’re doing—he got anxious. Am I aware enough of myself?