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We have to know that’s there. And every so often that has to happen. Because if there isn’t the experience that we go through called the screaming meemies at the end of the line, where everything has gone wrong.
Like, just before he died, the British novelist Arnold Bennett said, “I feel somehow that everything’s absolutely wrong!” You know? So the possibility, even the imagination, that there could be such an experience in the back of our heads is the background which gives intensity to the sense that we call feeling good, feeling that it’s alright. It’s alright, ma, I’m only bleeding.
So if you understand that, you see that—really and truly—you’re always in the same place. Just as every creature thinks it’s a human being. And as just every being turns out to be a reproduction by some interesting technology—whether it’s electronic or biological makes very little difference.
And just as it may be—I don’t know—planets are stars’ ways of becoming other stars, and so on, and so on, and so on. But the moral is: you’re always in the same place. And what is that place?
You can ask yourself very, very—I won’t say ‘seriously’ because this isn’t really serious, it’s sincere—ask yourself very sincerely: if that is so, if—in other words—the place in which you are now is the place where everything and everybody else really is. Only, there’s an arrangement to pretend that you ought to be somewhere else. So the place where you are is the place where you’re always pretending you ought to be somewhere else.
And this is the nature of life. This is the pulse. I ought to be somewhere else!
So it’s kind of a “ga-zinn,” like that, see? Well, if you discover that that’s the trick that you’re playing on yourself you become serene, and you don’t entirely give up the game because you’ve seen through it. But you say, “Hmm, it really might be fun to go on playing!” When I was a boy in London I used to love to visit the British Museum.
And in the neighborhood of the museum there were a number of old shops—some of them, I think, dating from the end of the 18th century—and on the inscription over the shop window it said that they sold philosophical instruments. And I couldn’t for the life of me make out what ‘philosophical instruments’ could be because I thought philosophers were people who simply sat thinking and wouldn’t have any need for any special instruments. But when I went up to these shops I found that what they had in the window were telescopes, slide rules, chronometers, and all sorts of what we would now call scientific instruments.
Because, you see, the original name for science was natural philosophy. Because a philosopher is a person who is curious about everything. He’s not only curious about theoretical matters, but he’s also curious about what we should now call practical matters.
And I regard myself as a philosopher in exactly that sense because, aside from being interested in changed states of consciousness, in problems of death, problems of time and space, and the practice of meditation, I’m also interested in what you would call down-to-earth things such as food, clothing, housing, problems of ecology and population. Because all this is part of natural curiosity or philosophy. Well now, today I want to begin with the subject of clothing.
You see me now arrayed in what has become the standard official man’s dress for the whole world: the business suit. Derived from England, popularized by the Americans, adopted by the Japanese, the Indonesians, the Indians, the Persians, the Arabs—everybody on the face of the Earth is now tending to go around dressed like this, in a peculiar form of clothing which derives from military uniforms. Because you will notice that it has buttons on the sleeve.
Now, what do you suppose those are for? They don’t fasten to anything. Originally, though, on the uniforms from which these coats are derived, there were a whole row of buttons all the way up.
And they were on military uniforms, or uniforms worn by servitors, to prevent them from wiping their noses on their sleeves. And then it has these curious lapels. And goodness knows what purpose these serve.
Sometimes people turn them up to try and protect themselves from the rain, but they’re not really very effective. And then you have to wear this extraordinary shirt which is extremely difficult to fold up if you’ve tried and you’re not an expert laundress, and you have to strangle yourself with a necktie. Also, you have to wear pants—British trousers—which is the most devastating garment for men.
Trousers are worn by Chinese women. Chinese men, in the old times before the era of Mao Zedong wore skirts. Because trousers are a garment suitable for shapely women.
They are not at all suitable for men because they’re castrative and extremely uncomfortable, especially if you want to sit on the floor. To wear a business suit and be comfortable you invariably have to sit on a chair because, if you don’t, your trousers will become baggy at the knees. And a coat—as you know, when you try to put it in a suitcase—is very difficult to fold.
And the problem of a business suit coat is this: that it’s made to fit the contours of the human body. It doesn’t—you see, it has to be tailored so that it fits you here, and it fits you here, and it fits across your back. And all this requires a very complex process so that it will snugly fit around you like this and show up your form.
Which is all very well if you have a slim form and you haven’t begun, in later age, to develop a protuberance here as we naturally do. And then, of course, also: how about keeping these trousers suspended? I still can wear a belt.
But the time is going to come when I’m going to have to wear suspenders, which is a kind of block and tackle contraption underneath here, which is another—and further—inconvenience. But it just does astonish me that all over the world men are putting up with this drab, funereal uniform—looking like undertakers and ministers—when they could be much more comfortable. So that I could be just as respectable, just as proper, just as demure—and instead of this, come on like this… …which is the Japanese kimono, as worn—not so much in modern times as 50 years ago—by all Japanese gentlemen.
Now, this is one of the most extraordinary garments ever made. To begin with, it’s completely comfortable. You feel absolutely relaxed underneath it, nothing is restricting you anywhere, and it has these tremendously capacious sleeves which are immense pockets into which you can put anything you want.
I mean, you know, you can put your wallet in there, and pipe, and tobacco, and cigarettes, and money; anything you want. And you also can put things in here. And then it’s quite proper for you to carry a fan.
And when the weather’s too hot you can just cool yourself off. And this outward garment, here, is a coat for cooler weather or for rather proper occasions when you should be wearing it. It’s called a haori.
You can take the haori off and just wear what’s underneath, and you see more or less the same thing as before with the big sleeves and the enormous pockets. And I want you to notice a peculiar thing about a kimono—and we can show it from the haori—and that is that it’s entirely cut from rectangular pieces of cloth. You see?
The cloth has not been shaped to fit the human body. Cloth is naturally rectangular because of its being woven material with a perpendicular warp and a horizontal woof. And so cloth, of its own accord, comes out in rectangles.
Now, in designing this form of clothes we do not alter the rectangular nature of the cloth. We do not attempt to shape it in any other way so as to force it to fit the curves of the human body. But if we honor the nature of cloth in that way and respect its nature, curiously enough, it respects our nature.
Because if you hang rectangular cloth upon you it falls in folds which give you a kind of natural dignity. When you shape the cloth to you, you begin to look more and more like a monkey. But when you allow the cloth to hang upon you and follow its own nature, you look more and more like a prince.
So this is the essential principle of Japanese clothing. Now, the Japanese—as I said—have been abandoning this clothing and I asked one of them why. Well, the first thing he said is, “It’s impossible to run for a bus in a kimono.” And that’s perfectly true: you cannot run in this garment.
You have to walk at a dignified pace. And I think that’s very good for us. I don’t think any self-respecting person should ever run for a bus.
That we need, above all things, to slow down and get ourselves to amble through life instead of to rush through it. And therefore, I consider that this garment, commonly worn by men, would have an enormously beneficent effect on American civilization, that we should be much more comfortable, much more at ease, much more dignified. I wear one all the time—not quite as formal as this, but I always wear a kimono around my home.
And next I’m going to show you the exact style of kimono that I would wear for normal purposes of relaxation. And that is called the yukata. It is a cotton kimono which the Japanese businessman—who would have worn the clothes that I was just showing you—would don.
When he gets home he takes a very hot bath in an enormous tub where practically all the family can sit together. It’s a wonderful institution; that’s the first thing you do when you get back from work. You don’t wash inside the tub; you wash outside the tub by taking a bucket and sloshing yourself with water from the tub, and then you soap yourself and rinse off, and then you go and sit in the bath, and the steam rises all around you, and you smoke cigarettes and chat with all the family.
And that’s the greatest kind of bath in the world. And then, back you get—afterwards—into your yukata, and in this it is perfectly permissible to go out strolling in the streets in the evening. This, of course, is a warm-weather yukata; made of cotton.
There is a cold-weather yukata which is different; it’s called a tanzen, and it’s made very often of silk, and it’s padded. But this light garment has exactly the same principles as the other kimono I showed you because it has, still, the same big pocket sleeves, and still the possibility of sticking things inside here. Now then, also: you can wear it with a same sash that you wear with a kimono.
This is called an obi. There are men’s obi, which are made with tie-die ornamentations on the end, and women’s obi, which are much more stiff and made of a very, very heavy silk, and they’re not nearly as comfortable to wear. But again, you see this is an absolutely perfectly relaxed dress for men.
And I, myself—since I’m a writer and do most of my work at home—I wear one of these almost all of the time. Because it is not constricting, and because of the extreme convenience of its pockets. And if I stand up, I show you how the sash fastens in a sort of elegant bow at the back.
And you may think that that, along with the absence of pants, is a little bit effeminate. But you know, men—especially in America, and I will say this also of the men in England—are terribly uptight about coming on in a way that they suppose to be feminine. They say, “Skirts are for women.
Sissy stuff.” But, you know, if you are biologically male you don’t need to prove that you are. It’s so strange to me how an enormous number of men don’t seem to be able to realize that they’re men unless they can—in some way, or through some sort of medium—go WARROOOOMM! and come on with tremendous energy, very strong!
See? That shows I’m a man! You don’t need to show that at all.
All you need to do to find out whether you’re a real man is ask a woman. Now here’s something else altogether. This is the ancient Greek chlamys.
A long linen garment that has come down to us in modern times through the Roman Catholic church in the form of what is called an alb, which a priest wears at Mass. Only, he puts it on over his ordinary suit, or he takes off the coat and he puts on a long, heavy black garment called a cassock, which is a kind of a wretched thing. Then he puts this extra suit of clothes over it.
But any sensible priest, in celebrating Mass, would take off all his clothes underneath and simply wear his underpants and his chlamys, which is his alb. And then this thing, here, is a hood which you can pull up over your head and—I won’t do it now; it’s a bit of a nuisance—ut it just sort of makes a comfortable thing around the neck. Catches the sweat.
It’s called an amice. Amicia, in Latin. But this is what men in our Western world commonly wore, back in about, oh, I should say 400 B.C.
and onwards in Greece. They wore the toga in Rome, which was a somewhat more inconvenient garment because you had to throw it over you, and all those things were always dropping down and falling off. But this is extremely comfortable and very convenient.
Now—along with the alb or the chlamys—a priest of the Catholic Church, when celebrating Mass, will wear over this a garment called a chasuble, in English; casula in Latin. And the word casula means a ‘little house’ or, in other words, a tent. That is to say, a poncho, a garment which you could tie to a pole, spread it out, put stones on it, and rest under it during the night and keep the rain off you.
So it’s a casula, a little house. But now, you can make a poncho by taking, simply, a perfectly square piece of cloth. All you have to do is hem it—you don’t have to fit it in any way—and cut a slit in it, like that.
You see? And then you have a cassula, a little tent. And I can get into it like that.
And we pull this outside. And, you see, without any tailoring or fitting you at once have a really very dignified and becoming garment. And these things are of enormous use.
You can wear them with anything. They keep you beautifully warm, especially if you make them out of some heavy material. This one happens to be made out of camel’s hair.
And, actually—once, when I wore this—I was stopped in a bar by an Irishman who said, “Where have I seen that before?” Well, I said, “You saw a priest wearing it at Mass,” which he thought was very funny. But this is the essential poncho and it gives, again, great freedom of movement. Your hands are free, and it’s very warm, and you can wear it over such loose-fitting clothes as these and be extremely comfortable, not castrated, and at your ease.
Now, of all the outlandish garments which I’ve shown you, the most outlandish is the Philippine sarong. My Japanese friends of modern times, objecting to the kimono, said “Well, you can’t run for a bus in a kimono.” Alright, you can sure run for a bus in a Philippine sarong because it gives you complete freedom of your legs. Get them right up, either way.
Because, you see, it’s essentially a divided skirt, very floppy, made of cotton, and it wraps around your waist and you tuck it in, and you can secure it with a safety pin. And over it you simply wear a colorful shirt. I don’t know whether this matches very good, but at any rate, one just sees how many different jazzy things you could put together.
But this… the sarong, with variations, is worn all over south Asia. But this particular Philippine design with the divide is the most comfortable, the most elastic that I’ve ever discovered. And I do not know any more comfortable form of dress in the world than this.
Now, the thing is, you can make it of any material. You could make this same thing out of heavier material, say, out of woolstead, out of silk, in order to be warm in cold weather, and have it completely comfortable and, I think, reasonably dignified form of clothing. Well, now, what is the problem with this?
What’s the problem with Western man, and even Western woman, that they dress so damned uncomfortably? I’ve thought about this a great deal because it comes down to some pretty fundamental philosophical matters. And I’ve discovered that one of them is this: that when people get up in the morning and they put up a bathrobe.
After a little time goes by they feel slightly guilty. And why do they feel slightly guilty? Because when you’ve got loose-fitting clothes on you may have a slight suspicion that you don’t really exist.
In other words, you’re not strapped in! Because all people of action wear big belts, like military, you know? Boots.
Things that clutch you tightly. And then you feel—because of the pressure upon your skin—you’re really there. Now, this is a very serious mistake, especially for soldiers.
I maintain that the German army lost two world wars because of the goose step; because of military pomp and swagger. Because of such things as brass bands and close-order drill. Because a really effective army should be invisible and inaudible.
But you cannot get men who are on the machismo kick, who have to prove that they’re men, to be invisible and inaudible. But a truly effective army, an army of guerrillas, should dress with complete comfort, complete practicality, and no kind of tying themselves together in knots so that the pressure on you will assure you that you’re there. Because, after all, that’s like sleeping on a bed of nails.
But a great many people in our culture don’t feel that they are really alive unless, in some way, they are uncomfortable or suffering. And the reason for that is that we have a profound, built-in sense of guilt about our existence. You see, we have a profound sense of guilt about our existence because we feel that we don’t really belong to the universe.
There was a wonderful story about a Japanese mystic—a kind of wandering holy man—who, one night, stopped in a Buddhist temple for shelter. And he went up to the high altar, and there were all these kneeling cushions which the priests use for celebrating the service, and he arranged them all and made a comfortable bed and went to sleep. And, early in the morning, the priest came in to celebrate the early morning service and saw this apparent bum lying on all the cushions in front of the altar.
And he said, “What are you doing here? Such disrespectful conduct in front of the altar!” And the holy man looked up at him and said, “Oh? So?
You must be stranger here. You cannot belong to the family.” And so, likewise, in an Italian church, little children are running around, in and out of the pews, ducking back and forth while their mother was offering candles at the shrine of St. Anthony. And two American spinsters from New England were viewing the church and were very shocked the way these children were playing, and went over and touched the mother on her shoulder and said, “Don’t you think these children should be controlled?” “Well,” she said, “it is their Father’s house.
Can’t they pray here? Can’t they play here?” See, I made a very interesting slip of the tongue. But that’s a most curious thing, isn’t it, you see?
Our clothing—as I said at the beginning in exhibiting the business suit—is undertaker clothing, ministerial clothing, military clothing. For all those things which—in our culture—we cultivate an uptight attitude. UNGH!
Hold yourself in! Restrain yourself! UNGH!
Like this. But in doing this, you see, we are constantly at ware with ourselves. It is as if you were moving your arm, and you wanted to move your arm very strongly in one way.
Alright, you go like that. You immediately tighten the bicep. And that would be the natural thing to do.
In lifting something heavy you immediately tighten the bicep, and up it comes. But supposing you tighten the tricep at the same time, which is the muscle here at the back. Then you get this… You’re fighting with yourself, you see?
And although this movement may look oooh, very tough and strong, it isn’t at all! Because you’re fighting with yourself while you do it. Now, in this way—all the time—we have been taught to fight with ourselves because our personalities have been split.
Our culture tells us that we are, on the one hand, a nasty little animal that has to be controlled and beaten into submission, and that, on the other hand, we’re a rational soul, which is the sort of higher self which is supposed to take control of the lower self. And for this reason we’re always at cross-purposes with ourselves. Freud, for example, distinguished between the pleasure principle (which he located in the genital region) and the reality principle (which he located in the cortical region, in the brain).
So there’s a distance between these two centers. This is the pleasure center, this is the intelligence center. And because they’re not in the same place, for some reason or other, it seems there always has to be a fight between them.
In a plant, like a flower, its mind and its sex organ is the same place, and so it doesn’t have that conflict. But in a human being they’re divided. We think they’re divided, at least.
Simply because they are at a distance from each other in space. But they’re not really divided at all. They look different; the head looks very different from the genitals.
But, in the same way, bees look very different from flowers. Everybody loves the box, especially an exciting looking box. Something absolutely fascinating about what is in the box.
And this is a box—mmh!—full of goodies, because it contains some of the most priceless oriental incenses. It’s like when the wise men brought the baby Jesus gold, frankincense and myrrh. These treasures, including a pair of scissors for dealing with these things—I think they’re actually 17th century English candle snuffers, but they handle incense very well—and then there’s very exotic incense from Nepal in here, of which we’ll see something more about later.
You know, it seems sort of ridiculous to talk about incense on TV. In England, you know, they call TV the telly, and I’m going to try and make it the smelly—although that’s electronically impossible and probably will be possible someday. There’s a curious reason why we haven’t investigated that kind of thing.
Because, I wonder if you realize that the sense of smell is our repressed sense, the one that we aren’t really very proud of. For example, if I asked you, “Do you smell?” it seems, somehow, a little bit of a rude question. There’s a famous story, you know, about that great British literatus, Dr. Johnson, who got onto a stagecoach one day—and this was in the 18th century when people didn’t bathe as much as they do today—and shortly after, a lady got onto the stagecoach, and sat opposite him and said to him, “Sir, you smell!” He said, “On the contrary, madam!
You smell. I stink.” And so, you see, how—in this way, even in those times—the word ‘smell’ had a bad odor. And it’s curious, also, [that] there are only four adjectives in the English language that apply specifically to the sense of smell.
We have ‘acrid,’ ‘pungent,’ ‘fragrant,’ and ‘putrid.’ We have ever so many adjectives from taste which we apply to smell; from plants, when we say something is musky, or something of that kind. But we really aren’t very conscious of the sense of smell. And yet, although we’re not conscious of it, it exercises an enormous influence upon us—just because we’re not conscious of it.
I believe that instant likes and dislikes that we have for other people—that are sometimes completely irrational—are based on an unconscious apprehension of whether we do or don’t like their smell. You know, too, how smells are so powerful in evoking memories. Something you smell as a child—say, the smell of fresh coffee being cooked early in the morning, or bacon frying, or leaves being burned on an autumn day—all these things invoke very vivid emotions and feelings of our childhood in the past.
But, you know, when people talk about very deep things, they never talk about the sense of smell. They talk about touch, vision, and even taste, and hearing. For example, we hear about the “vision of God.” In the Catholic church it is said that the highest thing to which man can attain, or to which the angels can attain, is the beatific vision: to see God.
And the prophets would hear the word of the Lord. And in one of the psalms it says, “Oh taste and see how excellent the Lord is.” Taste and see. But no one ever had the idea of smelling God; of having not just the beatific vision, but the beatific smell.
This has never been brought out. And yet, curiously enough, throughout the whole history of religions—until we got to what is called the phenomenon of the Protestant nose—we’ve had incense. Hindus use incense, Buddhists use incense, Mohammedans use incense, Catholics use incense.
But there came a break at the time of the Reformation when incense was somehow given up. (Oh, Hebrews use incense, too; or used to.) And why is this?
Why this repression of the sense of smell? I don’t fully know the answer to that question, except to say that I do know that it is repressed, and that it’s a shame! We’re depriving ourselves of a whole world of wonder because the nose is just as sensitive as the ears, and there can be music for the nose in the same way as music for the ears, and the same way as there can be glories for the eyes there can be glories for the nose.
And I don’t know why we’re so… diffident, so uptight about admitting that we have noses. Because, of course, we very well recognize that animals have the most incredible senses of smell and can detect all sorts of things—open up to themselves a whole new world of experience—by simply using their noses. Now, if you don’t use your nose, you are really in just as pitiable a condition as somebody who was born blind or deaf.
You’ve lost a whole sense. And so there is a whole art of smell—I don’t know one half of it—and that is the art of perfumery. But I do know that a very skilled manufacturer of perfumes is a person who gets a very beautiful lady, and gently and unostentatiously sniffs the natural odor of her body.
And then he combines the natural odor of her body with a perfume ingredient that will be its perfect partner, and therefore make some entirely individual scene that is her own authentic smell. And I don’t know why you shouldn’t have your own authentic smell, just as you might have your own authentic voice, your own authentic face and, indeed, your own authentic character. But the mysteries of perfumery are closed to me.
Not, however, the mysteries of incense, and I know quite a bit about them, and I thought I would try—although television is kind of an inconsistent medium to use—to show you some of the mysteries of incense. Now, of course, everybody knows that incense is widely sold in the United States of America and in Europe, and you can buy it in the dime store. But the ordinary incense which is sold to you is usually black in color, or purple in color.
And although there are good incenses that are black and purple, I advise you on the whole never to buy a black or a purple incense—unless you’re buying from somebody like my friend Kim von Tempsky, who really understands incense, who can advise you what to buy. But ordinarily, black or purple incenses smell like cheap perfume. Bad incense always has, at the back of it, a soapy smell, whereas a good incense has a woodsy, or resinous, or floral smell.
But it should never have that feeling of having a soapy ingredient. Now, absolutely basic incense for the Orient is sandalwood. And this is a trunk of sandalwood on which are written the Chinese characters ‘bird,’ ‘sound,’ ‘flower,’ ‘perfume.’ So: from the bird, sound; from the flower, perfume.
That’s basic sandalwood, and sometimes a piece of this type is made into a statue, as this charming Hindu goddess. But generally speaking, sandalwood is the basic incense, and it comes in various forms: in chips, and it comes in powder, and it comes in sticks. Now, in order to burn incense you need a basis of charcoal.
The thing to do is this: the best way to burn incense is to have a bowl with sand in it, and get charcoal—which you can buy from ecclesiastical shops—which is impregnated with saltpeter so that it lights itself. See? You can use ordinary charcoal that you use for a barbecue, but I don’t recommend it.
It will work. And then you get this charcoal going, fanning it. It’s fun because it sputters and spits all over the place.
See? Then, after that, you take a, say, a chip of incense wood and just place it on it. See?
And slowly it will heat up, and you find the whole room marvelously impregnated with this curiously sweet, woodsy smell that isn’t icky sweet. You know, really, there are two basic kinds of—well, three basic kinds of incense: temple incense, punk (for scaring off insects), and boudoir incense. Boudoir incense is very, very erotic in perfume.
Temple incense is very pure, it has a feeling of high mountain forests, of loneliness. And so this is the chip form of sandalwood. Then there’s the powder form of sandalwood.
You just put a pinch on, like that, you see? Also, you can use powdered sandalwood for rubbing into your hands. See, now, I have around my neck what the Japanese call a juzu.
It’s a Zen Buddhist rosary. And you rub a little sandalwood powder into your hands like this, see, and then you play with it. These are actually used for counting your breath during meditation so that you don’t have to figure.