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And I want you to share it. But there are conditions. In order to share it, you must love me.
But you can’t love me unless I give you the capacity to do so. But if I give you the capacity to love me, you get at the same time the capacity to hate me, or to love yourself instead.” So from that, you see, we set up a whole pattern of game rules in which you think like this: “Oh dear me,” you know, “I ought to get that thing, that love of God! That’s terribly serious!
I ought to get that. Because if I don’t get that, I haven’t made it. I haven’t got the purpose of the whole creation.
And that’s terribly difficult to do.” But what, then, when you get it? What then? Suddenly, the whole thing changes.
And it’s no longer this awful kind of thing; will I or won’t I? Am I good or am I guilty? Am I saint or am I sinner?
Then, suddenly, at the end of it all, the Christian sees that what he was being invited to, you know, was a party in heaven where they could all sit around and go blee-blwebble-dee-blee-blwoo-blupp-blwebble-bubble-bee-bwlll, like this, because that’s great, you see? The vibrations. You can do it forever.
Just like children like to throw stones into a pond and watch the waves go out. Or like birds will sit all through twilight and sing and sing and sing, in no hurry, repeating the same themes, sometimes with subtle little variations and so on. They just sit and they sing.
So, you see, always, when you get down to the bottom of anything and you say, “What’s that for?” “What’s that for?” You’re finally going to get to a point where somebody says, “Well, I just like to make a noise. I can’t explain it. It has no purpose.
But I saved my money for years. I bought an insurance policy. I did everything purposively just so that I could finally sit down and make this noise.” Oh, I mean, you may like to smoke cigars and sit in a rocker on a porch, and smell the smell of that smoke, see?
You may think that that’s very decadent and that you ought to be working for others, that you ought to be raising funds so that there shouldn’t be anybody underprivileged. And when you’ve raised the funds and you’ve given all that money away to the poor, what are the poor going to do? They’ve got to find some other poor they’re going to work for.
But then, when they’ve worked for those and they’re alright, and everybody’s all alright, what are they going to do? Why, they’re going to sit on the porch and then smoke a big cigar! Now, this has become a serious problem!
Because it’s highly possible that we’re entering into an age of automation in which it’s not going to be necessary to work—except, I mean, if you want gravy, it’s going to be, yes. But if you want simply to have the basic necessities for survival, the advanced food, and medicine, and so on that a technological society can produce, you won’t have to do a thing. We will move into an age when all that will be, practically speaking, for free, because the machines will earn the money for us, and we’ll get paid for it.
And people will say, “Well, now, a human being (we’ve always felt before), you don’t have any right to live unless you are productive. You must work, you must produce something.” That’s why it’s always been difficult for a literary man. If you’re a farmer, then you know you’re serving the community.
If you’re a fisherman, even if you’re a grocer, you know you’re doing something useful. But if you’re a poet, you begin to get a guilty conscience: shouldn’t I have been a farmer? So on.
But always, though, when you follow it through, through, through, through, when the farmer gets the milk to the baby, the baby drinks the milk and goes bleeah, bleeah, bleeah, absorbs this milk and gets bigger. Finally it becomes to be a man. And man does all these things.
He gets all this food, and he sends it around, and he makes more people, and he feeds them all. And they say: “Thank you so much for feeding us. We’re doing well.” But he may say, “Well, so what?
What’s it all about?” I mean, it looks as if—I’ve sometimes suggested that all we are is an elaborate system of tubes, and the object of these tubes is to put things in at one end and let them out at the other, and enjoy that. Enjoy it so much that you like other tubes, and you make connections with those tubes in such a way that you get more tubes. Now, these tubes have ganglia at each end, the top end, called a brain.
And the point of that ganglion is to be a very sensitive, cunning little thing that finds out where there are things to eat. So they keep reproducing each other. And so the whole of life becomes the flow of a stuff through a tube.
Get that through, and get it going faster, get more of it going through. Get more of it. And don’t let it foul things up as it goes through.
Everything, as it goes through a tube, tends to wear the tube out. So the tube tries not to be worn out by the stuff going through it so as to keep the sensation going on. Now, the tubes, when they are through with eating and they’re satisfied in that way, they are going to play other games just to keep things interesting.
And so, slowly, they invent civilization, and they invent literature and music and painting. And they do all this thing, you see, because when you go off to the evening, you’ve done your day’s work, you’ve eaten your dinner—I hope not out of too much of a sense of duty—well, then what? Well, there are so many things you can do.
You can go to the concert, where they will make all kinds of complicated noises. And you’ll say, “My, listen to that!” So that you’ll be able to get that feeling of being astounded. What fantastically complicated noises are made here!
Or you go dancing. And when you go dancing, you see, you go jitter-jitter-jitter-jitter-jitter-cha all over the room. See?
Jiggle, jiggle, jiggle, jiggle. A complicated jiggle, see? Even beautiful jiggle.
But basically, jiggle. And that’s what that led up to. So, you see, the more you think about it—about what all this work is for, why we are campaigning for this and for that, to get world peace, to get recognition for negroes, to get this, that, and the other—what do we all want everybody to do?
So the negroes get their recognition, then what’re they going to do? Well, they’re going to gather together, and they’re going to go hoojie-doogie doogie-boogie boom-ba boom-ba and do all sorts of things like that, because that’s great. But you must see, therefore, the whole world as that sort of a thing, ultimately.
When you finally get down to it, it likes to make noises, it likes to blow bubbles, it likes to dance in a ring, and that’s what it’s all about. Look at it still another way: supposing I use words to refer to a certain situation which happens to be the situation of some trees growing near my front gate. Now, this form of life I can refer to.
And I say, “Here are trees.” And you understand what I mean. The word “tree” is meaningful. And my being able to point out the tree to you, you know I’m making sense.
We all agree about the word. But now look at the situation from a slightly higher point of view. Here is a creature that goes to another creature and says, “tree,” the other creature understands.
And we’ve set up a form of life between us now, which includes the tree and you and I, and we’ve all referred to it, and we’ve got the communication method we understand about it. Now, see, this whole situation that I’m now describing as a form of life, a form of goings-on, which is something in its own turn, just like the tree growing. Well, there it is.
What does that mean? And you finally see: oh! Well, it really doesn’t have to mean anything.
It’s just that we say, “Good morning. Aren’t those beautiful trees at my front gate?” You say, “Yes, they are.” “Come around here and look at them from the other side. How wonderful they are against the sky!
Isn’t that great.” Now, we’ve made sense to each other. But I ask again: what does it mean that we make sense to each other? It is a playful activity, it is a going-on, it is a performance—just like the tree is a performance that does this and this and this and this and this with all its branches and leaves.
And that absorbs things and so on, and then it drops seeds so that it can go on; another one’s going this and this and this, and they can drop seeds, and go on so and so and so and so. Now, you have to be very careful at this point, because you may go absolutely stark-staring crazy. At this point some people get the horrors, and they suddenly see the whole performance of this human race as nothing but automatic gyrations.
They see: here are these mechanisms all sitting around here, and they’re saying, “We’re human.” “Good morning.” “Good afternoon.” “We’re here, isn’t this nice?” Et cetera. And you can suddenly get the horrid feeling that they all are just so much wiggly protoplasmic hullaballoo that goes through the motions of being alive. In other words, if you insult one of them or you hurt one of them, they get on a pained expression.
But you can get to the crazy point of regarding that as nothing more than the fact when you hit water with a stone, it goes splash. Naturally, a person gets on a pained expression when they’re hurt. But that’s all it is.
Then there are certain tensions inside that being. They may be very acute tensions, they may be rather slight, but it’s just tensions going on inside. There’s nothing to worry about.
And so you can suddenly get the awful feeling that you are surrounded by nothing but senseless process. And so when people sometimes do get that feeling, they lose all their compassion, they lose all their morals, they go entirely to pieces, and they feel they can exploit everybody in any situation in all directions. And so there’s a sort of a hairline difference between that and a vision which is very much the same.
Very much the same, but instead of being a kind of thing you put down by saying, “Well, it’s just a lot of behavior. That’s all it is,” you say, “Good heavens! Think of that!
You know, it’s not so bad after all.” For example, there are many, many situations of physical or moral pain of which we are very frightened. And we’re frightened of them because we have been taught that these are bad for us. You see, there are some children who are thought of as schizophrenic—sometimes the Mongolian idiot doesn’t really have… he’s in a situation where he cannot absorb adult judgments about happenings.
So he really doesn’t care if he gets run over in the street. He’s not interested in adult life goals. And so a Mongolian idiot type of child, you can get on with them wonderfully, provided you never cross them.
If they do something you don’t want them to do, change the subject, interest them in something else. But never say no. Because they roll with anything.
You know, if he suddenly wants to strike the matches and light the house on fire, you go up to him and say BLEEAAGHOOOPS! and he gets so interested, he looks at that, and says, “Wow!” And you’re off. And if you want to pay attention, you can play with a child like that for ages.
Because they’ll do anything. They’ll sit down at table, and they’ll get interested in bread and jam, and they’ll pick it up like that, and drop it on the plat, and splosh the jam all over the place, and they’ll make figures in it. They’re always absolutely fascinated.
But they’re way out. They won’t do what we want them to do. Well, we say: you’re idiots—because they have a head shaped different from ours, and they’ve got another idea about life.
But it doesn’t really follow that they’re idiots—I mean in a bad sense. They’re living on different lines. They’ve got a different game.
But so we have a little bit to learn from them. They don’t go in for all this business about giving life meaning and arranging it in certain patterns about which you get compulsive. They just go with it as it comes.
So their point of view is apparently, then, quite different from the person to whom the thing is a rattling monstrosity of meaninglessness. This, of course, is liable to be the person who reacts that way against an overdose of insistence that life be meaningful, and that a child behave sensibly and orderly and in accordance with some domineering adult’s game. When he sees that all that doesn’t necessarily hold together, he’s apt to get a bad reaction.
But now, to get back to this thing. When the adult who has got his program and is pushing the child through it—supposing a child vomits. Overate something or other, the milk was bad.
The adult teaches the child that the sensation of vomiting is disgusting, because the adult goes BLEAGH! See? And makes the child feel that, in addition to vomiting, he ought to feel disgusted by it.
That makes a complication. Alright, so when the adult hurts the child, pinches it, has a doctor stick a hypodermic into it, or something has to be done, then there’s a sensation of pain. But when mother sees the child stuck with a needle and she goes AAAH!
you know, or something, this doesn’t help the child at all. The child feels that, in addition to screeching, reacting, or jumping to the pain, it also has to go AAAH! about it, you see?
Because mother did. Or if the child feels like crying, crying is a shameful thing to do. You mustn’t cry.
So the child, in addition to having the cry thing, has to have the shame about the cry thing. And, you see, that sets up reactions to reactions to reactions on different levels inside us whereby all these complicated problems begin. Think, for example, about the way we humans die.
It’s just terrible. We sweep ourselves under the carpet. We don’t let death be an important thing, really.
Because look at what we do to die. Death is terribly important. Just as important as being born or getting married.
But death is something that we can’t allow. Because it is a flat contradiction of our image of ourselves. So instead of dying in a riotous and glorious way, we get shuffled off to hospitals, where everything is kind of good intentioned, indeed, but it’s kind of… doctors don’t know what to do when people die, because doctors are supposed to cure you.
They can’t help you die, therefore. They are out of role when that happens. And so their whole attitude to your death is: “Well, I’m so sorry.
This is dreadfully unfortunate.” It’s too bad. Well, it isn’t necessarily too bad. May be a very good thing.
They used to say with mothers and childbirth, you know, that this is a dreadful pain you’ve got to go through, because it’s your punishment. Eating that fruit of the tree in the beginning of time. You are a daughter of Eve, and therefore you suffer.
It’s very good for you. And so everybody got these big ideas about the pains of labor. Until some doctors came along and said, “Let’s invent some new language and rehypnotize these patients in another way, and call it contractions instead of pains.” And this made things simpler for many women.
Not all women; a lot of them simply are not going to be convinced at all that they oughtn’t to hurt like blazes. But when those who are convinced suddenly realize that this so-called pain is a sort of orgasm you can have, the attitude is a lot better. Well, let’s get another revolution.
Instead of talking about the pangs and pains of death, let’s give them a new name. You know, the ecstasy of disappearing. I’m serious!
You may laugh, but the thing is that all those sensations have been, in a social context, where they’re interpreted negatively, and so everybody when you’re having them they say, “Oh, dear me! Oh, dear. That’s awful.
We’re so sorry for you. And we’re going to give you a pill to take away the pain.” And that’s alright, you know. But it’s no so much the pill, it’s the attitude of saying, “Oh dear, isn’t it awful you’re going to die.” Well, is it?
I mean, it’s very difficult because we’ve all been so thoroughly indoctrinated about this. And we feel—I mean, I remember all through my childhood the way that my peer group and all the literature we read played up death. The image of the skull.
The ghosts. The shrieking horrors in the dark. The graveyard.
The tolling bell. The bats. The shroud, you know?
And all this hocus pocus making this grizzly scene so that everybody interprets the basic sensations that are involved in this in a highly charged, overloaded fashion. So then, when the cat dies, it dies with great dignity. A sick cat disappears, especially if it’s out in the country, and it curls up in the grass and dies.
Birds, they drop off the trees. I remember Ibram Lassaw describing a dying gull on the beach near Montauk. This bird looked and looked and looked into the sun.
And as the sun went down, the bird looked and looked, and followed the heat light of that sun until there was nothing left, and it shivered and died. Very dignified. But human beings aren’t allowed to die like that.
Because when you die, you see… oh, it’s a big mess. It’s you with all your memories that are being folded up. I remember a woman who came to me, had high blood pressure, and she said, “I’m sick to death of being afraid of dying.
I don’t know what it is. I can’t make out why I’m so frightened of dying. I don’t think it’s the pain I’m afraid of.
I don’t think I have any fear of what’s going to happen to me after death in some sort of heaven or hell. But what is it?” So we talked about this for a long time from all sorts of points of view. And finally she said, “You know, I believe what I’m afraid of is what other people are going to say.
I just can’t stand the thought of my funeral with all my friends around there saying, ‘Well, poor old Gert. It caught up with her at last.’” Well now, she had touched the point exactly. Because it wasn’t quite what people were going to say about her, but it’s what people have taught you to think about death, about the disappearance of your self, your ego, your memory system.
Because with all the propaganda that’s gone on to you, you must build this thing up, you know? You must be you. You must be great, you see?
And then, when this comes to an end, they say, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! You couldn’t make it after all”—as if you ever could! So then, we need to see death and its allied phenomena in its suchness.
That is to say: well, it is just, after a certain time, as the leaves in the fall disintegrate and fall off the tree, and we say, “Well, what a lovely autumn this was, these New England trees. Very gorgeous season.” So, in the same way, human beings fall apart. And we say, “Well, that’s terrible.” And the unanimity of the social attitude makes it terrible for each individual.
But supposing the unanimity of the social attitude was quite different—and there is no reason why it shouldn’t be—and falling apart is considered quite the thing to do. After all, it helps to clean things up. It gets old stuff out of the way, and so we, us, I can all go on.
We renew. We come back. And so the whole thing, you see, is this: you can’t suddenly switch from “death as an awful horror” to “death as a great event.” You have to go through a certain intermediate point where you have to see it just as that.
This is very useful in getting yourself accustomed to all kinds of queer things. There was a woman who was a good friend of mine who moved into the country, and found her house was full of black widow spiders. Well, she was horrified.
But being very sensible, she bought a book about black widows, and she got a model—there’s things they sell from biological firms—a dried black widow spider encased in a plastic cube. And she got a magnifying glass, and she studied this thing, and she learned everything about black widow spiders. Finally, she captured a live one, and looked at it under a magnifying glass, and slowly, slowly, slowly she appreciated the suchness of it.
I mean, it’s a thing that goes this way and that way, and it has things that go like this, and it bites, and it does this and that, and that’s that. Well, having appreciated the suchness of it, she relieved herself of her fear. And then she learned after a while to respect them, and then, really, to be on very good terms with them.
She knew how to keep out of their way, and what their habits were. Always, when she picked up a shoe, shake the shoe. Don’t put your foot in without shaking the shoe first.
Little things like that. So somebody wrote me the other day from Santa Barbara, and said that in her part of the country there are more private planes than anywhere else in the United States, and they fly at less than a thousand feet, and they keep going over her place. And she’s a very well brought up lady.
She says, “I’m horrified to find myself running out of doors, shaking my fist at these planes, and using foul language.” She said, “I just can’t stand them at any price!” So I wrote back. I told her the story about the spiders, and said, “Now, what you’re to do is: you get yourself a certain book”—which I named—“which is a complete photographic catalog of all makes of private planes in the world, and you are to identify them. And every time a plane goes over, look it up in a book and see what kind it is.
Go down to the airport, watch them come in and go out, get rides, and never miss one. Always, get right into that plane situation.” Because then this constant neeeoooowwwmmm over the house, which is a horror, you can get rid of it. And you can say, “Neeeowwmm!” I heard of people who hate drumming.
Every time people start playing the conga drums, they call the police. Because there’s something about that which seems threatening. They think, “Why, the cannibals are in the dark.
They’re out after us.” Until you get with it yourself, you see, and you move with that. Then, however noisy it is, it isn’t a problem any longer. But you have to see the suchness of it first.
That it is just doing this kind of a bumpa-chee-chee bumm bumm bumpa-chee-chee bumm bumm, and that’s that. That’s what it is. And it isn’t a threat, nor is it, for that matter, a promise.
In our fourth session this morning, I was trying to put across two principal ideas, one of which is that, since the idea of thusness is not a way of putting down the nature of things—that is to say, it’s not a form of nothing-buttery—there are certain things to be considered about it. And one is that there is what we call consciousness involved in the nature of thusness. Thusness is transparent and reverberating.
And the other was that within this domain, there is room for an enormous number of value games. But you must remember that value games are games. Now, let me just review those two points slightly, because they are tremendously important.
First of all, we’ve got into the habit of thinking of the world as a physical continuum which is not really a continuum, which is divided into the inert things and the ert things, into the conscious and the unconscious, the living and the dead, the organic and the inorganic. And the mythology of the 19th century was to make it a case that everything was really inorganic, you see? And that consciousness is something actually purely mineral and metallic.
Only, it’s so complicated and it’s got all kinds of liquid and gooey things in it, but they’re basically minerals and they’re basically machinery. And it’s all like that, you see? And I say the objection to that point of view is simply that it’s a way of looking down your nose at things.
In fact, it’s an objection. The objection to it is that it’s an objection. We won’t go into such embarrassing question as: who objects?
But the thing is that when you construe the whole universe in an objectionable way, the person who does this is really saying: “I want to be miserable.” Now, you’re perfectly entitled to be miserable. Or “I want to be realistic” and miserable in that sense. And that’s perfectly okay if that’s the way you want to be.
But he has absolutely no right whatsoever to say that his point of view is more valid than ours when we say the opposite; that actually, the universe is a continuum of whatever it is, thusness, and it’s a spectrum in which there are the very conscious things and the only slightly conscious things. But all of it is conscious. And so that when you ring a bell, and ears get this as ting, the bell itself gets it as a state of vibration—which is a very simple form of consciousness, but there it is.
So you don’t have to explain, you don’t have to invent a ghastly problem, which is: how did anything conscious ever get into this mechanism? It’s a simpler thing that it always was there, everything is conscious, but conscious in very many differing degrees. I don’t really know whether that’s a simpler explanation than another.
I mean, somebody could, I suppose, scratch their heads a while and say, “How do you get from one degree to another?” See, they want to know how you get from the unconscious rock to the conscious, living being. And I say, “That’s no problem. They’re just different degrees of the same thing.” But he says, “How do you get from one degree to another?” And has he recreated all over again the same problem we started with?
Maybe he has. But if he has, you can see a new line on the thing: that this man’s function is to create problems, is to make interesting difficulties. He’s like a person who makes up the crossword puzzle every day for the newspaper.