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Now you’re seeking it in holiness. Formerly, you bound yourself with chains of iron. Now you’re bound with chains of gold.
Formerly, you boasted to all the boys how many sins you committed. Now you’re boasting before the Lord of how many virtues you have. Same trap.
Why do you do it?” So the student eventually finds there’s no way at all to not desire. Even desiring not to desire is desiring. Even trying to accept one’s self is a way of trying to escape from one’s self.
Because one hopes psychotherapeutically that, by accepting yourself, you will get rid of your nasty symptoms. So you’re not accepting them. You’re not accepting them by the gimmick, by the pretense, of trying to accept them.
So this is the way in which the dialogue of Buddhism begins to work. And as it progresses step by step—let me try and show you a little bit more how it works, because I’m shortening it enormously in order to give you an outline of the whole thing. What is going on between the teacher and the student, the Buddha and his disciples, is not merely a dialogue.
There is the verbal dialogue, yes. That goes on. But also, spread over a long period of time and in the intervals, the students are practicing meditations.
They are making efforts to control their minds and emotions, and practicing those things which are the Buddhist equivalents of yoga. So that, in parallel to the intellectual discussion, there is going on a total devotion of one’s whole being to a quest—morning, noon, and night. And so, you see, this works up to a very considerable psychic alertness.
It makes the student put a very considerable psychic investment in the task. And as he goes on, you see, he becomes more and more frustrated. Because as the trap closes and he finds that it’s impossible to do the right thing, because the right thing is always done for the wrong reason—when the wrong man uses the right means the right means work in the wrong way.
You see? There is something you could do to attain liberation—or as the Christian would say: union with God—if you could do it. But the Christian would say: by reason of original sin you can’t, because through original sin everybody is basically selfish, and you can’t be unselfish for a selfish reason.
But you have only selfish reasons. So to him that hath shall be given. But, of course, he doesn’t need it.
From him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. Poor fellow! What is he to do?
So, you see, in this way the teacher closes a trap on the student where he finds himself completely impotent. Not only can he not do anything that will bring about his salvation, he is also unable not to do anything. One might say: you must do nothing, you must be completely passive.
But you can’t do that, because the moment you try to be passive you’re doing something. So you get into the state which they call in Zen Buddhism a mosquito biting and iron bull—or as we would say in our Western idiom: the state when the irresistible force meets the immovable object. Where something must be done but simply cannot be done.
And in this state of maximum frustration there is an opportunity to understand the situation. To understand that I—the meaning of the state “I cannot do, I cannot not do”—the meaning of this state is that the separate I which you thought yourself to be is an illusion. That’s why it cannot do and why it cannot not do.
You see, what is our I, our ego? Some time in the development of man—maybe 3,000–4,000–5,000 years ago—we developed self-consciousness in a peculiar way. We began to realize that, by directed thought, we could control our environment.
And then it was, you see, that we had a sense of responsibility Let’s just assume for the sake of argument that there was a time when nobody deliberated. They did exactly what they felt like. When you were hungry, you ate.
When you were thirsty, you drank. When you were angry, you hit something. When you were happy, you danced.
But you never stopped to think what was the right thing to do. You just trusted your intuition, your instincts, your unconscious, or whatever it might be called. Well that was great, because nobody worried.
Nobody had any problems when it was like that. See, a baby is in the same situation today. Now, maybe you were unsuccessful.
Maybe the thing you did spontaneously was absolutely the wrong thing, and the tiger ate you up. Well, that was alright. Because it really doesn’t matter if the tiger eats you up so long as you weren’t spending your previous time worrying about it.
See, everybody dies. And if you die—CLUNK—like that, that’s that. You don’t spend all your life before you die worrying about death.
You don’t spend all your time before you get sick worrying about getting sick. And when, you see, you move on that level of unpremeditated spontaneous behavior, that’s the golden age. And the reason people look back with nostalgia to the golden age is because that was the time of irresponsibility.
But when people began to see that they could provide for the future, and that they could look after things, and take care, and direct everything—immediately, anxiety came into the world. See, that was the fall of man. Because then, the moment you start doing that, you begin to think: now, having thought this question through and decided that such and such is the right thing to do, have I thought it over carefully enough?
Now, that’s a real bugaboo of a question! You know, you go out of the house and you wonder: did I turn off the gas stove? I think I did.
But on the other hand, I’m not quite sure. Let’s go back and see. So, having gone about five blocks, you walk back.
Yes you did turn it off. So you go out again. And you wonder again: now, I wonder if I really looked, or whether I was so keen on finding out that I did turn it off that some sort of wishful thinking perverted my consciousness, and whether I hadn’t better check that I really did look properly.
You see? Well, this way you never get away. You’re trapped.
So this, you see, is the problem of all self-conscious beings. They feel responsibility, then they feel responsible for being responsible, and responsible for being with responsible for being responsible. And there’s no end to it.
So then, in this obscure way, everybody wants to get back to the golden age. But they say, “If I just acted as I felt and was completely spontaneous, goodness only knows what would happen!” Jesus, you see, said to do that. He did!
And everybody reads it in the King James Bible, where it means nothing: Oh, I mean, it sounds lovely read in church. But what it says—everybody says, “Uh, uh, uh, uh! No!
That’s the Sermon on the Mount, and that’s not practical. Nobody can do that. That may be for a few saints, but after all, in our practical life as practicing Christians in the modern world, we can’t do that kind of thing.” Well, isn’t that funny!
Why can’t you do it? I mean, that’s the real reason for saying it in the first place. Jesus said many very strange things.
For example, in the parable of the Pharisee in the Publican: how the Pharisee goes up into the front row and says how good he is, and that he has fulfilled all his obligations and paid the tithes. And then there’s this publican who goes into the back and sits there and beats his breast and says, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” And Jesus says, “Now, that man was the right man. He was justified.” But the moment he’s told that story, everybody creeps into the back row and says, “God be merciful to me, a sinner.” And they’re all in the front row again.
Nobody can do it, you see? That’s why the story is told. In the same way, he says: “Take no thought for the morrow”—stop being anxious!
Like going to a psychiatrist and he says to you, “Oh, don’t worry. Stop being nervous.” Can you? See, nobody can.
And also, they find out, you see, that really, in the end, nobody can be God, nobody can make life any better by being responsible about it. Because whatever you gain in that direction, you lose at the same time. By being responsible we’ve created civilization, medicine, care of the poor—everything.
But what a headache the thing has become. As we solve all our problems, we make more problems. Every problem you solve gives you ten new problems.
I’m not saying don’t do that, but don’t think you’re going to get anywhere by doing that. That’s one way of arranging it—that’s one kind of dance you can have—is to improve everything and have technology. But it doesn’t really solve anything.
And it’s only in the moment, you see, when you fully understand that your situation as a human being is completely insoluble—that there is no answer, and that you give up looking for the answer—that’s whew! That’s nirvāṇa. And that’s how Buddhism works.
In the first session last night I was making two principal points about the nature of Buddhism. Number one: that it’s a dharma, or method, and its method is a dialogue—or what is sometimes called dialectic. It is basically a conversation, a dialogue, the beginning of which is not necessarily at all the same thing as the end.
The reason is that the discovery which constitutes the foundation of Buddhism—the experience of awakening—can’t be stated. Or at least, if it can be stated, it can’t be stated in such a way that the mere statement will communicate the experience to somebody else. The experience itself is the culmination of an adventure, and one has to go through that adventure in order to come to it.
I’ve sometimes tried to describe this adventure as a reductio ad absurdum of one’s own false views through a process wherein the teacher makes you act consistently upon your false views, so that you come to find out experimentally that they are false. And indeed, one might say Buddhism has nothing to teach. Nothing whatever.
All it has to do is to get rid of illusions, and then the experience happens when the illusions are gone, just like the sun comes out when the clouds go away. But if you try to manufacture the sun before the clouds have gone away—you see what I mean?—and you paint the sun on this side of the clouds, it’s not the real sun. So, in this way, the speculation as such, ideation as such, does not lead to the awakening experience.
So then, this was the first point, then: that it’s a dialogue. And from the statements about Buddhism that you can read in books you will discover only the opening phases of the dialogue. One of the methods that’s used in this respect—people say, now Buddhism teaches that all things are subject to change.
Nothing is permanent. Now, that isn’t exactly what Buddhism teaches. A more subtle scholar will tell you that the Buddha taught that the world is impermanent in order to counteract the wrong view that it’s permanent.
And Buddhist teachers always work in oppositions. If a person asks you a question about philosophical matters, you should reply in terms of everyday matters. “What is the fundamental principle of Buddhism?” “I have just finished washing the saucepans.” Or the other way around: if a person asks you a worldly question, you answer with a philosophical one.
“Please, will you pass me the knife?” And so the teacher passes it blade first. “Please, I want the other end.” “What would you do with the other end?” You see? Here, the metaphysics comes in in answer to the practical question.
And so, once, when R. H. Blyth—who was a great Zen student—was asked by some students: “Do you believe in God?” he replied, “If you do, I don’t. If you don’t, I do.” So when anything, then, is taught, it’s taught in order to counteract something. You see, the Buddha taught that there was no self, and scholars have debated eternally whether he meant there was no ego in the sense of the superficial “I” centered on consciousness alone, or whether he taught that there is no self in the more classical Hindu sense of the Ātman—that is to say: the ultimate self, the divine, final reality which is in everybody, which is the root and ground of all consciousness everywhere.
And some people, you see, have thought that he denied that. Well, he may very well have done so—but with the idea, you see, of correcting something. If you see a person believes that his basic self is divine and eternal and beyond all vicissitude, he may be believing that very wrong reasons.
He may be believing in it as something to cling to, to give him a sense of security. But so long as you have a sense of security and you feel safe, you haven’t got the point. Because it means you are still relying on something.
And a Buddha is a man who doesn’t depend on anything. Not because he’s so tough and he’s so strong. When you get a tough guy who says, “I’m not afraid of anything,” you try him out and you’ll soon find he has limits.
Everybody has his price, if you try hard enough. It isn’t, you see, a question of being strong in the sense of tough, it’s a question of knowing very clearly that there isn’t anything to depend on. So you don’t depend on things anymore.
The only thing to depend on is what you really are. But that’s not something you can hang onto, you see? You can’t catch hold of that.
You don’t need to. The sun doesn’t need to shine a light on the sun. So by the exploration of the dialectic, the teacher—by talking this way, and talking that way—completely undermines you.
That is to say: he digs out all the dirt from underneath you. And you drop, or think you do, because you’re used to having the Earth there. But when you’re in fully empty space, there’s nowhere to drop.
That’s why people get such a marvelous feeling when they go skin-diving and they get down below thirty feet or so and start to lose all sense of weight, or when astronauts go out and start to lose weight in the middle of their space bubbles. You know what’s going to happen? All those boys are going to get out there and they’re not going to want to come back.
This is just great! That’s what happens to skin divers, you see? If they didn’t have automatic controls on those things, they’re not too certain of getting the man back.
Because when people go down skin diving and they stay down too long—see, you have to have a watch with you, or someone with a string on you, or something, to know exactly when you’ve got to make the trip back. You may have oxygen to last you a long time, but you’re going to go out of your mind. Because you will suddenly realize that nothing matters, that everything is okay.
I mean… so what? Supposing I do die? And people take off their oxygen masks and present it to a fish; say, “Have a drag!” They’re so happy, you see?
So you know the famous story when Suzuki was asked, “What is it like to have satori?” He said, “Well, it’s just like ordinary everyday experience, except about two inches off the ground.” So there is this peculiar thing—a sense of, you might say, weightlessness—but you mustn’t interpret that too literally. Some people interpret it so literally that they believe great mystics levitate. I remember when I was a little boy, there was a famous Dean in England.
His name was Ralph W. Inge. “Ing,” I think it’s pronounced. And he wrote many books on Plotinus and mysticism.
And one day he came to Canterbury Cathedral and was sitting in the choir stall, and I was sitting right near him, and I noticed that all the time he was doing this. He had this tick, you know? But people said it was because he was always about to levitate, and he had to keep himself pressed down.
So that levitation, you see, is something in mystical experience, like a sense of luminosity or a sense of transparency. It’s very common. There are two visions of the world, you see, that painters have had in history.
There is the vision of—let’s say in our own Western history—the vision of Giotto, or Fra Angelico, and the vision of Rembrandt. You see, Rembrandt is full of shadows, whereas the other painters are full of luminosity. And then you can get some painters who are not only full of shadows, but their paintings look as if they were all drawn just outside of Fosters Freeze.
You know what a Fosters Freeze is? I don’t know if you have them on the East Coast, but you probably have the equivalent. They are places where they sell iced cream custard, and they sell them from a from a glass box which is all it inside with fluorescent light.
It’s absolutely blue and cold. And the customers all stand outside the glass box. And on a chilly night, there you see them, all under this ghastly blue light, eating ice cream cones.
And the men serve it to them through little windows, like a theater ticket box. And how people can go—that’s my idea of one of the cold hells. But they do.
And so there are some paintings, some visions of the world, that look as if they’re seen under that light, so that there is no light within things. Now, when you see the other painter who sees light in everything, even shadows are full of color. You notice with Picasso’s work how full of light it is.
And that’s because the vision of the world of the mystic is always full of light. Only, it isn’t quite literal light. It isn’t as if everything was blazing.
Or he may say that everything is transparent. And it doesn’t mean that he can see through your body to the wall, or the other person behind. It means that things are transparent because they’re clear.
It has become clear. A problem has disappeared that I thought was a real problem, and now it is clear. I can’t tell you how it’s clear, but it is.
And that’s what we’re going to get to in finding out what thusness is. When things are seen in the state of thusness or suchness, they are clear. There is no further problem about them.
They are what they are and they do what they do. And if you can really penetrate that—as we shall go into it—you will see the mystery clear up. The mystery clears up when you get to the point that you don’t know what questions to ask anymore.
The questions have vanished. The problem has vanished. Now, aside from the fact that Buddhism is a method, is a dialogue, I explained, too, that it’s a transformation of one’s state of consciousness.
That’s what “awakening” means. That is to say, it is a transformation of the way you see things—almost, I could say, the way you sense them. And in this respect I’ve often thought that the process of Buddhism is much more like ophthalmology than it’s like religion.
An ophthalmologist is a person who corrects your vision so that you see clearly. And so, in exactly the same way, awakening is to see clearly: a transformation of consciousness. Be careful of the implications that that word may have, because it doesn’t mean necessarily an ecstatic state of affairs, and it doesn’t mean an unnatural or even strange state of affairs.
I mean, you could imagine that, if you put on blue glasses, you would for a while see everything looking blue. It isn’t something like that at all. Or it isn’t as if you saw everything in a different way.
Like, you suddenly put on the eyes of a fly, you see, and suddenly everything became multiple. You saw this room of the people in it hundreds of times all at once. It isn’t something like that.
It’s just that everything is the way it always was, except it has a completely different meaning. And there is a curious connection between the experience of this and the understanding of it. First of all, there are really three steps in this kind of understanding.
You might say there is, in the first place, an intellectual comprehension; the getting of an idea. And what sort of idea do I mean? Let’s take, for example, the idea of a third dimension: to be aware of depth.
If you look at things with one eye only, you see, you don’t see depth. But if you look with two eyes, then the dimension of depth appears. And once you, though, have understood depth, though you can see depth—for example, I don’t look at things with two eyes at once.
I look either with my left eye or with my right eye, and I don’t have binocular vision. But I still see depth because I understand it to be there. And as a result of understanding it to be there, I see it—if I understand clearly.
I couldn’t understand the nature of depth if I was just told, looking at things, that they have two dimensions. But if I make an exploration and I handle the thing, and I understand what a third dimension is, then I understand it more thoroughly. I’m quite clear about it.
And then, as a result of being clear about it, I see it. Now, in the same way, people did one time actually see (believe it or not) the crystal spheres in which the planets were supported. We would say: how did they see it if it was transparent?
Well, they saw it. They knew it was up there. And it was there for all to see because, naturally, you can always see through crystal.
It’s clear. You see, people really think like that! And they see things if they’re hypnotized into seeing them.
Now then, if you take the suggestion away, then they won’t [interruption] anymore. Or conversely, if you have the idea of a number system which is only 1, 2, 3, many, nobody can see four things. They will see something that other people call four, but they won’t see four, they will just see many.
And four will be as many as five. They might begin, then, to have a concept of a “little many” and a “big many” and a “middle many.” That’s three again. They won’t be able to get “little many,” “not so little many,” “rather large many,” “very big many.” See, they won’t be able to do that so long as their number system is 1, 2, 3, many.
So then, it can never be a fact for such a person that a room has four corners. It has many corners, or else three. But once you’ve got the idea of “four,” then you can see that it has four corners.
When I see the sun rising, I know that the sun isn’t moving but the Earth is turning. One has traveled enough in aeroplanes to see that for one’s self. And the the question, now, is this: if someone believes that the sun is rising and the Earth is still, when he looks at the sun rise, is he seeing the same thing I’m seeing?
I don’t think he is. Because my seeing has an entirely different interpretation on it than his seeing. So what you understand also determines what you see.
So that’s what’s meant by—in dhyana yoga in India—a method of awakening through intellectual mind, through intellectual understanding. People say you can’t get it intellectually. That’s partly true, but only partly true.
That means, first of all—well, for example, the old Hindu saying that you cannot get wisdom through books is as I explained. Because it’s a dialogue. But also it’s because the books that exist are only notes.
In other words, all the sacred books are nothing more than memoranda, just like the notation of Hindu music is only a memorandum, it’s not something you follow. It’s a reminder of a certain raga, or theme, and then you play it and improvise on it. So, in the same way, all the aphorisms in the yoga sutras or the verses of the of the Gita, and so on, they’re notes.
Little jottings. And then the teacher will explain them. So when something is understood very thoroughly by the thinking mind, it will eventually become a sensation because you really understand it, you see.
So that—I’m saying all this as a basis for seeing—that when Buddhism envisages the character and the consciousness of the highest form of man (which it calls bodhisattva), it is not somebody who’s out of this world. It’s not somebody who is in a state of some weird ecstasy, or somebody who sees everything kind of full of angels, as we might expect in the ordinary way; anything like that. Real angels, gods, and so on, are very different from what you might suppose in the imagery.
You can find out, for example, that the dust is full of gods if you really look at dust, and that the pores of your skin contain many universes. And that’s marvelous, you see? That’s to see that things are full of gods.
But you’re still not seeing anything different from the ordinary things you see, but you’ve got a different understanding of it. So, having a different understanding, you’re nevertheless the same world, same everyday life, same everything going on that everybody else has. The understanding, in other words, is not away from this everyday kind of experience we’re having now.
So there’s the bodhisattva. And this is an extraordinarily important vision for the whole of Asia. Why?
Because there was always a tendency in Asian spirituality to want to go away. That’s very understandable, because when life is rough and there are terrible plagues and wars and hunger and diseases, a lot of people would think, “Oh, enough is enough is enough! And if this is going to go on and on, if we’re going to be reincarnated back and back into this mess, isn’t there some way of getting out?” So, in that way, you can lose all interest in everyday life.