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And consequently, these are so ingrained in everybody that they find it difficult to be liberated, to see everything in what Buddhists call its suchness. Now, suchness means this—and this is a very, very common feature of psychedelic experience—that you see that everything is simply a dance of energy. It isn’t good, it isn’t bad, but it is beyond good and bad.
Good with a capital “G.” That it’s just great. It’s a fantastic achievement, see? Life!
Woop! And it’s going joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo. There are all sorts of ways.
Joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, joo, goodlee-dee goo-dee, goo-dee, goo-dee, HYEEIIP! you know? Doing all these dances.
And that’s what it’s all about. And therefore, in a certain sense, anything goes. And yet, in another sense, it isn’t just anything goes, because the fun of this whole thing is to make patterns, to figure out games, to do something with it.
And it’s doing this for ever and ever and ever. And it’s going to surprise itself because, you know: what a shock death is! You know?
It just blows you right out. But if you observe the world, you see that it keeps coming back. So for heaven’s sakes, don’t worry yourself with images of being annihilated forever—you know, of being, as it were, buried alive in the dark and to be confined in darkness for always and always and always, which would be just unbearable.
Just forget it. That’s a complete hallucination. After you’re dead, you know, you’ll be someone else just as you are now!
You know? You came into this world—came out of this world is a more correct way of saying—and experienced yourself altogether new. Well, everybody who comes out of this world has the same experience.
And it keeps happening. And when one of them is finished and feels itself disappear, then, as we know, another one starts. And that’s you all over again.
That’s a difficult thing to understand because most people are unaware of the reality of intervals, of spaces. And there are spaces, intervals, between all human lives. And those spaces join the lives together—whether they are spaces is what the ordinarily call space, or whether they’re spaces of time, intervals of time.
And you can understand this when you listen to music and realize that the melody that you hear is a result of hearing the intervals between the tones. If you don’t hear the intervals, you just hear a succession of noises, and you don’t hear melody at all. So, in the same way, there are intervals between lives that join the lives together.
You don’t have to imagine any strings attached, any soul-spook transmigrating from one life to another. Lives to lives are joined simply by the interval between them. And to become aware of space in this way is the most important thing.
Most people are completely unconscious of space and regard it as nothing. So I said this, then, is a major feature of psychedelic experience, which is in common with mystical experience, is then: we’ll call it first the sense of polarity, and of the games, the suchness of things. That life is simply what it is, that it has no absolute value, but you put your values on it like you put values on the chips in poker.
But actually, let’s suppose—let me give two illustrations of suchness. Let’s say we consider the word “yes,” and that we mean by something that it’s affirmative. But say yes several times: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
You begin to hear it as a noise, you see? Yes. Isn’t that funny, that we make that noise?
Yes. Yes. And suddenly the meaning evaporates from it and you get just the noise.
So, in exactly that way, you begin to look at everything. Or take another illustration: when somebody doesn’t know about something and shrugs his shoulders. See?
And you do it once and it has a meaning. But imagine you’re watching someone going [Shrugging], you know, and suddenly you see everything is like that. It doesn’t mean anything.
But it’s fascinating because it is just krrck! a certain play of pattern. Like you’re fascinated when you look at a crystal.
You like to turn it around, look at all the angles in the thing, and all the patterns. Or pick up a seashell, pick up a fantastic rock, admire a fish. You see?
And this way of looking at it—that just everything is a fantastic pattern. It has no meaning, except it’s just what it is; dancing like that. Did you ever see a lady go this way, go that way?
Hmm? That’s what it is. And that’s suchness.
And then the second aspect is that you can often come to a level of experience where you get in touch with the final basic energy that is operating in all these patterns, diagrams, and games. And this is generally experienced as a sensation of intensely brilliant light—as if you realized the current inside your nerves, and saw it as this brilliant light. Somebody hits you on the head hard, you see stars.
See? Because then you suddenly experience the current inside the nerves. And with psychedelics you very often come to an experience of absolutely vivid light in accord with the physicist’s realization that everything is really light; that this whole world is light throbbing in different vibrations.
So that wherever we encounter something dark or something solid, it isn’t actually against light, but it is a form of light that is going so fast in its wavelength that it affects us as the experience of density and impenetrability. If light is too bright, it smashes your eyes quite as effectively as somebody’s fist can smash your face. So everything that we call density and impenetrability is really, in effect, strength of light.
Now, these are the two features, then—two principal features—of psychedelic experiences which correspond with mystical experiences. Now I want to talk particularly, today, about the aspect of danger in these things. Because you will see in what I’ve been saying so far that there’s a departure from common sense.
For example, people say, “Oh, I want my life to be meaningful. I want it all to make sense.” And therefore, when you propose the idea that life really doesn’t make any sense at all, that it’s just some kind of jazz going on, this is threatening to people. They say, “Is it, after all, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing?” But as R. H. Blyth said once when commenting on this passage from Macbeth: “It is said so well that it doesn’t seem so bad after all.” Maybe the whole thing is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, but it’s the sound and the fury that are important, you see?
But that’s an idea which we are not used to. We are taught to think that if your life doesn’t have some purpose, you’re a washout; you’re just an idiot. But maybe it’s a very good thing to be an idiot, to be a complete fool, and simply to sit and watch the waves.
You know how good a thing it is to sit on a beach and just watch waves breaking and dissolving? You can sit for hours completely fascinated. And children like to do this.
They like to sit by a pond and drop pebbles into it and see all the concentric circles coming out of the plop. Why not? You could say: well, it’s much more important to go into business and achieve some substantial results, and raise a family—why?
You’re just making a bigger splash, that’s all. And you have children, and the children go bla bla bla bla bla bla bla diggy diggy diggy diggy diggy diggy dee. Finally, when they started blebble-blee, they make sense and they talk and so on, but it’s all just the kind of jazz.
I mean, raising families and businesses and getting food and eating and going on and going up this way and so on—you know, it’s like hair growing or trees coming out and everything is going tchoo goody goody goody goody all over the place. That’s scary if you’ve been brought up to think that it’s supposed to mean something. When you see it doesn’t and that’s just what’s happening, a lot of people get frightened, and they think they’re going insane.
And they wonder whether they can remember the rules. Well, now, in getting into this predicament, the most important thing to understand is the immense sanity-giving power of letting go, and not trying to hold on to any sort of security. I think this is one of the most important things in life: to realize how powerful and how great in conferring order and sanity and a feeling of comfort on any conceivable situation it is to be able to let go.
Now, there is a difference between this kind of relaxation and being merely limp—in the sense of: when you hang a cloth over a clothesline, it is limp, it simply drops. And there’s a subtle difference between being completely relaxed and being merely limp. You see, when you are, as a physical body, you’re completely relaxed, you still have muscle tonus.
You have a sudden vibrancy going in you. You’re not just a bunch of jello or kind of grease that, if you relax, you will just form a nasty blob and eventually slip through the floor. There is the [???]
and strength. So, in the same way, if you relax psychologically and completely let go of things, you will find that you have psychological tonus; energy. And you cannot really do anything skillfully—any art, you can’t talk, you can’t think, you can’t have sexual orgasms or anything like that—unless you have learned fundamental relaxation.
So when in the midst of some sort of psychedelic experience—whether you are using LSD or whatever, or whether you have an experience that comes upon you spontaneously—and you get scared that you’re going to go out of your mind, you’re going to lose control, you’re not going to be in charge anymore, you do exactly what you do if you find yourself in a typhoon at sea. When you find yourself in a typhoon, what they do is: they turn off the engines. Because in a big steamship, if the propellers get swung out of the water and turn on their own, they shatter the ship by vibration.
So they turn off the engines and drift. Of course, they keep an eye on how near to land they are, but they try to get as far from land as possible and just drift. In the same way, if you’re in a sandstorm in the desert, there’s absolutely nothing you can do.
So the Arab, he wears a wool banús, and he crouches down on the ground like a fetus in the womb and simply covers himself with his banús and doesn’t move until the sandstorm is over. And, you know Edgar Allan Poe’s story about the vortex, about the man who gets into the middle of the thing where the calm center is. I had a friend in London years ago.
He was a psychiatrist, and a very wise one, and he wanted to see a royal procession celebrating the king’s jubilee or something. But he wasn’t going to walk out onto the street at four o’clock in the morning and wait so as to get a front seat. He came just a few minutes before the procession started.
Here was this milling crowd of people pushing and shoving and so on. He just leant on the back of the crowd. Did nothing else but lean, and in all the jostling he leant and he eventually found himself in the front row.
So when any kind of terror starts and you begin to feel uncomfortable and uneasy, you just let go. Now, why does it work? It works for exactly the same reason that you got born.
You had nothing to do with it—from the conscious point of view. All this remarkable brain and bones and everything came into being. Even your father and mother didn’t understand, really, how it happened.
They knew they had to do certain formalities to get the thing started. But really, how it all works, nobody understands. But it does it of itself.
It’s why the Chinese call nature zìrán, which means “of itself so.” Spontaneity. And this extraordinary organization of intelligence happened. And we are afraid of it because it is scary from the point of view of individual consciousness.
as the Psalm says, “Lord, I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” And that means I am scary to myself. And so we think that we know better and that we ought to make certain corrections to nature so that it will function more desirably. But that’s quite doubtful, you know, whether we really ought to do that.
It might have been better to leave it all alone. As the great Taoist sages of China had always advised is: leave life alone. They say the first man who trained horses was called Polo.
So we get the name of the game of polo from him. And that he ruined the nature of horses by doing this, We could say, too, that by our technology we really made an awful mess of things. Perhaps, you see?
Of course, we are stuck with it. That’s the nature of karma: once you once you’ve interfered, you’re stuck with it. You’ve got to see it through.
But it could be argued quite persuasively that we never should have done anything like that; that we should have followed our feeling and just let life happen. And then, of course, we wouldn’t have any of the problems we have now in terms of atom bombs, population bombs—all these problems, you see, would not have occurred. Only, from the standpoint of civilized people, we should say of human beings in that state: well, they’re just barbarians.
They do what they feel like. And from our standpoint that is not very pretty, because we’ve got a special concept of what it is to be very pretty, which is all stuck about with ding-dongs and clothes and bells and whatever, you know? Houses.
But the fish, the cats, the birds live with their curious dignity. And they make no—you know, you remember Jesus? When he said, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.” And I’ve never yet heard a sermon on that passage where the preacher commended it.
They all say, “Well, that’s a great life. But of course, for all practical purposes, it’s impossible.” The most subversive passage in the New Testament: “Be not anxious for the morrow.” Let it take care of itself. Drift.
Be like a leaf on the wind. I remember when I had my very first mystical experience. I was 17 years old and I was in a great state of tension trying to find out something.
And suddenly I abandoned the whole thing. And whoops, you know, it flipped your inside. And I felt like I was a leaf on the wind.
It happened to be, at the time of year, it was autumn and there were many dry leaves floating around and skittering about. You know how leaves play like they are little children let out of school? They go chicketty ticketty ticketty ticketty along the street with the wind.
And I felt exactly like that: as if I didn’t own anything, didn’t have any responsibilities, didn’t care whether it went this way or whether it went that. I was completely released. Wshht!
And I felt completely one with a leaf being blown by a wind, and I was the wind and I was the leaf. And this wind was the wind that bloweth where it listeth, that Jesus uses as an analogy of the spirit. You know what listeth means?
It blows where it likes. Not where you hear. It’s nothing to do with “listen.” The old English “listeth” means it blows where it wills.
In other words, at random. And to let go in that sense, and allow and really consider the possibility that everything in life is completely out of control and at random, but go with it—this is fundamental to any kind of strength, any kind of real control. So that what happens in a psychedelic experience is that, when—it is valuable for the reason that it can be a very threatening experience.
It can suddenly show you that you’re not really in control. That anything might happen. And this, I think, in a way, is the center of the whole thing.
Why these sort of drugs are effective is that they throw you off your normal functioning. You see, this is why there are a whole complex of drugs that are quite different, but act in the same general way. What they do is: they throw you off.
As I said, I think, earlier in the seminar, they gave you a sense of something queer. Change your state of consciousness so that, by contrast with your habitual way of feeling things, you say, “I feel odd.” Now, it may be odd good and it may be odd bad. But you feel odd.
It’s as if everything, the whole sensorium, your whole consciousness, has had a change in it. And you can’t really figure out what it is, because it’s common to every particular sense impression: to seeing, to hearing, to white, to blue, to red. Everything has been subtly altered as if it were buzzing, as if it were at a strange angle, as if it had become luminous, as if it were suddenly transparent, as if it were squirming a bit.
And because this is common to everything you say, “Jeez, this is queer!” So you suddenly are out of control. Things aren’t ordinarily what they should be. And, of course, the same thing can happen in sickness.
Some people, when they are dying, have the sense that everything is completely wrong. It’s all out of order. It’s weirdly out of order.
Now these, then, are opportunities to let go. Give it up. Don’t try to control anything.
And as soon as you are really persuaded by some kind of event to do that—like the person caught in the typhoon or the sandstorm, or people who are dying; anybody in extremis will recognize that he just has to give up. There’s nothing else to do. And when you do that, you suddenly discover you have enormous reserves of strength, intelligence, and power.
If you let go. But, you see, common sense militates against this. They say, “Well, if you let go, you just become a slob.
You’ll just become nothing at all and you will be sucked down the drain.” But it isn’t true. It’s only by complete letting go that you have a source of strength which bounces right back at you. So then, when people get the horrors and the terrors in using, say, LSD, they are so apt to panic and go running off to a doctor, or turn themselves in at a hospital and say, “Please, please, please!
I’m lost in the corridors of my mind. I’ve been chased down some endless passage and I can’t find my way back. Help!
Help! Help! I’m lost.” And then, of course, because if a psychiatrist doesn’t know what to do and thinks this person is really in a very serious condition, he gets anxious.
And his anxiety instantly communicates itself to the patient, who gets more anxious. And they come around and they look official and they give medications, and this, that, and the other, and the person is completely spooked. So a good psychiatrist, in handling anything like this, just treats it as if it were the most normal everyday occurrence.
People think they’re going to die. People think they are about to lose the power to breathe, that their hearts are going to stop, that their brains are going to dissolve into some kind of a drip, and feel all those sort of sensations. But all those sensations, you see, of being out of control are the sensation of the dissolution of the ego.
That’s what’s happening. The ego is a what Jung once called a cramp in consciousness. And in Sanskrit there’s a word, saṅkoca, which means essentially “contraction.” And the Jīvātman, the ego, is a saṅkoca.
And do you often feel, if you experience yourself organically, thoroughly, that you’re contracted? Can you feel a constant strain in yourself? It centers right between the eyes, here.
And Trigant Burrow made experiments with electroencephalographs and things to see what was the difference between the state of a person who had a cramp here and the person who relaxed it. But it’s not only here, you feel it all over you. If you become aware that through all the day long you are in a state of defensiveness; you’re tightening where you needn’t tighten.
And a lot of people experience it here, and as a result generate ulcers. There all sorts of places where we feel this tightening; holding on. Now, it doesn’t do any good.
Of course, I can’t tell anyone, “You should relax,” because that’s a sort of double bind. Because the moment you say “should,” you inculcate a state of mind which is unrelaxed. “Thou shalt love the Lord, thy God.” Heh, better watch out if you don’t!
Well, you can’t love on that basis. You can’t love because you know that you ought to love in self-defense. It’s impossible.
Love is something not under any ego control at all. You have to let go to let love happen. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
But that’s none of your business. So it’s very, very frequent in psychedelic experiences that people become vividly aware of how tense they are, defending themselves against everything all the time; on the watch out, see? But almost all the energy we expend in doing that kind of thing is waste.
So that if you stop doing it because you see that the only way to stop doing it is you can’t will yourself to stop doing it, you can only realize that it’s completely useless—that it doesn’t achieve anything at all, it just wears you out. It’s absolutely no good. It’s like having a sense of guilt, which is an entirely destructive emotion that doesn’t do anything for anyone.
There are a lot of existentialists today who say that unless you feel (a) anxious and (b) guilty, you are not living a genuine existence. Imagine that! You know, you’re not authentic.
Because if you’re a real human being, you know that if you exist, you might not exist. Therefore, you tremble. To be or not to be.
And if you’re a human being, you know that you’re not really up to what you might be. And therefore you feel guilty because you’re a little defective. And all this is posturing.
It’s a great pose. People say “To be real.” You’ve got to be uuurgh! You know?
That’s all play acting. It’s just a joke. Yes, I am deeply sincere, you know?
Yes, I am terribly sincere! I really mean this! You know, do I really need to exist?
To be here as an organism? I mean, good lord, I am here, you know? And, well, I can’t help it!
It has nothing to do with my ego that I have feet and that I exist and that I’m here. Do I really mean it or don’t I? Well, I guess I do.
I mean, my physical existence here is perfectly sincere. It’s about as real as anything can be, but I didn’t intend it. I don’t have to say UGH!
you know? I mean, if somebody threatens me, then I may bounce back rather strongly. But I don’t have to make a sort of cause out of it.
So the notion that I ought to feel anxious all the time, that I ought to feel guilty all the time, is simply a way of people who really don’t have a very good sense of existence, and they drum something up like lying on a bed of nails because that makes you feel more real, because it hurts. It’s a kind of masochism. Well, you can do that if you want to.
There’s really no reason why you shouldn’t. Except that I think it’s a sort of a drag. So the point being that people who who say, “Well, you should lie on a bed of nails,” and feel that makes you feel important, you’ve done something that most people don’t do and you are you’re a bit far out and therefore perhaps you’re more real.
I say, okay, but just please have a sense of humor about what you’re doing! Don’t take it quite that seriously, try to convert everybody else to sleeping on a beds of nails, because it’s not to everybody’s taste. But a lot of people, you see, who sleep on beds of nails—just because their very insecurity, because they feel that unless they suffer that something awful is going to happen—they try to convert everybody else to doing the same thing.
See, that’s one way of finding out that knowing that you are right is to get as many people as possible to agree with you. Like the Bandar-log; the monkeys in Kipling’s story The Jungle Book, who keep exclaiming, “We all say so, so it must be true.” So, to feel guilty and to feel anxious and then make a religion out of it and say, “This is the way any authentic human being feels. And if you don’t, there’s something wrong with you.” You know, like a lot of people who are being psychoanalyzed feel that anybody who is not being psychoanalyzed is neurotic.
As Philip Rieff puts it in his book on Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. He says the characteristic institution of our era is not the parliament, but the hospital. That everybody is undergoing therapy.
Everybody must admit that they are in the course of being cured, but is not cured. Nobody can claim—anybody who got up and said, “I am perfectly psychoanalyzed. I have no further problems” would be regarded in this day and age as someone who would, in a former age get up and say, “I’m absolutely holy.