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Now I’m handing. Handing it to you. So every kind of so-called ‘thing’ can be spoken of as an event, and because events flow into each other—the fisting flows into the handing—we cannot say exactly where one ends and the other begins.
So, therefore, if we remember that, we shall see that we do not need the idea of causality to explain how a prior event influences a following event. Because it’s like this: supposing I’m looking through a narrow slit in a fence and a snake goes by. I’ve never seen a snake before and this is mysterious.
And I see—through the slit in the fence—first the snake’s head, then I see a long trailing body, and then, finally, the tail. I say, “Well, that was interesting!” Then the snake turns ’round and goes back. And again I see first the head, and then—after an interval—the tail.
Now if I call the head one event and the tail another, it will seem to me that the event ‘head’ is the cause of the event ‘tail,’ and the tail is the effect. But if I look at the whole snake I will see a head-tailed snake and it would be simply absurd to say that the head of the snake is the cause of the tail, as if the snake came into being first the head and then the tail. The snake comes into being out of its egg as a head-tailed snake.
And so, in exactly the same way, all events are really one event. We’re looking—when we talk about different events—we’re looking at different sections, or parts, of one continuous happening. And therefore the idea of separate events which have to be linked by a mysterious process called cause and effect is completely unnecessary.
But having thought that way we think of present events as being caused by past events and therefore we tend to regard ourselves as the puppets of the past, as driven along by something that is always behind us. Now, to overcome this impression—it’s very simple. You begin again with an experiment which I suggested in the previous talk about meditation.
Approach the world through your ears. If you shut your eyes and make contact with reality purely with your ears—I mean, it’s kind of silly, perhaps, to shut your eyes when you’re looking at television, but do it; just for a moment—and you will realize that the sounds you are hearing are all coming out of silence. You hear [Alan strikes a standing bell] … and it fades away; fades, fades, fades, fades, and finally disappears.
It’s a curious world, this—isn’t it?—because you hear all the realities in it, the sounds, suddenly coming out of nothing. You don’t see any reason for them to begin, they just appear and then they echo away through the corridors of the mind which we call memory. Now, if you open your eyes—it’s a little harder to see this with your eyes because, unlike sounds, the eyes sound static.
Or rather, they look static; everything looks still to your eyes. But you must understand that the world you are looking at—say, when you look at a light, that light is vibrating—all material things are vibrations, and they are vibrating at you now in the same way as the sound was vibrating on your ears. In other words, the present world that you see is a vibration coming—just as the sound comes out of silence—the light is coming out of space.
It’s coming out of nothing straight at you now and echoing away into the past. So the course of time is really very much like the course of a ship in the ocean. Because here’s the ship, you see, and it leaves behind it a wake.
And the wake fades out, and that tells us where the ship has been in just the same way as the past and our memory of the past tells us what we have done. But as we go back into the past, and we go back and back to prehistory, and we use all kinds of instruments and scientific methods for detecting what happened, we eventually reach a point where all record of the past fades away in just the same way as the wake of the ship. Now, the important thing to remember in this illustration is that the wake doesn’t drive the ship any more than the tail wags the dog.
Supposing there’s a neurotic, difficult child. And one school of thought used to say, “Well, bang him about and beat him up, and maybe he’ll change.” Then they said, “Oh no! That’s not fair to the child, to beat him up, because it was his parents.
They didn’t bring him up properly.” And so, then they say, “Well, punish the parents.” Well, the parents say, “Excuse me, but our parents were neurotic, too, and they brought us up badly, so we couldn’t help what we did.” And so, since the grandparents are dead, we can’t get at them. And in any case—supposing we could—we would pass the whole blame back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and say they started all this mess. Then Eve would say, “No!
The serpent tempted me and I did eat, and it was the serpent’s fault!” Well, you know, when God—in the story of Genesis—asked Eve: “Didst thou eat the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” She said, “Oh, but the serpent tempted me, and I did eat.” And God looked at the serpent. And the serpent didn’t make any excuse. He probably winked.
Because the serpent—being an angel—was wise enough to know where the present begins. So, you see, if you insist on being moved—being determined by the past—that’s your game, but the fact of the matter is: it all starts right now. But we like to establish a connectivity with the past because that gives other people the impression that we’re sane.
If you ask me, then, why am I talking? Well, I could say I’m making a living this way, or I have a message that I want to get across to you. But that is not the reason.
I’m talking for the same reason that birds sing and for the same reason that the stars shine. I dig it. Why do you dig it?
Well, I could go on answering all sorts of questions about human motivation and psychology, but they wouldn’t explain a thing because explaining things by the past is really a refusal to explain them at all. All you’re doing is postponing the explanation. You’re putting it back, and back, and back, and back, and that explains nothing.
What does explain things is the present. Why do you do it now? Now, this is a slight cheat because that doesn’t explain it either.
Because what happens now? Just as the sound comes out of silence, all this comes out of nowhere. This is in connection with what I explained to you in another talk about the power of nothingness: all life suddenly emerges out of space.
Bang! Right now. And to ask, again, “why does it happen?” is an unprofitable question because the interesting thing is not why but what.
What happens? Not why does it happen? I can say, “Well, I am doing this now because I did that then.” And so I am producing for you a continuous line of thought.
But actually, I’m doing it backwards. I’m doing it always from now and connecting up what I do now with what I did so that you can see a consistent story. If I define myself as the whole field of events—we’ll say the organism-environment field, which is the real me—then all the things that happen to me may be called my doing.
And that is the real sense of karma. But when we speak about freedom from karma, freedom from being the puppet of the past, that simply involves a change in your thinking. It involves, in other words, your getting rid of the habit of thought whereby you define yourself as the result of what has gone before, and instead get into the more plausible and more reasonable habit of thought in terms of which you don’t define yourself in terms of what you’ve done before but in terms of what you’re doing now.
And that is liberation from the ridiculous situation of being a dog wagged by its tail. The Tibetan so-called prayer wheel: to all Westerners the supreme symbol of supersition. Just let it go round and it says the prayers for you, and you don’t have to do any work about it at all.
And here it goes. But what’s fascinating about it? Any child would like to do this.
Let’s keep it moving. In the same way, any child likes to do this. Swing it around!
It’s curious. It doesn’t form a perfect circle because you have to make your hand go whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, and so its path is an ellipse. It’s the same as the path of the Earth around the Sun.
It just swings; it goes around, around, and around, and around, and around. An orange on the end of a string. What’s the fascination of it?
Why does one like to do this and just keep it up? You know, I’m sort of stuck with it right now and I can hardly let go of it. Now I’m supposed to go on with this program, but I’m so fascinated with spinning this orange on the end of a string that I don’t know if I’m going to make it.
Why do we like to do that? We’ll play music, we’ll dance, and we’ll do other things like… I happen to be a lover of archery. But I don’t like archery for killing things, I like it as a sport.
But what I like most of all is to set an arrow free like it were a bird. You know, when it gets far up in the sky—wee!—you watch it, and it suddenly turns and drops. What is it that fascinates us about that?
Because it’s not useful, it doesn’t really achieve anything that we would call purposive work, it simply is what we call play. But in our culture we make an extremely rigid division between work and play. You’re supposed to work in order to earn enough money, to give you sufficient leisure time for something entirely different called “having fun,” or “play.” And this is the most ridiculous division of things, because everything that we do—however tough it is, however strenuous—can be turned into the same kind of play as I was showing you when I was completely fascinated with spinning that orange around my head.
Let’s, for example, take the situation that I ran into a little while ago: I was in the New York subway at 59th Street near Columbus Circle and I wanted to get my shoe shined. (Actually, I don’t wear shoes except when I’m on the East Coast, because there one dresses respectably, and on the West Coast I wear Indian moccasins, because it’s the only comfortable shoe I can wear. But on the East Coast, you know, you wear an ordinary shoe.)
So I went to get my shoe shined, and here was this black fellow who was making shoe shining a real art. He got his cloth—you know, which you spread out like this—and would go over my shoe: Da-doo-de-choo, da-boo-pa-da, dee-boo-pa, choo, choo, cha, da, boo-pe-da-be-doo-de-da, doo-daa-choo, like that, see? He was dancing while he was working.
And he had just the same fascination in shining shoes as one has spinning this thing around one’s head. Imagine, too, if you were a bus driver. A bus driver is ordinarily considered an absolutely harassed person.
He’s got to watch out for all the laws, all the competing traffic, the cops, the people coming on board, giving their fares and he has to give them change. And if he has it in his head that this is work it will be hell. But let’s suppose he has a different thing in his head.
Supposing he has the idea that moving this enormous conveyance through complicated traffic is a very, very subtle game, and he has the same feeling about it that you might have if you were playing the guitar or dancing. And so he goes through that traffic, avoiding this and avoiding that, and taking a fare like this, and he makes a music of the whole thing. Well, he’s not going to be tired out at the end of the day.
He’s going to be full of energy when he gets through his job. Or suppose, you know, you’re condemned to be a housewife—which is the most lowly of all occupations—and you have to clean up. You know, I’ve said that there are only four fundamental philosophical questions.
The first is: “Who started it?” The second is: “Are we going to make it?” The third is: “Where are we going to put it?” And the fourth is: “Who’s going to clean up?” This is the lowliest of all occupations; the housewife who washes the dishes and the garbage collector who takes away the stuff. And he has to find out where we’re going to put it. So now, who’s going to clean up?
Incidentally, if you ask yourself these four questions in order—Who started it? Are we going to make it? Where are we going to put it?
And who’s going to clean up?—it prompts a fifth question, which is: “Is it serious?” Like, “Doctor, is it serious?” Well, supposing it isn’t. Then, housewife—who’s going to clean up—approaches washing dishes in an entirely different spirit. And don’t think that I’m some sort of male chauvinist who’s trying to talk women into the idea of staying in their place, because I’m perfectly willing to wash dishes, too.
Because the art of washing dishes is that you only have to wash one at a time. If you’re doing it day after day, you have in your mind’s eye an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you have washed up in years past, and an enormous stack of filthy dishes which you will wash up in years future. But if you bring in your mind to the state of reality—which is, as I’ve pointed out to you, only now: this is where we are, there is only now—you only have to wash one dish.
It’s the only dish you’ll ever have to wash. This one. You ignore all the rest.
Because in reality there is no past and there is no future, there is just now. So you wash this one. And instead of thinking, have I got it really clean as my mother taught me with an angry voice?
That I had to get every little scrap off it, you know? And she got agh! Got angry at you.
Instead, you turn the cleaning movement into a dance. Shwww, shwww, shwww, shwww, like this. And you dig that.
And you swing that plate around and you let the rinsing water go over it, and you put it off in the rack. Tsk! Crazy.
See? Take the next one. Shwww, shwww, shwww, shwww, and you get this rhythm going, see?
And you’re not under compulsion all the time. You know, when I was a little boy and went to school in England I had to learn the piano. They called it “playing” the piano, but actually they said, “You must play.” We had, in England, compulsory games.
They used to post notices on the bulletin board in the school where I went to which said, “This afternoon everyone will go for a run.” And if you didn’t go for a run and it was found out that you hadn’t, you were flogged. So everybody hated going for a run, because they were under compulsion to play. Everybody must play.
It’s like the whole game of life we’re all involved in. It’s only a game, but everybody has got to belong. So we went running.
I remember, one day, I was out on a run and I was trying to enjoy myself because I was running on the balls of my feet, dancing along. And a fellow came up behind me who was running on his heels; he was jogging. And he was going clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump, clump.
I said to him, “What’s the matter with you? You’re running on your heels and you’re jarring your whole body all the way through.” Okay. But he stuck to it, and he became the champion long-distance runner of the school.
But he didn’t enjoy it; it was work. And all he enjoyed was the suffering that he endured that made him feel that he had really contributed to the human race because he suffered so much. He identified his existence and his worth with his suffering.
Now, really great runners dance when they run. They don’t necessarily follow a straight course, they may weave. And in the same way, if you happen to witness—in the year 1970—the world cup championship in soccer, you would’ve seen that the winning team from Brazil—which consisted mostly of spades—played soccer in a most extraordinary way.
They played it like basketball. They played it dancing. The way we learned soccer in school when I was a boy was very, very formal and orderly, and we didn’t really enjoy it.
But these fellows were bouncing balls off their shoulders, off every muscle, and they had astonishing teamwork, but at the same time were dancing the game. And the sportswriter in the London Times said that they danced their way to victory. So the point is, therefore, that you can do everything you have to do in this spirit.
Don’t make a distinction between work and play. Regard everything that you are doing as play, and don’t imagine for one minute that you’ve got to be serious about it. Let’s take, for example, the rest of the world other than ourselves.
Think for a moment: what are vegetables doing? Let’s, for example, consider this. What’s it all about?
I mean, it serves us human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? See, because here is this stalk, and all these leaves come out: kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching, all the way up, then whrooops goes into this. And then it goes into flowers in the end, you see?
And they go kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty all around. But I look at the thing and it’s like a symphony. It’s just like Bach doing a fugue with all the different movements going laa-laa-laa-laa la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la laa-laa-laa-laa-LAAA-laa, you know, it’s what it’s about.
Well, you say it’s using up air, it’s using up energy; it’s really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet, here’s the whole vegetable world. Not only cactus plants like this, but all trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables: cabbages, celery, lettuce—they’re all doing this dance.
And what is it all about? Why do they do it? Well, we say “One must live!
It’s necessary to survive!” You know, you really must go on. It’s your duty. It’s your duty to your children.
But you see, the thing I feel is: if you bring up your children that way and tell them that they ought to be grateful to you because you’re doing your duty towards them, they will learn to bring up their children in the same way and everybody will be depressed. There really is no necessity to go on living. We think—you know, it’s part of our Western philosophy that we think we have a drive to survive, that we must go on living because some big daddy said to us, “You’ve gotta go on living!
See? And you better make it, or else!” Well, I’ve already explained to you on this show that there is… the fear of death is completely absurd, because if you’re dead you’ve got nothing to worry about. So you’ll be alright.
So, in the same way, you must not—no, I don’t want to use that word, “must not.” Because I’m not trying to talk to you as an authority. I’m trying to talk to you as somebody who’s opening your mind up; a helper, not a father-figure. This thing, here—this plant—I’m quite sure doesn’t say to itself, “You ought to go on living.
You’ve got an instinct to survive, which is something other than yourself and which you have to obey.” See, I don’t think of my own instincts as drives, which is the proper psychological term for them nowadays. I think of my instincts as myself. I don’t say, “Excuse me, but I have an unfortunate desire to reproduce myself, and therefore I’m sexy and would you please accommodate me?” I don’t say, “Excuse me, but I have to eat.
And really, it’s absolutely necessary that I eat.” I say on the contrary, “Hooray! I am this desire to make love, and I am this desire to eat.” It’s not something else that pushes me around, it’s me. So all these emotions that we have—the emotions of uptightness, dread, shivers, horrors—can be interpreted in other ways.
But we interpret them in a negative way so long as we are under the sense that you absolutely must go on living. Now, you see, living—like this plant—is something spontaneous. In Chinese the word for nature is ziran, which means ‘that which happens of itself.’ Not under any control of an outside boss.
And they feel that all the world is happening so of itself; it’s spontaneous. And so you stop this spontaneous flowering of nature cold if you tell it “You must do it.” It’s like saying to someone, “You must love me.” Well, that’s ridiculous. If I were to ask my wife, “Darling, do you really love me,” and she says, “I’m trying my best to do so,” that’s not the answer I want.
I want her to say, “I can’t help loving you. I love you so much I could eat you.” And that’s what the plant feels in growing. It doesn’t feel that it must grow, it’s not under orders, it’s not a military chain of command, it does this spontaneously—so that when you try to command a spontaneous process, you stop it.
It’s like saying to someone: “Now, be unselfconscious.” You know, there’s a belief in India that if you think of a monkey while you’re taking medicine the medicine won’t work. So, therefore, when you take your vitamins or next pills, try not to think of a monkey. See?
That will completely tie up the spontaneous process and it won’t work. So all the things that we say to our children, like, “Well, you must have a bowel movement every day after breakfast.” “Try, darling, to go to sleep.” “Stop pouting! Take that look off your face!” “Oh, you’re blushing!” Make you feel guilty about blushing, see?
All those things are attempts to say this one thing: “Darling, little child, you are required to do what will be acceptable only if you do it voluntarily.” And everybody on this account is completely mixed up because we are trying to force genuine behavior. We all admire artists when we say they’re unselfconscious, they seem so natural. They seem to dance, or paint, or talk, or play the piano so effortlessly.
Of course, a lot of work has gone into it. But if you are a great artist, your so-called periods of practice—when you sit for hours and study your technique on the piano—you will not do that effectively unless it is a pleasure for you. You have to come to the point where going over it again and again is a dance.
One of my friends is a great Hindu musician who has the most extraordinary technique in playing an instrument called the sarod. It’s like an extremely sophisticated Hindu guitar. His name is Ali Akbar Khan, and he’s generally acknowledged to be the leading master of northern Indian music.
He told me once that the comprehension of music is in understanding one note. The meaning of that is: he can sit for hours and hours working on this, but there really is only one note at a time. And he gets into that note and listens; he really listens, gets into the sound.
And it simply doesn’t matter that it takes a long time, that he’d have to do this for many hours, because he’s completely absorbed in listening to the sound he is now making. He’s going with that vibration as when you might chant, you see—like they do in yoga—Oooooooommmmm. You can keep that up for hours and be absolutely fascinated just by the vibration going in the same way as in the beginning I was fascinated by swinging that orange around my head on a string.
What is this? See, this is the real secret of life: to be completely engaged with what you’re doing in the here and now—and instead of calling it work, realize that this is play. In Hindu philosophy the whole creation is regarded as the Viṣṇulīlā, that means the play of Viṣṇu.
Līlā means ‘dance’ or ‘play,’ and from it we get our word ‘lilt.’ They also, in Hindu philosophy, call the world an illusion, and in Latin the root of the word illusion is ludere, ‘to play.’ Because all this going on—the swinging of the ball, the pattern in which the flower goes—is just to swing. And if you take it seriously and say, “Ungh, are you doing anything useful?” Useful for what? “Useful to go on!” But if you take that attitude to going on, going on becomes a drag!
Survival becomes a sweat and it’s not worth it. And if you teach your children, and they’ll imitate you, they’ll treat survival as a sweat which they have to want to go, and they have to keep going on and they’ll teach their children to do it, and the whole continuation of the human race will be a drag—which is, in fact, what it’s become because of this attitude—and this is the reason why we’ve invented the atomic bomb and are preparing to commit suicide. Because… we think we must happen.
And to the degree that we think we must happen, we hate it and are going to bring it to an end and stop it. As far back as I can remember, into earliest childhood, I’ve always been absolutely fascinated with the idea of death. Now you may think that’s kind of morbid, but you know when a child at night says the phrase “If I should die before I wake,” there’s something about it that’s absolutely weird.
What would it be like to go to sleep and never wake up? Now, most reasonable people just dismiss the thought. They say you can’t imagine that.
They shrug their shoulders and say, “Well, that’ll be that.” But I suppose I’m one of those ornery people who aren’t content with an answer like that. Not that I’m trying to find something else beyond that, but that I’m just absolutely fascinated with what it would be like to go to sleep and never wake up. I mean, lots of people think it will be like going into the dark forever, or being buried alive.
But obviously, it wouldn’t be like that at all because we know darkness by contrast—and only by contrast—with light. I have a friend—a girl who’s very intelligent and articulate—and she was born blind, and she hasn’t the faintest idea what darkness is. The word means as little to her as the word ‘light.’ So if you went to sleep—you’re not aware of darkness when you’re asleep—and so if you went into sleep, into unconsciousness, for always and always and always, it wouldn’t be at all like going into the dark, it wouldn’t be at all like being buried alive.
It would be as if, as a matter of fact, you had never existed at all. Not only you, but everything else as well. You would be in that state as if you had never been.
And there, of course, would be no problems, there would be no one to regret the loss of anything, you couldn’t even call it a tragedy because there would be no one to experience it as a tragedy. It would be—simple—nothing at all. For ever and for never, because not only would you have no future, you would also have no past and no present.
Now, you would think that that was the point where we’d say, “Well, let’s talk about something else.” But I’m not content with that; I demur because this makes me think of two other things. This state of nothingness makes me think, first of all—the only thing I get anywhere in my experience that’s close to nothingness is the way my head looks to my eyes. Because I seem to feel that there is a world out there—as it were—confronting my eyes and then, behind my eyes, there isn’t a black spot, there isn’t even a hazy spot.
There’s nothing at all. I’m not aware of my head, as it were, as a black hole in the middle of all this luminous visual experience. It doesn’t even have very clear edges, because the field of vision is an oval.
And if I run my fingers along my field of vision it’s like this, and this is the point where my fingers just disappear from sight. Vague edge. But then behind this oval of vision there is nothing at all.
Just from the sense of sight. Of course, if I use my fingers and touch, I can feel something behind my eyes. But if I use the sense of sight alone, there’s just nothing there at all.
Now, nevertheless, out of that blankness I see. Well, that’s the first thing it makes me think of. Now the next thing it makes me think of is this: if, when I’m dead, I am as if I never had been, then that’s the way I was before I was born.
Because—just as if I try to go back behind my eyes and find what is there, I come to a blank—if I try to remember back, and back, and back, and back, I’ve got my earliest memories and then, behind them, nothing. Total blank. But just as I know there’s something behind my eyes by using my fingers on my head, so I know through other sources of information that before I was born there was something going on.
There were my father and my mother, and their fathers and mothers, and the whole material environment of the Earth and its life out of which they came, and behind that the solar system, and behind that the galaxy, and behind that all the galaxies, and behind that… another blank: space. So I reason that if I go back, when I’m dead, to the state where I was before I was born, couldn’t I happen again? You know, what has happened once can very well happen again.
If it happened once it’s extraordinary, and it’s not really very much more extraordinary if it happened all over again. So, in other words, I do know for certain—because I’ve seen people die and I’ve seen people born after them—that (at any rate) after I die not only somebody, but myriads of other beings will be born. That I know.
We all know that, there’s no doubt about it. But what worries us is that, when we’re dead, there could be nothing at all for ever, as if that were something to worry about. Before you were born there was this same nothing at all for ever, and yet you happened.
And if you happened once, you could happen again. Now what does that mean? Well, we’ll get at it first in its very simplest way, and to explain myself I must invent a new verb: this is the verb to I.
And in the first place, we’ll spell that with the letter I, but instead of having it as a pronoun we’ll call it a verb. The universe I-s. It has I-ed in me and it I-s in you.