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Here we’re getting to the root of the matter: the basic hidden belief system that “I came into this world.” You didn’t. You came out of it. You are an expression of it.
You are an aperture through which the universe is examining itself. Just as you have ever so many nerve endings in your retina which (by their multiplicity) see an image, so we are all nerve endings of a cosmos which, by the multiplicity, takes a not-too-prejudiced view of what’s going on. Because the cosmos is feeling itself.
Don’t you like to feel yourself? So every child, little babies, start out by feeling themselves. They pick their noses, they pull faces, they pull out their ears, they play with their toes, they explore their whole body.
And as they grow up they do it in a more sophisticated way. They study physics and chemistry and athletics and one thing and another, but it’s all the same thing. It’s feeling out who you are!
Now, what’s the point of going into all this? I have a sensation that if we don’t know what we’re doing, if we don’t have this sense of the world outside us is the same as the world inside us—in other words, if you don’t realize that what you do and what happens to you are the same process—you get crazy, because you go on a rampage against what you call the objective world, the external world, other people, other things, and so have projects with a conquest of nature, the conquest of space, and so on and so on. There is no longer that fundamental friendly relationship between the subject and the object.
If you don’t have that fundamental friendly relationship between the subject and the object, and then you go on to develop an extremely powerful technology, what that technology does is to magnify, turn up the volume, on the state of mind in which you are. So that baby hostility becomes colossal hostility. It becomes bong bumm-bum bumm bumm, bong bumm-bum bumm bumm, haa laa-la-laaa tumm, bong!
You know, with the atomic bomb on the end of it. And none of us really want that to happen—unless you are in a finally suicidal mood and you’re fed up with it. Then you can go out with a glorious explosion.
But I don’t think most of us really feel that way. We feel more confused than that. So it’s important—as I see it—to penetrate and realize the absurdity of this fundamental assumption that I confront an external world which is different from me.
You are what you see. And, more than that, do you realize—ever thought about space? Every child thinks about space.
It’s one of the fascinating things that intrigues children is: how far out does it go? And they pester their parents with questions about how far it goes. And the parents finally say, “Oh, shut up and suck your lollipop!” The child wants to go on and on and on, imagining the vastness of space.
What do you think about that? What is space? Well, we can say it’s extension, distance.
But all of this is nothing at all. That doesn’t tell us anything about space. What is space?
Certainly it isn’t air. You know, there’s space between my hands, but between my thumb and my little finger there is space, and between this part of my palm and that part of my palm there is space. This solid cannot exist without space.
But we think we know what a solid is, but we can’t really think what space is. Space. Could there be anything without space?
No. Obviously. But space is nothing.
But what fantastic importance this nothing has. Without it, no form is possible. And it goes on forever.
And yet, how big is forever? It could be very small. Because it really has no size.
Isn’t it clear that what you call space is yourself? That’s your real mind, your true nature: infinite space. That’s you.
Oh yes, maybe focused inside your head somewhere—but really and truly you are space. That was obvious to many cultures. It isn’t obvious to ours, because we think of ourselves as solids inside space.
We think of, you know, this head as being a thing, and of all space outside it. Let’s take a new look at your head. Can you see your head?
What color is it? Oh yes, you say it’s cheating to look in a mirror. That only shows you the outside.
Let’s be simple, childlike, and take a look at our heads. You all have heads but I don’t. I can’t find my head anywhere.
I don’t find behind my eyes a black spot, I don’t find a vague spot. All I can find behind my eyes, inside, is everything that’s outside. Because I know very well that everything I see out there is a sensation in my optical nerves.
So I have a blind spot where there should be a head. And, in other words, my head and infinite space are the same. And the skull—as in many ancient mythologies and symbolisms—represents the firmament of heaven.
Alright. Now, what I’m saying is this (and I have only been able to enter into a few aspects of the question), which is: call in question your fundamental assumptions about who you are, what reality is, what is the good life, where you are going, whether it is a good thing to survive. Question them.
See what would happen if their opposites were true. That is the task of philosophy. And if you do that, you will find that you have a far richer and more exciting life than if you don’t do it.
And I assume that I’m talking to an audience that is educated, that is academic in a way. Most of you are either students in a college or graduates of college. And the fertility of the intellectual life depends upon this kind of questioning.
And then, beyond it, when we go to this questioning, we go on to something else, which is what the Orient calls meditation: the ultimate inquiry. The observation or contemplation of reality without verbalizing it. Looking directly at it—as they say in Zen Buddhism: tasting water and knowing for yourself that it is cold or wet or whatever.
This, to me, is the foundation of sanity: to be able to regard what is—I won’t even say “the world,” because that is a loaded word. Just simply what is. Whether inside or outside, to regard what is.
Touch it, feel it, smell it directly without classifying it. See, now I could say to you: become again as children. Feel it as it is and forget for a moment all your opinions about it.
You can check those at the door, and you can always pick them up again when you go out if you feel you need them. But for this moment forget everything you think you know about life. All your philosophical ideas, all your religious ideas.
Forget them. Just lay them aside, and let’s naïvely—as if we were a bunch of babies—feel what’s going on. Where’s your ego?
Where’s your role? Where’s your death? Where’s your birth?
Where are your problems? Where’s your neurosis? Well, that’s the art of meditation.
You know, simply see what is. Where did all those great questions go? Poof!
Well, now there’s going to be an intermission for about five minutes in case any of you have to leave, and then we will gather together again, and I will attempt to answer such questions as you may have. Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you will resume your seats, we can continue. So then, if you have questions, wave your hand at me and I’ll recognize you.
Yes, sir? My motive and I are the same thing. If you ask me what is my motive, you are looking at life by analogy with a game of billiards: what cue hit your ball?
I look at it backwards. I look at it as the ball moving the cue. Because life begins from the present, not from the past.
The past is the wake of the present, like the wake of a ship in the water. So when you ask what is my motive, it is like a child asking: why? Why does this happen?
Why does that happen? And eventually the child tires out the person answering the questions. Because the question “Why?” always leads to a point of evaporation.
It may be more useful to ask: how does something happen? How is it done? How do you do it?
And sometimes somebody can explain how it is done. But when you ask why, the question ultimately goes back to: why does the universe exist? And of course nobody knows.
What could it exist for? We say, well, really, it exists for itself. When you get into a state of cosmic consciousness, you see very clearly that the point of existence is now.
I mean, us, sitting here at this moment, is what it’s all about. So what my motivation is—I mean, I could construct a fiction and explain my motivations to you, but that would be cheating you. There was another hand waving in your neighborhood.
Yes, sir? The question is: what do I think of Marxist utopianism? And sense of social liberation.
Well, I don’t think we can make a successful experiment of that kind until we have a changed sense of our own identity. If you force the Marxist experiment upon people, it will be forcing a communal style of life upon people who are not ready for it, and therefore there will be something strained and false about it. I’m very interested to see what’s going on in China, and as soon as I can get over there and explore what’s happening, I’d be most interested.
Although my spies have reported various things to me which I don’t altogether like, and some of them I do like. They still know how to cook. But I equally don’t like what we’re doing here.
You know, a Republican government is, in the United States, supposed to represent the individual, the small businessman. But it does nothing of the kind. And nor does the Democratic government.
They’re both the same. This is no way of choosing between them, except which group of gangsters you’re going to put in power. I don’t know how it is in Canada, but that’s what it is below the border.
I’m, in a way, an anarchist—in the sense of the philosophical anarchist, not the bomb-throwing anarchist, but the Prince Kropotkin style of anarchist, who would like to leave things pretty well alone so they sort themselves out. All society depends on our trusting each other. Now we’re all untrustworthy.
But there is no alternative than trusting each other, even though our trust may be misplaced. We must make that gamble. Because the only alternative to trusting each other is a police state—and who trusts the policemen?
Do they have our best interests at heart? All governments become self-serving corporations with their interests at heart. So face it in a hard-boiled realistic way: we’ve got to trust each other.
And there is no way of going on unless we do that. Yes, I see an arm waving here. This is a question which I get quite often.
I’m going to repeat the question. Can you hear me? I’ll repeat closer.
Now maybe this is better. Can you hear? This is a very urgent question nowadays which I often get: do I feel that something very special is happening today?
That there is a fundamental change in human civilization going on, or is it just a matter of—as the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing? There can be no doubt that the twentieth century is a unique historical period where things are going on that have never gone on before—whether for good or for ill, we don’t know. But the face of the Earth and of human civilization has within the last hundred years undergone catastrophic—or if you want to say anastrophic—change.
No question about that. But I think for myself that we should be cautious about all this New Age idealism—the Aquarian Age, and all that sort of thing. Because it is looking to the future for solutions—and there is no future, there is only now.
The future is an abstraction. It is memory projected ahead. And prophecy is the contamination of the future with the past.
Live now! Be completely aware now of what is. And if you do that, tomorrow will take care of itself.
For as Jesus says, “Sufficient to the day is the trouble thereof. Be not anxious for tomorrow; what you will eat, what you will drink, or with what you shall be clothed.” And I noticed that ministers never preach on that text, because they say that’s impractical. It was alright for the boss’s son, because he knew he was God anyway and there was nothing to worry about.
But don’t you know that? You see, the Gospel of Jesus is that you are all the son of God. That’s the “good news.” As ordinarily interpreted, I don’t see that the Gospel is good news at all.
It’s very bad news. Because it’s the institutionalization of the sense of guilt: the guiltier you feel, the better you are in failing to come up to the example of Jesus. But the real Gospel is dynamite!
And so it is this realization of the eternal present. Now, let me see. The next question—yes, the lady in front, here.
Yeah, this is very amusing. The question is that if you really go into experiencing the eternal now, your psychiatric friends will call you catatonic, withdrawn, and all that kind of thing. And you must realize that institutional psychiatry—as distinct from certain individual psychiatrists, who are rather different—institutional psychiatry is the enforcement and guardianship of standard reality.
Now, you know, if you’re in a funny state of consciousness—supposing you’ve taken LSD or something—the attending psychiatrist will ask you such questions as, “what is the sum of nine and seven?” You know? So that you know that. Because they see the world as real in terms of seeing the world on a bleak Monday morning, and also in terms of whether you are functionally able to drive a car.
Now, this is an aside on your question, but I have to mention this, because driving a car has become the criterion of competence. Whereas anybody who is deeply in love should not drive a car, anybody who is angry should not drive a car, anybody who is depressed should not drive a car, because you are in a very human condition. And most people are in this sort of condition.
To drive a car properly you should be as sober as an airline pilot. And you know how these airline pilots are: they look the absolute model of sobriety. They’re usually a little graying at the hair.
Their uniforms, they look like, you know, the guy who’s really in charge. The airlines establish this model, but few of us human beings can keep that up indefinitely every day. And a jet pilot doesn’t have to fly a plane every day.
They give them periods off where they can make fun with the hostesses or whatever they do. But we are completely dominated by the industrial ideal of driving a car. It’s a very dangerous instrument.
And we have to do this because we have such terrible public transportation that we have to drive our cars to work every day. Now, that’s an insane thing to do. It’s completely mad!
I would recommend, first of all, to all of you who do commute to consider whether you might not use the telephone instead and at less cost. It doesn’t solve everybody’s problem, but there are many professions and kinds of work in which you could telephone instead of moving. Consider it.
I’ve even got in touch with a telephone company about this so that they could go in competition with General Motors. You know, competition is a good Western custom, and they should play it! Now I haven’t quite answered your question yet.
Elaborate a little bit more, would you? Yes. Now, I’ve got on the track again.
One rule when you come into contact with psychiatric people is that you must not evince any interest in religion, and especially in Oriental religion, because that is practically a definition of insanity. Keep off the subject and—especially if the psychiatrist has any authority over you—appear to be as pedestrian as possible. I heard a very funny conversation in the bar this afternoon at Seattle airport.
There were three men sitting at a table, and one of them said that when he entered the Marine Corps, he was asked what his religion was. And he put down: pedestrian. Because he was actually a Presbyterian.
But that’s what he thought he was. We sort of have people from the South who wrote down that they were Babdist. And the funniest things came up.
Protistan. So always be sure that you are, by religion, a pedestrian. Although I’ve pointed out that you should really put down: automobilist.
Next question. Yes, sir? What should society do about educating children?
Well, I wish I could present myself as an example of this, but I have not been a good father. Because to ensure harmony within the family I had to go along with what my wives and our neighbors thought about as the proper method of education. Now, I’ll tell you what I really think: that the moment you get a child you must recognize that it is as if you had walked out on the street and to the first person you met given a promise of twenty years’ support, healthcare, and education.
A child is a stranger. But nevertheless, it’s very important that a child be treated as a small adult, and that from the beginning you talk to a child as if you were talking to another adult. Don’t use baby language.
Don’t even use oversimplified language. Talk to a child just as you would talk to another person. You will find that, by the time they’re three years old, they will have an amazing mastery of the English language and will be able to tell you all sorts of things about what it is to be a child that child psychologists have been longing to know but could never get out of children, because all children have been taught to be Mickey Mouse.
So we say to this child that comes into the world, “Doodey, doodey, doodey, doo,” you know? Instead of saying quite simply, “How do you do? We welcome you to the human race as a new member.
And there are all sorts of strange things that we’re doing which we’re going to try and explain to you as to what are our game rules, in the hope that, when you’ve understood them, you will be able to think of better ones.” But the trouble is: if you do that, see, you will have an amazingly intelligent three-year-old. Then you’ve got to send the brat to school! And when the child goes to school, such an intelligent child will be regarded as a freak by all the other children.
Because, you see, when you send a child to school, your child is brought up by all the other children—and that is to say: by the lowest common denominator of the culture. And the teachers have no real influence at all in big schools where there are thirty or forty children in a class. The teachers are merely desperately trying to keep order.
You know, in order to keep these brats off the labor market. And now it’s reached desperate situations. I have many young people who are my friends, and they say: “What on Earth is the use of our going on to get a graduate degree, since we know all these people with PhDs who can’t find jobs?” What are we going to do?
There are dozens and dozens of children completely dependent economically on their parents. Not able to find work. So they have to become perpetual students.
When you get a PhD, your only recourse is to become a professor. And so all academic institutions teach teachers to teach teachers to teach teachers. So everybody is teaching everybody else.
It’s like a society where everybody earns a living by taking in each other’s washing. Oh, it’s farcical! But I would suggest as an initial step, if you’re adventurous, to treat your child as an adult.
Treat the child fairly. Don’t talk down to your child, talk up to your child. And you will find that they can be amazingly intelligent.
I’ve seen some of these specimens, and they are quite something. They are very, very interesting. Whereas a child brought up to be “a child” is a bore and a pest.
You know, it’s a cutey-pie, itsy-bitsy sort of approach that is just, to my mind, nowhere. That’s what Disneyland is made for. Yes, ma’am?
Now, the question is: if we’re all one self, basically, if you encounter somebody who you think is perfectly terrible—you know, a real slob—what is to be your attitude? Now, understand this: that the sensation of your being yourself is dependent upon and in relation to the sensation that there is something other. Imagine for a moment a world of experience in which there was nothing that could be identified as the horrible.
And you will see, I think, immediately that we need what we experience as the horrible so that we can experience the good. Not necessarily that the horrible has to be around us all the time, but at least there has to be the apprehension in the back of our minds that something awful could happen, which mustn’t happen at all costs. And that gives us a kind of verve.
It’s like a spice in a stew. The whole stew is not to be spiced. We don’t want to eat solid spice.
But just a bit! And so there has to be just a bit of experience in our lives that is negative. And that’s why Jesus had the idea that praying for your enemies and for those who despitefully use you.
We need them. Any biological species needs another species that preys on it. If we abolished all bacteria—the principal beings who prey on us—we would overpopulate to the point where we would become impossible to ourselves.
So all species have other species which keep them down. And so, in the same way, in our own relations among each other, we have people we just consider impossible, offensive, and abominable. That is the yin and the yang of it.
Yes, the lady here. In what, the now? It ruins the now?
No, no. Wait a minute. When you really get into the now, you find that you stop judging.
You stop evaluating. I often work with people in this, and we practice a meditation which consists of listening to all sounds happening. Now ordinarily, when you ask a group of people to be quiet, there is some embarrassment about coughing or foot shuffling.