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Yeah. Really? Yes, yeah.
We’ve turned a corner. It’s a bigger corner than the Reformation. Probably.
Yes. It’s a corner on the order of the change between paleolithic and neolithic. And it’s like one of the three or four major turns in the history of man; not just culture, but man.
Right. Now: an enormous number of people go into the heart of New York every day for no other reason than to shop. They are, to a large extent, frustrated women living in these wretched dormitories; their husbands are working.
And the women go in in order to get some kind of sense of existence, of being, by buying things. Now, supposing it happens that, instead of that [??? ], they change their state of mind.
Right. Instead of going out—you know—and buying something, they’ve changed their state of mind sitting where they are in the first place. Then Bonwit Teller, everything in the middle of town, simply collapses—Lord & Taylor, and so on—have no more reason for existence.
It’s like Market Street in San Francisco, where everything is slowly falling apart because it’s so ridiculous to park there and you can’t get at the place anyhow. But where are people going to buy their Uher tape recorder machines? Supposing they don’t want them?
Pardon me? Suppose they don’t want them. Well, we all have them.
We’re transitional figures. We don’t need them. Like, I would be happy to hear Larry Bird sing his Corn Dance and his Buffalo Dance and I don’t want to tape it, you know?
I’ll hear it and that’s in my mind for the rest of my life. Right. I mean, the problem here is there’s a withering away of the state.
Advanced electronics. It’s called: let the state disintegrate. Well, the— In an advanced technology such as we are talking about, that lets you imaginatively transform it into some Buckminster Fuller process, you know, and each individual tribe can operate and create whatever it needs.
Other than that, there is the technology as we know it now, like a large electronic network. I think that the technology withers away as people learn to do it themselves. Like, it’s more interesting to do it yourself at home with your friends.
Like, sit around and blow the buffalo horn and blow the conch horn and not turn on the television. That was like conditions that were possible when the continent held fifteen million Indians. Yeah.
But now the continent holds a great many more. They have still what’s the most interesting. To do what you can do yourself.
The whole problem is reproduction. It’s not only the reproduction of the species in a sexual way, but reproduction as we are now reproducing what we are saying on tape. Because: if, supposing this conversation were very turned on and far out (I don’t know whether it is or not) people would say, “Oh, what a pity!
That didn’t get recorded.” Somebody remembers. See, because it didn’t really happen unless it was recorded. And increasingly we are developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it.
Well, trained minds remember. And the words of the Buddha were all remembered. Yeah.
Oral Tradition, oral tradition. And the words of the Buddha came down for 200 years before anybody put it in writing because people were paying attention to what he said. Yeah.
But Krishnamurti would argue that remembering it was already a fallacy. Well, he’s very pure. Yeah, that’s the point I’m trying to get at.
Which is not even a silly thing to say. It’s not. Exactly.
That’s exactly it. They’ve got to be told that they’re pursuing the holiest role. Well, there should be—again, if we had these meditation centers in all cities there would be centers where the Gita would be read, where the ancient Sutras would be read, where they would be reminded.
This is not teaching. What we need is personal example all over the place. Right.
But I would suggest that in these meditation centers there be some program of readings. Not in the sense of educating or teaching facts, but just reminding young people and any person who drops out and turns on that they are part of an ancient profession. The only holy profession.
The profession that’s kept the flame going. And it certainly should express itself in pushing that Mercedes. No drop-outs at public schools.
The public schools cannot be compromised. No. We’re not compromising with IBM or General Electric.
We’re simply saying, as Gary has said, that part of man’s karmic heritage is the ability to do incredible things with his hands and his analytic mind. But they should be holy things. Well, it’s a question of right occupation and right conduct.
It’s not like technology bad or that schools are bad. Well now, look here: what are we saying when we say, now, that something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you’re doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks.
Now, there’s a curious thing here. I have noticed—with Allen Ginsberg—that when he chants Hindu sutras he doesn’t do it in a pious way. Right.
There’s a joyousness, and there’s a feeling of delight to doing this chant that has more zip to it than anything we knew pas as being holy. Now, when you were doing something holy past, you had to put on a solemn expression, saying, “We’re doing this, but it hurts. But it’s good for us.” He’s not doing that when he chants.
He’s not saying it hurts and therefore it’s good for me. He’s saying it’s good for me because I enjoy it. It’s gorgeous.
I’m going right in there and I’m going to say all these Om Hare Rama Krishna Rama Hare Rama Hare et cetera. You see? He’s turning himself on.
Right. And I told some nuns a little while, when the mother superior came, and they were all talking about the reform of the liturgy, and how the Catholic church has gotten itself into a mess by translating the Latin liturgy into terrible English, and all the magic has gone out of it. And I said, “You should come and listen to Allen Ginsberg chant the sutras, because then you’d know how to celebrate mass properly!” So when we’re talking about something being holy we’ve got to be very careful.
We’re saying now, Gary, you were saying alright, people have got to be saints. And you said, well, that’s not just a joke to say this. But it’s got to be saints in an entirely new sense.
Not this masochistic kind of sainthood, whereby I am holy because I hurt and the amount of personal hurt that I’ve piled up is the… measure of my holiness. Well, that’s the Judeo-Christian idea that says the cross is at the center of the universe. Well, what about India, where we do have a giant psychedelic community, and many tribal groups, and tribal gatherings which serve as a model for our own?
What kind of material system is that? And would that be acceptable to Mario Savio? Sure, it’s acceptable.
So what do you think of Swami Bhaktivedanta’s plea for the acceptance of Krishna in every direction? Why, it’s a lovely, positive thing to say ‘Krishna.’ It’s a beautiful mythology and it’s a beautiful practice. Should be encouraged.
He think—but he feels it’s the one uniting the thing. He feels a monopolistic unitary thing about that. Well, the one thing’s— Well, I tell you: I think why he feels this is that it is… the mantrams, the images of Krishna, have in this culture no foul associations.
The word ‘God’ is contaminated, so Tillich would say Ground of Being instead of God. Anything except saying God. The words “get down on your knees and be humble before your heavenly father,” that gives everybody the creeps, it’s just awful to say something like that, you see?
Because all these Christian images have horrible associations attached to them, whereas when somebody comes in from the Orient with a new religion which hasn’t got any of these associations in our minds—all the words are new, all the rites are new—and yet somehow it has feeling in it, and we can get with that, you see, and we can dig that! And it can do something for us that it can’t do in Japan. For example, in Japan, when young people hear the Buddhist sutra chanted, they think, “Ugh.
Don’t let us hear that thing,” because they associate all that with fogeyism. Here, in the Buddhist churches—in the Niseis—they can’t stand it when the priests chant the sutras in Sino-Japanese language for the oldsters. They want to hear “Buddha loves me, this I know, for the sutra tells me so.” You know?
They want to be as much as they can, like Protestants, because that’s exotic to them. We’re writing our new myth and… Yes! But we all— …but we have to, in our sessions, relive the Christ thing, the Buddha thing, the Krishna thing I know we do, right.
But we’re creating a new myth. Right. You are, Tim.
And we won’t have saints. But we do. We do it in our own way.
Everybody, on his own, discovers the immemorial truth which has been handed down, and that’s the only way you can get it. Because you can’t follow the truth as other people have taught it. You can’t imitate it.
You can only discover it out of your own thing. And by doing your own stuff you keep repeating the eternal pattern. And this probably is the sort of situation we have.
Well, you think because an egg was thrown at me at Santa Monica that I’m going to be— Oh, I’m not just talking of that egg. I’m talking of what was thrown at you in Laredo. That worries me not at all.
Well, that’s as it should be. In game activity, when I wander into the television studio and try to do things… if I can bat 50%, 500%, it's gradual. Half the things I've done are wrong; a mistake.
I'm sorry I did them. The moratorium on pot [???] ridiculous, I shouldn’t’ve done that.
I know. But we all make fools of ourselves occasionally, good God! I make a blunder, at least, one out of two times I come to bat.
The celebrations were a mistake. The first four were great. They were spontaneous religious outbursts.
But then it became a success and people said yeah, you’ve got to keep them going, you’ve got to take it around thecountry and so forth. That was a mistake. It was a mistake to make it commercial, a mistake to have it in a theater, a mistake to charge admission, a mistake to keep a static point growing; and we dropped out of it.
Well, what are you going to with [???] self? What was beautiful, though: these four celebrations were— Have you any way of finding a ritual for celebration in which you’re making use of the established rituals—or the historical knowledge that’s been coming out lately on rituals—to make a celebration which is, you know, like, really a communal and beautiful… or do you want it— I think that… yeah… —and every time I’ve talked since that Be-In I’ve said, “Listen, we’re dropping out of the theater celebrations.
Good-bye, show-business!” Robert Oppenheimer is reported to have said quite recently that, obviously, the world is going to hell, and the only way that it could be stopped is not to try to prevent it from happening. In other words, when there is a game going on— He’s the guy who designed the atomic bomb! —when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting.
You see, we’ve left this game and it bores us. And we’ve got something going on over here which is where it’s at. You know?
That’s a good point. And this is where it’s at, and everybody who’s played this game—you know, they’re in the plane going NNNYYYEEOOWW on the mark, you know? And suddenly they realize that that’s not where it’s at.
So many people today live on the other side. And they go, “What’s going on there? Let’s go out to Haight-Ashbury and see what’s happening over there, because maybe something’s happening.” Instead of the emphasis on the dropping out—I think, in a sense, it’s one of the points to say there’s something else going on.
Right. Yeah. It doesn’t sound alliteratively correct, though.
Tune in, turn on… there’s something else going on. Unless his language, his interpreter, didn’t know words as understandable and acceptable. Well, that’s a matter of finding a euphonious formula.
What he really means—drop out, he keeps saying, and then [???] back in all the time. Yeah.
Very definitely. Well now, look here, Tim: at that thing in Santa Monica you made two points. One was a: you can’t stay high all the time, because when you finally come down from the high you realize that the ordinary state of consciousness is one with the higher state.
This, to me, has been the most fantastic thing in all my LSD experiences: that the moment I come down is the critical moment of the whole experience. I suddenly realize that this everyday world around me is exactly the same thing as the world of the beatific vision. Right.
Right. Now—then, how do you integrate that realization with the drop-out? Alright.
We’ll change the slogan. I’m competing with Marshall McLuhan. Everything I say is just a probe; I’m trying to get people to… Yes, I get that.
I do the same thing. Seattle—you know, we were banned in Seattle. And I went up there to talk about menopausal mentality and drop out.
And all the cocktail parties: “What does he mean? Drop out? Menopausal?
Menopausal; what the hell does that mean? Drop out?” I would agree to change the slogan to: “Drop Out, Turn On, Drop In.” In ancient times all kings had at their courts a court fool. And sometimes it probably was true that the fool was a crazy person who had a peculiar capacity for making inappropriate remarks.
And there’s something about inappropriate remarks that can be very funny. I remember, as a child, we used to play a game in which we had, first of all, a booklet with a story in it, but every now and then a word was left blank. And then you were given a pile of cards that were shuffled ’round the players, and in turn, as the story was read by one person, the players turned up whatever card they had and said the word.
And the most extraordinary things happened. And in this way, of course, the person who could make inappropriate remarks at the right moment can sometimes bring the house down. See, that was, in a way, the function of the fool.
He was reminding you of your finitude; of your mortality; and death, at the end—in somewhat the same way as monks used to keep, on the desks in their cells, a grinning skull. And all this is, of course, nowadays thought very morbid, because today we repress death very, very strongly. And the whole function and role of the mortician in our culture is to pretend in some way that death doesn’t happen.
He’s a husher-upper. He sweeps you under the carpet at considerable expense. Now then, I tried to think whether there isn’t any institution in modern society that really corresponds to the court fool.
And there isn’t. There is, of course, the political cartoonist, there is the satirist, there is the commentator, but he doesn’t sit in the President’s office. And the President can ignore him altogether if he so chooses.
We don’t like, nowadays, anyone to suggest that our social institutions are not altogether serious. We can’t stand it because we are much too insecure. And this is a very dangerous state of affairs.
And so it is really high time that, in many ways, the institution of the fool was reintroduced. I want to point out a parallel to this. In some ways, the fool (or the joker) and the monk have a parallel function.
The monk is a person who abandons society. He is an outlaw, only he’s an outlaw on the upper side instead of on the lower side. As the ordinary criminal is, as it were, below caste, the outlaw in the sense of the monk is above caste.
And in the Buddhist religion, at its inception, the followers of the Buddha wore those dark yellow robes because those were the garments of criminals. It’s just as if, today, we were to take the kind of blue jeans they wear over in San Quentin and go around in those, or the old fashioned striped things that were put on jail birds. And so they took on the garments and external appearance of the lower outcaste, but they were in fact respected as upper outcastes.
But in modern society it is very, very difficult to be in that position. For example, in such a true republic as France, every monk and priest is subject to military service. That is not true in the United States, nor is it true in England.
They are not quite so republican as the French. But in this kind of modern society, more and more, you must belong. As Thoreau said, “Wherever you may go, men will seek you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.” And the monks that exist today—Catholic monks and Anglican monks—are really a little bit of a freak in our society.
They represent, in other words, the opinions and the discipline of a particular sect. They have no actual official and social recognition. Because, you see, our society cannot stand non-participation.
It cannot stand, really, fundamental criticism. And so it’s in a very, very weak state. I remember, as a boy in London, going off into Hyde Park Corner and listening to people orate against anything they wanted to orate against.
They could criticize and vilify, even, the most sacred institutions, and the police would stand by and pay no attention. Sort of lean against the lamppost and let it all go on. And that’s because the people, as a whole, in those days, had a tremendous sense of security.
They knew they were right, and therefore there was no point stopping anybody from criticizing them. But when you’re not sure you’re right, you have to stifle criticism completely. And the worst kind of criticism is the person who pokes fun.
Non-participation of the monk isn’t so bad. But the person who somehow suggests that society occasionally is something that needs to be giggled at—see, this is the whole position. The joker doesn’t outrightly deride things.
He’s not a slapstick comedian. He gives people the giggles about things that they thought were terribly sacred. And that is extremely demoralizing.
So in our day and age, you see, you must belong. And we need to relax on this and allow for non-participation under certain conditions, and these are the ancient conditions. But the person who does not participate in society cannot call upon society for certain things.
He cannot call upon the protection of the police or of the army. He cannot call upon education for his children; he’s not supposed to have any children. He may—I suppose, in this day and age—make what arrangements he chooses about his love life, but he mustn’t be the head of a family and he mustn’t feel entitled to the protection and support of the community.
If the community respects him and wants to support him just out of its own free will, then that’s their affair. So that’s the way of the monk. But the fool is in a different class from the monk.
And to understand his role fully we have to go into a number of preliminary things, the most important of which is to understand the nature of a social institution. Because, you see, the standpoint of the fool is that all social institutions are games. He sees the whole world as game-playing, and that’s why—when people take their games seriously and put on stern and pious expressions—the fool gets the giggles: because he knows it’s all a game.
Now, when I say that he sees everything as a game, this does not mean mere game. Hamlet, although it’s a play, is not mere entertainment. Or when you go to listen to a great orchestra, it is playing music indeed, but you are not seeing something purely frivolous.
The idea of game, basically, is this: that the nature of the world is musical. That is to say, it is doing all these forms of trees and stars and people and all their complexities just to do them. It has no purpose beyond doing it.
And in exactly the same way, in music: music has no destination. It isn’t aimed at the future. It does travel in time; that is true.
But it doesn’t aim at a goal in time. The point of music is every phrase as it unfolds itself, and as you perceive the relationship of those phrases to earlier and later phrases. But music itself is dance.
It’s dancing with sound. And likewise, in the art of dancing, you are not traveling, you are not aiming at a particular place. You are dancing to dance.
And so, what you might call the musical or game theory of the world is that everything that is happening is its own point. It’s true that things do develop. For example, the seed develops into the tree.
And you might say, from one point of view, then, that the point of the seed is the tree; that’s the purpose of the seed. But that doesn’t really hold up, because then the tree goes and has seeds again. And so you might say, then, that the purpose of the tree is the seed.
Which is which? The whole thing is one process, you see? They really aren’t parts.
The seed isn’t one event and the tree another. It’s all one long, continuous event, going on and on just for the sake of going on and on. Now, of course, you can read purpose in it in another way.
That is to say, that a tree is only possible in a certain kind of environment. There have to be—for there to be trees—there has to be a certain kind of temperature, a certain kind of atmosphere, and there have to be insects, and there have to be bacteria in the soil, and there have to be weeds, there have to be birds. All kinds of things are necessary if trees are to live.
So you could say this is symbiosis: that the tree lives to look after the birds and provide them with perches, that the birds live to eat the worms which might destroy the roots of the tree, and so everybody lives to support everybody else. Well, the word “to”—or “in order to”—is not quite correct. It’s a little clumsy.
What we should see rather than that is that the whole relationship of trees and birds and worms and bees and so on is a network. And every aspect of the network—you might say every part of it—depends for its existence on every other part. That means, you see, that the network as a whole is a single organism.
Just as, in your own physical body (and you call yourselves a single organism), there are billions of creatures of very different kinds, and they’re all running around inside your blood stream and doing their stuff. They’re having battles, love affairs, all kinds of things. And this huge variety of stuff going on constitutes your life as an individual.