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Because we are captivated by the illusion of the necessity and the importance of going on, to keep other people going on, to keep children going on, to keep this thing up. And the difficulty is that, as we become disturbed and anxious about this, it’s more difficult to keep the game going. In proportion, as we are frightfully concerned to survive, we start fighting other people. |
We start clobbering our neighbors who are stealing our crops and whatever it is. All the old fights start. And it is these fights which (more than anything else at the moment, you see) are endangering the entire human project—but all based fundamentally on the illusion that it’s utterly important that we survive. |
A little while before he died, Robert Oppenheimer said, “It is perfectly obvious that the whole world is going to hell. It’s going to blow up. There is no way that it can be stopped, except that we don’t try to stop it happening.” Because, you see, the panic—what’s going to happen if this bomb goes off? |
See?—this more than anything else will make it go off. Because it’s like a person who’s looking down over a precipice and starts to get unreasonable. He is terrified to fall over it, and therefore suddenly all the strength goes out of his fingers and his legs get wobbly, and he’s ready to fall. |
Simply because of his fear of falling. But, you see, in all this, what underlies is the illusion that I am going on, that I constitute a real continuity from this moment to the next moment to the next moment to the next moment. What are you afraid of losing when you die? |
Why, all the capital you’ve acquired during your life. The experiences, the friends, the status, the skills. Everything that you remember would be destroyed, ordinarily, when you die. |
In other words, we are afraid of losing the past. Now, it’s perfectly obvious to me that, when you die, yes, everything that you’ve acquired as an individual and stored in your brain is dissolved and distributed. But at the same time, it is equally obvious that, when you die, there won’t be following the moment of death everlasting nothingness. |
That would be as ridiculous as to suppose that you went immediately to heaven and joined the saints and angels. The point is that when you di, you’re always reborn de novo—that is to say, just as you were before. When you came into this world there gradually arose into being the sensation of “I.” And it stays there a while, it goes through a development, and then it drops off. |
But all the time, everywhere, there are other “I”s starting up, see? Whether they be human, animal, anything you like, they be in other galaxies, et cetera. Always, they’re starting up. |
But we would say there is no connection between them. No. In the same way there is no connection between the molecules in your hand, and yet you say it is a hand. |
But if you look at it under a powerful enough microscope, the molecules in your hand are miles apart. And you would say there is no connection between them. What’s the connection between this galaxy and other galaxies? |
Well, we can’t see any connection. And yet there are gravitational swings whereby they respond with each other and move in a certain collective order. So, in a very similar way, the constant appearance of beings who feel that they are “I” constitute a wave motion. |
And they may be considered individually—see, what we’re doing in this is not setting down a doctrine, but it is doing an exercise in perception. You can see it either way. You can see yourself, in other words, as existing only now. |
That’s the only you there is. The alternative to that, logically, is to see yourself as everything. Either it must be that you exist, bingo, like that. |
You’re a point instant. Bong! You know, if you go and the Fillmore Auditorium and dance, they turn on the stroboscopic light, going very rapidly, brilliant light, on and off, on and off, on and off, on and off. |
And it seems that everybody is all the time going in and out of existence. See? Now, in a way, that’s a kind of exemplification of the truth: that we are vibrations, and that everything does go on and off, on and off, on and off all the time. |
So the only real thing is the moment of “on,” where you are now. Got it? Lost it. |
Got it? Lost it. Got it? |
Lost it. See? That’s the only thing that’s real. |
That’s one pole. The other pole is the view that all these on and offs, just like the molecules in your hand, constitute a continuous reality. But if you follow that line, you’ve got to add up not to just what you are at this moment, you’ve got to add up to the whole universe through the entire span of its existence in space and time. |
Any middle position you take between these things is arbitrary. You say: okay, I’m going to be so much. I’m going to call myself this particular human being who lives for such and such a time. |
Okay. That’s the way you want to play the game. Those are the rules you’ve been told. |
And if you want to get attached to that and hung up on that, you’re going to say that matters. And so you feel material. And the Buddhist idea is simply saying: don’t get hung up on a (what is called in Sanskrit) dṛṣṭi. |
Dṛṣṭi means a “view,” a particular way of looking at things. You say: looking at it from this point of view, this is the way it seems to me to be, and I’m going to stick for that. I’m going to get hung up on that. |
That is the meaning of attachment. So in Sanskrit, the word sakaya dṛṣṭi, means the “view of separateness,” the view that the separation of a certain bundle of wiggles, taken out of the total willingness of all that there is, is me, and another bundle of wiggles is very definitely you. And to get stuck on that, see? |
And therefore to start a fight about it. Therefore, to start crying and weeping and gnashing of teeth, all about this thing being the real thing. That is what these people are trying, all these Buddhist sages and Hindu sages: to get people off that hangup and say, “Wake up! |
Wake up! Wake up! Don’t you understand? |
The whole thing’s an illusion.” Not that this is a word to put it down and say that it’s horrible or bad. If you could see that the whole thing is an illusion, you’d be happy as a lark, and life would be lived much more joyously by everybody. We would dance together and give things away and stop fighting, see? |
If we really saw it was an illusion we’d all be happy in our big dream. But we are constantly saying to ourselves, and we are saying to our children: “It’s real! Goddammit, it’s real! |
And death is gonna be awful! And sickness is gonna be horrible, you see? It’s real, and you better watch out!” See, people say to me, “You can say, as a philosopher, that all this thing is… and you can talk this way because you’re sitting in a comfortable place. |
You’ve got plenty to eat. But you watch: when the thing hits you, you’ll laugh the other side of your face.” Krrck! Well, I don’t give a damn! |
When it happens, it’ll happen. But it’s not happening now. And what I’ll do when it does happen is: “sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.” As if you let yourself be free to react as nature dictates when catastrophe falls, you’ll be okay. |
But if you go through your whole life standing in a state of preparation for catastrophe, and eeeeugh, you know what’s going to happen, you just torment yourself and get ulcers and rotting of the brain, long before it’s necessary for that to happen. In this seminar on birth, death, and the unborn, we’ve been discussing the Buddhist philosophy of change: of life as a flowing, dynamic pattern process, which is essentially immaterial. Because it isn’t anything you can grasp. |
We use the word “substance,” we use the word “solid,” we use the word “matter,” for something you can catch hold of or stand on or rely on or cling to. And the basis of the Buddhist philosophy of change is that there is nothing of the kind. There is nothing to hang onto, nothing to rely on, nothing to cling to. |
But when we say, you see, something matters, the word has a double meaning in that it means that it’s substantial in that it’s important. And so we are brought up from birth to play the game of life in a certain way. There are certain things we are told by adults, who were told by their adults, who were told by their adults that these things matter. |
And one of the fundamental things that matters is that you go on living. And so everybody is tremendously concerned with the things that matter, that they’ve been taught to value, and because these things actually don’t matter—that is to say, because they’re not substantial, but they’re all a flowing pattern. As I illustrated: a flame seems to be a substantial object that’s there to burn you, and you can watch it for a long time. |
Actually, it’s a stream of hot gas. And so, likewise, the human organism is a stream of energy. It’s never the same for two seconds. |
Only, we’ve been taught to watch that thing, and to cherish it, and value it, and it matters, dammit! And yet, it’s going to wear out. And yet, it’s going to get sick. |
And yet, it’s going to die. So everybody is involved in playing the game of life in a way that goes beyond play and becomes deadly serious. And as a result, the whole of existence is lived in a state of constant frustration. |
Because you are trying all the time to hold together and to preserve something which (in the long run) can’t be preserved at all. And therefore, in response to this cry of pain which everybody puts up as a result of being in this situation of trying to hold on to things, the wisdom of the various ways of liberation—be they Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever—is saying to everybody: look, now. Cool it. |
Wake up! See what the scene is. This is the kind of thing that’s going on. |
And you are not a captive in a trap. You’re not just some mere little measly being that somehow or other was brought into an insane universe, but you are what the thing is. You are not the victim, you are the system. |
Only, you have identified yourself with one wave in it, and have forgotten that you are one with the whole energy that’s going on. But what you’re doing is: you have got a particular way—that is to say, a particular accumulation—of memories, of associations, of skills, of things that you’ve learned. And you don’t want to let go of them because you found in that accumulation of memories (which you call yourself) an identity. |
So you know where you are—or think you do. But actually, you don’t need to be anywhere. Where is the universe? |
You know, think up an answer to that one. And so the question “Where is the universe?” is really ultimately the same question as “Where are you?” So what this is saying is: look, let go. It’s alright to play the game and be involved and work out the various intrigues, problems, creative projects, and so on, that life involves. |
That’s fine. But if you get involved in it so that you’re hung up, this deprives you of delight and joy in playing the game. So the point is to get people un-hung-up on the whole thing—which in the way we have been accustomed to translate Sanskrit, Chinese, we have been calling “unattached.” But “un-hung-up” is much better. |
It’s much clearer. This colloquial phrase, a hangup, is a much more direct and exact translation of what the Sanskrit word kleśa means: an “attachment” or “evil passion,” or something like that. Kleśa is hangup. |
It is blocking, being fixed on a particular point of view. And I was trying to show you this morning that we can take ever so many different points of view towards what’s going on. No point of view is the right one. |
Infinitely many points of view are possible. But if you take a point of view, and you insist that’s the only point of view, then you’re hung up on it. If, for example, you take the point of view that there are only two kinds of human beings—men and women—and either you are a man or you are a woman. |
That’s a hangup, because actually we vary a great deal. There are men who have much more feminine elements in them than others, and women who have much more masculine elements in them than other women. And so there is an enormous variation. |
But so long as you insist that black is black and white is white, and that there are Republicans and Democrats, and capitalists and communists, and good guys and bad guys, it’s a hangup. So, also, between what is you and what is other than you. Well, that’s the general area of what we were discussing this morning. |
And now I want to go further in explaining what I started out to explain, which is the basic Buddhist idea of rebirth, of our being reincarnated. I said that this was not in Buddhism the idea that one has a kind of spiritual spook, or astral spook, or soul, which travels from one life to another. It is a much simpler idea than that. |
But it’s so simple that it’s difficult to explain. I would begin, you see, with the assumption that every person, every sentient being whatsoever, is “I.” “I” is simply the universe aware of itself at a particular place and time. That’s what the word “I” means. |
William James once said, “The word ‘I’ is a noun of position, like ‘this’ or ‘here’.” And so the feeling that we call “I” is how everything feels on the inside. But it is always in a particular place at a particular time. And these particular places and particular times, they keep going on and on and on and on and on. |
Myriads of them, all over—not only on this globe, but probably in worlds scattered throughout the whole cosmos—the “I”-feeling arises. And you feel that you are “I” just as much as I feel that I am “I.” And your “I”-feeling and my “I”-feeling are essentially the same—only, we’re looking from different places. But it’s all one “I.” Only, we don’t see this because we are hung-up on the coming and going of “I,” on the particular circumstances in which every “I” appears. |
And so, just as the flame changes its physical identity every second, every split second, every microsecond, so do you. You’re a stream. And so, taking us all together—supposing you watched the human race from a very different point of view: you were watching us—you didn’t know anything about human beings, never seen them before—and you were observing what’s going on in this planet from some other point of culture in space and time. |
And you would say, “Well, this world is peopleing. This planet peoples just like a tree bears fruit. And year after year the apples that come off an apple tree all look very much the same.” And you would say, “Yeah, the apples come and go, but they’re always the same apples coming back.” It’s only if you look very minutely at the apples, and studied the details of coloration and formation, that you would say that one apple was different from another. |
Now, we’re all so used to each other, and we know each other so well, that we see and emphasize the differences between us. But somebody who knew nothing about humanity would see the coming and going of human beings as a repetition of the same process. Just as the flame burning: we say it’s a flame, but it’s a repetition of the same process. |
It keeps on flaming. Cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, you see? Now, if you’re going to count each cha as a distinct and separate event, then you cannot hear—cha, cha, cha, cha, cha—the rhythm. |
So, because of our myopia, because our point of view is fascinated by the details and the differentiations between everything that’s going on—the differentiations between people, the differentiations between generations—we are so preoccupied with that particular view of things that we’re hung-up on it, and we don’t see that it’s the same thing happening again and again and again, and that every “I” that comes into this world is you. Now, you don’t have to have any inside information to understand that. It doesn’t require any sort of is a esoteric, spooky knowledge, something that can be demonstrated. |
It’s just looking at things the way they are, standing right out in the open and facing it. All “I”s are I, wherever soever scattered. Because, you see, this is the place—at the point called here and now, this universe knows itself on the inside. |
You look around you and you see everything, as it were, presenting and exterior to you. Supposing I want to delve into another person: how am I going to do that? Well, there are many ways. |
I can talk to them, I can get them to express their inmost thoughts and their feelings, I can make love to another person and exchange a very fundamental sort of electrochemical union, I can take a knife and like a surgeon go in and analyze. But my relationship to the other is always seeing life on the outside. However much I get down to the tiniest cells that constitute your nervous system, I’m still looking at that cell from the outside. |
If I go down into the molecules, I go down into the atoms, I’m still regarding them from the outside. The only point at which I know the thing on the inside is where I am. Then I have inside knowledge of what everywhere else appears to be outside. |
So if you want to know what all this is, that’s why mystics say you have to look within. So they talk about the inner life within yourself, and so on. Because that’s the point at which you know what it’s like on the inside. |
And so, to realize inside, there must of course at the same time the outside. To realise self, there must be the counterbalance of other. Because this, like black and white, is like back in front. |
They’re inseparable. So then, this is where we start from: that every being coming into this world is “I,” and they keep on coming. It doesn’t matter how long the intervals are between their appearances. |
Supposing this planet were completely wiped out by a cobalt bomb explosion. That would be the end of this race in just the same way as, say, a group of insects will eat their food supply up on a plant, and the whole population will perish. It happens again and again. |
And so in all probability, throughout this galaxy, and throughout other galaxies, there are human or comparable populations that arise and go, arise and go, just as we do individually. So don’t get too worried about the thought that this whole human system on this planet may go away and disappear. Because if you get too worried about it, it’s going to happen faster than if you don’t worry about it—because of the attraction of a vertigo, the feeling of wanting to throw yourself over the precipice even though you know it’ll destroy you. |
But it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose, in other words, that there is a constant rhythm of what we call consciousness, being awake to life, going on and on just as stars go on and on. If the stars are going all over the place, if galaxies are going on all over the place, it’s equally reasonable to suppose that life is going on all over the place. And although the distances from our particular point of view between these islands of life may be vast, don’t forget that the distances between the molecules in your own body are equally vast, on their scale. |
You could go down and blow up the inside of your own head so that the various elements would be hundreds of miles away from each other, and yet somehow or other they hang together. Don’t be deceived. Because distance, space, isn’t just removal. |
Space isn’t just nothing. This is the grand delusion: that space is somehow a thing to be ignored. When Buddhists say that the root of frustration (or duḥkha) is avidyā—avidyā means “ignorance,” “ignoring,” “not knowing.” And this is very clearly explainable in terms of the Gestalt theory of perception. |
The Gestalt theory of perception is that we notice the figure and ignore the background. We notice what is a relatively small enclosed space and ignore the more dispersed. We notice what moves against what is relatively still, and what is relatively still is ignored. |
So, likewise, when we get a constant stimulus of consciousness: we begin to ignore it and not to notice it. Consciousness tends always to notice novel things, novel changes in the environment. So that the most unnoticed things in life are those which are the most constant and the most regular. |
And because, you see, you lose touch with the most constant and the most regular things, you screen them out of your your general thought as insignificant: they don’t matter, they’re not there. And the most ignored thing is space. Because space is always the background. |
The solids are the figures. And therefore we say, simply, space is just nothing. It may be filled around this planet for a little distance with air, which is important. |
Because we do this a while, and you notice something. See? There’s some whoosh going on. |
But out there, space—that’s nothing and all. The Michelson–Morley experiment showed there isn’t even ether in it. And so we say that is nothing. |
But all that is saying is that that is the background to every figure, and as the figure cannot be there without the background, the solid cannot be there without the space, and so the space are the world is the one thing we’ve forgotten and the one thing that is absolutely essential to there being anything at all. Because in every direction the stimulus of space is a constant: we don’t notice it. Just in the same way you don’t notice when you hear music on the phonograph, you don’t consider the fact that all the music that you hear is a vibrating diaphragm. |
Whether it imitates drums, flutes, human voices—it’s still a vibrating diaphragm. But that’s ignored. We say that’s not important. |
But it is important. Because without the vibrating diaphragm there wouldn’t be any music at all. Space, then, likewise, is everywhere. |
But, we ignore it because it’s common to everything. A constant stimulation stimulation of consciousness is forgotten. So then, we must realize that what we call separate things, separate molecules, separate lives, separate planets, separate stars, separate galaxies, are joined by space. |
Space, in other words, is a relationship between solids. You would not be able to think about space without a relationship between solids. And so the whole theory of rebirth in Buddhism is based on intervals. |
Not on a transmigrating soul, but upon intervals between lives. Because it’s the interval that’s important, just as in the same way, when you listen to music, you hear melody simply because you hear the interval between the tones. If you couldn’t hear that interval, you would not hear a melody. |
Tone-deaf people cannot hear melody. They hear merely a succession of sounds. And they can’t understand why other people enjoy this, because they haven’t got the capacity to hear the interval between tones following each other in succession, or the intervals between tones played simultaneously, as in a chord. |
Now, isn’t that magical, when you come to think of it? That music is created by not so much the tones, as the distance; the musical or sonic space between them? But so goes for everything. |
It is how it is spaced that creates the significance and interest of any being whatsoever. You say, for example, the human body consists of about ninety-five cents’ worth of chemicals. But how it’s arranged! |
Playing a violin by a great master is just scraping cats’ entrails with horse hair. But how it’s done! See? |
So the order of the way things are distributed is the magic. And that requires the spacing; how it is spaced. And so architects, they understand that space is real, because they talk about space using space. |
People, when they first listen to architects talking, are very puzzled. Because an architect will use an expression like “the function of a space.” And the ordinary person says: how can space of a function? How can nothing do something? |
When the physicist speaks of space being curved: how the devil can space be curved? How can there be properties of space, you see? Because the average person is simply brought up to ignore space as being total non-entity. |
So then, it is spaces between what we’ll call solids, instants, points, that makes it possible for the points to have some point. After all, if everything was point, nobody would be able to make out one point from another. So there has to be interval. |
So likewise, then, when it comes to considering relationships between lives. Your past life, or past incarnation, your future incarnation—to understand this problem I repeat: you do not need any spookery. It is all perfectly obvious, and I’m going to demonstrate to you by playing a game with pebbles. |
Now, I’ve scattered these pebbles at random all over the floor. And let’s consider for the sake of argument that each pebble is a human life. And you see the slats of the floor going across this way: they may be taken to represent, each one, a century in time; clock time, calendar time. |
And so here are human lives, all of different sizes, lengths—that is to say, different breadths, how much they travel, how much space they occupied—scattered right across a period of time. And we are looking at them from a sort of celestial position with a kind of eye of God, and seeing history happening scattered all over the place. Now, one of the first things that we do when we see a scattered arrangement of this kind, the first thing, we maybe say: oh, it’s just a mess. |
And the second thought: hmm, it seems to have some lines of continuity in it. Because especially, you see, as you can make out, very quickly, you can pick out a line. You know how you do this lying in bed in the morning and looking at a chintz curtain, or lying in hospital and looking at patterns on the ceiling? |
You start to pick out designs and themes. Leonardo da Vinci used to look a dirty old walls where there’s moisture and damp and mold, and see in those walls all kinds of paintings; that he could therefore bring out the glorious cave paintings which are found in the south of France by most prehistoric man. They’re done by what’s called eidetic vision. |
Those people looked in the caves at the patterns on the wall, and in them they saw cattle, people. And they simply touch them up, and therefore got the most vividly realistic impressions. It’s called eidetic vision. |
So, in just the same way, in looking at the scatter of pebbles on the floor you can (with eidetic vision) pick out certain continuities. So if, for example, we—it’s very easy, you see, as things are, to spot this line. It’s almost a straight line. |
And a straight line is an abstract concept which is useful to us. See? I notice those are all lined up like that. |
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