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You’re not really a human being. You know the words but you don’t know the music.” And so, therefore, if you belong to the prickly type, you hope that the ultimate constituent of matter is particles. If you belong to the gooey type you hope it’s waves.
If you’re prickly you’re a classicist, and if you’re gooey you’re a romanticist. And—going back into medieval philosophy—if you’re prickly you’re a nominalist, if you’re gooey you’re a realist. And so it goes.
But we know very well that this natural universe is neither prickles nor goo exclusively. It’s gooey prickles and prickly goo and, you see, it all depends on your level of magnification. If you’ve got your magnification on something so that the focus is clear, you’ve got a prickly point of view.
You’ve got structure: shape, clearly outlined, sharply defined. We go a little out of focus and it’s gone “blleeeaaaahh,” and you’ve got goo. But we’re always playing with the two.
It’s like the question, “Is the world basically stuff—like matter—or is it basically structure?” Well, we find out, of course—today, in science—we don’t consider the idea of matter, of there being some sort of “stuff”. Because supposing you wanted to describe stuff: in what terms would you describe it? You always have to describe it in terms of structure, something countable, something that can be designated as a pattern.
So we never get to any basic stuff. There is a sense in which the universe is purely game—but not in the sense of a one-upmanship game, but in the sense of music—which is lowing with sound, is dancing delightfully with sound, you see? “Oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee-oee,” and nobody was ever able to give a better account of what it’s all about.
I mean, let’s take the traditional Christian account of what the angels do in heaven: why they sit around the throne of God and sing Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, and again, you know? See, it’s not just Alleluia in a sort of formal way, but they’re going “ja-hoo-dee-da-dee, hoo-dee-da-dee, hoo-dee-da-dee hoo-dee-da, ha-cha-cha-cha-cha, choo-dee-da-dee, doo-dee-da-dee, doo-dee-da-dee,” you know? They’re really swinging!
And by the time you know where they are the swinging has reached such fantastic proportions, and they’ve thought out the most amazing little “goo-jee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doos” that you’ve got the whole physical universe happening. You know? That’s the way it starts.
So this game is great. In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so the best conductors would be those who played fastest.
And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end! Say, when dancing, you don’t aim at a particular spot in the room; that’s where you should arrive.
The whole point of the dancing is the dance. But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct. We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression.
It’s all graded. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system with a kind of, “C’mon kitty, kitty, kitty!” And now you go to kindergarten, you know? And that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade.
And then—c’mon!—first grade leads to second grade, and so on, and then you get out of grade school and you go to high school, and it’s revving up—the thing is coming!—then you’re going to go to college, and by Jove then you get into graduate school, and when you’re through with graduate school you go out to join the World. And then you get into some racket where you’re selling insurance, and they’ve got that quota to make. And you’re going to make that.
And all the time this thing is coming. It’s coming! It’s coming!
That great thing, the success you’re working for. Then, when you wake up one day—about 40 years old—you say, “My God, I’ve arrived! I’m there!” And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt.
And there’s a slight let-down because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax. A dreadful hoax.
They made you miss everything by expectation. Look at the people who live to retire and put those savings away. And then, when they’re 65, they don’t have any energy left, they’re more or less impotent, and they go and rot in an old people’s—“Senior Citizens”—community.
Because we’ve simply cheated ourselves the whole way down the line. We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end and the thing was to get to that end. Success—or whatever it is, or maybe heaven—after you’re dead.
But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played. Why is it that all those old English songs are full of “Fal-de-riddle-eye-do,” and “hey nonny, nonny,” and all those babbling choruses?
Why is it that when we get hip with jazz we just go “boo-dee boo-dee boop dee boo,” and so on, and enjoy ourselves swinging it? It is this participation in the essential, glorious nonsense that is at the heart of the world—that isn’t going anywhere, that is a dance. But it seems that only in moments of unusual insight and illumination that we get the point of this, and find that thus the true meaning of life is no meaning, that its purpose is no purpose, and the its sense is non-sense.
Now I’m sure most of you know the old story about the astronaut who went far out in space and was asked, on his return, whether he’d been to Heaven and seen God. And he said, “Yes.” And so they said to him, “Well, what about God?” And he said, “She is black.” And although this is a very well known and well worn story, it is very profound. Because—I tell you—I knew a monk who started out in life as pretty much of an agnostic or an atheist.
And then he began to read Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who proclaimed the vital force—the élan vital, and so on—and the more he read into this kind of philosophy, the more he saw that these people were really talking about God. And I’ve read a great deal of theological reasoning about the existence of God, and they all start out on this line: If you are intelligent and reasonable, you cannot be the product of a mechanical and meaningless universe. Figs do not grow on thistles, grapes do not grow on thorns.
And therefore, you—as an expression of the universe, as an aperture through which the universe is observing itself—cannot be a mere fluke. Because if this world peoples, as a tree brings forth fruit, then the universe itself—the energy which underlies it, what it’s all about; the “Ground of Being,” as Paul Tillich called it—must be intelligent. Now, when you come to that conclusion, you must be very careful because you may make an unwarranted jump.
Namely, the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence—that marvelous designing power which produces all this—is the biblical God. Be careful. Because that God, contrary to his own commandments, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal, authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East.
And it’s very easy to fall into that trap because it’s all prepared, institutionalized—in the Roman Catholic Church, in the synagogue, in the Protestant churches—all there, ready for you to accept. And by the pressure of social consensus, and so on, and so on, it is very natural to assume that, when somebody uses the word “God,” it is that father figure which is intended. Because even Jesus used the analogy “the Father” for his experience of God.
He had to, there was no other one available to him in his culture. But nowadays we are in rebellion against the image of the authoritarian father. Especially this should happen in the United States, where it happens that we are a republic, and not a monarchy.
And if you, as a loyal citizen of this country, think that a republic is the best form of government, you can hardly believe that the universe is a monarchy. But to reject the paternalistic image of God as an idol is not necessarily to be an atheist, although I have advocated something called atheism in the name of God. That is to say, an experience, a contact, a relationship with God—that is to say, with the Ground of Your Being—that does not have to be embodied or expressed in any specific image.
Now, theologians on the whole don’t like that idea because—I find in my discourse with them—that they want to be a little bit hard-nosed about the nature of God. They want to say that God has, indeed, a very specific nature. Ethical monotheism means that the governing power of this universe has some extremely definite opinions and rules to which our minds and acts must be conformed.
And if you don’t watch out you’ll go against the fundamental grain of the universe and be punished—in some way. Old-fashionedly, you will burn in the fires of hell forever. More modern-fashionedly, you will fail to be an authentic person.
It’s another way of talking about it. But there is this feeling, you see, that there is authority behind the world, and it’s not you! It’s something else.
Like we say, “That’s something else! That’s far out!” And therefore, this Jewish, Christian, and indeed Muslim approach makes a lot of people feel rather strange—estranged—from the Root and Ground of Being. There are a lot of people who never grow up and are always in awe of an image of grandfather.
Now, I’m a grandfather—I’ve five grandchildren—and so I am no longer in awe of grandfathers. I know I’m just as stupid as my own grandfathers were, and therefore am not about to bow down to an image of God with a long white beard. Now naturally, of course, we intelligent people don’t believe in that kind of a God—not really.
I mean, we think that God is spirit, that God is very undefinable, and infinite, and all that kind of thing. But nevertheless, the images of God have a far more powerful effect upon our emotions than our ideas. And when people read the Bible and sing hymns—Ancient of Days, who sittethst, throned in glory; immortal, invisible, God only wise; enlightened, accessible, hidden from our eyes—they’ve still got that fellow up there with a beard on.
It’s way in the back of the emotions. And so we should think, first of all, in contrary imagery, and the contrary imagery is: she’s black. Imagine, instead of “God the Father,” “God the Mother.” And imagine that this is not a luminous being—blazing with light—but an unfathomable darkness, such as is portrayed in Hindu mythology by Kālī—the great mother—who is represented in the most terrible imagery.
Kālī has a tongue hanging out long, drooling with blood. She has fang teeth. She has a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other.
And she is trampling on the body of her husband, who is Shiva. Shiva represents also, furthermore, the destructive aspect of the deity, wherein all things are dissolved so that they be reborn again. And here is this blood-sucking, terrible mother as the image of the supreme reality behind this universe.
Imagine: it’s the representative of the octopus, the spider, the awful-awfuls, the creepy-crawleys at the end of the line which we’re all terrified of. Now that’s a very important image because—let us suppose, just for the sake of argument, that all of you sitting here right now are feeling—umm—fairly alright. I mean, you’re not in [the] hospital, you don’t have the screaming meemies, you have a sense—you’ve probably had dinner, and are feeling pretty good.
But you know that you feel that you’re fairly good because in the background of your minds—very far off in the background of your minds—you’ve got the sensation of something absolutely ghastly that simply mustn’t happen. And so, against that which is not happening—and which doesn’t necessarily have to happen—but by comparison with that, you feel pretty alright. And that absolutely ghastly thing that mustn’t happen at all, is Kālī.
And therefore, at once, we begin to wonder whether the presence of this Kālī is not, in a way, very beneficent. I mean, how would you know that things were good unless there was something that wasn’t good at all? Now this is—I’m not putting this forward as a final position.
I’m only putting it forward as a variation, as a way of beginning to look at a problem, and getting our minds out of their normal ruts. She’s black. Well “she”—first of all: feminine—represents what is called, philosophically, the negative principle.
Now, of course, people who are women in our culture today and believe in women’s lib don’t like to be associated with the negative, because the negative has acquired very bad connotations. We say “accentuate the positive:” that’s a purely male, chauvinistic attitude. How would you know that you were outstanding unless, by contrast, there were something in-standing?
You cannot appreciate the convex without the concave, you cannot appreciate the firm without the yielding. And therefore the so-called negativity of the feminine principle is obviously life-giving, and very important. But we live in a culture which doesn’t notice it.
You see a painting—a drawing—of a bird, and you don’t notice the white paper underneath it. You see a printed book, and you think that what is important is the printing, and the page doesn’t matter. And yet, if you reconsider the whole thing, how could there be visible printing without the page underlying it?
What is called substance, that which stands underneath—“sub:” underneath; “stance:” stands—to be substantial is to be underlying, to be the support, to be the foundation of the world. And of course, this is the great function of the feminine: to be the substance. And therefore, the feminine is represented by space—which is, of course, black at night.
But were it not for black and empty space, there would be no possibility whatsoever of seeing the stars. Stars shine out of space, and astronomers—very high-powered astronomers—are beginning to realize that stars are a function of space. Now that’s difficult for our common sense, because we think that space is simply inert nothingness.
But we don’t realize that space is completely basic to everything. It’s like your consciousness. Nobody can imagine what consciousness is.
It’s the most elusive whatever-it-is that there is at all, because it’s the background of everything else that we know. Therefore, we don’t really pay much attention to it. We pay attention to the things within the field of consciousness: to the outlines, to the objects, to the so-called things that are in the field of vision, the sounds that are in the field of hearing, and so forth.
But whatever it is that embraces all that, we don’t pay much attention to it. We can’t even think about it. It’s like trying to look at your head.
You know? You try to look at your head and what do you find? You don’t even find a black blob in the middle of things.
You just don’t find anything. And yet, that is that out of which you see, just as space is that out of which the stars shine. So there’s something very queer about all this—that that which you can’t put your finger on, that which always escapes you, that which is completely elusive, the blank, seems to be absolutely necessary for there to be anything whatsoever.
Now let’s take this further. Kālī also is a principle of death, because she carries a scimitar in one hand and a severed head in the other. Death: this is tremendously important to think about.
We put it off. Death is swept under the carpet in our culture. In the hospital they try to keep you alive as long as possible in utter desperation.
They won’t tell you that you’re going to die. When the relatives have to be informed that it’s a hopeless case they say, “Don’t tell this to the patient.” And all the relatives come around with hollow grins and say, “Well, you’ll be alright in a bout a month, and then we’ll go and have a holiday somewhere, and sit by the sea, and listen to the birds and whatnot.” And the dying person knows that this is mockery. Well, of course.
We’ve made death howl with all kinds of ghouls. We’ve invented dreadful afterlives. I mean, the Christian version of heaven is as abominable as the Christian version of hell.
I mean, nobody wants to be in church forever. Children are absolutely horrified when they hear these hymns, which say, “Prostrate before thy throne to lie, and gaze and gaze on thee”—they can’t imagine what this imagery means. I mean, in a very subtle theological way I could wangle that statement around to make it extremely profound.
I mean, to be prostrate at once, and to gaze on the other hand, see, is a coincidentia oppositorum: a coincidence of opposites, which is very deep. But to a child it is a crick in the neck. And that’s the sort of imagery we’re brought up with.
So, the idea of what might happen after death: where you’re going to be faced with your judge, the one who knows all about you. This is Big Papa, who knows you were a naughty boy and a very naughty girl—especially girl—from the beginning of things. He’s going to look right through to the core of your inauthentic existence.
And what kind of heebie-jeebies may come up? Or you may believe in reincarnation and you think that your next life will be the rewards and the punishments for what you’ve done in this life—and you know you got away with murder in this life—and the most awful things are going to happen the next time around. See, you look upon death as a catastrophe!
Then there are other people who say, “Well, when you’re dead you’re dead.” Just, y’know—nothing going to happen at all. So what do you have to worry about? Well, we don’t quite like that idea, because it spooks us.
You know? What’s it like to die, to go to sleep and never, never, never wake up? Well, [there are] a lot of things it’s not going to be like.
It’s not going to be like being buried alive. It’s not going to be like being in the darkness forever. I’ll tell you what: it’s going to be like as if you never had existed at all.
Not only you, but everything else as well. There just never was anything and there’s no one to regret it. And there’s no problem.
Well, think about that for a while. It’s kind of a weird feeling you get, when you really think about that; you really imagine it. Just to stop altogether.
And you can’t even call it “stop,” because you can’t have “stop” without “start,” and there wasn’t any start. There’s just… no thing. Well then, when you come to think of it, that’s the way it was before you were born.
I mean, if you go back in memories as far as you can go, you get to the same place. As you go forward in your anticipation of the future is to what it’s going to be like to be dead. And then you get these funny ideas that this blankness is the necessary counterpart of what we call “being.” Now, we all think we’re alive, don’t we?
I mean, we’re really here? That there is something called “existence?” You know, the existentialist: Dasein, thrownness, UNGH! You know?
Here we are! But how could you be experiencing that as a reality unless you had once been dead? What gives us any ghost of a notion that we’re here, except by contrast with the fact that we once weren’t, And later on won’t be?
But this thing is a cycle, like positive and negative poles in electricity. So this, then, is the value of the symbolism of “She is black.” She—the womb principle, the receptive, the in-standing, the void and the dark. And so that is to come into the presence of the God who has no image.
Behind the father-image, behind the mother-image, behind the image of light inaccessible, and behind the image of profound and abysmal darkness there’s something else which we can’t conceive at all. Dyonysius the Areopagite called it the “luminous darkness.” Nagarjuna called it śūnyatā: “the void.” Shankara called it Brahman: “that of which nothing at all can be said.” Neti neti; beyond all conception whatsoever. And, you see, that is not atheism in the formal sense of the word.
This is a profoundly religious attitude. Because what it corresponds to, practically, is an attitude to life of total trust, of letting go. When we form images of God they’re all really exhibitions of our lack of faith.
Something to hold on to. Something to grasp. How firm a foundation, what lies underneath us, the Rock of Ages, or whatever—Ein’ feste Burg.
But when we don’t grasp, we have the attitude of faith. If you let go of all the idols you will, of course, discover that what this unknown is—which is the foundation of the universe—is precisely you. It’s not the you you think you are.
No, it’s not your opinion of yourself, it’s not your idea or your image of yourself, it’s not the chronic sense of muscular strain which we usually call “I.” You can’t grasp it. Of course not. Why would you need to?
Supposing you could, what would you do with it? And who would do what with it? You can never get at it.
So there is that profound, central mystery. And the attitude of faith is to stop chasing it. Stop grabbing it.
Because if that happens, the most amazing things follow. But all these ideas of the “spiritual,” the “godly,” as this attitude of UNGH! Must!
And we have been laid down the laws which we are bound to follow—all this jazz is not the only way of being religious and of relating to the ineffable mystery that underlies ourselves and the world. It’s really a very unorthodox and un-academic thing to do to start a discussion with a group of psychologists on the subject of metaphysics, but we have to do that because a lot of people say that their approach to life is scientific—as distinct from metaphysical—and that metaphysics is bosh anyway. But everybody—by virtue of being a human being—is, willy-nilly, a metaphysician.
That is to say, everybody starts from certain fundamental assumptions as to what is the “Good Life,” what he wants, what are his—shall we say—axioms for living? And I find that psychologists tend to be blind to these fundamental assumptions. Maybe it’s truer of psychiatrists than it is of psychologists, but they tend to feel that they are scientists.
And they’re rather bending over backwards to have a scientific status, because that, of course, is fashionable in our age. But you know, it’s so amusing that when, say—let’s take psychoanalysis for example. It’s pointed out to many philosophers that their philosophical ideas are capable of being shown to have a psychoanalytic reference.
For example, John Wisdom wrote a book about the philosophy of Berkeley in which he attributed a great deal of his point of view to his experiences in toilet-training as a child. The philosopher is very grateful to the psychoanalyst for revealing to him his unconscious and its emotional contents. But the psychoanalyst must, in turn, await a revelation from the philosopher as to his philosophical unconscious, and the unexamined assumptions which lie in it.
So if I may start by insulting your intelligence with what is called the most elementary lesson: the thing that we should have learned before we learned one, two, three and A, B, C, but somehow was overlooked. Now, this lesson is quite simply this: that any experience that we have through our senses—whether of sound, or of light, or of touch—is a vibration. And a vibration has two aspects: one called “on,” and the other called “off.” Vibrations seem to be propagated in waves, and every wave system has crests and it has troughs.
And so life is a system of now you see it, now you don’t. And these two aspects always go together. For example, sound is not pure sound, it is a rapid alternation of sound and silence.
And that’s simply the way things are. Only you must remember that the crest and the trough of a wave are inseparable. Nobody ever saw crests without troughs or troughs without crests, just as you don’t encounter in life people with fronts but no backs.
Just as you don’t encounter a coin that has a heads but no tails. And although the heads and the tails, the fronts and the backs, the positives and the negatives are different, they’re at the same time one. And one has to get used, fundamentally, to the notion that different things can be inseparable; that what is explicitly two can at the same time be implicitly one.
If you forget that, very funny things happen. If, therefore, we forget, you see, that black and white are inseparable and that existence is constituted equivalently by being and non-being, then we get scared. And we have to play a game called, “Uh-oh, black might win!” And once we get into the fear that black—the negative side—might win, we are compelled to play the game, “But white must win!” And from that start all our troubles.
Because, you see, the human awareness is a very odd mechanism. (I don’t think mechanism is quite the right word, but it’ll do for the moment.) That is to say, we have—as a species—specialized in a certain kind of awareness which we call conscious attention.
And, by this, we have the faculty of examining the details of life very closely. We can restrict our gaze, and it corresponds somewhat to the central field, the vision, in the eyes. We have central vision, we have peripheral vision.
Central vision is that which we use for reading, for all sorts of close work, and it’s like using a spotlight. Whereas peripheral vision is more like using a floodlight. Now, civilization and civilized human beings—for maybe 5,000 years, maybe much longer—have learned to specialize in concentrated attention.
Even if a person’s attention span is short he is, as it were, wavering his spotlight over many fields. The price which we pay for specialization in conscious attention is ignorance of everything outside its field. I would rather say ignore-ance than ignorance, because if you concentrate on a figure you tend to ignore the background.
You tend, therefore, to see the world in a disintegrated aspect. You take separate things and events seriously, imagining that these really do exist when, actually, they have the same kind of existence as an individual’s interpretation of a Rorschach blot: they’re what you make out of it. In fact, our physical world is a system of inseparable differences.
Everything exists with everything else, but we contrive not to notice that because what we notice is what is noteworthy. And we notice it in terms of notations: numbers, words, images. What is notable, noteworthy, notated, noticed is what appears to us to be significant and the rest is ignored as insignificant, and as a result of that we select from the total input that goes to our senses only a very small fraction.
And this causes us to believe that we are separate beings, isolated by the boundary of the epidermis from the rest of the world. You see, this is also the mechanism involved in not noticing that black and white go together. Not noticing that every inside has an outside, and that what goes on inside your skin is inseparable from what goes on outside your skin.
You see that, for example, in the science of ecology. One learns that a human being is not an organism in an environment, but is an organism-environment—that is to say, a unified field of behavior. If you describe, carefully, the behavior of any organism, you cannot do so without at the same time describing the behavior of the environment.
And by that you know that you’ve got a new entity of study. You’re describing the behavior of a unified field. You must be very careful indeed not to fall into old Newtonian assumptions about the billiard-ball nature of the universe.
The organism is not the puppet of the environment, being pushed around by it. Nor, on the other hand, is the environment the puppet of the organism, being pushed around by the organism. The relationship between them is, to use John Dewey’s word, transactional.
The transaction being a situation, like buying and selling, in which there is no buying unless somebody sells and no selling unless somebody buys. So that fundamental relationship between ourselves and the world, which is in an old-fashioned way—by people such as Skinner, who has not updated his philosophy—interpreted in terms of Newtonian mechanics. He interprets the organism as something determined by the total environment, he doesn’t see that, in a more modern way of talking about it, they’re simply describing a unified field of behavior—which is nothing more than what any mystic ever said.
That’s a dirty word in the modern academic scientific environment. But if a mystic is one who is sensibly—or even sensuously—aware of his inseparability, as an individual, from the total existing universe, he’s simply a person who has become sensible—aware through his senses—of the way ecologists see the world. So when I’m in academic circles I don’t talk about mystical experience, I talk about ecological awareness.
Same thing. And so the next aspect of our metaphysical introduction must be about games. You know, I think there are really four questions that all philosophers have discussed from the beginning of recorded time.
First is: “Who started it?” The second is: “Are we going to make it?” The third is: “Where are we going to put it?” And the fourth is: “Who is going to clean up?” When you think these over it poses a fifth question: “Is it serious?” And that’s the one I want to discuss; Is existence serious? Like you say, “Doctor”—after he’s looked at your x-ray—“is it serious?” What does that mean? It means: “Am I in danger of not continuing to survive?” But the basis of it all is this, now: if we say, “You must survive,” or “I must survive,” life is earnest and I’ve got to go on.
Then your life is a drag and not a game. Now, it’s my contention and my personal opinion—this is my basic metaphysical axiom, shall we put it that way—that existence, the physical universe, is basically playful. There is no necessity for it whatsoever.