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And they get up to a tremendous speed saying this, and it was the most gorgeous babble. And then they were playing these various instruments, and all the sounds became—I became peculiarly aware of the nonsense in them. There was, for example, an oboe sound which sounds like somebody singing with his nose pinched.
Meeeeeeeeh, weeeeeeaaah oooowwooowooweeeaaah. You know, this sort of sound. Children love to do that.
It makes a fascinating noise. Why is it fascinating? Heaven only knows!
But in this sort of bleaah, bleaah, bleaah, bleaah sound, which they weave together with incredible skill, Hindu music involves the most complex orders of pattern, and to count it out is quite difficult. But they do it with consummate skill, especially with drums. And as a result of listening to this, everything became that.
Everything became Hindu music. And so people—you see, when we listen to our own music, well, that’s very serious and we take it all for granted. This is a violin and this is a piano.
And these seem to be very normal noises. And we’ve so long been accustomed to them that we take them for granted, and we think that they’re perfectly sensible. Whereas, of course, if you listen to it with new ears, they’re nothing of the kind.
I mean, take an organ, for example: what a monstrous construction of pipes! And playing all these sounds through them, blowing through holes, is simply fascinating. When you hear the Hindus who do things musically that at first sight strike us as ridiculous, because they concentrate on using sounds that we avoid.
But we do sometimes use those sounds when we’re, especially as children, are trying to see what funny noises we can make. And so they will do things with their voices that sound to us like some sort of clowning. But to them, of course, this is all perfectly normal and serious music—unless, of course, they are turned on when they’re listening, as they very often are in India, and it’s perfectly legitimate there.
The thing that they forbid is alcohol. It’s difficult to get in India. But they don’t forbid bhāṅg.
I remember I was having dinner in Kyoto with a Buddhist priest and a little party. And naturally, all Japanese, including Buddhist priests, are drinkers. And he passed around beer and sake in fairly plentiful quantities.
There was sitting at the table a Hindu man, very intelligent fellow, and I noticed he refused them. So a little later I said to him, “Do you not drink for religious reasons?” He said, “Oh, no, it is not that. It is just that I don’t need it and I don’t want to cumber myself with just something I don’t need.” I said, “Do you drink bhāṅg?” “Oh, yes!” He said.
“You would like it! Is a very good drink!” And, as you know, bhāṅg is an infusion of cannabis indica. And so I suppose the Hindus hear their own music from that point of view very frequently.
Cannabis is hemp; vulgarly known as pot. So the impression, you see, of this music—at the time and in the state of mind I was in—in becoming the music and becoming this sort of marvelous nonsense, everything became that. And so I could see life behaving as patterns do so often behave.
Look at a tree: you see, first of all, the heavy outline of the trunk. Then the trunk gives birth to branches, and the branches give birth to twigs, and the twigs give birth to leaves, and the leaves give birth to hairs and veins. And if you go on looking with a microscope, there is wiggle after wiggle after wiggle after wiggle, all coming out, and yet all adding up to the perfection of this tree’s pattern like some sort of symphony.
And so I could see all the wiggles and patterns of human imagination and behavior as being involved in this. And the things that we call good as well as the things that we call bad, the things that we call healthy as well as the things that we call sick, the enlightened and illuminated and liberated point of view as well as the egocentric point of view in bondage—all of them as being integral parts of this terrific playfulness which the Hindus call the līlā, or sport, of creation—or better: play. Better than sport.
“Play” in the sense of playing the piano, playing the drama, and so on. Not “play” in the sense of the trivial. So it was a most astounding feeling of being entirely a pattern.
And nobody was making the pattern. There wasn’t a patterner outside the pattern, the pattern itself was it. It grew itself.
It created itself. It was spontaneous. It was all there was.
And what a was-ness! And so one is constantly reminded of this by all natural forms and objects in which pattern is very apparent, and in which at the same time transparency is apparent. These two aesthetic qualities go together to be suggestive of the psychedelic experience.
And so it seems more than ever natural to surround oneself with not only the objects of human art, but with dried flowers and herbs and grasses and seashells and various kinds of rocks and crystals. And I know a very great sculptor, and—no, she’s not a sculptor, she’s really a mosaic artist and painter. Her name is Louisa Jenkins, and she is a great admirer of Teilhard de Chardin, the very progressive Jesuit theologian.
She’s a Catholic, and she has caught this feeling of universal pattern from him. And her studio is an absolute wonder museum. And she sees the artistic significance of everything.
For example, we were having dinner with her one evening, and she was serving Japanese sake in those small cups—her cups were white—and one of them dropped off the table and split in two. And we were about to pick it up and throw it away. She said, “Oh, don’t throw that away.” She said, “I have a use for it.” And a little later she presented me—it’s hanging in the dining room, there—with an amazing face made on a flat disk of cement, and the sake cups had been turned upside down and used as the eyelids for this creature.
Well, the thing is that her whole studio contains—yes, she painted this. This is Leviathan, the monster of the deep. Her whole studio contains things like skeleton leaves, feathers of the most intricate type, fish skeletons, animal’s bones, marvelous pieces of driftwood, gorgeous blocks of quartz.
Everything that is absolutely fascinating. A child would go out of its head in that studio. But somehow this intimates a world which is entirely design; pattern.
And it has an extraordinary levity and joyousness to it. It seems to be a world that is immaterial—in the double sense of the fact that it is not material, and that it doesn’t matter (in the sense of when something matters, that it is grave and thus heavy). It becomes, in other words, a universe whose whole meaning is playfulness.
But playfulness must—in order to succeed—must have an aspect which simulates tragedy, and can play at not play so that one can realize play. It is fundamentally play, but it plays very serious games, or plays at seriousness. Now, this leads me to a question that is important about the use of psychedelics.
All the people who have been involved with it talk about games. Game theory is very fundamental to it. Now, when Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were at Harvard, both of them started out in their work as very, very respectable scientists in psychology.
They knew all about statistics, and Timothy Leary, while he had been here at Berkeley, had done some very careful statistical analysis of psychological mechanisms and so on, and went on and got his doctorate, and was a very respected scientist. Then they began working with psilocybin. Well, they made what was to their colleagues the fatal mistake, not just of experimenting on subjects and making careful notes and analysis of how they reacted, but they took it themselves.
And then they slowly began to realize that what is called serious scientific inquiry is a kind of game. And you can see it as that, of course, without being under the influence of a psychedelic, just by reading some of the literature—especially in the social sciences, where you will find amazing jargons are used, and that you have to be able to speak that jargon in order to belong to the academic fraternity. If you don’t talk that way and if you don’t acquire the special rituals of the fraternity, you are not one of the boys.
And an enormous amount of these investigations are truly trivial. I remember—for a time I was associated with a certain university which has a famous Department of Education that’s in this state. And I remember reading the subjects of masters dissertations when their degrees were awarded at commencement, and what they had done, you see, was to choose subjects about running schools which were as specialized as you could get.
I mean, somebody got his master’s thesis from writing about the relationship of windows in a classroom to the circulation of air for the children. This is fundamentally a job for a constructor or architect or someone. I mean, you know?
But that this qualifies one for a master’s degree in education is simply fantastic. But all those sciences—and this is particularly true of the study of English—they want to become scientific. And that means: studying something minutely.
Well, it’s very important, sometimes, for a physicist or a chemist to study something extremely minutely. But what these other people are doing, because that the physicist and the chemist have acquired a certain power and status through their studies, they are simply trying to copy the method of doing things in spheres where this method is not particularly applicable. And so it becomes strictly a game—especially in psychology, where anything that is studied has more variables in it than anyone can think about.
But it does make a very, very pretentious thesis to put forward some really good psychological statistics. So—I shall have more to say about psychological statistics in a few minutes—but so it becomes a game of staying in a certain caste. Well, they saw through this, you see, and they felt at once that it was really rather ridiculous that they were doing this game, and the psychology department at Harvard University, and all this, and they ought to be mumbling in their beards and looking very grave.
And so the funny thing was, the university couldn’t stand it. And there was a question as to whether they were resigned or actually fired—it was probably both—but they just couldn’t go on with it. But now, then, it followed from that that they had to react to the opposite extreme and play another game altogether, which was, of course—what game is there, that is the opposite of the academic game?
It is obviously the beatnik game—which is another game, too, because that, too, has its uniform, its rituals, its language; everything. And the moment you begin to start talking that way, you align yourself with a certain in-group. I mean, if you dig things instead of appreciating them, and so on, that that puts you in a certain thing.
Because they have their in-group language just as the academic people do. They’re all games. Well now, the problem becomes this: there is a danger when you see how game-y life is; to overtly to regard everybody as playing games.
So that, when somebody says something to you which is supposed to be either serious or sincere (the two things are not the same), you treat it as a game gambit. And a person who is by no means ready to admit that he’s playing games is very, very put off with this. Because you say: you don’t take me seriously, you’re treating me as just as if I were playing games.
And so, too, when people get swept away by the notion that everybody is playing games: they’re also liable to get what has been called the holy man syndrome—which is: I am divine, and therefore I am above right and wrong. I can do anything I please because, after all, it’s only a game. And this is one of the things that in what I would call imbalanced people is very liable indeed to result from the use of psychedelics, and one of the reasons why society is afraid of it.
And this really does present a considerable problem. If you consult, for example, the literature of Zen, and if you know anything about the way Zen is carried on, here you find an astounding ability of the great men to carry their exalted spiritual state in a very human way. One of the great points of Zen is that its ideal is not to become a super-man, only a man—a human.
And so the Zen people do not aspire to any claim of super-humanity. And the last thing that they learn in their very long training, say, of a person who is going to teach Zen—you might think it would be the first thing, but it is the last thing—the last thing they learn is the Zen interpretation of moral precepts. It comes right at the end.
If you read this new book by Miura and Sasaki called The Zen Koan, which was just published, Miura discusses the all the stages of kōan study. And right at the end comes the study of the precepts. The irritating thing about this book is that it doesn’t tell you anything.
It tells you a lot of headings, but no content. And one sometimes wishes that they would either put up or shut up. But it does have in its marvelous translations of Zen poems which are well worth the price of the book.
But anyway, this thing, this point, does come out: that it is all part of making a bridge between deep insight and the everyday life of the world. Just as I said: you can’t go off into ecstasy—or at least, you can, but it isn’t a good idea to go off into ecstasy and not ground it. So, in just the same way, it is not a good idea to go off into a state of godly omnipotence and divine holiness, et cetera, and not bring it down to Earth.
And this is one of the things that I could really complain about among many people who have taken a great deal of psychedelic substances. There is this tendency to pooh-pooh everything. For example, I mean—and to do absolutely outrageous things.
There is a movement afoot called the Neo-American Church to put the whole thing on a religious basis. But what do you suppose they do? They have a number of what you might call elders of this church, but they call each one a boohoo.
A boohoo. Well, I mean, some people are just going out of their way to make themselves ridiculous. This is the revolution, you see.
And some people are fired with a real revolutionary spirit that we are going to make this thing work, we are going to turn the world on—but we are going to do it on our terms. Of course, you can see from the standpoint of deep insight that it’s a very cute idea to call a religious patriarch a boohoo. I don’t know what boohoo always means in American slang.
In my slang it means a crybaby. Or it means something… it could mean sort of a hot air bag. And true Zen masters in their private references to each other refer to one another as rice bags and tramps and bums, and all sorts of things.
But outwardly, so far as their contact with the world is concerned, they wear the proper and dignified governments of high officials, which they’re expected to wear. Because people want someone who is in a position of great authority or responsibility to look like it. So the pope is the only man you can’t slap on the back and call Harry.
So it is of the essence of real insight that when you arrive at the point of understanding—what for want of a better term I must call the total harmony of the world—you have to see that, in this scheme of things, there really is no person who is superior or inferior in the final sense of this of this word. That is to say, it becomes apparent that everybody (at his level and in his place) is manifesting the divine just as much as you are, or as much as any Buddha is. This is why it’s said in the Buddhist scriptures that when you become a Buddha, everybody else does.
And so you have no basis for giving yourself airs and graces, or for breaking other people’s game rules in such a way as to cause hostility. Because they, in their way, playing their games—even if they are limited games, even if they’re bad games—they, too, are all one with you. And their not knowing that they’re enlightened is, at the point where they are, very important indeed.
It seems sometimes that events could be put on different levels, and the levels could be numbered. And a level that occurred on number 23, where it was quite right, would seem very wrong if it occurred at level 95. But what happens to us often is that we see an event and think it’s at that level 95, when it’s really only at 23.
And so it seems out of place and it seems quite wrong. So this sensation, this real thorough absorption of the point that, from the situation of the deepest mystical union, from that standpoint, at that standpoint, all men are equal, all beings are equal. The problem arises when you try to bring that standpoint into practical affairs.
You can make one of two mistakes. One, by saying: you are all equal, but I am more equal than the rest of you, because I know you’re all equal and you don’t. The other is the more common one: all men are equally inferior.
This, of course, is the one from which our culture suffers to a high degree. This is what results in what you might call a sort of travesty of democracy. You see, all democratic thinking in the Western tradition was based on German mysticism.
The great tide of democracy came from people inspired by Tauler and Eckhart and Suso and Ruusbroec, the brothers of the Free Spirit, the Anabaptists, the Levelers. All those people were the seedbed of democratic ideas and the idea of liberty. Their mysticism influenced George Fox and the Quakers.
But when you translate this “all men are equal in the sight of God” to “all men are equal on the level of politics and economics,” then the parody is: they’re all equally inferior. And this is why it issued in the various fashions in the West for explaining greatness away as neurosis, of psychoanalyzing all great saints and artists and so on, and reducing their accomplishments to frustrations in sex and toiletry. This gave everybody, you see, who was really some kind of a bum a sense of satisfaction in knowing that the great are, after all, just as inferior as you are.
And that is democracy at its worst. What has to be understood, I think, is this: in order to integrate the level of mystical understanding with practical life, you have to remember one of the famous stories of Sri Ramakrishna. There was a student who had been with him and had been learning that all things in the world are Brahman; are manifestations of the divine.
And having heard this, he left the master’s ashram and went walking down the road. And there comes along an elephant swinging its trunk and looking rather fierce. And there is a mahout riding on the elephant, and he says to this man, “Hey, get out of the way!
This is a fierce elephant.” But he thought, “I am Brahman. Elephant is Brahman. We are all one Godhead and no trouble can come.” So he didn’t get out.
And as he approached, the elephant swatted him with his trunk and threw him into the bramble bushes at the side of the road, from which he eventually extracted himself bleeding and bruised. And he went back to the master and told what had happened. And the master shook his head and said to him, “But you should have realized that the mahout warning you was also Brahman.” Well, so it is like this.
When you see that all people whatsoever (whether they be high or whether they be low) are manifesting the divine just as much as you are—supposing you are in a high situation (you know, you’ve really seen the mystery, and you see that all people manifest it): you must stop to consider that what also manifests it is the differences between them. That they are arranged in a certain hierarchy. That the king being king and the cobbler being cobbler, they are—but, you see, these are like these levels I was just talking about: level 23 and 95.
The cobbler at level 23 is doing alright. But what he is doing would not be appropriate at level 95—or however you want a number it or turn it around. So when we equalize things, we must also take into account everything that is there to be equalized.
Put it in another way. You might say: if I really understand that all is the work of the divine, but should I or should I not be angry when somebody like Hitler destroys millions of Jewish people? Many people jump swiftly to the conclusion that, of course, I ought not to be angry, and then jump to the next conclusion, which is that although I ought not to be angry, if I’m not, I’m extremely cold-hearted.
But I would point out that my being angry at such a state of affairs would be as natural as water boiling when put over a fire. I would be very angry indeed. But this anger is included in the manifestations of the divine just as much as the villainy of the people who destroyed the Jews.
They’re going to be villainous, I’m gonna be angry. Is follows like the shadow and the substance. And so you might say, then: if all is a divine, why do anything to change anything?
If we see any sort of social injustice or what you will—disease—if it’s all divine, just let it go. You know? But included in the things that are is change, is irritation, is all the workings of the human being.
And so the people who work to change things are just doing their stuff at their level, and they have to be included in this thing; in this totality. Goethe once said: “We work with nature even when we work against her.” So you have to have the most inclusive view possible in order to integrate these two points of view. And it’s an oversimplification altogether to say, when you’ve seen that the divine is in all things, you just cut up your legs, relapse into samadhi, and watch the world go by.
That’s alright for old men and for people who are physically tired and weak. That’s very proper; to sit on one’s porch and in a rocking chair would be the American equivalent. That’s fine.
But obviously, when you are young, you must be involved in the world. Because what has to be understood is: there is no way of not interfering with life. Even when you glance around this room, you make an effect on it.
The slightest little breath upsets things—not very seriously, not very much, but still it does. Our existence, the mere fact of existence, is an interference. There is no way of not interfering because you are absolutely connected with everything that goes on, and every move that you make has repercussions.
So one has to interfere. Therefore the question—if you have to interfere—the practical question is: how? There are several ways of doing it.
Which one? Really, lack of considering the fine points can bring about dangers. Things like the holy man syndrome.
Incidentally, I should mention another point about the holy man syndrome. Not so long ago, a young psychiatrist came to see me who had some experience in these matters, but he had a very noticeable chip on his shoulder. And he was all for emphasizing the point that, say, Zen—he had read a lot about it—was a con game.
See? He said, “You know, you’re a con man. I’m a con man.
We’re all con men.” And everything he did and said had a certain aggression about it, as if to want to make a great point that we’re all crooks. Now, when you see that, you smell a rat. You see?
It’s all very interesting, but there’s a rat here. This person is overcompensating, and therefore he hasn’t really understood. If you have to go around, in other words, challenging everybody with your insight, it shows that you are not secure in it.
You don’t really believe it, otherwise you wouldn’t have to brag about it. And this is the cause of almost all the kinds of excess and disruptive behavior that come from the use of psychedelics. People get the vision and they go mad with it.
They just can’t keep it under their hats. They have to go and use it to kick the world in the teeth. I even know an old man who should know better, who says that when he’s got spiritual nourishment, he’s ready to kick the world in the pants again.
It may be just a jokey way of talking; I’m not so sure. But that little edge of somehow having to insist on it is the same state that I was talking about yesterday in the first seminar. When you understand it fully, you go beyond ecstasy and come back to everyday consciousness.
Likewise, when you understand fully, you go beyond any special claim to be a holy man (or to be a real devil, or whatever exalted position happens to appeal to you) and you come back. But now there’s some further wrinkle to this. There always is.
There are people, as you know, who are aggressively ordinary. And this is a peculiar phenomenon in the United States, where we very much in this country believe in being natural, and so we feel uncomfortable with ceremonies and with dramatic behavior, or dramatic clothes, or anything like that. We feel that that’s too much.
It’s showing off. It reminds us of the aristocracies of Europe that persecuted our ancestors, I suppose. And so we like things in this country to be folksy.
See? And so many of us were sort of beat-up clothes—and especially wealthy people, you’ll find. Wealthy people on vacation will wear real beat-up clothes: jeans and an old T-shirt and so on, and look as grubby as possible.
Because that’s natural, you see? That’s…! So, also, then, when people realize that they’ve come to a great exalted insight, then they’re going to bring it down to Earth, and they realize they shouldn’t be aggressive about it.
They’re going to be as natural as possible. But you can spot, just KRRK! like that, that their naturalness is phony.
It’s a put-on. So I would say, to to be natural, really, you don’t have to put on any special guise or something for protecting yourself against other people. What you have to do is to do what you like—in the sense that, really, wear what you like, play what role you like (as long as you’re comfortable with it) for yourself, and don’t care whether it’s natural or not.
Then it will be natural. But don’t try to be natural, because immediately one can detect the spuriousness of it. So now, this brings me to the last question in view of the whole problem of the social adaptation of unitary consciousness of the world as a total harmony on the one hand, and our ordinary, normal consciousness of the world as an intensely competitive system, gravely serious disputes.
We’re discussing bringing these these things together, fertilizing the one point of view with the other. What are we going to do bout the practical problem of psychedelics? I pointed out at the beginning that the whole subject falls between two stools.
Because, as a whole, neither the clerical professions nor the medical profession are ready for it. And this is true even of that aspect of the medical profession which is strictly psychiatry. The divorce of psychiatry and religion—and it is, generally speaking, a divorce.
There are exceptions to this where clergy, for example, in many theological schools are trained in psychiatry, and there are a smattering of psychiatrists who are members of some kind of religious group. But, by and large, psychiatry is attempting to be a pure science without any religious commitment at all. And I get the feeling again and again—and I talk to a great many psychiatric groups, and I talk to them endlessly about methods of therapy, and this, that, and the other—but I realize with a funny intuition that they are completely superficial.
They don’t even know what therapy is; what they’re aiming at. And so often—this is not always the case—therapy means success in getting a person to behave like everyone else, and to give him the same sort of tastes that everybody else has, so that he’s a safe norm. But even when this is not the case, and many therapists, say, who follow Maslow, Carl Rogers, and our most brilliant men, I still get this feeling that psychiatry is dying on the vine for lack of any metaphysical foundations.
Now, I said I was going to say again something about statistics. Such statistics as there are showing up today shows that psychiatric treatment, by using other methods than the drugs they’re using in asylums to quieten people down, psychiatric treatment is extraordinarily ineffective. Samples show approximately that, of any control group, one third of the psychiatric patients recover from their symptoms in three to five years, and one third of patients under the care of a general practitioner receiving no psychiatric treatment also recover in three to five years.
And those who were under the treatment of the psychiatrist came out a good deal poorer financially. I don’t want to say this in a way of belittling the seriousness and the skill with which many psychiatrists are trying to study their problems. But they do have an abominably superficial concept of the human organism and of the human mind.
One would think that a psychiatrist would be eager, above all, to explore every possible modification and state of human consciousness. He should be expert. He should know his way around inside all of them.
Just as a linguist wants to master many languages, so a psychiatrist should master many madnesses and many mystical states. He should run the whole gamut from mystical vision to catatonic schizophrenia and know them all from the inside. Because then he is in a position to communicate with his patients.
He cannot communicate while he remains a mere professor of psychiatry. See? Psychiatry is not something that you can study like the history of Persian pottery.
You know? And it’s all out there and it’s objective and so on, so on, and you never have to get involved. To be a therapist effectively you have to be right on the inside.
You have to get mixed in with it. And even though you may lose a certain objectivity in scientific impartiality by doing this, what you’ve got to acquire is the art of being able to get involved and then come out again and be scientifically impartial, and then get in again. That’s difficult, but it’s worth trying.