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In fact, you see, what happens is this: we know that an airline pilot is a fallible being. And when he’s driving a jet things are happening much too fast for him to make up his mind if he has to make a decision. And therefore, increasingly, we put in all sorts of automated decision-making machines on a jet plane.
Eventually, the pilot loses his confidence in himself more and more, because he doesn’t know how the damn thing works—he’s just sitting there. And the famous story about the time when we have supersonic rockets, and you get on board, and a tape recorder says, “You are now taking off for London, where we will be arriving in half an hour. All facilities on this aircraft are fully automated.
There is no chance of human error and, therefore, no need to worry—to worry—to worry—to worry—to worry—” But, you see, we can do a rather good job in eliminating error by use of the computer in rather limited circumstances. Why? Because the computer, as it develops, is more like a nervous system than it is like a linguistic system.
In other words, it is able to deal with ever so many operations at once, and to synthesize them. And words can’t do that. Words have to go along a single track.
Now then, if the brain is still far more sophisticated than any computer we can yet construct, what is the limitation on human skill is that a human being isn’t using his brain in the right way. He’s not really using it to the full at all, except in some peculiar beings whom we call geniuses. And the funny thing about geniuses is they cannot explain why they are geniuses.
They can’t teach it. Here is a case in Zhuang Zhou’s book of a wheelwright: he makes the most beautiful wheels, and the trick of a wheel is to get it to fit the axle. It mustn’t be so loose that it wobbles, and it mustn’t be so tight that it sticks.
It has to have just the right thing. And he says, “Here I have been doing this for years, but I do not know how I do it. So I can’t teach my son, and so I’m still working when I’m 75 years old.” And this is an eternal problem of all fine craftsmen and skilled people.
They cannot explain how it is done. This was my problem as a small boy in school. Because, when I started out in school—around when I was seven, eight, nine years old—I was considered stupid.
Because I always failed in examinations and got terrible marks. But at the same time I was absolutely fascinated with the bookish process. I collected books, I loved books, I loved the smell of books, I liked the look of them.
But nobody really got across what you were supposed to do with them. I mean, I could read them. I used to think, well—they used to say, “You don’t work!” You know, like saying, “This watch doesn’t work!” I said to the teachers, “I want to work very badly, but how do you do it?” They had no explanation.
So I used to look at exemplars of intelligence, some of the teachers whom I admired, and I thought maybe I can find out how to do it by imitating the way they do their handwriting, or by wearing clothes the way they wear them, or by making the same sort of gestures, or by speaking in that sort of way. That, by some sort of sympathetic magic, I would acquire the mysterious power which I seemed to lack. In the same way, I remember from childhood, again, that our nurses in a hospital, sanitariums, or homes had a very, very peculiar anxiety about constipation.
In fact, that was about the criterion of health; was that you were not constipated. Therefore, you had to do your duty—as they called it—every day. And if you didn’t, there was a graduated series of punishments.
It started with a concoction called California Syrup of Figs. It went next to a thing called senna tea. It went next to cascara.
And finally, to castor oil, which is disgusting stuff. The trouble is that, if they resort to that, you get back in a vicious circle because the whole muscular system is upset, and so you begin all over again. Now, the mistake that they all made was to issue a commandment to the conscious mind to achieve a result which the conscious mind is perfectly incapable of producing.
The conscious mind has nothing to do with whether you’re constipated or not. That has to do with the unconscious. Or, I prefer to call it the superconscious, because it’s a lot more clever than the conscious mind is—and, indeed, a great deal more trustworthy.
Only, we don’t believe that because we believe in original sin. And therefore, the unconscious can’t be trusted, and if it wants to take a day off or so from going to the bathroom, we think it’s sinful; there’s something wrong with it. And that attitude, you see, that was reflected in this rather trivial little illustration, ran through everything.
You must love us! You must be free! You must make the right decision!
It’s up to you. You’ve gotta do it. See?
Well, of course, as a result of that, one of two things happens. Most people simply lose their nerve. They realize: “I’ve got to make the right decision, but I can’t!” Therefore, they drop out; they become the sort of people who just say, “The whole thing is just too much.
It’s absurd.” And they become low-grade intelligences, or so we think. Then there’s another kind of people who grit their teeth, they pull themselves together, and they resolutely smash into this way of existence, and they get rewarded accordingly—that is to say, they get more and more power. They succeeded in this game of being God, and so society rewards them, you see, by saying, “Well, you be president.
You be this. You be that. You be the other thing.” Looks fine.
Looks great. Everything’s going beautifully. But we’ve only seen the beginning of it.
As it goes on, they say, “Well, hmmm. You’ve got to control this. Got to control that.
You didn’t think of that one before, did you? You know, we can avoid a mistake if we get that under control.” We get this one fixed, then say, “Now, wait a minute. I can’t think about all that.
We’re going to hand all that problem to this computer which we’ve got here. We’ll keep an eye on that one corner and we’ll get that deciding about this.” And so, all these aids to intelligence come along, but at the center of it all is a guy who thinks he’s in charge with his conscious intellect. And so, soon, he begins to feel more and more responsible.
And because he’s making a mess anyhow—I mean, just imagine being the president of the United States! You don’t know where you’re going, you’ve got all these decisions to make, you haven’t got any private life at all because there’s a telephone here and a Secret Service man there and a secretary there, and a this, and a that. And here it goes.
But whatever you do, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. Everybody’s objecting; everybody’s saying, “You mustn’t do it that way! You forgot this!
You are a so-and-so!” And they call you names and everything. The only way of insulating yourself to that is to plug your ears. But then you can’t get any information at all.
Cut off the phone, you know? But then you’re stuck. Because, you see, this is the fate that comes to anybody who tries to be God in the wrong way.
Everybody is God, actually, so there’s no need to try to be. But the moment somebody tries to be, that means he wants to be God from the standpoint of the very limited faculty of conscious thinking and deciding, which is a very clumsy agency for controlling what happens in the world. You’re never going to be God that way.
Because if God—just figure it out—if God had to think about every motion that a gnat made with its wings in order to see that it happened, boy would he be tired! What a nervous breakdown that would be. Well, you can say, “Only God can do it,” but it’s a way of saying the whole conception is nonsense.
Things like that aren’t handled that way. Things like that are handled the way you and your body handle things: which is that they organize themselves without thinking about it. That is to say, they have an intelligence, but it’s not verbal intelligence, it’s not linear intelligence.
It’s multi-dimensional, multi-variable intelligence wherein everything altogether everywhere is happening all at once. And if we don’t reacquaint ourselves, shall I say, with that kind of intelligence, we’re going to be in trouble. Now, you see, the point is: we have it.
It’s all there. But we don’t give it a chance. Let’s take in social intercourse, see?
We’re very, very controlled. When somebody—you see, conversation goes on in a linear pattern. And it’s a game.
Somebody suddenly changes the subject. Now, that creates a small social crisis because they say, “Wait a minute, we weren’t talking about that. You interrupted.” So, in order to protect ourselves against that you, say, you wait for a slight pause and say “Ahem, excuse me for changing the subject, but…” And that indicates that you know—that they are not to take you for a madman who thinks associatively instead of logically, in a linear development.
Now, what happens if you change the rules and you put a group of people together for conversation and say, “Say anything comes into your head.” Well, that sounds like free association in psychoanalysis, doesn’t it? And what about saying to somebody, “free associate?” It blocks them, because they suddenly go blank. Which is a warning: don’t move because you can’t trust yourself.
Don’t move. Go blank. So, to help you along, the analyst says, “Did you dream anything last night?” Oh, that’s alright.
“Yes, I did have a dream.” I tell the story of my dream, which is a way of kidding yourself. You are making a statement through a dream for which you’re not held responsible—because it was only a dream. You can, through that, say something about yourself without admitting that you’re saying anything about yourself.
And without your—you did the free associating in the dream, you see? The dream was an associative process of thinking rather than a logical one, and you can describe it because it’s safely passed; it’s not happening now. Then he can, perhaps, draw you out a little further and say, “Now, what do you think about that dream?” Well, if the analyst is a Freudian, you know what to think about the dream.
All long things are one thing, and all round things are another, and it’s as simple as that. If you’re a Jungian it’s not so easy; if the analyst is a Jungian it’s much more complicated. But he’d help you out, saying, “Well, it’s up to you.
I don’t know what these things mean in your dream. But when you think of a particular image that occurred in the dream—which was a certain friend of yours, say—what does that fellow mean to you?” And he tries to get you to see that the person you dreamed about actually represents an aspect of yourself. You didn’t have a dream about that actual, objective person out there, but he stands for something in you which you associate with him.
So, gradually, associative thinking is drawn out from you. Then, another thing to do is draw pictures. That’s pretty safe.
Just draw anything. Well, you draw a lot of meaningless stuff, you know, and bloo-loo-loo-loo-loo for a while, and then gradually use it as a Rorschach blot. And things begin to come out.
But all this is coaxing people, you see? But in a situation where you are directly verbalizing spontaneously, it’s very embarrassing because words are tremendously powerful in a social scene. People can be blown to pieces with words in just nothing flat.
Say the wrong word and everybody blushes, just like that. I’ve produced a complete neurological-physiological reaction with nothing but words! So it’s dangerous to get away from the order of words and communicate with people in an unstructured way.
Because that’s, to some extent, what happens in tea groups where—or things like the Synanon game—where people are somehow encouraged to say anything they like. But it would get way out indeed if, instead of saying to somebody, “After all, when I look at you, you really annoy me. Something about the expression in your face which I can’t stand.” You know?
That can become a stereotype; you can go on with that kind of argument. Kind of mutually embarrassing game until it merely becomes a ritual. But let’s suppose that, instead of that, we just started talking nonsense.
Or anything goes. It might suddenly stop being nonsense, or at any minute change into nonsense. So that we would immediately withdraw, you see?
Say, “Oh, that can’t go on.” But, on the other hand, if we don’t withdraw, we say “Well, all this is going to be words anyway, and there’s nothing much that they can do to us. So let’s see what happens.” Then, if we don’t withdraw, people begin to feel at ease. That, after all, I can trust myself to behave in a non-egocentric way without harming others, without creating murder and mayhem and bloodshed, without stealing people’s things.
And suddenly, when a group discovers that it can have that kind of lalling, pentecostal, glossolalia bit with each other, there’s some possibility they might love each other. That’s why this has been done in certain spiritual circles for a long time. And this is why, in Zen Buddhism, there is this game of challenge and response, where you are put in a situation where, if you stop to think what to do, you’ve lost and you’re out.
And you have to try again. But you never really know what the situation you’re going to have to respond to is going to be. So, once upon a time, there was a master who posed a kōan to one of his students.
And a student gave a certain answer, and the master accepted it. The master’s assistant, after this student had left, said to the master, “I’m doubtful about whether he really understood the point there.” The master said, “Oh, really?” He said, “Why don’t you try him again?” The master said, “Yes, I will.” So the student came back the following day and he put the same problem to him. And the student responded the same way.
The master said, “No, no! That’s wrong.” But the student said, “But you said yesterday that it was right.” He said, “I know. Yesterday it’s right, today it’s wrong.” Because, you see, every situation is different.
It’s always changing. And the point is to respond in a way that is appropriate to the field of forces as it is now. And you cannot tell intellectually, you can’t tell by analysis, you can’t tell by a process of conscious criticism what the structure of the field of forces is.
Your body knows, your brain can find out. But not through conscious attention and formulation in words. But if you don’t trust your brain to be able to find out, you will fumble and you will do silly things.
And since you have been habitually brought up not to trust your brain to find out, to get into a pattern of trying to behave spontaneously is, of course, to run the danger of making a great fool of yourself. And that, of course, is indeed what happens in a great many experiments in the arts where people think they’re going to paint spontaneously, they’re going to make spontaneous noises with a musical instrument, they’re going to dance spontaneously, they’re going to have non-plays on the stage—or happenings—where anything goes. By and large, these things are colossal failures and are completely boring.
And it’s perfectly understandable why: that, namely, they’re being done by people who don’t really trust themselves and who are doing this in a background of self-mistrust. And who have never, in other words, cultivated—because it is a kind of a discipline to trust yourself and let it happen. But, you see, when you get a great comedian working, you can’t really train to be a great comedian.
I mean, how would you go about it? Would you read all available jokes and memorize them? Would you study the great comedians of the past?
Remember all their gags, gestures, expressions? The point is: if you did that, everybody would think you were corny. They would say, “Oh, that’s just Mark Twain again.” Or whatever.
W. C. Fields; it’s his gag. The whole point of a comedian is the element of surprise, the unforeseen joke that nobody expected. The thing that really has people laughing is what they just didn’t quite expect.
Now, the ability to put this over is something that you either—apparently, you either have it or you don’t. And you—also—you have to do it in a situation where you don’t know what’s coming up yourself. You could be a comedian, in the terms that you’ve got a script and you’ve learned your lines, and the script was written by a genius, and you’re a good actor and it’s very funny.
But if you’re in a real comedian situation where people in the audience are interacting with you and, in other words, the situation is unstructured, the real genius is the one who can pull the gags just like that, as if, indeed, they are ad-libbed. That man has got his genuine intelligence working for him. But so, we come back to the point, then, that the genius is unable to say how he manages to do it.
He can say, “Oh, well, yes. I do a lot of hard work.” All geniuses do. But that’s not the cause of it.
It goes along with it; it’s a kind of necessary accompaniment of the art rather than the cause of the art. Because one uses work to polish something which was a gem in the first place, you see? When you write poetry, it’s a lot of work to get it; exact melody and beauty of words takes hours.
But you had to have something there in the first place that wasn’t simply the polishing, it was the gem. So that the coming forth of such gems, in the same way as a cure for constipation, is something that requires trust in one’s own inherent and original intelligence. This was what the Zen master Bankei calls your unborn mind.
That is a way of saying the mind that you have, that is not individualized, that is not personalized, that is not the ego. And he would say to people, “When you hear something go caw, you know immediately it’s a crow. When you hear something go ding, you know at once it is a bell.” And when he was once heckled by one of those Nichiren priests—you know, they are very fanatical Buddhists; they run the Sōka Gakkai movement—this priest said (standing right at the back of the audience) he said, “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.” And Bankei said, “Come closer and I’ll explain it to you.” And he moved in.
And he said, “Closer, still. Still, closer.” The man came forward. And he got right up to the platform.
Bankei said, “How well you understand me!” So, in the same way, once a military man was with a Zen master and he said to the master, “I’ve heard this story that there was a man who kept a goose in a bottle, and it grew so large that he couldn’t get it out. Now, he didn’t want to hurt the goose and he didn’t want to break the bottle, so how does he get it out?” And the Zen master changed the subject. So, finally, the military man—the officer—got up to leave.
And just as he got his hand on the screen to go out, the master said, “Oh, officer?” And he turned and said, “Yes?” The master: “There! It’s out!” Of course, if I say to you, “Hello!” or “I say!” you say, “Yes, what is it?” See? You don’t stop, you don’t hesitate.
You don’t think, “What mischief is up here? What could he be planning?” You just respond. And the response is, in this case, perfectly appropriate.
Now, you could say this is just habit. True, there is habit. And there are responses that are conditioned, fed into people.
But we saw that that doesn’t work for the comedian. He needs something more than habit. And you’ve often had the experience of finding yourself in a crisis where you somehow managed to act intelligently though there was no time to decide.
Driving a car, or something, you know? Suddenly, your own being comes to your aid. Well, that—of course—is the whole thing.
But the basis of it is to realize not that this is something sort of rather heroic, which one really ought to try to do—as if there were some other possibility, as if it would be safer not to do that, as if we could sit back here and say, “Oh, now, let’s not get mixed up with that adventure! Let’s be safe and rational, and believe in original sin and mistrust ourselves.” If we do that, we are finished. We go straight—by that method, with the kind of technology we have—we go straight into the totalitarian state and all that goes with it.
The total police state: everything’s gotta be controlled. Somebody’s going to win at the God-game. And the end of that—of course, as everybody knows—is: every great totalitarian state destroys itself because it becomes too rigid, and it consumes itself with its own fury and frustration; it has to take itself, it’s hostility, out upon itself.
So, actually, it isn’t a question that this is something that we really ought to do, or that to have faith in one’s self is virtuous, or something—you know—like psychologically integrated, and you hope you can be more psychologically integrated than the other people you know. It isn’t like that at all. It’s something that you really cannot avoid.
That you, actually—although one, you know, sort of doesn’t believe it—you do do it all the time. Only, when it comes to your attention, then you think you should. But when it doesn’t come to your attention you are functioning intelligently without thinking.
When it does come to your attention you say, “I’d better not do that.” It’s like, you know, we work for certain bosses. And, you know, one thing you mustn’t do, if you could possibly get away with it, is never ask their advice. Go ahead and do your job.
But if you take it to them and say, “Should I do it this way or that?” then, suddenly, everything is held up while they think about it. And then they can’t make up their minds. They go this way and they go that way, and they say, “No.” Don’t ask.
Just go ahead and do it. And it’ll save the boss so much time, and it’ll stop him worrying, and prevent him from having ulcers. So, in the same way, there are a certain kind of people want to know whether something’s legal.
And the best advice is usually: don’t ask. Because there’s a saying in Zen: “Officially, not even a needle is permitted to pass. Unofficially, a carriage and six horses can get through.” So if the law is not challenged and asked to make a decision on this—forget it!
You can probably get away with it. So, in the same way, again, if you realize that trusting in your own organic skill and intelligence is something you can’t really avoid. You can try to avoid it and get mixed up.
You can get so mixed up that, if you cannot—if you say, if you think you can’t trust yourself, then it follows that that idea itself is untrustworthy because it’s one of your ideas. If you think you can’t trust your brain, how can you trust the logic which your brain makes possible? And this logic is so simple and, therefore, so clumsy in dealing with the subtle complexity of our world and of the field of forces in which we live.
So, you cannot let go, you know? You say, “Now I’m going to let go,” see? “Today I’m going to let go,” see?
Don’t do it that way. You remember that you can’t hold on. That’s the only way to let go.
You can’t hold on; there’s nothing to hold on to, no one to hold it. It’s all one system, one energy. Throughout Asia and Europe, Americans have the undeserved reputation of being authors of the most materialistic civilization that ever existed.
The undeserved reputation: because never was there a culture so completely un-materialistic. I define a materialist as a person who loves material, and who reverences it, and who delights in using it to its best advantage. And if you will examine the system of education through which most of our children are compelled to pass, you will discover that it imparts almost no knowledge whatsoever of any kind of material competence.
Our education is exclusively bookish, and is designed, on the whole, to train people to be bureaucrats, bankers’ clerks, insurance salesmen, teachers, and—we hope—intellectuals. It is a curious thing, but in its weak moments it admits that there are a lot of people going through the scheme who really will never qualify for graduate school, and not even, perhaps, for college. And for these it must provide, rather regretfully, some courses which train them for other things.
It’s always a joke among Europeans that, in American colleges, you can get credits towards an A.B. for courses in basket-weaving. And this isn’t really so funny as it looks, because when it is the ideal that—sort of—everyone should go through college if possible.
You have to adjust to facts: you can’t have a nation, you can’t have a society, in which everyone is always occupied in intellectual and computational pursuits. A few people have to be around who know how to handle the material world in a gracious way. And for these people we provide only regretfully, as an afterthought.
The people who might otherwise be dropouts in high school should be given some courses which would prepare them for trades in carpentry, metallurgy, even, perhaps, auto mechanics, furniture makers, cooks, and so on. But, as a rule—because these kinds of education in the academic world are provided only with regret, they are provided in a slovenly fashion. We do not—we simply do not—relate to the material world, and we are increasingly lacking in any kind of competence in handling physical matter—except in such far out cases as people who make jet aircraft and certain very sophisticated types of scientific instruments, where it is absolutely necessary that there be the highest degree of mastery—aside from that, because of the lack of material competence, our life is extremely drab.
It is simply astonishing that the wealthiest nation on Earth simply does not know how to enjoy itself in a material and obvious way. Now, you would think, you see—if you were just an ordinary kind of a horse-sense kind of person—that the richest nation on Earth would have a whale of a good time. You would think that, with all the money one earns—even at doing a factory job—that, when the hours of work are over, that people would go home with all the money that they earn—which makes them princes by comparison with Indians and Chinese—that they would go home to fantastic banquets, marvelous orgies, and riots of pleasure all the night through.
This would simply be common sense to people who did not suffer from a Protestant ethic. But in fact what happens is this: that we’ve got life strictly divided into two categories: work and play. Work, on the whole, is something that you do to get money, and you are paid to do it because so much work is so deplorably boring that nobody wants to do it, so they’ll pay someone else to do it instead.
So, while you do it, you watch the clock. You put in your hours, and then you get money for having done it. Then you’re supposed to go home and enjoy yourself and have fun.
Well, what do you do? You get home, and instead of having fun, the main thing is to watch TV. And TV is an electronic reproduction of existence, which is cut off from you by a glass wall.
It has no smell. If you are very rich it has color. But you are as in a zoo, where you look at something beyond the bar where it says Do Not Touch The Exhibits.
You cannot touch it, you cannot mingle with it, you merely witness it in a passive way. And while you do this you are served a TV dinner, which is something that was originally animal and vegetable that has been frozen so as to deprive it of almost any taste at all. It is then warmed over, and you eat it not because you enjoy eating it, but because it’s good for you.
It enables you to continue living, because it has been carefully studied; it has in it exactly the right amount of calories, carbohydrates, and vitamins, and many of such preparations are served with a small label which contains a scientific formula on them as to all the good things for you which it contains. It tastes of nothing whatsoever, and you eat this while you watch this show going on. You may wash it down with a soft drink that’s vaguely alcoholic—called beer—and, in the meantime, you get absorbed by the spectacle going on in front of you—in which you do not participate, you merely witness it.
And it goes on long enough for you to be tired enough to go to sleep. This is supposed to be a life of pleasure. Generally speaking, you see, we really are not materialists at all.