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And when we see it, we say: “Good heavens! Why didn’t I ever see that before? There it was, right under my nose, and I never noticed it!” Oh, this sort of thing happens, I suppose, every day when you lose your glasses, and you go around all over the house looking for them, and then suddenly they’re on your nose.
Or you’ve lost your handbag, and there it is over your shoulder. There’s an old story about an Indian king who one day woke up in the morning and turned to his bedside to look at himself in the mirror. He had a mirror like this—you know, these old bronze mirrors, which used to be polished on one side, and then had a design of some kind on the other.
And here he was with a mirror beside his bed, and he was kind of bleary-eyed in the morning, and he picked it up and looked into the wrong side. And he said, “Where’s my head? I’ve lost it!” And he summoned all his attendants and started running around all over his apartment looking for his head.
And when the attendants arrived they said, “But, your majesty, oh King live forever, it’s still on your shoulders. You looked in the wrong side of the mirror.” And that story is told as an illustration of what is, after all, the greatest theme of Indian philosophy: the recollection, or remembering, of something that mankind as a whole seems to have forgotten. I was talking a moment ago about great discoveries of benefit to the human race; how they are things that might have been obvious all the time.
Supposing there was a very greatest discovery, something that would really set the heart of man at peace, and it’s the most obvious thing there is, and nobody is noticing it at all. What might it be? Well, when in Indian philosophy it is said that the objective of the whole thing is remembering or recollecting something that has been forgotten, what is that?
It means remembering who or what we really are. Well, of course, if we say, “Well, who am I?” we say, “Well, I’m I. I’m a person.” Well, what is a person? Here is a person.
A person is originally an actor’s mask—whether for an ordinary dramatic performance or a ritual performance—and in the Greco-Roman world these masks were called persona. For the word per-sona means “that through which there comes sound.” And those old masks, as they were made from the Greco-Roman stage, had mouthpieces that were shaped like a megaphone. Rather wide mouths.
And so, because those mouths emphasized the sound, persona became the name for a mask. And this use of the word still survives when you look in the title pages of a play, and you see a list of dramatis personae: “the persons of the drama.” Because this was originally a list of the masks that the actors were going to wear. And so isn’t it strange that the word “person,” which originally meant a “mask,” has come to mean what we really and truly feel ourselves to be?
And this is perhaps a very, very significant confusion. After all, what one is as a person—that is to say: as a mask, as a part in a play—is what we nowadays call one’s role. And we are such (aren’t we?)
that we very much depend—for our personal security and our social security—we very much tend to fix upon and identify ourselves with certain roles. Now, I think one of the best illustrations of this is when you go to a party, and you’re meeting a lot of strange people. And when your hostess introduces you to each other she always gives some little indication in her introduction so that another person can identify your role.
She says, “Oh, I do want you to meet Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith is a painter.” “I do want you to meet Mr. Jones. Mr. Jones is a banker.” And so Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones know who they are.
But what they know is not exactly who they really are, they know what roles they play in society. And by knowing their roles they are able to converse with each other without difficulty. You have, in other words, a starting point for conversation.
Oh, it may be something so trivial: “Oh, I do want you to meet Mrs. Dokes, because she comes from your home state.” And then immediately the conversation can begin quite easily talking about one’s home town or home state. And in this way, you know, you can talk with people without ever really meeting them. By identifying clearly with your role and playing your part—oh, I mean, it may be some other part than banker or doctor or lawyer, it may be regular guy or buffoon or bohemian or whatever sort of role one identifies one’s self with—by playing this part you can completely conceal yourself from other people.
You know, the only people who don’t really need these role keys in meeting each other are children. A child has no embarrassment in going straight up to you and saying, “Oh, what a pretty face you have!” Or, “Isn’t that a funny nose you’ve got!” He can go right into conversation without having to meet your persona, your front, your mask. And that is, of course, why great philosophers and sages have always admired children and have, in that respect, tried to emulate them.
So then, society encourages us—not only modern society, but ancient societies—have encouraged the individual to identify himself with a consistent role and to play his part consistently. In other words, we all find that the moment in which we really make fools of ourselves, when something goes wrong, is when we act out of role. In other words, my role at the moment is being a speaker on television and talking to you, and I would be considered to flub the show if suddenly I acted out of role and did something that simply speakers don’t do.
And if I did this unintentionally, I would feel embarrassed because my role had slipped. Now, in Indian society the roles that people play are what we now know as their castes. In old Indian society there were four principal castes: the priests, the warriors and rulers, the merchants, and the laborers—rather much as in medieval European society there were lords spiritual, lords temporal, commons, and serfs.
And then, within each one of these caste groups, there were many subdivisions corresponding to the various vocations that people adopted. But Indian society contains an interesting custom, an interesting tradition. And that is that when a man has established himself in his role about the middle of his life, he hands over his vocation, the running of his business or his shop or whatever it may be, to his oldest son and says, “Now you carry on.” And the man who gives up his job or gives up his role becomes what is called a forest dweller.
He retires from active life. He changes his name and he gives up his role. And this is done in the pursuit of what is called in Hindu philosophy liberation, or to use the technical term, mokṣa.
And this means “becoming a nobody.” You give up your identifying role. You drop caste and become, as it were, no one. You, in other words, go to find the great question of all life: who behind these masks, these parts I play in life, who am I really?
Now, we often talk about finding ourselves. We often talk about finding ourselves in relation to our work: am I doing the job I am really fit for? Am I married to the person who really suits me?
Am I living in the part of the world that is really congenial to my nature? But this, you see, raises the question—doesn’t it?—what is one’s fundamental nature? And if you look into this question carefully, you suddenly find yourself rather like an onion.
You start peeling off masks or skins, looking deeper and deeper and deeper, until you get to the point of ultimate puzzle: what is it behind all this that is the very foundation of my consciousness? What am I really? And in Hindu philosophy the answer to that question is always: behind all the many masks of the world—be they masks of Men or masks of animals or plants or stars or mountains—there is one actor, there is the supreme self of the universe, which is called Brahman.
Brahman (in its personal form Brahma) is the name thus accorded to the one actor playing all the different personae, or parts. And the deepest self in Man, the one who is under all those onion skins really us, is called Ātman, meaning “the self.” And the great formula of Indian philosophy is: Ātman is Brahman. You are not really this role, this mask—whether it be the social mask, or the mask of skin over one’s body.
What you are, fundamentally, is the Brahman. And so comes this formula which sums up the whole inner doctrine of Hinduism. Excuse me, I’ve started to write it the wrong way.
We’ll begin over here. Tat: that means “that.” Tvam: “thou.” Asi: “Art.” “That thou art,” or in ordinary English order: “thou art that.” The very word, “that,” in English, is, I think, originally from this Sanskrit expression tat. And this is, in a way, the best word that can be used for the underlying reality of the world.
And perhaps I can try and explain to you why. Now, you know, when I was in my teens, I first became interested in this, and I very much fervently wanted to realize what it would be like to experience the whole world as a unity and myself as being involved in that unity, of being it, of being the one self which is all. And at first I thought: well, I suppose this is a state of consciousness which, if one realized it, all the distinctions and outlines of things would disappear, and the whole world would kind of go bleeagh into a great sea of cosmic jello, like this.
Or else I thought perhaps that it wouldn’t be quite like that, but maybe everything would become suffused with a kind of omnipresent interior light; something like this. But I couldn’t make it happen that way. And, you know, it’s strange.
There was one thing in my experience—I was living in London in those days—which really stuck in my craw, one thing that I just couldn’t make disappear into this jello or this infinite continuum of the one ultimate reality, the one true self behind everything. And that happened to be a London taxicab. I wonder if you’ve ever seen a London taxicab.
They used to look like this. They were upright, they were ugly, the were the most individual, impertinently definite things you could imagine. And I could not make these silly gadgets which I saw all around me disappear into the one.
And suddenly it dawned on me one day that, to see the unity behind life, things don’t have to merge into jello. They don’t have to become suffused with inner light. I saw it with that taxicab.
I saw that that taxicab, by being the very upright, impertinent, stupid-looking thing that it is, precisely as taxicab, it manifested the one underlying reality. In other words, this is not a question of imposing upon the world of differences some abstract conception of unity in your mind. You don’t have to go around saying to yourself, “Now don’t get fussed.
Don’t be disturbed. Be at peace. All things are fundamentally one.” You don’t have to do that at all.
You have to see the secret that it’s the very differences of things, the very individuality of things, their prickly personal reality, that manifests, that shouts out, that advertises the underlying unity. You remember, perhaps, that in a previous program I was talking to you about the contrast of figure and background, and we saw what happened to my figure when the background disappeared. And we were getting from that the idea that it’s precisely the difference between the figure and the background that makes us able to see both the background and the figure.
There is, in other words, a hidden unity underlying these contrasts. And so, then, it is through seeing the fact that the differences themselves are the unity that we come to an inward, clear realization of, after all, the thing that we’ve forgotten. Because going about our everyday tasks involves constantly focusing on the details [???
], focusing on the contrasts and the differences between them. And so in this absorption, in dealing with the difference aspect of the world, we simply forget, we overlook, the unity aspect of the world which the very differences so clearly proclaim. So then, if we know that the differences redeem the unity, then we see that what we really are is tat—“that,” “it”—so what?
Does it make any difference? Does it make anybody any happier to understand that behind all the differences of life is a unity which each one of us is? Well, it does—doesn’t it?—in this way.
If you really know this, you come to a point where nothing can faze you. For you know that you aren’t anymore just the fragmented individual. You know that what you are deep down at the very center is something beyond time and change, the eternal Ātman, the self of the world.
Now, of course, that just doesn’t mean that you become, oh, insensitive. It doesn’t mean that you go beyond human emotions, that you’re no longer ever afraid, no longer sad, no longer loving other people because you see it’s all one and so it doesn’t make any difference. It’s not like that.
In Buddhism they say our object is not to make stone Buddhas, but living Buddhas. A stone Buddha is a symbol of what we might call an ultra stoic: a person who so represses his fears and his emotions that he doesn’t have any left. And they say: well, if that’s your idea of a sage, a rock will do just as well.
It doesn’t mean that. It means rather that you’re no longer afraid of being afraid, you’re no longer afraid of grief, of pain, of being sensed. You’re no longer afraid, in other words, to go into life with total zest.
In other words, when we say you’re not fazed by anything, it means you don’t block. Blocking, you know, is always difficult to overcome. It’s just about the time of year when we have to do a lot of figuring, say, to work out our income tax.
Don’t you notice sometimes, when you’re adding columns of figures, that there are certain combinations—like it may be nine and seven, or something like that—at which you block? And this annoys you. Every time you reach this combination you think: “Oh yes, nine and seven is… umm, what is it?
Four, five, six—oh, thirteen!” And you block. (Nine and seven aren’t thirteen, anyways. You see how it is!)
Well, anyway, that happens if you get annoyed that you block at it: you block at blocking. And it gets worse and worse and worse. But if you don’t get annoyed at it and you say, “Oh well, I’m going to block anyway,” and you don’t resist the fact that you block, it’s okay and you’ll eventually stop blocking.
So, in this way, too, it isn’t a question of a state of mind which enables us not to be afraid at all, of not to be sad at all. It’s a state of mind in which we don’t block at being afraid; we are not afraid of fear. And so, as I said, this enables one to go into life with a certain kind of zest.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese Buddhist master. One of his disciples asked him the question, “What is the Tao?” You know, I’ve used that word before. Tao means the “way of nature” in one sense.
It has almost the same meaning as Brahman. It is the same one reality underlying the whole universe. Also, Tao means a “way of life,” a “way of behaving,” a “way of conduct.” So both meanings were involved in his question.
What is the ultimate reality? What is the way of conduct by which one comes into accord with it? And the teacher answered him in two words: “Walk on.” You know, it’s almost like a policeman when he comes out into the crowd hanging about in the street, and he says, “C’mon now, keep moving, keep moving!” For, after all, keeping moving in this sense is keeping alive, keeping things circulating, not hoarding, not blocking—not, as it were, getting clots of blood in one’s psychological and spiritual arteries.
Another illustration that is given of this state in Chinese Buddhist philosophy is the way of behavior of a ball on a mountain stream. Think of a ping pong ball on rough water: the ball keeps dancing, dancing, dancing, and it is never swamped. It never stops moving.
It’s always instantly responsive to the motion of the water. And so, in this way, when we are living, to be able to go straight into things without hesitation, without blocking—we have our own proverb: he who hesitates is lost. And hesitation is what is basically meant in Buddhist thought by attachment in a bad sense, in the sense of evil attachments to the world.
It doesn’t mean love. It doesn’t mean joy and sorrow in that sense. It means blocking at love, blocking at joy and sorrow, blocking at fear.
This is the attachment from which the sage is going to be liberated. And so, in his answer “Walk on,” “Keep going”—you know, sometimes you wake up (maybe Monday morning) and you think of the week coming up, and all the chores you’ve got to do. And right as you wake up in bed you feel this fundamental block to going any further.
And you think, “Oh, I wish time wouldn’t go on. I’d just like to lie here and let it stop. I don’t want to face it.” The longer you lie that way, the more and more difficult it becomes to wake up.
And, you know, the answer is given to us over and over again. It is just: get up! Don’t think about it!
Move! Walk on! The moment one moves into it, the problem becomes simple.
It’s only when you stop to think about it that it’s difficult. I referred in a previous program to that astonishing gentleman Bodhidharma: the sage who is supposed to have been one of the people who introduced Buddhism from India into China. Let’s look at a picture of Bodhidharma again.
This is—here he is in rather an odd form. You can see him there, looking like a kind of a rolly polly, and here he is rolling around various positions, and at the top it says: jinsei nana korobi ya oki, which means: “Seven times down, eight times up, such is life.” And here he is: the doll that can never be fazed. Because he’s not afraid of yielding.
Whichever way you knock him, he always comes up again. He goes down, he comes up. You can never defeat him.
He doesn’t block. “One thing do I teach, oh my disciples: suffering and deliverance from suffering.” It was in this way that Gautama the Buddha, living in the sixth century BC, gave the gist of his whole teaching. And it’s for this reason that many commentators and critics of Buddhism have called it a way of escape: because of its tremendous concern with the problem of human pain as the fundamental problem of human life, and the means of deliverance from pain.
But I believe this is really a very mistaken criticism, because there is nothing that is so much the very essence of suffering as the fear of suffering itself. And if the doctrine of the Buddha were fundamentally based on an obsession to get rid of suffering, it would be a kind of self-contradictory vicious circle. This is very well illustrated by another of those stories which I tell from time to time, where a student came to his master with the question, “It is terribly hot, and how shall we escape the heat?” In other words, this was a symbolic question asking about the whole problem of the heat of suffering.
“It is terribly hot, and how shall we escape the heat?” And he answered: “Go right down to the bottom of the furnace.” “But in the furnace,” said the student, “how do we escape the scorching fire?” And the master’s final word was, “No further pains will harass you.” Now you might say, then, that the attitude of the Buddhist philosophy to suffering is not at all one of turning away from it, of solving the problem of suffering by turning one’s back on it and escaping it. Rather, its whole attitude is that the solution to the problem of human pain—whether it be physical or whether it be moral—is to go right into it. Now, in the Buddha’s doctrine, pain (or suffering) in its most general sense is designated by this word duḥkha in Sanskrit.
Duḥkha is the opposite of sukha. And if you break the word down, duḥ, here, means what is “disagreeable,” “painful,” “bitter,” and kha means “condition.” Su means what is “sweet.” So you might say this is bitterness in contrast with sweetness. And the first proposition of the Buddha’s teaching—what is called the first of the Four Noble Truths—is the idea that life as we live it is fundamentally duḥkha; fundamentally a kind of chronic frustration.
And Man’s effort is always to get rid of this and go to that. But the idea of the Buddha was that, if you have this, you must have this, because these two contrast with each other. You don’t experience this unless you experience this, you don’t experience this unless you experience this.
So if you go after sweetness, you cannot experience sweetness unless there is always as its background the contrast of bitterness. And therefore, the objective of the Buddha’s doctrine was not to get rid of pain and put pleasure in its place, but to go to something else which stands, as it were, transcending these two opposites, above and beyond them, which in Sanskrit is called ānanda. That word is usually translated “bliss,” but in a rather unusual sense.
There is a poem, again from the tradition of Chinese zen, which says: And so bliss, here, has a very special meaning. It isn’t bliss in contrast to agony. And I think probably the best way of translating the word ānanda is to use the English word “ecstasy.” Now then, our problem is simply this: how is it that through a profound going into suffering—that is to say, a profound acceptance of it—there can come out of it some sort of bliss?
This is the problem we have to understand. Now, first of all, by way of illustration I would like you to consider a mild but nevertheless chronic form of suffering which we constantly undergo: the experience of fear. What is fear?
What, in other words, when you are afraid, are you actually feeling? A great deal of the doctrine of primitive Buddhism as we have it recorded from the Buddha’s own teachings is concerned with close attentiveness to one’s inner feelings and states of mind. A careful watching of them to find out what they really are.
And supposing, then, you’re afraid. What happens to you? Many people, when asked this question, seem strangely unaware.
Their thoughts are concentrated on the particular imagination of the feared event happening. In other words, a person is afraid of having a certain sickness, disease, and he keeps thinking of what it might be like to have that disease. But supposing we switch our attention from that and concentrate for a moment on what it simply feels like to be afraid, we find—don’t we?—that we get a kind of creepy feeling up the spine, we get a sort of sinking or hollow feeling in the pit of the stomach, and a clammy sensation in the palms of our hands.
Now, as a matter of fact, that’s not really very painful, is it? That’s all that’s the matter with you, and that’s the worst that life can do to you at that moment. Furthermore, notice something else: that when you have what you call fear, you have also precisely the same sensations that you have in a totally opposite situation.
When you have what we call shudders or thrills of delight, they are the same shudders, the same trembles, sometimes even the same creepy feeling up the spine, the same sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach that a very profound positive emotional experience can excite. So that we find that our feelings depend for their valuation as to whether they be positive or negative very much as to the context in which they occur. For example, say a father is playing with his boy, and he gives him a slap on the behind.
The boy looks around, and if he sees an angry expression on his father’s face, he feels hurt. It was painful. But if he sees his father as laughing at him and was just teasing him, it doesn’t hurt him at all.
And so it is with all our sensations. The way they impress us positively or negatively, as good or bad, depends to a very large extent on the context in which they are set. Take, for example, in a poem like this by the humorous poet Thomas Hood.
The poem says: Now, it’s the same sound told in either case, but its meaning is completely different because of the context in which it occurs. If the second line had said, “And the sexton told the minister,” then it would’ve had the same meaning in both lines. And just as words change their meaning in accordance with their context, so the meaning of what we experience alters contextually.
And so it is this, then, that close awareness of our feelings reveals. In the same way, we can say we weep when we are sad, but we also weep for joy. There are tears of joy and tears of sorrow.
Exactly the same tears, exactly the same physical sensation, but what a difference the context makes. And therefore, the idea of the Buddha was to become delivered from suffering not by running away from it, but from looking at the actual concrete reality of what we feel and forgetting the context. Now, of course, this is obviously something quite possible in the milder forms of suffering.
But what happens when suffering becomes really acute? Perhaps, as an illustration of this, I might turn to a very extraordinary work of art. It is a sculpture of Saint Teresa by Bernini.
Look at that face and try and decide what feeling that face is expressing. Is it agony? Is it a rapture of delight which would, as we say, cause one almost to swoon?
What is it? Actually, if you look back and see the whole scene, you will see that the saint is confronted by an angel who is piercing her with a dart, the dart representing the divine love. And so the figure represents Saint Teresa in ecstasy; in profound joy.
Profound delight at the state, the inner feeling, of her union with the godhead. And this is exactly what is meant by ānanda: ecstasy. For pleasure and pain in their most intense forms both produce a feeling that we could call ecstasy.
A very striking illustration of this has been given recently. Some of you may have heard of the work of a British obstetrician by the name of Grantly Dick-Read, who has many students among obstetricians in this country. For, as you know, the pains of childbirth can be some of the severest pains that a human being can undergo.
And the point of Dr. Read’s work has been to show that if you change a woman’s attitude to the experience of childbirth—if, in other words, you stop calling these feelings pains and instead you call them tensions, and if, before childbirth, you train her to relax, to let go of herself and, as it were, cooperate with the tensions that she’s experiencing—the whole character of childbirth can be changed. And many women who have undergone this pre-birth training say afterwards that what they might’ve expected to be an extremely unpleasant experience turned out to be a profoundly moving experience, even a joyous one. Now, of course, it’s pretty clear that we can do something like that when the context of a painful experience is very positive, as it is with childbirth.
After all, this is a creative event. But wouldn’t it be a very different matter in the case of the pains of death? Would it be possible, for example, to look upon the pains of death as natural tensions, and so have an entirely different attitude to it?
I don’t know why not. After all, we fear death, we have a negative attitude to death, largely because of social conditioning. It’s what we’ve been taught.
For example, just to give another illustration and then get back to the subject of death, the idea of being sick—I mean vomiting—is something which most of us regard as disgusting. But is it actually disgusting? Don’t we revolt with the feeling of disgust from it because, when we were little children and we were sick and we threw up, our mothers went bleaagh, and we caught from them the emotional attitude toward that kind of experience so that it reverberates and echoes with us ever afterwards?
Well, it’s rather the same with death. Because death is, after all, beneficent. If we never died, not only would our world become hopelessly overpopulated, not only might we become utterly bored with century after century after century of experience without intermission, we might crave death after the first five hundred years of life, and never to be able to have it would be like the torture of a chronic and fantastic insomnia.
So if death is fundamentally merciful, if it is natural, if it is something that is just as much an integral part of being a human being as having a head or having hands, then would it not be possible to have a changed attitude to death in any community or society, so that in due course people could begin to look upon the pain attending death in the same way as they can be taught to look upon the pain attending birth? Now, there’s another aspect to the problem, and that is that a great deal of our negative attitude to the experience of pain—and acute physical pain I’m speaking of now—is connected with a certain culturally conditioned unwillingness to react to pain in a natural way. In other words, we are afraid of giving in to suffering in the way that our own physical organism suggests to us.
We’re afraid of crying, we’re afraid of screaming, we’re afraid of going into those very undignified motions which constitute the human being’s reaction in pain—even though, as I just pointed out, we sometimes have the very same reactions in acute pleasure. But we are fundamentally ashamed of pain because we are taught that giving in to pain—weeping or something like that—is unmanly, sissy, or something like that. Now, it’s a very dangerous doctrine that a human being should always be rigid in conditions of suffering.
I often like to quote a passage from that Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu which says: In other words, there is strength in weakness. Consider a cat: when a cat drops off a tree, what does the cat do? Does it go rigid?
Does it say, “I’m going to be a real tough guy and meet the ground without flinching”? Does the cat stick out its feet like this? No.
Because if it did, when it hit the ground it’d be just a broken bag of bones. When a cat’s in midair, it relaxes. It goes with it.
It becomes weak. And so it hits the ground with a soft, heavy thud and is unharmed. Think, also, of water.
Water was one of the basic symbols of Lao Tzu’s philosophy: to be like water. Nothing in the world is softer and more yielding than water. And yet, at the same time, nothing is like water for overcoming and wearing away things which are hard, like rocks.
And thus, if you put a knife into water and you try to cut it, what happens? The water gives completely to the knife. The water closes up wherever the knife went.
And although you strike at it as hard as you like, you can never create a wound. So it is, you see, because of its softness that the water triumphs over the hardness of the knife. So then, it’s the same with human beings.
Unfortunately, we are so brought up to mistrust our natural feeling reactions to certain experiences. We are conditioned to believe that we will suffer less, that we will somehow triumph over pain, if we hold our feelings rigid. But, you know, our reactions to pain are in a way therapeutic.
They’re healing, just like fever. When we have poisons in our blood, the natural defense mechanisms of the body send up our temperature, and in this way boil out the invading bugs. Now, it used to be thought that when people had fevers, this was the disease; the fever itself was the disease.
And so, once upon a time, doctors used to give medicine to take away the fever. But by taking away the fever, they very often killed the patient because they took away the defensive action of the body to drive out the disease. And so, in just the same way, if one refuses to react in the way of nature to invasions of pain, so too one may shatter the body beyond what it can stand.
It’s the same thing. You know, no bridge will stand up unless it has give. If a steel suspension bridge is built so firmly that it doesn’t sway in the wind, that bridge will come crashing down on the first gale.
It’s just because there’s give in it that the bridge is strong. Take a great building like the Empire State: the Empire State also has a sway in it. And if it didn’t have that sway, it would be a very insecure structure indeed.