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But we had this one evening, and we got every man in the room to put it on—and there were about five men—and it turned all of them into kings. They looked absolutely regal in this thing; it was so dignified and so exquisitely beautiful. I have a Japanese friend who told me he always wore Western clothes in Japan, and I asked him why.
I said it’s absurd. I said, “You have the most comfortable clothes anybody ever invented. What on Earth do you go around in a Western business suit for?” “Oh,” he said, “I wouldn’t be seen dead in Kyoto in a kimono.
You can’t run for a bus in a kimono.” It’s true. But what a degradation, you see, of the human being: you’ve got to be someone who’s got to run for a bus now, you see? Whereas if you put on a kimono, you’re very comfortable but you have to be leisurely.
You have to stroll rather than rush, and that slows you down. Because, you see, all people who are in a rush are not related to the material present. Supposing—let’s take—you’re in a rush to get coffee when you get up in the morning.
What do you do? You take instant coffee. And that’s a punishment for being in a hurry.
It doesn’t taste of coffee; not really. So, because you forced it—it’s like forcing the growth of tomatoes: they don’t taste of tomatoes anymore. Forced apples: they’re called “delicious”—they’re nothing but wet pith.
So this is very important. This is showing that we aren’t here. We’re insane: we’re not all there, as they say.
But trying to get to something—the result, the thing we thought we wanted, the thing that we thought would be what would make us happy; you’ve got to get something. Now, it’s true: in order to not be hungry, you have to eat. And therefore, when you eat there’s a certain satisfaction.
You feel alright. But then, when you begin to consider that life is going to wear out, and there are all sorts of problems—disease, change, and misfortune—and you get depressed. And then, in order to feel happy, you eat when you don’t need to eat.
Then you begin to get obesity and indigestion, and wonder why the possession of all this great food isn’t doing anything for you—it’s supposed to! And so, in the same way with property of all kinds: when it is used to get the thing that you look forward to in the future and don’t seem to have now, it becomes a complete delusion. And you can’t understand, because you think that the possession of these things ought to make you happy.
The admen have persuaded you that if you could get this kind of car, this kind of yacht, this kind of house, this kind of scene—whatever it may be—that’s the thing in life; that’s what’s important. And it doesn’t make people happy at all. And then they wonder why it doesn’t, and feel cheated, and they have to go to psychoanalysts and churches and things like that to be persuaded that it’s coming sometime, somehow; the thing that always seems to be missing.
And there’s nothing missing at all! Except—I mean, supposing you’re absolutely starved and you just don’t have the normal flow of energy through your organism, then, of course, you need food. Or, if you’re freezing, you need shelter.
But in the ordinary way, when you are fed and sheltered, there isn’t anything missing. It’s all here, but nobody is here to see it; everybody is wandering off to something else in the distance. And, of course, this is preeminently true with two other aspects of life.
I’ve discussed housing, furniture, and clothing. But, more specifically, food in the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture is unbelievably bad when you consider it by and large. The reason being that we eat food because it’s good for us.
And that’s a dreadful thing to do because it means that you look at the food from the point of view of abstract dietetics rather than concrete taste. And wherever dietitians get interfering with cooking, it is utterly destroyed. In every university from coast to coast, where you would think would be centers of culture, the institutional food is unbelievably abominable, and the scholars are ashamed to come out about it and protest and lay down the law because they’re supposed to be devoted to higher things.
And, after all, what you eat—just so long as it’s got the right chemicals in it—isn’t very important. But what this is—you see, the trouble with that is two things: to eat in order to live—sort of, that it’s good for you—is… what do you mean, “good for you?” It means that it helps you to go on into the future. But what is the point of going on into the future when all the meals ahead of you are these unappetizing things that are just going to enable you to go on into the future?
And the second thing is that eating in this spirit is very disrespectful to all the creatures you have killed in order to eat. It’s even disrespectful to an onion to eat it improperly. Onions are living creatures, and if you cut up an onion for dinner you should reverence the onion, you should respect it.
Because if you don’t have a feeling of love for the onion, for the fish, for whatever you eat, you won’t cook it properly and you won’t enjoy it. Cooking is a process of loving. And it is a paying of respect to these marvelous beings which we ingest in order to go on living.
So this entirely futuristic, dietetic attitude to food is—again, you see—a question of purely quantitative thinking, of lack of relation to the material world. I may make out: one other rather important aspect of life is lovemaking. Here, again, is a subject entirely neglected in our education—from any practical point of view.
I mean, [there are] a lot of theoretical works, some of which are fantastic and grotesque. But as a fine art, when you compare what goes on in most bedrooms with the things that are suggested in the Kama Sutra In yesterday’s session—two sessions—I covered first the ecological conception of an organism’s relationship to its environment—and thus, of course, of the individual’s relationship to the universe—and I was trying to show you that this is not a question of two systems that are separate, acting upon each other or interacting. It is a question, rather, of a single system of energy expressed with great complexity which is one process, one activity.
It is possible to become aware that this is so, not simply theoretically, but as a matter of sensation. And when one becomes aware of it in that way, the feeling is at first curious and is apt to be misinterpreted. It can be felt either as if you were sort of floating—that is, completely passive: not doing anything, not making any exertion of will, but as if all your behavior was simply happening.
That is one way of feeling it. Another way of feeling it is the sensation that you are God and making everything happen. These are the polar opposite ways of feeling the same thing.
And when people, for one reason or another, slip into this kind of sensation—and it can happen by accident—they may jump to very strange conclusions depending on their background, their religious upbringing—because it is that background which gives them a language in which to express to others and to themselves how they feel. But you must be very clear about this and understand it theoretically thoroughly—just in case this ever happens to you—so that you won’t be accused of being crazy. It is not, you see, that your own individual organism is the puppet of everything else, responding to it as a billiard ball responds to being hit by a cue.
It is not also that you, as an individual, are an independent source of energy which pushes the world around. Both these views are based on a false assumption that the individual organism is really separate from the world; that’s the false assumption. And we think about this situation by analogy with billiards because Newton thought that way, Descartes thought that way.
And Newton and Descartes have molded the common sense of the average person living in the twentieth century, even though our science has abandoned the mechanics of Newton—it certainly has in physics, it certainly has in biology. Although I find that, in psychology, people still talk and think in a Newtonian way. That, for example, Freud structured the organism of psychology, of the human psyche, by analogy with hydraulics.
So you must call Freudianism a form of psycho-hydraulics: the unconscious is the deeps, sexual energy is represented like the flow of a river which can be dammed up, repressed, it has to be provided with outlets—these are all hydraulic terms. And hydraulics is a form of Newton’s mechanics. Because, you see, in Newtonian mechanics—which is based, really, on billiards—the balls are standing for atoms, and they bang each other around.
And so everything is explained, the movement of ball A, is explained by the behavior of balls B, C, D, E, and so on insofar as they impinge against it. And you have to go back, and back, and back, trying to figure out how it all started. Who pushed it first?
And who pushed him? You see? Well, this model won’t do anymore.
Things just don’t behave that way because they are not separate from each other in the first place. This is the point I wanted to make clear in this first round of discussion that we had yesterday: that the differentiation of the world is not separation anymore than when you see many waves on the ocean, they are different waves but it’s all the one ocean waving. And you can’t have half a wave, for example: a wave that is crest without trough.
That’s—half-waves are just not found in nature. And so, in the same way, you can’t find solids except in space, and you won’t find space except where there are solids because they are aspects of each other in rather the same way as in magnetism: the positive and negative, or north and south poles, are always found together. You can’t have a purely north-poled magnet.
And in order to have a current—an electric current—flowing, it must be polarized. It will not flow until both poles are hitched. So, in the same way, there is a polar relationship between the individual and the world.
They are both aspects of a single energy. And so, there is no question of things being controlled, and moved, and pushed by other things as billiard balls are, or billiard balls appear to be from a certain superficial point of view. We’ve just got this huge being—although “being” is not quite the right word because existence is composed of being and non-being, corresponding to solid and space, crest and trough of wave.
Because, fundamentally, the energy of the world is vibratory. It’s on and off, and there is no off without on, no on without off. To be or not to be is not the question, because to be implies not to be as much as not to be implies to be.
So in the Taoist Chinese philosophy it is said that being and non-being arise mutually. It’s like the egg and the hen: you don’t find eggs without hens, nor do you find hens without eggs. A hen is, as a matter of fact, one egg’s way of becoming other eggs.
It all goes together. But we don’t see this for the simple reason that we are primarily involved in using a method of perception which is analytic, which spotlights various features of the world and does so with the aid of naming, or giving symbols to, those features of the world which we consider significant and, therefore, ignoring features of the world which we don’t consider significant and for which, therefore, we don’t have names. Haven’t you noticed how often children point at something and say, “What is that?” And you can’t make out exactly what it is they’re pointing at.
They are pointing out something they’ve noticed but which adults don’t consider important, and they want a name for it. We don’t have a special word for dry space. We don’t have a special word for the inside surface of a tube.
But American Indian languages have such words. Eskimos recognize five different kinds of snow, but the Aztec language has one word for snow, rain, hail, and ice. You can see the geographical reasons for that.
So, according to what you consider important, you have names. And according to naming, you identify separate things. But they’re only separate in a purely theoretical way.
They’re not materially separate, not physically separate. And so it’s immensely important that we become aware of this fact, because if we’re not aware of it we do the most stupid things. We try to solve problems by altering what are only the symptoms of problems.
We try, for example, unilaterally to abolish mosquitoes, forgetting that mosquitoes go with a certain kind of environment and play a very important part in it—not to mention other insects which are killed when we kill the mosquitoes. And so, in this way, we are doing things without recognizing that they’re going to have unpredictable results in unexpected places. Same way if you put certain drugs or certain operations in the human organism: you’ve got to be very careful of what you’re doing and you have to study the organism very carefully in order to know what consequences this will have.
If you farm in a certain way without due respect for the ecology of the whole area in which you’re working you can get the most appalling results. And, characteristically, our technological civilization is much too heedless of these ecological connections. Therefore, in order to overcome our characteristic sense of hostility to the external world—and to stop conquering nature with bulldozers, or conquering space with rockets—we have to realize that the external universe is just as much ourself as our own body.
That we have—each one of us—an inside and an outside. And if the inside of your skin is your inside, what is outside your skin is your outside. And the two are inseparable, they are polar.
Because you can’t have an inside without an outside or an outside without an inside—except [if] you construct something like a Klein bottle that is a sort of freak. Maybe the universe, as such, is a Klein bottle; who knows. However, the second point I was making, which arises directly from this—and this was the burden of the second session—was that this ignorance (or ignore-ance) of the inseparability of all different things goes hand in hand with a bad relationship, or an inadequate relationship, to the material present.
I was showing that the material present is the only time there is. Other times—past times, future times—are abstractions; there never is anything but the present. But you mustn’t, of course, think of the present as a split second.
That’s an abstract view of the present. You tend to think of the present as a split second because you’re used to looking at a watch, and the watch is marked out with hairlines, and the idea of watchmakers is to make those lines as thin as possible consistent with visibility. And therefore, as the hand sweeps across the hairline, you’ve hardly time to say “now.” And we begin to think that the present is that.
Well, of course it isn’t. Present time is rather like the field of vision where you’ve got, as it were, a fairly clear center: the field of vision is an oval and you can run your fingers ’round it just at the point where they start to become invisible. And you realize that the edge of the field is fuzzy.
And so, in the same way, we have a vision of movement in time as having fuzzy edges. Just as when you are listening to music: you don’t hear music a single note at a time, you hear it in phrases. You anticipate what’s coming and you remember what has been played.
And so you have a kind of wide but fuzzy-edged view of what is called the present. But it’s what is always there, you see? And if—in a culture—we are brought up not to see this, we start to living for the future.
And we live for the future mainly because our present is inadequate. And it’s inadequate because we are not seeing it fully; we’re seeing it in terms of abstractions. And if your present is inadequate and is, matter of fact, only an abstract version of life, you’re like a person with a non-nutritive diet.
You always, therefore, feel hungry, and you keep eating because you want more! So, in the same way: “More life, please!” “More time, please!” More! More!
More! More! Because sometime or other, it’s gotta be alright; the thing I’ve been looking for must happen—I hope!
But, of course, it never does. Not if you live that way. Because when all your goals in life are attained and you are at the top of your profession, or you’ve got beautiful children, or you—whatever it was you wanted—you feel the same as you always felt.
You’re still looking for something in the future. And there isn’t any future! Not really.
Therefore, I often say that only people who live in a proper relationship to the material present have any use for making any plans at all. Because then the plans work out; then they’re capable of enjoying them. The other people aren’t.
So people, then—who aren’t here, fully, but whose minds are off somewhere else all the time—are always starved and always rushing to get there. And there’s nowhere to go—except here. But I qualify this word “material present” because of the fact that the word “material” is a very much misunderstood word.
It’s a word you can use in a lot of different ways. As generally used, we say the body, the earth, the rocks, the trees, the animals, and all that are material. And we set over, against that, the spiritual (or the mental) as if that were some kind of vaguely gaseous world permeating the material world.
Or perhaps not gaseous, but rather abstract: a world of ideas, a world of principles. But it’s so curious that, when people do that, they debase both the material and the spiritual domains of life because these domains of life have vitality only when they’re together. When you see the material as the spiritual and the spiritual as the material.
And then both of these concepts tend to vanish because what we call the material world in this put-down sense of the word “material” is only a concept. If you want to conceive the world as material then that means, really, people who do conceive it as material (in that sense of the word “material”) haven’t got a good relationship to it. But if you have an immediate relationship, if you really are aware of the present, then your vision of the material world is transformed and you see that it isn’t material, it isn’t spiritual, it’s indefinable.
It’s what there is. And there is no way of saying what that is because you can’t put it into a particular category. And you can only define what you can classify.
Now, I know that is perhaps a little bit of a difficult idea to master because of our confusions of language. We could—if I might try to put it in one more way: I would say, probably, that the correct use of the word “material” is to mean something like “metered,” “measured.” When we say something is immaterial, we can mean both that it doesn’t matter—that is to say, it doesn’t measure up to anything, it doesn’t meter—or that it’s spiritual, non-material, immaterial. So I would say the correct use of the word “material” is: “the world as measured:” the world as represented in pounds, miles, decibels, photons, or whatever.
And that, of course, is abstract. Because when you measure the world you don’t really make any difference to it, just as the equator does not cut the world in two pieces. So what is the world that is existing upon which our measures are imposed?
What is it that underlies the network? The network of measurements, of classifications, of quantification? Well, you can’t say.
You can point to it, but you can’t really say what it is. It’s not a what. But that is what’s here, I mean, that’s the world we’re actually living in, you see?
What Korzybski called the unspeakable world. And so when I said the “material present,” I was using the word “material” in an incorrect sense. Not the measured present, but the physical present of actual nonverbal being.
And people, therefore, who do not relate well to this become incompetent in the practical arts of life. They become bad cooks, bad lovers, bad architects, bad potters, bad clothiers, because they really have no love for anything except abstractions: money, quantities, status, symbols. And people become absolutely bamboozled by symbols, and so want the symbol rather than what is signified by the symbol.
But, you see, however, if you want what is signified by the symbol, then you’ve got the universe by the tail because every thing that is symbolized by a symbol is inseparable from the whole universe. When you, in other words, you catch a fish, it’s not just a thing called a “fish” that you’ve got, you are being fed by all oceans when you catch a fish. You are being sustained by this colossal life.
And everything, of course, that goes with the oceans. It’s as if the ocean reached out and fed you. And that’s why the real reason for giving thanksgiving at meals that… of course, in the West people thank God, but it’s a more concrete expression to thank the fish.
But then, of course, you’re thanking the ocean, and so on. So this attitude, now, of a new vision of nature: not as something chopped up into bits so that we could look upon the universe as an assemblage of things, as if somehow or other there’s all this collection of galaxies and stuff floating around—where would they come from? Well, they’ve sort of been washed up like flotsam and jetsam, and have come together by some sort of gravity, and here they are, spinning around.
As if it was a collection in the sense of something gathered, that formerly hadn’t been gathered. Of course, astronomically, this isn’t taken seriously. People think, rather, that it all blew up, that all the galaxies expanded from a center and are still going.
It’s far more likely. Maybe they’ll come back together again and then blow up once more. Who knows?
Maybe they’ll all fade out. But then, things will be where they were before it all started. And what happened once can always happen again.
Pulsation, you see, is the very nature of life. Big pulses and tiny pulses. Pulses within pulses, forever and ever.
So, this point of view is one which has flourished in the Far East, where the relationship of man to the physical world has been very different from our idea. And this raises some curious problems because the great civilizations of the Far East, particularly the Chinese and the Japanese, did not—until coming into contact with Europe and the United States—did not evolve a technology. And because they didn’t evolve a technology, they had all kinds of problems for which we say that made them backward.
They had problems of disease, and famine, and poverty. And we say, “Well, the poor benighted Chinese! We have nothing to learn from them because their civilization didn’t do the things we’ve done!” But what we don’t realize so readily is that this technology which we’ve produced is very recent.
It was only in the middle of the nineteenth century that we really got going with this. And note that, before that date, we permitted as perfectly ordinary procedures judicial torture, slavery, child labor, filth of unspeakable proportions, and plagues, and all that sort of thing was just the way it was anywhere else in the world, in Europe. But we’ve forgotten it; we have short memories.
We could sing in church: Now that verse is, today, eliminated from the hymn. Because it’s saying, you see, that the stations of life—fortune and misfortune, riches and poverty—are God-given and nothing can be done about it. And people tend to accept states of affairs about which nothing can be done.
And nothing could be done about it until the industrial revolution. And then, of course, the minute that starts everybody wants it. The Chinese want it, the Indians want it, the Japanese want it, and so on.
But the Chinese—for some reason or other, you see—did not develop technology. Now, why didn’t they? And why did we?
There isn’t any simple answer to that question, but one thing that we should note: there are various geographical reasons, and this is not the only reason, but when you look at the map of Europe you will notice that it’s very wiggly. It’s full of inlets, harbors, and all like this, see? China, by contrast, is a great solid landmass.
So is India. The Europeans were preeminently sailors, and it is highly possible—to begin with—that all the great early technical discoveries were the work of seafaring people. This is one of Buckminster Fuller’s theories.
That, in quite ancient times, there were rather independent seagoing people who had their own culture, who knew that the world was round, who had great navigators, and from then we learned such things as the hoist cranes, that the first real houses were overturned boats, and that trade and the cross-fertilization of different civilizations and different cultures was a work of sea travel. With the machinery necessary for sea travel. You’re not depending on a horse, you’re depending upon something a human being has made, and upon a very high form of technology.
Because sailing is a direct exemplification of man and nature in cooperation. Rowing is different. Rowing is a rather unintelligent way of propelling a boat because it requires a great deal of effort.
But sailing is so skillful because you are simply using the energy of nature to move the boat. You are flowing through nature, effortlessly, by using the forces around you in a clever way. When you want to go against the wind you tack, you get the wind to blow you into it.
And this is what is called in Chinese wu wei, meaning literally “non-interference” or “non-agression.” Sometimes translated “non-action,” but that isn’t quite correct. Wu wei is acting in accordance with the field of forces in which you find yourself. Therefore, in splitting wood, you split with the grain because that is the way, the course of things, the Tao, is arranged.
So any skillful person will therefore always inquire: “What is the nature of the field of forces in which I find myself?” The Chinese would ask, what is its lǐ? And the word lǐ means: what is the organic pattern of this situation? And then: act in accordance with it.
Don’t ever force it. Suppose, then, you are sawing: you will find that if you push the saw you will make a jagged cut. And you get impatient.
When any people saw wood impatiently they always make a mess of it. But the saw has its own weight, and if you get the sensation that the saw is doing the work, you see—that’s not quite true; your muscles are involved—but you get the sensation of the saw doing the work, then you will make a good cut. See that the saw is sharp and let it do the job for you.
You will find in all crafts that the same kind of thing happens when anybody develops consummate skill. When you sing well, you get the sensation that the song is singing itself. When you drive well, somehow, the car and the road are carrying you along, but in a very skillful way.
This is this thing I was remarking on at first, this new feeling of a relationship to the world. And what you’re doing when you do anything skillfully, you see: you are expressing the total power of the field of forces which is expressing itself in the form of skillful action through the agency of you as a human organism. But it requires intelligence to do this.
Now, what is intelligence? Well, I’m going to reserve that question. I just want to go back a bit to the Chinese.
Why didn’t they evolve technology? Well, they knew an awful lot of things. Joseph Needham is writing a seven-volume history of science and civilization in China.
Telling us all about their mathematics, their astronomy, their physics, their husbandry ideas, everything in the way of techniques that the Chinese evolved. But there were two reasons why they didn’t go on to technology as we have it. One of them the bad reason—I think—and the other a good reason.
Confucian thought is not interested in nature. It is humanistic—interested in human relations—but very scholastic because it’s based on a literature. In other words, the great Confucian classics exercised a rigidifying effect upon Chinese culture even though they were a great principle of order, of social order.
But just in the same way as when you get any scripture—the Bible, the Koran, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, anything like that—and people say that that’s the authority, then you’re stuck. And then you get the situation of the theologians who said to Galileo, “We won’t look through your telescope because it already says in the Book how the universe is working, and the book can’t be wrong. We know!” And people who get stuck on books always think they know.
And it’s happening today. When somebody advances an absolutely outrageous proposition for science, lots of scientists are so blind they say, “Well, that’s impossible. It couldn’t be.” Because many scientists aren’t true scientists.
They are rigidly defending a conception of the universe which requires that everything be as dull as possible. That the universe be absolutely boring, and stupid above all. And therefore, anything that reveals something that science can’t account for—all events that science can’t account for are simply ignored.
And Charles Fort was a man who devoted his life to collecting records of events and occurrences for which there is no reasonable scientific explanation as yet. And the trouble is: all these events are rather unusual because science only studies the usual. And you have to have an event happen several times in order to study it scientifically.
[You can] say, “Well, it happened. And we all saw it.” And then the scientist comes in. It’s like, you know, when you get sick and you call in the doctor, and all the symptoms vanish.
And so—or your car goes wrong, and you take it to the mechanic and nobody can make it make that funny noise it was making, and so on. So, in the same way, a scientist comes around and says, “Well, you say you saw this thing happen. Well, I’ll observe it.” Well, it won’t happen!
So this is the problem, you see: the Confucians got too hung up on books—that is to say, on a theoretical system—in just the same way that we are hung up on our abstract concept of nature, and are operating in terms of an abstract concept of nature which is taught to us in school, and which we are brought up so much so that we are absolutely hypnotized by it, and we can’t experience things which our conceptual system doesn’t provide for. When the concept system stops working because it no longer fits the constantly changing pattern of reality, we’re in trouble. Well that, of course, was the trouble for the Chinese.