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Now, the first thing, then, is to see that that’s what’s happening, so that you don’t think, “Well, now there is some special thing I have to do to understand this harmonious relationship between the individual and the world.” Because if you work on it that way, you will start from the presupposition that that relationship doesn’t already exist and has to be brought into being. See? Because it doesn’t have to be brought into being.
It’s there. But now, when you see that that’s so, it obviously starts to make a difference. You do behave in a different way.
But the behavior—the new kind of behavior that is the result of a transformation—is not forced behavior. When you try to imitate the way a saint behaves, you have made a forced change. And you know all forced behavior is phony.
It’s like someone saying, “I love you, I love you, I love you” when you don’t. You feel you ought to, but you don’t really. And something doesn’t ring true.
Just think of the poor Lord, listening to all the prayers of all those people, saying, “I love you, Jesus,” and he knows they don’t. They’re just saying this because they think they ought to. And it can be very trying.
So whenever you do a thing like that, you see, you make a forced change. Now, if the change is to happen in the same way that a seed (at proper season) breaks open and sends up a shoot, see, it comes from the whole force of life itself. Now, when you see that, without your having to do anything—see?—you are living the uncalculated life and you’re only pretending you’re calculating it and arranging it, then—as it were—you will have a grasp of the total situation.
And you can allow it to produce changes in action which are not forced. So this is why there is always a trend in every kind of spiritual doctrine which says something about grace. Divine grace.
There must come about something in you, a change, which you can’t produce. And if you try to produce it you will be a victim of spiritual pride. But on the other hand, all teachers at universities are saying, “You’ve got to make an effort.” There’s some discipline.
There is something you must do. Well, that’s the only way to get it across to people that you, as a separate effort-maker, are a myth, are a phantasm. Because if you really try to control your mind and only think the thoughts that you think are good thoughts to think, you will find that you’re going ’round in a circle.
Krishnamurti’s awfully good at pointing this out. When people ask him, “How do you meditate?” he says, “Why do you want to meditate?” “Why are you concentrating?” “Why are you saying prayers?” “Why do you think you should believe in God?” And it always comes up: “Because I’m just a son of a bitch. I’m out for my own good, and this seems to be the way.” So he says, “You see?
You don’t have any genuine love at all. It’s all fake!” And so you have to find, first of all, where the genuine love is. Now, you love you, don’t you?
That’s genuine. I won’t argue about that. But then, when you start from this—I gave a talk some time ago to the Air Force; their camp or lab where they make weapons, do all the research.
And they got a bunch of us there who were ministers and philosophers, and they had the nerve to ask us: what was our basis for moral behavior; personal moral behavior? Well, I said, “My basis for moral behavior is pure selfishness. And I’m talking, after all, to realistic people here, and I don’t think we need be sentimental and beat about the bush.
After all, you’re all warriors and fighters and so on, and you know how rough things are. So I’m going to say to you, frankly: I’m out for me. But, of course, I don’t do it in a tactless way.
I don’t go around and hit people over the head and say, ‘Give me this’ and ‘Give me that.’ I’m much more subtle. I say good manners, and ‘please,’ and ‘how nice you all are,’ and so on, and finally people feel massaged, psychologically, into a state where they’ll give.” But then I said after that, “There’s some things that bother me. The first one is: if I love me, what do I want?
And furthermore, who am I?” Because if I’m going to be realistic about getting what I want, I’ve got to be pretty sure what it is that’s me, and what is the state of desire in me. If I am desire, you see, if I am a center of desire, what’s it all for? Well, I think of all the things I want.
Well, it so turns out that none of them are me. I might say, “I want dinner.” Doesn’t mean I’m going to eat me up. Any pleasure I can think of is the enjoyment of something that I haven’t thought of defining as myself.
Because I like my sensations, I like what happens to my body when I take a fine wine and down it. But then, what’s the difference between my body and the wine? If I say I like the wine, I also mean I like me and the wine together; the mixture.
But then I don’t eat you, or a friend, or a lover, in the same way as I drink wine. I live in association and like this. But then I’m loving things that aren’t formally supposed to be me.
And as I go into it—in other words, as I investigate what I mean by “me,” I find that I can’t put any limits on it; that I cannot experience “me” without “you,” or without the “other.” They’re inseparable. But you don’t find this out until you investigate it, until you really go into the question: “What do I want?” And that’s the most important investigation anyone can make (which I’m going into in the next session): the question of power. And all these military men, they think they want power.
And so I said to them some very subversive and undermining things without anybody knowing it until long after I’d left! It’s curious that a cardinal feature of the Buddha’s doctrine is that craving is the root of suffering. But craving—going further back to another root, which is ignorance; avidyā in Sanskrit means “lack of vision.” Video, in Latin, is “I see,” and that’s related back to the Sanskrit vidyā.
Avidyā—unseeing, unconsciousness—lies behind craving, and this in its turn lies behind suffering. And, of course, when we in the West first heard about this, we interpreted the idea in a very crude way, which is this: that all one’s disappointments are the result of frustrated desire. But it’s a very much more subtle point of view than that.
To understand Buddhism in any case, you must realize that it is not something like a teaching as we ordinarily understand the system of teaching. It isn’t simply a way, as we have in our universities, of a teacher imparting you certain authoritative information which, when you’ve heard it, you’ve got the message. It’s a dialogue.
It’s a situation in which the teacher doesn’t really have anything to tell you. He’s simply reacting to your own bringing up of problems. And it’s as if people came to the Buddha and said, “Sir, we suffer terribly.
And what are we going to do about that?” And he replies, “Is it not true that you suffer because you desire?” They said, “Well, maybe that makes sense.” “Alright,” he said, “see if you can do without desire.” And all those students go away and see if they can calm their desires. They come back and say, “This is pretty difficult, because we’re animal beings and we have all these appetites to begin with. And then, beyond that, we’re in the unfortunate position of being aware of time.
Being aware of the future. And although it’s advantageous to know about the future, in the long run it’s depressing. Because we all know that we come to a bad end and that everything fall apart in time.” That would be especially true if you lived under the influence of Indian cosmology, where the world is regarded as a process that begins beautifully, but as it goes on it gets worse and worse until it destroys itself.
Then there’s a long period of rest, and it starts out again, beginning beautifully but getting worse and worse all the time. Everything runs down in time according to that cosmology. And so there seems to be a fundamental futility.
Desire, desire for whatever it is that you want. But behind the intention of studying desire, seeing whether one can discipline desire, whether one can curb it, is a deeper question altogether, which is: what do you desire? What makes you itch?
What sort of a situation would you like? Let’s suppose—I do this often in vocational guidance of students. They come to me and say, “Well, we’re getting out of college and we haven’t the faintest idea what we want to do!” So I always ask the question: what would you like to do if money were no object?
How would you really enjoy spending your life? Well, it’s so amazing—as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say, “Well, we’d like to be painters. We’d like to be poets.
We’d like to be writers. But as everybody knows, you can’t earn any money that way.” Another person says, “I’d like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses.” I said, “You want to teach in a riding school?” Let’s go through with it. What do you want to do?
And when we finally got down to something which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, “You do that, and forget the money.” Because if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living; that is, to go on living doing things you don’t like doing—which is stupid! Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.
And, after all, if you do really like what you’re doing—it doesn’t matter what it is—you can eventually become a master of it. It’s the only way to become a master of something: to be really with it. And then you’ll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is.
So don’t worry too much. Somebody’s interested in everything. And anything you can be interested in, you’ll find others who are.
But it’s absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don’t like in order to go on doing things you don’t like, and to teach your children to follow in the same track. See, what we’re doing is: we’re bringing up children and educating them to live the same sort of lives we’re living, in order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to do the same thing. So it’s all retch and no vomit: it never gets there!
And so, therefore, it’s so important to consider this question: what do I desire? Well, when we answer that question in a naïve way, we figure out that what we want is to control everything: to create girls that don’t grow old, apples that don’t rot, clothes that never wear out, conveyances that get from one place to another instantly so we don’t have to wait, power available to do anything that you could conceive and do it just instantly; like that. To get this funny technological omnipotence.
But if you take time out to think about that, and really go into it with your full strength of imagination and find out whether that’s where you want to be, you will soon see: that’s not what you want. Because the moment you have a situation where you are really in control of things—that is to say, in which the future is almost completely predictable—you will see, as I said last night, that a completely predictable future is already the past. You’ve had it.
And that’s not what you wanted. You want a surprise. You don’t know what that’s going to be because, obviously, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you did.
You want a pleasant surprise. Like, you say, “What sort of a surprise would be pleasant?” And you can’t really answer that. Because you know if there are to be such things as pleasant surprises, there must also be unpleasant surprises.
There must be rude shocks. So you’re like somebody taking one of those wishing-well tubs, you know, where you fish in and you bring out a package. And you don’t know whether you’ve got a dead rat in it or a new camera.
And that’s the way. That seems to be the thing that really excites people. But quite certainly there comes out of this inquiry a feeling of real disillusionment with the ideal of power.
To be in power, to be in control, is not something that any sensible person wants. Imagine the situation of Big Brother: Mr. J. Edgar Hoover, Heinrich Himmler. To be glued, day and night, to a highly defended office with telephones, television screens, watching, peeking, spying on everyone and anything.
Getting all this information together. Why, you could never leave the office! I mean, a character, I suppose, like J. Edgar Hoover goes home in the evening.
But when he’s back home, you know, there are guards sitting outside the door, there’s that hotline telephone going to something. He’s always having to be in control. And he can’t take any time off, he can’t go for a walk in the park with a friend, or go innocently to the movies, or sit down and just relax and have an undistracted party in the baths at Big Sur.
What a pauper this guy is! Completely deprived! Because he wants to be in control, because he wants power.
People are frustrated in love; if you’re jilted. There’s a natural tendency in a human being to seek power as a substitute. And that’s a very negative thing.
It’s like having a bad temper, to seek power after you’re frustrated in love. You should try and get back on the love beam. Because nobody wants power!
Now, you may say that’s shirking responsibility; that if you were a really responsible person you would go out for power and try to use power to the best possible advantage, for the benefit of all. Alright, what would be the benefit of all? Ask them.
What do you want me to do with this power? I’m dictator—what would you like me to do? Well, nobody knows because they haven’t thought it through.
They think of all sorts of short-range things, and they are largely conflicting and confusing because they’re not well thought-out. But again, when it finally comes down to it, nobody wants to be God. Now then, when Oriental philosophy and religion was first introduced to the Western world, it was introduced under the auspices of people who were fascinated with power.
It was introduced in the latter part of the 19th century, when we had heard all about evolution and how the human race was going on to ever greater heights, and we would eventually develop superman according to Nietzsche or G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. Remember all that early fantasy of where evolution would lead through the development of technology. And so, at this time, people like H. P. Blavatsky were talking about the mysterious wisdom of the East, and they phrased it, they commended it to us, in a technological spirit: that there was psychic technology, that there was something, that you could go way beyond anything that could be done through the physical sciences.
You could cause your physical body to disintegrate to another level of vibration, and then transmit it and reassemble it somewhere else. You could live as long as you like because you control the fundamental processes. You could determine, if you decided to die, where you would be reborn, exactly.
You would be a complete master of life. And so there are still innumerable books being sold which present Oriental philosophy and religion in this light. That charlatan, Lobsang Rampa, who writes about Tibetan mastery—people read that because they think that there may be a way of beating the game.
So, therefore, the wise men of Asia were represented through this kind of propaganda as masters of life; as, for example, people whose emotions didn’t bother them, who could put up with any amount of pain by simply turning off their feelings, who could foretell the future, who could read your thoughts, and who were above all kinds of ordinary human frailty. Well, when I first met Buddhist priests, Zen masters, swamis, all these wise men from the East, one of the first things that impressed itself upon me was that they were perfectly ordinary human beings. They had bad tempers, they were fussy about certain things, they just acted as I would expect human beings to act.
And so, at first, I was very disappointed. I thought they had feet of clay, but they didn’t come up to these promises of psycho-technology. But after a while I got to realize why not: that they had already thought all that through.
They had thought through what might be done if one had all these powers, and had decided that wasn’t what they wanted. The powers of this kind, in Sanskrit, are called siddhi. But there is hardly one decent scripture or text on yoga that does not say, again and again: if you get siddhi, ignore them.
Go on to something else. These are only the foothills. These are, furthermore, not only foothills, but they are seductive, blind alleys.
Won’t take you anywhere at all. Now, I think that this is the greatest possible lesson for the Western world to learn, because we are so hung up on the idea of power, of control, of being able to make everything go the right way, and we’ve never thought it through. When you get control of it, what are you going to do with it?
Supposing I’m an alchemist and I have a whole secret closet full of love filters; very potent ones. And if I see a desirable woman, all I have to do is to offer her a cigarette or give her a glass of wine with one of my secret potions in it, and instantly I’m her master. Now, when I think that through, what would I do with a situation like that?
Because all I’ve got, again, is that plastic doll that, when I push it, it does what I tell it to and doesn’t have any comeback. What you always are looking for in things is where the surprise is there, where there’s a comeback. And you say, “My god, this thing is alive!
It has a will of its own. It is not in my control. And I would like to have a relationship with something like that, because it would never be dull.” And also, you would feel true affection.
After all, you can make love to yourself in a mirror. You can have one of those Dutch wives; you buy them in a place in Kobe, where you get these rubber girls that you fill with hot water. And sailors take them on long voyages.
But what an awful thing, you know, when you realize that this thing has no surprise in it, no thing that it does on its own, you see? And so, when you think things through like that, you understand: you do not want power, you don’t want to control everything. And therefore, these Zen Buddhist masters that I met and others were not super occultists, and very many Westerners who visited Japan expecting to get a satori—as a result of which they would know everything and control everything—were grievously disappointed and said there’s not much in this after all.
So, therefore, from the standpoint of Buddhism, the fact that the power game is not the game is expressed by saying, “A Buddha is one who has gone beyond the gods.” Because the gods have power. Buddhism imagines all kinds of levels of heaven-worlds inhabited by all kinds of gods, and the supreme of all the gods is called Īśvara. But it is said that all those gods in their paradisal worlds are in saṃsāra: they’re in the round of birth and death.
And what goes up must come down. They’re immensely successful. They’re at the peak of power; spiritual power.
But they’re not delivered yet because they still don’t know what they want. And therefore, in the exploration of what you want, you get to the point of having all pleasures at your command—and they pall. And you think of new sources of pleasure.
And eventually you get like the ancient Romans, who had all these mad crowds of barbarians who had to go every Saturday to the Colosseum for a show that really had to surpass everything. Because they had public baths, they had prostitutes, they had every kind of luxury. But when they went to see one of the big shows that people like Nero put on, they would have, for example, floats circling the Colosseum, all full of slave girls from distant parts of the Mediterranean garlanded with flowers and waving at the crowd and going innocently around.
And the next minute they would release wild lions into the arena to eat up all the slave girls. And they got a big sadistic kick out of it. Because, you see, pursuing pleasure beyond a certain place takes you into what the Buddhists call the naraka world; that is to say, to hells.
When you have explored pleasure to its ultimate limit, the only thing you can get a kick out of is pain. So naturally, you descend from the deva world at the top of the wheel to the naraka world at the bottom, where it shows all these beings in states of torture. Now, of course, the priests say—when they’re bringing up children—if you do bad things you will end up in the hell world.
But this is a very inadequate way of showing how one gets to the hell world. You get to the hell world as a result of not knowing what you want, as a result of thoughtless pursuit of pleasure which ends you, eventually, in the pursuit of pain. So if you’re in the hell world, that’s where you want to be!
So then, the question is—to clarify once more—what do we want? If you understand, first of all, that you don’t want absolute power, you don’t want absolute control. You want, yes, some control.
You see, we always love controlling something that’s not really under our control. Remember, I gave you the illustration right in the beginning of holding a gyroscopic top, and feeling sometimes you’re with it, but sometimes it’s alive under your hand. And this sensation, too, you often get, say, in driving a car, or something like that.
It’s more or less under your control—but on the other hand, it isn’t. And that’s the beautiful thing. Because when something is partly under your control but isn’t, then you have the same sort of relationship with it that you have when you have someone you love; some other person.
They’re partially under your control because they’ve agreed to live with you and go along with you, and so on, but also they’re not. And the measure to which they’re not is the measure to which they seem really alive to you. So then, we ask the question: if the motivation of power-gaining disappears—you've seen through it and you know that's not what you want—what other motivation takes its place as the origin of actions?
And it seems to me that the answer here is compassion. Simply because, when you want to relate to another living being, what you really are asking of them is that they be in the same situation that you are. You want to meet and encounter someone else who has your problems, your fears, and your delights.
You don't want a doll, you want another “you,” another “self,” because that would be at least as surprising to you as you are. And so, then, at once, when you see that that is the case, and that the most interesting thing in the world is the relationship with these others, and you can see at once yourself in the situation of all the other people, and then you think: no, I don't want to control these people. I would like them—yes—to be controlled in the sense that they were happy to do the things I would like them to do.
But obviously, I can't force that. Because if I forced it, they wouldn't be happy. See, when you marry someone, when you have a family, you want your children, you want your relatives, you want your wife, et cetera, to be happy to do the things for you that they do.
And so we say to each other, “Would you like to bring the washing in?” And very often the answer is, “No, but I will.” Because, you see, we put it that way because we always hope that the things that we do for each other will be pleasurable to both sides. So a school teacher will get up in class and says, “What nice boy will clean the blackboard for me?” All these ways we use of trying to get voluntary cooperation. Willingly given help: that's what we look for.
But there is, despite a lot of foolishness that goes on this, is a sound thing, you see? That there really is no greater satisfaction that you can imagine than that kind of personal relationship wherein you can trust a being who is other than you and not under your control to do for you what you want—because they like it. As you, on your side, would want to do something for them in that way, and so as to give pleasure to the other person.
Just take, in sexuality, where you get a kind of a critical example of this: the biggest fun in sexual relationships is giving orgasm to women. And if that doesn't happen, many men feel disappointed. Because a thing that they really wanted to do was to give pleasure and get their own pleasure out of giving it.
Now that's compassion in the real sense of the word: feeling with and through someone else, where the whole trick is that you lose control for a while of the situation, and say, “I throw the ball to you. Now it's yours.” Now, I may seem, therefore—as a result of talking in this way—to be talking like a Jewish or a Christian theologian. Because that's what they say about God: that God did something called kénōsis in the beginning of all time—kénōsis is a Greek word meaning “self-emptying,” “self-sacrifice,” “giving up”—and thereby conferred freedom of will and the power to love on angels and human beings.
And therefore took a terrific risk by trusting the other, by trusting a principle called “other” that's not under your control. With God, of course, it is ultimately under his control, but he sits back and smokes a cigar sometimes and lets it go; see what the children will do. Like the Lord in green pastures with a big cigar.
So you see, it's really, in a way, the same idea as the Hindu idea. When the Christian speaks of God giving the creature freedom of will, the Hindu says: no, God gets lost in that person and gives up power. And it's really the same thing.
It's the idea that the all-powerful surrenders power. So that the more you give the power away, what you're really doing is you're “othering” yourself. Now, the more you “other” yourself by giving power away, the more of a “self” you are.
Because “self” and “other” are reciprocal. So you find that people who, through a sādhanā (a yoga-discipline), have overcome their ego, have transcended the ego, are tremendously strong personalities. You would think, theoretically, they would all be non-entities and to lack entirely what psychologists call ego-strength.
But actually, they're nothing of the kind. They are—every one of them—unique. They're all quite different from each other.
And they are very, very (what I would call) strong characters. Because the more they have given it up, the more they get it. So, in this way of thinking—let's put it in another dimension for a moment.
Let's suppose we're thinking of a relationship that is not just of people. People are very obviously other and independent of one's ego. But give it to everything.
Say to everything—which, of course, is going to include as much of yourself as you can objectify. In other words, your stomach, your intestines, your everything, you see? Say to it all: “Now it's your turn.
Let's see what you're going to do.” Let it happen. You know? You do this complete let-off of control.
And you find that you—I have to put it in a provisional way first—you get the sensation that everything else is living you. It lives you. That you've given away control, you see, to everything else.
It's a lovely irresponsible state to be in. But then, you see, you do the flip. Bllwp!
In giving away the control, you got it. You’ve got the kind of control you wanted. That’s to say, where you had a loving relationship to the world but you didn’t have to make up your mind what it should do.
You let it decide. Now, do you see: that’s how your bodies work. You don’t have to make up your mind what your nerve cells are going to do.
You’ve delegated all that authority. If the president the United States has to lie awake at nights thinking what every official under his command is going to do, he can’t be president. He’s got to make an act of trust in all those subordinates to be responsible and carry on their things in just the same way as you make an act of trust to all your subordinate organs to carry on their functions without you having to tell them what to do.
And this is the secret of what we will call organic power, as distinct from political power. Lao Tzu puts it in this way: The more, therefore, you relinquish power—trust others—the more powerful you become. But in such a way that, instead of having to lie awake nights controlling everything, you do it beautifully by trusting the job to everyone else, and they carry it on for you.
So you can go to sleep at night and trust your nervous system to wake you up in the morning. You can even tell it: “I want to wake up at six o’clock,” and it will wake you up just like an alarm clock. This seems a sort of paradox to say this, but the principle of unity—of coming to a sense of oneness with the whole of the rest of the universe—is not to try to obtain power over the rest of the universe.
That will only disturb it and antagonize it and make it seem less one with you than ever. The way to become one with the universe is to trust it as an other—as you would another—and say, “Let’s see what you’re going to do.” But in doing that, you see—in saying that to everything else (that you have been taught to think is not you), you are also saying it to yourself. Because, finally—as I pointed out—you do not know where your decisions come from.
They pop up like hiccups. And when you make a decision, people have a great deal of anxiety about making decisions. See, there’s this guy, a farmer, who ordered a helping man to come in and found that he was an extraordinarily efficient worker.
For the first day he put him on sawing logs. And he sawed more logs than anybody had ever sawed. It was fantastic.