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You know, policemen, soldiers, and people like that are always very rough; UGH. Because that role is expected of them. But when you carry seriousness to its full extent, you’ve got a cosmic jail.
And who is prisoner? Who is warder? Same fellow—but he doesn’t know it, because he won’t gamble.
And so, you see, the ultimate prisoner is the guard. Think of Nineteen Eighty-Four, think of the super-big brother sitting in his inner, inner sanctum: all the security systems outside, all the little television things to inspect what people are doing, checks on checks. Who is the prisoner?
See, the spider’s caught in its own web. He can’t goof off. Can’t even sleep, because somebody might creep in.
He can’t trust the most trusted guard. Always might be poisoned. And in, of course, this great electronic age when every kind of deviltry and snoopery becomes more and more subtle, just think of the possibilities of being the man who controls it all!
Now, this also implies that, in behaving with each other, in making the gamble, in playing the game of existence, there must also be rules. There is both order and randomness. But, you see, the difficulty is that our attitude to the rules of behavior is rather curious.
We tend, always, to derive our game rules from the past. We tend to be uninventive and uncreative in thinking about the rules of the human game, and refer back, say, to such an ancient Bronze-age document as the Ten Commandments. Now here was a set of game rules for a certain kind of society, but there’s somehow the idea, you see, that this set of rules is sacrosanct—or whatever other set of rules; it might be the laws of Manu or something in India.
But always the idea that there is a right way to live, which is somehow laid down like tram lines. And, you see, we have this idea also about the laws of nature. Although this is not the current (I would say) view of a physicist about the laws of nature, it is traditional in our culture to think of certain rules that have been laid down in advance which the universe obeys.
We talk about “obeying” natural law. And so human law is very often thought of on the same model—or vice versa, the law of nature on the model of human laws: that there is an authoritative law-giver, who is grandpa, and who says, “This is the way it’s going to be around here!” And you had better follow. Now, actually, it doesn’t seem that nature obeys laws, but rather that, when we watch nature behave and study the regularities in its behavior and write those regularities down and make notes of them, we find that those regularities can be gambled on.
They’re liable to go on again. And it’s only a kind of figure of speech that one talks, therefore, about the world itself obeying laws. The laws of nature—I mean, it’s like saying: because you’ve devised a clock, and it goes tick-tick regularly, you’re suddenly astounded to find that the Earth, in its rotations, is obeying the clock.
You see? It’s actually the clock (which is the law-thing) is obeying the world, if anything. But this is the law.
That’s why we alter our clocks for summertime. Instead of being sensible and getting up an hour earlier, we have to alter the law. So that we have authority for getting up earlier.
But, you see, the rules of human behavior are highly necessary, because we’ve got to agree about how we’re going to communicate with each other and deal with each other for exactly the same reason that we have to agree about the rules of language. Otherwise we just don’t understand each other. But do you suppose that the rules of language are fixed and unalterable?
We are changing them all the time. We’re constantly inventing new words, new forms of expression, getting rid of old ones. We’re very creative, especially in this county.
People are amazingly creative with language. Where I come from in England they’re not so creative because they’re more traditional, more conservative. But here there is a wonderfully creative language.
And so what happens is that the linguists and the people who make dictionaries, they observe how the people are in fact talking, and then they chronicle all that so that everybody is informed through the dictionaries of what rules are being used. Now, the same sort of thing must go with morals. Actually, human beings are always changing morals.
But there’s a terrific fight [that] constantly goes on between the people who say, “Well, let’s try it another way,” and the people who say, “No, no. Nope, nope. Nope.
You can’t get away with that. It’s against the will of god,” or something. But, you see, we have very little—although we change the language quite a bit, do you get— [ AUDIO END ] You don’t like that?
How about that? That better? Now what I want to talk to you about tonight is hidden belief systems—that is to say: what unexamined assumptions underlie our common sense?
Assumptions that are buried in the structure of our language, and thus in the structure of our thinking, which therefore are responsible for the way we think as we do, and for the fact that a great deal of our thinking is against nature and therefore causes an enormous amount of confusion. Let me begin by putting it in this way: when we try to translate what happens in the world (and also inside our own bodies) into language—whether it be the language of English or Chinese or Sanskrit or Greek or French, or whether it be the language of mathematics—what we’re trying to do is to represent what is going on in this world in terms of a series of symbols that are strung out in a line. One reason why it takes you so long to go through your education is that your eyes [have to scan along] miles and miles and miles of print.
[???] don’t know what you’re doing. Show me the steps.
And so you get a plane laid out which is one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. See? And so lots of us feel that we don’t understand anything until it is translated into language, not realizing that the translation of nature into language is a deprivation of the richness of nature.
Nature itself, the world itself, is far richer than anything we can say about it. And this is most of all apparent to people who are masters of language—who are, say, poets. And a poet is a person who is always trying to say what cannot be said, and therefore feels fascinated by the art of poetry, but at the same time frustrated by its impossibility, and therefore can never quite get the mot juste (the exactly right word, the exactly right phrase) for a living experience, but approximates to it, makes a good try at it.
But finally, it cannot be said. So to make things as clear as I can make them using language: the world as it is is not the same as the world as it is described. But what we study about in all our educational processes—what we are learning, what we are reading about—is the world as described, and we pay very little attention to the world as it is.
A professor at Harvard several years ago said, “No knowledge is intellectually respectable which cannot be put into words.” Alas for the department of music. Alas for the department of fine arts. Not to mention the department of physical education.
Because in all those disciplines we learn to do things which are nonverbal and which can only be understood by grasping them intuitively. A musician cannot explain in words how certain musical things are done. There is a notation for them, but even that doesn’t explain it adequately.
There is, beyond that, the interpretation of the notation, and that you have to understand from actually listening and from actually using the instrument. So there is this colossal disparity between the world as is and the world as described, because the world as is—from the point of view of the world as described—contains an unknown number of variables. What is a variable?
Well, let’s say we are playing a complicated fugue as composed by Bach. Each line of melody in the fugue is a variable. And a skillful organist, using two keyboards, both hands, and his feet as well, can keep perhaps as many as ten variables running at once.
Ten melodies all going at the same time—it’s very difficult to do! Because the average person cannot keep more than three variables going at the same time in his head without using a pencil. Three different simultaneous motions.
Now, in nature there are an unknown number of variables going together at the same time in every situation that we experience. And supposing I ask you, “What did you do yesterday?” and you give me a catalog of events strung out in a line, in a history: that will only be the barest skeleton of what you actually did and experienced. Because if a psychologist examined you, if a physiologist examined you, if a sociologist examined you, if a physiologist examined you, they would give very different histories of what you actually did.
And all of them would be right. But all of them would be wrong in the sense that they excluded certain aspects of what you did. So there is this radical difficulty of making our descriptions of the world equivalent to the world itself.
So, for example: to the extent that we are hung up on the descriptive language, we are hung up on the verbalized symbolization of what is going on, we have ideas of ourselves that bear no real relationship to ourselves whatsoever. We think of ourselves in terms of images of ourselves derived from the descriptions of ourselves that others have given to us. We have all been told by our elders and betters as well as by our peers who we are, what kind of people we are, what roles we play.
And we believe that. But, of course, it’s untrue. We are not who we think we are, because we think in terms of words, and words cannot comprehend the multidimensional complexity of nature.
In order to find out who you are you must, of course, suspend thinking and feel directly without asking, “What is it?” You feel what it is. And you will discover (if you make this very simple experiment) some very odd things. In other words, if you stop thinking and simply feel as if you were a child who had never yet learned to talk: feel.
Feel what is going on. You will be amazed to discover that you can feel no future and no past, you can’t feel anyone separate from the feeling that feels the feeling. All that appears to be not there at all.
There is just what, for want of a better word, we must call “this.” And when you feel that thoroughly and find out that there is no future—never was and never will be—your anxiety to survive begins to diminish. Why should you go on? What is the point of going on?
Everybody feels that it is a great thing to continue to be. Oh? Is that so necessary?
Because you’ll eventually die. Everyone now is as good as dead. Because that’s one thing that is certain: that we will die.
So we feel this colossal necessity that we must go on through future time. And if we can’t do it ourselves, we’ll produce children, who will produce children, who will produce children, who will always have this frantic necessity to go on and get somewhere. And nobody has any idea where that somewhere is.
Fantastic! Now, here I’m beginning to reveal at once a hidden belief system: the fundamental, commonsensical notion that almost everybody entertains that it is good to go on. When we get some basic reason for ethical behavior, and we get a gathering of people who cannot agree about religion, who cannot agree about the revered will of God and all that—you know, whether you should be monogamous or polygamous, et cetera, et cetera—they all seem to agree that those things are good in behavior which have survival value.
That is: those things which enable us to go on. And those things are bad which prevent us from going on. Now, I don’t want to challenge that opinion too emphatically, but I want to get you to think it over: what is so good about going on?
Obviously, merely to survive may be horrible. What we want to do, obviously, is to survive elegantly, to survive in a pleasurable manner. We don’t want to survive in jail or in a state of terminal cancer.
We want to survive pleasantly. And that introduces a funny qualification. But merely to go on—in the sense that while there is life there is hope—is sort of stupid.
T. S. Eliot said, “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.” And G. K. Chesterton replied, “You may go off with a whimper, but we will go off with a bang!” It might be glorious, you see, to die dramatically. When you’ve got a fire going, some people say, “Cherish that fire.
Keep it down to a dull roar, a glow, so that it will go on as long as possible.” You see? This is some anal-retentive, miserly attitude. Other people say, “Let’s have a glorious blaze!” And of course it will finish, but it will have been a great thing.
See, here’s a fundamental question about what lifestyle you’re going to choose: are you going to be a glorious blaze or a prolonged glow? Which are you going to be? And what rules will you establish for which is the better?
It seems to me very arbitrary matter of choice as to which you’re going to choose. Those people who are, in history, heroes, fighters—the heroic style is to be short and sweet, to do violent things that are very dangerous, to drive a hot rod and play games like chicken, you know, where you drive two cars straight at each other and the chicken is the one who yields first. I mean, that’s crazy, you know?
That’s real life. The nearer the bone, the sweeter the meat. And other people say, “Oh, that’s very immature.
That’s not true adulthood, to do things like that.” And who knows which of the two is right? So now I’m beginning to reveal an assumption that underlies our practical everyday conduct that we don’t ordinarily look at: whether it is better to draw out life in what we call a sensible way, make it as long as possible, or whether it wouldn’t be much better to make it as vivid as possible for a short time. Now, the whole medical profession is based on the idea that it should be drawn out as long as possible.
The function of a doctor is to save your life. And failure in doctoring is death. Fascinating!
I attended a conference several years ago of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, and the subject of the conference was “Failure in Psychotherapy.” And so they presented cases of failure. And the first case that came up was somebody who was about to commit suicide, and went to this therapist who presented the case, and stayed alive for five years and finally committed suicide. Now, I said: “Why do you regard this as failure?
If this were a cancer statistic, they regard five years’ survival as a cure. You kept this guy alive for five years. And, of course, at the end of it he died, because you have to die sometime.
But by what standards do you regard this as a failure?” Because, of course, for every psychotherapist, a patient who commits suicide is a bad mark. But he kept him alive for five years. All skill in getting out of trouble is postponing it.
Lawyers know this very well. If there’s a sticky case in court, the whole art is putting it off. And a lot of their clients don’t understand this, because they want to come to an immediate decision.
They’re anxious, you see, when there’s some case pending: “Let’s get it settled.” But a good lawyer says, “Let’s not get it settled. Let’s put it off as long as possible.” He’s clever like that, you see? Now we’ll go to another dimension of this problem of hidden assumptions.
Our language is so constructed that the basic logic of a sentence is that for every verb there must be a subject. And if the verb is transitive, there must be an object. In other words, an action represented by a verb word, such as “to know,” must have in front of it a noun—such as “I know,” “he knows,” “she knows,” “John knows,” “Mary knows.” If there’s a verb like “love:” “I love you.” Which is the whole basis of the doctrine of the holy trinity.
“I” is the Father, “love” is the holy spirit, and “you” is God the son. Now, how on Earth can an action—loving, knowing, running, moving—be started by a noun? What is a noun?
A noun is a word for a thing. I once asked a group of high school children, “What do you mean by a thing?” Well, they said, “It’s an object.” I said, “You’ve only given me a synonym. You haven’t told me really what a thing is.” And some bright child who was Italian in the group said, “A thing is a noun.” She was getting warm.
Let’s take “fist.” “Fist” is formally a noun. So we would say this is a thing. But what happens to it when I open my hand?
This thing—and all things are regarded as reasonably permanent—suddenly vanishes. Then I can return again. So clearly, “fist” should be a verb.
“I fist,” “I hand.” What happens to my lap when I stand up? This thing called a lap unaccountably vanishes and turns into thighs. So it is with every kind of event that we would call a thing.
I could talk of you—just as we talk of houses as “housing”—I could speak of you as “peopleing.” You’re all peopleing in different ways. But when I say you are peopleing, I’ve invented some mysterious entity which does this. Because our language requires that we put a subject in front of the verb.
Isn’t that amazing? And when I say, “Isn’t that amazing,” listen to what I’m saying. Amazing means to be in a maze; to be lost in a maze.
And so we are amazed—lost in a maze—by our language, and therefore don’t see what is perfectly self-evident and simple, which is in this case that a verb does not really require a subject. There are languages like the Nutka Indian language of the northwest—the Nutka Indians used to flourish somewhere around Seattle—where there are only verbs. No nouns in their language.
In Chinese the distinction between nouns and verbs is very vague. Mostly Westerners talk about Chinese nouns and Chinese verbs. But any Chinese character can do duty for both.
So do you see? You don’t actually have to think of actions or events or processes as being caused or set into motion by things. That is simply a rule of speech, it is not a law of nature.
Now then, let’s explore this a little further. Everybody assumes that it is basic that there’s such a thing as cause and effect. I mean, this is so much a fundamental assumption of our world that you seem to be an idiot if you call it in question.
But all good philosophy is calling in question our basic assumptions. The most thrilling works of philosophy are to take what you find out to be everything everybody agrees about, and then call it in question. Well, everybody agrees about cause and effect.
They say everything that happens is the effect of a cause, and everything that happens is the cause of some other effect. This is bullshit! Because actually, what we call a cause and what we call an effect are two ways of looking at one and the same event.
So let us suppose the sun shines and shines and shines, so that there is no rain. And we say: as the result of there being no rain, there is a drought. And as the result of there being a drought, there is no water to drink, the plants do not grow, and people and animals starve.
And that is the consequence of the drought and of there being no rain. Well, all that is nonsense. Because the lack of rain, the lack of water, and the starvation, are simply all the same event.
Only, they are separated into parts for purposes of description. Perpetual sunshine, no rain, drought, lack of water, lack of food, starvation—these are all names for different aspects of one and the same event. Only, when we separate that event into different parts and have forgotten that we did that in the first place, then we have to explain how they are connected.
And so we invent a mythological deity called causality in order to connect them together. There’s nothing of the kind! It’s all one event.
Supposing we say: well, I am the result of the fact that my father went to bed with my mother. That is ridiculous nonsense! You are the same as that.
You’re not the result of it. That introduces an element into thinking which is completely unnecessary. A man fertilizing a woman is a child.
It’s all one process. And then, if you think it back the other way, you cannot blame your father and mother for having produced you, since you are one event with their having done so. You were their lust for each other.
Fascinating when you think of it like that. Because you also contain that lust, and so you should be able to understand them and absolve them for any responsibility for having brought you into this world. You can’t say “I didn’t want to be born” if you yourself have sexual lust.
It’s all of a piece. Let’s go into some other buried commonsensicals. Oh, I think this time I’ll pick a real sticky one.
In our culture it is practically a definition of madness to suppose that you are God. If anybody gets up and says “I am God,” they are immediately consigned to a lunatic asylum. Because how can you possibly say that you are in charge of this universe?
Jesus—you know, our great culture hero—discovered that he was God, and there was an immense uproar, and they completely were bugged by this and had him put to death for blasphemy. Although his followers were convinced that it was the case (in the case of Jesus) that he was in fact God, but they mixed everybody up by saying only Jesus was God. And they became his followers, and they pedestalized him by putting him up into that peculiar position of preeminence, so that what he had found out was rendered null and void.
Lots of crazy people suddenly discover that they are God. And a certain flip occurs inside their consciousness, as a result of which they become aware—and they may not be very intelligent and sophisticated in expressing what they found out—but they find out that you are doing this universe. In other words, what you do and what is happening to you are the same process.
Well, any neurologist can explain this to you. It’s quite simple. Your nervous system has an output as well as an input, and the input and the output are really the same process.
Because of the structure of your nervous system, the sun is seen as light, vibrations in the air are heard as noise, and shapes are seen as shapes. If you had a different kind of nervous system, the world would look different. But your nervous system—by virtue of its structure—interprets whatever vibrations are going on out here.
So you, as a nervous system, are in fact creating the world that you see. At the same time, it appears that your nervous system is something in the world that you see. So which came the first?
Egg or hen? By virtue of being this particular neurological structure, you evoke the kind of world you’re looking at. Everything you see is inside your head—from a strictly neurological point of view.
Oh, but we say it isn’t. It’s out there. There is an objective world.
My God, if there isn’t an objective world we’re lost! Because our whole nineteenth-century, twentieth-century faith is that there is an objective world which is so, that it can be defined, that it can be scientifically described, and be settled that there is that objectively. And therefore, on the basis of objectivity there can be authorities who can say, “Bwaah, bwaah, bwaah, bwaah, bwaah, bwaah, this is the way it is!” [Whistles] Everybody says: crazy!
We want that authority! My goodness, what would we do without it? Somebody has to know what it’s all about!
But don’t you see? That is pure mythology! Everybody wanted something to hang on to.
Everybody wanted security. Everybody wanted to know just what it is. So we invented this immense and marvelous myth of objective reality.
But we suddenly discovered in the course of so doing that objects were objectionable. Especially when we made objects of ourselves, and we (through various kinds of psychology, behaviorism, and B. F. Skinner-ism, et cetera) found that we were pure objects; that our psychological processes were simply mental mechanisms. And (having discovered that) we started to hate ourselves because we were objectionable.
And so we have engaged on an enormous project to destroy ourselves. I mean, to disintegrate ourselves through physics: through the exploration of the nucleus, through the examination of matter, to such a point that we examine it so closely that it blows up. That is the project of physics.
Because we don’t understand this: that when we examine the world minutely, it’s like putting pins in it. It’s like cutting it to pieces. Chop, chop, chop chop!
Get it finer, finer, finer, finer. And then they just get it right down until the point where it goes kablooey! Or the other project, which is to get these telescopes and things, and watch the biggest things there are.
And the telescopes get bigger and bigger and bigger, and we find the world is running away from us. We thought we understood it at one point. We thought that we’d found out most of the stars and named them, and so on, and then suddenly we found out that the things that we call spiral nebulae were other galaxies at vast distances from our galaxy.
Well, we could take that. But then something turned up called quasars, and nobody’s at all sure what they are. And then, worse still, they found black holes in space!
And they said, “Wowee! what’s that?” See? The more you probe into it, the more it runs away from you.
Because it’s you looking at yourself. It’s like a snake chasing its own tail or a dog running after its tail. The more we explore into the atom, the more we explore into the exterior vastness, we’re really looking for ourselves.
We want to know what it is. And it—obviously, it, the universe—is you. But that’s a thing that’s closed to Western knowledge.
The whole thing is—in the West, the basic assumption of common sense is that it is not you. That you are something that confronts it, that encounters it, has something that you must master and conquer and understand. And you don’t see that it’s you.