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You see, the positive and the negative together constitute existence. We have to use “existence” as a neutral word that doesn’t have as an opposite “non-existence.” Existence already includes non-existence. You could say being and non-being constitute existence.
Just as we know, physically, sound is constituted by sound/silence in very rapid alternation. So being/non-being constitute existence, and existence is something of which you may say the game is worth the candle. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be.
It’s like that. Some people try to say there is good and bad with a small “g” and small “b,” and they together constitute Good with a capital “g.” Or one might say that humanity and the good of humanity is a curious combination of beneficence and rascality, of reason and passion. And if human beings didn’t have those two sides they would be less than human.
Man is, in a certain sense, redeemed by his passions, redeemed by being something of a rascal. Because if he weren’t he would be like a stew with no salt in it. The salt somehow is something that, in a large quantity, is horrible, but in a certain small quantity, delightful.
And so everybody has to be salted with a certain amount of unrespectability. Otherwise, they’re impossible and intolerable. The only thing is—as a fervent cook—don’t overdo it.
It is in that respect, you know, that it’s said of great gurus in India—they have a very funny thing they say. Westerners go over and they meet this man who’s supposed to be extremely holy, and they’re all agog, you know? And then, after spending a few days with him, they begin to wonder.
They find he smokes cigarettes. They find that he occasionally loses his temper. And they begin to think, “Well, is this man so holy after all?
I mean, he surely should not be dependent on these little habits and luxuries and so on.” And then they find he has a girlfriend, and they leave because they’re so scandalized. Well, then the Hindus say, “Nuh, uh, uh, uh, you shouldn’t get so upset about this, because if this man didn’t have a few little vices, he would cease to manifest. He would simply disappear.
He has to have these things to keep him grounded; to keep him in the world.” Or if, suddenly, you know, he gets terribly angry with a certain student and seems to lose his temper, they say, “Oh, no, no, no. That’s a tactical anger that he did on purpose to wake you up to something. It was for your own development and for your own good.
He didn’t really feel angry at all.” Oh dear! But do you see the point? There is something in the fact that if he didn’t have these little attachments, he wouldn’t be manifesting.
He’d simply disappear. There’s something in that. Only, don’t take it too piously.
I think you get the point. So then, we now have to explore a very important aspect of the joker as equivalent to Gurdjieff’s sly man. You see, he points out the four ways: the monk, the fakir, the yogi, and the sly man.
And all the first three ways are ways of great difficulty. They involve very, very strenuous discipline. And, of course, as we get it through the books about Gurdjieff, the way of the sly man involves a discipline, too.
But I think there’s more to be said about the way of the sly man than appears in any of those writings, because this is very closely connected with the whole approach of Taoism, the Chinese philosophy of wú wéi (or non-aggression), and with what is called in Buddhism the Middle Way. When the Buddha first discussed the Middle Way he put it like this: he said, “To try and solve the problem of suffering by immersing yourself in pleasure only leads to a hangover. To try and solve the problem by asceticism also brings no liberation.” You merely get tied up in a kind of masochism where you say, “I know I’m right just so long as I’m hurting.” And all that is doing is expiating your infantile guilt sense.
So he said there is a Middle Way between asceticism on the one hand and hedonism on the other. But actually, the Middle Way is more subtle than that, and it’s beautifully discussed in Professor Bahm; a book called The Philosophy of Buddha. Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Mexico.
And he gives a very, very fascinating analysis of the Middle Way in the form of a dialogue, whereby it works simply like this: the student brings a problem to the teacher, and he says, “I suffer and it’s a problem to me.” And the teacher says, “You suffer because you desire. If you didn’t desire, you wouldn’t suffer. So try not to desire.” And the student goes away and says, “I’m not very successful in this.
I can’t stop desiring. It’s terribly difficult. And furthermore, I find that in trying to stop desiring I’m desiring to stop desiring.
Now what am I to do about that?” And the teacher replies, “Do not desire to stop desiring any more than you can.” And so the student goes away and practices that. But he comes back to the teacher and said, “I still find myself desiring excessively to stop desiring, and it doesn’t work.” So the teacher says, “Do not desire too much not to desire to stop desiring.” Now, do you see what’s happening? Step by step, almost like Achilles approaching the tortoise, the student is being brought together with himself to the point where he catches up with his own inner being and can accept it completely.
And that is, you see, the most difficult thing to do: to accept one’s self completely. Because the moment you can do that, you have, in effect, done psychologically what is the equivalent of saying, in philosophical or theological terms, “You as you are now are the Buddha”—just as I was explaining a few minutes ago. That’s unbelievable.
Because we’re always trying to get away from ourselves as we are now in one fashion or another. And we will only stop doing that through a series of experiments in which we try resolutely to get away from ourselves as we are. So that is the Middle Way.
But ordinarily in these other ways—the way of the yogi, the fakir, and the monk—the individual makes a big thing out of the work of liberation, and especially likes a kind of teacher who will put him through the most severe paces. It’s interesting how there arise, from time to time, schools in the West where someone comes along offering—people say, “Look, it’s all very well to go to discussion groups and talk about these things, but that’s not the real thing. What you need is really to get down and do some work.” And often these teachers are very rude and very stern.
But people love it. And such a person will always attract a great following. Because people get the feeling now we’re at serious business here.
This is really something, you see? And this, you see, though, can be an awful problem. Let’s suppose that you have some difficult and distressing habit, like drinking too much.
And you’re assured that, once you’ve become the victim of this habit, it’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to get rid of it and it requires intense willpower. And so that kills you right off. You’re a dead duck from then on.
It’s as if, you see, you had said to the devil one morning, “Look, I’m going to get rid of you. I’m not going to have anything to do with you anymore.” So the devil—who is an archangel, and is terribly clever—is all set for you. And because he knows that you are getting out of his way he surrounds you with greater temptations than you ever imagined.
If you are going to outwit the devil, it’s terribly important that you don’t give him any advance notice! And this is where the work of the sly man comes in. Put it in other terms—in Hindu or Buddhist terms; in popular terms of popular Hinduism and Buddhism: liberation is getting out of the toils of karma.
It’s like this. During your many past lives you’ve done all kinds of deeds good or bad, and you are reaping the consequences of these deeds today. And also, today, you are setting up future consequences.
Now, before you can be liberated you’ve got to pay off your karmic debts. And so the moment you set your foot on the path of liberation you are apt to find that all your karmic creditors will come to your door. And that’s why it’s often said that people who start out on a serious work of yoga suddenly get sick and lose their money and their best friends drop dead, and all kinds of ghastly things happen.
That’s because, you see, they served notice that they were going to do this. And so all the creditors came around. If you’re going to leave town and you owe lots of money, you know, you mustn’t announce that you’re leaving or give a farewell party to your friends, because the grocer will find out.
So the art of the sly man is to make no contest, but simply to leave without one word. In other words, that’s the meaning of wú wéi in the technical vocabulary of Taoism. Wú wéi: not to interfere, not to force things.
That’s the best translation of wú wéi: “not to force things.” But so, he just drops it like that. But in this respect, you see, you’re your own worst enemy. Because even if you serve notice privately on yourself that suddenly you’re going to drop it all, already the devil knows—because who do you think the devil is?
Now, this lies behind the whole problem that is discussed in the book Zen in the Art of Archery. The necessity of letting go of the bowstring without first deciding to do so. Another way of putting it is that the decision to release the bowstring and the action of doing so must be simultaneous.
Not to decide and then act, but to act-decide all at once. Now why is this? If you are going to be an expert archer, you must shoot before you think, otherwise it’ll be too late.
You don’t aim and then shoot. It’s all one action. And this is true, likewise, of any sort of shooting—pistol shooting as well—that, if you aim, if you decide and then fire, you’re apt to do things like pulling the trigger instead of squeezing.
All kinds of wrong things are done. And you’re always a moment too late if you decide first. You have to act and decide simultaneously.
So what does that do, you see? That puts up a very curious problem, which in its own term becomes a bind. To try and act quickly enough so that you overtake the preliminary decision.
To try not to decide first. And that is an impossible problem. I wonder if you ever read von Kleist’s story about the fighting bear.
This is included in Nancy Wilson Ross’s book The World of Zen as a kind of Western Zen. It’s a story about a man who has a fight with a circus bear. And the bear reads his mind.
And always forestalls any attacks that he makes on it. There’s absolutely nothing he can do to get past the bear. And so, in the same way, you might imagine a guru who is a mind reader, and he always knows if you decide before you act.
And if you do, you see, the devil will catch you. Instead, you see, of deciding that you won’t be an alcoholic anymore, the only thing to do is not to drink without any previous decision on this matter. But how can anyone do that, you see?
That’s the question. How can I decide not to decide? How can I announce that I won’t make any announcement without making an announcement?
You see, there is no way out of that bind. Try as you may, you’ll go on and on and on trying, as Herrigel did, to release the bowstring without thinking first to release it. But then, strangely enough, one day the thing happened.
He did it. And this is involved in our learning of almost all techniques. That we work and work to achieve that final point of perfection, and it doesn’t come, it doesn’t come.
And then one day it happens. Now, what is the reason for that? Is it simply—and this is really, you know, a way it’s usually explained, but this is an oversimplification—it is not that we have practiced it so often that it suddenly becomes perfect.
It is much more subtle than that. What happens is that we’ve practiced so often that we find out we can’t do it. And it happens at the moment you can’t do it.
When you reach a certain point of despair, when you know that you are the one weird child who will never be able to swim, at that moment you’re swimming. Because the desperation and the total inability to do it at all has brought you to a point which we might call “don’t care.” You stop trying. You stop not trying; trying to get it that way.
You just have arrived at the insight that your decision, your will, doesn’t have any part in the thing at all. And that’s what you needed to know. You’ve overcome, you see, the illusion of having a separate ego.
There is no way of telling anyone that that’s an illusion and getting appropriate action, because we are thoroughly indoctrinated with the idea that it’s real. And if I say, “Well, I’m going to get rid of my ego,” that’s what the Taoists call “beating a drum in search of a fugitive.” He hears you coming! So the ego—that is to say, the illusion of having a separate will and a separate “I”-center that can be an effective agent—that cannot be overcome by a decision which seems to be centered in the ego.
You might as well put out fire with fire. It can come only when an attempt to act from the ego-center has been revealed to be completely futile. Then the thing happens, because you’ve really discovered that it was, after all, an illusion.
Now, be very careful how you formulate this sort of thing philosophically. This could, of course, correspond to the kind of person who feels unafraid and who feels very free because he’s a complete fatalist. A lot of people are, and are very happy in their fatalism.
They really feel that they don’t do anything, it just happens, and that it’s all life, and that they won’t die until it’s their time to die. And so why worry? They have the sense of everything is just happening to them.
And this is a kind of a floating feeling. It’s as if you didn’t have to push things at all. They just float along.
Well, now, that state of affairs—that feeling of you don’t have to push anything, it just floats along—is very similar to the experience I’m describing, if not the same thing. But this person has interpreted it, as a fatalist, in a rather passive way. That is to say, he has felt that there still is some kind of a little differentiation between himself as the experiencer on the one hand and that force or set of forces called fate on the other.
He is pushed around, but he witnesses being pushed around. Now, in this state, this person still has a little fragment of impurity left. There’s still one fly left in the ointment.
And that is the sensation of being pushed around. There is still a fundamental division between the knower and the known. And in this case—the case of the fatalist—the knower seems to be the passive thing, and everything known (the objective world, all the goings-on of his own physiology) they appear to be the active end.
And the knower just has the experience of himself being moved, moved, moved, moved by the tides of life. The important thing to find out is this: that the sensation of being the knower and the experiencer of all this is not, as it were, aside from everything else that’s going on, but it’s part of it. Just as you—although you experience your own existence subjectively—you are nevertheless part of the external world.
You are in my external world just as I am in your external world. So in this way the final barrier between the knower and the known is broken down. There is nobody, as it were, being carried along by fate.
There is just the process. And all that you are is part of the process. Then there is a curious flip.
The individual (who has always felt himself to be the tiny little thing on the end of the big determining process) suddenly goes bllwwwp! Have you watched, sometimes, a tiny little piece of mercury coming nearer and nearer to a large piece of mercury? There’s a sudden moment when they touch each other, and bllwwwp!
The little thing vanishes into the big one almost more dramatically than a drop into the ocean. In this case that I’m talking about it isn’t that the individual organism vanishes; the individual human being doesn’t vanish. But he experiences no longer a passive relationship to the world.
He simply sees that all that he is and all that he ever was was something that the entire process was doing. At the time, in other words, when he felt himself to be separate, he sees that that is, in a certain way, just what he should have felt. Because that was what the process was doing in him in exactly the same way that it was giving him brown or blue eyes, or blond or brunette hair.
And that’s going through the door, and turning ’round and seeing there wasn’t a door. Finding that you aren’t fated, that you’re not trapped—because there’s nobody in the trap. And it takes something trapped to make a trap.
We’ll begin by refreshing memories as to what went before. In discussing the theme of the joker I have been talking about a point of view—the joker’s point of view—from which not only our social institutions but also the formations of the natural world are seen as games. Be careful of the word “game.” It doesn’t mean as “trivialities.” Because when we say, “It’s just a game,” this often means it is just trivial.
There can be important games, as when we play the piano or musical instruments. We’re not necessarily doing something frivolous, but we are playing. And there is something in the nature of all play that is not serious, but at the same time may be sincere.
And I tried to give you the picture of the multiplicity of natural forms on the one hand, and of human social institutions and all the things we do and consider important and busy ourselves with as human beings—I tried to give you the point of view from which these can be seen as games; as things being done, as it were, simply for themselves and not for some ulterior motive. And therefore, these games are, in a way, best played when they are played as games. Although it’s really alright for people to take them seriously, except that they are a little bit deprived.
They’re missing something. And so when the joker sees a person taking his life seriously and regarding himself as extremely important, there is something a little bit funny about it and he is inclined to get the giggles. And he knows that the very intensity of seriousness with which the individuals concerned are taking these games will be a kind of foil for the subsequent bursting into laughter when he sees that it wasn’t serious after all.
You see that? You might say there are these classes of people: there are the very far out people and the very far in people. Now, ordinarily we say someone’s very far out when they are oddballs, when they are exceedingly unconventional.
But I want you to turn the picture ’round and look, as a conventional person, look at a square as a person who’s very far out. That is to say, he is so involved in the seriousness of the game he is playing that he is lost. He doesn’t know where he started from, and he thinks he’s there.
But he’s completely lost. Because he is actually—under the cover of his assurance, of his status, of his position in society—he’s really a very anxious person. I said a lot yesterday about the way in which our society shows anxiety because it cannot permit the existence of people who don’t belong.
And it cannot really permit the criticism of laughter. It cannot permit the presence of the old-fashioned court jester, because these people are so far out. They’re so involved.
But from a certain standpoint, you see—from the joker’s standpoint—he doesn’t condemn such people. He rather congratulates them on their heroism for getting so lost and involved. But to keep the far out people from going quite insane there have to be far in people.
And the far in people are those who keep contact with the original goings-on behind the scenes. They are like the prompter in the theater. Where there are the actors out on the stage, relying on their memories, et cetera, and they’re supposed to get completely involved in the play.
But there’s a concealed prompter with a script in front of him, and he is the connection of the actor on the stage with the green room behind the stage. So this prompter, you see, keeps the actor on the stage in touch with the green room. And so there are certain people in the world who might be a kind of a priesthood sometimes—although priesthoods are apt to become corrupt and square.
But a kind of people in the know. There always has to be somebody around in the know so that, as it were, the wheel of society and of existence—the wheel of the squirrel cage, the wheel of the rat race—can have an axle firmly planted. And at the center, then, there have to be the far in people.
So this is the domain of jokers. Now, having developed that side of the joker—the person who sees through the social institutions as games—I went on in the second session to discuss another aspect of the joker as the sly man in comparison with the monk, the fakir, and the yogi. All those three undertake in certain different ways disciplines which have the intent of releasing them from their karma.
The individual, in other words, challenges his involvement, his attachments, his limitations, his finitude, and endeavors to overcome it. But in each of these three cases the individual involved stirs up an immense opposition because he serves notice upon the devil—or, shall we say, upon his karmic creditors—that he is about to leave town. And so all the creditors come rushing to the door: all his past sins catch up with him and the devil lays his temptations in the way all the more thoroughly.
So that the sly man is the one who, when he is going to leave town, does so instantaneously without any prior announcement. And so in this way there is, shall we say, a cunning manner of becoming a Buddha, and that is to become one instantly without any preparation or warning whatsoever. This is why Zen is called the sudden school, and why satori is a sudden awakening.
Because it has to be done without the slightest warning. But then I pointed out that the moment you have any idea about doing this, you’ve already ceased to be sudden. That is to say, the moment you seek for some spiritual attainment—which is becoming a Buddha, becoming awakened, becoming released, getting in there—you already served notice upon your creditors.
So that, somehow or other, you find that you have to do it without intending to do it. And that is a double bind which you impose upon yourself when you say, “I must find a way of doing this spontaneously.” That’s the old, old basic double bind “you must be spontaneous.” You are commanded, or you command yourself to do something, which is acceptable only if it happens spontaneously. Then you think about that and say, “Well, well, well.
What a fix that is. Here am I, saying I must be surprised. And I’m going to lay plans to surprise myself.” So by going through this you discover, naturally, that that can’t be done.
You can’t surprise yourself on purpose. Yet that’s what you have to do. So what about it?
You come to a state of total paralysis. You’re stuck. The one thing that is terribly important to be done can’t be done.
It has to happen; it really does if you’re earnest about this. You want to get out of the trap. But you can’t do anything about it—either actively or passively.
But then, as you begin to see what you are doing all the time, you notice a very odd fact, which is that you can’t help being spontaneous. If I say to you, “Good morning,” and you say, “Good morning,” what is that? Did you plan this answer?
Did you make preparations to grow your hair? Do you make decisions about having blue eyes? You see?
About breathing—is this all planned? About beating your heart? And what about your thinking?
Even if it’s very blocked thinking, even if you feel from a certain point of view that you’re all mixed up. What is going on anyway? You see, you can’t stop it.
It’s like trying to—we were discussing the Gurdjieff thing yesterday, the self-remembering exercise: the attempt to live completely in the present. Well, that’s not only a Gurdjieff idea, that’s a very ancient yoga and Buddhist discipline. To be completely here and now.
But, of course, as you pursue this you discover you can’t do it. Because you couldn’t even know when to go shopping unless you made plans and started thinking about the future. You couldn’t move.
But then you discover, you see, that, in the long run, there’s nothing to think about except the here and now. There really isn’t anything else. Because even when you make plans for the future, you remember the past, you’re doing it all in the present.
Your memory is a present activity. There’s no way of not being self-remembering and having presence of mind. So when you discover that, there’s nothing left to you but to have a good laugh!
Well, now, I want to develop to a greater extent something I only touched on yesterday afternoon when we were discussing anxiety and laughter and the relationship between the two. I suggested that anxiety and laughter are really the same phenomenon but seen from different points of view. As we all know, we can have shudders of horror and shudders of delight, tears of grief and tears of joy.
And it’s the same shudders and the same tears in either case, but they have a completely different meaning. Now, life is a matter of oscillation. Life is vibration.
It’s yoeeoeeoeeoeeoeeoeeoeeoee the whole time and all the way through. The question is: how are you going to interpret that? Is it tremble, tremble, tremble, or is it laugh, laugh, laugh?
That’s the great thing. And sometimes it’s one, and sometimes it’s the other. So that the whole thing of the joker is he comes into being, as it were, at the point when the anxiety-interpretation of the trembling becomes the laughing-interpretation.
Now, why? What is it about death being a jest? We discussed the problem of the zebra.
You remember? Whether a zebra is a yellow horse with black stripes or a black horse with yellow stripes. And, of course, you can see it either way.
And you can argue till all is blue about which side is right. And let’s suppose that a black horse is a horse of ill omen (even though striped with yellow), and a yellow horse a horse of joy and good omen (even though striped with black). This is our eternal problem.
We are in the state of egocentric consciousness, firmly convinced that death is a threat. We are so convinced of this, even though individuals may say, “Well, I’m not really afraid of death. What I’m afraid of is dying in an unpleasant way.” Nevertheless, since almost all moralists and people concerned with ethics seem to agree (whatever their differences of opinion) that survival is a good thing.
In some sense, if not survival in this body, even the most—I mean, the people who would rather be dead than red firmly believe that that is true, because they believe there is a hereafter where they can go, and where they can be rewarded for the courageous stand against evil which they have taken. You see? So that’s still some kind of insistence on the value of survival.