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Well, actually, the whole world is a Rorschach blot. It’s all fundamentally wiggly. Clouds are wiggly, mountains are wiggly, plants and waters and, above all, people.
People are peculiarly wiggly. And then the task, you see, of consciousness is to make sense out of it all, is to tell a consistent story about the wiggles so that we can keep track of them. And what happens is: in human society, our forefathers—the more persuasive among them—invented a story about the universal Rorschach blot, and they pounded their children and made them believe it, too.
And so, now, we all accept approximately the same version of the thing. And so, by this method of attending to one little bit of the wiggle, and then another little bit of the wiggle, we can make sense out of the wiggle. You see, you do it the same way—supposing, instead of a Rorschach blot, you have a piece of territory: you have the Monterey Peninsula.
And on the map it’s a wiggle. But if we superimpose over this map a grid, simply lines—north and south, lines of latitude and longitude—and then we describe where each wiggle is in terms of the numbers up or the numbers across of these lines, we can measure the area. Well, that’s the basis of calculus.
That’s the basis of all careful, accurate description of our wiggly world. And so, by concentrating on the wiggles, area by area, bit by bit, we learn how to manage it, how to make sense out of it. Just in the same way, for example, your mouth has only a certain size and therefore you can’t eat a whole chicken at once.
In order to be able to absorb a chicken you have to cut it into pieces. So you get a cut-up fryer. And even then, you have to reduce it to bite-sized units so as to assimilate it.
Well, in exactly the same way, the physical world has to be reduced to bite-sized units in order to be assimilated by our intellect. And those bite-sized units we call “things” and “events.” There are—in nature, in the actual physical universe—no such things as things, and no such happenings as events. They’re all invented by us in the same way as we invent lines of latitude and longitude, inches, meters, minutes and hours.
They’re all measures: they don’t really exist out there. But we choose certain lines. For example, we choose the boundary of the human skin and we say this divides “me” from “everything else.” Inside this bag of skin is “me,” inside those bags of skin is “you.” And outside that is a foreign world that isn’t me, that isn’t you.
But that’s not true! The skin, from one point of view, can be said to divide us from the external world, but from another point of view it is exactly what joins us to the external world. The skin is full of pores through which we breathe the air.
The skin is full of nerve ends through which we become sensitive to what goes on around us. And if, as a matter of fact, the air pressure outside the skin was not exactly fifteen pounds per square inch—if it was anything less than that—we’d blow up. The pressure inside would be too much for the outside.
See? What we don’t—we are carefully educated not to notice certain things, because once you start noticing it—in other words, using your spotlight to concentrate on certain areas—at the same time as you notice, you also ignore, you also don’t notice. Often I take a blackboard and I draw a circle on it.
And I say to people, “What have I drawn?” And they’ll say, “A circle,” “a ball,” “a sphere.” Very few people ever say, “A hole in the wall.” A few smart ones do. In other words, do you notice what’s inside the circle, or do you notice what’s outside? Because what’s outside is just as important as what’s inside.
You know, the fundamental secret of life—I’m going to tell you this, and this is worth all your price of admission; it’s the ultimate secret! The ultimate secret is: for every inside, there is an outside. And they go together, and you can’t have one without the other.
And that’s the whole problem of metaphysics, of religion, of life and death, so be of good cheer. But normally, you see, the way we are trained to attend our attention is captured by the area inside just as it’s captured by an object that moves rather than one that’s still. In other words, if a mouse were suddenly to go skitty-skit across the floor here, everybody would notice the mouse.
And I keep moving a little instead of standing still, like this, while I talk to you so that you will notice me a little, see? Motion against relative stillness, the background of the curtain, captures our attention. And my figure against the curtain captures your attention.
Imagine what would happen if the total consciousness of the curtain vanished and your entire field of vision was filled by me only. Then do you see what would happen? I would disappear, and what you would become conscious of as the thing presented to you would be my necktie, or something like that.
See? So by that I mean the inside always goes with the outside. Now then, the whole use of consciousness—this is the point I’m making—the whole use of consciousness is the isolation of certain areas which we pay attention to.
And we pay as the price for that kind of attention ignoring what stands outside them. For example, most people think that space is nothing. Space is just emptiness through which we all move.
Interstellar space—the space between planets, the space between galaxies—is nothing. But every painter and every architect knows that space isn’t nothing at all. Architects sometimes talk about the influence of space upon behavior.
And to the uninitiated this sounds like nonsense. And if you paint, you realize that you have to paint the space as well as the things in the space. In other words, if you work in oils on canvas, you have to work on the background.
You have to paint the background in. And you realize, therefore, that it’s something that’s there. Can you imagine a solid without a space ’round it?
Why, you can’t possibly do so! Can you imagine a space without a solid in it? You can’t possibly, because you have to constitute the solid to imagine yourself in the middle of an empty space.
There is no way of having a space without a solid just as there is no way of having a front without a back. They go together. But we are trained by our education and by our language—by the patterns of thought which our culture instills in us—to notice the solid and ignore the space.
So, in the same way, we notice ourselves as we exist inside our skins and ignore ourselves as we exist outside our skins. And that gives us our peculiar feeling of insularity, of being skin-encapsulated egos who feel ourselves to be different from, to confront, to meet an alien, external, and largely hostile physical universe. And this is the supremely difficult price that we pay for our ingenious ability to use symbols, and to divide the world into the symbolic and the real, the significant and the insignificant, the important and the unimportant.
We have lost the fundamental physical elemental sense that every single one of us is the entire works, focused here and now. That is to say, every human being—every beetle, every mosquito, every living cell—is something that the entire cosmos, the whole universe, is doing in a particular way. Just as when you hold a magnifying glass to the sun, and you focus the sun as a vivid little point of light at that particular spot on that particular leaf, so every creature that exists is a focus, a special case of what the entire works of existence is doing.
Only: we have been taught to forget that. By being concentrated on the here and now—who I am, what circumstances I’m in, what I’m doing, what’s important for me—we get absorbed in it. Supposing, for example, you got under a microscope some of the little animals that are working inside your blood stream.
You would suddenly become aware through your narrowed attention of a great conflict going on. There’s a thing with wild whiskers on it and eyes all over that’s going to eat that thing, which is more humane-looking because it’s only got eyes on one end. And you see this awful thing through the microscope about to eat that and you get panicky.
What’s the result going to be? What’s going to come out of this? See?
But from a larger point of view you realize that if that fight weren’t going on, you wouldn’t be healthy. Because the constant conflict of microorganisms at one level is, at another level, your ongoing life and health. But if you look at it intensely—I mean, if you concentrate and ignore the context of what’s happening—you get involved in this struggle and think, “Oh!
It’s going to eat it!” Well, that’s the situation we’re all in. We’re all absorbed in our daily success, our business opportunities; whether we’re going to make it or not. See, that’s one of the great philosophical questions.
There are really four philosophical questions: Who started it? Are we going to make it? Where are we going to put it?
And who’s going to clean up? So this “Are we going to make it?”—see?—arises immediately; someone has started it. And what they’ve started is this concentrated attention: looking at the little details.
Those details are fascinating! I mean, you know, it’s the details that matter. It’s whether a woman’s nose goes this way or that way that determines whether she’s attractive or not, whether she goes this way or that way that determines—you see?
It’s the details. And it’s the details that differentiate between each individual personality. And we get absorbed in that.
It’s marvelous! Beautiful! But unless you can keep the details in balance with the background you get so sucked into the details that you lose yourself.
You lose your balance. And so, in this way, the narrowed attention gets you involved into believing that you—I, myself, ego—am just some kind of a thing inside this skin. I’m a sort of chauffeur in my physical body.
And I believe that. It’s a hoax, but I believe it. And the whole of society conspires to make you believe that.
The whole of education is designed to give you that particular sensation. But it just isn’t so. Because if every inside goes with an outside—like the head goes with the feet; you don’t find heads without feet.
You don’t find cats that have tails but no heads. Only manx cats have heads but no tails. They go together.
So, in the same way, a living organism goeswith an environment. But fascination with symbols—the fact that we can talk about the organism as if it were something separate from the environment, because we can talk about “I” as if I was something separate from you—hypnotizes us into the feeling that we really are separate. And so we lose the sensation of being really at home in the world.
You know, you might use an illustration: Here’s a tree. A barren tree; dead branches. And from nowhere at all a bunch of birds come and alight on it.
There they are: birds from somewhere else alighting on a barren tree. That’s the way most people feel themselves in the world: human beings in a world largely composed of rocks, and fire, and electronic jazz which has no feelings, no sense of values, no intelligence. But we just live here by accident.
The other image is the tree, again, that suddenly gives rise to leaves and fruit. What a different situation. But according to all our knowledge of the sciences—of biology, ecology, evolution, and so on—we are leaves on a tree.
We live, we express—each one of us—a world which produces human beings in precisely the same way that an apple tree produces apples. After all, when we see the apple tree in the spring it has no apples on it, only blossom. And in the winter not even any blossom.
And you might go by the apple tree and say, “Just a tree.” And you come by later and you see the blossoms, and you begin to get interested. And then, later in the summer, you go by and it hat apples on it. And you say, “Excuse me!” So, in the same way, this solar system might have been visited ten million years ago by someone in a flying saucer from Alpha Centaurus, and he would’ve looked ’round and said, “Just a bunch of rocks,” and gone away.
Now he comes back in his flying saucer again, and looks at us and says, “Excuse me! I see you were, after all, intelligent rocks. Because you are human-ing just as the apple tree apple-s,” you see?
A world which does us is an intelligent world, is a human world. At the very least it may be something more. Goodness only knows what it might do next!
But at least, you see, it does us. Now this, then, is my moral: the ability to cut the world up into pieces as a result of our facility with symbols and words is marvelous. It enables us to analyze things, to predict the future, to see all the details and to bring out the value of the details.
That is a wonderful thing. But you can have too much of a good thing. You need to underpin, to background this vision of the details with something to support it, otherwise you go insane.
Otherwise you get lost in a detail. You get lost in a point. You get so absorbed that, as we say, you can’t see the forest for the trees: we can’t see the world for the selves.
And this isn’t just a matter of theoretical understanding, not just grasping a new theory. We need to find ways in which our actual everyday consciousness—our sensation, our physical feeling of being alive—is so transformed that each one of us feels himself not only to be alive inside his skin, but also to be definitely, substantially identical with everything going on around him. So that when you move and talk to me, I feel that that’s just as much me as it is you.
Because these are the facts. This is the way it is. The outside goes with the inside, and you don’t find them apart from each other anymore than you find the front of the coin without the back.
Look: supposing I’m interested in another human being, but this is a human being who thinks only about themselves—has no interest other than what is defined as themselves, socially. In other words, the interior of the bag of skin. Well, this is the most boring kind of person you could imagine.
Has no personality whatsoever, even though they’re entirely concentrated on themselves. When I feel that a person has genuine personality—is unique, and different, and alive—that is a function of their interest in things outside themselves—in other people, in their ancestry, and so on. You know?
It’s wonderful to look at a person and say, “I think your background is… hmm… a little bit French, slightly Irish, touch of Yugoslavian.” Wow! See? Then I’m beginning—the person might say, “Well, you’re not talking about me, you’re just talking about my parents.” But you are your parents, you see?
That makes you interesting. And then your interest in music, in fish, in birds, in trees, in clothes—anything you want to mention—makes you more interesting. In other words, the more related you are to your external world, the more unique and interesting you become.
My fingers—all of them move separately and independently, but only because they are part of the hand, and only because the hand is part of the arm, and so on. So underneath our marvelous ability to analyze the world through concentrated attention and through symbols—words which suggest that a tree is a tree. The word “tree” is different from the word “ground,” and therefore it seems that the tree is different from the ground.
But it isn’t. The tree is the ground reaching up to grab at the sky and, you know… enjoy. It’s the ground, swinging.
So, in the same way, each one of us is the whole cosmos waving and saying, “Yoo-hoo! I’m here!” So that knowledge is necessary. That knowledge of being one with the totality is necessary to underpin and support the knowledge of being different, and unique, and individual.
Without it, the individual goes mad. Crazy mad, not angry mad. Crazy mad, because he feels unsupported, and therefore he seeks security in the collective—that is to say, in religious or political merging of individuals into the crowd, into the mob, into the mass—to escape the terror of being alone.
It has become extremely plausible that this trip between the maternity ward and the crematorium is what there is to life. And we still have going into our common sense the 19th-century myth which succeeded the Ceramic Myth in Western history—I call it the myth of the fully automatic model. Man is a little germ that lives on an unimportant rock-ball that revolves about an insignificant star on the outer edges of one of the smaller galaxies.
But, on the other hand—if you think about that for a few minutes—I am absolutely amazed to discover myself on this rock-ball rotating around a spherical fire; it’s a very odd situation. And the more I look at things, I cannot get rid of the feeling that existence is quite weird! I know that—see, a philosopher is a sort of intellectual yokel who gawks at things that sensible people take for granted.
And sensible people: “Existence is nothing at all; I mean, it’s just—basic. Go on and do something.” See, this is the current movement in philosophy. Logical analysis says you mustn’t think about existence; it’s a meaningless concept.
Therefore, philosophy has become the discussion of trivia. No good philosopher lies awake nights worrying about the destiny of man, and the nature of God, and all that sort of thing, because a philosopher today is a practical fellow who comes to the university with a briefcase at nine and leaves at five. He does philosophy during the day—which is discussing whether certain sentences have meaning, and if so, what—and then he would, as William Earle said in a very funny essay, come to work in a white coat if he thought he could get away with it.
The problem is he’s lost his sense of wonder. Wonder is like—in modern philosophy—something you mustn’t have; it’s like enthusiasm in 18th-century England, it’s very bad form. But, you see, I don’t know what question to ask when I wonder about the universe.
It isn’t a question that I’m wondering about, it’s a feeling that I have. Because I cannot formulate the question that is my wonder. The moment my mouth opens to utter it I suddenly find I’m talking nonsense.
But that should not prevent wonder from being the foundation of philosophy. So there is obviously a place in life for a religious attitude in the sense of awe—astonishment—at existence. And that is also a basis of respect for existence.
We don’t have very much of it in this culture, even though we call it “materialistic.” In the culture that we call “materialistic” today we are, of course, bent on the total destruction of material and its conversion into junk and poisonous gas as quickly as possible. This is not a materialistic culture because it has no respect for material. And respect is, in turn, based on wonder.
On feeling the marvel of just an ordinary pebble in your fingers. Look: Here is a tree in the garden, and every summer it produces apples, and we call it an “apple tree.” Because the tree apple-s; that’s what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that—at least on the planet Earth—the thing people-s, in just the same way as an apple tree apple-s. Now maybe two million years ago somebody came from another galaxy in a flying saucer and had a look at this solar system, and they looked it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, “Just a bunch of rocks.” And they went away.
Later on—maybe two million years later—they came around, and they looked at it again, and they said, “Excuse me! We thought it was a bunch of rocks but it’s peopleing,” and “It’s alive after all; it has done something intelligent.” Because, you see, we grow out of this world in exactly the same way as the apples grow on the apple tree. If evolution means anything, it means that.
But, you see, we curiously twist it. We say, well, first of all—in the beginning—there was nothing but gas and rock. And then intelligence happened to arise in it—you know, like a sort of fungus or slime on top of the whole thing.
But we’re thinking in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks. Where there are rocks, watch out! Watch out!
Because the rocks are going, eventually, to come alive. Theology has not, as a matter of fact, had a very distinguished record in promoting the study of other than the Christian religion. If you know, in the first place, that you have the true religion, there really is no point in studying any other one, and you can very quickly find reasons for showing them to be inferior because that was a foregone conclusion; they had to be.
Because if, for example, you get into discussions as to whether Buddha was a more profound and spiritual character than Jesus Christ, you arrive at your decision on the basis of a scale of values which is, of course, Christian. And in this sense the judge and the advocate are the same. Now, as you know, I’m not being very fair and very kind to modern theology.
But there is this strange persistence of insisting that our group is the best group. And I feel that there is, in this, something peculiarly irreligious, and furthermore it exhibits a very strange lack of faith. Because I believe that there is a strong distinction between faith on the one hand, and belief on the other.
That belief is, as a matter of fact, quite contrary to faith. Because belief is really wishing—it’s from the Anglo-Saxon root leif, “to wish”—and belief stated, say, in the Creed is a fervent hope that the universe will turn out to be thus and so. And in this sense, therefore, belief precludes the possibility of faith because faith is openness to truth, to reality; whatever it may turn out to be, I want to know the truth.
That is the attitude of faith. And therefore, to use ideas about the universe and about God as something to hang on to in the spirit of “Rock of ages, cleft for me,” and there’s something very rigid about a rock. And we are finding our rock getting rather worn out in an age where it becomes more and more obvious that our world is a floating world.
It’s a world floating in space where all positions are relative and any point may be regarded as the center. A world which doesn’t float on anything, and therefore the religious attitude appropriate to our time is not one of clinging to rocks but of learning to swim. And you know that if you get in the water—and you’ve nothing to hold on to, and you try to behave as you would on dry land—you will drown.
But if, on the other hand, you trust yourself to the water and let go, you will float. And this is exactly the situation of faith. I had a friend who was studying Zen in Japan, and he got pretty desperate to produce the answer of who he really is.
And on his way to an interview with the master to give an answer to the problem, he noticed a very common sight in Japan: a big bullfrog sitting around in the garden. And he swooped this bullfrog up in his hand and dropped it in the sleeve of his kimono. And then he went in to the master, and to give the answer of who he was he suddenly produced the bullfrog.
And the master said, “Uh-uh, too intellectual.” In other words: this answer is too contrived, it’s too much like Zen. You’ve been reading too many books, it’s not the genuine thing. And so the method of teaching used by these great Eastern teachers is to make fools persist in their folly—but very rigorously and very consistently, and very hard.
Now, if you go to a Zen teacher he’ll say, “Why, I have nothing to teach! There is no problem, everything’s perfectly clear.” And you think that one over. And you say, “He’s probably being cagey.” But the teacher says, “Quite honestly, I haven’t anything to tell you.
I don’t teach anything, I have no doctrine.” As I said to you in the beginning of this talk, I have nothing whatsoever to sell you. So the student thinks, “My, this is very deep!” Because this nothing that he’s talking about, this nothing that he teaches, is what they call in Buddhism śūnyatā, and it’s supposed to be the ultimate reality. But, as you know, if you know anything about these doctrines, this doesn’t mean real nothingness—not, kind of, just nothing there at all; not just blank—but it means no-thing-ness.
It’s the transcendental reality behind all separate and individual things, and that’s something very deep and profound. So he knows that when the teacher said, “I have nothing to teach,” he meant this very esoteric no-thing. Well, he might also say, “Then, if you have nothing to teach, what are all these students doing around here?” And the teacher says, “They are not doing anything, they’re just a lot of stupid people who live here.” And he knows again, you see, this stupid doesn’t mean just straight stupid, but the higher stupidity of people who are being humble and don’t have intellectual pride.
The Christian proverb is that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity—and so people, in other words, have to get desperate. Imagine the idea that the moment you were born you were kicked off the edge of a precipice, and you’re falling. As you fell, a great lump of rock came with you—and it’s traveling alongside you—and you’re clinging to it for dear life, and thinking, “Gee, I’ve got to hold on to this!” You see?
But it doesn’t do a thing for you. And it’s only making you anxious. And it’s only when you understand that it doesn’t do a thing for you, that you let go and relax.
So everybody’s in this situation. We’re all completely insecure, we’re all headed straight for death as if we had been condemned by a judge. And yet, here we are, all clinging on to things.
And we have all sorts of alibis for doing this; we say, “Well, I have responsibilities for my dependents and I’ve got to cling on,” but all you’re doing is you’re teaching your dependents to cling in the same way as you are. Making them miserable by learning to go on surviving compulsively. So the thing is [the] same way if you’re caught in a torrent, and you try to get out of it by swimming against it, you’ll just wear yourself out and you’re still carried along with it.
So the sensible thing to do is to turn around and swim with it. And if you want to get out of it, swim towards the edge. But go with it.
Same way when you’re sailing: always keep the wind in your sails. If you want to go against the wind, tack! But use the wind.
So it’s this way, you know: we’re all in this great stream of change which we call life. We are the stream. If you imagine you’re separate from it and you’re being carried along by it as if you were a cork, that’s a delusion.
You’re a wave of the stream itself. So get with it! So you perform a discipline by experiment.
By reductio ad absurdum of these premises. And so, in the same way, the guru—whether Hindu or Buddhist—performs a reductio ad absurdum on the premise of the skin-encapsulated ego. Well, what happens then?
You might imagine—from garbled accounts of Eastern mysticism—that one thereupon disappears forever into an infinite sea of faintly mauve Jello, and become so lost to the world and entranced that you forget your name, address, telephone number, and function in life. Nothing of the kind happens. The state of mystical illumination—although it may, in its sudden onset, be accompanied by a sensation of tremendous luminescence and transparency—as you get used to it, it’s just like everyday life.
Here are the things that you formerly thought were separate individuals, and here’s you, who you formerly thought was merely confronting these other people. When the great Dr. D. T. Suzuki was asked, “What is it like to be enlightened?” he said, “It’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.” Because what is altered is not the way your senses perceive, what is altered is what you think about it. Your definitions of what you see.
Your evaluation of it. So when you don’t cling to it, when you have no longer a hostile attitude to the world—because you know the world is you. It is.
I mean, let’s take it from the point of view of biology. If I describe the behavior of a living organism, I cannot possibly describe that behavior without simultaneously describing the behavior of the environment. So that I discover that I don’t describe organisms in environments, I describe a unified field of behavior called an organism-environment.
It’s an awkward word, but there it is. The environment doesn’t push the organism around, the organism doesn’t push the environment around. They are two aspects, or poles, of the same process.
You see, in the history of philosophy and poetry and art we always find the interchange of two personality types which I call prickles and goo. The prickly people are advocates of intellectual porcupinism. They want rigor, they want precise statistics, and they have a certain clipped attitude in their voices—and you know that very well in academic circles, where there are people who are always edgy like that.
And they accuse other people of being disgustingly vague, and miasmic, and mystical. But the vague, miasmic, and mystical people accused the prickly people of being mere skeletons with no flesh on their bones. They say to you, “You just rattle!