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And suddenly somebody gets an awful itch in their throat and feels that they have to leave the room in order not to disturb the quiet. And I say invariably: forget it. If you want to cough, cough.
Because that’s all part of the symphony that we’re listening to. Now—so we listen to sound without judging. And, in the same way, we can attend to the various manifestations of human behavior without judging.
If birds chatter outside, we say, “Oh, it’s birds.” And so, in the same way, if people become foolish, one says, “It’s people.” So learn to listen to sound—this is the beginning of the process—learn to listen to sound without judging it; as a susurrus, as a thing going on. I always say that you cannot meditate properly unless you can meditate in a boiler factory, or at a very heavy crossroads of traffic. Just listen to it.
Everything going nyaaah nyeeah naaah laaah bleeeaaa ka-che-katta katta katta blwoomm, you know? And just dig that sound. Yes, sir?
Can I raise my level of consciousness to cosmic consciousness at will? It’s the wrong question. See, what you have to find out first of all is that the idea of will is phony.
Because that—if I say “at will,” that means I’m something different from the universe, I’m something different from what is going on. And I introduce a thing called “will” which says: switch from this state to that. Now, you cannot switch into cosmic consciousness that way.
Cosmic consciousness consists in discovering that what you will and what happens are the same. And therefore, the idea of “I” being in command of a state of consciousness is precisely the obstruction to cosmic consciousness. Yes, sir—on the aisle.
No. The question is this: we divide the universe up into separate things, as it were, by imposing a rigid grid over the flux of our experience. Just in the same way, for example, as we put lines of latitude and longitude on both the Earth and the heavens.
Wittgenstein explained this very beautifully in his Tractatus. So the question is: how do we get rid of the grid? Simply by understanding that that’s what we are doing.
An enormous amount of what I would call spiritual insight, enlightenment, is merely a matter of recognition of what’s happening. When you understand that the moon is a ball and not a plate, you never forget it. You always see it as a ball.
When you understand perspective, it is instantly apparent how perspective works, and you feel the depth in a picture—which, although it is on a flat surface, has the canons of perspective in it, and it appears to you to be three-dimensional. That’s the kind of understanding I mean. Any more questions?
Yes? The question is: based on the fact that in Hindu cosmology, where the course of time is discussed, and there are four yugas, or epochs, in every kalpa, or time cycle. And if you add up the years in which the good prevails and those in which the evil prevails, the evil amounts to one third of the time, and the good to two thirds of the time.
In this sense, the game is worth the candle. There must be some evil to give spice to the good. But there must be an overplus of the good to make the game worth happening at all.
One would think, logically, that they ought to be balanced half and half. But a half and half situation never works, because it has no blwwp to it. It is static.
But the universe has this thing which I call blwwp, and this is known as flip-floppability. And that is always a result of a certain kind of imbalance. So that the Earth does not revolve about the sun in a sedately circular orbit, but in an elliptical orbit.
So, in the same way, when you put a ball on the end of a string and spin it round your head: you can’t do it with this motion, you have to do twwt, twwt, twwt, twwt, like that. That’s the flip-floppability, see? I don’t know how to explain that logically, but it seems to me to be the way life happens.
Yes. I mean, you will always find that. Let me see how to clarify that.
Let’s take it that, in the largest frame of reference that we can think of, nothing happens that is out of order. For example, within your own life, your own feeling, your own behavior, you cannot deviate from the Tao, from the course of nature, from the divine. Take that as a fundamental premise.
Now, within smaller frameworks there can be deviation, there can be evil. A favorite illustration I use is that in this room there’s a very definite distinction between up and down: we wouldn’t dream of trying to sit on the ceiling. We’d all fall off.
But this room is also in interstellar space, where there is no difference between up and down. Now, first of all, go to your interstellar space situation, where it does not matter whether you live or die, and realize that state. Having realized that state, you can come back to the other states and live them with more verve.
Because then you will have courage. So when you discover your divine nature, come back to your human nature. This is the Buddhist idea of when one attains Buddhahood, you don’t quit the world, but come back as a bodhisattva: go back into life out of compassion for all living beings and become involved.
Don’t be afraid to get into life, into emotion, into feeling, and so on. Do that. That’s the bodhisattva’s way.
Yes, sir? Ooooh, there was always Armageddon going on. Be careful of these historical fantasies.
Because people who talk about these things generate self-fulfilling prophecies. Prophecy is very dangerous. If somebody told you—supposing I told you that on April the 15th, 1975, you were going to die in the middle of downtown Vancouver, and I made myself sound very authoritative, I bet you anything you would do all you could not to be in downtown Vancouver on April the 15th.
Well, what context did you mean it in? Wait a minute, I didn’t get your question. Could I—?
The question is to tell you some more about meditation and the methods of meditation. A little difficult to do that briefly, because there’s so many kinds of meditation. And I don’t want to lay down the law because there are lots of other teachers of meditation who have, one way or another, somewhat different ideas than mine, and I don’t want to put them down.
But the way I teach it is to see if we can get ourselves into a state where we are simply aware of what is. You’re not going anywhere, you’re not trying to change anything, you have no goal, no objective in the future. You are simply observing what is now.
And the easiest way to start that for most people is to close your eyes and listen to the sound going on now without naming it or judging it. Although, if you find out that, compulsively, you are thinking about it and naming it, don’t try to stop that but listen to it as part of the sound. Listen to your own interior thinking as of the same nature as the sound of traffic outside or whatever.
Simply observe what is in a very simple-minded way. Observe what is in the same way that you listen to classical music, where you are listening to the sound of it without asking what it means. Then, after a little while, become aware of your breath as part of what is.
Are you breathing or is it breathing you? Do you do it or does it happen to you? Can you hear anything past?
Can you hear anything future? Can you hear anybody listening to sound? If you can’t, then obviously those things must be figments of your imagination.
So by pure listening—ears first, only: look, mama, no hands!—you will hear sounds coming out of silence, which is pretty weird. Then open your eyes and look in the same way as you’ve been listening without naming. And you will see light coming out of space just as sound was coming out of silence.
All that I’m looking at is buzzing at me. It’s a vibration. All of you are going zuzz-zuzz-zuzz-zuzz-zuzz-zuzz-zuzz, but incredibly fast.
And you’re all coming out of nothingness right now. Wowee! We’re all present at the creation of the universe.
This is it, today. This moment. Don’t look to the past for some big bang.
The past will tell you nothing, because the past vanishes like an echo. But now is when it begins, see? Now is the time.
Now is the day of our salvation. Heh! See, it begins right now!
This is where it’s at! Oh, I can make jokes about this. This is why, in Sanskrit, the real Self is called the Ātman: the man where it’s at.
Philologists will be horrified. Here! See?
I say, “UGH!” That started it. I keep starting it, see? Well, I don’t know who I am.
Because I—you can never get at. It’s like you can’t bite your own teeth. You will never make “I” an object.
But I am. Yahweh is the name of God. “Before Abraham was, I am.” But “I” is not ego—ego is just your image of yourself, which must be false.
Because it’s just an image. “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image.” Whew! These Christians don’t know what they’re saying!
Yes, sir? Can I help you to understand what yin and yang is all about? Well, the words mean roughly the shadow side and the sunny side of a mountain.
Obviously, where you have a peak, you have to have two sides. You can’t imagine a one-sided peak. So one side is in the shade and the other is in the sun.
And so we get what we call the positive and the negative, as we have in electricity. You can’t have electrical current without the positive and the negative poles, you can’t have a magnet without the north and the south poles. You take a bar magnet, chop it in two in order, say, to eliminate the north pole, and you will find you have two new magnets, each with a north and a south pole.
Now, however, these poles are different. But although they are different, they are inseparable—like a front and a back. You can’t have a front without a back.
The only exception to this is a very curious phenomenon called a Möbius strip, which is a strip of paper which is twisted, and then joined, and you discover to your amazement that its front is the same as its back, and it has only one edge. But this is the exception which proves the rule. The back is the front.
So in all life the back is the front, and you can’t have one without the other. Explicitly they are different, but implicitly they are the same. Exoterically, good is different from bad.
Esoterically, they’re the same. And esoteric knowledge simply means the understanding of the unity of the opposites. Now, socially that is disreputable.
That’s why esoteric knowledge is kept silent. Mysticism comes from the Greek root muin, and muin means the finger on the lips. Shh!
Mum’s the word. Don’t give away the secret. Oh, so I’m talking to a big audience, and in a way giving away the secret—but on the assumption that you are a very select company of people, and you’ve come here at some trouble to yourselves, and I feel that if you aren’t ready to know what I’m talking about, you won’t understand.
So the yin and the yang generate each other. In the Chinese phrase, they arise mutually. Just as to be and not to be.
You can’t understand one without the other. You don’t know what you mean by beautiful unless you know what you mean by ugly. You don’t know what you mean by solid unless you know what you mean by empty.
And if you understand that, I really would have nothing further to explain to you. Now it’s time to draw this session to a conclusion, and I thank you all very much for coming here and for giving me the pleasure of thinking out loud in your presence and watching your intelligent faces. Thank you so much and good night!
I want to start by giving (what may be to many of you) a new definition of the word “myth.” As normally used, the word “myth” means an idle tale, a fable, a falsehood, or an idea that is out of date, something untrue. But there is another, older, and stricter use of the word “myth,” whereby it doesn’t mean something untrue, but it means an image in terms of which people make sense of life and of the world. Supposing, for example, you don’t understand the technicalities of electricity, and somebody wants to explain them to you—he wants to explain about the flow of currents—well, to do that he compares electricity with water.
And because you understand water, you get some idea about the behavior of electricity. Or, if an astronomer wants to explain to you what he means by “expanding space,” he’ll use the metaphor of a balloon: a black balloon with white spots on it. The white spots represent the galaxies.
And then, if you blow up the balloon, they all get farther away from each other at the same speed as the balloon blows up. In neither case are we saying that electricity is water, or that the universe is a balloon with white spots on it. We are saying it’s something like it.
And so, in the same way, the human being has always used images to represent his deepest ideas of how the universe works, and what man’s place in it is. And tonight I’m going to discuss certain aspects of two of the greatest myths, in this sense of the word, which have influenced mankind’s thinking. First of all, the myth of the universe as an artifact, as something made—as a carpenter makes tables, chairs, and houses, or as a potter makes pots, or as a sculptor makes figurines—and on the other hand the image of the world as a drama in which all the things in the world are not made, but acted—in the same way as a player acts parts.
For these are the two great images which govern, respectively, the religions of the West descending from Hebraism (that is to say, Hebraism itself, Christianity, and Islam), and on the other hand the myth which governs those religions which have had their origin in India (most particularly Hinduism itself, and to a lesser extent, Buddhism). And I want to make it perfectly plain before I go any further that, in talking about these two great religious traditions in terms of images, I am talking about the way they express themselves at a rather popular level. Sophisticated Christians and sophisticated Hindus think beyond images.
For example, a Christian may think of God as the father, but a sophisticated and educated Christian does not imagine that God is a cosmic male parent with a white beard sitting on a golden throne above the stars. Nor does a Hindu imagine literally that God is the super showman, the big actor. These images are what it is like, not what it is.
And perhaps, when I get through with discussing them, we’ll be able to ask the question as to whether any of these images still make sense to us in this 20th century when we have a view of the world so powerfully shaped by Western science. Now, let me begin, then, with a few things about the image of the world—and thus the image of man—as it comes to us from the Hebrew Bible. It’s said in the Book of Genesis that the Lord God created man out of the dust of the Earth, as if he had made of Adam a clay figure.
And then he blew the breath of life into its nostrils, and the figurine became alive. And it said that the figurine was made in the image of God. For God—who is conceived in this particular image as personal, as a living, intelligent spirit—creates in man something like that.
But you must note very definitely that this is a creation, as the potter makes a pot out of clay. For the creature that the Lord God has made is not God. The creature is something less than God; something like God but not God.
And you will see some very interesting consequences follow from this idea of the world as an artifact. What follows from it is that the whole universe is seen as a marvelous technical accomplishment. And if it is made, there must be an explanation of how it is made.
And the whole history of Western thought has in many ways been an attempt to discover how the creator did it: what were the principles, what were the laws laid down? What, in other words, was the blueprint that underlies this creation? And this image has therefore persisted throughout Western history, and continues on into a time when very many people do not believe in Christianity, or Judaism, or Islam.
They are, you might say, agnostics or atheists, but they still carry on something of this idea of the world as an artifact. If you are a Christian or a Jew, you believe that the world is the artifact, the creation, of the intelligent spirit called God. But if, in this culture, you are an atheist or an agnostic, you believe that the world is an automatic machine without a creator; something which made itself.
We might say, then, that our original model of the universe was the ceramic model. And the Bible is full of references to God as the potter who makes the world out of obedient clay. But then Western thinkers in the 18th century began to drop the idea of a personal God.
They kept the idea of the artifact. And so we could say that, after the ceramic model of the universe, we got the fully automatic model. And still, you see, underlying our way of thinking about things is the question: how are they put together?
And if you want to find out, one of the obvious ways to proceed is to take them to pieces. Everybody knows that if you want to find out how something is made, you unscrew the parts and see what the secret is inside the box. And so Western science, in its beginnings, took everything apart.
It took animals apart, it took flowers apart, it took rocks apart. And then, when they got it reduced to its tiniest pieces, they tried to find methods of taking those apart, too, so that we could eventually discover what the very smallest small things were, and so know what building blocks the creator (or the fully automatic model) used in order to put it all together, hoping that that would lead us to an understanding of how life works. Man himself in all this was looked upon as a creation; something made.
Only: there were some difficulties about this, because if you believe in the world in accordance with the idea of the fully automatic model, you’ve really got to admit that man, too, is fully automatic. In other words, he’s a machine rather than a person. Man is something, in other words, that doffs its hat to you and says, “How do you do?
I’m a person. I’m alive. I’m sensible.
I talk, I have feelings.” But you wonder: do you really? Or are you just an automaton? Am I real, or am I just an automaton?
The general result of the Western image of man hasn’t been quite that. What it’s come down to, under the dispensation of the fully automatic model, is this: we are living beings, we’re very sensitive, and inside the human skin, by an extraordinary fluke of nature, there has arisen something called reason, and there have also arisen values such as love. But this was a fluke because it happened inside a fully automatic universe, which is stupid because it’s merely automatic.
You won’t, in other words, find anything really intelligent outside human skins. And therefore, if that is so, the only thing that people can do if they want to maintain reason and love in this universe is to fight nature and beat the stupid, external world into submission to the human will. And so the war against nature is the great project thus far of Western technology.
Because, you see, each one of us—because we inherit from thousands of years of history a view of man as something made and almost of a sort of breath breathed into a pot of clay, or an image of clay—each one feels himself as a globule of consciousness (or mind) living inside a vehicle called my body. And since the world outside that body is stupid, we feel estranged from the world. When we find out how enormous the universe is, that makes us, as individuals, feel extremely unimportant and rather lonely.
Because, you see, we consider ourselves—our basic image of ourselves is of a soul, or an ego, or a mind, all by itself in its little house, looking out at a world that is strange and that is not me. I am therefore a brief interval of consciousness between the darkness and the darkness. And that isn’t too happy.
I would like to be able to believe that is was more than that. “If I could,” so many of us say, “if I could only still believe that there is an intelligent and eternal God in whose eyes I am important, and who has the power to enable me to live forever, that would be very nice.” But for many people that’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to believe. Now, I want to contrast this image of the world with another—what I call the dramatic image, as distinct from the image of the potter, or the ceramic image.
And this will be the presiding image of Hinduism. Their idea is this: that God didn’t make the world like a technologist, but he acted it. That is to say, every person—and every thing, for that matter; every tree, every flower, every animal, every star, every rock, every grain of dust—is a role or part which the godhead is playing.
You must understand, of course, hat the Hindu image of God is a little bit different from the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic. When I was a little boy, I used to ask my mother interminable questions. And when she got sick of it, she said, “My dear, there are some things in this life that we’re just not meant to know.” Well, I said, “Will we ever know?” She said, “Yes, if you die and then go to heaven, God will explain it all.” And so I used to hope that, on wet afternoons in heaven, we would all be able to sit around the throne of grace and say to the Lord, “Why did you do this?” and “Why did you do that?” and He would explain.
Every child in the West asks his mother, “How was I made?” And nobody knows. But they know that, perhaps, somebody does, and that’ll be God. And he’ll be able to explain.
Likewise, if anybody gets mentally deranged and claims to be God, we always humor such people by asking them technical questions: “How did you make the world in six days?” Or: “If you are God, why couldn’t you change this plate into a rabbit?” But that is because, in our popular image of God, God is the supreme technocrat. He knows all the answers, he understands everything in detail and could tell you all about it. But the Hindus don’t think of God that way.
If you ask the Hindu God, “How did you create the human body?” he would say, “Look, I know how I did it, but it can’t be explained in words, because words are too clumsy. In words I have to talk about things slowly. I have to string them out, because words run in a line.
And lines add up to books, and books add up to libraries. And if I explain to you how I made the human organism, it will take all eternity for me to tell you. Fortunately for me, I don’t have to understand things in words in order to make them happen.
Nor do you.” You don’t have to understand in words how you breathe—you just breathe. You don’t have to understand in words how to grow your hair, how to shape your bones, how to make your eyes blue or brown—you just do it. And somebody who does understand, to some extent—maybe physiologist—he can’t do it any better than you can.
So that, you see, is the Hindu idea of divine omnipotence. And that is why their images of the gods very often have many arms. You’ll often see the god Śiva with ten arms, or the Buddhist Avalokiteśvara with one thousand arms.
And that is because their image of the divine is a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it. So Śiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about it.
And you know what happened to the centipede when it stopped to think how to move a hundred legs? It got all balled up. So, in this way, the Hindus do not think of God as being a technician in the sense of having a verbal or mathematical understanding of how the world is created.
It’s done in a simpler way, just like that. Only, if we had to describe this simple way in words, it would be very complicated. But God, in their idea, doesn’t need to do so.
But the remarkable difference is that the Hindu doesn’t see any fundamental division between God and the world. The world is God at play. The world is God acting.
Now, how could you possibly arrive at such an idea? Very simply: when he tries to think why there is a world at all—because, if you think about it, it is extraordinarily odd that there is anything. It would have been much simpler and required a great deal less energy for there to have been nothing.
But here it is. And why? Well, what would you do if you were God?
Or let me put it in a simpler way: supposing that every night you could dream any dream you wanted to dream. What would you do? Well, first of all, I’m quite sure that most of us would dream all the marvelous things we wanted to happen.
We would fulfill all our wishes. And we might go on that way for months. Besides, you could make it extraordinarily rich by wishing to dream 75 years in one night full of glorious happenings.
But after you had done that for a few months, you might begin to get a little tired of it. And you would say, “What about an adventure tonight in which something terribly exciting and rather dangerous is going to happen? But I’ll know I’m dreaming, so it won’t be too bad.
And I’ll wake up if it gets too serious.” So you do that for a while. You rescue princesses in distress from dragons, and all sorts of things. And then, when you’ve done that for some time, you say, “Now, let’s go out a bit further.
Let’s forget it’s a dream and have a real thrill!” Ooh! But you know you’ll wake up. And then, after you’ve done that for a while, you get more and more nerve until you sort of dare yourself as to how far out you can get.
And you end up dreaming the sort of life you’re living now. Now, why does one do that? Why would one do that?
The reason—the Hindu would say—is that the basic pulse of life, the basic motivation of existence, is what we call the game of hide-and-seek: now you see it, now you don’t. You see, everything is based on that because all life is vibration, pulsing. Light is a pulsation of light/darkness.