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And so this is an artform designed to get you into the mood to understand that by looking at it. It is absolute, total fascination. But what I was trying to describe to you about the nature of these artforms, where you look at the details, and then you suddenly discover that behind the details there are millions more details, and you never fuzz out.
You find, in other words, that the possibility to see down into something goes on for ever and ever. Now then, that is the visual equivalent of hearing when you work with mantras, with these formal chants. To get to hear sound in such a way that, just as you could say that a visual field is rich in detail, like these paintings are, like a piece of Hindu beautiful silk weaving, which is rich with gold and flowers, and you see detail in that—now, you can hear sound in the same way.
And that’s what Hindu music is playing with. And so when you get down into that, you see, you are what I would call truly listening in to the universe. Because eventually, if you listen to sound that way, or you look at form that way, you discover its secrets.
This is just another way of investigation of life comparable to our scientific investigation with microscopes and chemical analysis and this, that, and the other, but it’s a different road. Scientific investigation does what we call looking out into matter, into the physical world. This is going in the opposite direction, but it’s all the same thing.
It’s the same continuum. But it’s going into the nature of your feeling of it; that is to say, into the center of awareness, into the self. And what all these drawings are from various points of view is: they’re drawings of your own interior world looked at in this way under the influence of the traditions of, indeed, a particular culture which is not our culture, and which therefore strikes us as a little strange.
But whenever you look at a work of art and you feel, “Gee, isn’t that weird! That’s not the way people look!” You know, for people’s first impression of Chinese art, say—they perhaps don’t meet Tibetans so easily—is that it’s… well, everything’s got curls on it! It wiggles.
It’s very strange. And the reason for that is that they are showing you a vision of the universe which you haven’t looked at, and so it looks odd to you. And what you mean by “odd” is: well, it curls where it shouldn’t.
Or I don’t see things that way; I don’t see them with that extra flip on them. No, indeed you don’t, because the way you see things is what you call ordinary and what you’re used to. And, as you know, when we see things we ignore.
We screen out certain aspects of things which we don’t notice. And therefore, by studying other people’s artforms we are taught to see things that we wouldn’t ordinarily notice. So that when you become used to Chinese or Tibetan painting, you say, “Why, of course!
That’s the way the world is also!” So the feeling of the strange, of the—we use the word “exotic,” and that means a thing looks exotic wen you look at it from somebody else’s point of view. And eventually you get used to it. And so, if you move into a state of consciousness (such as I’ve been trying to describe) that is not the usual kind of state of consciousness, you say, “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” And if you aren’t prepared for that you might be afraid of it and say, “Am I going mad?
Am I going out of my mind?” Yes, you are. You are going out of your set, ordinary set of mind, but you’re going into just another aspect of mind. And at first it always feels weird.
That’s why people have difficulty in meditation, and they really start moving. They say, “Well, I’m going to go out of my mind if I think about that!” You know, all those famous stories about people who invented computers and went mad, or who thought about the nature of thought and absolutely were never heard from again. There’s a certain fear, in other words, of the loss of one’s own ego; of the sort of regular world where conventions go on, where the familiar gestures are made so that you feel at home, and you get into other dimensions of awareness where the gestures are different, the nerves are doing something else, or indeed you don’t know whether they’re even nerves anymore.
They may be Ādi-Buddhas and all these charming girls who you see in these things, and you don’t know who they are. Some kind of weird Tibetan fantasy. You say, “Uh-oh!” So you get cultural shock.
Stay away from that! But it isn’t cultural shock with respect to some other people, it’s cultural shock with respect to your own inner life. In other words: that we all have within us levels of vibration which we’re not used to, not familiar with, and therefore are scared of.
So this particular kind of Buddhism—Vajrayana—is a rather adventurous, not to say dangerous, exploration of man’s inner consciousness, depicting it in an elaborate symbolism which, although to a Westerner used to Christian symbolism, looks as if it were a drawing of some heaven somewhere, of potentate seated on thrones and receiving homage, and all that political bit, all these are quite definitely—I’m not making this up—all these are quite definitely to be understood as exteriorizations of your own being. In other words, let us suppose that we looked on a microscope slide at the cross-section of a spinal column, or of an area of the brain: this would show us certain designs, certain patterns, and they would be rather central to you. Now, these are equivalent to those.
But they are moving in a different direction. And you have to understand, now, the difference between what is called the material body and the subtle body. The rūpa—actually, that means the “formal body,” as I explained in the second seminar.
The word rupa, in Sanskrit, which is applied to the material world means “the world of form,” the world seen in a certain form, a form to which we’re accustomed. So you have a formal body which is you as you appear to any other objective observer. Then you have a subtle body which is the way you are as you feel to yourself.
In other words, supposing you’ve been on a dunk and you wake up with a headache and it feels that your head is so bit—well, that’s the shape of your subtle body. Spiegelberg used to show a wonderful cartoon of Corky in the comics looking at a plane going over that was doing some stunts, and it made his neck grow longer and longer until it all got tied in knots while watching the plane. That was the shape of Corky’s subtle body, which is called his liṅga śarīra in Sanskrit, as opposed to sthula śarīra, which is your gross body; that means more dense.
Now, so when you get the drawing of the microscope slide of, say, a cross-section of the spine or something that is quite fundamental to the structure of nervous system, you’ve got a design of the gross body. But when you start looking into the other direction of things, which is how you feel, and you really go into feeling to what sound is, to what touch is, to what emotion is, and you trace the senses back along their channels until you get to the mānas-vijñāna, which is the central sense behind each separate sense, and you find that it isn’t just kind of a goo, it’s an incredibly detailed experience. And then you draw pictures like this to represent what you found.
We would draw them in a different way if we genuinely made this inquiry ourselves, because we have different traditions. And we would find ourselves goodness only nows what we’d be drawing. But we would be making things like the stained glass windows in Chartres cathedral, you see?
And crucifixes. Because when you investigate sensation, you go down into it and yu feel it getting more and more intense, more and more intense, more, more, more! And you get eeeeeek!
You see? Right down is: how much can you stand? Well, there’s Jesus on the cross, see?
Cover it with jewels. Make it gorgeous. So all these things, you see, are investigations of the basic sensation of being alive, and people are curious about that.
You know, where are we? What’s it all about? Well, the only way is to look and see.
So if you want to find out what you mean by “meaning,” by “asking a question,” by “being conscious,” by “being here”—why, you have to meditate! And meditation is not meditating on something (like thinking it out in an intellectual way), it is looking more closely at what you’re asking the question about. So you could do that externally with a microscope, with chemical analysis, and so on.
That way is valid. But it has to be balanced by the internal way: going down into your own sensations and your unconsciousness. And the point that I am going to make again in another way that I made this morning is that this isn’t something you’re supposed to do.
That is to say: it isn’t a chore, it isn’t your solemn duty—unless you want to come on that’s the sort of person you ought to be. This is a delight: to get into that out of total fascination and joy and love of whatever it is that you are, and everybody else is. So that this is a different spirit of religion than that to which we are normally accustomed.
Instead of saying—which I suppose is an attitude characteristic of what you might call a patrist from a matrist culture—“Go and read your Bible! Brrr! Get down on your knees and repent!” You see?
Oh! Krrr! Now, we feel pretty spooked by that attitude.
This one says instead, “Psst! I have got something to show you! Look in here!
You want to know what all this is about? You watch. Take a look.” And you look in there and say, “Oh no!
It can’t really be like that!” You look at the other guy—who’s the guru, you see—and he says, “It’s alright. Don’t be afraid.” “Oh! That’s not possible!” He says, “Oh yeah,” you know?
And this is the attitude. And I don’t know how to suggest it except by this sort of drama of the two different approaches. So this, then, is as near as I can get to describing the inner meaning of tantra, of an attitude which is common to both Hinduism and Buddhism.
When they say tantra it means not only the web, the warp and the woof, where you can’t have yes without no, you can’t have this direction without having that direction, because this direction, to have it there, needs this other one to hang on to. But he says, “Now look here, I’ve got to have something to hang on to, too.” So we hang on to each other, and so there we are. See?
That’s the nature of a web. And so tantra means: the comprehension of the unity of opposites, of the good and the bad, of life and death, of love and hate, of all extremes in the whole spectrum of our emotions, our sensations, everything. In a sense, this is not something for children, because you have to be reliable to get into this, because otherwise you go berserk.
You wouldn’t pay any respect to any rules or anything if you didn’t have a mature attitude before getting mixed up in this. Because you suddenly see: anything and everything goes. There is no way of being wrong.
Because you are It—whatever there is, forever and ever and ever. And that’s so! You can die!
Fantastic! Forget everything altogether. Blow right out.
Come back. Because the light is the other side of the darkness. Be all new again.
But it’s all you just as it was before, because you do the same patterns, same kind of stars, same kind of physical properties, the same dance. Blot it out, it starts again. Just like the physical forces in things, you see, repeat.
They are fundamental laws and patterns. It’s exactly the same with the inner world I’m talking about. Investigating the outer world, investigating the inner world—it’s all one.
And that’s you. So Buddhist enlightenment is simply to know that secret. And that’s what it means—really, finally—to grow up.
You see, again, just as I said that we find, in our own preachers and religious people, an attitude of against life-ness, and we get a funny feeling about that, that they’re full of reprimands and they’re full of—there’s a trap, you see, and they have the young people’s fellowship, as I explained, to suck you into this trap. Exactly the same thing exists here. In particular, I think one of the basic tantric texts is called Saraha, the treasury of songs, by Professor Günther of the University of Saskatchewan.
Saraha was a tantric teacher living probably in the area of Bengal about 1000 AD. He is making a critique of both the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy. So he says: —that means a Buddhist monk— —that's crrk!
what you really are— This seminar is going to be a fundamental course on cosmic gamesmanship. We shall discuss, first of all, the yang and the yin, because what we are studying is the way (whatever may be called) the “universal energy” plays. And so the fundamental thing is yang and yin, the positive and negative principles, to use the Chinese words.
Next, we shall discuss relativity. Next we shall discuss group theory; in and out. And finally, we shall discuss identity: who are you?
But in starting, the moment one talks about cosmic gamesmanship it carries with it the assumption that the physical universe is a game. And that doesn’t seem to be taking it sufficiently seriously. Of course, according to Hindu philosophy, the physical universe is an illusion.
They use the word māyā. But māyā has many meanings. And among these meanings only one is “illusion.” And the word illusion, of course, always carries a bad connotation to Western ears.
We want something that’s for real. But it doesn’t necessarily carry such a bad connotation to Hindu ears, because the word māyā also means “magic,” “creative power,” “art,” and of all things, “measurement.” Because it comes from the Sanskrit root mātṛ, from which of course we get “meter,” “matter,” and the Latin mater: “mother.” In other words, the world is looked upon (or can be looked upon) as a perfectly good illusion. Because all art, in a way, is a creation of illusion.
On a stage the actor plays. And Hindus think of the world by analogy with drama: the whole thing is a big act. And there is one actor behind the whole thing, which is you—not you in the sense of your so-called empirical ego.
Not you as you imagine yourself, and as you ordinarily sense yourself to be, but what is really and truly you at a much deeper level. But, you see, when we use the word “game” or “play” in English, we usually tend to mean that it’s something trivial. You see, we divide life very strictly into play and work.
Other peoples don’t do this. And that’s one of the shatteringly awful features of our culture, this division of play and work. So that most people are working at tasks which they hate so that they can make enough money to stop doing it and play.
This is perfectly ridiculous! Nobody needs to do that. Because what you get with work—done in this way; done heartlessly and without joy—is money.
And what can you do with it? Supposing you do earn time to spare and money to spend, what is there to buy with it? The answer is: the other fake and joyless products made by other people who hate their work.
So there is a certain phoniness, a certain lack of essential quality in almost all the work that we perform, because the work is done not for the work, but for money. And play is considered something separate from work. Work is serious.
Play is not serious. In fact, we have a strange incapacity to play at all. Because we always—especially in the United States—play with an ulterior motive.
That is to say, play is good for you. And we do everything because it’s good for us, because we judge the physical world without our senses. We judge in theory.
We believe that the proof of the pudding is not in the eating, but in the chemical analysis. It is often my fate to have to take lunch in college cafeterias. And what must be happening to the intellectual life of the nation as a result of professors, graduate students, and students eating this kind of stuff?
It must be catastrophic. Because I go all over the United States to various colleges, and everywhere the fare is exactly the same. You get a so-called salad, which is a piece of that wretched iceberg lettuce, with a dollop of cottage cheese and a wedge of canned pineapple on top of it.
Then you get slices of beef that have been tormented for hours in an electronic purgatory. Sloshed over (or rather, coated is the exact word) with a gravy made a water, library paste, and bouillon cubes. Then there are peas, carrots, and corn which have been sterilized (because that’s important) by boiling for hours.
And finally, there is a pie which is a slab of beige goo, encrusted in reconstituted cardboard and topped with sweetened shaving cream squirted from an aerosol bong. And all this has been analyzed by dietitians, and by the whole Department of Home Economics, and is found to veritably contain the right amount of calories, proteins, carbohydrates, and vitamins. Now, actually, this is all a result of academic politics.
Because academic politics, you know, is mainly concerned with feuding between departments. And this is the way in which the Home Economics Department has won out by rotting the brains of historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, and physicists with this miserable fare. And this goes on all over.
Things are judged, you see, because they are good for you. And if we inquire carefully as to what this good for us is, you know, you mustn’t look into that. It’s taboo.
The whole culture would fall apart if we found out what it was. Because what is the good that is good for you is always and necessarily something in the future. It never happens and is never going to happen.
All of these vitamins and carbohydrates and things can do for you is keep you in a state of reasonable survival and in which you never catch up with anything. Because, you see, time is strictly an illusion. There is no such thing as time any more than that is such a concrete thing as the equator.
The measurement of time—time is a measure of motion, just like lines of latitude and longitude are a measure of the geographic surface of the Earth. and nobody will ever tie up a rolled roast with the equator. There is, however, such a thing as timing, which is quite different from time.
Timing is skillful rhythm. But you cannot ever attain proper timing if you hurry; if you’re in a hurry to get to the future. Because the future is never going to arrive.
So if you hurry to get to the future, you always get a punishment for it. For example, instant coffee. TV dinners.
The sort of food they serve on airplanes. Or beef that is cooked in electronic ovens, where you push the switch on and EEEEOOOWNNN! and a whole roast is done.
It isn’t. It’s heated through, it’s not roasted. And all these things are awful because they are the result of the illusion of time: that there is something that is good for us and that we’re going to get to.
And so this is the result of an educational system which is completely geared to literary and mathematical pursuits, which trains everybody to be clerks, insurance salesmen, and bureaucrats. And only with great reluctance does education offer any kind of instruction in material competence, and then only for people who are considered too stupid to be intellectuals, to go on to college. So the basic arts of life in our culture—farming, cooking, dressing, furnishing, lovemaking—are utterly neglected.
There is no sophisticated training widely available in any of these things for the average person. And so that’s the reason why there is nothing on which to spend the time that we save and the money we earn, except trash. So fake cars, pasteboard houses, bread made of squishy styrofoam (vitamin enriched), and all that sort of thing, you see?
Because of the illusion that we’ve fallen for the illusion of time. So what is absolutely necessary for a culture—that means a society of cultivated people—is the cultivation and devotion to the present, to the material world, rather than to the purely theoretical world. You see, māyā, in Sanskrit, does indicate in one sense the physical world—in the positive sense, that the physical world is actually a marvelous work of art.
But māyā, in another sense, in the sense in which it means “measurement,” refers to all the ways we have of numbering and naming and dividing up into categories the physical world. So time is māyā. Latitude and longitude is māyā.
The future is māyā, in the less exciting sense of illusion. So, you see, because of this state of mind we don’t think that play is important. We play in order to refresh ourselves to go back to work, and that’s not playing.
Playing is a real absorption—in the delight of a dance, for example. You don’t dance because it’s good for you, you dance because you’re happy. But, you see, we have a very odd incapacity for happiness because we are happier when we expect good things to happen rather than when they’re happening.
And so we say of a thing that we consider bad, “It has no future.” Well, nothing has a future. There isn’t a future! There’s always a present.
And one has to get this is a kind of a basic approach. So then, one can also, therefore, use the word “play,” or “game,” in a sense that is not trivial. We don’t think, for example, that when we hear a performance of a Bach cantata—or better, a purely non-symbolic thing like a fugue—we don’t think that that’s trivial.
We don’t think it’s trivial to play the organ in church. We don’t think that the plays of Shakespeare are trivial. They’re plays.
Play, you see, in the sense that I’m using it, is a musical thing. It is a dance. It is an expression of delight in the sense of Blake saying that energy is eternal delight.
And, for example, the art of Islam, the arabesques, which aren’t pictures of anything. They’re just fantastically intricate, beautifully colorful designs. They are play.
And according to this thesis, the universe is just like that. It is a very, very elaborate play system. And the fundamental elements of this play the Chinese call the yang and the yin.
Yang means the positive and yin the negative. Yang refers to the south side of a mountain which is in the sun, and yin the north side which is in the shade. Yang refers to the north bank of a river which is in the sun, and yin the south bank of the river which is in the shade.
Yang is symbolically or prototypically male, yin is symbolically female. That’s not to cast any reflections on women. So you might say the reason they’re called male and female is that yang is aggressive and yin is yielding.
Yang is convex, yin is concave. Now, the secret about the opposites—which is as important as realizing that there is no such thing as time—the secret about the opposites is this: that they appear to be as different as different can be. We say of opposites like black and white that they are the poles apart.
But in using that phrase, poles, you imply a connection between them. As there is a connection of the north to the south pole of the Earth, and as there is a connection between the north and south poles of a magnet. They are two ends in the same stick.
Two sides of the same coin. Two opposite points on the same sphere. And that means that they go together.
In Chinese this is called a rising mutually. As in the second chapter of Lao Tzu, where he says, “When all the world knows beauty to be beautiful, there is already ugliness. When all the world knows goodness to be good, there is already evil.
For to be and not to be arise mutually.” What confuses people is that they don’t see this. They think, for example, that the positive is something there which truly exists, whereas the negative has less reality. It doesn’t exist.
We think that, for example, the space in which this universe floats is a nonentity and has no importance. And we are thereby—because we see energy manifested in the positive aspect of things and no energy manifested in the negative—we are afraid that energy and its delight is threatened by nothingness. That it’s going to be swallowed up and that, in the end, darkness will win.
We feel that about ourselves and we feel it about the universe as a whole. Because energy is effort. And effort, after a while, you get tired and you can’t keep it up.
And so darkness must win. According to Chinese philosophy that is a hallucination. Because energy cannot be manifested without inertia.
There must be something to push against for there to be any manifestation of energy. You cannot dance without a flaw to use your energy against. When energy or any kind of motion is completely unobstructed, there’s a sort of squish, a fizzle, and nothing happens.
Because fundamentally, as we shall see next hour, motion is only realized when there is stillness. Relative stillness. And so energy is only realized when there is inertia, and the positive is only realized when there is the negative to bring it out.
These things work together. But when you don’t realize it, you are anxious. You are afraid that the dark side is going to win.
Now, the minute that happens, you become unable to play. You start getting serious and the game degenerates into a fight. Because you feel it absolutely urgent and necessary, under those circumstances, that the positive must be made to win.
“Accentuate the positive,” you see? And that leads to all this beastly kind of religion where people go around with false smiles and hearty handshakes and accentuate the positive. And the moment that a person does that, you know that it’s a big fake, it’s a put-on, and that there’s something utterly unreal about it.
That’s why you may have often experienced the fact that certain kinds of virtuous people are offensively virtuous, and they are very difficult to get on with. They don’t have any light touch. And, of course, this is particularly prevalent in religions.
Because—not all religions, but many religions—are states of terror about the negative side. I was talking with a very enlightened nun the other day—Catholic—and she was open to all sorts of new ideas. I said, “You know, there’s one thing wrong with your worship and the way you sing your hymns and chant your chant and do all these rituals.
You don’t swing.” I don’t mean by that that it isn’t syncopated. I mean by that that there is not an attitude of delight about it. It’s always you feel the service is being conducted in the presence of the chief inspector of morals.