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It’s incidental things like this which, to the Chinese and Japanese mind, and increasingly to our own way of thinking, make the real beauty of things. For instance, consider a shell like this. Here is an object which any one of you would pick up on the beach if you saw it.
And yet, what does it represent? If you saw a painting with markings on like that, you might say, “Well, that’s not what I call a painting. It doesn’t look like anything.” And yet, as I say, none of you would hesitate to pick that up and treasure it if you found it.
That it, too, like the jar, is a sort of controlled accident. And it is the art of trusting the medium to express itself along with your own contribution to it as an artist. When this harmonious relationship of man and nature is brought into play we get marvelous little objects of this kind.
And so, in the same way, if we can learn to trust our own nature, we will—I think—be profoundly surprised that things don’t go out of control at all, but on the contrary suddenly come back into control. Take, for example, a very familiar instance: supposing you’re learning to ride a bicycle. Some of you will have known that, when you started out this rather difficult art, you found yourself immediately falling over, and your first instinct was to turn the wheel right opposite the direction in which you were falling.
And in this way you collapsed totally on the ground. It seemed to be common sense to turn away from the direction in which you were falling. And yet, the thing you have to learn to do is to turn the wheel in the direction in which you are falling, and in this way you—zhhup!—suddenly come up straight again, and you’re in control.
You expected to fall, you went with the fall, and you came to yourself again. In precisely the same way, when we go with our own nature, our own inner feelings, we come into control of them. We don’t lose control.
If we fight them we get in that state of balled-upness, of anxiety, of dither, which makes us incapable of doing anything at all—an anxiety and a dither which is comparable to the whole problem of maintaining freedom in a world like ours; a problem that we are in danger of losing our freedom through being over-anxious to preserve it. Or think of another illustration: those of you who live in the East and the Middle West are familiar every winter with the problems of icy roads. But any good driver knows that when you skid on an icy road, you have to turn in the direction of your skid and not against your skid.
That, again, brings you into control. To fight the trend of things, to fight what the Chinese call the Tao, the way of nature, is to come into conflict with nature, so that you can’t do anything at all. Or another common example: everybody who ever used a sailing boat knows that, if you are going to move, you’ve got to keep the wind in your sails.
Even if you want to go against the wind, you would never dream of turning the boat directly into the path of the wind. So you always have in some way to keep the wind behind you. so when you want to go against the wind, you don’t fight the wind, you use the wind.
You, in other words, tack against it at an angle so that it blows you into itself. This is the fundamental principle of Chinese philosophy which underlies that startling manifestation of it in Japanese wrestling called judo, where you overcome the enemy not by opposing him, but by using his own strength to bring about his downfall. For this is the philosophy of bend and survive: of the strength of weakness.
As the willow trees under snow go supple and drop the snow, the pine with its tough branch piles up the snow and cracks. We were talking last time about the extraordinary conflict between man and nature which exists among almost all highly civilized peoples, and especially here in the Western world, where we talk so much about our conquest of nature, our mastery of space, our subjection of the physical world. And I think one of the main reasons why we feel in this particular way is that each individual experiences himself as a peculiarly separate being.
In other words, every man thinks of this world as a collection of objects. The world is a lot of things. And each person considers himself as a thing.
And I wonder if you’ve ever stopped to ask yourself what a thing is, and why you think you are a thing? Are you quite sure that you are a thing? Because if we take a look at ourselves from another point of view—for example, like this—we shall find that we’re not one thing at all.
We’re an extraordinary number of things. For what you’re looking at there is the cell structure of your own body. A whole multitude of tiny, tiny little individuals.
And now we might ask again: what other points of view could we take to ourselves? We could, of course, take the sociologist’s point of view, where we’re not really a thing at all, but a sub-member of a group. Or, still more, if a man visiting us from another planet in something like a flying saucer were to hover down and look at what sort of creature is inhabiting this Earth, what would he see?
Let’s take a look and get some idea of his view. This is the kind of creature he would find inhabiting this planet: a sprawly, nubbly thing, with various lines connecting bits of it. That would be, in his view, the kind of thing that we are.
For, you see, how many things we are depends upon the point of view which one takes. Every point of view that we’ve taken—the point of view of the cells, the point of view of the man hovering above the Earth in a flying saucer or an aeroplane—is a correct point of view. And according to the way in which we look, so we divide the things of the world.
For, you see, it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the word “thing” is very like the word “think.” Because by breaking down our world into things is the way in which we think about it. We break down what we call the material world into objects, and assign to those objects the kind of words we describe as nouns. And then the world of action we break into events, and assign to events the kind of word we call verbs.
But things and events are fundamentally the ways of breaking up our complex world so that we can think about it. I wonder if any of you have ever been to a psychologist and taken a Rorschach test and been asked to look at one of these extraordinary blots. Now, actually, the blot that we’re looking at here isn’t a real Rorschach blot, because you’re not allowed to show them in public in case people saw them before the test.
But they’re something like this, and they’re made by splodging ink on paper and folding the paper over so that you get a symmetrical blot, and the psychologist says to you when you look at that, “Now, please, will you tell me a story about it? What do you think it looks like?” And you might say, “Well, I think it looks like a great big cat face, or maybe it’s a woman’s handbag, or maybe it’s a dancer waving his arms in front of a pair of pine trees with some rocks around.” All sorts of stories you could invent about it; anything you like. And the psychologist will use the kind of information that you’ve given him, the sort of things that you project out of your own mind into that blot, and he will then form some diagnosis of the kind of person you are.
But, you see, he’s not interested in the information which you give him about the blot as a description of the blot, he’s interested in what you say as a description of what is going on inside you. In other words, what you are saying about that blot is a projection of yourself into its strange and complicated conformations. Now, you see, our whole world is in many ways not so very much unlike this peculiar blot.
And you might think that there might be some persuasive person who stands up and gives a story about the blot of the world, and other people agree with what he says. He says, “Look here. That’s a mountain.
That’s a tree. That’s a rock.” And everybody else would agree because he was so persuasive, and we would all be beginning to give the same story about the cosmic Rorschach blot. Because, after all, our world is a very wiggly affair.
Consider, for example, clouds, or clouds with mountains across them, or waters, or stars. All the world is a wiggly affair, not at all unlike that blot we were looking at. And we have to find out ways of making sense of it.
Perhaps one of the strangest and most difficult to understand things that men first began to make sense of in this kind of Rorschach blot interpretation way were the stars in heaven. And one of the ways in which they did this was to project upon the skies figures of all kinds of mythological monsters and beasts, such as the idea of a dipper for the great bear—those stars in the Great Bear that look, you know, like a ladle; or some people call them the plow. Or here, perhaps on a celestial sphere of this kind, you can see quite clearly the outline of the constellation Leo, the lion.
A lion drawn in the sky! So that men could find their way about in the stars, recognize their outlines by associating certain groups of stars with familiar images. But, you see, this is fundamentally a projection of ideas out of our own minds onto nature.
Nature itself will take all kinds of different projections, and no one is necessarily the right one. They work for us so long as we agree about them—that is, so long as we abide by convention. And in Indian philosophy, the fundamental word for this kind of thing is the Sanskrit term māyā.
I’m going to write that down for you. And this word comes from a root in the Sanskrit language, ma. And the word ma is at the basis of all kinds of words that we use in our own tongue.
It’s at the basis of “matter,” of the Latin “mater” or “mother,” at the basis of “matrix” or “metric,” because the fundamental meaning of the root ma is “to measure.” And so it works in this sort of way. I was talking about our world being wiggly—you know, something like this: that is the typical sort of shape that we are having to deal with all the time. And I think you’ll see at once that a shape like that is extraordinarily difficult to talk about.
If I were talking on the radio at the moment, and not on television, I would have the greatest difficulty in describing that line to you in such a way that you could write it down on a piece of paper in front of you without seeing it. But here you can see it, and you can understand it at once. But it isn’t enough just to be able to see things.
We want to be able to talk about them, we want to be able to describe them exactly so that we can control them and deal with them. I mean, supposing this were the outline of a piece of territory on a map, then you might want to tell someone an exact spot to which he should go. And then you would have to be far more precise about it than you can be when you just get the general idea of it by looking at it.
And so we introduce, then, the idea of māyā by essentially doing this. This might be called a matrix: lines crossed by lines in a very formal, simple pattern. And the moment we do that it becomes very easy indeed to talk about this wiggly line, because we could, for example, number all these squares across—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and so on—and we can also number them downwards.
And then, in terms of numbers across and numbers down, we can indicate the exact points on this grid which cross the wiggly line. And by numbering those points one after another, we can give an accurate description of the way that line moves. And furthermore, supposing the line under our grid were not still like this one, but supposing it was wiggling, in motion; supposing it was a flea or something dipped in ink, who is crawling across the paper, and we wanted to know where he was going to go, all we would have to do would be to plot out the positions which he has covered, and then we could calculate statistically a trend which would indicate where he would be likely to go next.
And if he went there next, we should say, “By Jove, isn’t that incredible! This little flea crawling across the paper is obeying the laws of statistics.” Well, as a matter of fact, he isn’t. What he is doing is—or rather, I should say not what he is doing, but what we are doing is: we are making a very, very abstract model of the way in which that line is shaped, or in which that flea is crawling.
We are breaking it up into little bits, whereas in fact it is not a lot of little bits, it is a continuous sweep. But by treating it in this way as if it were broken up into bits, we are measuring it, we are making a māyā. And these crossed lines are a māyā just in the same way as the idea of the lion, the Leo constellation in the stars, is a māyā.
A way of projecting. You see, this thing, it comes out of our minds, and we project it upon nature like this and break nature into bits so that it can be easily talked about and handled. But, you see, this tends to give us the impression that our world is a lot of bits, and that things are really separate from each other.
You see—how could I demonstrate how this is? I’ve an idea. Mr. Cameraman, will you focus the camera on one small, tiny spot in the set, and come very close to it, and travel along, bit by bit by bit?
Now, you see: this is looking at the world little bit by little bit, as if we were only using the central vision of our eyes. The kind of vision we use for reading and close work of that kind. But if this were the only way we had of looking at things it would be very difficult to make any sense of life at all, because we would see everything in series, bit after bit after bit.
But fortunately we are also able to enlarge the whole view and take in everything at once in a single sweep. And, you see, this shows all the advantages and the disadvantages of looking at things in the way that Indian philosophy calls māyā. Because if māyā were the only way we had for looking at things, we should only be able to understand one thing at a time.
And our world is not just one thing happening one after another, one at a time, our world is an enormous volume, a great vastness, in which everything is happening altogether at once. Now, being able to think of things one at a time is extraordinarily useful because this is what enables us to have science, to have scientific control of nature, to be able to count things, measure them, manage them, and predict their behavior in the future. But it is inclined to run away with us and give us the impression if we think to hard about things, or if we put too much faith in thinking, that the world is made up of a lot of separate bits, so that we have a kind of bit-by-bit approach to nature—what I might call a putt-putt-putt-putt view of life.
It’s useful indeed to break things down into things and to classify them, but the moment it gives us the impression that these little bits into which we have divided the world are really and in nature separate from each other, we get into confusion. Now, how do we know that divided things aren’t really separate? Look, for example, at me.
How do you know I’m here? How can you make out the outlines of my body? Isn’t it because there is a contrast between the background behind me and my figure?
You know where the background ends and I begin, and so you are able to see me. But now what would happen if the background should vanish and disappear, and I would no longer be there, but the figure and the ground, instead, would be my button. In order to see me, you have to see a background along with me.
And so if we go back and look again at the whole thing, then we can see once again. Now, what does that tell us? Surely, the thing that it tells us is not merely that the background is one thing and the figure is another.
Since the two must go together, it indicates that there is a connection between them. If you can’t have the perception of a figure without a background, if you simply cannot see it if there is no background there, doesn’t that mean that the background and the figure are some way inseparable. They’re different, yes, but they’re inseparable differences.
Take, for example, a coin: when you have a coin, it has two sides, heads and tails. And these two sides are indeed different. You might say they are separate sides.
But what would happen if we take a file and start rubbing away to get rid of one of the sides? Well, we would rub and rub and rub, and when we finally got rid of the side, the other side would’ve vanished, too. Because the two sides of a coin go together.
Yes, they are different, but they are also inseparable. And this is true of almost everything in the world, because we distinguish things from their background, we distinguish one side from another as we distinguish up from down. Now, imagine what would happen if we arranged everything in this set—or tried to arrange everything—so that nothing were down, everything had to be up.
If we could really, in nature, separate the up from the down—why, we couldn’t do it. Because up goes with down, is unintelligible apart from down, in the same way that the head side of a coin goes together with the tail side. And so, in this way, we—as individuals, as separate beings—are really inseparable from the whole natural environment in which we live.
We go together. And you cannot have the one without the other. Without what we call things, there would be no world.
But without what we would call the whole world, there would be no things. And this is not only true of what we call things and objects, it’s also true of many of our experiences. Let’s take, for example, one of the most fundamental distinctions in experience: what is pleasant and what is not.
Now, a great many people are bending the whole effort of their lives to have pleasure and get rid of pain. This pursuit of pleasure is regarded as the fundamental aim of human existence. And, you know, when you start to read old books on Indian philosophy, Chinese philosophy, they very often say that the first thing a man must understand is to give up the pursuit of pleasure.
And people who read these things think that these are very… oh, ripey puritans, people who have a sour attitude to life, who burnt their fingers in the game of the pursuit of pleasure and say, “Well, let’s not get mixed up with that anymore.” But, as a matter of fact, this is just a plain clear sensible statement. It’s like saying you cannot have up without down, you cannot have a figure without a background. And in the same way, exactly, you cannot experience pleasure unless there is something with which you can contrast it.
You know what happens when a person who’s longed to make a great deal of money all his life, and he makes it—finally he gets a million dollars. And he thinks this is the answer. Well, it’s fine just in the moment of transition, while he is going to poverty to richness.
But when he’s had his million dollars for a few months, everything adjusts itself and he begins to feel just the same as he always felt before. Conversely, if some of you have lived near a tannery, or near a public utility place like a gas-producing factory, you get so used to the bad smell in the background that you cease to notice it. It becomes the normal smell, and so you don’t notice it anymore as a bad smell.
For both the bad and the good need each other as contrasts. And therefore, when we try to get rid of one of the pairs and possess the other only, we do something that is profoundly nonsensical. We think we can do it, because in māyā—that is to say, in conventional thinking in terms of that kind of measurement that we call “thought”—we can separate the one from the other, we can talk about “up” as different from “down,” we can talk about one thing as different from other things.
But in actual experience it can’t be done, just as in actual experience that wiggly line was a continuous line and not a series of points. And in another way, too, we can’t really pursue pleasure, because pleasure is something that has to come to us. For example, you can pursue a cow, and you can go out and catch it and kill it and serve it up as steak.
That you can do. But you can’t pursue the pleasure that you get from eating steak. If, in other words, you try to get pleasure out of steaks—supposing I sit here and I have a great big splendid steak served to me, and I say, “This is the best steak I ever ate!
Why, it’s a chateaubriand and it cost $12 a plate, and therefore I must make the very maximum effort to enjoy it,” and I cut the thing up, and I put it in my mouth and say, “Now I really got to get the most out of this piece of steak!” And so I chew it with all my might to get the very best out of it. And what happens? I’m making so much muscular strain, I’m trying so hard to get something out of it, that I frustrate the very pleasure that it should give.
Why is that? Surely it is because pleasure is a function of nerves. And you can’t make an effort with your nerves.
Catching a cow is a function of muscles, and you can make an effort with your muscles. To give another illustration of the same thing: supposing I want to see an object in the far distance. I want to make out the time on a distant clock.
Now, my eyes are nervous rather than muscular. And if I strain my eyes very hard to make out what is way off on the clock in the distance, what happens? All the images of the figures on the clock go fuzzy.
But if I relax my eyes and let the image come to it, as light does in fact come to the eyes, then I can see the image clearly. So when we think of the world as consisting primarily of a lot of disconnected things, and ourselves as one of them, so that we go out and get those things, or we can push those things around to suit ourselves, we forget so easily that the entire system of nature, ourselves included, is interconnected in every conceivable way. You know what happens when you think, “Well, we’ve got a lot of mosquitoes around here.
All kinds of insects that bite us and bother us. Let’s get rid of them!” So we bring in the DDT and we send and aeroplane over and spray the whole surrounding territory with DDT. Now, what happens?
Suddenly we find that other insects or other pests which those insects we destroyed were feeding upon multiply and increase, and we have a new problem. We have to get rid of those. It’s like when they brought rabbits into Australia because they thought they’d be useful there for some reason or other.
The rabbits multiplied because there was nothing that fed on rabbits. Then they had a plague of rabbits. You see, you cannot just push nature around.
You cannot regard it as something to be attacked, so that you can grab bits from it and shove it around any old way as if it were a machine that you could bang around like a mechanic. Indeed, even machines—as any good mechanic knows—are not that simple to play with. But if we do not see that our view of the separateness of the world is based on a convention of thinking—it exists, as it were, in here, it doesn’t exist out here in actual concrete reality.
And if we are confused, then we jump to follow our thoughts instead of our senses. And this is no-sense. I suppose most of you are familiar with this old optical illusion, and you’re asked the question, “Which of the three thick black lines is the longer?” And I suppose one’s natural reaction is to say, “The one on the left.” And I think you know that this is a result of the illusion of perspective, an illusion to which we are so used and by which we’re so easily fooled once we’ve accustomed ourselves to it.
You might, if that picture were drawn more vividly, even be predisposed to thinking that was a real passage stretching away from you with doors at the end. Of course, if you came up against that kind of thing painted against a wall, you might make the mistake of walking into it and banging your nose. But this is an example of what we were talking about last time as māyā, that word from Indian philosophy which generally has the meaning of “illusion,” or rather, illusions brought about by the acceptance of certain conventions, of which perspective was an example.
When we are not aware that certain things which we take for granted—like the separateness of things from each other—when we’re not aware that this is a matter of convention, we are apt to be fooled. Now, I think one of the conventions by which we tend to be fooled more than almost any other is time. And for all human beings time is a matter of extraordinary importance, and perhaps this is one of the principal ways in which we differ from animals.
Because man has been called a time-binding animal—that is to say, a creature who is visibly aware of the fact that his life moves, as it were, along a line from the past through the present and into the future. Animals apparently live pretty much moment by moment. They don’t appear to have very strong memories.
But because man has a strong memory, he is able to bear the past in mind and, as it were, cast it forward into visions of the future based upon what has happened in the past. And therefore, although this facility gives man the most extraordinary ability to plan his life, to prepare for future eventualities, at the same time there is a very heavy price which he pays for it, and especially if he takes this ability too seriously—in other words, if he doesn’t realize that the true reality in which he lives is the present moment, now. For example, the animal probably doesn’t concern itself very much with problems of future disease, death, or starvation; things of that kind.
If an animal sees another dead animal lying around, I don’t suppose he thinks to himself, “Well, one day that’s going to happen to me.” Rather, he just sees a dead animal, sniffs it, sees whether it’s good to eat, and wanders away. But for human beings it’s entirely different, because we actually spend most of our time and a great deal of our emotional energy living in time, which is not here; living in an elsewhere which is not concretely real. So much so that, although we may be quite comfortable and happy in our present circumstances, if there is not a guarantee, not a promise, of a good time coming tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, we’re at once unhappy even in the midst of pleasure and affluence.
And so we develop a kind of chronic anxiety about time. We want to be sure more and more, because of our sensitivity to the theme of time. We want to be sure more and more that our future is assured.
And for this reason the future becomes of more importance to most human beings than the present. And in this sense we are hooked, taken in, by a māyā, because it is of very little use to us to be able to control and plan the future unless we are capable at the same time of living totally in the present. And so, when in civilized societies we spend so much of our time living for the future, we become very much like those celebrated donkeys, you know, that have a carrot fastened on a stick that’s tied to the neck—you know, behind here—and it comes over, and there’s the carrot dangling in front of them.
And they pursue it, pursue it, pursue it, but can never reach it. And so, in exactly the same way, it’s that way with us. My goodness, don’t you remember when you went first to school, and you went to kindergarten?
And in kindergarten the idea was to push along so that you could get into first grade, and then push along so that you can get into second grade, third grade, and so on, going up and up. And then you went to high school, and this is a great transition in life. And now the pressure is being put on: you must get ahead.
You must go up the grades and finally be good enough to get to college. And then, when you get to college, you’re still going step by step, step by step, up to the great moment in which you’re ready to go out into “the world.” And then, when you get out into this famous world, comes the struggle for success in profession or business. And again there seems to be a ladder before you; something for which you’re reaching all the time.
And then, suddenly, when you’re about 40 or 45 years old in the middle of life, you wake up one day and say, “Huh, I’ve arrived. And by Jove, I feel pretty much the same as I’ve always felt. In fact, I’m not so sure that I don’t feel a little bit cheated.” Because, you see, you were fooled.
You were always living for somewhere where you aren’t. And while, as I said, it is of tremendous use for us to be able to look ahead in this way and to plan, there is no use planning for the future which—when you get to it and it becomes a present—you won’t be there! You’ll be living in some other future which hasn’t yet arrived.
And so, in this way, one is never able actually to inherit and enjoy the fruits of one’s actions. You can’t live at all unless you can live fully now. And because now is never satisfactory, because we’re never really living in it, we get more and more avid to go ahead and pursue the future.
We develop our technology to a fantastic ability where we can more and more fulfill our desires for the future almost immediately, working towards a sort of push-button world. But have you ever stopped to think what the world would be like if you could fulfill every wish the moment you wished it? Suppose, for example, on going to bed at night, you could always dream whatever you wanted to dream.
What would happen after a while? Of course, I suppose, at first you would dream fantastic pleasures, wonderful adventures, fulfillment of all the things you ever wished. But then, as time went on, don’t you think you’d want to be… oh… a little bit surprised?
To have a little bit less control over what was happening to you? And after you’d experimented with this for some months or years, you might even want dreams in which you suffer. Because there is no real delight, no real fulfillment, without delay.
Doesn’t every child know on a hot day—and you think, “I’m terribly thirsty, and I’d like an ice cream soda.” Haven’t you tried the experiment of putting off drinking it, and putting off, so that you get thirstier and thirstier? And it’s so much fun when you finally get to it. And so, in the same way, in patience with time, always wanting the future is frustrating.
Now, you know, in Indian thought one of the basic myths or ideas is of Brahmā, the world creator, who has infinite power and has everything that he wants. But he is like our dreamer, and he wants to do something with the infinite time at his disposal. And therefore, what he does is to dream just like this; to dream the existence of the world.
And he does it over enormous and incalculable periods of time, dreaming that he is the knower, the Self, in every single creature that exists in the world, dreaming them all at once, experiencing their joys and sorrows, completely plunging himself into the adventure of forgetting who he is. But he does this for immense and vast periods, rivaling in conception the latest modern astronomical ideas of the extent of time. You know, the basic reckoning period of time in the life of Brahmā the Creator is called a kalpa, and that is a period of 4,320,000 years.
And the kalpas are called the days of Brahmā: one day for Brahmā’s life is a kalpa. And so there are the periods (which you can call his days or nights, whichever you wish) where he goes into dream and he dreams the world. Then, for the following kalpa, he wakes up and realizes who he is again.
And then he dreams again, going on and on and on through years of kalpas of 360 days and nights of Brahmā, centuries of kalpas, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly. For the Hindu doesn’t think of time in quite the same way that we do. Obviously, we think of time as linear: day after day after day after day, going along on a line.
Or sometimes we like to think of time as this sort of line, going up and up and up and up and up and up, and getting better and better and better. But that’s not the fundamental idea of time for almost any people in the world outside of Western civilization. In nearly every other part of the world time is thought of as a circle.
And they say, after all, isn’t it reasonable for it to be a circle? Look at your watch: doesn’t your watch go ’round and ’round? But the Hindus not only think of time as cyclic, going ’round and ’round and ’round forever, just as the Earth cycles around and around the sun, they also think of it in another quite fundamentally different way from our conception of time.
I referred to this idea that’s common among us; that time is going up and up, and things are getting better and better. But in the general Hindu view, in every cycle of time things tend, on the whole, to get worse and worse. They divide the kalpa into a number of shorter periods, each of which is called a yuga.
But the yugas are so arranged that there are four of them in what is called a mahāyuga, or “great yuga.” The first one, occupying this period, is the longest. The second one occupies a shorter period, from here to here. The third, still shorter than the second.
The fourth, the shortest of all. And the names that are given to them are the names of the throws in the Indian game of dice. The best throw, the throw of four, is called krita, and that lasts for the longest time.
It is a golden age where everything is just fine. The next one is called treta, the throw of three. Pretty good, but not quite so good.
The third is called dvapara, the throw of two. And here, good and evil are equally balanced. Not so hot.
The final throw, the throw of one, is called kali; the worst throw. And that’s the shortest period. And, of course, according to Hindu ideas, we’re living in it now.
But in kali yuga everything goes to pieces and becomes deadened, and time goes faster. Now, why do they feel that time deteriorates in this way? It is because, as one lives in time and becomes more and more conscious of time, we tend more and more to pursue the future—as I said a little while ago.
And as we pursue the future, present time becomes more and more unsatisfactory, and we feel that we have to chase our happiness at greater and greater speeds. I was talking the other day to a college president who said, “You know, I’m so busy now that I’m going to have to get a helicopter.” I said, “Whatever you do, don’t do it. Because if you get it, more will be expected of you.
You’ll be expected to go to more places faster.” And, you see, in this whole problem of speed, of getting advantages in life because we can move about rapidly, we forget that speed is only of real advantage to you if you’re the only person who has it. Then you can get ahead of other people. But the minute everybody else catches up with you, you’re all back where you were, only going much faster and much more nervously; going, as it were, faster and faster to less and less desirable objectives.