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It is your body which turns the sun into light, which turns it into heat, which turns water into wet, and rocks into hard. And in turn, your body is one of the pulsations of nature, along with the sun, the rocks, the water, et cetera. So there’s a mutual arrangement.
It creates you, or evokes you, or does you—whatever word you want to use—and at the same moment you do it, and you do all of it. So this is why there was some kind of truth in astrology. I say this, but at the same time, I certainly don’t consult astrologers and plot my life by the crude calculations of horoscopy.
Because if you do that, you get into endless tangles of self-deception because it isn’t accurate. But it has a principle. The astrologer was right: when he drew a map of your soul, he drew a crude map of the universe.
He drew the universe as it was at the time and place of your birth. The universe as it was, as seen from the point of view where you were born. And that was your soul.
So your soul, you see, is not in your body. Your body is in your soul. Because your soul is the entire network of relationships in terms of which you live.
Your soul is the whole universe. But each one of us, as it were, is a different point in it. But all these points in it are the center.
We can go way beyond Ptolemy and Copernicus now, and if we think that space is curved, every point of space is the center of the universe, because any point on a ball is the center of the sphere; of the surface. See, you could turn any point of a ball, and wherever you look at it it’s the center, isn’t it? See?
So, in the same way, take a crystal ball in your hand—a crystal mirror. No, what I mean, it’s not a crystal mirror. I mean a spherical mirror.
Look at it. And wherever you turn it, your face will be in the middle. So, in exactly the same way, every place in the universe is the middle of the universe from a standpoint of curved space.
So we go back to an entirely new Ptolemaic view of the world, beyond Copernicus: not that the Earth is—yes, the Earth is the center of the universe, but every other place is also the center of the universe. There is no absolute center. So this is a an astronomical way of saying, in Sanskrit, tát tvam ási: you’re it.
Everyone is rightly the center. You may think—my mother used to say to me, “You’re not the only pebble on the beach!” No, indeed. But in a way, everyone is the central pebble.
And the feeling that you have of being the center (which turns out into selfishness and all this sort of conflict and scrapping) is nevertheless based on something true. What we do is we misinterpret it. We don’t realize that everybody else is the center, too.
In that sense you are not the only pebble on the beach. You’re not the only center of the universe. And yet there is only one center.
And that’s why—who was it? I think it was Bonaventure who first thought up the description, or the definition, of God as “that circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” And this is a poem I seem to remember from Alfred Noyes: So this, then, you see, what I’m playing with here is what the Buddhists call the jiji muge (事事无碍). That means, ji means a “thing-event.” And you repeat it twice, so that means “between thing-event and thing-event.” Muge: “there is no mutual obstruction.” This is called the doctrine of the mutual interpenetration of all things and events.
So it would be like those lovely drawings where you take a circle—and you can play with this; it’s a nice thing to play with—and you mark out twelve equal points around the circumference of the circle. Then you join every point to every other point. You get a beautiful star.
And incidentally, this is the diagram of the twelve notes of the scale. Bach worked this out. And it’s a lovely thing, you see?
This beautiful star. So this is the diagram of the way it all fits together. Now, if you study that—and by study, again, I mean not just think about it, but feel it out—you will find a very strange thing happening.
You will find that the present moment, with all its particularity in which you live and are functioning now, is exactly the same thing as anything you could possibly conceive of as eternity. You will find that your limited life—and remember what I said about limits: you have to have something to push against—your limited life with its frustrations and with its particular problems at this instant is the same thing as omnipotence. And that your situation in space—which appears to be in Sausalito, California, sitting on a boat which is a rickety old thing; miles and miles away is China and Russia and England and Mars, Venus, and everything—but this particular point in space (you will find in the same way by this law of relativity) is the same thing as infinity.
Infinite space. Because it all goes together. It implies the infinite, the eternal.
All the energy of the universe is implied in any tiny hair on your skin. It goes with it. “Mutually implies”—this is the point.
Just as the kind of cosmos and atmosphere in which we live, my existence implies that kind of an environment, so the environment implies me, mutually. And it all goes together. Now, the only reason for saying this, you see—this is really terribly obvious—but the only reason for saying it is that people don’t know it, and think instead that they don’t belong.
That, because of the parents put down the children and said, “Little children should be seen and not heard. You don’t belong here.” Like, I read the other day in some paper, some young person was addressing a girl and saying—he was trying to make love to her. He was trying to woo her.
And she said, “You won’t be friends with me because you say, ‘I don’t like your personality.’” But he said, “You don’t have to have a personality. A personality is something you had to put on because your mother didn’t love, you and you had to make up to her.” Really, you don’t need a personality because you’re the essential thing, you see? And a personality is just a way of performing to ingratiate yourself.
Well, we all do it because we put on personalities when we act like clowns and entertain the audience. Put on masks, funny faces. But, really and truly, the mask covers the one Self that we all have.
And we all know it. Only, just like black and white, we are pretending to be as different as possible while remaining the same. I said that one of the aspects of cosmic gamesmanship that we were going to deal with was the group theory.
And, of course, I don’t mean exactly by that a sort of mathematical meaning, but the relationship that’s tremendously important and that is not sufficiently recognized between in-groups and out-groups. You know how you’ve heard about little birds where they’re cold and they’re all huddling together? The idea being to see who can get most inside.
And human beings are just like that. And so, also, is everything else. Because this is a an absolutely basic requirement of having an identity.
To have an identity is, in some way or other, to be in. I often try the experiment in giving a lecture and drawing a circle on the blackboard, and asking the assembled multitudes what I have drawn. And people will almost invariably say that I have drawn a circle, a ring, or a ball.
Only very rarely there’s some bright person who suggests that I have drawn a wall with a hole in it. Because the Gestalt theory of perception shows us that our attention is captured by enclosed areas as against open areas, and by moving objects rather than still. And so, always, therefore, we tend to prefer the in-situation that is something, you see?
The star is an in-situation with respect to space. The space is the out-situation. And so we feel that space is not important, it is nothing, it is just unimportant in a way.
But the in-situation is something. So then, whenever human beings get into an out-situation—like being a rejected minority, living on the wrong side of the tracks—they will find reasons for convincing themselves that their situation is the truly in one, and that the people who claim to be in are really out. So, as I’ve sometimes said before—I hope this doesn’t bore too many of you—but in Sausalito we have exactly that situation.
We have the hillbillies who are the old time people, who regard themselves as in because they have the money and they live in the fancy houses up on the hill. And then we have the waterfront people whom they regard as out, as a nefarious bunch of beatniks and bohemians and scallywags. And so the people of the hilltop fortify themselves at their cocktail parties with conversation about how awful the people are down on the waterfront, and at the cocktail parties down on the waterfront people fortify themselves by discussing the squares on the hill.
And we believe, down here, that we have the true way of life, that we are not beating our heads out, making money to buy pseudo rocket ships—although I do own a pseudo rocket ship, but it was wished on me! Because, you see, I try to be a bridge person. That’s what’s called a pontifex: one who, between opposed classes, points out the connections.
Because the connection is that neither class would know who they were without the other. So it’s tremendously necessary to have an out-group in order to know that you’re an in-group. In other words, if you belong to the church (which is the assembly of the elect of God), or if you belong to the synagogue (which is to be a member of the chosen people, an outsider, all those goys), then you know you’re in, you see?
But you must have the outsiders to know that you’re in. There must, in other words, be (beyond the pale of the village) the howling waste. Then you feel cozy, you feel protected, you feel you’re there.
And so, in that way, bodies have skins, eggs have shells, and so on all through nature. Inside versus outside. But this versus must be understood as a form of symbiosis.
And this is the crucial matter. This is absolutely of critical importance to anyone who wants to understand politics or military strategy or any of the real hard, tough games of life: that social conflict, or conflict between the various biological species, is a form of symbiosis. Now, ordinarily we consider the symbiotic relationship to be one of mutual support, as is obviously the case between bees and flowers.
Which came first, bee or flower? This is the same question as: which came first, egg or hen? Because where there are no flowers, there can’t be bees.
And where there are no bees, or other fertilizing insects, there cannot be flowers. So the truth of the matter is that bees and flowers, different as they are in appearance and separated as they may be in space, they constitute a single organism. This is the real lesson of the bees and the flowers.
And the same must be said, truly, of man and woman. There are no men without women. There are no women without men.
Because it always takes a man and a woman to produce a human being. So we are a man-woman arrangement, a woman-man arrangement. Whichever way you want to look at it.
And so, although, you see, therefore, we move and look as if we are individuals and separate from each other, this is not the case at all. So now, what I want to point out is that this same sort of relationship exists between groups that would seem to be hostile to each other. Now, what are some of the bases of hostility?
The real basis of hostility is that the biological order is a mutual eating society. It’s a very curious game indeed. And if you are philosophically inclined, it is one which might bother your conscience.
When you realize that you, as an organism, are a compound of murders. You are actually a bag of water, because the human organism consists mostly of water, and this water is held together and prevented from slobbering all over the floor by a very complex arabesque of tubes and cells and films, the material of which was invariably belonging to some other being before you got it. You had to kill a chicken, a cow, or a cabbage, or an apple in order to get that tensile film of tube, or whatever, to hold the water in you and as you.
And so we are, as human beings, a predatory creature. In fact, we are more predatory than anything else in nature. The sharks are supposed to be predatory, but they stay in the ocean.
The piranha fish are supposed to be very predatory, but they stay in the Amazon. The Eagles are predatory, but they stay in the air and on the land. Only man ranges the whole range of elements: earth, air, and water, and preys on things.
And he eats like a swarm of locusts. Not only does he prey on the living beings, he preys on the minerals. And someone recently described our civilization as a lot of people sitting in the middle of a sewage dump shooting rockets at the moon.
Because if you get Playboy magazine for September and read about the use of water, or rather the misuse of water, in our civilization, and it is absolutely horrifying. We’ve got to get that atomic power bringing us water from the ocean in nothing flat, or we’re going to be very thirsty. And you can see how we use water in the most amazingly uneconomical ways.
So we are a predatory monster eating up the planet. And I have seen, say, a sorrel plant in the country covered with greenfly. One day it is full of little green, succulent bodies having a ball.
A day or two later, stalk with gray dust all over it. See, they’ve multiplied to the point of eating up the plant, and so they turn into gray dust. Human beings could do just exactly the same thing.
And the reason why human beings are in danger of this is that they have refused membership in a mutual eating society. They want to be top and only eater, and do not want to be eaten. So that instead, nowadays, of returning what you ate to the earth, we return our remains to the earth in an unassimilable form.
Our remains include not only mummified formaldehyde in bodies—courtesy of the morticians, encased in concrete, so that no worms even get in—but also the fact that many things that we return to the Earth are no longer in the organic cycle. For example, rust does not assimilate properly. All sorts of chemicals, all sorts of gases that we give off, do not return into the organic cycle.
And we are ruining—we are we are actually abolishing animals. Wild animals have less and less of a prospect of living. Wild birds are being greatly reduced in numbers.
Whales are ceasing to exist because the whaling industry is getting rid of them. And what is more, some of the animals we farm, like chickens, are no longer chickens. They are strictly non-chickens which lay pseudo-eggs because they are raised in enormous wire cell blocks and fed on chemicals under the superstition that anything fed to a chicken will turn into chicken.
And it won’t. That is why you may have noticed that the chickens you buy don’t taste like chickens could taste, especially those that have been allowed to run around in the sunlight and scratch. Those can become real chickens.
Because, you see, the necessary thing about any species that you live on is that you must love it. I love you so much, I could eat you. Or: I eat you so much, I could love you.
But where you get things raised without love—you cannot love a whole cell block of chickens, you cannot love wheat when it is grown in vast wastelands out of any trees and it is sheared off the Earth and then winnowed and reduced to pancake makeup, and then chemicals are added to it, and it is converted into this styrofoam material called bread. You know, like one converts milk into casein, so one converts wheat or rye into a plastic material, which is a kind of universal solvent, which is nothing at all and tastes of nothing at all. In fact, you know, when you feed babies that kind of nasty white pablum, and you feed it in and they will spit it back into the spoon?
Well, our white bread reduces itself to that instantly on the contact with liquid and becomes a miserable paste. It’s not bread at all. So if you are unwilling, you see, to join the mutual eating society, and you want to conquer everything and not be eaten by anything, the penalty you pay for this is the annihilation of your species.
And you eventually annihilate through eating things that taste like chalk and string. That’s what it will come to, because you don’t love what you eat. You have no respect for the raw materials.
So what we haven’t understood, then, is that all groups need an enemy group, but that the enemy group which preys upon it is actually a kind of friend. Because the enemy group prunes your own group. It keeps your population at a reasonable level and it keeps you on your toes.
Because you have to defend yourself against it so you don’t become flabby. But, you see, we have lost the meaning of chivalry in all war situations and all conflict situations. Chivalry is indicated, for example, still, in such customs as that the partners to a fight salute each other before beginning to fight, and salute each other again at the end.
You shake hands before boxing. You do these various things. You bow before a judo contest, and so on.
And that means that you recognize the opponent as an honorable opponent; as somebody with whom a fight is a really important matter. And that is really one of the most essential laws of survival: to recognize that enemies—unless they are predatory locusts who have no respect; who do not, in other words, farm the species that they prey upon. That’s the essence of the thing: you must cherish the species you prey upon.
You must see, like, for example, in in lumbering: you must resow. So you must plant a tree for every tree you take. That is cherishing the species.
If you farm cows, you don’t treat your cows, you often treat them better than you would your servants. Because the servants can go hang, but the cows are valuable, and so you nurture them because they’re going to sell as beef and they’re going to provide milk or whatever it is. So the perception of the fact that it is absolutely necessary to have an out-group for your having an in-group, and that you cannot do without it, is the beginning of sociability.
And so what you get, then, in that case, is a situation of contained conflict. A conflict gets out of hand when an in-group does not realize that it needs the out-group. Then it says, “Let’s get rid of the out-group!
Get the dirty communists off the face of the Earth!” But do you realize what a fix we’d be in without communists? The whole economy would fall apart because there would be no external threat. And the communists are in exactly the same situation.
Their kind of politics would fall apart unless there was some wretched capitalistic imperialists with whom they could contrast themselves, and against whom they could organize their energies. Because it is a curious thing that it’s very difficult to get human beings to organize their energies for something pleasant. It’s only under fear, under external threat to their life, that human beings will really get busy and cooperate.
So the solidarity of any group of human beings depends to an enormous extent on an external menace. And therefore, that menace is friendly to the solidarity and the cooperative enterprise of the group. And this will be true of big groups as well as of small groups.
Even people who say—say, in matters of religion—that religious exclusivism is bad, that bigotry is terrible, those same people are actually playing a game called “I’m more tolerant than you,” and so constitute an in-group of the tolerant opposed to the out-group of the bigots. There’s no way of getting away from this except by transcending it with a sort of humor. When you see that the two groups need each other, you start laughing.
When—for example, if I have people who argue with me with contrary opinions and who belong to different religions, I can’t get mad about it because I realize that I wouldn’t know what I thought unless somebody disagreed with me. And therefore, your disagreement is necessary to the preservation of my opinions. And this is the secret of humor.
So, when you realize that, you are given one of the most important clues that there is to the nature of yourself. Now, you see, we are all brought up in a huge historical, cultural, linguistic background, which has a very powerful influence upon the way in which we experience self. And we experience self as an enclosed island confronted by an enormous out-group called the universe.
Within me, within my body is a palpitating, soft, sensitive reality, there is the self. But outside I don’t feel. When I hit you, you suffer but I don’t.
The outside is therefore somehow alien. And it has been drilled into us, therefore, that the world as a physical entity or process is an organization that goes on and on and on, probably through all eternity, but that the individual is in it as a brief occurrence. And is furthermore, as man, a tiny little germ living on an obscure rock revolving around an unimportant star on the fringe of one of the minor galaxies.
And that the other galaxies are much bigger, and that there are more of them than you can think of. And so this puts us in this extremely remote position. As if to say: you don’t really belong at all!
Now, I explained yesterday a new cosmology where we can surely say that any point in the universe can be regarded as the center of it. There is no absolute center, but all points are the center. And so, in the same way, if we can see that, we can make a very curious psychological readjustment to our life situation, and learn how what it is that we call “I” is not a poor little puppet, but that the situation of I-ness—that is to say, of feeling central to all things—is a kind of distortion of the true situation, which is that I-ness and being, I-ness and existence, are the same thing.
Only, just as the sense of self requires the sense of other, the sense of being here requires also the interval of apparent nothingness, which we call death. Life goes with death in the same sense of self goes with other. We saw there has to be this yang-yin rhythm, the crest of the wave and the trough of the wave.
The crest is the life, the trough is the death, the interval. Someone has asked me what I think about the survival of the individual personality. And so, you see, this problem of death is very critical to us.
But you have to understand it and approach it by seeing that the real you is not the individual. If, for example, we draw a circle, and that circle represents the universe, then we draw rays coming from that circle in such a way that you’re drawing tangents to the circle which meet at points outside it. And so making a star in which each ray is a point which focuses the entire diameter of the star.
Now, turn it inside out so that the rays go inwards into the circle. So that, inside the circle, the whole circle focuses itself at innumerable points within it. And then you have something like what we are.
I said, using the astrological illustration that the soul is not in the body, but the body is in the soul. The soul is the whole universe focused at a particular time and a particular place; a here and now. And that is what you really are.
In other words, those galaxies that are immensely far off, and which you could think would have nothing to do with you at all—all that’s in you. And what you call your body, your brain, your nervous system, and so on, is in you, too. Now, you can never get at—just as we can’t get at the whole universe in the sense that, if there is only one ball in space, and that one ball constitutes the whole universe, I showed you that we couldn’t say whether that ball was moving or standing still.
Because there is nothing else in relation to which it moves or stands still. So there’s something about the universe as a totality which is always indescribable and un-getatable. Now, that is the same indescribability and un-getatability as your own mind.
There is no way, in other words—just as we cannot find a name for the color of vision, the color of the lens of the eye. And so we call it transparent: no color. Of course we have to, because in the same way—a mirror has no color, otherwise it would not be able to reflect colors.
So at the root of all experience whatsoever there is the non-experience which is fundamental to it. It can never be described in terms of any of the experiences within it. But it’s basic.
And it lies between light and darkness, coming and going, life and death. But there is no way of your, as it were, possessing it. And you have to realize that there is no way of your possessing it for the very simple reason that it is you.
So because of the invisible and intangible nature of this reality, one tends to forget all about it and to become fascinated instead with subsidiary features inside it. Because it has no color, no shape—at least none that could be defined, because it would have to get outside itself to define its shape, and therefore, for all practical purposes, it doesn’t have any shape. Therefore, it slips out of attention, and especially out of conscious attention, because (as I’ve pointed out to you) conscious attention always is a concentration on figures in contrast with backgrounds.
And so, naturally, the total background of everything that’s going on—this is, again, what Tillich means by the ground of being—escapes attention. It is the very first thing we fail to notice. And so, in this way, we’ve become absolutely fascinated with all the things going on inside it.
And we start identifying with them and taking sides, as if, for example, again: when you read the newspaper and you read out about all the terrible things going on, you find you get worked up. You get mad about this, that, and the other. And before you know where you are, you’re completely absorbed.
That’s just in the same way as going to a play or in the cinema. You get infuriated. You get excited.
You get—you’ve identified, you see, with the contest going on. If you could look at your blood with a microscope and see all the different kinds of creatures in your blood eating each other up, you would think that you were in grave mortal danger if that side is going to win. Wowee!
Look at that poor thing. And that’s part of me. And so you get absorbed, you’d get partisan in that quarrel.
So we’re all, in this way, absorbed in the daily events going on—the conflicts and everything like this—and we’re taking sides. Not realizing, you see, that you can’t actually take sides, because you need both sides. You are both sides.
You are self and other. You are inside and outside. How can you take the side of the outside against the inside?
Because if you won, you wouldn’t be outside. You wouldn’t be inside, either. So then, the project of ways of liberation—like Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism—is to restore to the fascinated individual an awareness of his eternity and his infinity.
Not necessarily in terms of what we ordinarily call personal immortality, a system in which we would be able to go on into a future life with memories of all the past lives through which we have lived or past times in which we have been. So that I could address myself to the pleasures of heaven in the person of Alan Watts. I think there might be something mutually exclusive about that.
But in another way, a much more interesting way. Because you well know, if you think it through, that, if you remembered forever and ever, and it had a kind of continuous, cumulative experience that after a while you would want to forget things that had happened. You see, forgetting is as important to remembering as elimination is to assimilation.
Just as you don’t simply eat food, but you let out the excrement, so, in the same way—we were discussing this morning, or somebody brought it up: an analogy between the mind and the digestive system. So forgetting is tremendously important to one’s mental functioning. That’s why we sleep.
That’s why we have these intervals of unconsciousness. And unconsciousness renews things. You remember, don’t you, your childhood?
When the world was new to you, and how extraordinary it was, and how very beautiful. Well, if you want to go on being an adult for always and always and always, you can never have that experience again. Because you’ve got to die first and see it all anew.