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But I think a tomato is a lot more spiritual than 1 + 2 = 3. This is where we really get to the point. That’s why, in Zen Buddhism, when people ask, “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” you could very well answer “A tomato.” Because, look how—when you examine the material world—how diaphanous it is.
It really isn’t very solid. A tomato doesn’t last very long. Nor, for that matter, do the things that we consider most exemplary of physical reality, such as mountains.
The poet says, “The hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form, and nothing stands.” Because the physical world is diaphanous. It’s like music. When you play music it simply disappears, there’s nothing left.
And for that very reason it is one of the highest and most spiritual of the arts: because it is the most transient. And so, in a way, you might say that transiency is a mark of spirituality. A lot of people think the opposite: that the spiritual things are the everlasting things.
But, you see, the more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless. Nothing is so dead as a diamond, and yet, this imagery—the idea of the most mineral objects being the most permanent, and so they get associated with the spiritual. Jesus Christ is called the Rock of Ages.
And even the Buddhists have used the diamond—the vajra—as an image of the fundamental reality of the universe. But the reason why they used the diamond was not that it was hard, but that it was completely transparent and, therefore, afforded a symbol of the void which everything fundamentally is. Not meaning that there simply is nothing there, but the void means that you cannot get any idea which will sufficiently define physical reality.
Every idea will be wrong. In that sense, it will be void. So then, the physical world: we can’t even find any stuff out of which it’s made.
We can only recognize each other, and I say “Well, I realize that I met you before, and that I see you again. But the thing that I recognize is not anything, really, except a consistent pattern.” Let’s suppose I have a rope, and this rope begins by being manila rope, then it goes on by being cotton rope, then it goes on with being nylon, then it goes on with being silk. So I tie a knot in the rope, and I move the knot down along the rope.
Now, is it—as it moves along—the same knot or a different knot? We would say it is the same because you recognize the pattern of the knot. But at one point it’s manila, at another point it’s cotton, another point it’s nylon, and another it’s silk.
And that’s just like us. We are recognized by the fact that, one day, you face the same way as you did the day before, and people recognize your facing. So they say that’s John Doe or Mary Smith.
But, actually, the contents of your face—whatever they may be; the water, the carbons, the chemicals—are changing all the time. You’re like a whirlpool in a stream. The stream is doing this consistent whirlpooling and we always recognize—like at Niagara: the whirlpool is one of the sights, but the water is always moving on.
And we are just like that, and everything is like that. So there’s nothing in the physical world that is what you might call substantial. It’s pattern.
And this is why it’s so spiritual. To be non-spiritual is not to see that; in other words, it is to impose upon the physical world the idea of thing-ness, of substantiality. That is to be—in the sense that the Hindus use it—that is “to be involved in matter;” to identify with the body.
To believe—in other words—that the body is something constant, something tangible. The body is really very intangible. You cannot pin it down; it’s all falling apart, furthermore.
And we’re aging, getting older, and so, therefore, if you cling to the body you will be frustrated. So the whole point is that the material world—the world of nature—is marvelous so long as you don’t try to lean on it, so long as you don’t cling to it. And if you don’t cling to it you can have a wonderful time with it.
Let’s take a very controversial issue: all spiritual people are generally against lovemaking. Ramkṛiṣṇa used to speak about the evils of woman and gold—I’ve already demonstrated the evils of gold. But what about the evils of woman?
In my point of view, yes, women can be a source of evil if you attempt to possess them. I mean, if you can say to another person, “I love you so much I want to own you, and really tie you down, and call you”—well, it’s like that poem of Ogden Nash, where someone claimed that he loved his wife so much he climbed a mountain and named it after her. Called it Mount Mrs. Oswald Tregennis!
And so, in other words, if you try to possess people and you make your sexual passion possessive in that way, then, of course, you are trying to cling to the physical world. But, you see, women are—in a way—much more interesting if you don’t cling to them, if you let them be themselves and be free. And, in my opinion, you can have a very spiritual sex life if you are not possessive.
But if, on the other hand, you are possessive, then you’re in trouble. But, you know, the average svāmī won’t agree with that because he confuses—by thinking that the body (the body that I touch) is something evil—he’s hung up with it. It’s like the story of the two Zen monks who were crossing the river, and the ford was very deep because of the flood.
And there was a girl trying to get across, and one of the monks immediately picked her up, threw her over his shoulder and carried her across. Put her down on the other side, and then the monks went one way and she went another. And the other monk, who had been in a kind of embarrassed silence and which he finally broke, he said, “You realize that you broke a monastic rule by touching and picking up a woman like that?” And he said, “Oh, but I left her on the other side of the river, and you’re still carrying her!” So the whole question, then, you see, is that even—you can find this to some extent in some rather irritable saint (Paul), where he speaks of the opposition of the flesh and the spirit.
Now, this word—σάρξ (sarx) in Greek; “the flesh”—as he uses it, is really—as Bogaev points out—it’s a spiritual category. For the Christian, you see, the word is made flesh in Christ, and there will be the resurrection of the body in the final consummation of the universe. So you cannot really, as an orthodox Christian, take an antagonistic attitude to the flesh.
Why, then, does St. Paul take an antagonistic attitude to the flesh? Well, you can only save the situation and make the New Testament consistent with itself by saying that he meant by “the flesh” a certain kind of spiritual category. He didn’t mean this [Alan slaps his own arm], because this isn’t flesh.
Flesh is a concept, this is not. And so the flesh—or, you might talk about the sins of the flesh—they have entirely to do with certain hangups that we have about our bodies. And that, again, is what I would call leaning on the world, exploiting it.
When you take, as a Buddhist, you take the Third Precept: Kāmesumicchācāra veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi. And it’s usually translated “I undertake the precept to refrain from adultery.” It doesn’t say anything of the kind. Kāma is “passion.” Kāmesumicchācāra, therefore, is “I undertake the precept not to exploit the passions.” So, in other words, you may be bored—see?—and you’re feeling sort of empty and at a loose end, and you think, “Well, I dunno, let’s go and commit adultery.
It might liven things up.” See? And that would be what they call in Zen “raising waves when no wind is blowing.” It would be quite a different matter if, in a perfectly spontaneous and natural way, you fell in love with some woman. You wouldn’t be going out of your way to get in trouble.
It would be appropriate and natural at the time. Or, in the same way, a lot of people—instead of saying “let’s commit adultery”—when they feel sort of bored they say, “Let’s go and eat something.” And so they become fatter and fatter and fatter because they’re filling the spiritual vacuum in their psyche with food, which doesn’t do the job. It’s not the function of food to fill spiritual vacuums.
So, in this way, one exploits the appetites or the passions. So, likewise, also the Fifth Precept: Surāmerayamajjapamādaṭṭhānā is a list of intoxicating substances. And it doesn’t say that you are not going to take them, it says you’re not going to be intoxicated by them.
In other words: a Buddhist may drink, but not to get drunk. I don’t know how that applies to psychedelics, but that’s another story. So one might say, then, that we are confused, through and through, about what we mean by the “material world.” And what I’m first of all doing is I’m just giving a number of illustrations which show how confused we are.
And let me repeat this to get it clear, because it is rather complicated: in the first place, we confuse abstract symbols—that is to say, numbers and words and formulae—with physical events as we confuse money with consumable wealth. In the second place, we confuse physical events—the whole class and category of physical events—with matter. But matter, you see, is an idea; it’s a concept.
It’s the concept of stuff, of something solid and permanent that you can catch hold of. Now, you just can’t catch hold of the physical world. The physical world is the most evasive, illusive process that there is.
It will not be pinned down and, therefore, it fulfills all the requirements of spirit. So what I’m saying, then, is that the non-abstract world—which Korzybski called “unspeakable,” which is really a rather good word—is the spiritual world. And the spiritual world isn’t something kind of gaseous, abstract, formless (in that sense of “shapeless”), it’s formless in another sense: the formless world is the wiggly world.
There really is no way that the physical world is. In other words, the nature of truth—I said in the beginning that somebody had said thoughts were made to conceal truth—this is a fact because there is no such thing as the truth that can be stated. In other words, ask the question “What is the true position of the stars in the Big Dipper?” Well, it depends where you’re looking at them from.
And there is no absolute position. So, in the same way, a good accountant will tell you that any balance sheet is simply a matter of opinion. There’s no such thing as the true state of affairs of a business.
But we’re all hooked on the idea that there is, you see, an external, objective world which is a certain way, and that it really is that way. History, for example, is a matter of opinion. History is an art, not a science.
It’s something constructed, which is accepted as a more or less satisfactory explanation of events which, as a matter of fact, don’t have an explanation at all. Most of what happens in history is completely irrational. But people always have to feel that they’ve got to find a meaning.
For example: you get sick, and you’ve lived a very good life, and you’ve been helpful to other people and done all sorts of nice things. Then you get cancer. And you say to the clergyman, “Why did this have to happen to me?” And you’re looking for an explanation—and there isn’t one.
It just happened that way. But people feel if they can’t find an explanation they feel very, very insecure. Why?
Because they haven’t been able to straighten things out. The world is not that way. So the truth—in other words: what is going on—is, of course, a lot of wiggles.
But the way it is is always in relation to the way you are. In other words, however hard I hit a skinless drum, it will make no noise, because noise is a relationship between a fist and a skin. So, in exactly the same way, light is a relationship between electrical energy and eyeballs.
It is you, in other words, who evoke the world. And you evoke the world in accordance with what kind of a you you are; what kind of an organism. One organism evokes one world, another organism evokes another world.
And so everything—reality is a kind of relationship. So once one gets rid of the idea of “the truth” as some way the world is in a fixed sense—say “it is that way,” see?—then you get to another idea of the truth altogether: the idea of a truth that cannot be stated, the truth that cannot be pinned down. And then, that is the kind of truth that is God when we speak of God as the reality that exceeds all thoughts, that surpasses all definitions, that is infinite, unbounded, eternal, immeasurable in terms of time.
That’s what we’re talking about. We’re not talking about a gaseous vertebrate or a huge, vast void without any wiggles in it. All gas.
We’ll put it another way altogether: the truth that cannot be pinned. Well now, in the first talk I was explaining that the theme of this seminar was the problem of how thoughts protect us from truth and what to do about it, and showing various ways in which the symbolizing process—which we call thinking; the use of signs, words, symbols, numbers to represent what’s going on in the external world or the world of nature—leads us into a curious confusion that we confuse the symbolic process with the actual world. And the temptation to do this arises from the extraordinary relative success that we have had in controlling the world of nature with the power of thought.
But I don’t know if it’s ever struck you that we really don’t know whether we have successfully controlled it or not. It could be argued—a very strong case could be made—that the entire intellectual venture of civilization has been a ghastly mistake, and that we are now on a collision course, and that all the vaunted benefits of intelligence (technology and all that) is simply going to draw the human race to an extremely swift conclusion. Of course, that might not be a bad thing.
I’ve sometimes speculated on the idea that all stars have been created out of planets. And that these planets developed high civilizations which eventually understood the secrets of nuclear energy and, naturally, blew themselves up. And in the process these stars flung out lumps of rock as they blow up, which eventually spun around them and became planets all over again.
And that this is the actual method of genesis of the universe which would accord, of course, with the Hindu cosmology where time and the events in time are invariably looked upon as a process of progressive deterioration through the cycles of each kalpa, in which things get worse and worse as time goes on until it can’t stand itself anymore, and it blows up and, after a period of rest and recuperation, begins all over again. Why do we somehow have a distaste for a theory of time which runs in that direction? I mean, would you rather have a rhythm that goes nyeeaow-zhip, nyeeaow-zhip, or one that goes neeiyp-punng-neeiyp?
See? I mean, which is it? Or you want one that’s going up always?
You see? Always getting better. You can’t even imagine such a state of affairs because, you know, it’s relative.
As you succeed in life you simply… well, there was a communist—a Russian, not a communist—a Russian philosopher who accused the communists in their various five-year plans and progressive notions (wherein people were always preparing for tomorrow) of converting all human beings into caryatids. Now, you know, a caryatid is a pillar, shaped in a human form, which supports a roof. And he said “You are turning all men into caryatids to support a stage upon which others will dance.” But, of course, you know they never will.
You have one row of caryatids supporting a floor, and very soon your children are the next row of caryatids supporting another floor: so that it gets higher and higher, and we don’t really know where we began and we’re always in the same place. Always hoping, always thinking that the next time will be it. And this, of course, is an eternal illusion.
It’s much better—actually, one would be much happier—to think that the future is simply deteriorating. I can explain that very simply. Human beings are largely engaged in wasting enormous amounts of psychic energy in attempting to do things that are quite impossible.
You know—as the proverb says—you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. But recently, I’ve heard a lot of references in just general reading and listening where people say, “We’ve got to lift ourselves up by our own bootstraps!” And you can’t! And you can struggle, and tug, and pull until you’re blue in the face, and nothing happens except that you’ve exhausted yourself.
All sensible people therefore begin in life with two fundamental presuppositions: you are not going to improve the world, and you are not going to improve yourself. You are just what you are. And once you have accepted that situation, you have an enormous amount of energy available to do things that can be done.
And everybody else, looking at you from an external point of view, will say, “My God, how much so-and-so has improved!” But I know—I mean, hundreds of my friends are at work on enterprises to improve themselves—by one religion or another, one therapy or another, this system, that system—and I’m desperately trying to free people from this. And I suppose that makes me a messiah of some kind. But the thing is that you can’t do it!
One very simple reason—which, I think, most of you are by now familiar with—is that the part of you which is supposed to improve you is exactly the same as that part of you which needs to be improved. In other words, there isn’t any real distinction between ‘bad me’ and ‘good I,’ between the ‘higher self’ which is spiritual and the ‘lower self’ which is animal. It’s all of a piece; you are this organism, this integrated, fascinating energy pattern.
And as Archimedes said: “Give me a fulcrum and I will move the Earth.” But there isn’t one. It’s like—you know—betting on the future of the human race. If I were really smart I would lay a bet that the human race will destroy itself, because (in practical politics) one realizes that nothing is going to work out right.
No candidate I’ve ever voted for ever won the election. But the trouble is there’s nowhere to place the bet! And so, since I can’t place the bet anywhere, I’m involved in the world and must perforce try to see that it doesn’t blow itself to pieces.
But the thing—I once had a terrible argument with Margaret Mead. She was holding forth one evening on the absolute horror of the atomic bomb and how everybody should immediately spring into action and abolish it. But she was getting so furious about it that I said to her, “You know, you scare me.
Because I think you’re the kind of person who will push the button in order to get rid of the other people who were going to push it first.” And she told me that I had no love for my future generations, no responsibility for my children, and I was a phony swami who believed in retreating from facts. But I maintain my position. Robert Oppenheimer, a little while before he died, said that it’s perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell.
The only possible chance that it might not is that we do not attempt to prevent it from doing so. Because, you see, all the troubles going on in the world now are being supervised by people with very good intentions. They’re attempts to keep things in order, to clean things up, to forbid this and prevent that possible horrendous damage.
And the more we try, you see, to put everything to rights, the more we make fantastic messes. And it gets worse. And maybe that’s the way it’s got to be.
Maybe I shouldn’t say anything at all about the folly of trying to put things to right. But simply, on the principle of Blake, let the fool persist in his folly so that he will become wise. This is an argument against all kinds of do-gooding.
In other words, it’s simply—it’s the… what I’m saying is: don’t take me too seriously. I’m pitching a case for the fact that civilization has been a mistake; that it would be much better to leave everything alone. That the wild animals are wiser than we in that they—putting it in our crude and not very exact language—they just follow their instincts.
And if a moth mistakes a flame for the signal on which it gets a mating call and flies into the flame, so what? That just keeps the moth population down. And a moth doesn’t worry.
You know, it doesn’t go buzzing around in a state of anxiety, wondering whether this sex call is the real thing or just a flame. It doesn’t think consciously about the future—at least, we suppose this is so. Maybe it does.
But we suppose that it doesn’t and, therefore, it isn’t troubled. But the species of moths goes on and on and on, and so far as we know it’s been around for an incredibly long time, and may be even longer than we have. Bees, ants—creatures of this kind—they have long since escaped from history, so far as we can see.
In other words, they live a settled existence which you might consider rather boring because it doesn’t have constant change in the way that we do. They live the same rhythm again and again and again, but because they don’t bother to remember it consciously it never gets boring. And because they don’t bother to predict, they’re never in a state of anxiety.
And yet they survive. Now we—who “look before and after,” as Emerson says, and predict, and are always concerned whether this generation is gonna be better or worse than the one that came before—we are tormented. And we just don’t realize—because of this tremendous preoccupation with time—we don’t realize how beautiful we are, in spite of ourselves.
Because, you see, the conscious radar is a troubleshooter: it’s always on the watch out for variations in the environment which may bring about disaster. And so our consciousness is, from one day’s end to another, entirely occupied with time and with planning, and with what has been and with what will be. And since troubleshooting is its function, we then get the general feeling that man is born to trouble.
And we ignore in this preoccupation with conscious attention how marvelously we get on, how—for most of the time—our physical organs are in a fantastically harmonious relationship, how our body relates by all sorts of unconscious responses to the physical environment. So that if you became aware of all the adjustment processes that are being managed spontaneously and subconsciously by your organism, you would find yourself in the middle of great music. And, of course, this occasionally happens.
The mystical experience is nothing other than becoming aware of your true physical relationship to the universe. And you’re amazed—thunderstruck—by the feeling that, underneath everything that goes on in this world, the fundamental thing is a state of unbelievable bliss. Well, why not?
Why else would there be anything happening? Because if the game isn’t worth the candle, if the universe is basically nothing but a tormented struggle, why have one? Hasn’t it ever struck you that it would be much simpler not to have any existence?
It would require no effort. There would be no problems. So why is there anything going on?
Let me say not why, but how is there anything going on? Because if it’s all fundamentally a drag, I just don’t see any reason for its being. Everything would have committed suicide long ago.
And to be at rest. So we might work on this possibility, then, that civilization is a mistake and that we’ve taken completely the wrong track and should have left things to nature, as it were. And, of course, this is the same problem that is brought up in the Book of Genesis.
Actually, the fall of man, in Genesis, is his venture into technology. Because in the Bible, the Hebrew words for the knowledge of good and evil are connected with technics. What is technically expeditious and what is not—words connected with, actually, metallurgy—and to be as God, you see.
When you “eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you become as God” means you think you’re going to control your own life. And God says, “Okay, baby! You wanted to be God!
You try it!” But the trouble with you is you’ve got a one-track mind. And therefore you can’t be God. To be God you have to have an infinitely many-tracked mind—which is, of course, what your brain has, you see?
The brain is infinitely many-tracked, but consciousness is not—it’s one-tracked. As we say: you can only think of one thing at a time. And you cannot take charge of the universe with that kind of a consciousness because there’s too much of it.
As I explained before: too many variables. And our science can take care of a few variables, or of an enormous number of variables (as in quantum mechanics) by statistical methods—as we can use statistical methods to predict that most people will live to be 65 years old, at least, but we cannot say of any given individual whether he will live to 65 or not. That’s what we wanted to know!
But the problem is that the variables on each individual are too complicated. And we have not yet, you see, developed a science which can deal with, say, 50- or 100- or 500-variable systems. It’s too complicated to think about.
But computers are going to help us. But, as yet, we are either on the low number or the extremely high number. And these are outside the range of the problems with which we are really concerned.
That’s why, for example, a lot of people have taken to using the I Ching; the Book of Changes. Because if you’re tossing a coin to make your decisions—and everybody does, fundamentally, make their decision by tossing coins—it’s better to have a 64-sided coin than a two-sided coin. The I Ching gives you 64 possibilities of approach to any given decision instead of just two: yes or no.
It’s based on yes or no because it’s based on the yang and the yin, but in the same way that digital computers use a number-system which consists only of the figures 0 and 1 out of which you can construct any number. And this was invented by Leibniz, who got it from the Book of Changes. It’s amazing how this book is somehow always with us.
But this, then, is a way of helping your own multi-variabled brain arrive at decisions, cooperating with your own mind. Because, then again, after you’ve tossed your 64-sided coin, the oracle that you read—that explains each particular hexagram in the Book of Changes—is a sort of Rorschach blot. It is a very laconic remarks into which everybody reads just exactly what they want to read.
But that helps you make a decision by the fact that you don’t really have to accept responsibility for it. See? Then you can say, “It told me.
I consulted the oracle.” The same way when you go to a guru. You say, “My guru is very wise and he’s instructed me to do this, that, and the other.” But it was you who decided on this guru. How did you know he was a good one?
See? You gave him his authority because you picked him out. It always comes back to you, but we like to pretend it doesn’t.
But the thing is that one’s self is certainly not the stream of consciousness. One’s self is everything that goes on underneath that, and of which the stream of consciousness is a mere—well, it has about the same relation to one’s self as the bookkeeping does to a business. And if you’re selling grocery, there’s very little resemblance between your books and what you move over your shelves and counters.
It’s just a record of it, and that’s what our consciousness keeps. Now supposing, then, we work with the argument that we’ve made an awful mistake in bringing out civilization and we’re not going to survive. Now, there are various things that can be said about this.
Just as I made the joke that all stars used to be planets, one could say, “Well, is it such a good thing to survive?” You know T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land says “this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a whimper.” But some people would rather end with a bang than a whimper. Some people are stingy and they like to burn up their fire very gradually, conserving the fuel and just keep enough heat going so that they get a long time. Other people prefer a kind of a potlatch situation where they have a huge whiz-bang fire that goes out in a hurry.
Now, who is right? Do you want to be a tortoise? You know, a tortoise that lives for hundreds of years but drags itself around all the time very slow, slow, slow, sullen?
Or would you rather be a little hummingbird—yeah, yeah! Humming bird, that’s the thing! See?—that dances and lives at a terrific pace?
Well, you can’t say one is right and the other’s wrong. And so there may be nothing wrong with the idea of a world, a civilization, a culture that lives at a terrific increasing pace of change and then explodes. That may be perfectly okay.
My point is that if we could reconcile ourselves to the notion that that is perfectly okay, then we would be less inclined to push that button. It’s the anxiety. If you cannot stand anxiety—and if you cannot simply be content for issues to be undecided—you are liable to push the button because you say, “Let’s get it over with.” People who have trouble with the law and are manipulating the courts in one way or another always learn to delay everything: put it off, introduce legal red tape managed to—like Ralph Ginzburg, who’s been in trouble because of the Eros Magazine.
He’s got a very smart attorney who’s simply the—although the case has gone to the Supreme Court—he’s simply mumbling away and putting up all sorts of things so that he keeps Ralph out of jail. And that’s life! Life is simply a way of postponing death.
And that’s what we have to do. So then, let’s say: well, civilization wasn’t really a mistake. It was just as natural as anything else: a being that exists under conditions of illusion that imagines that it’s controlling its own destiny, that thinks it’s capable of improving itself, and—by virtue of this illusion—destroys itself rapidly in an interesting way.
You see? Let’s suppose that’s what we are. But you still come back to the point that you are spending an enormous amount of energy in doing things that can’t be done—that is to say, tugging at the bootstraps.
And if you find this frustrating, if you really don’t like it, you don’t have to do it! You can stop. And the paradox is that, when you stop, you become happier and more energetic.
People always wondered about the Calvinists because Calvinists believed that, from the beginning of time, God had foreordained who was to be saved and who is to be damned, and you have no choice. Predestination. Therefore, the logical assumption would be that people who believed in predestination would be a laissez faire: they just sit and wait saying, “There’s nothing we can do about it.” But Calvinists were quite other than that.