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So what you’ve got, then, are spectra of different kinds. See, when you dial, and you move the dial, what you’re doing is: you’re changing the wavelength of your radio. That is to say, you are moving from one end of the spectrum of waves slowly to the other.
So the spectrum of radio meshes with another spectrum which is being used in the production of music. As a matter of fact, the production of music is an interlocking of many spectra. But we won’t go into that because the emotional spectra are involved.
Spectra of speed, of dexterity, of harmonics, all kinds of things go into this. So you get the picture of the world as an enormous web where spectra mesh with spectra of all kinds. And they’re all mutually interdependent.
And through them, it all hangs together. And the peculiar fact of these spectra is that they come into being together, almost. The world is not—you don’t see things appearing in nature, except with certain insects and birds that actually practice weaving.
But you don’t see plants and trees being exactly woven. What seems to happen more than that is that warp and woof come into being together at the same time in rather the same way that back and front necessarily come into being together at the same time. Or head and tail: you don’t see a creature born as a head and then later developing a neck, a trunk, feet, and tail.
It just doesn’t work that way. It comes in together, head and tail. Even the spermatozoan has a head and a tail.
So then, what I want to go into, of course, is the spectrum of consciousness and its many transformations. The huge range of the spectrum is extraordinarily fascinating. So then, let me first be sure that we are quite clear about this physical conception of the world.
You see, you can also call these spectra (if you want to) dimensions. And dimensions is a very useful idea. You can see that you can’t have a physical existence in terms of point, line, surface.
Each of those is a dimension. It’s not till you get the so-called third dimension—although it should correctly be called the fourth, and time the fifth—it’s not till you get the so-called third dimension that anything is physically manifested. Then you’re there.
Now, you could say these dimensions are quite different from each other. The surface is a very different thing from a line, as is a line from a point. But somehow they all go with each other in a way that we don’t normally think of as a kind of… in other words, dimensions don’t seem to bear the same sort of relationship to each other as do opposites—at least not in our ordinary thinking.
We think that opposites are mutually exclusive, and that you can’t have something that is hot and cold at the same time. It’s either hot or cold. But dimensions are not mutually exclusive.
Dimensions are always dimensions of the same field or the same thing. And so, then, you have to think, therefore, of what we’ve hitherto called the mental and the physical, the spiritual and the material, as dimensions of the same thing: dimensions of patterning, dimensions of energy. So then, you’ve got this fantastic universe with all these interlocking spectra and dimensions.
And this, of course, is the real harp that the angels play. When they talk about you going to heaven and playing the harp, what are you doing? You’ve got a spectrum of strings, you see?
And from that, though, when you play the harp, you don’t play all the strings at once. That’d be just chaos. Like when you play the piano: you just don’t take your elbows like this and slam the whole thing down.
You select. So, throughout nature, all these spectra that are interlocked are being selected from. That is why the eyes select only a narrow band of the spectrum of light, why the ears select a narrow band only of the spectrum of sound.
And further than that, by the use of attention we screen out all sorts of things we don’t want to notice. Our senses are further selective, you see? Influenced by thought.
And so this is analogous to plucking the strings of a harp, where you make choices as to which strings you will pluck. So when the angels play their harp, the music is everything you see. So that’s the real meaning of what you do in heaven when you go and play the harp: you become one with God and you create the universe, you see?
That’s the real me. Well, now, what about the spectrum of consciousness? I’m going to designate—I couldn’t avoid it; I tried to, but I couldn’t—a sevenfold spectrum.
That number seven is awkward. Every kind of phony occultist is hung up on seven. And I wanted to get away from that, but I somehow couldn’t manage it.
So let’s take it like this: we’re going, you see, from one end, the most dull dimension of consciousness (or band of consciousness), and landing up at the other end at the brightest. So you begin with number one, which is sleep. And, of course, there are two kinds of sleep: dreamless and dreaming.
Number two is torpor, as in the state of going to sleep or under the influence of alcohol: you feel no pain at all, or you’re sort of anesthetized and your senses are dulled and blurred, and you don’t feel like being very active. Three: waking consciousness—only, I have to qualify this, because the others are awake, too. But I mean our normal everyday consciousness, which we’re going to call symbolic.
And I’ll explain why as we go through these in detail. Number four: sensory consciousness. Number five: cellular.
Number six: molecular. And number seven: we’ll just give the name “light” to it. Now, I want to make it perfectly clear that these names that I have used are not claiming to be exact scientific names.
They are simply suggestive. We do not yet have a science of consciousness—in the Western sense of science; it doesn’t exist. And that’s one of the things we shall eventually have to do.
So these names are rather symbolic names than exactly scientific names, and you must keep that in mind. Now, it’s rather interesting that this particular spectrum should best be drawn not on the usual way a spectrum is drawn, which is simply a band, but it should be drawn as a circle of which each of these is, as it were, a cut in the pie. So that, beyond here, is, again, sleep—deep sleep, dreamless sleep—because, you know, the Hindus have a way of classifying the states of consciousness, which isn’t quite the same as this.
They start out with, number one, this one: the waking state. Then they take number two, the dreaming state. Number three, the dreamless state.
And number four, this one, which is called turiya, simply, which means “the fourth,” and which cannot be described. And they would say that, when you go to bed at night, you sink first into the dreaming state. Then you go down into what they call sushukti, the dreamless state, and you may get back into the fourth.
And that is why sleep refreshes you, because you, as an individual, are withdrawn into the center of the universe, into the Ātman or the Brahman, the primordial reality—the ground of being, to use Tillich’s phrase, which he got from Jakob Böhme. And so that’s why you are refreshed every night. That’s how you—there, you know who you are, really deep in.
Because, as the Hindus teach, everybody is really it—that is to say, the Godhead—playing at being, dreaming at being, whoever is your particular personality. And then it’s only at night, then, when you sleep, that you go back again to being the undivided one and only single essence of the universe. Only, when you wake up, you forget about it.
Why? Because in the primordial state there’s nothing to remember. There’s no time.
And you have to have time working for memory to work. So imagine, then, this thing as a circle where, say, at the top of the circle you have number seven. Brilliant.
And then the colors of consciousness going right ’round and meeting again here. here and here. So you kind of have black and white next to each other at the top, if we put this in terms of color.
Then all the other colors connecting them all the way ’round. Because, of course, you see, black and white—as I will show you later on in the seminar—are astonishingly creative. You can do everything with black and white.
Black and white really contain all color. And this is why the Chinese theory of the universe is based on the opposition of the yang and the yin, the positive and negative. The names yang and yin are derived, respectively, from the north and the south sides of a mountain.
This is the primordial image. The yang is the south side of the mountain, which is bright. The yin is the north side of the mountain, which is the shadow.
Now, nobody ever saw a one-sided mountain; there can’t be such a thing. So, in the same way, you cannot have a yang without yin. The symbol of the yang-yin you know well.
I don’t even need to draw it. The two interlocked commas: one black, one white. And each with the opposite color as its eye, so that they look like two fishes chasing each other.
This is a very profound symbol because the idea which goes with it is this: that yang and yin are a wave process where the yin aspect is the crest and the yang aspect is the trough. And likewise, in the same way as you can’t have a one-sided hill, you can’t have half a wave. Half a wave doesn’t exist anywhere in nature.
There are no half waves of light, no half waves of sound. There are always complete waves or none, because you cannot have the crest without the trough and you can’t have the trough without the crest. It just won’t work.
Now, however, there is a pulse in this. There is a point where the yang force reaches an ascendancy and then begins to drop into the yin, where the yin force reaches an ascendancy and begins to rise into the yang. And the Chinese are always thinking about this in relation to tendencies in natural and human affairs, where, for example, the yang force of a storm will reach a peak point where it must drop over into the yin force of calm.
The whole book of changes—called the I Ching—is based on this. The I Ching is a marvelous play with yang and yin, you see. Just let me say this about it in parenthesis: when you want to make a decision, and you’ve got all the facts in—at least all the facts you have got time to collect, because you could go on collecting facts about any decision forever.
But the time comes when you have to make it. And you say, “Now I’ve got all the facts, and they really don’t help me to decide. Because I might go one way and I might go the other.
Let’s flip a coin.” And everybody’s always doing that. But, you see, a coin only gives you two possibilities; two answers. Either the thing answers yes or no.
So the Chinese have a coin, as it were, to flip which gives you 64 possibilities. And you take one of them. And it doesn’t give you a yes or no answer, it gives you a kind of thing like a Rorschach blot—really, it doesn’t look like a Rorschach blob, but that’s what it is—into which you read your situation and make up your mind accordingly.
And this is done, you see, by combining the yang and the yin in a complex pattern. The I Ching consists of hexagrams, and they are composed of two kinds of lines: an unbroken line, like this, is a yang (or positive) line, and a broken line, like this, is a yin (or negative) line. Then there you’ve got them.
Now, there are—if you take a figure with three lines (which we’ll call a trigram, see? ), there are eight ways of making such a trigram with yang and yin lines. This one happens to mean fire—no, water.
No, fire. Excuse me. Fire.
Two positive and one negative in the middle. Now, if you’ve got eight trigrams, there’s a possibility of making out of those eight trigrams 64 hexagrams. So this one would be water, and you would get one which was fire and water together.
See? So to each of those the book of changes attaches an oracular remark. And if you look up the book, when you’ve, by a certain process, got your hexagram, it gives you some light on your decision and the direction it should take by bringing it out of you by its remarks in the same way as a Rorschach blot brings out your psychological disposition.
So that’s 64 ways of tossing a coin. If you had a 64-sided coin, you could do it that way. If you could make such a thing.
You probably could, but it’d be spherical. So from yang and yin, from the the extremes of polarity—because, you see, light is as intensely alive as you can get. But if you go too far into light, it’ll burn you up and you’ll get darkness.
People don’t know. They don’t realize that the farthest you can get into darkness, it’ll start getting bright. Because you can’t have darkness without light any more than you can have light without darkness.
So when we were babies, we were never told this—and it’s a secret—that light and dark go together. It is the only real secret there is. Black and white.
But we’ve forgotten the secret, because with black and white we’re playing another game which is called: uh-oh, black might win! See, that’s what makes everything a thrill. If you knew you would always win in any situation, it would be just a pushover and life would suddenly cease to have any interest whatsoever.
You would be—I mean, imagine yourselves in total control of everything that happens; a kind of Jehovah type. You would be bored to death! Everything would be just what—no surprises, nothing.
You see, when, in a game—you’re playing a game and the outcome of the game becomes known: supposing in the course of bridge, the four players all suddenly realize together that one of them has all the cards, it will take the tricks, what do they do? They don’t play the game. They cancel it and begin again.
Shuffle the pack. When, in chess, two pundits are sitting there, meditating, and one of them suddenly says, “Well, it’s obvious. In 53 moves you’re going to win,” they cancel the game.
So, in the same way, an omniscient God who knew the whole future would cancel the universe and say: “Think up another!” So it is fundamental to the game of black and white that it must seem that black will win and eat up white. That, in other words, nonexistence will triumph over existence. Or rather, let me put it this way: non-being will triumph over being.
Because the secret is that existence is being and non-being, oscillating. So that for every time you get being you get non-being, just as everything is vibration. And these spectra of vibration—light is vibration.
If I sit next to a girl at the movies and I want to make flirtations with her, and I put my hand on her knee and I leave it there, she’ll cease to notice it. But if I gently pat her knee, she’ll know I’m there all the time, because I go on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off. And that is energy, you see?
That’s something happening. And so everything is on-off. Only, sometimes on-off happens so fast that you don’t notice the off.
For example, light is a pulsation. But all light seems to be constant. And so we don’t notice the off because our retina is retaining the image of on while the off is happening in the light.
So we don’t notice the off—except if you get an arc light, you can notice a little flicker to it. And that’s why they don’t allow arc lights in sawmills, because sometimes the flickering of the arc light can synchronize with the movement of the teeth on the saw in such a way that the saw seems to be still when it’s actually moving, and people get into very serious accidents that way. But everything is on-off.
Now then, sometimes, you see, we don’t notice the off. But at other times we don’t notice the on. And that is when we’re asleep—when, in other words (or when we’re dead), when the trough, the off section, takes a long spin.
Because, you see, there are big vibrations and little vibrations. Some vibrations happen so fast that we can’t measure them. Others happen so slowly that it takes a century.
It may take a million years for a single swoop of the curve that goes down or that makes the up-crest of the wave. You see, when you look at the wave pattern, you must realize that the crest is measured from the top to the middle of each trough, and that the trough is measured from the top of each crest to the bottom of the trough. They overlap.
So if you can argue it’s all trough, you can argue it’s all crest. It’s a funny world. So the argument that it’s all trough, and that maybe just a little bit of crest, about poinnng, like that—poinnng—these are the people who say we are flashes in an eternal darkness.
This is a pessimistic point of view. Then there are the people who say there really is no death at all. Death is just an illusion that seems to happen.
This is the optimistic point of view. And the optimistic point of view is essential to the pessimistic, as the pessimistic is essential to the optimistic. Because you wouldn’t know who you were, you see, if you didn’t have both points of view.
I’m not going to, see—and when I teach, I don’t try to persuade anybody. And everybody is at liberty to disagree, because I wouldn’t know what I was thinking unless there were people to disagree with me. So, in the same way: supposing you’re in a social scene like here in La Jolla.
There are nice people and there are not so nice people. There are various kinds of nice people, various kinds of not so nice people. There are, for example, nice people who belong to the country club set.
There are nice people who belong to the arty set. Nice people who belong to the social service set, and so on. And then there are nasty people who could variously be defined as the poor, the beatniks, the generally disrespectful people who live on the wrong side of the track or the wrong part of the hill or whatever it is, or the wrong town.
But the nice people boost and maintain their collective ego by talking about how dreadful the nasty people are, and the nasty people boost their collective ego by talking about what frightful bourgeois squares the nice people are. But neither group realizes that they have a symbiotic relationship just like bees and flowers. Only, whereas the bee-flower relationship is harmonious, the symbiosis of different social groups is disharmonious.
Because each group needs the other to know who it is. Because if you were the only kind of people that were, you wouldn’t know who you were. See, in a totally conformist society, someone sitting next to you is just like you.
There’s no point talking to him. Because you might just as well talk to yourself. In other words, really, truly, to be yourself, you need “other.” You don’t know what you mean by “self” unless you know what you mean by “other.” So this is how yang and yin, the polarities, generate everything and are absolutely essential to each other.
Now, the funny thing is this. If you belong to a certain group of saved or elected people, and you know you’re saved and elect because of the damned people outside—whether this is a social salvation, a spiritual salvation, or any kind of salvation you want to think of; financial salvation, whatever—when you realize that you only know who you are because of the, as it were, adversary or enemy or out-group, you start laughing. Because that’s very funny.
It’s the contrast from suddenly thinking, you know, “Wow! Those bastards outside!” and suddenly realizing that they are enabling you to take this pose of coming on tough, which you think is great. And you start laughing.
And this is why society, as we now know it, is afraid of this ever getting let out. This is really subversive. This is terrible subversive stuff.
I mean, all that Marxist [stuff] is just the same thing ass-backwards. It’s the collectivist idea of the state as opposed to the individualist idea of the state. But the individualists become collectivists through huge corporations.
Lenin said he would love to see these great corporations growing up, because it would be just so much easier for the state to take over. They’d have already provided the organization. But, you see, there is a tendency within our economy to become a collectivist economy just by progressing with its own whatever it’s doing, with its so-called free enterprise.
And there will be naturally, therefore, a tendency in a collective economy to fall apart because it all gets so boring, and stop everybody out on his own initiative again. This thing goes ’round and ’round. But the important thing is that, supposing you believe in a free enterprise economy: you must have—in order to maintain your solidarity, especially in a very great country—you must have an external enemy.
And if there wasn’t one, you’d have to invent one. Because it keeps everybody on their toes, it keeps us from slacking on the job, and saying, “We’ve got to beat those fellows!” And, “They’re terrible!” So we’ve got to be very serious about that, see? Wowee!
And, of course, you lose your sense of humor. When you get so serious, you don’t really know underneath that it’s a game. And you become a bircher on one extreme or a communist on the other.
So you have to keep—if you want to be a sane human being—you have to know right in the back of your head (right back here, what the Germans call a Hintergedanke, which is way the back of your mind), you have to see the point that enemies need each other. Cops and robbers. Where would the cops be for a job if there weren’t any robbers?
How would you know you were law-abiding if the weren’t criminals? It’s tricky. But it’s very dangerous teaching.
Very subversive, because you might think I would say, if I realized that, “Well, it simply doesn’t matter what kind of a person I am,” and do anything I want because evil is necessary to good. There’s no fun in that attitude because that simply says, “I won’t play.” Alright, if you want to sit by yourself under a tree and not play, I guess you could do that—provided you don’t interfere with our game. And if you come and interfere with our game and say, “Well, now, look here.
You people, you’re all wrong.” You know? “Because you think you ought to be good. But it doesn’t matter whether you’re good or not.” You see?
You mustn’t do that. Don’t interfere with a game in order to have this kind of knowledge. That’s why all this kind of knowledge has always been esoteric.
And in any esoteric school, people were tested first before they got in, in order to find out whether you were civilized. In other words, you can’t give powerful tools and powerful knowledge to people who aren’t civilized, and who have no humor, and who have no graciousness. That’s why it’s difficult when young people get hold of knowledge for which they’re not emotionally prepared.
And they are given full and total instruction on birth control when they’re four years old—it means nothing at all. Or it may mean something positively dangerous. But nowadays there’s no way of concealing these things.
I said it’s a secret, but in the world of science there are no secrets. So I don’t feel any compunction about talking about these things, because if I don’t, somebody else is going to. Because an awful lot of people know about it.
But that is the inside dope. if I may say so: that these extremes need each other and can’t manifest without each other. And the point is how to keep your head when you know that.
So, let’s have an intermission. Well, now, this morning I was dealing mainly with two key ideas, one of which was the physical universe as a system of inter-meshing spectra depending on each other and playing with each other in the same way as warp and woof in weaving. And I underline the notion that these spectra are different dimensions rather than components of the physical world.
And that, although I’m using the word “physical” here, I’m using it in the sense of its original meaning, “natural,” rather than the later meaning that has been attached to it, that is to say, “material” world, the world envisaged by analogy with ceramics. The material world considered as a world made out of stuff. You see, as we all know, stuff is supposed to be something inert and stupid which can’t do anything.
And therefore, in order that stuff may be found in intelligent shapes, it has to be informed by an external energy, an external intelligence, so as to be brought into shape. And this is the idea of the world based upon the analogy between creation and carpentry, or creation and ceramics, or creation and sculpture. Just in parentheses, good ceramicists and sculptors don’t treat their medium as if it were stupid.
The potter who is a good potter knows that there is life in clay, and that he has to respond to that life in order to do the work of pottery properly. But those who are not themselves artists don’t know this, and therefore the public has been bamboozled for centuries on the notion that patterns have to be composed of some sort of basic stuff. Now, I was trying to substitute for that sort of conception of the world the idea of interweaving spectra, which are different dimensions of energy, or of patterning.
And I used, advisedly, the verb (“patterning”) as distinct from the noun (“pattern”), because when you use nouns in combination with verbs, you obscure language. Watch out for this. This underlies many people’s misunderstanding of things: the differentiation of noun and verb.
It’s an entirely unnecessary differentiation, and it gives one the impression that wherever there is an action going on—that is to say, something appropriately described by a verb—there must be some other kind of thing than an action which is described by a noun. And to this is ascribed the origin of the action. So when you say there is thinking (because the verb has to have a subject which is a noun), someone says, “Well, who is thinking?” Obviously, there can’t be any thinking without a thinker, without a who who thinks.
And that is a question, a problem, that arises simply because it is a convention of our grammar that every verb has to have a subject which must always be a noun. So a noun stands for a thing, and a verb stands for an event. And we therefore suppose that events are caused by things.
But if you ask a person what he means by a thing, he will never be able to tell you. He will give you a series of synonyms such as “object,” “fact,” whatever. But all these are simply alternate words for “thing.” Then what do you mean by an event?