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And just in the same way, for example, that when you see—if you see well—you aren’t aware of your eyes. But if there’s something wrong with your eyes, when you see spots in front of you, then you are looking at your eyes and your eyes are getting in your own way. So the Taoist sage Zhuang Zhou says that “when clothes fit well you are not aware of them.” When your girdle or belt fits properly, you are not aware of it.
Good shoes you’re unconscious of. And so, in exactly the same way, the perfect form of man is unaware of himself because he doesn’t get in his own way. He is, in this sense, completely transparent.
Now, you’re thinking I’m trying to sell you a bill of goods; that I’m going to teach you some technique so that you can feel perfectly transparent, and that this is the proper way to feel, this is the way you ought to feel. It’s not that simple. Point is, to begin with: if you do in a really rather natural way feel alone and feel a little bit vulnerable—that you’ve got a soft skin and you’ve got a weak heart and you’ve got, you know, all those ills that the human body is heir to going on inside you.
Let’s begin with that. Let’s begin with the way in which we do, in fact, constitute a sort of block in the middle of things, and that fact we hurt a bit, and through hurting a bit we know we’re here. See, people go very often to extreme measures to know that they’re there.
I was in Mexico two years ago, trying to find out what was really behind all the blood and gore in Mexican Catholicism, why they love these pictures of Christ sold in the little shops where he’s green, and his face is contorted with horror, and blood pouring down, and a crown of thorns, with the longest spikiest thorns you ever saw all sticking in, and these crucifixes where they have carefully modeled sores on them, and all that kind of thing. And then, at Guadalupe, these girls kneeling-walking for a mile right down the avenue to the altar in that thing—what is it all about? Why, the answer is quite simply: if you hurt, you know you’re there.
And this is part of the whole meaning of penances, and all sorts of trials that people go through, and all kinds of adventures, and all sorts of very, very difficult massage experiences, and so on, is that, as a result of this, it becomes quite apparent that you do truly exist. You are there. You are a kind of an obstacle to the flow of life.
And as life impinges upon you, whammo! You rebound and you hurt a bit, and so you you are there. Now then, although people cultivate this, they say, in general, they rather it would be not that way.
We would like to forget ourselves. And so ever so many people say, “Well, I want somebody to lose myself in.” “I want something to belong to.” “I want to join a religion where I can sort of feel that I take part; I mean something.” Or: “I go to the movies to forget myself.” “I read a mystery story to forget myself.” “I get drunk to forget myself.” Because a peculiar quality of the drug called alcohol is that it turns you off. It makes you increasingly insensitive to pain, and to being, and so on, so that you can get a certain vague sense, a rather misty sense, of floating.
When Gurdjieff had a boy that he was training, he was making him wait table one evening, and he suddenly (before dinner) filled him with an enormous amount of vodka. And the boy went around all evening in this sort of floating state. And Gurdjieff said to him afterwards, “Now listen: when you can feel like that naturally all the time, you’ve learned my discipline.” But here it is.
So as things stand, one ordinarily doesn’t feel that way, and therefore takes alcohol or something in order to disappear; in order to feel less this sensation of resisting the world. Do you know if you study your body and its dynamics, you will find that you are fighting all the time? Most people are.
Some aren’t. But most people are fighting the external world all the time. My friend Charlotte Selver often tries an experiment where she makes a person lie down on the floor and says to them, “Now look: the floor is solid and it will hold you up.
You don’t have to do anything to stay where you are. Just lie on the floor.” And then she looks at the person, or may touch them slightly, and say, “Do you realize you’re making all sorts of efforts to hold yourself together? Because you’re basically afraid that if you don’t do that you will just go bleeah and disappear into a kind of formless goo all over the floor.
But you won’t. You see? Your skin, your bones, your muscle tonus and everything, is all there naturally, and it will hold you together.
There’s nothing to worry about. And all you have to do is lie on the floor. And you don’t have to make any special efforts to stay together.” But very many people are afraid that they will fall apart or somehow disintegrate if they don’t make efforts to hold themselves together, or else that they will be disintegrated by some outside agency if they’re not constantly on the alert, like this: dee tch tch tch tch tch tcha tcha tcha all around, you see, to protect themselves.
Now, I’m not a preacher. That’s the most important thing to understand about me. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do that.
But I’m inviting you to become immensely aware of the fact that if you do that at all, that you do it. And that you have therefore this sense of being alone—of being a particular separate form that is unlike any other form on Earth, that’s just you—and concentrate on that. After all, for many people, they define this as their problem.
So you ought to be able to feel it without the slightest difficulty. It isn’t as if I were asking you to feel some transcendental sensation or something of that kind. This is just a very ordinary sense of being you and being alone.
Now, as you focus on that sensation of distinctness, we’ll even call this one separateness, because we do: we have been brought up to feel separate, we have been brought up to feel actually disjoined from the external world—although that is pure mythology and doesn’t exist at all. You are as much part of the external world as a whirlpool is part of a stream. But we are brought up not to notice that.
But if you’ve been brought up that way, and you don’t notice that you’re as much part of the world as a whirlpool is of a stream, you feel this intense separateness. The thing to do with all feelings that you don’t like is to experience them as deeply as possible, and go into the inmost depths of loneliness, and indeed, let us say, the inmost depths of selfishness. Are you selfish?
You know, lots of people try to pretend they aren’t and say, “Well, I try not to be, but I guess I don’t succeed all the time.” And so, Krishnamurti, you know, is a very devil because he always roots it out. He shows all the people who are very good and have the highest ideals and who are doing everything, that they are really doing it for the same sort of motivation as other people are robbing banks. Only, they’re giving it a name so as to conceal it better.
See, that’s like culture: culture is a way of more cleverly concealing the fact that you have to eat. See, like the Queen of Spain who, in the days of the 1860s, came on with these enormous skirts and floated into the room, and, you know, was sort of coming on like she was an angel. And somebody, when they were first invented, gave her a present of beautiful silk stockings, a dozen pairs, and sent them to the Queen.
And her majesty’s chamberlain replied with a better returning the stockings and saying, “Her Majesty the Queen of Spain does not have legs.” Like: “Look mama! No legs! I managed to float along just the same because I’m an angel.” So you see the way in which all kinds of high culture are subtle ways of concealing and pretending that we do without the things that the lower classes—whether of humans or of animals—do.
See? We pretend that we don’t. Just like you don’t go around crudely taking a bull and banging it on the head with a mallet or sticking a knife through it and tearing it apart and eating it.
All that’s done from way off in the stockyards, and it comes to us in the butcher’s shop as a completely neutral looking thing called a steak. Steak has absolutely nothing to do with a cow! A steak is something wrapped up, packaged like that, and they’re all tch-tch-tch-tch-tch down like that.
And nobody, when they pick up a steak and test it, thinks, “Poor cow.” It doesn’t even look like a cow! It doesn’t remind you of one in any way. So that’s culture.
But you see, however much you mask it under lofty ideals—I mean, the most religious people in the world, the greatest saints, are nefarious rascals. I’ve known lots of them. I must tell you in confidence: I’ve known a lot of clergymen, and the filthiest stories I have ever heard in my life were told me by clergymen!
So in Hebrew theology, incidentally, there is a thing called the yetzer hara. And in the beginning of time, when God created Adam, he implanted in him the yetzer hara. And the yetzer hara means the “wayward spirit.” He put something funny in man so that man would be a little odd.
And it was a result of the yetzer hara that Adam was tempted by Eve, who was tempted by the serpent, to eat that famous fruit. But the Hebrew believes that everything that God created is good, including the yetzer hara. Because if it hadn’t been for the yetzer hara, there would have nothing ever happened.
Everybody would have obeyed God, and God would have said, “Well this is kind of a bore.” But, you see, you can’t just get up to someone and say, “Disobey me!” because if they do, there are varying you. See? That’s a double bind, to say to somebody, “Disobey me.” But God is much more subtle than that.
He didn’t tell Adam to disobey him. He told him to obey. But subtly he put this yetzer hara thing in, like that, so that God could say, “Well, I’m not responsible.
This thing’s going to happen of its own.” Because what everybody wants is something to happen on its own. And everybody wants that. Because, you see, the sensation of being you—this curious, lonely center of awkward sensitivity, subject to the most peculiar feelings and pains and anxieties and all that sort of thing—all that is an essential prerequisite for feeling something else.
These two experiences go together. In other words, if you want to be omnipotent and you want to live in a universe where nothing happens except exactly what you will to happen—in other words, you say: “I would like to be God” (if you think that’s the way God is)—and everything is therefore totally under my control, everything is absolutely transparent to my intelligence. I have no problems.
A lot of people coming on like they think they’ve attained the state. Well, that’s a lot of bunk! Nobody wants to be in that position.
Because there wouldn’t be anything to it. Because once everything is under your central control—well, just nothing is happening. It’s a bore from beginning to end.
So what any one, or any being whatsoever—who has a sense of centrality, who has a sense of self, who has a sense of identity—that sense of identity is inseparable from something else going on that is defined as not being me, as not being under my control, and that may jump at any time. It might even eat me. So what I want you, first of all, to understand is that these two sensations—one of being the lonely, central, sensitive, vulnerable self, living in the midst of a world that feels other, that is not under your control—I want to try and show you that these two sensations are really one sensation; or rather, two aspects of one sensation.
You couldn’t have the one experience without the other experience. Now, this is a rather good thing to know, because it means that you won’t panic if you discover this. People who suffer from chronic anxiety are always in doubt, you see, about this relationship between what I feel as myself and what I feel as something else.
Let’s suppose you are anxious about your relationship with other people. You walk into a room like this restaurant here, and you sit down at dinner, and some stranger opposite to you, and you know nothing about the stranger, and you begin… maybe you feel a little reluctant to open conversation. You don’t know whether this person is going to be sane, or some kind of a crackpot, or some kind of awful stuffy square, or you don’t know what it is.
So you start tensing around a little. But you get the feeling, you see, of—now, I better watch myself, because I do after all want to make a good impression. I don’t want to make an enemy.
So you watch yourself, and this funny thing then begins called self-consciousness. And people say sort of, “Heh, heh” to each other and... you know, the usual way in which strangers come on. Also, there is involved in this encounter the secret games that people are playing all the time to defend themselves by putting other people down.
This is really a very wicked game. But, you see, every living being, if the truth be told, is a manifestation of everything that there is. It’s what we call “God” in old-fashioned language.
Every human being is. And every one, as I look around, I can see every one of you as the divine being coming at me in a different way. Crazy!
But the thing is that what we do is to try and prevent people from realizing that this is so by pointing out to them in the most subtle ways their limitations, and seeing if we can phase them: put a person off a little bit, make them uncertain, make them unsteady. It’s like all sorts of games you can play where, if a person wavers, he loses. But people play that with each other all the time.
And the reason they do it is not the reason they think. It is that if everybody were perfectly clear that they were a manifestation of the divine being, nothing very much would happen. But so as to keep everybody a little bit unclear about it, the whole thing bugs itself and creates these little doubts.
So what we are beginning with is little doubts, you see? These sensations of blockage; of not being very sure of yourself, but knowing very much indeed that you are yourself, and that you’re alone, and it’s all up to you. The terrible feeling of responsibility.
But what I’m trying to point out to you is: if you intensify that feeling and bring it to its highest pitch, you will immediately realize that you are aware of it only by virtue of the entire sensation of something else, something defined as “not you.” So the feeling of “not you” and the feeling of “you” are relative. They go together. And you can’t have the one without the other.
And if you can’t have the one without the other, that means there’s a secret conspiracy between the two. They are really the same but pretending to be different. Because the whole idea is: if there wasn’t a difference, you wouldn’t know anything was happening.
I mean, if it was all the same, it’s like that song of Bob Dylan’s which says something like, “Well, I’m just a guy like you. I’m just like anybody else. No use me talking to you, because you just like me.” You know?
So the whole point is, then, if everybody of us all were the same, and all shared the same ideas exactly, and so on, there’d be nothing to talk about because everybody would be a bore. There’d be just yourself echoing back at you, you see? You’d feel like a madman and a hall of mirrors.
Where everywhere you went was just yourself, you see, in all directions. Just you. Well, that’s not fun.
But you may think that I’m speaking in favor of some kind of schizoid pluralistic universe. No. The whole point is this: that difference and every kind of variety of differentiation is the way through which unity is discovered.
I mean, this business about vive la petite différence is very important. And the fact that men and women, for example, as a primordial kind of difference, never can really understand each other is tremendously exciting. Because that’s a way by which something happens.
If it makes a difference then it’s there. If it doesn’t make a difference it doesn’t matter. And what doesn’t matter doesn’t exist, because it has no matter.
So, however, wherever you notice a difference, the difference has two sides: what it is and what it’s not. And these two sides—since you can’t have the one side without the other side—they’re really one. Because they go together inseparably.
So when you get this extreme sense of your own existence as a rather painful fact in the middle everything else, the “everything else” feeling and the “you” feeling are two poles of one and the same process. So that the real you is what lies, as it were, between these poles and includes both of them. Now, this is the fundamental principle of the whole way in which ancient Chinese thought developed.
The philosophy of the yang and the yin. This is one of the oldest ideas in the universe. I mean—no that’s rather too big language.
On this planet. Ands the philosophy (which I shall have occasion to speak of a little bit more later) of the Book of Changes, the I Ching, is based entirely on this. That the universe is the interplay of difference, and the primordial difference is between up and down, back and front, black and white, is and isn’t, male and female, positive and negative.
So the word “yang” in Chinese means or refers to the south side of a mountain, which is the sunny side. The word “yin” refers to the north side of the mountain, which is the shady side. Did you ever see a south-sided mountain only, with no north side?
Or “yang” may also refer to the north bank of a river which gets the sun, and “yin” to the south bank of the river, which gets the shade. And so, you will remember this— —and one half, of course, is colored dark—as it were, two fishes interlocked. And they are chasing each other.
They actually form now—you can see more complicated symbols in which they form a helix. This is a helix. And the spiral nebulae are shaped this way; in the form of a helix.
And this is the position of man and woman making love, fundamentally: where I am trying to get inside you, and you’re trying to get inside me, and we’re trying to get into the middle of each other, but there’s somehow or other a difference and we can never quite get there. Just like if I want to see the back of my head I can go ’round and ’round and I can chase it, but I never quite catch up with it. But that’s what makes everything work.
It is said in the the Vedanta sutras that the Lord, the supreme knower of all things, who is the knower in all of us, doesn’t know itself i the same way that fire doesn’t burn itself and a knife doesn’t cut itself. So nothing—to God, even, you see?—would be more mysterious than God. Do you know, somehow, how you surprise yourself?
For example, when you feel your own pulse, and you suddenly feel this life going on in you which you’re not willing. There are all sorts of ways in which you can—say you have the belly rumbles, and you didn’t intend to have the belly rumbles, and suddenly it happened. Or you had hiccups.
And now: are you having hiccups or not? Is this something you’re doing, or is it merely something that’s happening to you, as if it was raining and the rain was happening to you? This is a very debatable question.
Consider breathing: are you breathing, or is it breathing you? Well, you can feel it either way. You can decide to breathe and feel that you’re breathing in just the same way that you walk when you want to.
On the other hand, when you forget about breathing altogether it still goes on. And so it seems to be something that happens to you. Which is it?
Do you grow your hair or does your hair just grow by itself? What enables you to make a decision? When you decide, do you first decide to decide, or do you just decide?
Now, how do you do that? Nobody knows, you see? When Zhuang Zhou tells this story that one philosopher asked another: “How can one get the Tao” (which is the power of nature) “so as to have it for one’s own?” And the other philosopher answers: “Your life is not your own.
It is the delegated adaptability of Tao. Your offspring are not your own. They are the outputs of Tao.
You move—you know not how. You are at rest—you know not why. These are the operations of Tao.
So how could you have it for your own?” And there’s a funny thing then. We can experience ourselves through and through as something that just happens. Look at it this way: if you feel your body, your skin, and your solidity of you, and regard what marvelous eyes you have, which are the power which generate light and color out of all these electrical quanta in the external world.
And these ears! These beautiful shells that you wear on the side of your head, with their little spiral bones, the cochlea inside—you know, all that? It’s marvelous!
But you don’t feel responsible for this. You don’t know how it’s made (if it is made). But it’s you!
That’s what you are: that extraordinary pattern—beautiful, gorgeous, wonderful arabesque of tubes and bones and cartilage, and myriads of interconnecting electronics and nervous systems, and everything wonderful. See? But the point is: most people don’t own this.
They don’t say, “This is me.” They say, “Well, it’s some kind of very clever machine which the lord God made out of his infinite wisdom and put me in it.” And this is a very limited view. Because the extraordinary thing is, you see, that this is you. This extraordinary marvelous goings on, see?
But you can feel it—all of it—as if it was just happening to you. But if you want to feel it that way, then you’ve got to go the whole way and you’ve got to feel that your decisions just happened to you. And that the thing that you call “yourself,” to which things happen, is just something that happens.
See? You don’t know how you managed to be and ego; how you happen to be conscious. That just happened, too.
So happenings happen to happening. And so you can feel yourself completely irresponsible. Like that, see?
There’s nowhere. When you get that way, that’s a very interesting road to run. But you can try the other way.
You can extend it and say, “Now look here: if, if, if, if I really am my eyes”—and although I don’t understand them… I mean, let us say I can’t describe it in lines, in words.—“this is me.” It’s an extraordinary thing, but it is. Well, I don’t understand how it happens. But then, you see, that’s the whole point as I made a little while ago that the very lord God himself doesn’t understand how he happens.
Because if he did, hat would be the point? There’d be no mystery, there’d be no possibility of surprises. That’s why there has to be yang and yin.
Yang is bright and it understands everything. Yin is dark and damned if she’ll be understood! But they are two phases of the same being.
So your yang side is your conscious attention, all the bright things you know, and all the information you have, and all the know-how that you know what to do. And your yin side is the other side of the yang, which enables the yang to function. Because you don’t know why the yang inside of you functions—that is: the conscious, bright, intelligent side of you.
It all depends on something you don’t understand at all. Because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be there. Just like you wouldn’t be here unless there was something else.
So they move together. And therefore, if you will accept the idea that you are your own eyes, and your own heart, and your own ears with that wonderful little spiral cochlea inside, and all these amazing gadgets here—you’re all that, but you don’t know anything about it, but you are it. Now, therefore, by a little extension of the imagination, you can very well see that if all those the bones and subtleties inside you feel other than your conscious ego, but nevertheless are one with it, the same argument will go for all the other things going on around you.
The sun shining, the stars twinkling, the wind blowing, and the great ocean restlessly pounding against these cliffs—that’s you, too. You don’t control it, of course, because there has to be something about you you don’t control or you wouldn’t be you. Now, you see, all that is lesson elementary in relativity.
And relativity—I’ve talked about it in this way which is kind of unscholarly and so on, but I want to get the message across, the idea across—because to understand the principle of relativity is the absolute foundation of the philosophy of the Tao. Lao Tzu takes it up in his second chapter, when he says: “When all the world understands beauty to be beautiful, there is already ugliness. When all the world understands goodness to be good, there is already evil.
Thus to be and not to be arise mutually. High and Low are posited mutually. Long and short are compared mutually.” And he goes through a whole list of opposites, and shows how they create each other.
It’s like that wonderful little parable: the Chinese character of “man” (人) looks more or less like an upturned V. And Lafcadio Hearn, in one of his books, tells the story of a Japanese girl telling her little sister the meaning of the character for “man” by taking two sticks of wood and balancing them together on the ground—two sticks of firewood—so that they form the upturned V. And she says to her little sister: “This is the character for ‘man’ because neither stick will stand up unless it has the other to help it.” And so, you know, we we must dig each other. But the profounder meaning underneath this is: there’s no self without other. And no man—and to get back the original point—every creature in the world feels it’s a man.
I don’t mean a male, but a human. And that is because it is in this situation where the thing it feels as its “self,” as its separate identity, is supported by the equal and opposite sensation of “other.” Center/periphery. Here/there.
Now/then. Is/isn’t. Or whatever.
These two, the yang and the yin, the two poles, that hold each other up. So the Zen poem says: Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse—ran away. And all the neighbors came around that evening and said, “That’s too bad.” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day, the horse came back and brought seven wild horses with it.
And all the neighbors came around and said, “Why, that’s great, isn’t it?” And he said, “Maybe.” The next day his son was attempting to tame one of these horses, and was riding it, and was thrown and broke his leg. And all the neighbors came ’round in the evening and said, “Well, that’s too bad, isn’t it?” And the farmer said, “Maybe.” And the next day the conscription officers came around looking for people for the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. And all the neighbors came ’round that evening and said, “Isn’t that wonderful!” And he said, “Maybe.” This—in a way, in a certain sense—reflects a fundamentally Taoistic attitude, which is that the whole process of nature is an integrated process of immense complexity, and it is really impossible to tell whether anything that happens in it is good or bad, because you never know what will be the consequences of a misfortune, or you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.
I know a woman who was quite happy until she inherited two million dollars, and then she became absolutely miserable because she was afflicted with paranoia that everybody was going to take it away from her—especially the government. And, on the other hand, you’ve all known cases where some sort of ridiculous inconvenience or accident preserved you from a worse one, or else it was an occasion on which you met someone you fell in love with, or formed a fast friendship with. You never know what is the chain, the pattern, the connection between events.
And it is for this reason that the Taoist has been critical of two things. One: of words, and two: of interference. He criticizes words because, among the Confucians, who were always literary people, they had a thing going called the rectification of names.
Now, I have to introduce this by a little observation about Confucians in general, because they have their positive and their negative side. But their negative side is their rather exclusive interest in matters literary. In the history of Chinese civilization, no kind of really scientific advance came through Confucian studies, because they were scholastics—that is to say, a scholastic is one who knows what’s in the book and believes what the ancient texts or the ancient scriptures say, and he studies them and becomes proficient like a rabbi or a Christian theologian.
But mystics are not interested very much in theology. All mystics have been interested in direct experience, and therefore—although you may laugh at them as mystics and say they are not scientific—they are empirical in their approach. And the Taoists, being mystics, were the only great group of ancient Chinese people who seriously studied nature.
They were interested in it from the beginning, and their books are full of analogies between the principles of the Taoist way of life and the behavior of natural forces of water, of wind, of plants, and rocks. In many, many passages, Lao Tzu likens the Tao to water—in the fact that it doesn’t resist and yet nothing is stronger, in the fact that it always takes the line of least resistance, that it always seeks the lowest level which men abhor. And many, many things are said about water.
Many things are said about plants. Many things are said about the processes of growth. About wind: how wind plays music with all the orifices and openings in nature, and blows through them, and brings out their particular hum.
So it was, strangely enough, from the Taoists that Chinese people developed as much science as they did develop. But, you know, they never developed anything like Western technology. And this is because—or in part because; there are many, many reasons, some of them purely geographical—but one of the reasons why the Chinese did not go on to develop an advanced technology had to do with names, and it had to do with a certain attitude to nature.
Now, so far as names are concerned, the Taoists always laughed at the idea of the rectification of names. Because they said, “Now, look: when you compile a dictionary, you define your words with other words. Now, with what other words are you going to define the words with which you define the words, so as to be sure you’ve got them straight?” I remember when I was a small boy I wanted to write a book which would preserve forever the fundamentals of human knowledge.