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My wife and I attended a very marvelous ceremonial which is held in Holy Week, and it’s called Tenebrae. It’s really very simple, but it’s extraordinarily dramatic. It goes on for about two hours and consists of the chanting of Psalms interspersed with the most gorgeous anthems composed by, I think, Victoria.
And during the chanting of the Psalms fifteen candles on a triangular-shaped candlestick—like this, standing up so—are slowly extinguished until only one is left. And this is supposed, historically, to represent the desertion of Christ by his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane and at the crucifixion. Then that one candle is taken out behind the altar, and the place is totally dark.
And the choir sings the psalm Miserere: “Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness,” which is a penitential Psalm; the fifty-first Psalm. “For behold, I was shaped in wickedness, and in sin hath my mother conceived me.” And then they make an enormous crash, and the candle is brought back, put on the stand, and everybody goes away. This is a church—it’s a high, high, way-out Anglican Church—where they do everything to ultimate perfection.
The music, the ritual is just… there’s nothing like it in the world. And so I began to think about what those people were really doing. What are they digging in this rightful penitence, repentance, about the death and the crucifixion of Christ?
So this led me to begin thinking about various ways or fundamental attitudes that run through all the religions. And I classify them in a scheme under three Rs, and I use the “R” simply as a mnemonic device so that you could remember it easily. And we get this scheme.
So here is the attitude of repentance. And I question: what is its opposite? Well, obviously its opposite is rebellion: “I won’t give in.” When I was a little boy and I was taught the Lord’s prayer at my mother’s knee, when we got to the phrase “thy will be done,” I would never say it because I thought it was saying “I will be done.” And I was damned if I would be done!
Now then, over here is another attitude: resignation. And over at the opposite side I consider: what is the opposite of resignation? Now, this is difficult to find a word for, and so I’m using an old word in a new sense: reincarnation.
This is not being used exactly in the sense of successive lives. But incarnation means: entering into the flesh, into life. So reincarnation is when we don’t do it once, but we say, “That was that was something!” And so we do it again.
So it’s the attitude of a child. When a child sees you do something that’s amazing the child says, “Do it again!” And an English poet once said that when the Lord God created the world and commanded the stars to shine and the planets to revolve around the Sun, he was so fascinated that he said, “Do it again!” And it kept on happening. So I’m using this to express an attitude of what we call, slangily, “getting with it;” of complete affirmation of life.
So now, the point is this: that every one of these can be seen as a way leading to a center, at which point they all coalesce. And you can get to the center—that is to say, to the transcendence of our ordinary sense of isolated individuality—you can get to the center by following any one of these ways to an extreme. Only: it’s very difficult for a person who follows this way to understand this way, or for a person who understands this way to get with this.
Or even between right angles; they’re a little difficult to understand. And I imagine many of you here—you wouldn’t be in this kind of a scene if, for example, you understood the way of repentance. And that was the way that you like to follow.
You would be in church instead. So I’m starting out with this way because it’s the most difficult for probably most of you to understand, and the most repugnant. The extreme of repentance, you know, of course, is the Penitente cult in Mexico and the southwest here among the Indians: an extreme of identification with Christ and His crucifixion, a kind of self-torture.
And the extreme of this way is, of course, the penitentiary. The most interesting experiences that many of us that have had through exploring the prison world, the world of the asylum, the world of the enemy of society. And that, as a kind of yoga.
You know that San Quentin looks like the Potala at Lhasa? The great Tibetan monastery. It’s almost the same architectural design.
And there are—I lecture at San Quentin about once a year, and the most extraordinary questions and most attentive audience you could imagine. And lots of them. It is a kind of monastery, as asylums for the insane are also kinds of monasteries.
So I’m just saying these general things to give you an outline of the scheme we’re going to follow. And then, I’m also going to illustrate these moods by playing music appropriate to them. It’s difficult, in a short time that I’ve had to prepare this, to find the music that is perfectly appropriate.
But this is suggestive, and I’m going to say something about that in general later. Now then, let’s go back to the fundamental assumption that all people—and this also includes all beings whatsoever, but we’re talking mainly, of course, about human beings—all people are manifestations, disguises, of the total reality behind this cosmos and that, if that is so, there are not any mistakes in the world. When you look at patterns on the foam of the breaking waves on the seashore, and you look at the outlines of mountains, and the grain in wood, and the markings on marble, you notice that it never makes an aesthetic mistake.
Never. Also, when you study plants and you go into their relationships with each other and with insects, the fact that the so-called diseases of plants are the full life of some other kind of organism having a ball. And you see this complexly interrelated world, and you realize that it all hangs together.
That everything outside the human world is a system of balances where you couldn’t have, really, any form of life without the others going on, too. There have to be friends and there have to be enemies. Because if there aren’t enemies, the friends get too prosperous and they kill themselves by their excessive exuberance.
So they are constantly being pruned by various kinds of enemy species. And what is—when you got down there, and suppose you identified yourself with a certain plant, you would thoroughly object to—if you were a lettuce—to the snails eating you up. And also, a person who gets identified with lettuces, you see—say, somebody who grows lettuces for his living—gets mad at the snails.
But actually, the lettuces need snails. Because there would be too many lettuces if there weren’t snails. And those lettuces would choke each other.
Now, of course, the human being comes in and starts organizing the lettuces, you see, so that the seeds don’t propagate in the usual way. Because he puts them out in row, and that’s a different kind of a scene. And so he objects to the snails.
But that’s because he’s looking at the problem of letters from a partisan point of view. And it’s quite right that he should do so. What he may not see—because he’s taken the side of lettuces against nails—he fails to see that conflict at one level is health at another, just as a conflict going on between microorganisms in your bloodstream is absolutely essential to the health of your organism as a whole.
But you’re not aware of that conflict going on, because conscious attention doesn’t need ordinarily to focus upon it. And so you don’t get involved, and you’re not anxious about what party is winning and what party is losing. They’re keeping up a kind of balance.
Now then, to take this a step further: we are all amazingly involved in the process of being human, and playing our game and taking our side, and therefore our victories and defeats, our sicknesses and our healths, are things we get mighty partisan about. And therefore we cannot see that human behavior is just like everything else: it never makes a mistake. Only: its never making a mistake must include the feeling that mistakes can be made.
See, that’s where this point of view would differ somewhat from the point of view of a Christian scientist, who strives—manfully, in a way—to assert that evil is purely illusory, but doesn’t quite grasp the point that the illusion of there being something evil is important and good, too. We’re not trying to get rid of it, you see? Because if you get rid of it you would have problems.
It’s… I could say, for example, that a character—a historical character like Hitler—is someone about whom it is very natural for most of us to feel angry. And that’s perfectly right that we feel angry—although he is a as much a natural phenomenon as an earthquake. So what we have, then, is a system of a sort of hierarchy of levels.
And at the point where you are involved you can’t stand aside from yourself and look at it objectively in the same way as you look at the patterns of foam on the seashore, or as the life of the fishes of the tide pools. But to be liberated is to be able to see human life in the same way as you see all other life. And to do that you have to be able to live, as it were, on two levels: the level of involvement and the level of detachment.
And therefore, cultivating the level of detachment is something that is done through the mysterious human property of self-consciousness. To be able to know that you know, to feel that you feel. And by possessing that faculty—which is self-consciousness; is being able to reflect upon one’s own life—we are able to become, as it were, to go to a level at which our own life is seen in its total context in the universe.
That is to say: to realize that your Self is not your ego, which is the standpoint at which you are involved in your game and taking sides, but your Self is the eternal, immeasurable reality that is what there is. Only, the difficulty here is that this capacity—this capacity of self-consciousness—although it is that which enables us to awaken is also capable of getting us into perfectly frightful messes. Into all kinds of (what must be called) feedback snarls where you know that you know, you can think about thinking, and the moment you can think about thinking you can think whether your thinking was right or not.
Did it come off? Was it? Did I do the right thinking?
Then you start to worry. Then you start to worry about the kind of thinking you are doing about thinking. And so builds up our particular human anxiety.
When these creatures that are not self-conscious behave, they behave spontaneously. They just go zoom-zowee, and do what they have to do. And so if it doesn’t work they die, but they don’t worry about it in advance.
That’s that. Magnificent, you see? And human beings have a faint memory.
Kind of archaic, sort of collective unconscious, Jungian-style feeling that there was a time when we didn’t have to worry and when we could never be neurotic. And a great deal of religion, you see, is an attempt to regain the golden age, the paradise lost. And so it involves, as it were, an attitude of surrender: I’m translating it myself to put it in a way that isn’t just so familiar that you don’t hear it.
Now, I mean, that’s totally subversive! These words in the Bible are outrageous! Everybody says, “Well, it’s all very well for Jesus, and the few Saints, and things like that.
For all practical purposes that’s ridiculous! You can’t live that way. After all, you’ve got to plan for your old age.
You’ve got to have a savings account. Got to have insurance. You gotta have a job.
You’ve got to do all those things. See?” So you have to think about that. Why can’t I do that?
So you see, in this way the human being comes to reflect upon himself and begins to see that there’s something wrong. Now, there isn’t—but it’s right that he should feel that something is wrong because it is through this that his capacity for self-knowledge and self-consciousness develops. So you see, there is the sense that somehow or other at some time there was a fall; a point at which we became unnatural.
There’s a great deal of worry going on about this now because of the rise of the computer. Do you know this? This is terribly interesting: that a new form of intelligence, you see, has come into the world which is in certain directions vastly superior to human intelligence.
And people are beginning to worry like anything about whether the machines are going to take us over. But we’ve got to realize that machines aren’t… see, “machine” is becoming a dirty word. Just a machine!
Mere machinery! You see? But actually, there has grown out of us through these things enormous electronic circuits that are new forms of life.
And these are all connected with us. They’re not separate from us. They’re not something like a different order of beings that might come from some other planet and conquer us.
The whole development of the electronic minds and brains that we have are new cortexes. See, the cortex overlaps the original central brain. And, as it were, when you play this game—you know, putting hands over hands over hands that children like to play; it’s a game called capping—well, the cortex caps the central brain (that is more like the brain of an animal) and enables us to reflect on it.
Now, all this machinery that we are making is an extension of our brain and is a new kind of life. But it worries us. And when we start to do that, we get the feeling something is going wrong.
There has been a fall, there has been a mistake. And exactly the same sensation, you see, is anciently connected with the development of self-consciousness in the cortex: something went wrong. Because every time we get that feeling it means that we’ve taken a new step in controlling things.
Instead of relaxing and letting our wings fly us—like a moth or a bird—we now have these jet planes where we have an elaborate system of anxious people morning, noon, and night checking that those things go right. And it’s marvelous that they do. Our friend Ralph Johnson, who often attends these seminars, is an American Airlines captain, and saved the jet the other day in very dangerous circumstances.
Fantastic! But here it is. Now, when you haven’t yet discovered that the new development (such as self-consciousness) is really a new form of nature—like a branch coming out of a tree, which is a kind of a new development of the trunk—and it’s something just as healthy and just a splendid as that, then you begin to reproach yourself and say, “Oh dear, I am awful.” You begin to be alienated, you see, from your own center.
But do understand that being alienated from your own center is a form of, a way of, stepping apart so that you can see yourself? Now, that’s important. That is resonance.
See, when you sing in the bathtub you find you’ve got a better voice than when you sing in a non-resonant room, because you’ve got a little echo. You mustn’t get too much echo. But just a little echo is resonance, and that’s more fun because it’s more conscious.
If you’re happy and you don’t know you’re happy, you see, you’re not as happy as if you know you’re happy. But if you know you’re happy, you may spoil it by getting anxious about it. So this self-consciousness is a kind of resonance.
But then, you see, when it gets to the point of this terrible feeling, “I can’t trust my instincts anymore.” “I’ve got to decide.” “I have,” as it were, “taken over the prerogatives of God.” Well, that’s a terrible thing to do because you can’t be genuine anymore, you see? You know that when you love somebody, you also want to get as much out of them as you can. You know that when you act as a responsible citizen, you do so so as to have a good image in your own view of yourself.
This is your ego-kick, only you dress it up so that it’s not an ego-kick at all, but perfectly sincere public service, and charity, and good feelings towards everybody. Ha-ha! And so then there begins this awful thing.
Repentance. And so, somehow, there comes up this state of mind when you appear to yourself as a rotten. Some people, when they take LSD, get visions that everything is glorious, you see, and has light inside it, But occasionally, people get the vision that everything is corrupt, that all faces are things that are slowly drooling away into into sort of [purulent] rot.
And just everything is falling apart. And they begin to get the feeling that life is a disease. We originally had here a nice, clean planet with nothing but rocks, fire.
And it was sterile and nice. And then all this dreadful goo developed. And the best thing for it is to wipe it up.
Life is a terrible mistake, see? And a lot of people feel that, and therefore want to get away from their bodies to a purely geological, electronic state, which is called spirituality. You know what most people think of as spirituality?
Something totally abstract. Something mathematical. Something electronic.
Something that has no kind of pus or blood or goo, especially no flesh in it, you see? That’s the spiritual state. So that expresses the feeling of these people, fundamentally, who are at variance with their essential life.
Now, this is going to get complicated, I warn you. They’re ambivalent about it. See, in both Hebrew and Christian—and I should add Islamic—theology, sin (of which one repents), is a spiritual thing.
It does not arise from the body. The author of evil is an angel, a bodyless being. And therefore he is something closer to, say, E = mc² than to a rosebud.
But at the same time, in practice—that’s the theory—in practice, what so many Jews, Christians, and Muslims regard as evil is the body, the physical world and our involvement in it; our interest in it. And so, you see, for this reason materialism is a dirty word. You shouldn’t be a materialist.
Although William Temple very wisely said once that Christianity is the most materialistic religion. That is true theoretically. Judaism is an equally materialistic religion, theoretically.
Sometimes more so practically than the Christian religion. Because materialism is the love of material. And, as we shall see, it is fundamental to Judaism that God’s creation of the world is not a mistake, but a great good thing—and a material world at that.
So then, if you can see what I’m pointing out to you is this: how ambivalent we are. We say that evil is spiritual, and yet we treat it as if it were fleshly. As if one couldn’t escape from this flesh.
See? The wall of flesh, the image of the prison, and the soul inside. I’m quoting Shakespeare.
“O that this too too solid flesh would melt.” And, you see, when you get sick, when you get old, when you find that your body is something tiresome to carry around, it grows up this resentment against physical existence. So all of these different moods, horror at one’s own perverse soul, horror at being involved in a corruptible body, will be involved in the penitential mood. Now, I presume most of you have had personal experience of this at some time in your lives.
It’s always puzzling to children when they all start out on this kick. I know in the Anglican Church they have everybody says a general confession at the services, and children can never understand it. They don’t know what all these terrible things that they’re supposed to have done are.
Say, Think of it! The children—that the most amazing thing to say. Or that awful one they have at the Holy Communion, talking about our sins: “The remembrance of them is grievous onto us, the burden of them is intolerable.” And then, of course, in the Catholic Church it’s simpler, where they say, In Latin: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
The story is told of an altarboy who didn’t understand Latin, and was always saying, “Me a cowboy! Me a cowboy! Me a Mexican cowboy!” But you see, first of all, there is a wonderful security in admitting that you’re wrong.
Then you’re sure to be right, see? If you know you’re wrong and make a great point of it. And if you’re suffering and paying a punishment, you see, for being wrong, then you know it’s okay.
See? So the way of the cross is interpreted by many people as this way of life lived in chronic frustration. And I’ve read many manuals on this.
The spiritual advice, for example, they say: when you get a headache don’t take aspirin. Live the pain through and offer it to the Lord in union with the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Always arrange your life in such a way that it will be a little difficult.
That’s why some people where a hair shirt. They are always uncomfortable. They always itch.
And they do it to keep them going. I mean, this keeps you alive. You know you are there.
I was in Mexico last August studying this, because I wanted to go down there and find out why their form of Catholicism is so agonizing. And I even meditated a long time on this in the cathedral in Oaxaca. And here was the main altar—no, not the main altar.
The chapel where the sacrament is reserved. The central figure behind the altar is a huge crucifix of Christ covered in blood and wounds. The sores are all modeled, you know?
And then, on either side of the walls facing this, there are great paintings. One of Christ carrying the cross, and being mocked and scourged, and the other of the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. And all around in the stores where they sell [???]
in the neighborhood of the cathedral you can buy these agonized faces of Christ with the crown of thorns, and every thorn individually sticking in, and dribbles of blood. The face is kind of green and ghastly. And the people dig this!
They love it! They’ll go walking into the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe; go for a whole mile on their knees. You’ll see young girls doing this, you know?
And what is this about? Well, you see, some people don’t really feel they exist until they are sitting on the point of a thorn, if I may put it that way. Reality is a measure of pain.
See, pain—in this way of looking at things—is the most real thing that there is. The pleasures of this world escape and disappear and pass away. There’s nothing to cling to, so don’t go after pleasure, my dear friends!
That’s awful, that’s deceit, because the real thing in life is pain. And so what you do is you train yourself from childhood to deal with pain. We were brought up in a school system where it was simply axiomatic that suffering builds character.
So therefore, any time you inflicted pain on anybody, you were perfectly justified in your own conscience because you were doing him a favor. You were building his character for him. “Do him good!
Hit him hard on the head!” You know? This sort of attitude. And so this is based on—this philosophy of “pain is reality”—is the ultimate penitential philosophy.
Going down, down, down into the most awful. “I am wrong.” See? “I am a mistake.” “I am responsible for this mistake, therefore I ought to suffer.” And I go right into that state of mind.
And if I’ve got guts and courage, I’ll go as far into it as possible. And what will I find out at the end? Now, if you go far enough—the trouble is a lot of people don’t, and they stay around, mimble-mambling about their sins and all that.
It’s just sort of disgusting. And they never really get down to it. They never find out.
What I’ll call “the moment,” the hidden motivation behind all this. Behind self-renunciation, behind wallowing in the reality of pain. They don’t see that it’s phony.
Because nothing can be more egotistical than true repentance. As I pointed out: you’re safe when you’re repentant enough. Therefore, you conceal for yourself, temporarily, what an egotist you are.
But if you really get down to the bottom of this thing, as some of the Christian saints have done, and find out what that repentance is all about, and you suddenly see why it’s dear old sin all over again. What I thought was good was, as a matter of fact, evil. It was the same self-seeking and self-righteousness and ineradicable pride and irreducible rascality which the Hebrews call the yetzer hara, which means the “evil inclination.” But they say that the evil inclination was created by the Lord God.
And probably the Lord God has a yetzer hara himself; that the Lord has his own element of irreducible rascality. And that is, of course, what you might call the dark side; the left hand of God. The left hand that doesn’t know what the right hand doeth.
Because that mustn’t be let out. That’s the secret, you see? If the game of the cosmos is of the fundamental pattern of hide and seek, then when hide turns up and it’s the time for hide to happen, then darkness has its day.
Hide in the dark. But when it’s time for seek, then light has its day and we find out what was hidden in the dark. And then the right hand suddenly discovers what the left hand was doing.
At first it’s shocked. What, that? What is “that,” by the way?
What is the fundamental taboo, The thing you really mustn’t do? Freud said it was sex. But because he said that, you see, we’ve recovered from it.
The epoch B.F., “Before Freud,” and the epoch A.F. are very different. Sex isn’t the taboo.
Maybe it’s incest. Why is incest taboo? It’s getting kind of close to home.
Going back to mama. Going back, but not going back in the ordinary way. It’s going back as an adult, not as a baby.