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And that is why all initiation ceremonies involve a symbolic death; what you call “dying to yourself.” In various rituals people are put in coffins. And all books of the dead, like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead, actually are coded references to initiation rites and initiation processes whereby you die to come alive. And that is for this reason: thinking about death is extremely productive.
You know, it’s so difficult to think about death, isn’t it? Imagine what it would be like for consciousness to cease and never occur again. To go to sleep and never wake up.
This is a consideration which teases you out of thought. What would it be like to start out of nothing at all, as it seems that you did when you were born? That equally teases you out of thought.
What is outside space? You see? All these questions which are beloved of children bring you to a point where you have to stop thinking.
You can’t possibly imagine it. And that is a creative moment: when thought is nonplussed. Because what you have got to, at that point, is yourself.
Just in the same way as you cannot conceive yourself—in its vastest sense, in the sense of being one with the universe—so you cannot conceive these particular questions that I have raised. And you will find, if you think long enough about death, about the possibility of your total disappearance—and which will, so far as you’re concerned, be the total disappearance of everything else, there’s a clue in that, you see, as to who you are—if you think long enough about that, there will occur a curious flip. Yang leads to yin.
You will realize that the infinite nothingness into which you will disappear when you die was the same infinite nothingness out of which you came when you were born. Do you remember not existing for millions and millions of years before you were born? You see how it flips?
And so you will see the rhythm of this. That you know, of course, from objective observation, that after you are dead there will be babies born. Baby humans, baby snakes, baby beetles, babies spiders, baby fish.
Billions of babies. You’ve watched people die and you’ve watched babies born later. So then, you will be every one of those babies.
Only, one of the interesting properties of being a baby individual is that you can only experience yourself one at a time. That’s the game. There would be no point in experiencing yourself as many eyes simultaneously, because the nearest thing to that would, of course, be the self of all the cells in your body, which are coagulated into one individual.
But you are all of those ones that are born. But each one, of course, experiences itself in the singular. So you can expect very well after you’re dead to have the same experience in general as you had when you were born.
Now, it may be that you are born again as a human being, or you may be reborn as a fish. But if you are a fish, you will be in a situation where you feel that you’re a human being, and that people are fish. I mean, they are something else.
They are another species. You are the center species, which is the human situation. So it will be like it is now.
It keeps repeating itself. Only, it does it with variations on a theme. That’s the reason for the many different species, many different kinds of consciousness.
So you do not need—if you understand the sense of this—you do not need to believe in any secret supernatural information which I might have access to and you don’t. It is perfectly obvious what’s going on. You would say, “But there is no connection between me and somebody else living later.” My dear friends, there is no connection between the molecules composing your hands!
There are no strings joining them together. There is nothing but space between them. There is, as I talk, no connection between the sounds I am uttering, because they are vibrations.
And if you magnify the sounds—I’m saying: that means you would have to slow them down on a recording system—you would eventually get something that goes: ah, ah, ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah aaaaah ah ah. And, you see, I can gargle that a little so that I get a deep bass enough you can actually hear the texture of the sound. That is to say, you’re beginning to hear the spaces in the vibration.
What is the connection between these things? Well, you say as you listen to it while I’m talking to you, it makes perfect sense. Or it’s just one sound.
Aaaaaaaaaah! Sounds like it’s one sound, continuous, but it’s not. It’s discontinuous.
But when you look at it from far enough away, it looks like it’s continuous. So it is with connections between lives, with connections between anything whatsoever. There are no connections.
You could look at the universe from the prickly philosophy point of view and see it as purely discontinuous particles. Putt, putt, putt, putt, putt, putt, putt, putt. Machinery.
But if you are a goo-type person, you see it as all continuous. Woo deedoo deedoo. Wavy, you see, instead of going putt, putt, putt.
But both points of view are correct. So if you want to be continuous, you go a little bit to goo. If you want to be discontinuous (and some people would much rather be dead when they’re dead), then you can go over to particles.
But you must realize, you see, that the differentiation between particles and waves is a differentiation that is necessary to both sides of the difference. You’ll always find this is so, whatever kind of duality you make. You will never be able to escape nonduality, which is what holds dualities together.
So cheer up! The whole system is rigged! You’re it!
Only, you learn to be bugged. Yes, to be bugged: to be phased by eventualities. See?
Well, when you’re a baby, see, this is pushed into you by the whole society. The babies know—you see, when they first arrive in the world—the babies know that they can’t say because they don’t have any language. But they know who they are.
They have what Freud calls the oceanic experience. (I don’t know really how he found this out….) See, the problem of a child psychologist is that we would just love to teach an infant to talk so that it can tell how it feels not to be able to talk how things are before you get any concepts.
And so we have a kind of a theoretical notion that a baby experiences the whole world is its own body. And it makes no differentiation between itself and its mother, and so on. Maybe.
Very probable. It is a matter of inference, because none of us remember quite how it was. We can’t remember because we didn’t have any words to put our memories into.
No notation. Memory depends to a large extent on such notations. Well, you can get regressions by hypnosis, and maybe they tell us something, maybe they don’t.
But at any rate, what happens is that, as you start to grow up, you—let me put it like this. I think I can get this across. To a baby, nothing has any special value.
Life is just a thing that goes nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooing nyooooooooouuuuooonngg blibb-blibb-blibb dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee KRRRAAOOWUPP dagga-dee dagga-dee dagga-de HWUPP, see? There’s something just happening. There’s just a play of energy, see?
And there’s nothing to say in it that this is the right noise and that’s the wrong noise, this is the right shape and this is the wrong shape. It’s all just shape! It’s jazz with no discrimination as to what ought to happen, what ought not to happen.
When the baby’s in pain, it hasn’t yet been taught that pain is bad. The baby just squawks. And squawking isn’t necessarily bad—until mommas teach babies that they ought not to squawk.
Then squawking becomes bad. Now, when you get enlightened at the other end of the road, you will once again see that everything that’s going on is just jooeeyoeeyoeeyoeeyoeeyoo in all kinds of ways. Marvelous!
It has no value. It doesn’t have to go on. But, as a matter of fact, if it stops, stopping means going on later.
It’s just an interval. There’s nothing except intervals. You can’t—just as there’s nothing outside space.
You can’t stop permanently. Supposing you take the theory that the universe—you know, it’s called the explosion theory of the universe—that there was a big bang some time or other, and that all these galaxies were flung into space, and they are systems of falling energy. And eventually they’ll fade out.
And that’ll be that. Well, then what? Well….
But then, how did it ever get to start? I mean, presumably, before it all happened, there was nothing going on—which will be the way it is when it stops. Anything that happened once can happen again.
So—I mean, you may say I can’t prove that. You may say that is my metaphysical leap of faith, that anything that happened once can happen again. But I would like to be able to bet on it if I could find some way of collecting the winnings.
Of course, if I lose I’ll never know I lost. But I think this is the way it works, because everything works that way. Only, the thing is: don’t worry about not retaining your personal identity.
Because you would get absolutely bored with it if you could. Enough of it would kill you—and indeed does! So in the Far Eastern philosophy, human life is looked upon very much as one looks on the seasons.
And spring, summer, autumn, winter. And it is felt, especially in Japanese poetry, to be an absolutely essential rhythm in the rhythm of the seasons. So, too, there is felt to be this marvelous rhythm in the biological cycle, in the life cycle.
And you will disappear. But you will reappear. And the interesting thing about it is this: you could reappear in a form very like what you are now, just in the same way as two performances of a given musical piece are different performances and yet the same composition.
And there are all possibilities of making this energy system go into every conceivable kind of complexity, and differences of shape, and differences of games, and every conceivable sort of possibility. And it’s going waah waah waah waah all through time. Now, the moment—you see, this is an essential step, you might call it, in the meditation process; is to see this.
Is to see everything as nonsense, as completely meaningless. Being just what it is. It is what Buddhists call seeing things as of one suchness.
The words “suchness,” in Sanskrit, is tathātā, and that means “da-da-da.” See? Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da da da! Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da da da!
Like this. And you get to seeing everything like that, where nothing matters—it doesn’t matter if you die this instant (because that will be one kind of a jazz), if you go on living a long time, it’ll be more kind of jazz if this happens, if that happens. It’s all just kind of jazz, you see?
You get to being able to see that. And simultaneously with seeing that, it becomes perfectly obvious that you, sitting here, are a continuous life with everything else all around you. One life.
But that the jazz—which is called feeling that I am myself—has a way of going booey booey booey booey this way. And then feeling that there’s something other is a thing that goes brappata rappata rappata rappata, like that, you see? But it’s all, as it were, bonging on the same drum.
And you’re the drum. Well, now, following on from our discussion yesterday afternoon about relativity, and about the mutual interpenetration of every individual thing or event in the universe with every other one, and having previously discussed in the morning the yang-yin principle (the interrelation of the opposites), we are in a position to take a look at the meaning of this extraordinary classic of China, the Book of Changes, called the I Ching—not the “why ching.” I’m afraid that the way that we romanize Chinese words, there’s very little resemblance to the way they’re pronounced. That’s because the scholars have a secret conspiracy to out-group everybody else, because only if you’re in the know do you know the fact that it should be “jing” when there’s no apostrophe after the “ch”, but “ching” when there isn’t an apostrophe after this the “ch.” And so it goes.
So the I Ching, or the Book—ching means a classical book, a scripture. The Sanskrit sutra is translated into Chinese by ching. So the “classical book.” The book of I, which is change.
It is suspected that the character for I was once a picture of a chameleon or lizard. Because in the same way that the chameleon changes its color on whatever background it’s put, so it came to mean change. But, you see, in that idea of change, it isn’t simple, it is is an idea of adaptation, an idea of harmonization with surroundings.
And one of the basic ideas of Chinese thought about nature is a word that means resonance—as when tuning forks respond to each other. And so the resonance between any individual event and the context in which it occurs is one of the most important things that strike the Chinese mind. For example, if we take blood: blood in the veins is not the same thing as blood in a test tube.
Because it’s in a different environment, it is not behaving in the same way. And, to a very large extent, you must say that a thing is what it does. I never tire of pointing out this fundamental confusion in our thinking: by reason of the fact that grammar contains both nouns and verbs and therefore gives the impression that there are two quite distinct classes of reality.
One is process denoted by verbs, the other is stuff, objects, entities denoted by nouns. But actually there is no need for this division because all nouns, all so-called things, are processes. They are particular forms of behavior.
And we never can possibly describe anything but their behavior. We can say what they do, but we never can say what they are, and we can never say what does things. There isn’t any need for anything that does anything.
All you need is doing. That is energy. And that’s enough for anybody.
What is energy? Well, look at it and you can see for yourself. You don’t need to define energy, just like mathematicians found out that, for purposes of geometry, you don’t need to define a point.
You use points, but you don’t say what they are. To say that the point is that which has position but no magnitude is a lot of nonsense. Position but no magnitude—that’s just gobbledygook.
And it’s based on human beings being confused by the words they use. So in this way, then, in Chinese thought, the world is process. And it’s changes.
Because behavior is change. And so they watched the rhythm of behavior, And as you see, basically, one of the basic rhythms of behavior is a wave. Waves on the water, waves of sound in the air, light waves.
And the nature of a wave is that it’s yang and yin: it has a crest and a trough. Now, you can’t have a crest without a trough. You can’t have half a wave.
There is no such thing in nature as a half wave. So there are always full waves, at least one full wave, in any energy system. And that implies a “now you see it, now you don’t.” An up and a down, a crest and a trough.
And the crest is the yang and the trough is the yin. Well, now, the Book of Changes has a very mysterious history, and scholars are naturally disposed to believe that a great deal of this history is pure legend. But there was supposed to have been, many thousand years ago, a great sage emperor by the name of Fuxi, who was followed in due course by a king whose name was Wen.
And Fuxi is said to have looked around and studied nature, and to have felt the forces in it, and to have invented what are call the bagua, or the eight trigrams. Now, you see, if you will arrange yang and yin—which are represented by broken and unbroken lines; unbroken line for yang, a broken line for yin—if you combine these in groupings of three, you have eight possible combinations. For example, three yang lines which are unbroken will then represent what the Chinese called tian, or heaven.
Three broken lines, being all yang, all female, will therefore represent the opposite of heaven, which is earth. Two broken lines on either side of one unbroken line will represent water, and the opposite arrangement (two unbroken lines on either side of one broken one) will represent fire. And so on, until you get eight fundamental elements.
And this—they call the bagua—you will see on the national flag of Korea. There it is with the yang-yin symbol, the two interlocked black and white commas in the middle. And you will find this symbol of the yang-yin and the bagua on ever so many plates, and Chinese objects, the backs of mirrors, and things like that.
It’s a very common thing. And the idea is, you see, that it represents eight elements of the process of nature. Now, we used to say in the West—before, in a pre-scientific age—that there were four elements: earth, water, fire, and air.
We got this from India. The Indians add another one, actually, called ākāśa, which is space. We say now that is pre-scientific gobbledygook, because actually there are how many elements today?
Ninety-something have been established by chemistry. But it’s the same sort of thing as saying there are three primary colors, so many colors in the spectrum, so many notes in the scale. It is simply that, in order to describe nature, you have to divide it up some way.
For example, in classifying people there are various schemes that have been worked out. We talk about there being extroverts and introverts, and Jung made up his four functions so that he could describe intuitive type, sensation types, thinking types, and feeling types. Sheldon has his own special way where he can talk about ectomorphs, mesomorphs, and endomorphs, and then have them variously cerebrotonic, somatotonic, and viscerotonic.
And he could combine these three in various ways. Now, a man like Aldous Huxley was quite obviously a cerebrotonic ectomorph: a long, skinny, intellectual. But if you look at any of these sort of classifications, you can always find flaws in them.
They never really fit. And so, in the same way, the, say, political classifications that we have don’t really fit people, because their opinions are always too complicated (unless they’re quite stupid) to be able to be fitted into any of these divisions in a precise way. But nevertheless, you can’t do without classification of this sort.
You can’t do without spectra. We used to have a sergeant in training in the in the army in England who used to teach us about rifle shooting. And he said “Today, we’s goin’ to practice aiming all for wind.
Now, there are three kinds of wind. Mild, fresh, and strong.” Three kinds of wind—there you are, stuck with it! You see, because, as always, you can always think of this extreme, that extreme, and something in the middle.
See? Well, now, you’ve got us something a little richer to play with if you have eight instead of four. And that’s the the sort of thing that the I Ching classification is based on.
Now then, that was Fuxi, who was supposed to have invented these things. And there is another legend that he saw these trigrams by heating the shell of a tortoise until it cracked, and then studying the cracks. In the same way, Leonardo da Vinci used to go to a filthy old wall where there were all sorts of bird droppings and scratches and markings, and he would do a Rorschach blot on it, and he would see a great battle scene.
And this would give him inspiration for a painting. This is the same thing that you do when you gaze in a crystal ball, or when you look into a deep pool of ink: there are all sorts of ways of what is called divining. To divine is to consult the oracle.
Like, it’s like a word, to divine—you see, there’s a subject called divinity, which has to do with the scriptures. So to divine is to study the oracle, just as Wittgenstein wanted to make a verb out of philosophy. Philosophy—he always taught to do philosophy.
Philosophy isn’t just a subject, it’s an activity. And so to divine is to call upon the unconscious. Instead of thinking something out in a logical way, you allow your imagination to flow into something that is useful for an oracle—whether it’s a Rorschach blot or a crystal ball or a hexagram of the Book of Changes.
For, after Fuxi, King Wen combined the eight trigrams, and there are obviously 64 possible combinations of eight. And so the Book of Changes is simply a setting out of the 64 hexagrams with a commentary on them. And when you are a beginner in the art of the Book of Changes, you need the book.
You look up the commentary to help you find out what the hexagram means. But when you are an expert you don’t need the book, you simply feel the meaning of these combinations of two elements. Now, the theory of the Book of Changes is a very curious one.
It is related to jiji muge—that is to say, the mutual interpenetration of all things and events—and is based on the idea that anything that happens at this moment will be related to this moment, because it’s in the context of this moment. Therefore, the way I would do something at random at this time will be what we call a sign of the times, or a manifestation of what in German is called the Zeitgeist. The spirit of the time, or the mind of the time.
Another way of putting it would be the configuration of the time. And it’s in the same way that, for example, astrologers cast what is called a horary horoscope. That is to say, as of the moment, what are the stars?
What is, in other words, the configuration of the universe? And so, in exactly the same way, the I Ching philosophy is based on the idea that how one randomly selects the yarrow stalks (or the sticks, or tosses coins) in a given situation—and you might define the situation by asking a question—that random pattern that falls will be related to the situation, and you can divine something about the situation from it. I remember a Zen master who used to use the I Ching.
He had another way. He would take anything. He took, for example, one day, a bowl of flowers, and he looked at the pattern of the arrangement of the flowers and derived a hexagram from the pattern.
And from that he told us about the mood the person who had arranged them had been in. Now, of course, this is all (from our scientific point of view) unverified and maybe unverifiable. And, of course, a scientific person pooh-poohs this kind of thing.
Because he’ll say, “That’s not the way to go about deciding what to do in an important situation.” When you have to decide upon action in an important situation, what do you do if you’re a scientifically minded person, is: you study all the relevant data, and you get information, and then (on the basis of that information and past experience and previous scientific studies of behavior) you decide how this situation is likely to turn out. But there is a very serious problem about that. It is not any use for practical purposes.
It is only applicable in trivial situations which are highly controlled in an experimental way. For example, in the old times when you went to the doctor, he would look at you and prod you and smell you and come up with some feeling about what was the matter with you. No doctor will do that today.
They daren’t move unless they take innumerable tests. See? So you’re tested and measured precisely.
Then they come back and they think about it. But, you know, they still don’t know what to do, because there comes a point in any decision-making process where you have to act on hunch. How do you know when you’ve gotten enough data about any situation; when to call a halt?
Because you can go on collecting data forever. There are always infinitely many variables in any situation whatsoever, and especially in the human situation. So ultimately, don’t kid yourself.
You are always deciding on a hunch what you’re going to do. Even the best informed person ultimately comes to a leap of intuition before making a decision. So then, when you really don’t know which way to decide on a certain thing, people say: flip a coin.
You know, you can always rip Christians on this because the disciples of Jesus cast lots to make a decision. But we’re always doing that. You’re fundamentally always at the point where you don’t decide for what we call purely rational reasons.
So then, flipping a coin gives you two possibilities: yes or no. Now, let’s suppose you had an eight-sided coin. See, six-sided dice is a little bit richer.
Instead of giving you only two decisions or possibilities, here you’ve got a possibility of variation. Now, let’s consider a 64-sided coin. That’s what you’ve got here.
Now, again, when you get the oracle in the I Ching, it is never terribly specific. Although sometimes, in your given situation, it seems to be absolutely specific when you consult it. But on the other hand, you use it like theologians use the Bible.