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So you must stop thinking in order to find out what there is to think about. If you talk all the time, you will have nothing to talk about except talking. If you think all the time, you will have nothing to think about except thinking.
And so you will exhaust yourself and come to a dead end, which is called psychosis. So, for health, it is very important to stop thinking—not always—so that you find that you get a non-thinking state as background to the thinking state. And this corresponds to floodlight awareness as background, or spotlight awareness.
In Zen Buddhism the non-thinking state is called munen. This is Japanese. Munen.
Mu: “no.” Nen: “thought.” It means “thought” and it also means “blocking.” Having a jerky mind, let’s call it that. So this state I’m describing is the state of munen, of no thought. But it doesn’t mean a kind of anti-intellectual attitude.
Hakuin, the 17th century master, writes in one of his poems—he uses the phrase “taking hold of the no-thought in the midst of thoughts.” So that means having a mind that is, in a way, like a mirror. Zhuang Zhou, the Chinese taoist, said, “The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing, it refuses nothing.
It receives but does not keep.” And so the poem says, “The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection. The water has no mind to retain the image.” So it’s a mind that has no attachments. Now, “attachment” is a word that has associations in English which doesn’t quite give the Buddhist feeling for the meaning of the word.
But the slang term that we now use, a “hang-up,” is the right translation for “attachment.” When you say a person’s all hung-up, or he has a particular hang-up, that is the Buddhist meaning of “attachment.” It means a mental fixation, or an emotional fixation, on some particular pattern of life. So to get rid of hang-ups one must first get rid of thinking. After you’ve got rid of it completely, and have thereby revived the background—the mirror, as it were; the mirror-mind—then you can go back to thinking, and you can think against the background perfectly comfortably and not get hung-up on thinking.
And so, in this way, you get an extraordinary feeling of life going on as a single process all the time, which doesn’t stick. You and it are all one, and it’s got all kinds of differentiations within it. So that it doesn’t become some sort of a formless blur, but it sort of flows like water.
As water has all the patterns in it—the network of sunlight, the ripples, so on—so, in the same way, the world has all this. But it constantly flows because there are no hang-ups. So then, the royal road to this state is giving up the sense of urgency that you ought to do something—something is required of you—and understand, for example, that looking at a rubber band on your fingers can be quite as important as anything else you can do.
In other words, being here at this moment and listening to the sound of my voice without paying the slightest attention to what it means can be as important as anything there is in the universe. Why not? Is the tree outside important?
It’s beautiful. Is it worth looking at? Why, certainly.
But it’s not achieving any great mission in life. It’s just being a tree. As Emerson said in his essay, I think, On Compensation: “These roses under my window are not concerned whether they are better than last year’s roses, or whether next year’s roses will be better than they.
There is simply the rose. It lives for today.” And that’s the point. When you learn the art of meditation in this way, you will see other people rushing around wildly like chickens with their heads cut off.
And they think they’re going somewhere, and they’re completely deluded. They’re there, and they don’t know it. That’s why they’re rushing around so wildly.
But you, by this means, can begin to learn that you are there, now. And the extraordinary thing, as you see the world in this way—especially as you see people in this way and from this point of view—you realize that people are valid natural processes. Just like trees and birds and clouds.
Now, do you ever criticize a cloud for being badly shaped? Did you ever see patterns in foam make an aesthetic mistake? Well, no, one just doesn’t.
There was once an 18th century classicist, one of those people who enjoyed formal gardens and Greek palaces, who criticized the stars for not being symmetrically arranged. But that would never occur to us today. We don’t want to see our stars in wretched geometrical patterns.
We love to see the scatter of them and the curious groupings through sky in a marvelous, irregular order. A marvelous, orderless order, you might call it. The funny thing about clouds and stars and mountains and all natural outlines is that they are beautiful, and we know that they have a quality which distinguishes them from being messes.
You know a mess when you see it. But these things don’t apparently make messes. So in a way, human beings don’t, either.
And when you see human life as something that is just the same kind of thing as the shape of a tree or a cloud or like that, you stop judging it. And you have to know that about yourself. And this is the beginning of everything.
This is the beginning of every kind of wisdom: to see that you really don’t have to go anywhere. You don’t have to get any better than you are, because with all your defects, your selfishness, your neuroses, your sicknesses, and everything—well, fish have neuroses and sicknesses and so on, and so do plants. You often see it in plants that have got bumps on them or some queer little diseases and so on.
And they all have those sort of troubles. That’s life. But when you realize that you’re an authentic projection of the universe, just as you are at this moment, then there’s nowhere to go.
There’s no need to do anything. And out of that peace comes energy. Real energy instead of phony energy, which is trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps—the usual kind of human energy, which gets progressively nowhere with more and more busyness.
Now, beyond this state there is going to follow another, which I have numbered five. I called it cellular awareness. And I must repeat the fact that I use this word, “cellular,” not in a strictly scientific way, but as a good way of describing the kind of awareness that it is: how it feels from the inside.
Because it is as if every cell in your body became alive. Now, you know your cells don’t talk English. But they are very, very subtly and highly organized things.
If you’ve ever seen a model of a living cell, you’ve seen the most fantastic object. And those cells are engaged in all sorts of activities. But they don’t structure the world the way you structure it, because they don’t use that language.
And so, as you get into cellular awareness, you begin to feel rather like the artist who paints in a pointillist fashion—that everything is dots; little tiny vortices. You become aware of the texture of things to an extraordinary degree. It’s almost as if the world had been photographed through a screen which put into the senses a feeling of intense detail; as if every one of your nerve ends was now detected in sending its separate message to the brain.
And so this makes the world look highly textured. There are no more such things as blank green or blank white spaces. All space is rich.
And that is what those painters are representing in doing spaces with dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit, dit of the brush, like this. And also, you will notice that certain kinds of painting—particularly, say, Persian miniatures—if you look at them, you will see the artist is painting the world as the Arabian Nights describe the secret garden into which Aladdin went, where all the trees were made of jewels, and where everything looked as precious as if it had been carved by a master carver. And they try with their art to give the impression that, the more you look into the background, you see, suddenly, that the background of a pillar—the painter hasn’t made it white, he’s put a design into it.
In white, but just a slightly different shade of white. Complex design. And you feel that within the design there is still another design.
And it has an infinitely carved, rich texture. This is why Oriental art, in general—you find this among the Chinese at a certain period. You find it constantly in India.
You find it in Persia. You find it in the Moorish work. And you find it, too, in early Celtic manuscripts, like the Book of Kells, the Lindisfarne Gospels, and so on.
This fascination with what seems to be a world of infinite detail. And this, of course, is the world of paradise. This is what all those angels and whatnot are about.
Now, from cellular consciousness, you can pass to what I would call—again, symbolically—molecular consciousness. Not that you are going to be aware of molecules; no. But it is as if, suddenly—this is the state which Buddhists (or part of the state) which the Buddhists call suchness.
It’s as if… it can be rather frightening, because everything becomes perfectly meaningless. People, everything that’s going on, is just jazz. Almost electronic jazz.
It is a dancing process of energy. And you feel sort of lost in it. Well, what’s supposed to happen?
I mean, well, what’s it all about? It’s just dancing energy. And you have to be careful here, because this is the danger point in the meditative process.
Because here you can suddenly get the vision of hell. And the vision of hell is that this world is a monstrous mockery, that it is meaningless in the worst sense of that word. It is just a gyration, a pointless gyration of particles—or of wavicles, or whatever—which is tormenting itself.
It keeps itself going on with a certain kind of hope in order that it may eventually destroy things. And then you see the horror of biology as the mutual eating society. What a ghastly conception it all is.
And everything is phony. People say they’re people, but they’re not. They’re just robots.
Everything is made of plastic or enamel tin. Everything is just buzz. That’s a danger, you see, here.
But if this happens to you and you get the feeling that everything is pointless, everything is just mechanical buzz, what you do is what an Arab does in a sandstorm: he knows there is no possibility of conquering the sandstorm, so he kneels down—sort of in a fetal position—and takes his wool banús and covers himself completely, and waits until the storm is over. If he gets covered by sand, it is usually porous enough to admit some air for breathing. Or in the same way as an ocean liner in a typhoon—they just turn off the engines and drift.
It’s the only thing to do. So, in the same way, if you ever get into this particular kind of psychic horrors, drift. Just let it be.
And it will resolve itself. And it’s important to go through that state, in a way; important to realize that you don’t know anything. You don’t know what it’s all about.
You don’t understand the universe. It’s all incomprehensible. Words and systems were just a way of whistling in the dark.
We all whistled in the dark together and agreed that we had the same whistle, and that was great, but we really don’t know anything. Anybody who poses as an authority about anything at all is just making an authoritative noise. And he may be able to make some remarkable demonstrations—for example, by interfering with diseases in various ways we can make people healthy for a time, until we can’t make them healthy anymore.
This may be a good thing. It may not be a good thing. It might be best not to interfere with nature, but simply to let human beings alone and regulate by a kind of inner, natural homeostasis their own population level, and just let it happen.
There is no way of proving conclusively that our way of dealing with these things is better than doing nothing. But life is, in a way, an experiment all the time. One’s whole existence, the very shape of one’s body, is just coming on.
You see? You’ve got to come on somehow. And so one way is this.
We all come on together, looking like each other and having certain common characteristics. Well, look at a snake’s skin. Every scale is rather like the other, and it’s all coming on together.
So you suddenly see that there is no particular reason why you should be this way rather than that; that everybody is putting on a good show, a big act. And if you’re not ready for that, if you’re not educated to the point where you can understand that situation, you may get very nervous. You say, “Well, everybody always wants to know: what am I supposed to do?” See, this is a common question: what am I supposed to do?
How am I supposed to feel? I want an authority. I want someone to convince me that the way I’m doing it is the right way.
But don’t you realize: whenever you accept authority, you accept it on your authority! You say, “I believe the Bible.” Why do you believe the Bible? Because it says Jesus says in the Bible that we should believe the Bible.
Yeah, but it’s your opinion that that is an opinion to be accepted. It’s on your own authority. You create the power of your own teacher.
And you create the power of your own government. That’s the saying: the people get what the government deserves. And if you don’t like it and you don’t overthrow it, well, then that’s your problem.
But always, you see, authority springs from you. So, also, does the way you define yourself. You accepted society and its suggestions—always rather tacitly, but you did.
So here, in this amazing moment of seeing the world as a big act, as a big buzz, as jazz, doing zzzuh-zzzuh-zzzuh-zzzuh; all vibration. And you see absolutely no compelling reason why it should be that way rather than any other way. Well, if you don’t panic, you see, then you get into the domain that Buddhists call suchness.
It is just as it is. Now, if it’s a big act, who’s doing it? Who is the actor?
What lies behind all this jazz? That’s the big question. And it is through asking that question that we move from six to seven: into the state that I called light.
Because when you become aware of energy jazzing this way and that way—and on top of this you have already, don’t forget, become aware that you and the outside world are a single energy system—then what is it? Do you realize, for example: I do not exist as “I” at all, unless there’s something else that’s “other.” And that immediately is the clue to the fact that “self” and “other” are polar. They go together.
Well, how did they go together? Alright, put it the other way around: what would you do if you were God? If you were the works, in other words?
If you were this whole capacity for patterning energy, what would you do? Well, you’d first of all have to draw the line somewhere and then proceed. You have to make a difference.
Because if something doesn’t make a difference, it doesn’t matter, does it? So if you want to make matter, you’ve got to make a difference. Well, if you take that along, and you try all the amazing differences that can be tried, and you differentiate this from that and so on and so forth, among all the possibilities of being God you will eventually arrive at what you’re doing now: to be just this sort of circumstance.
Because this will be one of the infinitely many things to do. With certain restrictions on you. Which, of course, you tacitly originated, because you wouldn’t know where you were without them.
And then you suddenly see with this astounding clarity that the energy may symbolize itself to you as a sensation of intense light. You see, understandings have a way of representing themselves to us in sensuous imagery. We say, when very happy, “I was walking on air.” “You could have knocked me down with a feather.” “He saw the light.” “Everything became clear.” “Are you transparent?” Now, these are not necessarily meant literally, but in intense cases of insight there is a literal sensory feeling corresponding to the insight.
And when something becomes utterly clear in a way that is emotionally and intellectually overwhelming, you are liable to have the feeling of intense light inside your head—or sometimes a feeling that everything looks transparent, as if it were glass, but it’s still there. You don’t actually see through it. You don’t see the pattern on the chair behind somebody’s head, but they look transparent because things have become clear.
And it has become, at this point, the light, shatteringly clear that everything is it—the light, the energy—coming on at you in different ways, and you are coming on at it, and it’s all one coming on. You can see that light is the basic component of black things. There is nowhere that isn’t light.
And if you can’t see it, you can hear it. It comes on at you in all kinds of disguises. So here, you see, it’s tabling, here it’s handing, here it’s revolving, it’s dancing.
All sorts of patterns. And you’re it. Now, as I said, this may clothe itself—this comprehension in the sensation of vivid light—as being the ultimate component of the… you might say the very inside stream of the nerve.
Reduce it all down to what it is fundamentally. That’s why, when you blow up the atom, you get this light: because it’s all locked in it. But then, simultaneously—you remember how I described yesterday the fellow who gets to the hub of the wheel and gets his peace there, then he gets energy, and then he goes out to the circumference again?
Well, then you see that there really is no difference (not fundamentally) between this state of illumination and what we call number three, or ordinary everyday consciousness. You suddenly realize that the way things are now, in the perfectly ordinary life, are the same thing as the light, which is sort of undifferentiated and overwhelmingly brilliant. The same energy that seems to you light, in that state—pure light—then you understand is just what you’re looking at.
That, sitting in this room, you are sitting bang in the middle of the beatific vision. Only, we were taught before then to sort of put down the world by saying, “Well, this is prosaic, ordinary, everyday life. And we’re sitting in a lecture room, and on these sort of funny chairs, which act as perches for the human body.” And, you know, having a lecture, so on.
on very ordinary. Matter of fact. And you see, from this point of view, there’s nothing ordinary about it at all.
Wowee! So the Zen poem: Well, now, I want a deal, this afternoon, with a troublesome aspect of the whole problem of the transformation of consciousness, which has received (during the past few years, and even more during the past few months) an enormous amount of publicity. And that is, of course, the connection between alterations of consciousness and development of mystical states of awareness with drugs.
And the first thing we have to do in considering a question of this kind is to clean up our semantics. First of all, I want to say a little bit about artificial and natural. Because there are certain contexts in which the word “natural” means “good,” and “artificial” means “bad.” And I, for the life of me, cannot get to the bottom of this.
Because nothing is more artificial than the distinction between the artificial and the natural. A bird’s nest is as artificial as a house. So is a bee’s nest.
Everything done by artifice is artificial, I suppose. And yet, if you look (as the Chinese do) at art as a work of nature, you wonder what all this means. Artificiality, in one sense, is acting with skill or with art.
It means in Latin… “-ficial” is from the root facere: “to make.” Artis: “artifact,” “what is made by art.” So a sculpture, a painting—in fact, anything well and skillfully made—is an artifact or a work of art. Doesn’t have to be fine art. It can be a shoe, a dress, a cooking pot, anything.
In fact, our museums are stocked with the everyday objects of the ancients which we consider works of art. I don’t know whether in the future they will stock museums with aluminum saucepans and things like that. It remains to be seen.
But then, “artificial” also has a secondary sense of something that looks too much as if it were a work of art: what we call affected, studied, or contrived. When you get what looks like a drinking glass made of glass, and you suddenly find out it’s made of plastic, you get a feeling of the artificial in its second sense. Something pretending to be what it isn’t.
Something that lacks what you expected. The cool, heavy quality of a glass—suddenly it’s featherweight and has no substance to it. Or when a person behaves in an artificial way, you feel they are awkward about it.
They are putting it on. And what they are putting on at you is entirely different from what they feel underneath. Then you say their behavior is contrived or artificial.
And I suppose we could use the word “artificial” this way to mean to have a kind of a bad sense. So, then there arises the troublesome question: is there any difference between natural and artificial ways of attaining transformations of consciousness which lead you to great insights and understandings? And this is, of course, comparable to the problem of travel.
It’s natural to walk. You are endowed with legs. Is it unnatural to ride a horse, to take a carriage, to drive an automobile, to take a jet plane?
Is that artificial? Or is it an extension of human capacity in the same way as a bird’s nest? That’s a very difficult question to decide.
If you’ve time, of course, it’s fun to drive to the east coast. Practically no one bothers to walk. Nowadays, that would be very abnormal.
But, of course, if you drive—or even take a bicycle—you do see the country and you are aware of the great transition that you’re making from one coast to another. But you sure can’t swim to Tokyo. If you’re going to go there at all, you require at least the artificiality of a boat.
And the Pacific is a big, big, empty bunch of water, and one bit’s as much like another unless you land at an island. So you may as well take the plane. And there you are in 13 hours.
What a difference from the day when they drifted across by the currents, took sailing boats. Well, you could say when they got there, they really knew they were there. Nowadays, traveling by jet is simply like going inside an elevator.
You get this thing where, as the elevator, if it goes too fast, goes down from the tenth floor to the first, and you feel your stomach has been left on the tenth. Traveling by jet, you are apt to feel that your psyche hasn’t caught up with you. You left it back in New York, and here you are in La Jolla, and the time’s all different, and it’s earlier in the day than practically when you started.
And you feel sort of disarranged. But all the same, would it be reasonable to argue that you ought not to travel by jet planes, that you should leave and proceed in a proper, slow manner? Of course, the people who can’t afford to travel by jet will tell you so: that their way is obviously more natural than yours, and that you’re cheating when you take the jet.
You’re a wretched capitalist or something. But, you see, this is an eternal debate. It goes on and on and on.
And it’s a kind of oneupmanship. The real question is, of course: if you take a jet plane to the Orient, what are you going to do when you get there? That’s the real question.
Are you going to go to all the best European-style or American-style hotels, and visit Japan as if you were inside a glass case? That would be pretty artificial. Because, after all, you could just sit home and see color movies for all that goes.
And I do take people to Japan on and off, and some of them like to get mixed up in the life of the country, but some of them absolutely want to be wrapped in cellophane and hygienized. They can’t stand the idea of eating Japanese food. A Japanese bathtub is deplorable.
As for a Japanese toilet, it is unspeakable. Because they are so rigid and unadaptable that they won’t learn new ways of doing things. So it does make a difference whether, even if everybody goes by Jet, how they relate themselves to the new environment when they get there.
That’s the important question. And that depends on whether they’re adaptable personalities or rigid personalities; how stuck they are, how how their identity is glued to certain ways of behaving. There are some people who, unless they have a certain same kind of breakfast every day, are just not themselves.
I remember I used to eat at the lunch counter in England, where an extremely square young man was often there at the same time I was, and he would invariably order three small beef sandwiches. This place specialized in rather small sandwiches. And he ordered, every day, three beef and a glass of beer.
And if it had ever changed, he would have had a complete psychic upheaval. Well, now, the question of the jet plane—that is to say, the technical means of arriving somewhere—is, in a way, parallel to the question: will you travel in these states of consciousness by… there are many ways of doing it, you see. There are the methods of meditation, some of which are quite difficult and take a very long time.
They are like walking. Or do what want to have technical help—that is to say, what about the chemistry of the matter? Do these states of consciousness correspond to various states of chemistry?