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People say, “Well, but you don’t go ’round with the purple shadow on you, do you?” What do you mean? You think that a shadow is brown because you haven’t ever looked at a shadow. You don’t realize that shadows are absolutely vibrant with light. |
We’ll go more into that later, when we come to this number seven. But there it is, you see? The world that we see (or think we see) is actually not the world at all, but is a selection of things that are in the world, a selection governed by certain symbolic processes—what a man ought to look like, what a woman ought to look like. |
And we try, ourselves, to dress and to behave in such a way as to live up to the symbolic requirements that are expected of us. So then, we think that’s a certain kind of work that is worthy of being done. And you ought to be tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief—or whatever it is—and you ought to fit into one of these roles. |
Of course, there are innumerable things one might do. Infinite. But we we like to get classified. |
We want to know whether you’re Republican or whether you’re a Democrat, whether you belong to the left wing or to the right wing, whether you are a Christian, a Jew, Baptist, Methodist, whether you are a Mohammedan, or what you are—just so long as we can get you put into a compartment. That is to say, into a symbolic classification. Now, what is the reason for that? |
Well, this kind of consciousness, here, is based on a very peculiar specialization of the human brain, which we call in everyday life conscious attention. That is the capacity to focus or concentrate awareness upon what we call any one thing at a time. It’s as if, in other words, conscious attention where a spotlight, and that the rest of awareness were a floodlight. |
In other words, every nerve end in your body is receiving input all the time; is in this sense energized, is aware of everything that comes into its periphery. So you are taking in the totality of your surroundings, but conscious attention is flipping from point to point to point to point to point, like this, and is making sense out of what it sees by adding it up with memory. It’s an immense advantage from some points of view to be able to have this faculty, because it does the same sort of thing for the human organism that radar does for a ship. |
That is to say, the function of radar is to scan the surroundings of the ship and watch out for unexpected changes in the environment. And radar is a scanning process. In other words, it is a beam that goes out and bounces against things and feeds back the bounce to the screen. |
So, in exactly the same way, consciousness (or conscious attention) is always scanning the environment and watching out for new eventualities that might be threatening or that might present favorable opportunities for some sort of advancement. Now, conscious attention has to be programmed as to what to attend to. What is important to look out for? |
So that we say to baby, when we’re teaching it language, “Watch out for the cars on the street. Watch out for that dog. Watch out for this. |
Watch out for that.” This is programing the baby’s radar. But we, as a human community, have put so much importance and so much psychic investment into our radar that we believe ourselves to be that. We identify the self with the radar, and not with the rest. |
So that we get this sort of a situation: when I say, “I do this. I walk, I talk, I think, I run, I hit.” But other things—such as the beating of the heart, the breathing of the lungs, the functioning of the glands, the constellation of the shapes of the bones—are all defined not as think anything I do, but as something that happens to me. Just in the same way, when it rains, it happens to me. |
I don’t rain. But I do walk. And so, in other words, what has happened here is that we have identified ourselves with the point of origination of conscious attention, and with the point of voluntary control. |
That’s me. Anything else happens to me. So, in this way, we have disowned most of ourselves. |
It’s not me. The body you have is merely a vehicle that you go around in, like an automobile. So if I would say to some young woman, “Gee, you’re beautiful,” she might well reply (if she were highly influenced by our culture), “Oh, you’re so like a man. |
All you think about is bodies. I may be beautiful, but I got my body from my parents. And I want to be admired for myself and not for my chassis.” See, she’s a poor little chauffeur. |
That’s how she defines herself. She’s disowned herself. She disowned her body and said, “It was given to me by my parents. |
I’m not responsible for it.” Or a child, in rage, can say to its parents, “I never asked to be born! It was you who brought me into this world.” And that child doesn’t know that when the father was going after the mama, and there was just an evil gleam in his eye—that evil gleam in your father’s eye was you. Just as it was you that was the little spermatozoan that made it. |
It was you that was that fetus. Just as, if your heart is you, all that was you, too. But, you see, this waking consciousness, symbolic consciousness, ignores that altogether. |
Because it sets limits (and rather arbitrary limits) to what you are. You are just that voluntary center. You are that beam of consciousness that sweeps over the environment and sees things in series, one after another. |
Especially if you use a language which uses an alphabet. Alphabets spell everything out one after another. And you see, in other words, these sort of words strung together into sentences which build up meanings. |
Whereas, on the other hand, if you work in terms of an ideographic language, although it’s true that an ideograph has parts like words do, the parts of a word always follow each other in this direction, whereas the parts of an ideograph may go in an entirely different direction. See? This, which is the tao in Chinese. |
“I take it in all at once.” I need a sentence to translate that word in English. But it’s more of a picture than it is like ordinary words. And as you grasp all the elements of the picture simultaneously, you see the form altogether at once. |
That is nearer to the way nature exists. Things in nature exist all together at once. Everything’s happening all together everywhere all at once. |
You know? And we say, well, in words, it won’t stop for you to describe it. It’d take too long. |
By the time you describe it, it’s all different. So, we do, you see—luckily for us—have an aspect of our organism which is paying attention to all the things we don’t notice. This is how you can walk without stumbling, how you can drive a car downtown and at the same time carry on a conversation with a friend. |
Because it is your subconscious, as it were (or whatever you call it), that is taking care of the driving, and is watching out for the red and green lights and for the other cars while your consciousness is preoccupied with the conversation. So, however, in a culture where the value of spotlight consciousness is exalted, and that is you, then do you see: you have an exceedingly great need for state number two. For torpor. |
Because the spotlight is so bright, and you can have too much of it so fast. And also, if you identify yourself with that only, you identify yourself with the troubleshooting aspect of your organism, and you become relatively unaware of the amazingly harmonious and happy states of your organism that are going on all the time. And in times you see certain kinds of cultures, certain epochs in history, people emphasize that you’ve always got to be on the watch. |
And they regard it as very simple to relax into the beautiful, wonderful processes that are going on in us that are harmonious constantly. See, to enjoy breathing: that’s a silly thing to do. Most people would say, “What? |
Enjoy breathing? What’s that going to achieve?” So this is the complete identification of man with his troubleshooter. Just got to be on the watch. |
Now, the only difficulty about this is that, when you manage to protect yourself so successfully against all the powers of darkness, you reach a point where you become the kind of creature that’s no longer worth protecting. It’s the same sort of thing that happens that, if to defeat the Nazis you have to become Nazis, what was the point of the fight? If to defeat the Gestapo and the Secret Service and the red Chinese and all that plot we have to have a secret police ourselves, who are going to be just as bad as theirs, what is gained? |
What are you protecting? See? The biggest farce of all is this: that if you want to know the real lowdown on the next war, join the Air Force and be safe. |
Because the only people who are really going to be protected are the guards. You know, you’ll either be way up there, or else you’ll be in great vast basements in Nevada, where they’ve built under-mountain airports with all sorts of oxygen tanks and supplies and things that will last forever—because what a farce the whole thing has become. The original idea of guards and soldiers was to protect the women and the children. |
Now what we do is: we have the women and children bombed out of existence in the cities, whereas the guards are guarded. So all guarding eventually becomes guarding of guards. It’s circles of defense protecting circles of defense. |
And in this way, mammals turn into mollusks. A mammal is so constructed, you see, that the hard stuff is on the inside and the soft stuff on the outside. A mollusk is the other way around, with the hard stuff on the outside and the soft stuff on the inside. |
Well, nature favors a bit mammals over mollusks, because a mammal is more sensitive, more responsive. You see, a mollusk—you go donk on it and it doesn’t feel anything, whereas a mammal is really pliable. Which is why, of course, in military tactics we abandoned armor. |
The knight in armor was completely helpless once he was unhorsed. Because he wore this armor, but he depended upon the forward rush of the horse and his lance to just blow through everything. But once you manage to unhorse him, he was a clumsiest thing. |
He was like a lobster. And all you had to do was to knock him down and crack open his shell with a can opener. So increased mobility was found to be more effective. |
So, now, this watch business. Watch—God always be watching you see? As I say, it creates, it protects, it encourages a style of life which eventually is not worth living because it is like being the great dictator. |
It is like trying to be God. If you are the great dictator and you’re in charge of everything, you should read a Hindu book called the Arthaśāstra. This deals with advice to a man who is a chakravarty—that means a “turner of the wheel;” or we would say a big wheel—who is the supreme ruler. |
And it tells him, first of all, that he mustn’t trust anyone. No friends for you, my boy! No intimacies. |
Keep your own counsel. And especially watch out for women. They have a way of worming secrets out of you for their favors, which you want so much. |
So don’t ever get too close to a woman. You can have concubines and prostitutes and everything like that to satisfy your physical needs, but don’t fall in love. And trust no one. |
Then arrange it so that everybody around you mistrusts everyone else. You set up what’s called a kind of negative mandala. A mandala is a circle of power. |
You so arrange it that your immediate ministers are at odds with their subordinates. Why? Because if your immediate ministers do anything to betray you, their subordinates (who want to occupy the superior position) will sneak on them to you. |
Then you’ll knock off the grand vizier and put someone in his place—because he is fool enough to want to get up there. But still. Then, outside that rank, you have another rank of people at odds with those. |
And so all the way down. Divide and rule. Then you live at the center yourself, and you have a secret passage connecting your inmost center with somewhere down the river where you’ve got a boat waiting in case anything goes wrong. |
And on the way out there’s a stone which you can remove. And when you remove this keystone as you escape through your underground passage, the entire palace will collapse and kill everyone in it. It gives you architectural instructions how to do this. |
Then, of course, you have to have poison testers for your food. Eat nothing until someone else has eaten it and see if they drop dead. And then you have to have guards standing beside you, always, day and night. |
But there are other guards. secretive, behind panels in the wall, who are watching the guards guarding you. And so you can’t really ever sleep except with one eye open. |
You can never be like an ordinary inconspicuous individual and take a carefree walk in the park. Because you have got to be in control 24 hours a day. So, do you see how big brother—this is a Hindu version of big brother—is the greatest prisoner of all? |
He is the captive of his own survival system. He can never go this way. He’d find it very difficult, too, to go this way. |
He has to be all the time playing God, playing the personal autocratic monarch of the universe. Now, you may think this very courageous, and so on. But in the end, the game isn’t worth the candle. |
It has to fall apart. So always watch that what you fight for is worth fighting for, and that it’s something other than fighting for fighting for. Because otherwise you start fighting for fighting for fighting for fighting for fighting for fighting for. |
So these, then, in sum, are the advantages and limits of waking consciousness: that it is a version of the world where what is important is what is valuable for survival; where we live for a future where we live always watchful for trouble. Because death is the thing most of all to be avoided. But this is a form of life which is always in danger of becoming not worth living, and which totally ignores a whole world of experience going on all the time around us which is magical, gorgeous, and far surpassing in depth and wonder most of the things which ordinary waking consciousness people call pleasures. |
Yesterday afternoon I was working mainly on the contrast between the normal state of waking conscious attention—which was this one, number three—and what you might call the generalized awareness of the human organism. And I was using the metaphor of conscious attention as a spotlight, and the generalized awareness of the organism as a floodlight, and showing how, by identifying ourselves with the spotlight operation of consciousness and with the voluntary neuromuscular system, we attain to a very partial conception of ourselves and a very partial and symbolic view of the world. That is to say, we see what we learn to notice, and we screen out everything else. |
We really don’t notice anything that we don’t also have a name for. And children are constantly asking, when they’re learning to talk, “What is this?” and “What is that?” And you’ll notice that children very often point to things for which we don’t have any names, and they want to know what it is. For example, we don’t—like some of the American Indians—have a name for dry space. |
Nor do we have a name for the inside surface of a cylinder. There may be a mathematical term for it, but in ordinary speech the inside surface of the cylinder doesn’t have a name for it—except a long phrase “the inside surface of a cylinder.” Nor, for example, do we see any connection between having six toes and pushing aside the branches of a bush to get through. But in an American Indian language, those are the same ideas. |
It’s all based on the idea of vee. You vee the branches to get through, and as to your foot, you have a sixth one veeing off at the edge. You see? |
Now, what you notice, the way the world seems to you, the way its logical connections seem to you, depend on whether you have words for it or whether you have symbols for it. So then, what happens is: as a result of concentrating on,or of using—shall I say, overusing, over-exercising the faculty for conscious attention—we come to have a sensation of our own existence as beings definitively separate from the outside world (the world beyond the skin) and from most of what goes on in our own bodies. And this state of affairs we could call alienation when this state of affairs exists all by itself. |
But it is not necessary for that state of affairs to exist all by itself. The spotlight consciousness can be supplemented by increasing use of the floodlight consciousness, so that it becomes balanced. We assume that the baby, before it has learned conscious attention and before it has learned any words, is all the time using floodlight consciousness—with a little bit of spotlight—and therefore would feel, as Freud supposed, oceanic—that is to say: at one with its surroundings. |
When, later, words are used and it is taught to be itself and to construct the outside world as society constructs it and conceives it, then the baby develops a sense of having a separate ego. And this development is brought about by means of a stratagem which gives the infant a great deal of confusion. Because since the baby is given a sense of identity by parents and teachers and relatives and other children, it is unable to resist the pressure put upon it by the social group. |
The pressure of a group, even upon an adult, is enormously powerful. Much more so on a child. So the odd thing is that, by the commanding pressure of this group, the child is informed that it is free. |
That is to say, that it is an independent agent and an originator of actions for which this separate identity is to be held responsible. And in that, you see, there is a weird gimmick. Because the baby is told that it must be free. |
You are ordered to be free—that is to say, you are required to do actions which will be acceptable only if you do them voluntarily. And this basic contradiction that underlies our sensation of personal existence is the result why most people are confused and why there is a nagging sense of frustration underlying all civilized human existence: because you are trying to solve a self-contradictory and therefore insoluble problem—how to be responsible. You see, the word “responsible” carries its own contradiction. |
It carries freedom. You are able freely to decide upon your own actions. But you must be responsible. |
You must do what you’re told. So that paradox creates, then, the sense of the separate ego, which is (if anything is a hallucination) a hallucination, because it does not correspond to any kind of scientific facts whatsoever. The separate organism—although separate, although having a clear outline and identity in that sense, and although every human character is unique and different from all others—nevertheless, every organism goeswith its environment inseparably. |
And the behavior of organism-environment is a single field of behavior. These are the facts as they are seen by physicists, biologists, and ecologists. But our experience, our sensation of our own existence, is not in accord with the facts. |
So what it seems necessary for us to do is not, as it were, to try to get rid of the sense of having a separate ego. You can’t do that. You can’t wash off blood with blood. |
And if you try to get rid of it, you actually intensify the hallucination that it exists as a real thing. But the ego exists in the same way as the equator. That is to say, it is a social institution, an imaginary boundary, which has a certain convenience to it. |
But when you start mistaking social institutions for physical processes, you are under a hallucination. So, then, could we possibly go to a state of consciousness in which, without giving up the spotlight—that is to say, the faculty for conscious attention and for constructing symbolic worlds by selection among our sense impressions—could we do that not sort of all by itself in a vacuum, but against the background of more generalized awareness? Because, after all, every particular activity, every tracing out of details (as I pointed out yesterday), requires a background. |
So the background of ordinary attentive consciousness (looking at) is generalized awareness, and the more you become aware of generalized awareness, the more you realize that you and the external world—right out to the furthest known galaxies—are a single process. And so, when this begins to appear, one moves into state number four, which I’ve called sensory awareness. Now, beyond that, you can very simply get into a state of consciousness where your mind seems to be all over you. |
Where, instead of feeling that you are looking at things, you feel rather that you are becoming them. And the whole external world comes on, one could only say, in a very different way from the usual. The reason why this can happen is, of course, that all that we feel about the external world is in fact a state of our own bodies. |
What you are seeing now in front of you is how it feels inside your head in the optical nervous centers. Your brain, and all that goes with it, is translating whatever there is in the outside world into states of itself—called color, shape, weight, texture, and so on. So all that you see is you—really, physically. |
But also, one must add to this that one of the things in the external world is you. So you are both outside and inside. You are something in nature, but all that you know of nature is you. |
And you would have to take these two things into consideration simultaneously. So sometimes it might feel as if everything you see is inside your skull. And the next moment, it might feel that your skull was in the middle of everything. |
And then, the next moment, everything is inside you, and then you are in the middle of everything, you see? A sort of capping process, like this. So, in this state you find that you less and less discriminate between what is important to be looked at and what is not important to be looked at. |
In order to enter this state, the first thing that is necessary is to slow down. To suspend judgment on what you ought or ought not to be doing. And here I would say, then, that I’m describing the initial stage of a process of meditation. |
And in talking in general about meditation, it is absolutely essential to understand that one cannot meditate correctly if you do it as a preparatory exercise for something else. Meditation is not self-improvement. Do not enter into it under any such delusions. |
There is no one to be improved. Meditation is a form of enjoyment. It’s a way of digging the universe, if I may put it so slangly. |
Meditation is not meditating on anything. This always bothers Orientals. When somebody says, “Well, while we do this or that, we meditate.” Well, a Westerner always says, “What do you meditate on?” An Oriental can’t understand that. |
You don’t meditate on anything! Meditation isn’t about anything. It isn’t like thinking about. |
It’s simply a clarification of consciousness, and can be about anything or nothing. And so to enter the state of mind—which is called dhyāna; which, when translated into Japanese, becomes Zen (Dhyāna is a yoga word. )—the first thing that’s necessary is, then, to slow down and to abandon notions of what it is important to do and what it’s not important to do. |
And instead of closing your eyes, keep them open. Keep your ears open. Keep all senses open. |
But don’t program them. That is to say: don’t tell them what they’re supposed to look at. Let them simply fall upon, or let everything that is there to be heard or seen arrive, by itself. |
And let the senses work by themselves. That is to say, let your eyes see whatever they want to see, let your ears hear whatever they want to hear, let your nose smell whatever it wants to smell, and let your sense of touch feel whatever it wants to touch. And, in general, let your mind do whatever it wants to do. |
Of course, as a matter of habit, the mind tends to be incessantly chattering. Words set up constant circuits, and one’s skull is full of voices. They’re not always your voice. |
Your mother’s voice, your father’s voice, your aunt Matilda’s voice, your teacher’s voice is still talking to you when you think. And if you listen very carefully to your thoughts, you will hear other people in your head—because, you see, you are not you. You are an amazing collection of what George Herbert Mead called the interiorized others. |
And all this chorus of voices is constantly directing your life and propagandizing you. You have now to tell them to shut up, and try to let thinking—that is to say, interior talking—stop. Now, you can’t force it to shut up. |
And that is why one of the classical aids to meditation is concentration: to find something to focus the attention on so that the chattering will cease. And it should be something interesting. Something that is not interesting in the sense that you can think a lot of ideas about it, but something which is enormously fascinating for its purely sensuous aspects. |
The female form is not too appropriate for this purpose, nor the male form for women, if they find that very fascinating, because it has so much social junk attached to it. So many associations. So one inclines to choose something like jewelry, or a crystal, or a flower, or a purely abstract play of light patterns, or something like that, as what is called a support for contemplation. |
Something which you don’t need to think about, but which you can look at enrapt. And as you acquire this way of becoming wordlessly interested and fascinated with any focal point of consciousness, you will begin to see (as your eyes move) that the whole world is like that. That, for example, you become aware of the myriads of colors playing around on the floor. |
This isn’t a question of trying to see how many things you can notice. You know, a game that children play is that a tray of assorted objects is displayed before them for one minute, and then covered. And you write down how many things you saw on the tray. |
It’s not like that at all. Because on any given tray there are infinitely many things, and you could never count them all out. It isn’t the point of how many things can you see. |
The point is like having a clear window to look through instead of a dirty one. So that the whole of the sensorium—that is to say, everything seen, heard, tasted, touched, and smelled—becomes much clearer. And as you learn not to think about it, it becomes much richer than it is when you think about it. |
And so everything starts to be more real, more alive, more glowing, and you suspend also judgments about things—what is good or what is bad—and in doing this, you introduce yourself to a fascinating world. That is why some Indian yogis practice what is called mauna, which is silence. They may be silent (some have) for ten years. |
Some or all their lives. Because after you have practiced silence for a month, you get silence in your head as well. Now, there are dangers to being a mauni. |
When you see the clouds, you become the cloud. And if you are wandering down a street where there’s a riot going on, you’re liable to join the riot. Because that’s what’s happening. |
See, you just go with it. So one doesn’t enter into mauna without a guru and without some kind of a discipline which protects you; as it were, builds a protective wall around your experiment just in the same way as a bird builds a protective wall, the shell, ’round the young chick before it’s ready to hatch. So, in the ordinary way, therefore, you can’t expect a Western person negotiating a high civilization to be a mauni, or to be silent all the time. |
But for the sanity of any Western person involved in this kind of civilization, it is very important for him indeed to be silent some of the time. And I mean silent inside the head. Just as you must stop talking occasionally if you want to hear what anybody else has to say. |
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