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You know, be careful! But you can have this strange thing—and what happens is this: you meet a moment of total paralysis because each hand knows perfectly well what the other one’s going to do. It’s a stalemate.
So by following your ego to its most intense point you reach stalemate in the same way, because suddenly the left hand discovers what the right hand’s doing. And at that point, you see: ah, ah, ah, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. After all, I wasn’t a separate ego.
So, let’s have an intermission. It’s curious that in all the three approaches we’ve thus far discussed—the response of repentance, resignation, and rebellion—that there’s an element of desperation in each one of them. Each one is an expression of conflict: conflict between the human being sensing himself as a separate ego and the life situation in which he finds himself.
Now, remember that I pointed out that the situation of feeling yourself to be an ego is a kind of game. It is a pattern of life, a style of life, just in exactly the same way that a robin or an ant or a marigold is a style of life. It has a particular shape.
It goes this way or it goes that way, or whatever it is, you see? And so the human world in which we live out our egocentric adventures is a certain style of behavior, a certain kind of music. And so, also, are these three conflicting scenes.
The fourth way, though, that we bring up now, I call reincarnation simply because, for mnemonic reasons, I was giving four Rs instead of the usual three Rs. And I don’t mean reincarnation quite in the sense that it’s ordinarily understood. I mean getting with life.
And if this should by any chance involve reincarnation—that is to say, the willingness to be manifested in this world and all its adventures again and again and again and again—yes, you can take it in that sense. But, you know, this attitude in the religions of the world is extremely rare. Most religions are against life, practically speaking.
They turn back, as it were, to the Lord God and say, “You made a mistake.” Either in creating the world, or in allowing the snake in the garden. And what we really have to do is get out of it. The way of repentance says, “God you didn’t make the mistake, we did.
We’re terribly sorry, but we’ll try to do better next time. And we know we’ve offended most awfully against you. But I know you will still love us and we really will do our best if you will help.” The way of resignation tends to say not that there wasn’t some kind of original sin that man or an angel committed, but that the manifestation of the many out of the one is itself some kind of mistake in some way.
And this game—where, for example, all biological beings live by eating each other—is a bad show and we resign. If possible, we won’t eat anything that screams too loud when it’s killed. I asked R. H. Blyth—or my wife, I think, asked him—“Why are you a vegetarian?” R. H. Blyth is a great British Zen man.
And she said, “Don’t you realize that it also hurts the plants? To tear them up, and so on?” He said, “Yes, but they don’t scream.” But in the attitude of resignation, you see, there is still this conflict: spirit against matter, the sense of the dualism, of the soul incarcerated in the fleshly prison. In the attitude of rebellion there is still, even in a very critical way, expressed the sense of differentiation between the individual and the world.
And our modern technological civilization dedicated to the so-called conquest of nature is a preeminent expression of that spirit. But as I pointed out to you, if you push it far enough, if you rebel or oppose the universe with sufficient will and vigor, you eventually reach an impasse which is just like fencing with yourself. You have two knives crossed, see, and you are going to dig one of them—I mean, if you don’t want to do it so dangerously you can do it with knitting pins or even with chopsticks—and have a fencing match with yourself so that one hand tries to hit the other and the other to defend itself.
Well, you reach a stick point, because both hands know in advance what the other one’s going to do. And I use that as comparable to the situation which arises when you have opposed whatever it is that you want to oppose sufficiently enough to discover that everything you defined as “other” turns out to be the same as you. Or to put it more exactly: “I” and “not I” turn out to be two poles of the same process.
And it’s the process rather than the poles that really constitutes you. The last word in Metaphysics is—if you understand this, it’s the whole secret—there is an inside for every outside and an outside for every inside. They go together, you see?
When the inside moves, the outside moves. The movement of the inside is the same as the movement of the outside, and the movement of the outside is the same as the movement of the inside. When a globule of some kind changes its shape, this is the same thing as a change in the shape of the space that surrounds it.
Only, we are brought up to believe that space isn’t there and is an unimportant factor in the changes that go on among the solids in space. But this is why astronomers have such difficulty in communicating to the general public ideas that come under the heading of properties of space. Why?
Because to the average person space doesn’t have any properties. Space is just what isn’t there. But we know, now, that space isn’t nothing, that it has properties—only, that they are not yet clearly understood—and when space may be said to be curved, and by its curvature influence the way in which light is propagated, or when you can consider space as a magnetic field, you begin to realize that there’s something you’ve been ignoring all the time.
It was, for example, perfectly a matter of common sense to Dante (and probably many of his contemporaries) to regard space and mind as the same thing. If you read a book called Saving the Appearances by a Britisher whose name momentarily escapes me. [Owen Barfield] I think that’s it.
Saving the Appearances Anyway, that’s the title. He has the most marvelous discussion of changing common senses. How different it would be to live in a world where everybody realizes that space is the mind, rather than our present superstition that the mind is something inside your head.
When neurologists look for the soul somewhere in the brain, they can’t find it because they’re looking in the wrong place. The brain is in the soul. And the soul is not some kind of gaseous spook.
The soul is the total arrangement and system of relationships constituting the universe, as picked up and transmitted by a brain. The brain, in other words, is like a radio receiver, and it expresses in a highly complicated way the total configuration of all things that are. But in each brain it does it slightly differently.
So the soul—as you know, when astrologers drew a map of a person’s soul, cast his horoscope, they drew as nearly as they knew it a picture of the universe as focused upon the time and place of that individual’s birth. Well, that is—astrology, I think—is a highly unreliable science for practical affairs. But it did express in a kind of mythological image very beautifully the truth that everyone is the cosmos, centered in the place that you call here and now.
But, you see, when you don’t know that and you think that the external world is foreign to you instead of being, as it were, your better half—I mean, imagine that! It’s so. I know of one difficulty that people have in assimilating this idea is that what happens to me when I’m unconscious?
See, I go to sleep at night, and if I sleep soundly and don’t have any dreams I wake up at the same moment I went to sleep. You know, there just wasn’t any interval. Only, I feel different when I wake up.
I either have a hangover or I feel refreshed. But the interim just wasn’t there. And you think if it wasn’t there, then… but there was I, open to everybody else’s inspection while I was lying in bed.
Now, the same sort of situation bothers people about death. Because if you come to an end, and after death there is unconsciousness. But, you see, unconsciousness doesn’t last any time.
It may, from somebody else’s point of view. But actually, there is no such thing as experiencing being unconscious. But in the same way that you are unconscious of the way your, say, pituitary gland is functioning at this moment, or unconscious of the structure of small capillaries inside your body—and yet, they’re working even though you don’t know anything about it consciously—so in just exactly that way your extended body, namely the cosmos, goes on when you’re dead in the same way that your organic body goes on when you’re asleep.
And as, when you wake up, your organic body restores its particular local consciousness. So, after all of us die, the big organic body (which is the cosmos) waves lives somewhere else. And they are us.
By “us” I mean the real self, the total cosmos, appearing all over again and becoming conscious once more. And when it happens, do you know what it’ll feel like? It’ll feel exactly like it felt when you were born.
And whether you have, instead of eyes, long tentacles of some kind, or whether you have antenna on top of your head on non-head, whether you have a hundred legs or two, you will see yourself as a human being. After all, mice and cats look human to each other. They think we look very odd.
We are some kind of monster, because we’re a different species. But all species look human to each other, because what the word “human” really means is: the center place. Wherever anything looks out from is, from its point of view, the human place.
And you must also be very respectful to creatures, because although you may think that they’re not very cultured, they have a culture which is (from their standpoint) as refined as ours. They know—cats, for example—know that there are more and less refined cats. I’ve just been sitting on Henry Denison’s patio listening to a mockingbird.
And that thing has a tremendous culture. The things it can do with it voice! And there’s no apparent reason for all that.
It’s just sitting there on the TV antenna, enjoying the afternoon. It doesn’t seem to be a mating call; no mate comes around. It doesn’t seem to be threatening anybody.
It’s just happy. And it’s up there doing its stuff and making this gorgeously complex music. And it’s much more complex than we can hear.
There are things in the qualities of the voice, subtle tiny changes, that are perfectly fascinating. This creature is unencumbered with clothes. In other words, we judge people’s culture to such a large extent by their shopping.
I was talking about that this morning, you know? Why they go around and acquire things, and have them all around, and that’s the human way of showing off. But other creatures do it in a different way they would, from their point of view, criticize us as being messy, as having all these things we have to dangle on ourselves and put on jewels and things and whatnot, and they would say, “Well, that’s not… poor humans.
They have to do that because they have such ugly bodies. They look like potatoes underneath their skins. And we have all these lovely feathers, and the fish have such beautiful colors on them.
and they live in the water.” One of the most intelligent creatures on earth is the dolphin. And the dolphin—many, many thousands of years ago—was a land animal. But when it saw what human beings were doing and the direction a high intelligence was taking on land, they all decided to go back into the water.
Because in the water there is plenty of food. You don’t have to hunt too energetically. You’re never liable to run into a famine.
And you don’t have to be encumbered with houses and clothes, and so you don’t have to work. So dolphins spend most of their time playing. They like, for example, to pick up with a human ship.
And then the ship makes a wake, and so they set their tail at an exact angle of 26.5 degrees, or something, and the ship pushes them along. They can actually swim faster than the ship goes, but they don’t want to work. And they laugh.
They make circles around the ship. They do all sorts of things because that’s their way of life. And they’re very, very sensible people.
I’ve absolutely renounced eating dolphin because I feel it’s cannibalism. The dolphin, in other words, knows how to get with it. And, you see, this is the thing that these three religious approaches only find at the end of the line.
Now, is it possible that there could be a new kind of religious approach in which heaven says to earth, “I really do love you with no ifs and buts.” They say in Christianity: God so loved the world. But there’s always a “but” after it. But the world has fallen away from God and He loves it in the sense of a kindly but stern father who says, “This is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.” And as this sort of… I don’t know.
The whole attitude, you see, is one of schism, schizophrenia: division between the spirit and the material. Would it not be possible for there to be a real reconciliation in which the spiritual and the material make friends and can say to each other genuinely: “I love you with all my heart”? And, you see, this possibility emerges in the fourth way.
And this fourth way, historically, is largely characteristic of Mahayana Buddhism. Because whereas, in Theravada Buddhism, resignation is carried to its full limit, in Mahayana, what happens really is that, when resignation has been carried to its extreme and you find you can’t resign from the game—because you are the game, there’s no “you” to get out of it—then, you see, this tends to happen automatically. So that the kind of personality called the bodhisattva emerges.
That is to say, the one who doesn’t go off into nirvāṇa, but who comes back into the turmoil of everyday life out of compassion for all other beings, and helps them to be liberated. But when they get liberated, you see, they in turn become bodhisattvas. Because there’s always someone to liberate.
Because while with one hand reality is realizing what it is, with the other it’s forgetting. See? Like this.
And three for a penny, three for a pound, it’s love that makes the world go ’round. And that’s what happens. So this is constantly going on, just like you’re eating and yet excreting, in-breathing, out-breathing, coming and going.
Everybody is a whirlpool into which a great stream of milk and beer and beefsteaks and all sorts of things are flowing. And they swirl around like this and shoot out the other end. And that’s just like a whirlpool in water, you see?
So everything is like that, because existence is constituted by in and out. In alone doesn’t make any do. Out alone doesn’t make any do.
But in and out together, they make ado. And so, “much ado about nothing” is a Buddhist conception of the cosmos. And that’s marvelous, you see?
Because much ado will be better than nothing; nothing all by itself, you see? You can’t have nothing all by itself. You have to have something to have nothing.
And as soon as you get nothing, you’ve got something. They go together in the same way. So, in this point of view of, then, we are at peace in the middle of conflict.
This is really the point from which I started in saying that, from my point of view, there are no right religions and wrong religions. All of them are simply different, like different flowers. And one has certain preferences and tastes, one has one’s favorite flowers and the flowers one personally doesn’t like.
But the variety of them is necessary for every individual species. They all go together. Well, so in the same way, from this standpoint you get this odd view of the world as fulfilled and completed—not sometime in the future, but now.
Here. Today. With all the things in it that appear from various points of view to be faults, sicknesses, peculiarities, and horrors.
Now, I quoted this morning a kid in a college who said, “The thing I can’t stand about college is that it’s always preparing you for something to come. It never teaches you how to live now.” You know the poem called the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam—which is not really Omar, but FitzGerald. It’s an extremely free translation, but it carries the theme that we call carpe diem: seize the day.
Drink, eat, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And so, especially drink! Get roaring drunk because the future has nothing in it for you.
Actually, this poem is really mistranslated. You should read the translation by Winfield, which is quite a different matter. Omar Khayyam was a Sufi—that is to say, an Islamic mystic.
And the Sufis have to keep quiet about their doctrine. The central doctrine of Sufism is anal al haq. And that means “I am he.” The realization, “I am God.” And so they say, just as there is no deity but He, so there is no he-ity but He.
Well, many Sufis were tortured and slain because of the proclamation of the anal al haq. So they used hidden language to propagate their ideas. And in Sufi symbology wine is the divinity.
And to be drunk is to be enlightened, is to transcend oneself. And, of course, this imagery is likewise, in Christianity—that’s one of the meanings of holy communion: “Blood of Christ inebriate me” Is one of the sayings in the, I think, the divine praises. And so the whole meaning of the Rubáiyát is: get drunk today because there is no tomorrow.
Why is there no tomorrow? It is not because life is transient. Not because we fall apart.
We keep on falling apart. See? Once you’ve fallen apart, you fall apart again.
Everything is falling apart. It always has been. See?
I mean, life is a process of everything falling apart. That makes multiplicity; many things. But the reason to get drunk today, because tomorrow we die, is that there is no such thing as tomorrow.
There is only now. And if you don’t do it now you’ll never do it. Because now is the only time it can be done in.
So anybody who makes preparations for spiritual development and says, “Well, this is a tough and difficult road. And after many lives I shall finally attain,” you know what you’re doing? You’re playing games.
You’re postponing it. Because you don’t really want to wake up. It’s better to stay in the adventure; in the dream in playing the role that you aren’t you-know-who.
Now, you see how—in this way I’ve mentioned in talking about repentance—how you can play with guilt. And I raised the question, “What is the awful thing you’ve really done?” And I showed you how the confessor, if he’s a really smart confessor, will reject all the ordinary sins, all the murders and adulteries and all those things, and say, “Just small cheese. Just piddling menial sins.” But there is something awful.
Really awful that everybody’s done. What do you suppose it could be? Was it something I did in childhood and have forgotten?
No. Something you’re doing now but have forgotten. See?
Now, nobody can admit this sin, because if you admit having done it you’re immediately classified as insane. It’s to say, “Uh-oh! I see what happened.
I am the supreme Self playing it isn’t.” And the reason for having a guilt feeling here is to keep the game going. There is this prohibition: you mustn’t step beyond this mark. Don’t do that!
That’s the deepest taboo we have. This is part of a series of seminars on the future, and last weekend we were discussing the very nature of time. And I want to give a sort of summary of what we were talking about before going into this particular weekend’s discussion, which is the future of communication.
Last weekend we discussed the idea that history—the notion of human life as a kind of progressive system that is beginning from the old, the primitive, the worn out, the stupid, and going on progressively to greater and greater attainments, the wise, the good, the successful, and so on—that this is a very dangerous illusion. That, insofar as we feel we are participating in and improving human life through the course of history, we are actually destroying ourselves. Because everything that so far—through technology and through the accumulation of human skill—we call the increase of our powers is leading us to destruction.
Not because technology in itself is a bad thing, but because the spirit in which it is used is a spirit of man against the universe, man against nature. And man has to realize that he is an integral part of nature, that he is just as much a natural form as a seagull, or a wave, or a mountain. And if he doesn’t realize that he uses his technical powers to destroy his environment, to foul his own nest.
And so when you look at a great modern city like Los Angeles, and you see the absolute ruination of what used to be a very lovely natural scene full of citrus trees and sunshine, now turned into a smoggy slum. So the Los-Angelization instead of civilization of the world is a result of having a sense of our own existence which is contrary to the facts. That is to say, we’re all trained by our parents, by our teachers, by our peer groups to experience our own existence as an ego in a capsule of skin confronted by an external world which is not ourselves; definitely not!
And that this external world is something that really threatens us because we’ve been brought up to the idea that, basically, it’s a mechanism. It’s a stupid, unintelligent manifestation of energy, right out in the farthest galaxies; it’s nothing but fire and gas. Nearer to us it’s nothing but water and rock.
[Missing Portion] And it’s full of buzzing insects and other organisms that are inferior to the human status, and therefore something that’s not to be trusted at all. And we have been brought up to the idea that we come into this scene as if we were complete strangers to it. We’re born by an accident of bad rubber goods—or something like that—and we arrive in this and confront it—“kkrrx”, like that, you see?
It’s outside there. And this is a hallucination. All this is a complete fantasy.
Official people in psychiatry complain about the hallucinatory states induced by LSD and so on and so forth, but they are nothing—they are nothing!—in their hallucinations compared with the hallucination of being a skin-encapsulated ego. One is not that. For example—it’s very, very, very simple.
A human being exists by virtue of living in a world where there are plants, where there is air, where there is water, where there is sun and its temperature. And plants imply insects and grubs. They can’t live without them.
And grubs imply birds. And birds imply fish. And so on, and so on.
It all fits together so that you are patterns—every, every living organism is a pattern of something which is inseparable from the pattern of everything else that is going on. So that you could say you, as a living organism, are something that the whole universe is doing at the point of space and time which you call here and now. You’re not separate.
You flow into all that surrounds you in exactly the same way that your head goes with your feet. See, they’re inseparable. When you were born you weren’t put together like one constructs an automobile, screwing on this bit and screwing on that bit, and so on.
You beautifully grew, head and feet together, all of one piece from your mother’s womb. And in exactly the same way that your head and your feet are related together, so you gowith—I want to get this word into the English language: “gowith.” Instead of cause and effect, instead of that mechanical understanding of the world which was Descartes and Newton, they thought of the world as billiards, you know? You [click] hit a ball and it goes [click, click, click, click] and it hits that ball like that, you see?
And they thought of cause and effect. You don’t need to use that concept at all. Gowith, just as a front goeswith a back, just as a top goeswith a bottom, just as up goeswith down—they’re inseparable—so, in exactly that way, you gowith everything that you call the external world.
And therefore, you have to treat the external world as if it were as much you as your own foot or your own head. It’s part of you. It is you.
There’s no way of separating them. Therefore, you have to be very kind and reverent and respectful to the mountains, to the forests, and so on; to the water, to the fish. You, for example, live on fish, just as birds live on worms.
And if you kill any creature in order to live, you have a duty towards it. That is to say, you must not exterminate the species on which you live. People have—for example, in the whaling industry—they have practically exterminated whales, and it’s becoming a very serious situation because you must farm, cultivate, every species on which you feed.
If all worms were to be eaten by the birds, the birds would have no further sustenance. From the worm’s point of view, if all birds were to vanish, the worms would overpopulate themselves and starve themselves. So the worms depend on the birds just as much as the birds depend on the worms.
So we all depend on the whole interaction of the system of biology. It’s a mutual eating society. You may say that’s too bad—you know—that life has to involve this crunching and crushing and annihilation of other creatures.
But that’s the way it is. And therefore, if that’s the way it is, the way to do it properly is, number one: to farm instead of merely destroy. Be assured that the species you feed on is maintained, that it goes on.
Farm the whales, don’t just hunt them. That’s the first principle. The second principle is: whenever you destroy a living body for your own maintenance, give it the honor of cooking it as beautifully as possible.
A fish that has died for you and is not well cooked has died in vain—I’m quoting Lin Yutang. So this is the situation in which we find ourselves: life is a system in which organisms, by mutual eating, transform fish into people, grass into people, lettuce into people, cows into people—what about people? What are they transformed into?
We are proud—too proud—and we try to resist our transformation into some other forms of life, and therefore we have a wretched profession of morticians (otherwise known as undertakers) who try to embalm us, and preserve us, and put us in concrete and barriers instead of letting us simply join the biological rhythm. Actually, what should happen when a person is dead is that they should be buried three feet underground with no casket—nothing—just naked in the earth. And that field should be allowed to lie fallow for some years, and then it would be beautifully fertilized by human bodies, and crops would grow out of it.
They always say that the best wheat is grown on old battlefields. But, you see, we resist that. And the morticians will put an ad in with some girl who’s lost her husband, looking out of the window on a rainy day.