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We’d have to agree with each other. We’d have to say, “Well, hello everyone! You’re me.” Alright, now: we see our technology moving in this direction.
Inevitably. But insofar as it is doing this—insofar, in other words, as electronics is making everybody available to everybody else—what we’re doing is that we are discovering through technology a state of affairs which, in fact, has existed all the time. Look at it this way: the first thing that human beings created on this planet to communicate with distant points were roads.
Trails where people walked. With the coming of horses and the mastery of horses, the roads became, as it were, more clearly stamped—because of the hard hoof of the horse. But in the 19th century we began to go beyond roads because we discovered rails.
Then wires. And the world became a network. The economic world became a network of roads, rails, and wires.
But now the fascinating thing is: we are beginning to witness a disappearance of all those three methods of communication. The railways and the roads have gone to the airplane, and the wires have gone to radio and television, which require no wires to connect. And you will see that, as human beings become more technically efficient, that the scars of technology will disappear from the face of the Earth.
The moment that everybody has his personal hoppy-copter, there will be no more further need of the freeway. And the freeway will break up, and grass and moss will grow over it because nobody is traveling it, and it’ll disappear back into the landscape. Hooray.
What an awful thing it is. You know? The concrete octopus.
And these ridiculous automobiles in which we each travel around and make a nuisance of ourselves. But they will vanish because they simply are not technologically efficient. Now you say, “Well, the helicopter will take its place.” Alright.
Is that really necessary? Because, as a matter of fact, if we couple the science of television with the science of laser beams, we can get a three-dimensional image of anybody we’d like to see right here in this room. In other words, you can contact your friends in New York, and you can assemble them all together in laser beam images by, as it were, dialing each one and say, “Can you come on?” “Can you come on?” “Can you come on?” Then we can have a laser beam-created three-dimensional image of anybody you want to talk to, sitting right in this room.
Now, there may be some limitations to what you can do with a laser beam image of somebody else. But to all intents and purposes, there they are, sitting together. And you understand that each one of them, in their own room—in New York, or Boston, or wherever—they have an equivalent laser beam image of you and all the others who are involved in this conference.
So you’re looking at a certain area in a room where there are three-dimensional images of a group of your friends. And these three-dimensional images exist in the separate apartments of every single one of those people involved in the conference, so that the same conference is happening in five different places. Let’s say there are five people involved.
In each one of them, there’s one of them there who thinks he’s authentic. See? And he has these five laser beam images—four—talking to him.
And so it is in every other situation. And you begin to ask, then, “Where are you?” And, furthermore, by means of further electronic technology, every one of these five people are not only visible to each other in the cubic screen of the laser beam television, but also their inmost thoughts are clear to each other. There is no concealment.
Imagine that. So this kind of mutual knowledge of each other, which we could have by some sort of technology, would be wonderful. Really.
If we would accept it. It would go on from this that, just as the roads have disappeared—or will disappear—and the wires have disappeared, eventually, the electronic gadgetry will disappear. And the electronic network that communicates from person to person will eventually become ESP, or psionic.
We will get it from each other without any need for an electrical gadget. By telepathy. Because, you see, what all technology is doing: it’s not creating a new situation, it is discovering what has always existed.
When we started to use conscious attention as our main faculty of understanding the world and communicating with each other, we became ignorant of all the other methods of communication that exist. Because we specialized on one. And in order to function in this world, we had to make this one method of experiencing things find out all the channels of communication that exist.
And explain them, and talk about them, and measure them, so that we know they are really there. But as it goes on, you see—this conscious attention creating technological devices for communication—all it is actually doing: it is discovering the routes of communication that have always been there. Now, I want to take this a step further.
Do you understand this now? Let’s suppose we eventually discover that we don’t need radio and that we don’t need television because we have ESP, and that we come through our technology to make ESP respectable, so that we can admit to ourselves that there really is that thing going on. Because we couldn’t admit it before, because it was not scientifically acceptable that there could be anything like that.
The first step is we make an electronic model of ESP. And it works. Obviously, because it’s electronic.
But then we discover that we don’t need the model. We can do it anyhow. Just like homing pigeons have radar built into them, and whitethroat birds can navigate by the stars.
How much more value are you than many sparrows? You know? You have it.
So we discover that. Well, when we have finally no need to travel, to telephone, to communicate by any technical method whatsoever because we all instantly read each other’s thoughts and have all information whatsoever available to us, is that the point? Is that the great desideratum?
Is that what we want, the thing we were trying to get? You find there’s still something beyond that. Because when you can read every body else’s thoughts, what information will you get from doing that?
You will find that reading somebody else is just like reading you. Knowing somebody else’s mind is pretty much like reading your own mind. Yeah, there are some little variations that are of interest.
But basically, to know you thoroughly would be like knowing me thoroughly. So not only have the roads vanished, the rails vanished, the wires vanished, the radio has vanished, the television has vanished, but finally, the ESP vanishes as a line of communication. Because we’ve at last discovered that we are all one.
And so, in a way, there is no further need to communicate because we are in total communion. When we communicate, what are we really communicating about? What is the content of communication?
Because, you see, McLuhan has come up with a very strange idea: that the medium itself is the message. Or, putting it in a punny way to make it clearer: the medium is the massage. Not so much, therefore, finally, the content of what is being said is the thing you’re getting over, but what you’re getting over is the way of saying it.
So we have to go into what it is, finally, that we are communicating about when we communicate. What do we want to tell our friends, our other people, our other selves? Now, I had a great deal of trouble really sympathizing with McLuhan’s point of view, especially in what he has to say about television, where he feels that the medium of television is highly participative and that the mosaic technique of bringing the image across onto the television screen is something entirely different, say, from a film or from a painting.
He expresses the notion that television is more tactile than visual, and therefore it involves you as the sense of touch involves you, you see, because touch is the fundamental sense. All the five senses are specializations of the sense of touch. So when you see, you’re touching light.
When you hear, you’re touching air. And when you taste and smell—especially in smell—you’re touching gas; the quality of gas. And finally, with your fingers you have—in a way, the most primitive sense; the sense that is least acute in its differentiations—but nevertheless, you see, all of them are forms of touch.
And so you could say—as the Buddhists say—there is one sense behind all our senses. They have a sixth sense. For example, they use the word vijñāna, which means “consciousness.” And they have “nose consciousness,” “eye consciousness,” “ear consciousness,” “touch consciousness,” “taste consciousness.” Five.
But behind that they have manavijñāna, which means “mind consciousness”—that is to say, the unifying of the senses so that you will put together the sight of fish and the smell of fish and be able to integrate them and say, “Well, this is a single experience. The fish looks so and smells so. Touch is so.” And so, by the integration of the senses all being forms of touch, you can, of course, eventually come to a state of consciousness where you can hear colors and see sounds if you are very, very sensitive indeed.
So you might say, then, that all communication is information. But I want to show you that straight information is not the final thing we’re trying to communicate. You see, we live, now, in a culture where there is great disagreement about the values of life.
What do we live for? There is no consensus. Because all the religions—which, you know, where the philosophy is which gave us what life is supposed to be all about—they’re all fragmented.
And so, being no common religion, there is no common view as to what life is about. In default of that common view there is—especially in the academic world, where people think out ethical and political problems—a tacit agreement that the highest value we have that we can all agree upon is survival value. And therefore, naturally, when we communicate messages which have to do with survival (i.e.
where to find the food, where to avoid the enemy) then one says we are communicating about essentials. During the war—World War II—a friend of mine was in the office of the president of Northwestern University, and he had a number of watercolors around his office. And he said to this friend of mine, “Well, now that we’re at war”—waving his hand at the paintings— “all this is irrelevant.” We come down to essentials.
Is this trip really necessary? Is this trip really necessary? In other words, what do you mean when you say, “Is this trip really necessary?” When you say “essentials,” priority is given to essential industries in war.
They are the industries of survival. Because we got it into our common sense—even though we may not have intended to do this—but it is fundamentally established in our common sense that survival is the thing that is good. While there is life there is hope.
And this, of course, is a really asinine point of view, because it is not. Survival—just going on—that we want. Yes, we want survival, but survival in a certain way.
That is to say, in a certain style. And you will therefore see that, in the end, that while there is always a survival content in communication (so far as that communication is information), what is finally more valued about communication than this survival value information is the style in which it’s given. It’s just in the same way as lovemaking.
Finally, when it comes down to it, what do you want to say to the person? I love you. What are you going to communicate?
An engineer would say when you say “I love you” it means that we’re going to do reproduction, and therefore continue the race. But that’s not the point at all! It’s obvious that it’s not.
What are children for? Just to continue? No.
They’re to be loved. And how do you love things? You stroke them.
You give them a massage. If it moves, fondle it! And so it is, finally—what you are communicating to someone you love is a rhythm.
Whether it’s the rhythm of sexual intercourse or whether it’s the rhythm of dancing or whether it’s the rhythm of verbal play—as in telling a story or in singing a song—what you’re communicating is a sort of caressing rhythm which says to you, “I’m so glad you’re here and that you can receive my communication.” Which is about nothing. Only to say, “In this way of a dancing with you, I love you.” And that’s really what it’s all about. So then, you see, the Buddhists call that factor of communication “suchness.” For example, when we talk, you understand my words because each word that I use has a meaning.
And so the words that I use refer to something other than themselves. So I use these symbols and you get what I’m talking about. Now listen carefully.
What does that mean? That I communicate meaning to you by words is a situation. Now, what’s the meaning of that situation?
And you meditate a little bit on that and you discover that it has no meaning at all. A cloud has no meaning because it isn’t a symbol. It’s what we call the thing.
The word “cloud,” the sound “c-l-o-u-d” means that. But what does that mean? You see, it’s not a word.
So it doesn’t mean anything. A cloud is jazz. It’s part of the dance of the universe.
And so, likewise, when I make sense to you and you say it makes sense to me, we have a kind of interlocking that would correspond, perhaps, to a spider’s web where various rings of thread are joined to rings of thread inside rings of thread. It’s joined together. So we join together by talking, see?
We play together by talking. But what that all means is: some kind of jazz. And that’s suchness.
In the practice of meditation the most important thing is to get down to suchness in everything that goes on. A great Japanese Zen master, when he was about to die, wrote a poem which said “From the bathtub to the bathtub I have uttered stuff and nonsense.” In other words, the bathtub in which the baby is washed at birth and the bathtub in which the corpse is washed before burial. Alpha to omega, maternity ward to crematorium.
“All this time,” he said, “I’ve talked only nonsense.” And this is part of the whole thing of Zen: to be able to hear all voices, all communications, all gestures, all shapes, all sensations whatsoever in their fundamental form as lalling. When the baby starts to talk in the beginning, it speaks what [???] called the natural language.
And he says that man, at his fall—talking about the fall of Adam—lost the natural language. And the natural language is understood by birds and beasts, because they speak it. Because a lot of what birds say is not communicative in our ordinary sense of delivering information.
Some of it delivers information, but a great deal of what they say doesn’t deliver any communication, it is just playing with sound. And a great deal of what we do is playing with sound. I’m particularly aware of this as a philosopher, because a lot of people will be very critical of what I say and say, “You don’t really make any sense at all.
You sound as if you do, but you beguile and hoodwink the public into thinking that you have got something important to say, and all you’re doing is making noises!” And I say, “Granted, that’s absolutely true. But if I make interesting noises and manage to make a play of ideas that is in some way musical, see? Fascinating.
People say, ‘Well…’.” It’s the same sort of thing that we enjoy out of looking at a mountain or watching waves or the flight of birds. Because it’s this dance. You may remember that, this morning, I described the situation as follows: I’m talking to you, and you understand what my words mean.
Situation A. Situation B is: taking situation A as a whole—my talking to you and you understanding what I mean—what does that situation mean? And we find it doesn’t mean anything.
This could be a way—when we say something is meaningless it’s a way of putting it down. But on the other hand, when you consider a mountain or a cloud or a tree and ask, “What does it mean?” and you realize it’s not a word, it’s simply an authentic existence in its own right. It doesn’t mean anything, but it’s great.
And so, in this way, the nearest thing in that kind of achievement that nature does all the time in human activities is music. Once, when Gustav Holst was giving a lecture on music, he started out this way: he said, “Music is a natural and universal language.” He took a step backwards and said, “That’s so important I’m going to say it again. Music is a natural and universal language.” But nobody knows what it’s about.
Sometimes we say music represents emotions. But a great deal of music, although it has a very strong feeling quality, does not represent specific emotions. Inferior music copies natural noises: the sound of water, the thunder of the hooves of horses, or (in that dreadful composition, the 1812 Overture of Tchaikovsky) you hear Napoleon’s armies retreating from Moscow.
Or in some of the bad work of Debussy. Like La Cathédrale engloutie makes noises like bells tolling from under the water. But our very great musicians of the West—Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, and so on—they don’t do anything with the music except create elaborate patterns of sound.
Bach is very mathematical and yet, curiously, despite his tremendously developed intellect, the music has a very strong feeling quality; joyous and exuberant. But it’s all pure play with sound. And therefore, one might say the communication that you make with music is, in a curious way, the most important kind of communication you can make—even though you’re saying nothing.
The music delivers no information. But what a form of communication! And so it is also with dancing with somebody: all you are saying with dancing is, “I love you”—if you’re delivering any message at all.
“I want to play with you.” “All I really want to do is, baby, be friends with you!” What does it mean? What is the content of friendship? You can’t say.
What is the content of love? I want to screw you? That’s sort of part of it.
It’s incidental. It’s a way of saying very strongly, “Yes, I do want to be with you.” But basically, love is something we can’t put our finger on at all. We use such words as warmth, tenderness.
All these things—they don’t really get to the point. When you are loving somebody, you are simply delighting in that person as such. As if another human organism—in its mental and its physical aspects—were a piece of music or a work of art or a glorious morning; that you were just enjoying every inch of it.
And you go over another person’s physical form, and look at it from every possible point of view, and play with it and tickle it. And that’s what it’s about. It’s the adoration of the form of a human being.
And you do that adoring in terms of physical contacts that are, say, dancing with your fingers across the skin, or whatever it may be. But this is the nitty-gritty, the nub, of love. It is not that I, here and now, solemnly undertake to support you for the rest of your life.
That’s a delusion of the West. You think you don’t really love me unless you’ll sign on the dotted line here give me this contract, and then I know I can rely on you always. What did you want it for?
Why did you want the contract? Just to be fed indefinitely? Just to be supported indefinitely?
What a bore! One wants something much more than that. You want to be played with indefinitely.
That’s more like it. To have this vibrancy going through you. And this, then, is why music—of all the arts—is the most meaningless art.
After all, music is a major industry in the United States. The money invested in orchestras, in operas, in the recording business is fantastic. It’s—horse racing is a very great industry, but music, I think, probably absorbs more millions than horse racing.
And you could make a case that this was a complete dissipation. It solves no useful purpose, it doesn’t help anyone to survive, it is a noise; meaningless noise, endless meaningless noise going down the drain. And all these energies of orchestras, or all the power of electronics that delivers this, is total waste!
And people get hooked on it. They get the thing called chorditis, which is addiction to harmonics. And they have to have this repeated day after day.
Some people get up in the morning and they can’t function until they’ve had cup of coffee. But many more people get up in the morning and can’t function until they turned on the radio and got some music. And what would you say, then, of a culture which took this standpoint: music not allowed.
Music is a diversion from reality. You know, that kind of awful, utilitarian attitude—but really, one of the basic things, you see, that we live for. What makes it worth surviving and going on is there can be such a thing as music, there can be dancing.
In other words, that we can do things that are absolutely irrelevant so far as mere survival is concerned. Now, we have the proverb that “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Dull for work. And people who play—justifying their play by making it a means to that end—those people never play.
Because you don’t really play until you get so absorbed in the music—or the dancing, or the whatever you’re making; the part of doing, the calligraphy—until you get so absorbed in that there is no reason for it other than what you’re doing. The sheer delight of that. Then—because you are absorbed in something for which there is no ulterior motive, and which is pure play—this, by way of a byproduct, produces sanity.
In other words, if you play in order to be healthy, in order to be sane, you’re not playing. But if you play just to play, then, as a byproduct, as something you couldn’t aim at directly, you are sane. And so a culture which allows for this, which allows for this sort of goofing, is a healthy culture.
This is not the culture that we live in, because it is extremely anxious about play. Everybody, when they play, they have to find an excuse for it. They say, “Well, this is culture.” You try and persuade the city of San Francisco to support its opera.
What sort of propaganda do you have to use? You can’t say, “We should have a good opera house because we just like going to be opera.” You say, “This improves the city’s image.” After all, they have it in New York. And that is because we do not allow ourselves the idea that life is not serious.
Because somehow we feel if you aren’t engaged in something serious you’re a loafer. You’re not contributing to the social welfare. And so, in this way, the artist has a peculiar role in this society.
Very, very interesting. Because the artist is a very deceptive fellow. He appears to be the supreme luxury, the irrelevant fellow.
You can afford an artist, you can afford to buy paintings, if you have surplus money. That’s a luxury. So you can support an artist, and we call it “fine arts.” The completely useless person who makes paintings—which are sort of big labels or posters that you stick on your utilitarian walls to decorate them.
But on the other hand, the artist is the man who shows you the future long before everybody else sees it. The artist is the eye opener. Just because the artist is distinct in role from the preacher and the philosopher, the artist can get away with all sorts of things.
For example, in our culture, if you’re a university professor, a doctor, or a minister—these three professions: teacher, doctor, minister—you have to be very careful about your private life. Because the moment you have any alliances that are not quite regular, people’s tongues begin to wag. And why do they wag?
Because they say, “The way you behave is inconsistent with your profession, with what you profess. You are teaching people the good life, the healthy life. And you live in this disreputable way.
You have a mistress. You have something or other going on.” But the moment an artist should take a mistress, this is what is expected of him. Everybody says, “Oh, he’s an artist.” In other words: he doesn’t matter.
He’s irrelevant. He is an entertainer; some sort of clown. But on the other hand, if you belong to a high culture, you patronize artists.
See? So the role of the artist is very fascinating. Because he appears to be the clown, the jester, the absolutely unimportant and irrelevant person.
And yet, it’s actually through the artist that we learn how to live. Not through the preacher, not through the philosopher, not through the professor. It is the artist who teaches us, whether he does it visually with painting or sculpture, tactually, or whether, above all, in music.
So a man like Mozart, who could well claim to be the greatest man in European history, was a kind of a gay, happy-go-lucky fellow. With problems—money, illness, et cetera. But what a songbird, what a nightingale!
And so, then, to this day, listening to Mozart—as, in England, the Glyndebourne opera—this is about the farthest-out fashionable aristocratic thing you can do, to go to this lovely country house in Sussex and hear the Mozart operas. It’s as much a matter of status as going to church. Almost more so.
You should read—if you can get hold of it—an interview with George Harrison, one of the Beatles, in a recent issue of the East Village Other where he explains the deep philosophy of music that they understand and follow. How the the very nature of sound reveals the meaning of the world and why, because of this, he regards himself as a Hindu. In Hinduism, the fundamental source of life is called vāḍ.