Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
So I invented this limerick: So this is the thing, you see: not only do you remember what happened and say, “It made an impression on me”—which means “it made me remember.” Like your retina remembers whatever is seen so that it sticks there a little. In other words, that’s why you get the illusion of a circle of fire when you revolve a cigarette in the dark: it makes the impression of a circle because your retina remembers and holds, as it were, the impression of the flame. So then, beyond that we’re absolutely fascinated with the whole principle of remembering.
And so then, when there’s some gathering of people and we say, “Well, this is a great day! What a wonderful picnic (or whatever it is) we’re having. Pity somebody didn’t bring a camera.
It should have been photographed.” Now, do you see that in this whole thing there is both a gain and a loss? What one school of people are saying [is], “It should be photographed.” The other school of people are saying, “Let go of it.” When you go around—we had so much experience of this in Japan because all our students brought cameras and were constantly photographing things. And I had a camera and I was constantly photographing things, but I felt that—so long as I had a camera with me—I was somehow distracted from actuality.
I had a little box with which I went around grabbing life. Of course, it’s great to come back and look at it in the form of photographs, but there’s something about the photograph that is inferior to the actual experience that you’re photographing. But there is an immense fascination in photography, in painting, in reproducing.
And reproducing, you see, is the same thing as sexuality: it is reproduction—only in another way. Because it tells you you’re there, you’re alive; the thing bounces, it echoes. So the duplicity in all this is, you see: one school of religious people say, “Let it all go.
Don’t be attached.” In other words—and they also say, “Live in the moment.” Like Krishnamurti’s doctrine of “stop trying to remember everything.” You may need a kind of factual memory for your name and address, and telephone number, and things like that. But don’t linger over memories, and treasure memories, and say, “Well, I’m going to keep my girlfriend’s lock of hair, and I’ll take it out every now and then and look at it, and feel wonderful,” you see? That’s clinging to life because that memory has got you hooked.
It holds you to the past, and it holds you to death. But then there’s the other school of thought, you see—quite opposite to this—which says, “Remember to remember.” Title of one of Henry Miller’s books. Hold on to it all.
Get involved. Keep your girlfriend’s hair. Keep all the photographs.
You know how, in some houses, the piano—everything—is completely covered with photographs and reminiscences? I went to visit Gloria Swanson once. I’ve never seen such a house full of memories.
Everything, in all directions, was Gloria Swanson. Photographed on this occasion, signed on that on occasion, presentation this…. I went to visit once to the wife of a former archbishop of Canterbury.
And the whole house was memorials. I mean, it was a complete clutter of tombstone furniture with little brass plates on it presented on the occasion of this, that, and the other. Well, you say, “Look, that person isn’t really living.
And they’re all in the past”. But on the other hand, what is life, you see, except there is a memory, except there is an echo. So what I want to point out, you see, is the duplicity of all this.
That, if you’re a wise man, you don’t take sides in this issue. You do both sides. And that is the meaning of the unity of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa.
On the one hand, you let go of everything and you live in the eternal now, because that’s all there is. See, memory is an illusion; it’s all gone. So everything you know about, that makes an impression on you, is no longer there.
That’s the meaning of māyā. There is only the eternal now. There is only the present moment, and never will be anything else.
Because even what you’re remembering is happening in the present, the memory is in the eternal now, isn’t it? See? So it’s all really absolutely here.
But, on the other hand, what fun to drag it out! And to make it echo, and to get involved, and to fall in love, and to become attached. Once R. H. Blyth wrote and said to me—I may have told some of you this story before—he wrote me a letter and said, “What are you doing these days?
As for me, I am abandoning all kinds of satori and enlightenment and I am trying to become as deeply attached to as many people and as many things as possible.” Because these are the two sides, see? So, the thing is this: it’s just like riding a bicycle. It’s a balance trick.
You suddenly find yourself falling over one way—well, you balance that: you turn into that direction and you stay up. And so, in the same way, when you find yourself becoming too attached to life, you correct that with the realization that there is nothing except the eternal now. Then, when you feel it’s alright now—you see, you’re safe again because there’s only the eternal now—once more, you go and get attached.
Or you get involved, you get concerned about some enterprise—social, political, amorous, familial, scholarly, artistic; whatever it is, you get involved. And the two always go together. So this is the meaning of this symbolism.
Because the male only knows he’s there if there’s a female. It’s the echo. And she only knows she’s there if there’s a male.
Nobody ever came into existence without a couple of parents, see? And there’s simply no other way into this universe. Now, this is simply—I’m using this simply not as the main point, but as a sort of illustration of the simultaneity of attachment-detachment; involution and evolution.
Involution is how you get involved, evolution is how you get out. Well now, this tantric yoga represents all of this in the most extraordinary symbolism, which is basically the human body. Again, it’s not simply the sexual functioning of the human body, it’s the whole nervous system.
If you really dig into this, you will find that there is a psychic anatomy. And this psychic anatomy, in yoga philosophy, belongs to what I explained yesterday as the subtle body. You must not expect to find this in the physical organism, nor must you expect to find that there is—in addition to the physical organism—a sort of spook that goes around with us.
The physical body is the body as examined by others. The subtle body is the way you feel your Self. Now, there is an anatomy of the subtle body which consists of the process of involution and evolution.
There is a spinal tree, and it’s represented as having two paths down it. It is represented as a canal called the suṣumṇā. And then, in this canal, there are two routes.
One is called the iḍā and the other is called the piṅgala. And on one current something is going down, and on the other something is coming up. And you will recognize, I think, the familiar image of two serpents on a rod: the caduceus, carried by Mercury.
And alchemically, you see, mercury—the mirror substance—is the void; is the pure, clear light. The same thing as the Buddhist diamond. Now, down at the base of the spinal column, according to the cakra system, there is what’s called the kuṇḍalinī, which is the serpent power.
And the symbol of the serpent power is an inverted triangle with a phallus, upright and erect, and a sleeping serpent coiled all the way around the phallus. That is, in other words, involution—to be absolutely involved. And the sex symbol is used again because sex stands for symbolically complete involvement.
Now when you’ve got in, the trick is to get out. See? So then, the process of yoga is represented as waking up that sleeping serpent who is under the sleep of māyā—who is captivated by illusion—and thinks that the world really exists.
In other words, the female echo of himself or the male echo of herself, has captivated you. Memory has caught you. And you think it’s all really there, and you don’t realize there’s only the eternal now.
And you need to know that in order not to get quite lost. Because if you go out to any one end of the spectrum, you forget you’re there. That’s sort of a non-existence; you can’t really non-exist, you’ll always come back eventually.
But if you get one extreme too much, you don’t know you’re there. So then, the symbol is that you draw up the energy located in the kuṇḍalinī, which is the sex center. And you send it back up the spinal tree to the top again, from which it came.
Now, this is the theory of sex yoga. The theory is that the male and the female partners—who, as I explained yesterday, are husband and wife or some kind of spiritual marriage—what they do is this: the male sits in the normal meditation posture and the female sits on top of him, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck, and he holds her around the waist. And in this position they arouse the sexual force.
Now, the theory goes on to say this: that, instead of dissipating this energy in the ordinary way, having aroused it, they send it up the spinal tree—back into the brain. Now, don’t take this literally. This is a symbolism.
It’s just the same kind of superstition as thinking that heaven is somewhere up in the sky, and that there really are streets of gold and angels wandering around in nighties with harps. All this is a way of talking about inner anatomy; psychic anatomy. The kingdom of heaven is within you.
And when Jesus ascended into heaven, he went right into the middle of himself and disappeared. You know? Like the gates of heaven: they are pearls.
People think the pearly gates are gates covered in pearls—there’s nothing of the kind. The gates of heaven are pearls. Each one is one pearl.
And, you know, a pearl has a very thin hole through it for the thread to go in. And that’s why a camel can’t go through the eye of a needle: because you have to become no one to get through that hole. That’s why the idea of many incarnations is likened to beads strung together on a thread.
And this thread is called the Sūtrātman. Sūtra is “a thread,” Ātman the “Self:” “the threading self” that hangs all the beads together. But it’s so thin, you see, that it’s like nobody.
The real you. You have to divest yourself of all hangups, you see, to discover the real you. Well, we’re back again to the thing of pulling the snake up the tree: the serpent power.
You have to let go of the hangups and realize that there are no possessions. Everything’s falling away. All your memories are holding onto illusions.
And then, when you thoroughly understand that, you can go back in. So you’ve got a marvelous picture of the world, of the sort of systole and diastole, Of attachment and detachment, attachment and detachment. And this takes us right back, you see, to the bodhisattva who is liberated, who has let go and is no longer attached, given up memory.
And this is the meaning of giving up woman, who is your resonator. Give that up, see, and you find you’re free. There’s only the eternal now.
So the bodhisattva, instead of staying there, goes back in. And there are all sorts of funny symbolic stories about bodhisattvas appearing in the world as whores, and using every conceivable kind of device in order to liberate other beings. But this takes us completely back, you see, to the original Hindu image of the world as the Pralaya and the Manvantara.
The Manvantara is the period in which Brahma manifests himself as multiple beings for 4,320,000 years. And the Pralaya is the period in which he withdraws and everything disappears. And then starts all over again.
And this goes on for ever and ever and ever, in not only our kind of time but in many other kinds of time, and in all sorts of different kinds of spaces. But it’s the same fundamental myth recreated in another form. Now, you may say this is pretty monotonous.
And that is one of the basic feelings underlying Buddhism: “Must we go ’round again?” You see? So, indeed, you say, “Oh, enough of this! Let’s go to sleep.
Let’s stop. Time must have a stop.” And so you stop. Well, when you do that, you forget that it ever happened, you see?
This is a marvelous arrangement, because then it can start all over again without your knowing that it happened before. So you’re never bored! And this is a cure for being tired of it.
Because if you didn’t know—I mean, that’s where the memory goes, you see? And so, when you come back, there’s no problem. At least, no problem of boredom, of remembering the past.
There are going to be all sorts of new problems. But you won’t know you’ve had any problems before, so that won’t worry you. Until you begin to accumulate memories again, and you’ve had these problems, and it’s becoming a bore dealing with problems, and then you get rid of yourself.
It’s called death. It’s a beautiful arrangement for keeping everything young and new, and for keeping the universe running without getting tired of itself. And that’s the definition of keeping on.
So, you see, these are the two motions. Fundamentally, then, represented by the male and the female, the in and the out, the now-moment and the memory. See, memory, remember, creates the future as well as the past.
You wouldn’t know you were going to have anything happen tomorrow unless something had happened yesterday. You figure because the sun rose yesterday and yesterday and yesterday that it will arise again tomorrow. If you didn’t remember it, you wouldn’t know there was going to be any tomorrow.
Because there isn’t. Tomorrow is an illusion. So was yesterday.
Simply isn’t here! Where is it? Bring me tomorrow’s newspaper.
This is a perfectly marvelous arrangement, you see? So that you may feel, as you think these things over, that you are almost on the verge of going mad. I sometimes feel that when I get involved in the sort of contemplative state.
It is so weird and so far out that I think I’m going to lose my mind. But don’t worry. You see, just like being dead.
Just like… just let go and swing with it. Because it’ll always bounce. And what gives you the sense of going mad is that you think you’re not in control and that it’s all lost and someone else is going to take over.
Or something else is going to take over. Well, of course it has to! Because, like you say, when you’ve driven long enough in the car you say to your wife, “Will you drive for a while, please?” You want relief.
Something else has to take over. But it’s all you. So do you see that the nature of being is constructed in this extraordinarily fascinating way?
So that it constantly renews itself, and therefore is worth going on by eternal forgetting and getting rid of itself. Buddhist philosophy speaks of the four invisibles: water to the fish, air to the bird, mind to mankind, and enlightenment to the ignorant. Because, you see, you never know your own element.
Now, it’s impossible, therefore, to give a definition of consciousness, because we don’t know anything outside it—just as the fish doesn’t know anything outside water and the bird doesn’t know anything outside air. We don’t know unconsciousness, we only know when we have been unconscious. And so we are in a very difficult fix to attempt to define the subject of this seminar.
We all know what it is, and yet none of us know what it is. We know we’re conscious. It’s the same sort of problem as to try to say what color your eyes are—I don’t mean whether they’re blue or brown, but the color of the iris; the lens of the eye.
Because we say it has no color. It’s transparent. It’s like pure glass.
And yet, that might be a color to somebody who had a different kind of eye. An Englishman and Hindu were once sitting in the back yard of the Hindu’s home, and the Hindu was talking about the necessity of a background for the perception of any figure. So he said, “Against what background do you see those flowers?” And he said, “Against the background of the hedge.” “And against what background do you see the hedge?” He said, “The background of the hills.” “And against what background do you see the hills?” He said, “The background of the sky.” And he said, “And against what background do you see the sky?” And the Englishman fell silent.
The Hindu said, “It’s the background of consciousness.” There, you see, we reach a limit. And you can talk until all is blue about whether consciousness and reality are the same thing, whether there really is ever any such thing as pure unconsciousness, whether consciousness is eternal, whether—as the subjective idealists would say in philosophy—there is primarily mind and all so-called physical and material existence is something in mind or something in consciousness. You can debate that subject forever and ever and ever and come out nowhere.
There is no answer to the question when asked in that way. But it is helpful, as a start, to make things at once more simple and perhaps a little more difficult by overcoming, at the beginning, the traditional opposition between the spiritual and the material, or the mental and the material; by the trick of talking about all things, whether spiritual or physical, in terms of pattern. Because that’s all anybody can really talk about: pattern.
You see, it’s fundamental to our common sense—which was highly influenced by Aristotle and the Book of Genesis—that all forms are composed of some substance in roughly the same way as sculptures are made of stone or pots made of clay. But a serious physicist no longer thinks in such terms about the material world. He doesn’t think it’s made of anything.
Because what the physical process of nature is, is patterns. You could say patterns of energy, but that’s using the old ceramic language. Patterns aren’t made of energy, the patterning is the same thing as the energy.
So if you use the verb “patterning” as what the universe is, then you get something that you can talk about. You can describe patterns, you can measure them. You can say what a pattern is doing.
Although a pattern isn’t a thing. A pattern is a verb, it is a process, it’s an activity. So we can say patterning is what is going on.
And consciousness is a kind of patterning, as we shall see. Just so are flowers and human beings and stars, trees, water, air, everything. Even space itself is a form of patterning.
And this means, in other words, that the universe is what physicists would call an energy field. And likewise, consciousness is a field in the sense, say, that space is obviously a field. That is to say, an area in which things happen.
That’s the primary meaning of field. A field is a playing field; a field in which something happens, like an arena. Only, when you use the word field in more in the sense of physics, you mean a field of forces like a magnetic field, like a gravitational field.
And the curious thing about fields is that they exercise their energy in a non-mechanical way. For example, if gravity were non-field—that is to say, if it were the ordinary sort of exercise of energy like the propagation of heat, or like someone pulling—then, when you put something on the ground (you put a good heavy lead plate on the ground), that would be absorbing so much gravitational energy, and therefore anything you put on top of the plate would be less acted upon by gravity than the lead plate itself. And then anything on top of that would be still less.
And you would reduce the energy of gravity by piling things up. But you don’t. It doesn’t make the slightest difference to the gravitational field.
So, in the same way, if you take an electrical coil—say, surrounding a plastic tube—you can put a current through that and you create a field within the tube. You can put your hand inside the tube, but nothing will happen to it. But the minute you put something that is like steel inside the tube, it will get hot.
But no heat will be generated until the steel is inside the tube. Because the coil plus the steel equals heat. But the coil has to polarize with the steel inside before anything happens at all.
So that shows us that what is operating is a field. Now think, then, of the world as a field characterized by patterning, for which another name is energy. And we are going to have to treat consciousness in rather the same way.
Now, one thing that is characteristic of all energies—all energies whatsoever, all patterning whatsoever—is that we find it convenient to think about it in terms of the spectrum. So there is a spectrum of light: the visible spectrum running from red to violet. And beyond the visible spectrum there is a very big invisible spectrum, because our eyes respond only to a small section of the measurable spectrum of light.
So we have infrared rays at one end and ultraviolet at the other, and then so on out to cosmic rays, gamma rays, hard x-rays, all sorts of things on the invisible bands of the spectrum. So, in exactly the same way, there is a spectrum of sound. And if anybody was a sufficient scientist of cookery, they would devise a spectrum of taste.
There are certainly spectra of other kinds of vibration than sound and light. And there are, likewise, conceivable spectra of shapes. Spectra of emotions.
So we could talk, too, of a spectrum of love, ranging at the red end from lust (or the Freudian libido) to divine love at the violet end; divine charity. And in the middle, greens would be things like friendship and endearment and so on. Each emotion, as a matter of fact, could be thought of as having its own spectrum.
Now then, the curious thing about the world is that it’s a kind of interlocking of spectra—which, the best analogy would be weaving. The interesting thing about weaving is that you’ve got the two groups of cross-threads which give you the pattern, the warp and the woof. And if you pull out either one, there is no pattern—nor is there any cloth; it all falls apart.
It needs both the warp and the woof for there to be any pattern at all. And they, together, constitute the cloth. Now, let’s look at a similar illustration in the ordinary everyday world of this interlocking of patterns.
Let’s take the photograph of a face in a newspaper. If you examine this photograph under a magnifying glass, or even with the naked eye, you will easily see that it isn’t a continuous face (as faces are supposed to be), but it is a whole collection of dots. Some are heavy, some are light.
And according to the heaviness and lightness, as you stand back, you get, as it were, the illusion of there being present (in terms of those dots) a human face. Now, let me pose the question: what is the relationship between the form of the face and the gridwork of dots? At first sight, there doesn’t seem to be any relationship between them at all, because the printer uses exactly the same kind of screen with which this process is done for any face whatsoever.
So the kind of screen he uses makes no difference at all to whose face it is. Anybody’s face can be on it, or any other shape. So you might say the fact that he is using a grid is completely irrelevant to the form of the face.
Take still another illustration: the radio. When you turn on your radio and it comes on first thing in the morning, the announcer does not say, “The sounds you are now hearing are vibrations of a diaphragm activated by electromagnetism. This is mediated to you through a network of transistors and a broadcasting station with such and such features.” He does not intrude the mechanics of radio.
He comes right on saying, “This is station so-and-so. Welcome. This is this morning’s news,” or whatever he begins with.
So it would seem that the structure of the radio—the wiring, the transistors, the speaker—have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the message that’s coming across it. They are in two different worlds altogether, so it would seem. Then take another possibility: what about the brain?
Is thought, emotion, or consciousness itself a function of the brain? If we knew a great deal about the anatomy of the brain, would that tell us a great deal about the patterns of human thinking? Or would it tell us as little about the patterns of human thinking as knowledge of radio engineering tells you about the technique of Bach, whom you hear over the radio?
See, there’s a real puzzle. And this is one of the interesting subjects brought out in this extraordinary book called Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. And I don’t think he’s clearly answered it.
Because he is trying to say that what is most important is not so much the message, or what is supposed to be the content of any method of extending our nervous system—such as radios, such as televisions, such as printing, such as photography—he is trying to say that the message is the medium. That is to say, you are influenced by television not so much by the advertising and all the goop that comes across on it, but by the fact of being in touch with the world through this particular electronic system with all its peculiarities. That’s a very interesting idea, and he’s put up an argument for it, but I’m not convinced that his argument is quite solid.
But I want to go into this question because, obviously, you would not hear any music (except you had an orchestra in your room) were it not for your radio or your phonograph. And, as a matter of fact, even if you had an orchestra in your room, you wouldn’t get them to produce any music without those instruments. Now, let me ask the question in another way: what is the relationship between the piano and what you play on it?
Any? You can play anything practically on a piano. And the structure of the piano doesn’t make any difference.
And yet, without it, you couldn’t play. So we’ve never seen anybody thinking without a brain. So what is the relationship between?
Well, again, you see, it’s rather like warp and woof. The warp goes one way and the woof goes the other. But by the interlocking of the two, you get something.