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Their Confucian concept system had very serious limitations. Now, that was the bad reason. There was another reason why they didn’t evolve a technology, which was Taoist.
The Taoists were really interested in nature. If you read their writings—in Lao-Tzu and Zhuang Zhou—they are full of natural illustrations. The behavior of water, of insects, of the elements are all used as illustrations of the art of life.
Now, the Confucians—in contrast [to] the Taoists—were lexicographers. They believed in what’s called the rectification of names. The language, in other words, mustn’t get out of hand; there must be very clear and rigid definitions so that we use words the right way.
Now, the Taoists had a critique of this. They said, “With what words will you define the words? And with what words will you define the words that you used the ones to define with?” Obviously, this situation is circular.
Every dictionary is really a vicious circle because it’s words defined in terms of other words. And they’re all the words in the dictionary. So that, say, you take a dictionary that has no pictures in it: to someone who doesn’t know the language it’s absolutely a closed system that you can’t penetrate.
I once thought, as a little boy, I was going to write a fundamental book which would contain the necessary fundamentals for knowledge. And the first thing I naturally did, therefore, was to write down the alphabet. Then I wanted to write down how it was pronounced.
And I saw that I couldn’t possibly write down how it was pronounced. I needed to know from the living world how to sound “A, B, C, D.” And that could never be written down. So I was stuck at the start.
I abandoned the project at once. So the Taoists laughed at the Confucians on that account. But also, they felt that nature was organic.
They saw, so vividly, that it was a single living organism of immense complexity. And thus, they never thought of it as consisting of separate parts. Just as the head goes with the feet, and as a stomach goes with a brain, they arise mutually; together.
They are different but not separate. And therefore, they were very cautious about interfering with anything. Furthermore, their theory of politics was quite different from the Confucian.
Confucian politics is based on the idea of rulership. There is the emperor. There is the family, which is strictly hierarchical structure of authority from above which must be followed and obeyed by those below.
But the Taoists, when they—the first book, the Tao Te Ching, is a manual of advice to the emperor, among other things. And what it says to the emperor is: “Don’t rule.” Because: Therefore, the emperor is to be retiring, to disappear, to be rather more like—in our own local government—the sanitary engineer than the mayor. To have a kind of anonymous quality of being underground, and of being the one who allows a democracy.
Because the Taoist feeling is that you get cooperation-people from people best by letting them cooperate rather than compelling them to. Now then, contrast this with a Western theory in which the world is seen not as an organism, but as a mechanism. Now, what’s the difference?
A mechanism has replaceable parts. It is fundamentally an assemblage of parts. An organism isn’t.
Furthermore, a mechanism has a governor. And an organism apparently doesn’t. It may have a network of governors, all working together in a kind of reticulate pattern.
But take, for example: does the brain run the body, or does the stomach? Which is the more important? Well, there are two schools of thought (of course).
The stomach people say, “Well, stomachs are really fundamental. They were what was there at first. Because an organism… really, eating is the important thing.
But the brain helps the stomach find food. That’s what it’s really doing. It evolved in order to develop eyes and ears to sneak around and find out things to swallow.” So that’s the stomach theory.
Then, the brain theory is that it’s true that the brain is perhaps a later development than the stomach. That means that the stomach was just the forerunner for the really important character to arrive on the scene. And all the stomach does is it gives fuel to the brain.
And the operations of the brain, in terms of culture and all that sort of thing, are what life is really all about. Now, actually, both theories are right and both are wrong. The arrangement between the head and the stomach is mutual.
They arise together. Now, in a system which has a boss it’s different. When you’ve got the mechanism, and the chauffeur or the engineer who puts it together and operates it, then you have a government.
You have a monarchical world order. And when you have government, and things can be viewed as happening in a mechanical order, you can say, “Change it! I order you to behave differently.
Do it this way instead.” And how do we do that? Why, we apply mechanical techniques: chop off heads, or force people to do this, that, and the other; I mean, just separate these things up and rearrange them. So then, because—in the West—we went through the phase of Newtonian mechanics, which arises out of the theory that the physical world is an artifact, that it was made by an architect or a super-cosmic engineer, and governed from above by law, we thought up the idea of explaining the behavior of things by mechanical causality.
And this led to technology. To steam engines. To automobiles.
To hydraulic systems. Everything. Electricity.
But when we reached a certain point in that development we started wondering. We started discovering all kinds of processes for which the mechanical analogy was not adequate. It did us well up to a point, but now, in quantum theory and in biology—in these two things in particular—an organic way of looking at things is clearer, is nearer, to the way they’re operating than a mechanical way.
And therefore, say, the philosophy of Whitehead—he’s probably the greatest organicist in the West—reads just like the philosophy of Zhuang Zhou. It’s the same view of the world. So that, somehow, just at this moment of the development of technology—when we suddenly see it’s a lot more complicated than we thought it was, and that our project to change the universe is not going to be as easy as even H. G. Wells imagined—it’s just at this moment that this Chinese wisdom becomes available to the West.
And we can understand it because it’s now talking our language. It’s talking of the language of relativity. The whole Zhuangzi book starts out with an absolutely marvelous chapter on relativity: relativity of the opposites, the interdependence, the mutual interpenetration of everything that happens.
And we’ve discovered it. So, there is [the possibility], then—isn’t there, at this point in history?—of civilizing technology. Let’s put it that way.
You could almost say naturalizing technology. Technology came in as a barbarian. A very competent barbarian: all steely, all glittering with force of arms.
And technology is busy transforming the face of the Earth into its own image, which is the image of a machine. Covering the Earth with concrete. But technologists know that these freeways will be obsolete in the not too distant future.
Grass will grow up through the cracks and they will vanish. Because we shall take to the air like insects. And all our wires and cables; all that terrible stuff will vanish because we shall be able to transmit electric power without using them.
We shall abandon telephones. Suddenly, as it were, the whole mechanical structure will vanish because it was only a step; what de Chardin calls a peduncle—that is, you know, when you’ve got an amoeba separating, it goes apart and there’s a thin little—like an hourglass—a neck joining them, and then they separate, and so there are still two little pear-shaped tops facing each other, and gradually withdraw and they’re balls once again. And that little neck, and the two projecting pieces, those are peduncles.
And the peduncle disappears in the course of evolution. Like an umbilical cord is a peduncle. And so all this contraption that we’ve devised, technologically, is a peduncle.
And it will vanish because, as we really go about it, we’re going to get so that we don’t need houses, practically. We’re going to find ways of, you know, just altering the temperature in the air and living in a grass hut, or an invisible plastic dome. And spread it all so that we don’t concentrate in cities; don’t have to, because you can just sit and you can dial any book in the Library of Congress and read it on a screen in front of you.
All sorts of things like that to be done. So that this, also—Toynbee, in the Study of History, pointed out that we will become increasingly independent of tracks, roads, wires, and so on, so that the civilization becomes airborne. Maybe it’ll even go so far—and here I’m getting into science fiction—as abandoning the electronic method of communication; we may get a telepathic one instead.
Who knows? Be a funny world, wont it, when there’s no private thoughts. Everybody’s completely transparent to everybody else.
Sure have to get along! Although, as a matter of fact, this distribution will facilitate privacy. Because the thing that really militates against privacy is the city.
And the controls of huge traffics of human beings going about their business; this is a real problem. This is invasion. So then, this, however—this technical type of development, in order to go along those lines, requires that people who are responsible for technical development be well-imbued with an ecological philosophy and see the direction of things so they will not keep perpetuating anachronisms.
If—for example, the automobile is a hopeless anachronism with a gasoline engine. But it’s going to be very difficult to get rid of it because people want to sell oil. Or because machine tools would have to be completely made over.
It would be terribly difficult for the industry to change. Therefore, we get anachronisms which blind us to ingenuity and ability to see what could be done instead. You may think that sounds communistic.
It isn’t at all, because nothing is more of an anachronism than a bureaucracy. A collectivist state, in other words, is the most hopeless thing to change because nobody has any responsibility. It is not organic, it’s a monolithic machine.
That’s the pattern that we see in so-called communist countries. And they have just as tough a time producing an innovation as we do. We have to think of new political ideas altogether; ideas that’ve never been heard of.
But the way of thinking about politics, as of thinking about technics, is by an organic model instead of the mechanical model. The world as one body. But a body, you see, is a highly diversified system with all kinds of division of function, and yet, all one.
It is not like an anthill. It’s much more differentiated. And that is the human image as distinct from, say, the insect image or the machine image.
The problem I was discussing this morning was really the relationship of ecology to technology, but I was discussing it in a historical way: raising the problem of why technology originated in the West and not, for example, in China, and showing—first of all—that those people in China who did make some progress in the study of nature—the Taoists—thought about the world in accordance with a different model than people in the West. A model that did not immediately permit a technological development. The West thought about nature by analogy with mechanics, with machines.
The Chinese thought about nature by analogy with organisms. A machine is something which can be taken apart and reordered, something which is the product of an act of engineering, and is therefore an organization with a governor. An organism is not made piecemeal, it grows and doesn’t have a governor.
All the parts in an organism are in an orderly anarchy—that is to say, they govern themselves. And the Chinese word for nature, zìrán, means “that which is so of itself.” Therefore, that which functions without being pushed around by some external force. It is automatic, but not as we mean the word automatic.
We mean a self-governing machine, and there’s a certain difference here. So, the problem then is: if the Chinese—viewing the world as an organism—felt on the whole that it was wiser to restrain one’s interference with things—that is to say, there are certain situations in which the human being should simply lay hands off, there are other situations in which the human being collaborates with nature—but he does so by virtue of having great awareness of the field of forces in which he is situated. This takes us back, of course, to the point that I made right at the beginning: that you really are the field of forces in which your organism is situated.
Self-realization is, in fact, realizing—as a sensuous experience—that you are that field of forces; that you are both your outside and your inside. Which, of course, leads us to something that we can experience but cannot define. And we can’t define it for two reasons.
One is: it’s too complicated. And another reason is—even deeper than that—it leads us to the root and ground of reality, that is to say, (I’m only speaking in analogical terms) the continuum in which all things exist which can’t be thought about as an object because it can’t be classified. You can’t say anything really meaningful about it at all.
But it’s tremendously important to know that you’re it. That’s the real you. Because if you don’t know that you go crazy.
You become dementedly absorbed in details, identifying yourself with a purely temporal—and, indeed, in some respects arbitrary—role which you’re playing, and you forget that even if you do lose your shirt in this game, it doesn’t matter in this round. Because at that level, there’s no winner and no loser. So, the question we come to now is: well, how do you go about knowing the field of forces in which you live?
How do you know which way the wind is blowing so that you can sail properly? When it isn’t as simple a matter as wetting your finger and holding it up, and see which side gets cold first—that’s where the wind’s coming from. Or is it as simple as that?
We know—or think we know—that nature is extraordinarily complicated, and so, very difficult to understand. And if you can’t understand a very complicated situation it’s immensely difficult to make decisions about it. But there is a point of view from which nature is not complicated.
And that, to an educated Westerner, may sound quite astonishing. When Buddhists speak in their philosophy about the world of form and the world that is formless, these two categories correspond roughly to the world as complicated and the world as simple. What makes the world complicated is not its actual physical structure, but an attempt to understand it in a certain way.
When you ask, “How does it work? Why does it do it?” then you start analyzing a flower, a body, a geological structure, and you are asking the question, really, “How can I reproduce—in words or numbers—what is going on here?” in such a way that I can predict what it will do next. Now, the trouble with words and numbers is that they have some peculiar limitations.
It takes time to read. It takes longer, still, to listen to a tape recording. And to scan a mathematical expression—again, it is something strung out in a line, and you have to think carefully to understand the various steps which have been taken.
So these are methods of breaking down the phenomena of nature into a code. These codes can be handled by computers with astonishing speed. But the part of the human mind which we are mainly concerned with, which is the conscious mind, can only handle them very slowly because the conscious mind has to work in terms of symbols—verbal and mathematical—which are really very clumsy.
So that by the time we have really thought about something, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. The circumstances have changed. The crisis about which we had to make a decision has already happened, and therefore we have to act without the kind of preparation we think we ought to have and without the kind of knowledge we think we ought to have.
Because we cannot comprehend the world in verbal patterns. As a result of that we always feel frustrated. We think we’re supposed to comprehend the world that way, and manage it that way, and a lot of people are not satisfied until you’ve given them an explanation.
But it should be obvious that there never will be an explanation—in those terms, in the terms of words—because you can talk about the simplest object in the world forever and not fully describe its attributes. Words have a use, but they only have that use when they are operating in subordination to a kind of understanding that doesn’t depend on words at all. Words are like claws on the end of an arm, and the claws are no good unless subordinate to the more subtle organization of the arm and the rest of the body.
So words are the claws in which we tear life to pieces and arrange it in certain ways, just as you have to bite—and therefore separate—the bits of a piece of meat in order to digest them. So, to make the world digestible in a certain way, you need to claw it apart. But actually, we do all kinds of acts of understanding along with words which are not contained in the words.
A person, to get your point, does many, many nonverbal operations. For example, to read a book requires that I be able to see. And seeing is a nonverbal operation.
When you try to put it into words you come up against barriers of all kinds. It is a very difficult thing to describe. But that’s only because you are trying to describe it in a difficult way.
It’s the same problem if you want to unload the bathtub because the drain is stopped, and you take out the water with a fork—it will take forever. But if you bring in a pail it’ll be a lot faster. And there is something in trying to describe the world in words that is rather like trying to move water with a fork.
It is efficient, in other words, for some purposes. But words—again, I point out: they communicate only to those who already know what you mean. “To him that hath shall be given.” And for that reason they’re convenient: because then we can remind each other, in common by words, of things that we already know.
But “water,” as a word, means nothing to people who haven’t experienced water. Once they have experienced it, the word is useful because it’s like using money instead of barter. I can discuss water with you without having to bring some into the room and show it to you.
So words provide this kind of a shorthand. And very much, in so many ways, they have the advantages and disadvantages of money. Money helps us to transfer wealth, words help us to organize experience and communicate about it with each other.
But beyond that, when we try to put our experience into words and—in terms of words—comprehend experience, then we run into insuperable difficulties. Not so long ago, a professor at Harvard—in discussing the heresy of certain members of the faculty who were conducting experiments in terms of changed states of consciousness—said that no knowledge is academically respectable knowledge which cannot be put into words. I don’t know what became of the department of physical education at that point, but—or, not to mention, fine arts, and things like that, and music—but still, this is what he said.
That’s what lots of people feel, people who are in the scientific and technological world—but obviously is a type of intelligence that is not verbal or computational intelligence. The eye, the brain, the organization of a plant are obviously intelligent. What do I mean, “intelligent?” I say they’re obviously intelligent because anyone can see it.
I would even go so far as to say they’re not products of intelligence—as if some intelligent fellow had been around and left this as a kind of track of his competence—the growth of a plant is intelligence itself. And intelligence is naturally something that, in words, would always escape definition in the same way as the nervous system, upon which intelligence depends, is incomprehensible even to the neurologist. We know intelligence when we see it because we say, “It’s fascinating.
My, isn’t that tricky! How ingenious. What a wonderful organization.
How beautiful!” And we recognize in patterns of nature that this has happened. So when you see a human being, and you say, “What a piece of work is man! This is extraordinary!
The beauty of the eyes, the marvelous organization and coordination of the limbs.” But then you realize that this is you. But you don’t know how you work it—and you do work it. So, what it comes to is this: that in your total organization and nervous system you are expressing a kind of intelligence that is—when looked at from the point of view of conscious analysis—unthinkably complex.
And yet, from its own point of view, it’s perfectly simple because you don’t have to make an effort to see. You just see. You don’t have to make an effort to hear, the ear does it for you.
You don’t have to make an effort to hold yourself together, the body holds you together. You do have to make an effort to get food, sometimes to keep warm, sometimes to defend yourself. So, some effort is always involved.
And in a certain way, the heart, for example—which we don’t think about—it does work and it consumes energy, but you don’t have the sensation of making a decision every time your heart beats. Some, you see, people who are studying music, probably the wrong way, have to make a decision every time they play a note so as to stay on time and to play the right note. And then they get absolutely worn out because it’s decision after decision after decision, and there’s nothing more wearing than that.
Because with every decision goes anxiety: was it the right decision? There’s no way of avoiding that because if you’re going to decide—with the ordinary, responsible way of making decisions that we’re supposed to do—you never know whether you made a right decision or not until the event about which you’ve decided is past. Because you never know how much information you need to collect to make the right decision, whether you did indeed collect enough, and whether the information you collected was relevant.
And also, you realize that every possible decision can be radically affected by unforeseeable variables such that you’ve completed a contract with a business corporation and everything is in order, but you had no means of knowing that the president of that corporation upon whom you depended was going to slip on a banana skin and have a serious accident. There would be no way whatsoever of foreseeing that eventuality. Should you have taken an insurance policy on him?
How comprehensive can an insurance policy be? Is it worth taking out an insurance policy? What are the chances of unforeseeing events occurring of such significance and in such number that this sort of insurance policy is worthwhile and you’re not just wasting money on paying the premiums?
In the long run—in the long run—all insurance is a swindle. You should read Ambrose Bierce’s book The Devil’s Dictionary: he has the most subtle and extremely logical demolition of insurance. But in the short run, in a kind of chance-y way, you see, it sometimes pays off.
But, you see, this is the problem—the anxiety with which we are faced—in trying to conduct our lives by the exercise of conscious will and control: we realize that it is really beyond our comprehension. We don’t understand. We cannot foresee all eventualities.
And therefore, this sense of frustration through trying to control things gives us a feeling of existence which, for thousands of years, men have called The Fall. And the idea that there has been a fall, that something has been lost, is universal and very ancient. In the Taoist literature of China there are constant references to a sort of Golden Age.
Lao-Tzu says, “When the great Tao lost”—in other words, when things did not always and automatically go in accordance with the course of nature—“there arose duty to man and right conduct. When the six family relationships fell apart, there was talk of filial sons and daughters, and faithful wives. When ministers became corrupt, then only did one hear of loyal ministers and wise councilors.” Now, therefore, when things have fallen apart, somebody gets up and starts preaching.
And if there is one thing quite clear from history, it is that preaching does no one any good. It makes only hypocrites. Because if I tell you that you ought to be concerned, and you ought to be unselfish, and you ought to cooperate, and you ought to be responsible—and because I imply to you that you’re not—you will, in the first place, be resentful that I’ve had to tell you that, and you will feel guilty.
But now you are under the impression that you really (and indeed, are) a separate self with the power to perform all these virtues, and you then go through the motions of doing what you were told to do in the sermon. You are—in this case, then—an egocentric and selfish person pretending that you aren’t. And the truth will always out because, in the long run, you will let down the people who are relying on you to be what you’re not.
And we have the most subtle ways of letting people down while apparently going through the motions of doing exactly what they expect of us. Yes: we can be so pure, but so cruel. So loving, but so demanding.
So wise, but so dull. So that we take it out on others when we feel that we are forced into doing things for them that are against our own nature. And we do that invariably, but we do our very best not to be conscious of the way in which we do it, because that would puncture the whole balloon and show it up for a farce.
And we can’t afford that. So there is, then, this feeling of nostalgia for the Golden Age when we have the feeling that, once upon a time, at some point—and this may refer back to childhood, it may refer back to life in the womb, it may refer back to primitive conditions before the invention of language and writing and numbers—but somehow, there is a feeling that we get, especially from contemplating animals. They don’t worry very much.
They seem to follow their nature. They don’t seem to go through a decision-making process, just as you don’t go through a decision-making process when you sneeze, or when you breathe, or when you blink. It just happens.
And it’s just as well that it does. So the thought occurs to us: would it not be possible to conduct our life in that way always? And instead of making these pathetic decisions on the basis of utterly incomplete information, wouldn’t there be some way in which we could manage to do the right thing—that is to say, to respond appropriately within the field of forces in which we are living and which we are—without these clumsy attempts to do so by force and by will?
That, of course, is what Taoist philosophy is considering all the time. And it is trying to point out that there is, in fact, a way of living like that. Only: nobody will believe it because they’re scared out of their wits that it won’t work.
And, of course, you have to ask all sorts of questions as to what you mean by “work.” But surely it should be obvious that if you are organically intelligent enough to be able to see, isn’t there just the faint possibility that the kind of intelligence which enables you to perform the incomprehensible operation of seeing might also be of use if it could be canalized and invoked in solving other problems as well? Isn’t there a possibility, in other words, that the human brain is not a muscle, but a fantastic electronic contrivance—like a computer—which does not think in words, but thinks in terms of neurological operations which are never conscious? That is to say, they are never attended to in detail—that’s what consciousness is.
In other words, that thinking is not… basically—only a small part of thinking is a verbal process. The greater part of thinking is a physical process. But it’s a highly organized process and, when thought about inwards, is a very, very complicated one.
But we do it, and it’s the simplest thing in the world to do it because you don’t have to decide. That’s what you mean by simple. You don’t have to enter into the complexities.
Now, the proposition that this might be so—I have caused a professor to go completely blue in the face with rage at such a suggestion. That it seemed so—to him—anti-intellectual, undermining the whole nature and dignity of the academic professions, and so forth. But, really and truly, if human beings are to adapt themselves to the increasingly troublesome environment which they are creating, isn’t it possible that we are not really trusting ourselves or using ourselves to the full to come to an understanding of our problems?
You say—a lot of people say, “Oh, well that sounds like the people who simply say, ‘Oh, ask God to help you and he’ll do it. He’ll think it out. He knows.’” But that’s not the case, you see?
The case is: it’s asking you to do it. But if you have started out with a definition of yourself which really has very little to do with you at all—which is this kind of joke that you are an ego, and that you are some sort of being inside a bag, and that you’re in control, and that you’re the boss of this bag (or at least, supposed to be) in the same way as the chauffeur in charge of the car or the engineer who makes the machine. You might possibly be that if you knew how the whole thing was constructed.
But the whole point is: you don’t. But if you could revise your view of yourself—who you are—and realize that you are the field of forces with their patterning and with their incredible intelligence, and you trust yourself to decide. To respond, in other words, spontaneously to a situation instead of going through this whole thing of “what is the right thing to do?” But, you see, if you have been brought up in a civilization inured to the doctrine of Original Sin, you cannot possibly trust yourself.