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And so it’s said: a true Zen monk has a mountain hermitage in any place that he stands on. So let’s have intermission, shall we? Thus far, we have discussed two of the four attitudes to the human predicament characteristic of religions and methods of spiritual development: the attitudes of repentance and of resignation.
Now, let me repeat that the premise of this whole discussion, the first premise, is that existence is a game in all senses of that word. The best senses and the worst senses. That it’s a pattern of dancing, the principle of which is: “now you see it, now you don’t.” Or: hide-and-seek, or lost-and-found.
And that we, as members of Western culture in the 20th century, inherit a way of playing this game wherein we pretend that we are—each one of us—an isolated individual who comes into the world as a stranger. We do not know, in the ordinary course of events, that that is not true and that each one of us is a way in which the whole fullness of ultimate reality pretends that it gets lost in an individual life situation, and endures the adventures of pain and death, and endures all the critical efforts and decisions connected with practical and moral problems. The fact that this is the case is, of course, the content of certain kinds of experience which are extraordinary.
That means simply: not necessarily rare, but outside the usual order of things. The types of experience we call cosmic consciousness, mystical vision and so on—wherein sometimes, as the result of following a yoga, but sometimes simply as a consequence of a spontaneous change of gears (you might almost call it) inside the brain, or some anomaly of switching—we get let into the secret. And in such a moment a person feels that scales had dropped from his eyes and that he was awakened to the true state of affairs.
That we do not know this to be the case in the ordinary way is because we are—you could say, in a certain sense of the word—hypnotized; in the sense of the word that is applicable to the technique of a stage magician. Almost all stage magic consists in misdirection of attention, so that the magician makes you watch something that will distract your attention from the trick he’s going to pull on you. And we are almost all distracted in just such a way because we have so specialized in the powers and properties of conscious attention to things that we have identified our very selves with that faculty alone.
We are therefore unaware of a much more inclusive and diffused kind of awareness which underlies the possibility of conscious attention and which characterizes every single nerve end in our bodies. We screen out—that is to say, we pay no attention to—most of the information (or to use electronic terms, input) that our organism receives. It is possible, however, to—as I say—slip switches so that we become aware of the input.
I won’t say of the total input, because that would be shattering. But we become aware of a great deal more than we ordinarily notice. And it is in those moments that the experiences of cosmic consciousness occur, because it is in those moments that we become aware of the fact that what is inside your skin goes together with what is outside your skin in just the same way as your head goes together with your feet.
The two—obviously, it’s physically impossible for your inside organs to exist apart from the outside universe. I mean, you just simply wouldn’t have any air to breathe, for one thing; the simplest possible case of it. But it’s far more complexly related than that.
And the going-together of these two worlds constitutes a unified field of process, of being, and we are not ordinarily aware of it because of the trick, the game, of pretending that we are the inside of the skin only. So then, under the conditions of this game—and I’m not saying it’s a bad game, that we shouldn’t play this game. I’m only pointing out that it is a game and that it sets up—in other words, as all games sets up, it sets up some formal rules, but these formal rules of the game should not be identified with the laws of nature or with the state of affairs of reality.
The rules of games are conventions; that is to say, agreements about how we are going to carry out a certain operation. Like the rules of dancing a waltz are game rules. So, also, are the rules of marriage, of political elections, of how we measure time and distance, and all such things.
They are conventions. And “convention” is a word that translates exactly one of the meanings of the Sanskrit term māyā, which is the all-inclusive word that the Hindus and Buddhists use for the “world illusion.” It is therefore a convention to think of nature as divided into separate things and separate events. That is a convention that corresponds exactly to the mathematical operation of the calculus, whereby a curve is measured by pretending that it is a discontinuous series of points or of tiny, tiny straight lines.
It isn’t so. The curve is continuous. But by pretending that it could be a series of point-instances, we can count them, work out their positions in reference to some kind of a standard scale, and so get a measurement of the curve.
Now, just as one does that in mathematics, so in everyday life we count every human organism as a thing-unit. And we count all kinds of things as a thing-unit, but sometimes a child will surprise you by asking you for the name of something which you’ve never thought of as a thing. We don’t, for example, have a word which specifies the inside of curved surfaces, like the inside of a pot, or the inside of a pipe, or the inside of a tin can.
We don’t have a word that specifies dry space, or a dry surface. Now, other languages have words for those, because to those peoples (for some reason or other) this concept is important. Aztec language has one word which covers rain, ice, hail, snow.
Whereas the Eskimos have five words to just differentiate different kinds of snow alone. So a child will often ask about something and say, “What is that?” And the parent is not clear as to what “that” signifies. And it is because, you see, things and events are the units of experience, and they are those parts of experience that we notice.
And when you notice something you apply to it a notation. You notice by making notations. And notations are words, numbers, and such symbols as musical notes, or algebraical signs, or astronomical symbols, or whatever.
It is a way of dividing up the world so as to be able to discuss it with each other and so to control our environment. But don’t be deceived by noticing and notation. The world in which we live is not really divided.
It’s like taking a sieve and passing it through water. The wires, of course, cleave the water, but the water doesn’t stay neatly sliced into square lengths, you see? As if it were something like bean curd.
The water closes again. And so, in the same way, although the intellect constantly slices the world into units, the world won’t be sliced. That does not mean that the real state of the world is something like bean curd or junket; completely formless.
It means that the world is full of just those various forms that we see. But it’s full of a lot more forms than we see. First of all, the waveband upon which our senses are responsive to the electrical goings-on outside our skins is quite narrow.
And if we had a wider range of sensitivity—let’s imagine that we had some additional sense organs that were as different from the five that we have as sight is different from hearing—then we should be aware of all kinds of connections and phenomena that we don’t see in the ordinary way. But even without the addition of extra senses of that kind, it is possible to increase human awareness so that we can see all kinds of things that we ordinarily ignore. The simplest example of this is that, when we look at other people’s faces, we see the human face in a formalized way.
We see faces as painters and beauticians have taught us to see them. There are many characteristics of the human face that we block. Now, supposing you are a so-called white caucasian.
You are supposed to have, you see, a vaguely pinkish, smooth skin. Well, you don’t have anything of the kind. You have a highly differentiated, many-colored, blotchy skin.
Only, if you put on heavy makeup like a pancake makeup, of course, you reduce the color variations. But even then, your face moves constantly through an interplay of lights that are altering all the time. And we choose—unless you are a painter or a photographer who is trained to look at these details—you ordinarily ignore them altogether.
Our faces have all kinds of hairs on them, and pimples, and little funny jiggles, and it’s all there. Only, we don’t consider that those details are significant details, and so we screen them out of everyday consciousness. So this māyā—this calculus of dividing up reality into units which are presumed to be disconnected, but somehow related to each other in more or less the same way as billiard balls that interact by banging each other around—becomes the commonsensical view of the world, and is just a convention and nothing more.
Now, in that circumstance—in the circumstance of the person: the human being feeling lonely and feeling that he confronts an alien world—one of the possible tactics and the games that he can play is the highly aggressive game of dominating the environment by the power of his will. And this game is what I’ve indicated here by the word “rebellion.” Now, I’m using that word in a very loose and inclusive sense to cover not only formal rebellion—that is to say, the criminal way of life—but also even official rebellion. That is to say, a U.S. Marine sergeant might represent in some way an official rebel, since his attitude, his whole way of life, is based on guts and the exaltation the gutsy attitude to things, of the strong arm, of muscle, of brawn as against brain.
And you can carry this attitude to such an extreme that it can become a way of realization just in the same way as these others: repentance, resignation, and (as we shall see) reincarnation. In a certain sense, Jean Genet is an example of the rebel. Sartre has put forward the view that Genet is a holy criminal.
And this idea has had great popularity in modern times in France and is part of the mystique of criminal young people in the United States. And it has to be understood, because otherwise one doesn’t really deal with it. To be, in other words, delivered from the egocentric predicament by carrying egocentricity to its extreme.
Now, first of all, the idea that we are egos—although I have described it as a convention and as something that is not fundamentally so—nevertheless, the idea that we are egos does exist. But, you see, the fancy is there. And in the same way, the imagination—the illusion, the māyā that we are separate egos—is something that does exist.
And that fact of fancying so is not a bad thing. It is a form of game. If you would imagine life as a dance, a choreographic pattern, you might say that the imagination of being an ego is a very far out curlicue.
You know how people do frond design? Where you get a front like this, and another one here, another one here, and so. And then say, “Well now, come on.
Let’s go.” In this, smaller ones. Like this. So.
So. See? Drawing these tendrils on a vine.
And then itty bitty tendrils come out of the others. See? And they make it more complicated and more interesting.
And so, in that in that way, the development of the sensation of the ego is a very far out curlicue on the extremities of life. So the fact that you and I imagine we’re egos is the same sort of thing as you will observe in any complex pattern of ferns, or crystals, or surface tensions in foam, or anything like that. It is very, very natural.
And so there is, then, a legitimate way of following this fancy through to its logical conclusion: the yoga of egocentricity. This is a very difficult yoga for many people to follow, because we’ve been brought up so as not to have the courage of our convictions about it. To be a consistent egotist.
Perhaps Nietzsche was a great exemplar of this philosophy. To be a consistent egotist requires tremendous nerve because everybody is trying to put you down and say to you: “You should be unselfish. You should cooperate with us.” And that requires doing things that you may not like to do, but it is for the common good that you should do these things.
But the difficulty about all this is—and I’m talking about a quite superficial level of this dissent. I’m talking about here. When people pretend to be unselfish and cooperative, they confuse others horribly.
If you give somebody else the impression that you’re going to be their loyal friend and you’re going to really knock yourself out for them, and they rely on you to do that, and then you let them down because that wasn’t really what you meant to do, you create a great deal of trouble. So, in marriage, if you vow to be faithful and constant to some girl in a moment of intense passion and then, after a while, your affections cool off, and you’ve led her to believe that you will always be reliable and faithful, there’s an awful crash coming. So it’s terribly important to be emotionally honest.
It’s very difficult, because we don’t always know what our emotions are. But to say to someone that “I will love you for ever and ever” is a very, very serious dishonesty and deception. So, in the same way, to give the impression to all those around you in your society or community that you will put the community before yourself, and can be relied upon to do this, is a dangerous thing to do.
You may have the fullest intention of carrying this out. But I find, in practical relationships, that I am much more comfortable with people who tell me frankly what their feelings are. In other words, if I’m not welcome because they’ve got other business to do and they’re all tied up with things, it’s much better that a person should say “I’m sorry, but I don’t feel inclined to see anybody right now.
I’m busy,” and so on. Then I can rely upon that person that, when they tell me, “You are welcome,” that I really am. One of my best friends is a woman who is totally frank.
And if, even for purely irrational reasons, she doesn’t want to come along with something or do something, she just says, “I don’t feel like it.” And so we understand each other perfectly. Everybody understands her. Because then they know when she says, “Please come,” that she really means it.
So a proper egocentricity, if you feel like an ego, you see, is essential in good human relations. And to be guided by your real wishes—as far as you can make them out; you know what they are—is on the whole a safer bet in human relations than to be guided by abstract principles. Now, the abstract principles are all very well.
And we should know what an ideal pattern of human behavior might be. One has to keep, as it were, one’s eye on that: to see if you like it. You see, the game of existence is not very simple.
If I could say, you know, “Rely entirely on your feelings. Act on impulse. Never do anything except what you would really want to do.” That would be oversimplification because, among the things that most of us really want to do, there is a certain concession we would like to make to an ideal pattern.
So sometimes, when a person does do something which is an act of self-sacrifice or described as such, it really is something he wants to do. Somebody gives away [to] somebody some money, he doesn’t do it because this is a sacrifice and in a masochistic spirit, but because, good heavens, I would really like to see what would happen when this guy gets the money. What fun to see this enterprise start, even if I don’t get anything back from it.
I’ll have the entertainment. So an ideal pattern of how human relations might be is always something to be worked out, thought about, and kept in mind, for it’s always possible we might want it that way. But basically, to do what you really want to do is a more secure gamble than pretending all the time about a lot of oughts and shoulds.
A friend of mine (who’s a very brilliant mathematician) once told a story that, in the beginning of the ages, God was making up a dictionary of all the words that would be used in language. And one day he visited the Archangel Gabriel, and they left the dictionary in the taxi. And while he was in talking to Gabriel, the devil got into the taxi and wrote into the dictionary to words: “ought” and “should.” Well, as a result, then, of pretenses, of not being honest about what we want, untold confusion arises.
You know the proverb: “Be very careful of what you desire. You may get it.” We live in a culture where almost the whole economy depends upon the creation of artificial desires; upon giving you desires that you might never have had in the ordinary way, and therefore thinking that you want things that simply aren’t wantable. A lot of people—for example, when they feel miserable, depressed—simply go out shopping, because somehow purchasing something seems to be a fulfillment of life.
I mean, I know of a lot of wives whose husbands are engaged in business and leave them alone most of the day, and there’s nothing to do—except they regularly go and go shopping. They shop every day as if it was something they had to do every day like having breakfast. And, of course, that keeps things buzzing and keeps the economy going.
It means you misinterpret your own feelings. And so there’s always, after a shopping spree, a sense of letdown. Same thing happens every Christmas Day with children.
You know, toys are increasingly phony: they are a method of propitiating children. I was saying yesterday about the educational system as being a method of preventing children from growing up too fast so that they won’t come on the labor market in one huge podge. So, in the same way, children who are not allowed to participate in human activities, such as cooking and hunting and so on, have to be given so many activities: toy cooking stoves, dolls, dolls houses, guns, anything but the real thing, so that they will be kept amused and kept out of the way.
Because any real child, you know, likes to play with pots and pans and all the things that the adults use and are doing. But toys prevent them from doing that. Now then, what happens is: the children are given an immense artificial desire for toys.
A toy shop seems paradise. But when, on Christmas Day, the beautiful tree and all the tinsel and all the stuff and packages, wonderfully wrapped—you know, the wrappings are better than the contents! More beautiful!
They get all these things out and the room is strewn with guns and buses and dolls and all that stuff. By four o’clock in the afternoon they are screaming frantic. Because actually, the whole thing was a terrible letdown.
And that happens again and again. But that happens to the adults, you see? The adults are merely repeating for the children what they’re doing.
They’re acquiring all this kind of pretentious junk and thinking that’s the answer, and it’s a letdown. Because they didn’t find out that they don’t really want it, and they don’t find out what they do really want. Because everybody has to pretend that it’s good to work for what you don’t want.
So that’s the initial difficulty. That is the mere guardian dog at the gate on this path, you see? But so—I mean, just simply the initial step here is to be honest with yourself, and to be unashamedly eager to [???].
See, I like people who are—supposing they have a certain accomplishment—don’t be blushing violets about it, but say, “I can do this. I know how to do that and I do it well. And I can exact, therefore, a fair price for it.” I feel happy with a person like that.
Especially if he’s someone, say, like a doctor. I sure want to know that he’s good at his job! And if he is confident about it like that and says, “Yes, I know what to do,” then I have that essential faith in him which everybody has to have in their doctor in order to be healed.
But the community says to a person who does that: “You are immodest. You are too big for your boots. You’ve got a swelled head.” Now, a person has a swelled head when his opinion of his accomplishments is excessive.
But when a person’s accomplishments are good he ought to be proud of them and be delighted that he can do it so well. Everybody. If you can dance well, don’t you love to do it?
Are you a show-off? Yes, you are a show off. You know?
But beautiful. Show off! Please!
We like to see it. This is part of the reason, too, why we all go around in drab colors. Mustn’t show off.
Mustn’t be too conspicuous. You’ve got to have a kind of a clergy look to you. You know, modest.
Because, you see, people have thought in the past: if you show off, the enemy will notice you. So a chameleon disappears into its background and doesn’t show off, so that the birds or whatever want to eat that chameleon won’t notice it. But when you live in a reasonably protected community as we do, we are still carrying over from the past all kinds of camouflage habits which really aren’t necessary anymore.
You can branch out a little. It’s extraordinary that our society doesn’t really tolerate eccentricity, even though it was based on what it thought was rugged individualism. But, you see, that’s because we are half-hearted about individualism.
And if you are going to go the way of the ego, you must go it thoroughly. That was true of all these ways. If you’re going to chop off somebody’s head, and that really is the decision—somehow or other it’s necessary—you’ve got to do it with determination, for a half chopped-off head is very bad.
To use a blunt axe. This is the philosophy underlying Bushidō, which is the Japanese philosophy of chivalry based on Zen, where they decided that if there are going to be soldiers and if there is going to be fighting at all, then it must be done supremely well. And if you’re going to fight supremely well, you’ve got to have a sword like a razor.
You know? A Japanese sword is literally a heavy razor. And you’ve got to know how to go on; to have what we call follow through.
So the whole notion of Bushidō swordsmanship is based unhesitating going ahead. Going a-head. It’s called, in Chinese, mo chih chu, or “going straight ahead-ness,” which is an attitude of never pausing.
If, for example, you drive a car on a freeway here, you have to have a little mo chih chu. You mustn’t hesitate. It’s even more true driving a car in Rome, where these Italian drivers are fast but very subtle.
And they’re tremendously aware of each other—much more so than here. The worst drivers are in England, but in Rome there’s very fast-speed driving, but they’re instantly responsive. And you just have to go ahead and get into the traffic and go!
That’s the only safety there is. If you hesitate and fiddle around and so on, you’re done for. So this is the art of decapitation: with sudden, swift speed.
If what you’re going to do is wrong, do it well. As Luther put it: pecca fortiter. If you’re going to sin, make it a good one.
If you’re going to make a mistake, make it a good one. But don’t mimble-mamble and shuffle. As they say in Zen: “Walk or stand as you will.
But whatever you do, don’t wobble.” So that realization is about here. You know, we have the first one there. We’re about here now.
Now then, keep on going. When, in the Divine Comedy, Dante (accompanied by Virgil as his guide) explore hell, they pass through a gate which says “All hope abandon you who enter here.” You never, never can get out. That means you can’t retrace your steps.
There is a way out, however—but you have to go down to the bottom. And they finally come to the place where Satan himself is encased in ice, brooding over a huge, vast field of ice, and gnawing on Judas and Brutus and someone else—Cassius. The great traitors.
And there he is: utterly malignant. And every now and then his bat-like wings close together and open, close together and open. Now, those wings are the symbol of the active door.
The active door comes in all mythologies in some way or other, and it is the gate through which, in passing, you go through the critical moment of initiation. And to get through the active door you’ve got to go without hesitation. Because if you hesitate, you’re too late; it crushes you.
Jason, sailing the Argo, has to go through the Symplēgádes; the Clashing Rocks. Odysseus has to get between Scylla and Charybdis. In one of the Arthurian legends—is it Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?
I forget—but there’s somebody who has to charge his horse across the drawbridge and into the portcullis. And just as he gets in, the portcullis crashes down and takes off the rear end of his horse. He’s got in.
All sorts of stories like that. So the wings of the devil, going this way, this way, this way, they have to get quickly through those wings. And they climb down the devil’s back on this great, tough fur that he has.
Very heavy hair. Then, suddenly, they get a strange sensation that they are no longer climbing down, but climbing up. Because they’ve passed the midpoint of the Earth.
And then they come where they hear a stream flowing. And by following the sound of the stream they find the secret passage which leads them out again to the vision of the stars. So what it means—“all hope abandon ye who enter here”—is: you can’t go back.
You can only go on. And so in this thing, in this egocentric situation, once you’re an ego (or think you are) there is no way out but on. Now, you see what’s happened here?
The people who repented of being egos were trying to go back. And by trying very hard to go back, to relent, saying, “No, no, I should never have got into this,” they found they couldn’t go back and that they were phonies. The people who said, “We resign from being egos,” found they couldn’t resign.
And now we’re getting a little bit warmer, aren’t we? You found you couldn’t go back, and so you’ve got to play the ego game to the limit. And so comes the point where a person plays this to an extreme.
He may be in a very odd situation. He may play it by being a real criminal and end up in the penitentiary. But he’s going to end up in a situation which is symbolized by three great myths.
One is the myth of the tar baby, the other of giant sticky hair, and the other the crucifixion. We found the crucifixion again, didn’t we, when we went along this way. But, you know, the tar baby is… you get stuck to it whenever you touch it.
And giant sticky hair comes in the Jātaka tales about the Buddha. In one of his previous incarnations [he] attacked a [???] giant whose hair was sticky.
And everything that hit him got stuck. And this giant used to eat the people of a certain village. And the prince came there one day and heard about it, and said he would go and clobber the giant.
So he went for the giant and he struck him with his left hand and, it got stuck. He struck him with his right hand and that got stuck. He kicked him with his left foot—that got stuck.
Kicked him with his right foot and that got stuck. He then banged him with his head and that got stuck. And the giant said, “Aha!
Now I’m going to eat you.” And the prince said, “That’s all very well, but you will find if you eat me that inside my belly is a thunderbolt. And if you swallow that, it will blow to pieces.” So the giant released the prince and promised not to eat the villagers anymore. So when you follow your ego to the limit, you get stuck, you see?
You find you’re suddenly paralyzed in your effort to play against the world. But you realize that the reason for this is that, in fighting the world, you’re fighting yourself. You are like a person who picks up a dagger in each hand.
And the left hand says to the right, “I’ll take you on. Let’s fence.” You ever tried it? Fascinating!