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Because you realize that if your knowledge and power was without limit, there were no obstacle to it whatsoever, there would be no way of realizing it. When we know for certain the outcome of a game, we don’t play it. We call it off and we invent a new game in which we don’t know the outcome.
So power—whether partial power or omni power—will always be in a state of abrogating itself. So the fundamental game, therefore, the fundamental game form which is manifested in the yang and the yin (the two opposites), is of course the game of hide and seek: of remembering and forgetting. You see, really, to forget is the opposite of remember, only the word hasn’t the same form.
We should put “remember” opposite “dismember.” Because to re-member is to put back the members of something that has been dis-membered. So when the snake thinks that its tail isn’t itself, it is dismembered. When the snake finds that its tail is itself, its remembered.
So that’s why the Catholics say the words of Jesus at the mass, “Do this in remembrance of me.” So that you will discover that you are one body—which is, of course, the only body there is. So lesson number two is relativity; lesson number one having been the opposites in this course on cosmologic or cosmic gamesmanship. We were discussing the fact, this morning, that any manifestation of energy needs an opposition.
In other words, nothing happens—there is no motion, there is no possibility of energy—unless there is something opposing it. There is no dancing except on a floor against which you can push and move. And so I pointed out, therefore, the sense of self depends entirely on the sensation of there being something other, but that this is a kind of a māyā.
In other words, the general feeling that one side is definitively split off from and separate from the other is an illusion. But nevertheless, the opposition between energy and inertia, motion and stillness, is something that, as it were, is the bifurcation or two aspects of a single process. And you know it’s a single process because they can’t do without each other.
If they could do without each other, then it would be a divided process. Radically divided: split down the middle. But as it is, the interdependence of these two sides of things are two ways of looking at things shows that there is something in common between the two.
And to understand this is the essential key to living in a sane way. Because if you’re insane, you are split up. An idiot, you know—the Greek word ἰδιώτης means “private.” Purely private.
Isolated. Out of communication. Out of relationship.
And so this is a way of saying that insanity is a lack of awareness of relativity, because all existence is relationship. Now, if we can take a very fundamental illustration of this: I want you to imagine a universe in which all that there exists is one ball. This ball will, of course, have to be floating in space.
Because if there is no space outside the ball, nobody knows that it’s a ball. There’s no possibility of a ball which has no space beyond it, because then the ball itself—the solid material of the ball—would be all that was and there would be nothing outside it. So there would be no way of defining it as a ball.
So there has to be [in] our universe one ball in space. And the space outside the ball, furthermore, must be regarded as depending upon the existence of the ball. The ball and the space go together.
Now then, however, there is no way of telling what this ball is doing; whether it’s moving or whether it is still. It could be roaring through this space at thousands of miles an hour and there’d be no way of proving it. There would be no air friction upon it, there would be nothing relatively stable with which its movement could be compared and against which it could be measured.
So this ball has no energy. It can’t even be said to be still. It can’t be said to be in motion.
And, of course, this is the situation of the universe as a whole. In the beginning, one of the things that God said before the Bible started—the first thing, according to the Bible, was: “Let there be light.” But actually, there were several former pronouncements, one of which was: “You’ve got to draw the line somewhere,” and the other was: “Have a ball.” And this is why most objects of celestial existence are spherical. Don’t you think it’s very odd to be living on a spherical rock revolving ’round an enormous spherical fire?
This is weird when you wake up and find yourself in that situation! So he said: have a ball. Now, this is the fundamental situation.
The universe as a whole is presumably some kind of ball. It’s curved space, and there it is. And nothing can be said about the whole universe as to whether it is moving or whether it is still.
It’s neither. That’s why the Hindus, in trying to make some indication of the ultimate reality, say “it is not this, it is not that.” It is not one thing, it’s not the other. It doesn’t exist, it doesn’t not exist.
It doesn’t both exist and not exist, it doesn’t neither exist nor not exist. So you can’t say anything about it. Your tongue is tied up.
That’s why it is said in the Mumonkan, which is a great Zen text, that when you’ve attained enlightenment you’re like a dumb man who’s had a marvelous dream. Everybody who’s had a marvelous dream wants to tell everybody about it. But if you’re dumb, you can’t say a thing.
So, in the same way, the moment you realize that you are one with all that there is, well, it’s this fundamental ball and you can’t say anything about it. Because it isn’t moving, it isn’t not moving. You can’t think about it.
And the reason you can’t think about it is not because it exceeds you, it’s because it is you. You can’t get at it like you can’t bite your own teeth. So then, if we introduce two balls into our cosmos, then we can say something about motion.
Because it is apparent that they can approach each other or get away from each other. But no one can say which one is doing it or whether both are doing it, because there is no way of determining it. One may be still and the other moving to it or away from it.
Both may be moving towards each other or away from each other. But there is no way of saying which one starts. And furthermore, they can only move with respect to each other in a straight line.
They have no possibility of moving on a surface. They have defined, linear motion. Now we will introduce three balls into our system, and suddenly we find not only that they can move on a surface with respect to each other, but also that there’s going to be a little fight started.
Because if two balls stay together at a constant space apart, and one ball appears to approach them or to recede from them, well, here is a problem. Are the two standing still and the one likes them or doesn’t like them, so moves closer or away? Or is the one standing still and the two moving towards it or away from it?
Well, there’s only one way in this thing of deciding: two balls that stay together constitute a majority. And according to the majority vote, they will decide whether they are moving away from the other one or approaching it, or whether it is standing still, or whatever. Now, then, the third ball, of course, can lick them by joining them.
It can always stay, if it wants to, at a constant space from the other two, unless they break up and go off in different directions. So long as they stay together, it can stay with them. And then we are back to the original situation because no one is moving at all, however much they move.
Because the three constitute, now, one constellation; one triangle. Alright, introduce a fourth ball. Now we have the possibility of motion in three dimensions.
And you would say, well, now this is good because we’ve got an umpire—somebody who stands at the distance of objectivity and looks down upon those three balls and will decide which of them are moving and which of them are still. Very good, but the problem is: which one of them is the fourth? Who’s the umpire?
Everyone is in a position of a third dimension to the other three. So everyone is both involved in the game of three, and could be the external observer who is the umpire of what the three are doing. Now that is exactly your situation as sensing yourself as an external observer of the world.
And this is a simple basic principle in terms of which all bodies in the cosmos may be understood. It’s simply nothing but a multiplication of this situation. It’s complicated, yes, so that you have to scratch your head to think about it.
But it all reduces down to this fundamental mutual motion of balls. So you see, from this, what is the meaning of relativity. So none of the balls, incidentally, have such a thing as a true position.
Because the position of any one of the four is where it seems to be from the the different points of view of each member of the group. The members of the group can get together and agree upon a theoretical positioning of the balls, but they can never directly see all of the balls, including the one that’s looking, in this theoretical position—just in the same way as you have a theoretical idea of the dimensions of a room which would correspond to an architect’s ground plan and elevation. And you would say you know that that corner up there is a right angle, although you see it as an obtuse angle.
Now, this agreement as to what are the true positions of things is very important, because upon such agreement depends all possibilities of human communication. We have to have a standard of what is north, south, east, and west, of what is a unit of measure, of what languages and what words or what noises are to mean what experiences. And by constructing this conventional standard of measures we are able to agree with each other.
But one must see at the same time that this is a convention. There is no reason for driving on the right side of the road rather than the left, except that everybody must agree what side they’re going to drive on. One isn’t really preferable to the other.
The point is to agree. So when we agree about certain social conventions—whether they be legal or moral or descriptional, aesthetic—whatever they are, they are a construct. They are an abstraction.
And nobody—well, let’s say they’re an abstraction, and this abstraction is never directly perceived. Just as you cannot possibly go up to the ceiling to a position where you can see the whole floor as a rectilinear pattern as it would be drawn in an architect’s blueprint. Your vision will always be distorted—if by distortion you mean departure from the blueprint.
So then, except in terms of some sort of convention of this kind, there is no such thing as the true position of the four balls in space. Because you must always ask when you ask about truth: truth for whom? Or: truth in relation to what standards?
Now, you see, when we measure something by inches—inch number one is the same length as inch number two, three, four, et cetera. When we measure things by the clock, the clock is a circle regularly divided into 360 (or multiples thereof) degrees. But I’ve often wondered whether it wouldn’t be interesting to have elliptical clocks, or Mae West shaped clocks, so that certain times of the day would go faster than others or slower than others.
It might be very convenient to have the evening to last longer. Slow time down for the evening, you see? Speed it up at some other time.
Why not? But, you see, we tried to fit everything into an ideal of regularity. Now, the next point is that if relationship is existence, we are going to discover from this that the existence of any identifiable thing or event in the whole cosmos depends upon (and in an opposite sense, is responsible for) the existence of everything else.
But to do that we’ve got to understand another image, which I will illustrate with the parable of a rainbow. Now, you know, there’s an old philosophical conundrum: if a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody around to hear it, does it make a noise? This is a very simple problem, but it has been discussed in ways that make it very confusing.
A noise is a neurological experience caused by a vibration of air interacting with an eardrum and an auditory nervous system. So therefore, obviously, when the tree falls, it will set up a vibration in the air. But if this vibration in the air does not pulsate upon an eardrum, there will be no noise.
You can see it in a simpler way: what will happen if I hit a skinless drum? There will be a hit but no sound, because the drum has no skin. So if there is no eardrum, the vibrations in the air will not make a noise.
I don’t need to prove there’s any spookery about mind as distinct from matter or anything like that. That’s quite straightforward. But now, let’s take the somewhat more subtle case of seeing a rainbow.
To perceive a rainbow there must be three variables present, three factors: there must (A) be the sun, (B) there must be moisture in the atmosphere. And, funnily enough, (C) there must be an observer at a certain angle relative to the angle of the sun and the moisture. The observer will, in other words, be standing, shall we say, on a straight line between the sun and the body of moisture, and what will then appear to be the center of the rainbow.
That’s why the side of a rainbow is always off to one side. You never see the side of a rainbow directly in front of you. So the position of a rainbow differs for every observer just in the same way as that the position of this table differs for each one of you in the room.
Depends where you’re sitting as to where you see it. Now, the trouble with this illustration is that a rainbow is a rather diaphanous thing and we tend to accord it a rather low reality status. And yet, fulfills all the requirements necessary for a genuinely existent thing.
Oh, it’s true, you can’t grab hold of it. But neither can you grab hold of the moon—at least not yet. Now it has these criteria.
It isn’t a hallucination, because everybody standing around will curse and swear, and they see that at such and such a time and place, they veritably do see this rainbow. So it’s not like a ghost or a hallucination. But everybody sees it in a slightly different place.
And, you see, if there were no sun shining, there would be no rainbow. If there were no moisture in the atmosphere, there would be no rainbow. But let us suppose that the sun is shining and there is moisture in the atmosphere, but nobody is around.
We only say with great reluctance that there would be no rainbow. Because that way of looking at things upholds a particular mythology of the world—the world is something independent of us. This is the great superstition of Western culture: that the world is independent of you.
That you don’t make any difference to it. It’s just something into which you come and it’s going along and along and along, and you come in and you look in the box and say, “Well, that’s the way it is,” and then they kick you out again. But now, let’s set up the situation in another way.
Let’s suppose the sun is shining out on the ocean somewhere, and I am on a ship, and I could look over there and I say, “My goodness, isn’t this a nice day? If there was some moisture right over there, we would have a rainbow.” Then everybody says, “Well, there isn’t one.” It just does not truly exist that there is a rainbow. Alright.
The sun is shining out on the ocean and there is some moisture. If there were a ship sailing near it so that there could be someone to see, there would be a rainbow. Now, in these two situations, they are both exactly the same.
There would be a rainbow if there was some moisture around, but there isn’t. And equally, there would be a rainbow if there was someone to see it, and there isn’t. Those are two completely equivalent situations.
Because this isn’t, again, a question of spookery, it’s a question that the existence of the phenomenon “rainbow” depends on the presence of three factors—like the existence of a human being depends on the existence of two factors: a man and a woman. Everybody has to have a father and a mother, or have had. Otherwise, with exception of that relationship, you don’t exist.
Well, now, the case of the rainbow is exactly the same case as everything else. It’s just because a rainbow is rather diaphanous and intangible, although it sure hits you in the eye. And the eye, the seeing, is a form of touching.
Seeing is touching at a distance. When you find that the table is hard, that is a way of feeling with your fingers the same thing as that you cannot see through it with your eyes. So we we are funny about this.
Purely optical sensations are regarded as having a lesser grade of reality than tactile sensations. When you get hold of something and can grab it and you feel it’s solid, you feel you are sure of its existence than if you merely see it. But it’s all the same thing.
Touch is a sensation as if your finger ends were full of millions of little eyes. Every nerve end an eye. And they close around this and they find: it is not transparent.
There is a limit. Here is something we don’t go through. But that’s exactly the same as when you see with these eyes, here.
You don’t see through something. So then, the physical world responding to the sense of touch—I mean, it’s another way of saying that the table would not be hard and is not hard except when touched. It is the touch that evokes the hardness in the table.
When it is not touched, it’s not soft, it’s not hard. It has no quality at all. Nothing which is not in relation to us has any existence—or I will add: in relation to some other kind of responsive creature.
Just in the same way that, when light energy goes out of the sun into space, the energy will only be manifested as light if there is somebody outside the sun to reflect the light. Otherwise, the light does not in any way illumine the darkness of space. You must bring something into it to manifest the light in space.
So a Zen poem says: “The tree manifests the bodily power of the wind, the water manifests the spiritual nature of the moon.” Because, you see, if the wind is blowing—that is to say an energy is moving along and there is nothing to stand in its way—the energy is not there. The energy in the situation is evoked only by something standing in its way. Then it’s manifest.
“The water manifests the spiritual power of the moon.” Why? Because in the breaking waves, the moon can be shattered into thousands of fragments. And yet it always remains one.
That’s its spiritual power. You wouldn’t see that miracle of the Moon if it weren’t for the waves. They divided up like that.
Alright, you can say it’s a distortion. That’s not the way the moon is. The waves are not reflecting it correctly.
But that’s only trying to say that things reflected in a smooth and still surface are reflected more really than things reflected in a vibrating surface. Okay, if you want to construe it that way, it’s your your privilege. But you can have any kind of reflecting you want.
So, in the same way, it is with you. What you see, therefore, depends on the way your senses are constructed. You have certain kinds of sense organs, and these sense organs evoke the kind of universe appropriate to them.
It’s not necessarily the way things are because there is no way that things are apart from their impact (or better, relationship) with some kind of perceiver or perceiving organism. Because things are only in relation. When there is nothing to which they can relate, nothing is happening.
And the so-called existence which we perceive and that to which it is related come into being together. Now, is that to say that, before any living organisms existed, there wasn’t any universe? Is that to say that all our knowledge of the prehistoric and geological past of the world and the cosmos before life came to it is nothing but an extrapolation?
That is to say, all we are saying is that this is what would have been happening if there had been people around to see it. But since there weren’t, since there was no living organism around to witness this, nothing was going on. Now, it’s possible to make a very good case for that point of view.
But I would like to be a little more modest and not make it quite that radical. And I would say rather this: there would never have been a universe before living beings existed unless there was going to be a creature called man. Man living in a future, say, implies, in the past, a certain state of affairs.
In other words, this planet had to come into being with an adequate amount of temperature, oxygen, gases, everything else, food supplies, for the organism called man to exist. So let me say, then: the existence of man implies a certain kind of environment—meteorological, geological, and astronomical. But the other side of this proposition is that such an environment implies man.
Now, where you get two sides of the situation where they imply each other mutually, you have, in fact, a truly relational and unitary system. Well then, therefore, the answer to this problem is that, prior to the existence of any form of life, the universe at that time is dependent upon the fact that those forms of life are going to emerge. Now, this is a thing that is very difficult for us to understand because we think of reality proceeding forward into the future, but dependent only upon the past.
It’s very difficult for us to see that events that we call past are dependent upon events in the future. That a lot of things would never have started unless certain results were going to happen. Again, this is another of those ideas which is an affront to common sense.
But there are a number of ways of showing that it’s quite a sensible idea. Unless you were—if, you know, you’re flying an aeroplane. You leave London, you arrive in New York.
You wouldn’t have started out from London unless you had known in advance there was a place called New York where you could land. So, in a very similar way, the energy system of the universe does not start out with certain, say, very primitive, amoebic creatures until it knows that it can arrive. I don’t know where—where it’s going on beyond man—but at least it’s got to get as far as man.
Because if it’s not going to be able to do that, it won’t even start. Now, you can put this in other terms: an electric current. Electricity isn’t like water.
When you turn on the faucet, the water goes right down the hose and waits at the nozzle. So as soon as you turn on the nozzle, there’s the water. But an electric current isn’t like that.
When you’ve got two wires—I mean, two terminals, positive and negative—and you’ve got the positive one hitched up, and here’s your wire, and you leave the end of that wire just an inch away from the negative terminal, there is no electric current moving. It hasn’t flowed down the wire from the positive terminal so that it waits to be ready to jump. Trouble is that electricity moves so fast we don’t see these things.
And you can only see it if you do it on a colossal scale. Supposing that we had an electric wire that was, oh, 300 million miles in length. Now we connect it at the positive end.
Nothing at all happens. Connect it at the negative end so that, too, can have a possibility. You see?
That’s the other terminal. Then immediately the circuit starts. But the circuit of electric current does not start until there is a place for it to arrive.
See, that’s the point. So, in exactly the same way—you see, it makes no difference whether the wire be something that is 180,000 miles and is traversed in one second, or whether it’s 60 billion miles that will take a somewhat longer time. In either case the current will not start until the receptor terminal, the minus terminal, is secured.
So, in this way—I would say just exactly the same way—life will not start up in a universe to which it really doesn’t belong, in which it can be regarded as nothing more than a stranger. So if you follow that out, you see this, that the whole existence of the universe depends on every individual. It isn’t a question of how long you last; that the universe will only last as long as you do.
That’s not the point. The universe is much bigger than you are and you are very small. But at this moment, it depends on you.
The universe is much longer than you are and you are very short in time, but nevertheless it depends on you. The universe, in the future, long after you’re dead, will still be depending on the fact that you once existed. The universe in the past, existing long before you were ever thought of, still depends on the fact that one day you would exist.
And it depends on each person. So, in other words, there is in everything that happens—every whole depends on every part. Because, you see, in truth there are no parts of the universe.
Parts are an abstract creation. When we think of someone or something as a part, we are quite arbitrarily cutting him off and saying: by convention we will agree that our skins are our boundary. And therefore, since our skins do not include the whole cosmos, we are only a part of it.
But there are no parts. Just as, when you study your own organism, all of it is continuous. All the so-called parts flow into the others, like the motions of waves.
You don’t have detachable parts that you can unscrew inside you, you see? Unless you’ve got false teeth or something like that, then you can take it out, see? In the ordinary way you can’t unscrew parts of the human being from another.
They are continuous. Well, in exactly the same way, you are continuous with this environment. And although we have been habituated to looking upon ourselves as separate things, we are no more separate from what’s going on around us than each of these waves, here, are separate from the ocean, or that Mount Tamalpais is separate from the planet Earth.
We have great freedom of movement. So do the waves. So do the gulls floating in the air.
So do the trees waving in the wind. We have a larger degree of freedom than that because we are more volatile. But we are just as much waves in the total process—it depending upon us, and we in turn depending upon it.
Now, understand the meaning of there being no parts. All parts are ideas. We have an idea of a part.
We chop things up and say: one human being, two human beings, three human beings, and so on, and so think of it as parts. But that’s not the way it works. You can see this from the most elementary neurology by understanding that it is the way you are as a living body that evokes the kind of universe that you see.