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And we all cling to this idea of survival with tremendous passion. But we have been fooled. Because survival is an important ideal only so long as you have bothering you the bugbear of death.
That the world might stop altogether, and that your death, so far as you are concerned, is curtains forever. And that is really the bogey. You see, it’s all very well to rationalize and say, “No, it’s not death I’m afraid of, it’s the pains of death.” But if you think about it deeply—there are several stages in thinking about it deeply.
The first stage is the real horrors of endless night: of the futility, of the whole conception that one’s own life or indeed the whole life of the cosmos might be nothing but a flash, and beyond that nothing, nothing, nothing in all directions. When, for example, we think of the physicist’s idea that the universe is running down, that all energy is seeking a stable state. Supposing, for example, to give an illustration of what they mean: I have a jar of black pepper and a jar of salt.
And I pour them together into another jar, and I can see the white salt and the black pepper fairly well delineated. Then I start shaking the jar. And slowly, slowly, slowly, the black and the white disappear into a gray.
That can never be sorted out again into black and white. In this sort of way, as things go on, the universe, they say, tends to attain a stable state; to run down, run down, run down until that’s the end. And nobody knows how it could possibly start all over again.
But I always say—and I feel it in a sort of funny, intuitive way—that what happened once can happen again. If this world started sometime—supposing there was a colossal explosion which set all these galaxies flying out—then what existed before that explosion must surely have been something like the stable state to which we shall run down in the end. And if it went bang once, there’s absolutely no reason why it shouldn’t go bang again.
I suppose there are temperaments in logic. I have a temperament whereby I just cannot—I mean, it seems to me absolutely basic that what happened once can happen again. But there are other people who so cherish the unique that they can conceive the idea of something like existence happening only once.
But, you see, something that happens only once doesn’t happen at all. What happens if a given sound consists of only one vibration? What is the up-crest of a wave apart from the down-crest?
Can you conceive that? That’s the same kōan as “what is the sound of one hand?” You see, it always takes two. You can’t have a purely left-sided person.
Imagine! So, in this way, just as you can’t have just one vibration—I mean, it’s like the saying: the greatest strength of mind is to eat one peanut, which can hardly be done. So there isn’t just one vibration.
A dit but no dah sort of thing. You have to have it do more. So in just the same way, when you magnify this principle, there isn’t just one cosmos or one big explosion that starts and stops.
All stopping implies starting. Someone just wrote to me, “We haven’t parted because we never met.” So the whole point of saying this is the realization that existence is eternal. The going out of existence implies the coming in.
And St. Thomas had some points here when he said there could never have been a time when there was not being, because if there had been a time when there was nothing, there was nothing in nothing to produce something. But he didn’t quite have the point, because what he didn’t see was that nothing is productive in the sense that you can’t have nothing without something. They go together.
And all this thing is an argument, again, about whether the zebra is yellow striped black or black striped yellow. And what we see is that the black and the yellow, the darkness and the light, are simply two phases of the same. And that realization is exactly what transforms anxiety into laughter: suddenly to see that you just—after all this anxiety—that you don’t have anything to worry about.
Now, that doesn’t mean that there will not, in our future, lie some extremely painful experiences, or experiences that we would ordinarily interpret as horribly painful. We may all die of ghastly diseases, or of radiation burns, or of unimaginable things. But look here: I very briefly touched on pain yesterday and the way pain is interpreted.
If you interpret pain as something that is destroying you and is going in the direction of total death, then it’s very serious indeed, and it’s perfectly terrifying. But I’ve been investigating experiences of people who have undergone torture. I don’t know if anybody in this room has; it’s always possible—and if so you can correct me.
But the worst part of torture is the beginning when, of course, you’re full of all your illusions and all your fears about black and white and the terror that black may win. But it’s said that, as torture proceeds, it slowly changes the state of mind of the victim to a kind of drunken, masochistic, giving in to the torture, so that it becomes something that he cooperates with. And that, if the torturer notices this, he knows he’s through and has to kill him.
So in other words, there is a point at which pain becomes an experience without having a negative interpretation put upon it. It becomes, in other words, converted into ecstasy. It simply becomes, you see, a way of going through extraordinarily far out sensations which have no meaning.
If they have meaning—the meaning of threat, the meaning of death looming at the end—and you know this is the tearing-apart and destruction of you, then you see it is absolutely horrendous. But if it has no meaning at all—just transpose yourself into another dimension to illustrate it, because the dimension I’m talking about is a very tough one. But let’s go back to a simpler one.
Let’s take sounds. Now, if you lie down and listen to all the goings-on in this area, and you will planes moving, and cars, and fog horns, and all kinds of crazy sounds, you see? People this way and that, so on.
And you can listen to that and find it very interesting, very beautiful. But if someone were to do what John Cage does and put you in a concert hall with the expectation of hearing music, and by having a purely silent playing of the piano compel you instead to listen to all the sounds going on around you, you would be shocked and feel that some kind of avant-garde hoax had been perpetrated. You see, it depends on the set, on the way you approach the experience.
Now, you can listen to sounds that are ordinarily considered unpleasant in a totally unprejudiced way. You can listen to discordant musical noises and find them extremely interesting if you listen carefully enough. You can listen to a squalling brat and find it musical.
That this child—I’ll never forget waking up one morning and listening to a child whining. The child wasn’t saying anything, there were no words in it, it was just a plaint. And it wasn’t exactly crying.
It was a kind of eeeeh-weeeeeh-waaaaah-ooooooooooh-eeeeooo! There was something marvelous about it; this child’s wonderfully articulate protest against some sort of nuisance. And so listening into those things without interpreting them, listening to one’s own interior frustration and pain in the same way, without interpreting it as being on one side or the other—on the good side or the bad side, on the black side or the white side—is what makes it possible, you see, to transmute these things.
But you can’t do this—you can’t really, honestly transmute pain into a form of play, a form of weird far out sensations that are basically just that—so long as you fail to see the inner unity of the opposites. So long as you fall for the idea that you are nothing more than this particular life, than this particular ego, which came from nowhere and is going nowhere. While you remain under that illusion, you see, you—first of all, you don’t see your identity with everything else that exists.
Now, if death, then, is the joke—I remember the biggest joke on death I ever saw. I mention this in my book. We visited the Capuchin Friar’s Crypt in the Via Veneto in Rome.
Some of you may have seen it. Where there are three underground chapels where everything is made of bones. And the altar is made of bones, the pedestals of the altar are all shin bones, and then there are piles of skulls.
And the decoration of flowers on the ceiling are ribs alternating with vertebrae. And the vertebrae are the flowers, and the ribs curl this way, curl this way, curl this way, the twining stems. And the whole thing is bones.
And they have even a few intact skeletons dressed in monk’s robes standing on either side of these altars. It’s the craziest thing you ever saw. And then, when you have seen it and you come out, there is a little friar with a beard taking your offering at the top of the steps.
And he had a funny, wicked gleam in his eye. And one could see that this was a joke. The whole thing was a joke.
It was constructed by people who had somehow overcome the fear of death. You couldn’t possibly have such a thing as that. I was fascinated by it because I thought that, on the day of the resurrection, there’s going to be a tremendous scuttle fitting all those bones together and everybody getting up the stairs for the last judgment!
So, if it is seen that death is the jest. But the question is, you see: we are so tormented by the bugbear of it being the real end, by the imagination of the possibility of being in the dark forever. Now, you really must think this through, because it is a pure delusion.
If you think, first of all, seriously about annihilation of consciousness, you will realize that annihilation of consciousness couldn’t possibly be an experience. But being in the dark forever could be an experience. I mean, supposing you were buried alive, and somehow you were immortal, but you had to stay shut up in a tomb for always and always and always, that would be pretty grim.
But the annihilation of consciousness is not an experience at all. There isn’t anything there to be afraid of. So if that’s what’s going to happen, there’s nothing to worry about, I assure you.
But on the other hand, if you think about it longer—about a state of eternal not-being at all, you know—you realize that nature abhors a vacuum. And that, since—just as the universe happened once, it can happen again—since you were born once (you know, it did happen; really), well, it can happen again. Only, the next “you” won’t remember the one now just as the one now doesn’t remember the one before.
Not because you’ve forgotten, but because memory is transmitted along certain channels. It requires the vehicle of brains, for example. It requires books and other records to maintain it.
But as I pointed out yesterday, the fundamental what-have-you that underlies all this doesn’t need a memory. It doesn’t need to store memories, just in the same way as you don’t need to be conscious of the inner formations of your brain. Also—I mean, here I’m talking speculatively—also, there are curious connections where we don’t see any.
That is to say, the interval between events is not insignificant. Just as you don’t hear melody unless you hear the interval between tones—it’s the interval that counts—so, in the same way, are blank intervals between successive manifestations of the universe and blank intervals between your forgetting who you are altogether and dying and someone suddenly becoming a baby. The blank intervals are not insignificant.
Every painter knows, every architect knows, that the space around an object or inside an object is just as important as the object. That, again, is the fact. If you don’t notice the importance of intervals and you don’t notice the importance of space, it is as if you had settled on the carpet here for the black design being the thing and the white background as having no significance.
So what about the inside of this room? What about the shape of space that it encloses? We would say this is nothing more than a certain quantity of air.
But don’t you see that the distance, the space between that wall and this window, is life-room? That is not nothing. That it’s just as important.
It comes into being at the same moment as the walls come into being. It connects them. And so, likewise, the space between our planet and other planets is not insignificant.
So once you see that intervals of apparent nothingness are significant intervals, that their size makes all the difference to what’s happening. When the intervals between dits are short, the note is high. When the intervals between the dits are long, the note is low, or large; the high being little.
See? Why do we say high and low as distinct from little and big? Big instruments make big noises, little instruments make tiny noises.
But at any rate, it’s the interval that’s important. So, then, once you see the importance of the interval, you have seen that the white is as important as the black. Or the other way ’round if you want to change your analogy.
You see how you can switch these analogies? In one case the white can be the nothing, the unimportant, whereas the black is the mark somebody made with a crayon. Or the other way around, the black can be the darkness, and the white is the flash of lightning that appears in the darkness.
Change your analogies. It’s like saying… once we used to say about high matters, you know? High matters.
Lofty thoughts. But now we don’t. It’s more fashionable to say deep matters and profound thoughts.
Someone was telling me yesterday in the group here that they were going to an Indian village in New Mexico where they had Christianity. But when the speaker referred to Jesus and God and so on, he pointed down all the time. Because, you see, he felt that things grew up like this from below.
Whereas, of course, the ancient cults out of which the Jewish and Christian religions grew had the idea that the life of the sun and the rain came down from the heavens and fertilized the feminine Earth, which then responded. But these things keep changing because you can keep switching your point of view. You can see the black as the design against the white background and the white as the design against the black background.
And you can flip back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. And the more you do that, the more you realize that the pairs go together. Anxiety is the state of trying not to flip.
All life is flipping. Its flip-floppability is the condition of life. This way and that way.
When you’re trying to resist flip-floppability, you’re anxious, you see? When you push against it, it throbs in a way that you interpret as fear. And all rigid personalities—people who can’t swing, who have no movement in their hips, as it were, and psychologically—they are resisting flip-floppability.
But when you understand flip-floppability and that this is the way things are, then you laugh. Because that is the big flip-flop. This morning I was discussing the joke of death, and the principal point that I was making was that that death and life—or, that is to say in other words, the interval and the event; death being the interval between events, between one appearance and another of human beings in the same way as winter is the interval between the appearance of the leaves in spring and their disappearance in the fall.
But there is, you see, the chronic fear that the interval may be all that there is; that the interval may triumph, and there may be no event. And I was trying to show you that there is a polarity between the event and the interval between events in such a way that you can no more have the one without the other than you can have the crest of the wave without the trough. And that this goes on and on and on in endless cycles where there are small intervals and waves, which group together and make up a set of intervals and waves, and they in themselves constitute the crest of a larger wave with a much longer trough.
And then again there comes the group of intervals and waves on a short rhythm. And that this thing that goes like—you see? Like this, you see?—that this thing in its turn is the crest of a still greater wave, and that the nature of being is that this is the scheme of things.
But the joke about it, what makes it exciting, is the constant anticipation that there might not be anything again after the interval, that it might all come to an end. And the real problem in order to turn death into a joke—that is to say, suddenly to recover from this terrible anxiety that it might be finished, and then transmute the vibration-trembling of anxiety into laughter—it is the same thing. Only, the trembling of laughter is the trembling of anxiety seen from a different point of view.
Now, what are the things that are obstacles to our being able to see that? It’s almost as if life were itself a guru. And you know how gurus throw out tests to their students to see if they can pass these various initiations, all of which require nerve in the face of some formidable obstacle.
All fairy stories are full of this. And so life itself throws out all kinds of reasons for supposing that we are faced with something serious instead of something playful. And I want to discuss with you a few ways which, in Western history, this obstacle has been thrown out, and how we today are bamboozled by these obstacles.
In the history of Western civilization there have really been, in the past 2,000 years, two dominant mythologies. One has had a long run and the other has had a fairly short run. But they are both ways of terrifying you so that you won’t see the point.
But at the same time they are, perhaps, not merely negative things, but challenges: barriers of the same kind that a guru would offer. For example, in the study of Zen, each kōan is referred to as a barrier. And if you can pass the barrier, you see, you get in, in, in.
But the function of the teacher is to put the barriers up to see how you’ll react to them. So, in a way, we could say that the two great mythologies which have dominated the Western world in the past 2,000 years are two barriers. The first, of course, is the Christian mythology.
And in the Christian mythology the individual is made to feel that he is strictly on probation, that he does not really belong, that if he is at all a son of God he is so by adoption and grace. He isn’t really one of the family. Let me explore the theology of that a moment.
In Christian theology, God has only one son. The monogenēs, or the only begotten son of God, who is the second person of the trinity, the lógos: the divine idea of itself. The trinity constitutes a family.
Naturally, it’s therefore threefold, because for the Greek mind—and it was the Greek mind that molded Christian theology—meaning entirely depends on the structure of the Greek language. And Greek in common with all Western languages—and indeed also Sanskrit, from which it is derived—has a sentence structure in which there is the subject, the verb, and the predicate. And we can’t make any sense without those three things.
We have to have an “I love you” or an “I know you” sentence for there to be any love or for there to be any knowledge. There must be the lover. The lover can’t love without having a beloved.
And the lover doesn’t relate to the beloved without the relationship of love between them. So there you have the subject, the predicate, and the verb. And so naturally, in Greek, the very inner nature of reality, of the godhead itself, must be threefold, following the structure of Greek thought and Greek grammar.
So in this way, the inner life of the godhead is completely self-sufficient. There is the son, the object of God’s love, so that God doesn’t need any created world of finite beings as the necessary object of his love, so that he can be love, you see? So then, the created world is something extraneous.
It’s something that the Lord threw off in a fit of exuberance. And although it is very much beloved by him, he doesn’t in any way depend on it. He, in a sense, fathered it.
But he fathered it out of nothing. It had no true mother. And so, in a way, it’s an orphan.
And the relationship between the creator and the creature in popular Christianity has always been the relationship between the king and the subject. And the relationship between the king and the subject is very strange; estranged. Because the king—in the archetypes of kingship which existed in the Near East in ancient times, and upon which this theological imagery was originally modeled—the king was really afraid.
He always appeared in the throne room with his back to the wall. He didn’t stand in the middle of his people and look around at everybody like that. He stood with his back to the wall like this.
It’s funny how all altars, Buddhas, and things have their backs to the wall. Because there you can’t be stabbed. And you have your guards and your henchmen on either side of you.
And all the people prostrate themselves, because that way you can watch them all. They can’t see you and you can see them. So you’re safe.
And that’s the imagery, you see, which has given us our Western conception of God, of the father whose children have become a little bit too much for him. He’s had too many. And they had to be kept in their place.
And so he’s a little bit frightened. And so the rules are set up: “Ah! Ah!
Ah! Ah! Ah!
You just do so-and-so and so-and-so.” And you must feel grateful for having been fathered. You’re a miserable worm—inwardly. Because without me you might not have been.
You owe everything you have to my having produced you. And you are a debtor. And because you’re a debtor you have a duty.
“Duty” is the same word as “debt,” “debit.” You owe life to me, who produced you. Although I won’t admit I had a great deal of fun doing it. And so you must all crawl.
Now, you see, that conception of our relationship to reality has been the popular idea for centuries in the Western world. So that you never really knew where you stood with the authority. Because the authority gives you the impression that you are so bad, intrinsically, that at any time you ought to be punished and eaten up.
And it’s only a matter of mercy that you’re not being eaten up. So the prayers of the Christian church are full of the idea “Oh Lord, we are not worthy. And since it is only of thy great mercy that we continue to survive at all, we humbly beseech thee,” et cetera, et cetera.
Imagine! Going around with that feeling about the nature of reality: that it is watching you all the time, that you’re always on probation like a released prisoner. And therefore there is an all-seeing eye at every moment of the day and night, surveilling you much more efficiently than any big brother could watch you through tiny TV cameras in your bedroom.
I know a friend of mine who is a devout Catholic, and in her toilet there—but she is different; she has a sense of humor—and in the toilet (you know, it’s an old-fashioned one: there’s a tank and a pipe coming down to the john) there’s a little placard on it with a big eye painted. And in Gothic letters underneath it it says, “Thou God seest me.” So always, everywhere, according to this mythology, there is the eye of the paternal judge watching you. Now, what can you do with a situation like that?
If that’s the way things really are, you don’t know whether this lord has a sense of humor and whether you can say to him, “Hey, look, don’t take such an advantage of me like that! Turn down that light a little. Close off your eyes sometimes.
You don’t need to be all that particular. You know I can’t do anything to you. I can’t knock you over.
Why do you need to bug me all the time?” That “Ugh, ugh, ugh, ugh” sort of attitude is too much. And so people couldn’t stand it. You know, 600 years of it was enough.
And it became intolerable. Really intolerable. Because everybody knew they were sinners, and that they were doing all the things against the rules in the book, and nobody could possibly put up with it.
So the only thing they could do to relieve themselves of this horrible father figure was to make out that the universe didn’t have a father at all. That it was really an orphan. Not even virgin-born.
It didn’t even have a mother. In other words, in order to escape from the mythology of a conception of ultimate reality which was much too intelligent and much too nosy, people had to invent a conception of the ultimate reality that was completely banal and dead. So the second Western mythology is the mythology of the mechanical universe, which is a fluke emerging from a process of absolutely blind energy.
And you must notice the language in which the great thinkers of the 19th century thought about the world. Freud, for the basic psychic energy, used the word “libido,” which in 19th century Vienna was exceedingly uncomplimentary. Libido: blind lust.
And so, in the same way, the science philosophers of the 19th century talked about the world as being based on brute force, unintelligent energy, and worked out a conception of man as a really rather unfortunate natural fluke. Consciousness, reason, and indeed also the passions and feelings and desires of the human heart were nothing but the end product of a roulette wheel of natural selection. It’s a most curious paradox that those philosophers of the 19th century who denied the supernatural origin of man—and who insisted that man is simply a part of nature, one of the members of nature—nevertheless set up a state of alienation between man and nature without precedent.
I am a part of nature. I am something that nature fluked into being. But nevertheless, this fluke is something that nature doesn’t care about.
It doesn’t care about my ego and its future. All that is important to nature is the species. The individual is irrelevant.
At the same time this philosophy arose when we were becoming conscious of the sheer magnitude of the universe. And it took the first impression of this vastness as a pretext for making little of human beings, and saying, “What do you matter in this huge cosmos? You’re just a little fluke.
You’re just a little nothing at all. This thing goes way on, on, on, on, on beyond all imagination. And therefore man is just so much fungus on a rock, and a very tiny rock at that.” In other words, it took the standpoint: let’s set up a scale between two limits.
And this is the traditional Western opposition. On the one end of the scale, to the left here, you have matter: the inert, the clay put into shape by the potter. On the other end of the scale you have spirit, which is intelligence.
And these are what mathematicians call limits. And the limit is something you approach, but you never actually get there. Now, what the 19th century mythology did was to think of all things towards the limit called matter.
It said, in effect, there is this dead material stuff. It is energetic, but the energy is unintelligent. It’s a kind of roaring mechanical energy like fire, or electricity, or so on.
It is not intelligent. And everything is really that. What we call human intelligence and consciousness are merely complicated forms of this primordial energy.