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And your ideas of the functioning of the nervous system and of psychoanalytic process are based on Newtonian mechanics. Psychoanalysis is, in effect, psycho-hydraulics, because you talk about damming up things, you talk about repression, you talk about the flow of—what do you call it?—free association, and you talk about unconscious mental mechanisms. So it is clear that you are still in a Newtonian psyche, and you haven’t yet graduated to a quantum psyche.
And so, because of this, you have a theory—which amounts to high dogma—that the unconscious is stupid. And you call it libido, which is a cussword. Libidinous.
It means blind lust. And Freud used that word in parallel with Ernst Haeckel, who was a contemporary biologist who thought that the energy of the universe was blind energy. Despite the fact we have eyes.” So they all had their reductionist view that human life was a complication of a force that was basically stupid, ignorant, unconscious, and immoral.
“Well,” they said, “we can’t be like the Christians and attempt to beat this force into submission because it’s too powerful for us. But we’ve got a new wrinkle. What we are going to do is, we’re going to do it like we train a horse.
Instead of whipping it, you give it lumps of sugar.” And you—watch out though! You see, Freud was scared stiff of the unconscious. He was a good, bourgeois, Jewish-Viennese, well-behaved person.
Once upon a time, Freud and Jung went together to New York. And Jung was delighted to walk down Fifth Avenue and see so many beautiful women. And he turned to Freud and said, “My goodness, how many beautiful women there are here.
Why don’t we somehow arrange and make a date for the night?” And Freud drew himself up and said, “You forget, Herr Doktor, I’m a married man.” So Freud always thought that the unconscious was not really very nice. Now, he had a contemporary by the name of Georg Groddeck. And Georg Groddeck is very little known in this country.
And Groddeck gave Freud many of his basic ideas. The—he used slightly differently. Where Freud called it the id, Groddeck called it the it.
But Groddeck had tremendous faith in the unconscious. He trusted it completely. And he wrote a book called The Book of the It, which is a series of letters to his niece which he signs Patrick Troll.
And you know, a troll is a goblin. And Groddeck looked like a goblin. He had very big, pointed ears that stuck out.
And the kind of strangely weird but benign expression. And he had a sanitarium in Baden-Baden, and there he practiced massage for people who came to him for analysis, and analysis for people who came to him for massage. He was a completely wonderful man because everybody felt calmed by him.
They felt an atmosphere of implicit faith in nature, and especially in your own inner nature. No matter what, there is a wisdom inside you which may seem absurd, but you have to trust it. And so Keyserling, Hermann Keyserling, you know, who was a great Lithuanian philosopher, said nobody could possibly remind him more of Lao-Tzu than Groddeck.
Now, if Groddeck had got into Freud, it would’ve been a much better scene. But there was in all this, you see, in Freud, the basic mistrust of the unconscious. And this led to a quarrel with Jung, because Jung went down to a lower level of the unconscious, which he called collective, and found out that there was a patterning process here—formative patterning process, which contained all the wisdom of mankind.
So for example, if you say, “Well, it’s a great pity that the American Indian culture is wiped out,” a Jungian would say, “I know it is a pity but, it’s all still there—in the depths of the psyche—and sooner or later it will all emerge again.” Because this patterning is eternal. And we, in our modern life, we reproduce patterns, we reproduce rituals, we reproduce fantasies and myths which can be discovered as having existed 25,000 years ago. Because your unconscious is timeless.
And everything is there if you go hunting for it. But they were still a bit scared. I know some of the old Jungian analysts I used to know in New York were very uptight about fishing in the unconscious and said, “Yeah... true, but there is also in the unconscious the primordial slime, which is full of serpents and crocodiles and most things that would give us the heebie-jeebies.” And if you’re not very careful those things will come up and invade your consciousness.
Also, there are not only serpents and crocodiles, and all those creepy-crawlies, ghoulies and ghosties, and long-legged beasties, and things that go bump in the night—there’s also the divine. And if you’re not very careful you can be inflated by the divine. You can suddenly have a mystical experience.
Supposing you’re kind of a half-miseducated person, like most of us are, who takes LSD. And suddenly, these unconscious contents come up and you discover you’re divine, and you think you’re God, and you take on all these airs and graces. I mean, the people like Meher Baba, who ran around announcing that he was personally in charge of the universe, and expected to be treated as such.
Well, we put such people in the nuthouse; that’s what they did to Jesus. That’s intolerable. And Jung was right, in a way, when he said that is inflation.
It is turning your ego into God instead of having God as your ego. Because you didn’t understand. You have to, in other words.
Obviously, if you’re going to let up all these great energies in the unconscious, you must be wise. You must know something about it and not jump to silly conclusions and delusions. But you see, there was in Jung a basic trust.
More than the creepy-crawlies and the ghoulies and ghosties, the collective unconscious was a source of wisdom. A formative pattern, which—if allowed to develop in the right way—would integrate the individual so that all his conscious functioning would become like a flower. And you know how a flower is balanced.
It comes out as a beautiful circle, with a middle. And for some reason as yet unexplained, when anybody wants to create a symbol of the divine they don’t use a human face—they use a flower or a star. The rose window, the lotus.
When I think what I want, you know, I try sometimes to figure out what I would really like to have. What do I like to look at? I eventually settle for a flower.
That’s why they bring flowers to sick people in hospitals. Take a morning glory and look at it. Did you ever see such a thing?
Well, they say in the Freudian explanation you use that as a substitute for a vagina. I say that’s not an answer to a question; it raises a new one. What’s so interesting about a vagina?
See, the only thing my father and I don’t agree about is sex. We agree about everything else; religion and so on. But sex—he’s old-fashioned.
And he said, “Nature makes this activity extremely pleasant in order that the species will continue. So that we will be sure to go on. But you must be very careful not to do it just for the pleasure of it, but remembering the responsibility of continuing the species.
Well, then we got the population boom. And is that going to be solved by chastity? I doubt it.
You know, taking a rather realistic view of things. No, I don’t think that the—when I ask myself, “What is the point of continuing the species?”—we get back to the thing I was raising this morning about survival: why go on? What’s it about?
Do you live to eat or do you eat to live? Personally, I live to eat. And I don’t reproduce children—although, I’ve done my bit on that… rather, a little too much—but I think the point of having life going on is so that we can have sex.
It’s a good thing in itself. It’s like dancing and really communicating. Loving somebody is a tremendously fascinating thing.
I mean, what to do with an evening? Okay, you go to the movies and you watch other people loving each other. Why don’t you do it yourself?
I very rarely go to the movies because my own life is more fun than what I see on the movies. Now, you see what I’m doing? I’m wringing around a whole lot of subjects and ways of looking at certain topics which show us that it ain’t necessarily so.
Things are not necessarily what they seem. And so we can get in the mood to be open-minded. Now that doesn’t mean that you’re merely lax in your opinions.
True open-mindedness is what I’ve tried to explain as mental silence, of being able to be completely surprised by reality, and to observe that it is not at all what you thought it was or what you were brought up to believe. And not to be afraid when you suddenly discover the obvious, which is that the real you is not the ego, but the eternal center of the universe. Well, we’ll take an intermission now.
Now, this seminar this weekend concerns a subject which is so alien from anything that we understand in the West that it may stretch your skulls a little. I don’t know. But as Westerners face certain forms of Mahayana Buddhism from the outside, they see what reminds them of total irrationality and superstition.
And this in particular applies to a form of Buddhism which has several names, and they’re all—well, it’s really one form of Buddhism, but it’s named differently—and they’re all sub-schools of Mahayana. It’s variously known as Vajrayana, Tantrayana, or Mantrayana. You remember the word yana means a “course,” basically; sometimes a “vehicle.” And Buddhism is fundamentally likened to a vehicle or something like a raft, which you use for crossing a river.
Or let’s say you want to get in at a door, and you have to knock, and you need a brick to knock on the door with. So you pick up the brick and bang on the door. That’s a yana.
It’s an instrument, an expedient, a means, a technique, a method. And the Buddha’s doctrine is called in Sanskrit the dharma. And dharma has a whole multiplicity of meanings, but one of them is “method”—although it’s usually translated “law” in English; this is not a good translation.
So the whole idea of a yana is related to the idea of upāya, which I have previously explained to you, meaning “skillful means,” what we would call a pedagogical device or sort of trick. Because upāya in politics means “cunning,” but in religion or philosophy it means the skill of a teacher in getting something across to a student. And so the whole essence of upāya is really surprise, because everybody wants a surprise, but you can’t surprise yourself because you know in advance what you’re going to do.
When you have hiccups, then indeed you surprise yourself because you didn’t intend to. And upāya and surprise is deeply connected with the whole inner meaning of Buddhism. Life has to surprise itself, because if it doesn’t, you don’t know you’re there!
Because you only know existence to the degree that there is a balance between knowing and not knowing, see? So there must be this surprise. There must always be something in you, in other words, that is sort of spiritual hiccups that happens unbeknownst.
So an upāya is a method of the teacher producing the surprise of enlightenment in the student, and he uses a yana—that is to say, a vehicle or a course, just like we say we give a course in philosophy or semantics or chemistry or something—and so the course, then, is the Mahayana, the “great course,” which includes ever so many different upāyas, or different ways; the Hinayana, the “little course,” which has only a few ways. Now, in the Hinayana they are very tough-minded, and they stick to the notion that all enlightenment depends on your own effort. The Buddha is supposed to have said just before he died, “Be you lamps unto yourselves.
Be you a refuge unto yourselves. Take to yourselves no other refuge.” And in Japanese classification of Buddhist schools they have two that are respectively called jiriki and tariki, and they classify all schools of Buddhism under these headings. Ji means “self,” riki means “power.” So there are ways of salvation—or more accurately liberation—by your own power; jiriki.
And then tariki are the ways by the power of another; that is to say, liberation through what Christians would call grace rather than works. And it’s fascinating how the problem of faith and works, or grace and works, turns up in Buddhism just as it does in Christianity. And it’s really the same problem.
You see, in the history of Christianity there was a huge argument around 400 AD between a Welshman, or a Celt, by the name of Pelagius and Augustine of Hippo. And Pelagius was a kind of optimistic Britisher who believed in muddling through playing the game and putting your nose to the grindstone, and so on, and he believed that one’s own will and effort could obey the commandments of God. Because he argued that God would not have given us any commandments unless we could’ve obeyed them.
But St. Augustine said that he missed the point entirely, that if he had read St. Paul properly—especially the Epistle to the Romans—he would’ve found out that God did not give us commandments in order that we shall obey them, but in order to prove that we couldn’t—that is to say, as St. Paul put it: to convict us of sin. That the law, in other words, was a gimmick, an upāya, and nobody was ever expected to obey the law, the Ten Commandments summarizing the law. Especially “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all your heart and with all your soul and all your mind.” Nobody can do that at all!
And so even the greatest saints are always beating their breasts and confessing that they’re abysmal sinners. Because they’ve realized that they can’t live up to the commandments. So therefore St. Paul taught that the law, he said, is a pedagogue to lead us to Christ.
And, you see, a pedagogue has the same meaning as upāya. So what the law does is make you feel absolutely awful because you can’t obey it or do anything about it. Now, the Buddhists have come to an exactly similar conclusion in the course of time, because the Buddha was apparently (in his original teaching) tough-minded and said, “Listen, boys, you better discipline yourselves,” see?
“And you get to work, and you cut out women and drink and possessions, and meditate and control your minds!” Whew! Well, everybody tried this, and of course they couldn’t do it. A few people did, only they dried up.
They found that was a kind of a pyrrhic victory; that what you gain by stopping your humanity and stopping your emotions isn’t worth getting. It’s like cutting off your head to cure the headache. So they realized that wasn’t the way.
But that was why Buddha suggested it: so that they’d find out. So then came in the new schools of Buddhism which said that you must be liberated by tariki. And ta, as I said, means “other power.” That is to say: the power of something in you that is not your ego, just in the same way as your heart doesn’t beat at the will of your ego.
So in psychoanalysis, for example, we would say that the unconscious has to be worked on and that it will be watered and nourished and so on, and eventually the unconscious will produce your integration. This is Jungian language, not Freudian. And you depend on that.
It’s not you. Because, of course, integration means that you get the two aspects of yourself together and acknowledge them both as you—the conscious and the unconscious, the power of the ego and the power of the natural organism, of the psyche. And so in every art one realizes there comes a point where your will is exhausted, you’ve tried everything to make something work, and it won’t work.
And then, to achieve the perfection of the art, something has to happen of itself—which we variously call grace, inspiration, or tariki. And the problem that everybody’s always wanted to know is: how to make that happen? Now, you see, if we knew how to make it happen it wouldn’t be it, because it would be something we were doing and it would be, therefore, the old story of just simply an ego effort.
And so we don’t know how to make it happen. But if you just settle for that and say, “Well, sorry, but there’s nothing you can do about it,” everybody’s just going to go home and forget the whole thing and commit suicide. The thing is therefore: the state we call faith is the key.
And faith means that we know it will happen, only we’ve got to wait. Only: don’t wait too hard! Because that will be ego effort again and will stop it happening.
So the thing is to learn to wait soft. That is to say: in a state of openness. Well now, how do you do that?
There are all sorts of upāyas you see—means—that help one to do this, and one of them is this thing that I’ve been referring to as the Vajrayana (that means the “diamond vehicle”), the Tantrayana (that means the “web vehicle”), and the Mantrayana (which means the “sound vehicle;” sound in the sense of incantation). I may as well begin with Mantrayana aspect of it, because this is the most perplexing to us from our point of view and doesn’t make any sense. You know there is an age-old belief in spells, and that certain formulae said in the right way will produce results.
All of this descends philosophically (so far as Asia is concerned) from the Hindu Upanishadic idea that the world is the creation of sound. The Hindus say that in the beginning was vāc, which is exactly the same thing as saying in the beginning was the word, as in the Gospel of St. John. But it doesn’t mean the orders, like, “Give him the word.” The vāc means “vibration.” And so the name that is fundamentally vāc is the Sanskrit word ōṃ.
Because when you say ōṃ you begin at the back of your throat with the “O” and you finish at your lips. And so you take in the whole range of sound. And so this word, ōṃ, is called the pranava, and it is the holiest of all names.
And so you can chant ōṃ, you know, and really sir up things. And so all Hindus and Buddhists alike use this word ōṃ, and will use it to set going a meditative state. This is very easy to do, because it’s awfully easy to concentrate on sound.
It’s much more difficult to keep your eyes still. You flicker because your eyes tend constantly to—it’s natural for the eyes to rove over things, and you have difficulty in stopping your eyes from scanning. But sound is very easy to concentrate on.
And the whole point of a mantra is: it’s a method of digging sound. Now, I hope you know what I mean by that, because I purposely used a very slangy, popular word: to dig. That means: get right down into, so that you realize that the flow, the vibration, of sound is a way in which you experience basic existence; being here.
And you can learn everything from it, because sound is not a constant. It comes and it goes, it’s on and off. You only hear it because it is vibrating.
And so herein is the lesson that life is on and off, black and white, life and death, inside and outside, knowing and not knowing. They’re all in the vibration. But it’s easy to explain that in words.
But to understand it in your bones, to feel it, you have to learn how to listen to a sound. So then they invented this way of making chanting sounds. Now, there are various ways in which this is understood by people in Asia.
Incidentally, I should say that this, as a form of Buddhism—what I’m calling Vajrayana, the “whole movement”—sprung up in about the ninth century AD, and its geographical distribution is from north India into Tibet, China, and Japan, and Mongolia. And it is highly characteristic of Tibetan Buddhism. So then, let’s say there are various ways of understanding it.
The word, the formulas, used for mantra are understood by the ignorant as being shortcuts. Instead of saying the whole sutra, the whole sutra is summed up in the formula aum mani padme hum. And you can say that.
That’ll do. You’re a poor, weak slob, and out of infinite compassion the bodhisattvas have arranged to get you to nirvāṇa. Instead of going through all the heroic efforts of those saints and sages and meditation practices, you can just say aum mani padme hum.
And in fact you don’t even need to say it, you can have it printed on paper and enclosed in a silver box on the end of a stick, and all you have to do is rotate the thing. So the popular idea of this is the shortcut. The next idea of it is the one I’ve been sort of talking about, which is that you concentrate on these formulae, on these sounds.
And there’s a third interpretation, which is, you might call, the esoteric interpretation, which was originally—as far as I know, the first person to really bring this up was Vasubandhu, whom I told you about last week, who lived… oh, shortly before 400. And he said the whole point of mantra is that they don’t mean anything at all, and that the word ōṃ is completely meaningless, and that all these various different kinds of incantations are totally senseless. And the idea of repeating them is to liberate yourself from the notion that the universe means anything.
All those forms of Buddhism which are associated with the Vajrayana are what is called tantric. And tantric—the word basically means “web structure:” warp and woof. Well now, tantra, in Hindu context, is a discipline that is sometimes called the fifth veda.
There are four vedas, which are basic holy scriptures of Hinduism. The fifth veda is, as it were, the esoteric one. Now, according to the four vedas, in order to be liberated you have to give up physical life—that is to say, you must not eat meat, you must not have sexual intercourse, you must not take alcohol or any kind of consciousness-changing substance.
There are various other things; I forget them all. But in tantra the whole idea is liberation through the forbidden things—that is to say, liberation in the world, belonging to the world, participating in the world. And sometimes it is therefore called the left hand path.
There’s a Hindu story, you know, that Brahma was asked the question: “Who will gain to union with you first? He who loves you or he who hates you?” And Brahma replied, “He who hates me, because he would think of me more often.” So you can, in other words, attain to liberation by one of two ways. One is by complete altruism, and the other is by total selfishness.
And the moral of the whole thing is that if you are completely and consistently selfish you will discover that yourself is the other, that you don’t really experience yourself at all except in terms of others. When you say, “I love myself,” what do you mean? You mean you love being alive, and then you push it—you see, this is the point: push it—to an extreme.
So the left-hand path is a very dangerous way of going about things because nobody approves of it. I was discussing this morning of my father: some time in the distant past we had witnessed a comedy wherein the stage was set of a man asleep in bed in a highly Victorian bedroom with all kinds of fancy furniture and terrible stuff, you know? And the alarm clock goes off, and he wakes up in a total rage.
He immediately picks up his shoe and smashes the alarm clock. He then gets out of bed in fury, he rips the sheets to pieces, overturns the bed, finds a hammer somewhere, and starts breaking up all the crockery and the windows until the place is a total demolition. Finally there is left in one corner one of those enormous standard lamps, you know, with uugh all this sort of [???]
on it. And he takes several runs at this, and finally he picks it up and he flings it in the air. And as it comes down it bounces—it was made of rubber.
And this is the flip, you see? That dooopp. And that’s the surprise I was talking about in the beginning.
Satori: sudden awakening. It bounced! You know, you thought you were going to crash and you bounced.
And, you see, this is the whole thing about Buddhism. We all think we’re going to crash. And it must seem that way, because otherwise it won’t be a surprise to bounce.
So if, in other words, you press your selfishness and you go into this whole question of: what do I really want? Supposing I could have it. Supposing I have all the money, anything I can think of.
What is it I’m after? And you explore all the sensations you can imagine—all the delights of pleasure, all the ecstasies, all the drunks, all the orgasms, all the anything you can think of—go right through to the end of it: what is it you’re looking for? You say, “Oh, I want to be flipped!” You know, I want to be let out of myself!
Well, when you’re let out of yourself, that’s altruism. He that would save his life shall lose it. He that loses his life—or loosens his life—shall find it.
You go one way or the other and it all becomes the same thing. Alright. So, in the same way, take the path of meditative discipline on concentration, where somebody’s sitting there with a stick and says, “You attend!
See? I’m a master. You follow that way.” See, what you want to get out of that is try and get rid of yourself.
That’s one way of doing it. And there’s certain kinds of people who ought to take it that way. They want to.
They don’t know they’re here unless they hurt. And that’s the right way for them. We shouldn’t condemn it.
It’s just like there are certain kinds of plants that grow this way, there are certain kinds of plants that go this way, and so there are many types. On the other hand, there’s the mantra game where people say, “Oh, this is so simple to do. You really don’t have to chant it at all.
It’s just the shortest formula. It’s just this kind of cut.” And then they get going into this thing, and they get fascinated singing aum mani padme hum. So something like that.
Or like those Pure Land Buddhists in Japan: namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu. And it eventually becomes namuamda, namumdum, nammumm, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunnamun, nunn-damun, nunn-damun, you know? You really get with it.
And when you get with it you suddenly realize it’s doing you. Now, what’s the difference between you and it? Self and other?
Self power, other power? Jiriki and tariki? It’s all one.
Only, you play it isn’t. Because you have to do that. I say have to—that’s not quite the right word.
You do that in order to create the sensation of existence, which is called “now you see it, now you don’t.” I want to draw your attention to the fact that very vivid Tibetan painting has a curious way of creating a state of mind, if you really start looking at it, that I can only call psychedelic. I don’t know anything else quite like it as you get into the detail of it. It’s like this: let’s suppose that you look at some object, and instead of the thing becoming fuzzy and fading out, it always gets more detailed, more clear, more alive.
And you suddenly find out that what you thought was just a bunch of blur was sixteen thousand maggots with bright eyes on them, and that every eye was a deep jewel. And you go down into these deep jewel-like eyes, and you find inside them that there are cross-legged Buddhas with aureoles around them, and necklaces of human heads. And then you start looking at those.
And by Jove, in every eye on one of those human heads, you look inside it and there’s another Buddha sitting there. See? And you go on like that for ever and ever and ever in myriad detail, see?
Well now, that is a state of consciousness which these artists are trying to represent. It is the idea of the dharmadhatu, which I explained in last seminar—that is to say, the net of jewels where every jewel reflects all the other jewels, and therefore naturally contains the reflection of all the other jewels in each other jewel that it reflects, you see? The infinite interrelatedness, or they call it mutual penetration, of everything in the universe.