Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
That is to say, they read into it anything they want to find. Only, you mustn’t do this deliberately. You have to let your own unconscious processes read the oracle for you and decide what it means.
In other words, you use the oracle like a Rorschach blot. And the wisdom of that is this: that your brain—if it is your brain, and nobody really knows. You see (just to put something in parentheses) is the brain the mind?
Some say yes, some say no. One would think that the structure of the brain has something to do with the structure of thought. But, on the other hand, it may not—in the same sense that a structure of a radio has nothing to do with the message that comes over it.
Although Marshall McLuhan says (he belongs to the other school, you see) that the medium itself is the message. What is the relationship, for example, between the grid pattern of a newspaper photograph and the picture? The same grid pattern can convey any picture.
So there seems to be a complete irrelevance between the two. But, on the other hand, there is not quite as much irrelevance as you might think, because any picture reproduced by this method has some connection with a time and with a technology that can produce this method. It’s a rather roundabout connection, that one.
But nevertheless, from a big point of view, it’s a very close connection. Depends where what framework you’re looking at it in—whether you’ve got a very big framework or a very narrow one. So when it comes down to it and you don’t know how to make a decision, alright, then you consult your brain.
Now, I’m using the word brain here to mean a complex organization which you have at your disposal which you don’t understand and which is much smarter than you are. Because, you see, whatever it is that is the mind, the brain, or whatever—I don’t care what you call it—it takes care of ever so many things at once which you could never possibly think of consciously. You can’t be bothered consciously to regulate your glands, to see that your blood flows alright all the time, but your nervous system is taking care of that.
It is regulating it all. Your nervous system is receiving information which you don’t know anything about. Because when we look consciously, we by no means notice all that our eyes see.
But your mind or brain registers everything that is input to your eyes. So genius in thinking is fundamentally based on being able to trust your own mind and not confuse your mind with the content of conscious perception. The content of conscious perception is a tiny fragment of what’s going on around you.
You can train yourself to be more receptive than you are in ordinary consciousness. But this isn’t quite the point. It is not like: how many things did you notice?
You know how you can play a game with children when they become boring in a car, and they get out a pad and write down how many things you noticed as you went along. Scouts play this sort of thing. Well, that’s all right.
But that’s not the point here. The point here is not how much did you notice, because there’s no end to that. You can play that game and there are infinitely many things that you could notice.
The point is to take them all in in one glance. And you can’t do that with conscious attention, but you do do it with your basic neurological or mental equipment, whatever you want to call it. So, therefore, you have at your disposal this amazing computer, or whatever it is, that can think multidimensionally on ever so many levels at once.
Now, thousands of years ago—we don’t know how far all this goes back—but people naturally trusted their minds to tell them what to do. They didn’t make decisions. They did what they felt like.
Or, as we should call it, they followed instinct as animals do. Then they discovered how to figure—through language and through numbers. They found that figuring could be very effective.
And they started using it and relying on it more and more and more, and as a result of this developed anxiety. Because when you don’t figure and you live purely spontaneously, you never worry. If this decision is disastrous, it’s disastrous and death will hit you in a hurry and you never know what hit you.
You don’t spend all your time worrying about: did you make up your mind in the right way? And, you see, that may lead to trouble. But the thing is that people don’t realize is that everything leads to trouble in any case.
If you develop the intellect and its calculation processes to an excessive degree, what do you have? Well, you have the weapons lab of the United States Air Force, and you have the Russian this, that, and the other, and the Chinese something else. You have planned disaster.
If you leave it alone—which is what the Taoists mean partly by wu wei, or non-interference—there will still be troubles in the world, but you won’t have to worry about them. And you will float along and you will feel very free. And the question is to try and calm modern people into living that way.
Now, I’m putting this—you mustn’t take me too literally. Because for a really well-developed human being, he isn’t one who simply abandons thinking and planning. Because, after all, that is some faculty that we have in just the same way that a bird has a beak.
And you don’t want to, as it were, amputate your faculties. The point is rather something like this: we have to recognize the hierarchical situation of our faculties. That the thinking faculty is the servant of the larger mind, which doesn’t need to think.
Just as God—if I may use that expression again—if you asked him: “How high is Mont Blanc in millimeters?” He would say, “Well, I really don’t know. I’ll have to measure it.” Because to ask that question is to ask the relation of Mont Blanc to a ruler. Mont Blanc is not in itself any millimeters or meters in height.
That is what is simply a short way of talking about comparing it with a scale. And knowing what it is in height is the same thing as comparing it with the scale. So the Lord would have to say, “I must get out my ruler.” Just in the same way as you don’t know how you breathe, but you do it, so the Lord God creates the universe without knowing how it’s done.
That is to say, knowing in terms of technical considerations. But you still know how to breathe, even if you don’t know how you do it, because you do it. That’s knowing how to do it.
You know how to walk. Do you know how to think? Nobody does, but they do it.
So then, this unknown process produces the knowing process, but the knowing process is subordinate to it. And therefore you have to learn how to include thinking in spontaneity. But it’s subordinate to spontaneity.
That’s when I wrote that thing in the bulletin about Suzuki and ended with a quotation in which he described his own life as a thinker—because he was an intellectual, he was a scholar. But he did scholarship in the spirit of spontaneity. He used thinking, he was not used by thinking.
And when I say “he” here, I am referring to the mind beyond consciousness. Now, the mind beyond consciousness—we discussed a little bit of this yesterday—that we call the Self (with a capital S) as distinct from the ego. And I pointed out why the horoscope was traditionally considered to be the map of the soul.
And that the body is in the soul, not the soul in the body. So the mind that I am talking about is not merely your nervous system—if we will talk about it now in physical terms—it is not merely the nervous system, but it is the entire physical environment in which your nervous system exists and all the relationships operating within it. That’s your mind.
In other words, the kind of mind you have at this moment is impossible without your living in this kind of a society. Your mind includes the telephone book, the Encyclopædia Britannica, the University of California, and everything else going on, say, in the intellectual world. Every one of us exists mentally in relation to the total intellectual process going on in this day and age in society.
You draw on it, it infiltrates you, it provides you with language. You didn’t invent the English language, it was given to you as a result of a social enterprise going on for thousands of years. So, in this sense, when you consult your mind, you are consulting the entire organization of the universe as it is more immediately reflected in the structure of your nervous system, and everything that your nervous system is doing; all the kinds of messages that are running through it.
It is these messages that constitute the mind. And so this is what Buckminster Fuller means when he talks about synergy. Synergy means—from the Greek συνεργός—“working together.” And he believes that any organization has more intelligence than any one of its members.
And he therefore goes on to believe that the industrial complex of communication systems covering the face of the Earth is developing its own intelligence. And it will be much more intelligent than any one of us. And this may perhaps save the situation—we don’t know.
I mean, one illustration of this (that I’m very familiar with) is air transportation. Now, every country in the world has invested a fortune in jet aircraft. And by Jove, these things have to run, otherwise they fall apart.
So they must run on time. And this network of air communications is joining every city in the world together, so that by 1968, according to Buckminster Fuller, we have a one-town world. Figure it: if it takes you an hour to get from here to New York in a supersonic craft, New York is only as far away as Palo Alto.
Well, that’s practically in the same community. And this is going to include Tokyo, and Moscow, and Paris, and so on, and they’re all going to become the same place. They’ll speak increasingly the same language, share the same culture, eat the same food.
You can fly in San Francisco bread to Paris, which is being done because of some of the bread made here is better than the bread made in Paris. You know, it can go the other way, too. And we’re going to share a common urban culture.
And this is the work of synergy. Also, the aircraft people get increasingly bored at passport and customs regulations, because they hold up traffic. Well now, then, you might like to see how the I Ching is used.
And I have here (mainly for symbolic reasons) three ancient Chinese coins. You will see that they have a square hole in the middle, and that on one side they’re inscribed and on the other side they’re not. And the inscribed side is counted as the yin face and the uninscribed side is counted as the yang.
And when you use the book of changes, you usually face it with a question. And it seems to me that a good question that it might be faced with is: what should the people of the United States do about China? And you respectfully request the wisdom of the oracle in this matter, and you throw the coins down to see how they fall.
And what I have is one yang and two yins. Now, strangely enough, that counts in this system (and I don’t quite know why) as. what’s called the “young yang.” I think maybe I do know why.
You would think it would be a yin, with two yins and one yang. But it counts as the “young yang,” and that’s the bottom line of the hexagram. And by being a young yang, it means it’s a fixed line.
It doesn’t change. Perhaps the reason why that’s called the the young yang is that, when you’ve got two yins and one yang, it means the yin is weakening and the yang is coming up. Because when you reach a point at which the yin force comes to a maximum, there is in it the seed of the yang force, and vice versa.
And, you see, you have to do this six times to get six lines. And so this time we have two yangs and one yin, which gives us the “yang yin.” And that, again, is a line which doesn’t change. Then we get to yins and one yang, which gives us another young yang.
And it’s made the hexagram of water—no, fire. And this time we get three yin, which gives us a changing yin line, which is written like this. That means that after you consult the hexagram in its first form, you consult the hexagram, which is (so far as that line is concerned) the opposite.
Again. Two yins and one yang, giving us the young yang. And we get here two yangs and one yin, which gives us the young yin.
And so we get fire over water. Fire—no, water over fire. Water over fire.
Cool it, baby! So that is five over… sweet, sweet, sweet. Yeah.
Karma, believe, 63. See, the oracle is often very surprising. 63.
Jiji, meaning “after completion.” This hexagram is the evolution of t’ai, or the hexagram number eleven, meaning “peace.” The transition from confusion to order is completed and everything is in its proper place, even in particulars. The strong lines are in the strong places, the weak lines in the weak places. This is a very favorable outlook.
Yet it gives reason for thought. Therefore, it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder. The one strong line that has moved to the top, thus effecting complete order in details, is followed by the other lines, each moving according to its nature.
And thus, suddenly, there arises again the hexagram pi, number twelve, which is “standstill.” Let’s see, we’re going to move to 47. Now here comes the the oracle itself. It says: after completion—which is the name of the hexagram.
Success in small matters, perseverance furthers, at the beginning good fortune, at the end, disorder. Then, following the judgment, comes another part of the oracle called the image. Water over fire.
The image of the condition in after completion. Thus, the superior man takes sort of misfortune and arms himself against it in advance. And then there’s a comment on the lines.
And we have an eight in the—no, a six—in the one… fourth place. And the oracle here says, of this line, which is a moving one: the finest clothes turn to rags. Be careful all day long.
Now, there are many comments on this. But we should look first at the hexagram it turns into, which is number—what’d I say? 43, I think I said.
No, 47. Turns into forty seven. The one it turns into indicates the direction of the motion.
It turns into kun, which means oppression or exhaustion. With the lake above and the water below. The judgment is oppression, success, perseverance.
The great man brings about good fortune. No blame. When one has something to say it is not believed.
The image. There is no water in the lake. The image of exhaustion.
Thus, the superior man takes his life on following his will. There is a comment on this one. It says: the lake is above, water below.
The lake is empty, dried up. In other words, the water flows out. Exhaustion is expressed in yet another way.
At the top, a dark line is holding down two light lines. Below, a light line is hemmed in between two dark lines. The upper trigram belongs to the principle of darkness, the lower to the principle of light.
Thus everywhere, superior men are oppressed and held in restraint by inferior men. Now, the commentary on the judgment of the original hexagram reads: the transition from the old to the new time is already accomplished. In principle, everything stands systematized, and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved.
In respect to this, however, we must be careful to maintain the right attitude. Everything proceeds as if of its own accord. And this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let things take their own course without troubling over details.
Such indifference is the root of all evil. Symptoms of decay are bound to be the result. Here we have the rule indicating the usual course of history.
But this rule is not an inescapable law. He who understands it is in position to avoid its effects by dint of unremitting perseverance and caution. And then the image, which is water over fire: when water in a kettle hangs over fire, the two elements stand in relation, and thus generate energy.
But the resulting tension demands caution. If the water boils over, the fire is extinguished and its energy is lost. If the heat is too great, the water evaporates into the air.
These elements here brought into relation, and thus generating energy, are by nature hostile to each other. Only the most extreme caution can prevent damage. In light of junctures when all— This morning I was discussing with you some of the basic ideas and feelings of Chinese philosophy (and in particular Taoism) which underlie the development of Zen Buddhism, and which underlie the whole Chinese attitude to life, to nature, and to art.
And I suppose, of all these ideas that are discussed with you in the morning, the most important was the one of the mutual arising of things—that is to say: that you and your world go together in the same way as bees and flowers, but that we are not brought up (in, at any rate, our culture) to feel this. We don’t have a sensation of it. We have instead a sensation of confronting the world of nature as something alien, something outside, into which we come rather than out of which we come.
But it’s possible so to change your everyday consciousness that you feel yourself as something that the universe is doing. It’s as if you changed your center of gravity, your center of operations, from that little man inside the head (or the ego) to the whole works doing it. Now then, what I want to do this afternoon is shift from Taoism later on in time to the introduction of Buddhism into China and the birth of Zen, and to see what Chinese Zen is.
We do, though, first have to have a short look at what Buddhism is, as a product of India. It has been well said that Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. See, Hinduism is a way of life that goes far, far beyond what we in the West call religion.
It involves cookery, everyday family life, house-building—just everything. It’s the whole Hindu way of life. And so you can’t export it, just as you can’t export Shinto from Japan.
It belongs to the soil and the culture. But there are essential elements in it that can be transmitted outside the culture of India. And Buddhism is one of the ways of doing just that.
So one might say simply this to try and sum up what Buddhism is about. The word “Buddha” is derived from the root budh in Sanskrit, which means “to be awake.” So the Buddha is the the awakened man, the man who woke up. What does he wake up from?
Obviously a dream. And what kind of a dream is this? Well, I would call it a state of hypnosis.
And this state of hypnosis—although I’m using hypnosis in a rather archaic sense of the word—is a state of being entranced, spellbound, fascinated. And this is called in Sanskrit avidyā. Vidyā is “knowledge” in Sanskrit, and it is the root from which we get videre in Latin (“to see”), and so “vision” in English.
So they’re putting the a in front of it, means “non-”. Avidyā: “not seeing,” “ignorance,” “ignore-ance”—I was discussing that this morning—where you see, but you ignore everything that you’re not looking at. When you put the beak of a chicken on a white chalk line, and the chicken is fascinated with that and can’t get away from the chalk line, that’s avidyā.
So, in the same way, our beaks were put on a chalk line when we were hypnotized into the notion of attending to life by conscious attention alone—by the spotlight to the exclusion of the floodlight. And so we began to imagine that we were separate individuals—what is called in Buddhism satkāyadṛṣṭi: “the view of separateness.” And a Buddha is one who has overcome that. He has awakened from that illusion, from that state of hypnosis, and he knows that—well, I can’t put what he knows in any positive terms.
This is the special thing about Buddhism. Everything in Buddhism sounds negative. Let’s put it this way: let’s suppose you engage yourself in a relationship with the Buddha, or with one—I mean, there are hundreds of Buddhas.
The one we call Gautama is just the historical Buddha that everybody knows about. But one Buddha leads to another, because, as a result of his relationships with people, he turns them in the Buddhas, too—awakened people. Now, you meet one of these people and he’s going to give you a rough time.
But one of the Buddhas running around these days is Krishnamurti. And Krishnamurti absolutely destroys everybody’s religion. He’ll say: “Why do you believe this?
Why are you hanging on to that? Why do you want to insist that this idea is so?” See? And he shows you that all your fixed formulations, all the ideas to which you cling, are spurious.
And then you suddenly get into a kind of vertigo, dizziness, that you feel suddenly that you’re no longer standing on the firm ground, but that the universe has suddenly turned into water—or worse, air. Or worse still, empty space. There’s nothing to hold on to.
Now, you see, often, when one discusses religion with people, they say, “Well, I need a religion because I need something to hold on to.” But that’s the way not to use a religion. Because if you use religion as something to hold on to, your religion is an expression of unfaith. Faith is where you let go, not where you hold on.
When the cat falls off the tree, the cat relaxes, you see? And so the cat lands with a soft thud and doesn’t get hurt, because the cat has faith. But if the cat in mid-air were suddenly to grab itself with all four feet and tighten up, you see, it’d be hurt.
And that’s what people do when they say, “rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself and thee.” They want something to hold on to, see? And that is unfaith. So the method of Buddhism—it’s called the dharma (doesn’t mean “the law,” it means “the method”)—the method is to knock the stuffing out of you, to take away everything to which you cling, to cleanse you completely of all beliefs, all ideas, all concepts of what life is about, so that you are completely let go.
So Buddhism has no doctrines at all that you have to believe in. They don’t care what background you come from—whether you’re a Roman Catholic on one extreme or a logical positivist at the other. Both are clinging to something.
You see? And so the method of Buddhism is to knock out the underpinnings and say: well, not only do we not believe in anything, we don’t even believe in not believing in anything. You know, you crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after you.
But in this case, you do the exact opposite of that. That’s a defensive move, to crawl into a hole. In this way, you crawl into great space and then pull the space out after you.
And to go through this is pretty, pretty rough. Because you can do it on what seems at first to be a merely intellectual level. So you can engage a group of people in a discussion, and you can start, whenever they propose an idea that is their sort of guiding principle of life, you demolish it, show that it doesn’t hold water.
And step by step you unearth by talking with them: what are the fundamental ideas they’re operating on? Everybody is. Everybody is a philosopher.
Everybody has metaphysics—although they may not know what it is, ecause they’ve never examined it. But by this method you bring it out and you demolish it. And this, suddenly, what seemed like a very nice intellectual discussion turns into sheer murder.
People get really anxious. They develop all the trembles and the symptoms of extreme anxiety. And so they finally say to the guru, the teacher: “Well, heaven’s sakes!
What do you believe in?” He says: “I’m not proposing anything. I didn’t set anything up.” “Well, how do you navigate? How do you… how do you exist?” This is what’s the problem.
Because, you see, what we’re moving from—as I suggested a moment ago—we are moving from a state of affairs where we’re accustomed to navigation on land to a state of affairs where we’re in the water. And this is very critical for today, because the impact of modern science on Western culture has been very similar to this. Say, in Christianity, we sing hymns like “How Firm a Foundation,” and “Rock of Ages,” “Ein Feste Burg,” “A Mighty Fortress is our God.” We’ve something to stand on.
“The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, her Lord.” And it’s ugh! This firm thing. Alright, suddenly all that disappears or becomes implausible and we find ourselves swimming or sinking.
Now, when you find that you’re living in the midst of a universe of relativity but there’s nothing you can hold on to, you’ve got learn how to swim. And to swim you’ve got to relax and stop grabbing. So this is what Buddhism does when it says it’s the art of let go, of non-attachment—non-attachment doesn’t mean that you lose your appetite for dinner, it means simply that you stop grabbing.
You get rid of stickiness—stickiness in the sense of, for example, when a wheel has an axle that’s too tight and it sticks, you want to loosen it up a bit. You don’t want it too lose; you don’t want it floppy. A lot of people, when they tell them to relax, they become like a limp rag.
It’s not relaxing. Relaxing is having still tone. But it’s a certain—it’s a middle way.