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They were very energetic people; too energetic. Very, very vigorously moral. They gave us the Protestant ethic.
But they believed in predestination because, you see, they simply had all the psychic energy which Catholics were dissipating upon wondering whether they were saved or not—see?—and being in a state of fear and trembling about “Have I made the right decision? Did I act rightly?” and so on. So they didn’t have as much energy as the Calvinists.
So then, in this day and age we say—in the line of thought of psychiatry or of most schools of psychotherapy—it’s important for you to accept yourself rather than to be in conflict. Get with yourself. But everybody says, “But!” Because nobody dares take that too far.
There’s always a little bit of reservation on the end of it. It’s like, I’ve never heard a preacher—to this day!—give a sermon on the passage in the Sermon on the Mount which begins: “Be not anxious for the morrow.” They do occasionally refer to it and say, “Well, that’s all very well for Jesus.” But the the actual putting into practice of this—nobody will agree with. They say it’s not practical to not give a damn about how you’re going to provide for the next day’s meals, and all that sort of thing.
But it is practical. It’s much more practical than what we’re doing, if you mean by “practical” that it has survival value. Only, I want to point out that this is a kind of a two-step way.
See, the first step is not being anxious for the morrow, not dreaming for one moment that you can change anything, or improve anything. Which of you—by being anxious—can add one cubit to his stature, you see? But this, just like the belief in predestination, has an unexpected consequence: namely, the making of the energy available so that, in fact, you can take care of the morrow—but for the simple reason that you’re no longer worrying about it.
And thus it comes about that people who do not live for the morrow have some reason to make plans, but those who live for the morrow have no reason to make plans for anything because they never catch up with tomorrow; because they don’t live in the present. They live for a future which never arrives. That is very stupid.
But, you see, so all this is said in quite another spirit than the spirit of sermonizing. I’m not talking at all about something you should do. All I’m doing is explaining a situation, and you can do anything you like about it.
Actually, you know, you cannot lift yourself up by your own bootstraps—however hard you try—and I’m merely pointing out the it can’t be done. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t try, because it may be your lifestyle to be constantly attempting to do things that can’t be done. I do this in a way because all poets do it.
A poet is always trying to describe what cannot be said. And he gets close, you know? He often really gives the illusion that he’s made it.
And that’s a great thing: to be able to say what can’t be said. I’m trying to say, to express, the mystical experience—and it just can’t be done. And therefore, everything I’m saying to you is a very elaborate deception.
I’m weaving all kinds of intricate nonsense patterns which sound as if they were about to make sense, and they don’t really. But, you see, we could take that to another level and say, “Well, that’s just life!” Once I was talking with Fritz Perls at the Esalen Institute and he said, “The trouble with you is you’re all words. Why don’t you practice what you preach?” So I said, “I don’t preach.
And furthermore, don’t put words down. Because the patterns that people make with words are just like the patterns of ferns, or of the marks on seashells. They are a dance.
And they’re just as much a legitimate form of life as flowers.” He said, “You’re impossible!” But, you see, that’s very important. And that is why—in certain forms of methods of meditation and religious rituals—we use words in a way that is not ordinarily in accord with the use of words. Words are normally used to convey information.
But in religious rituals words are not used to convey information: words are used musically for the sake of sound. And this is a method of liberating oneself from enthrallment with words. When you say any ordinary word—just take a word like “body,” see?—and you say it once, and it seems to be quite sensible.
But say it four or five times: body, body, body, body, body, body. And you think, “What a funny noise.” Isn’t that curious? Or “apple dumpling.” Apple dumpling, you know?
That’s kind of a nice sound: apple dumpling. And so in one of the great methods of meditation—which is called mantra yoga—the use of sound for liberating consciousness is precisely that. You take all sorts of nonsense and chant it.
And you concentrate on these sounds quite apart from anything that they may mean. See, this is why the Catholic Church has made a ghastly mistake in having Mass celebrated in the vernacular. Now everybody knows what it means, and it really wasn’t so hard after all.
And—while it was in a tongue that was completely incomprehensible—have this sense of mystery to it. And furthermore, if you knew how to use it as a sādhanā; a method of meditation—you could do very well. All monks were trained when they recited the Divine Office.
They would explain to a novice: “Don’t think about the meaning of the words. Just say the words with your mouth and keep your consciousness on the presence of God.” They used it that way, see? So it’s a very good thing, then, to use words in this way to overcome slavery to words.
I’ve just written a book of nonsense ditties which are to be used in this way. To get the rhythm going—which is an incantation. Which is a way of getting beyond the bondage of thought.
Because, you see, you cannot think without words. You can use numbers and a few things like that. But if you preoccupy your consciousness with meaningless words, that very simply stops you from thinking.
And then you dig the sound. Do you know what it is, to dig the sound of anything? Anybody who’s had a psychedelic experience knows exactly what this means.
That you—I can only call it “you go down into sound,” and you listen to that vibration, and you go into it, and into it, and into it, and you suddenly realize that that vibration that you’re listening to—or singing—is what there is. That’s the energy of the cosmos. That’s what’s going on.
And everything that’s going on is a kind of a pulsation of energy, which in Buddhism is called “suchness” or “thatness”—tathātā. You see? What’s da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da-da-daaa.
And that’s what we’re all doing. Only: we look around and, you know, here we all are with people. We’ve got faces on, and we talk, and we’re supposed to be making sense, but actually we’re just going da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-d-da-daaa in very complicated ways, see?
And playing this life-game. And the thing is that if we don’t get with it, it passes us by. That’s alright!
You can miss the bus; it’s your privilege. You see? But it really is a great deal to go with the dance and know that that’s what you’re doing, instead of agonizing about the whole thing.
Well, now, we’ve been discussing—in two sessions—the ways in which thought can conceal truth, and so now we have to come to the other aspect of the problem, which is: how to get un-bamboozled. And I often say that, in a way, this is the wrong question because it reminds me of the famous tale about the American tourist in England who wanted to find a way to obscure a little village called Upper Tuddenham. And he asked a local yokel the way, and the man scratched his head and said, “Well, sir, I do know the way, but if I were you I wouldn’t start from here.” And the problem, therefore, of what to do is, in a way, the wrong question.
Because—as I pointed out yesterday—you have to begin with the assumption that you can’t do anything. You can’t change yourself because the whole idea involves a sort of schizy situation where this “I” is going to change “me.” And this is where the genius of Krishnamurti comes out, where he won’t give anyone a method. And, actually, he gets you into the meditation process by pretending not to.
He’s a real tricky character! Very, very great guru, except that nobody really knows what to do with him. Because whenever you suggest that there might be something that you could do to bring your mind to tranquility or your heart to the knowledge of the ultimate reality, he says simply, “Well, why do you want to?
Find out why you want to.” And then he gives you a kōan. And, in a way, this gets you meditating naturally instead of it being a kind of artificial process; you get so bugged by this questioning that you are involved in the kōan process right away. And he’s very insistent about this.
But my own view is very generous. I think that all ways of meditation can be followed. And because even if some of them are folly—to quote Blake again—the fool who persists in his folly will become wise.
All that’s required that you keep at it. So I want to talk this morning about the various central methods of meditation, and we’ll begin—why not—with the Yoga Sūtra, Patañjali, where [in] the first he says, “Now, yoga is explained.” This is the first verse. And the commentators point out that the word “now” means that this is a discourse following other discourses.
Something has gone before; certain things you have to have mastered before you try yoga. And this is in line with the Hindu view of life that life is divided into ashramas, or stages: that you start out with the stage called brahmacharya, which is the studentship, and then you become a gr̥hastha, which is householder. And only after you’ve fulfilled the life of the householder do you take up yoga.
And this is, of course, also in line with Jung’s views that spiritual awakening belongs properly to the second half of life. But you mustn’t take that literally. The stages of life can be lived simultaneously, and they don’t necessarily follow each other in chronological order.
And today, the predominance of interest in yoga in the West is among young people. And these are the people who are now the new saṃnyāsa; the “wandering monks,” the drop-outs. After all, a saṃnyāsa is a drop-out—only a high-class drop-out.
But he has—in India, of course—fulfilled his social debts. He has raised a family, established his work, and put his oldest son in charge of the business. But we are in an entirely different situation because many of our oldest sons despise the business that we, as adults, were involved in.
Because they see through the hollowness of a way of life that has so hopelessly confused symbol with reality. So I guess in our circumstances yoga is important for everyone. Now, the next verse of the Yoga Sūtra says, “Yogas citta vritti nirodha.” And this is a complicated thing to translate.
It says “Yoga is the cessation of turnings of the mind.” Vritti means “to turn,” to be turbulent. When you talk about a cakravartin as a great ruler, a great king, means “one who turns the wheel.” Vartin is the same as vritti. And a vartin is one who turns; a vritti is a turning, a wave.
Like a wave rolls over and splashes. Citta means, approximately, “consciousness.” It refers to the basic awareness that we have, whether it is strictly conscious or subconscious. Citta means something like—let’s suppose we make the mind analogous to a mirror, a reflecting mirror.
The mirror itself would correspond to what is meant in Sanskrit by citta. You see, we’re not aware of the color of the lens of our eye, and so we just name that color transparent. If it had a color, we wouldn’t know it, and so we don’t.
But you can’t really altogether ignore the background of vision because it’s very important, even though you never see it. It’s basic to all that you see, just as the diaphragm in the speaker of the radio is basic to all that you hear on the radio. But so, in the same way, there is something basic to all our sensations, and that is citta.
So now, there are two schools of thought. One who says that yoga—that “citta vritti nirodha,” the cessation of the turnings in the citta—is the elimination of all sense experience and all thought and all feeling whatsoever from consciousness. And when one speaks, then, of the goal of yoga as being samādhi—and particularly what is called asamprajnata samādhi, which means “samādhi without a seed in it,” or nirvikalpa samādhi—nirvikalpa is a moot word.
Some people think that that means this total elimination of all contents from consciousness. It’s like when you get into a sensory deprivation chamber and you learn to relax the muscles of your tongue, and the muscles of your eyes, and you really go blank. But I think that is a false interpretation.
It’s a very interesting experience to go through and I recommend it if you want to make a little adventure. I was just in a sensory deprivation chamber a day or two ago; it was fascinating. But, you know, it’s real quiet.
It’s just as nice as nice can be and I recommend that everyone install one in a New York apartment! But nirvikalpa means, strictly, “without concept.” Vikalpa means a “concept,” having an idea. And that’s a symbolic thing.
It doesn’t mean having no sensation. And they make a great point of this in the instruction about practicing meditation in Zen. They say quite definitely, “Don’t shut your eyes.
Don’t close your ears. But simply: eliminate thought.” If you cut out your sensation input entirely and have a blank mind, then you’re no better than a log. In that case, logs and rocks would be Buddhas.
The point, then, is, in other words, they have various poetic phrases in Zen to indicate the nature of samādhi. One is the moon in the water. You see, there’s a verse which says, “All waters contain the moon.
Not a mountain, but the clouds encircle it.” So “all waters contain the moon” means that whenever the moon rises, instantly, it is in all waters. They didn’t know, of course—in those days—anything about the speed of light. But they felt that the moon comes into the water when the moon is in the sky in exactly the same way as, when the hands are clapped, the sound issues without a moment’s hesitation.
And so another verse says, “The geese do not intend to cast their reflection. The water has no mind to receive their image.” It’s zzwht, there. Like that.
And so the ideal of samādhi is for you to have a mind like that—what they call a “mind of no hesitation.” A mind which doesn’t, as it were, stop to say whether this should or should not be reflected. And so they would go on to explain the basic nature of your mind is like that from the beginning. That’s what it is to have a mind.
That’s what Zen master Bankei would call the “unborn mind,” or the “Buddha mind” in every one of us that we all have as a natural gift. And so he says when you hear a crow go caw, you know immediately it’s a crow. (I am a crow, for the moment!)
And so, in the same way, when Bankei was once giving a talk, there was a Nichiren priest—you know, those Nichirens are kind of a Buddhist Jehovah’s Witnesses—and this priest was heckling him in the back and he said, “I don’t understand anything you’re saying.” And Bankei said, “Come closer and I’ll explain it.” And this man began to weave his way through the crowd. And Bankei said, “Come closer still.” “Still closer. Come right here.” And he came right up.
And Bankei said, “You see? You understand me perfectly!” So the feeling, then, is that the nirvikalpa samādhi is this state of just perfectly clear consciousness which responds to everything going on without labeling it, without categorizing it. And even to say “respond” isn’t quite right because that means as if consciousness was something that is pushed by life and then reacts to it.
Action and reaction, like cause and effect. The crow caws, and the ears vibrate: cause and effect. That’s not the Buddhist theory.
The Buddhist theory is not cause and effect, it is called pratītyasamutpāda. And that means “interdependent origination.” In other words: when the wind blows, the trees move. This is not two events, but one.
Wind blowing and trees waving are all the same process. And so the verse says, “The tree displays the bodily power of the wind.” It manifests it. Because nobody would know there was any wind blowing unless the trees were waving.
Nobody would know there was any light shining unless there was something reflecting it. They really go together, you see? So the tree displays the bodily power of the wind, the water exhibits the spiritual nature of the moon.
Because, you see, when the water flows and ripples, it breaks the moon into thousands of pieces. So that is the spiritual power: the one becomes many. So then, what we are looking at, then, is a state of consciousness which is like that—which is one with the whole thing going on.
And this is saying the same thing as Krishnamurti says when he tries to explain that there really is no feeler separate from our feelings and no thinker separate from our thoughts. There is simply a process going on. And so, in the same way, Huìnéng—the Sixth Patriarch—prefers not to use the image of the mirror for the mind, but he prefers the image of space.
That’s why, when his rival for the patriarchy made up the poem which explained that “the mind is a mirror and we must wipe it to keep off the dust,” Huìnéng countered this by saying “there isn’t any mirror, and so whereon can the dust fall?” See? So this is saying that you will never, never be able to discover a thinker other than thoughts, a feeler other than feelings, a sensor other than sensations. That’s the meaning of the dialogue between Bodhidarma and Eka.
When Eka said, “I haven’t any peace of mind. Please pacify my mind.” And Bodhidarma said, “Bring out your mind in front of me, and I will pacify it.” Eka said, “When I look for it, I can’t find it.” Bodhidarma said, “There! It is pacified.” So Eka, you know, was looking for his mind.
It’s like “Who are you?”—the question that the Maharshi Ramana always asked to anybody who said, “Maharshi, who was I in my last incarnation?” And he would always reply, “Who’s asking the question?” Which is the same as Krishnamurti’s “Why do you want to know?” Because this throws the question back at the questioner. Who are you? Who has the problem?
And you look, and you look, and you look, and you can’t find it. When you look for—Hume, the British philosopher, really went through the same experience, because when he tried to find out what was his consciousness he couldn’t find anything but sensations, or images, in his head. And so, in the same way, when you want to find out what’s behind your eyes—most people think that they have a blank space behind their eyes; kind of a non-dark, non-light blind spot which you can’t ever see.
That’s not the case. You know how the inside of your head is? Why, it’s what you’re looking at!
That’s how it feels inside your head. It’s all this that you see in front of you: that’s inside your head. It’s all in these nerves back here, where the optical nerves are centered.
And so this is saying that our conscious relationship to the world is a transactional relationship in which you can speak about the subjective standpoint and the objective standpoint. But that, really, you’ve got one continuum in which these two standpoints are simply opposite ends of a diameter. You go with it, it goes with you, and vice versa.
So this is the whole meaning of the Taoist idea that is called “mutual arising.” When Lao Tzu says that “to be” and “not to be” arise mutually, that “difficult” and “easy” suggest each other, “high” and “low” subtend each other, and so on—he’s describing this polar relationship. So you don’t get an ’—in other words, you don’t get a confrontation, you don’t get a kind of a meeting from things that impinge on each other from entirely separate situations. You get the opposite sort of thing where, when a flower buds and the bud breaks, the petals expand.
And it’s true—you have the petals on the far left and you have the petals on the far right. But they arise together, like that, see? That’s how all life is happening.
When you come into being, the universe comes into being. When you go out of being, the universe goes out of being. And that’s true for everyone.
Not only people—all sentient beings whatsoever. So without the being—the sentient being—there is no cosmos. All we are saying in talking about a cosmos that existed before any sentient beings existed is we’re simply describing what would have happened if there had been any sentient beings around.
It’s a kind of extrapolation. So that relativity of the sentient being and the universe is basic to Buddhistic philosophy and is saying, then, that the one implies the other. Because this is the philosophy called jiji muge (事事无碍): that between thing-event and thing-event there is no barrier.
This is the philosophy of the mutual interdependence of all things and events. That the moment there is anything at all, it implies everything else. So, in the same way—you know—with laser beam photography: you can take a tiny fragment of a photographic negative, and by laser beam photography you can restore the whole negative from which it was cut.
Because the crystalline structure of any part of the negative is in an inseparable relationship with its whole area. So you can imply it. You’ll get a picture which is (around the area that you have taken out) very clearly definite, and as it moves away from it the outlines will become a little vaguer, but you’ll be able to see everything that was there.
It’s fantastic. So in the same way, every hair on your head—this is the real meaning of the saying that the hairs of your head are all numbered—that every hair on your head implies all galaxies because it wouldn’t exist without all the galaxies. Nor would all galaxies exist without the hair, or without the hair having existed.
It doesn’t make any difference. So then, this state of complete unity of mind and nature (what’s going on) without the intervention—first of all—without the intervention of thought is the state of meditation. It may be called dhyāna, it may be called samādhi, and you may make certain subtle differences between these two states, but forget it for the moment.
Now, the way of arriving at this is, of course: there is no way. Because that’s the way your mind is working anyway. But you have to find that out.
You have to find out that you don’t need to accept yourself by trying to accept yourself. It doesn’t mean anything to accept yourself because who accepts what? But you don’t know that at first.
You think there is a “who” who has to accept “what.” And you can only do this by trying to do the impossible. This is the method of reductio ad absurdum. So then, in the beginning of meditation there are alternative methods you can use.
You can use the questioning method: “Who am I?” and “Who is it that wants to know?” “Who is asking who it is that is asking?” You can—that’s the method of interiorization; look within: thou art Buddha. Then there’s the method of concentration: a method of banishing the interior stream of chatter by watching your breathing. Or by focusing your attention on a small point of light or upon a single sound.
If you have a tape recorder, all you have to do is you make a loop tape with one sound on it. And you turn your tape recorder on, and that practices meditation for you. And you just listen to that sound.
Or—easier still—you hum a sound like om. And you take a long, long, easy, deep breath, and you hum “om, om, om, om.” And just keep it going. And that’s a great method.
It’s one of the best ways if you are an auditory kind of character. Then you can also do it by looking into a crystal ball or by using a mandala. You see, the way a mandala is constructed with circles, you eventually get the feeling from looking at a mandala that you’re dropping into it.
And you’re going in, in, in, in, in to that circle. Always in, in. And that brings you altogether in one place, and you go in, in, in to the heart of it.
The radii—or whatever they may contain—simply have the function of being, as they were, slides which bring you into the center. And you go in, in, in to that, and you get the same effect, visually, as when you do when you listen into a sound. And you go in, in, in to the sound.
You get down to the basic, basic, ungh—you know?—which everything is. And then, when you get that basic ungh, you stay there, see? And you dig that.
And eventually you see that that’s what there is, and always was, and always will be. In fact, there isn’t any time in meditation; time completely disappears. You discover there is only the present.
And that brings up another form of meditation that you can practice, and it is a good one for practicing while being active. You see, sitting isn’t the only way of meditation. There are actually four types of meditation.
Sitting meditation (called zazen), walking meditation, standing meditation, and lying down meditation. So it’s also good to lie flat on your back for these things—except that you may easily go to sleep that way. Walking meditation has long been practiced both by Christian monks and by Buddhist monks.
And in the satipatṭhāna method of meditation that is practiced today—in Burma, and Thailand; in Silom—they do a great deal of it walking. It’s a very good way because you certainly don’t go to sleep that way. And it’s a rhythmic movement, and therefore is peaceful: you just walk slowly up and down.
This is the way I use mostly. Especially if you go out to Jones Beach and it’s clear—you know? You go out on a weekday and it’s absolutely clear, and nobody is there, and you can go for miles and miles along the beach in the walking meditation.
Beautiful. So in [those] various ways of posture, shall we say, you can concentrate on sight, on sound. Nobody has done much with touch, but people have done meditation on bodily motion—as in dancing or mudra.
That is another thing. Mantra is sound, mudra is gesture. And in Huston Smith and Elda Hartley’s film of Tibetan monks you’ll see them doing the mudra method of meditation: constantly moving their hands.
This is the same kind of a thing. Or another method is the letting everything alone, where you allow all your psychic processes and sensuous processes free reign to do anything they want to do. And you will find, for example, that—let’s, supposing that, at this very moment, you are all hearing the sound of my voice.
Now, if you turn your conscious attention from the meaning of what I’m saying simply to the sound of the words, you will be surprised to discover that you don’t have to make any effort to understand what I’m talking about because your brain will take care of that. And you can just listen to the noise. It’ll all go into you and you’ll understand.
But you can just concentrate on the flow of sound. American Indians often do that when they’re encountering a stranger, because they can tell more about him by the tone of his voice than what he says. He may be lying.
So you can listen to the tone of my voice and find out whether I’m putting something over on you. It’s the tone that is important, you see? Fundamentally.
It’s the music that finally counts in life. As I was explaining yesterday, one may regard the universe as a musical phenomenon: that it is a huge system of extremely complex vibrations which is playing. And that’s what it’s all about.