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You are a process. But how do we draw the line about this process and its relationship to all other processes? We find that a very difficult thing to do the more you think about it.
If you really felt with your whole organism, instead of just with that part of it called conscious attention, you would become aware of this flowing fact. And you would get a very strange feeling, which at first might frighten you. It is possible, of course, to have this feeling.
And the feeling is like this: you would not be quite sure how to interpret it. You might feel that you, yourself, were doing everything else that’s happening. That would be one way of feeling.
The other way of feeling it would be that you are doing nothing at all, but that everything else is doing you. And you would feel completely passive, like a puppet on the end of strings. Although, on the other hand, if you got the feeling that you were doing it all, you would feel like God Almighty.
It is very easy for our consciousness to slip into this state of sensation. It can happen spontaneously, like measles. It can happen by training, as when someone practices yoga.
It can happen chemically, as when certain drugs are taken. And one has to be very careful about this feeling, because it’s enormously easy to misinterpret it—either as being omnipotent (being God in the personal, literal sense), or as being helpless and merely driven. Now, what should be understood is that both these ways of feeling are right.
Only, they must both be taken together. To be simultaneously omnipotent and helpless. These are two poles, opposite poles, of one and the same state.
Because the message that is coming through—and that we find difficulty in understanding because it’s contrary to our common sense, contrary to our whole history and conditioning—the message that’s coming through is: you as a living organism and all that is going on in your environment constitute a single process. What in physics we would call a unified field. A single process, like a pattern.
But, you know, any pattern has all sorts of subsidiary wiggles in it. Like, the organism itself is a unified pattern, but it’s full of wiggles: all sorts of tubes and organs and bones and nerves and so on, working in this way. You know the body doesn’t have a boss.
We could pitch a big argument: who is really the top dog in your body? Your stomach or your brain? I can argue for both ways.
Let’s first argue for the stomach. The stomach is fundamental. That’s what eats, and eating is the fundamental thing of being alive.
By putting food into the stomach it digests it, and from there it goes out and energizes everything else. Obviously, the stomach is the most important. The hands, the mouth, the feet all exist to serve the stomach.
And naturally, as a final achievement of the stomach, is the brain: evolving later in the evolutionary process as a gadget up there to scavenge around and find stuff for the stomach to eat. That’s the function the brain. But now, let’s take the argument to the side of the brain.
The brain says: “Oh no, no, no. Come, now. Just because I arrived late doesn’t mean that I’m unimportant.
I was being gotten ready for. Because I am the thing that is the flower at the top of this thing. And this tube with stomachs in it, and things below, was preparing for me, and the stomach is my servant.
It is doing all the dirty work, and getting energy to put currents through my wonderful circuits. So that, by the creation of all the goods of the mind, of the arts and sciences, and religion, and philosophy, and so on, I shall be the true head of man.” Well, both arguments are right. Because you have a relationship between stomach and brain which is a sort of polarity.
The one exists for the other. It’s like when you prop up two sticks against each other: they will stand up so long as they lean on each other. Take one away and the other collapses.
So chop off the head and the stomach is finished. Take out the stomach and the head is finished. So this is the way all organic life proceeds.
It’s different with mechanical life, because the mechanism must invariably have a boss. The man who puts the machine together, the person who constructs the computer, who designs it, who asks it questions, who programs it, he is the boss. But organisms don’t have bosses.
They are essentially, I would say, democratic arrangements where—somehow, in a marvelous way—an enormous company of cells are working together. But that isn’t the way. The body wasn’t sort of, one day, a lot of cells all crept to together and said, “We’re a body.” That does sometimes happen in the biological domain, but much rather this: when you watch the gestation of a mammal, you see, first of all, a very simple little organism which swells.
And as it swells, it becomes more and more complicated from within. No parts are added, nothing is screwed on, there’s no welding done or anything like that. It bulges.
And, of course, it does absorb material, but it transforms it. But all of it works together at once, like the legs of a centipede; like you work altogether at once. For, you see, when we come down to it: you think you decide things, but you don’t know how you do it.
How do you open and close your hand? You can decide, “I will now open my hand” and do it, but you don’t know how it’s done. And yet, in a sense, you do know how it’s done, because I say, “I know how to open my hand.” But you don’t know in words.
You can’t explain it. Still less can you explain how you see, still less can you explain how you are conscious. How are you an ego?
Well, you don’t know. Because the springs of being conscious, of being an ego, are outside the surveillance of consciousness. They are somehow underneath.
And that lets the cat out of the bag at once, because you see that what is “I” is something very, very much deeper than the superficial consciousness. And what you call “I” in the sense of the voluntary willing center, ego, has very little to do with it. You are just a watchman on top of the mast, or a radar on a ship that is scanning the environment by conscious attention, looking out for trouble or looking for food.
The real you is much too complicated to think about. Supposing, when you woke up in the morning, you had to switch yourself on. That is to say, you had to—by an act of conscious attention—to go through your brain and turn on all the synapses necessary for wakeful life.
It’d take you hours. Supposing you really had to be conscious of all the details involved in walking, or in breathing, or in circulation of the blood. You’d never get around to it!
So, you see, when we inspect the physical world with conscious attention, the first thing that strikes us is that the physical world is extraordinarily complicated. How can it possibly be organized? But actually, the physical world is not complicated at all.
What is complicated is the task of trying to describe it in words, or of trying to figure it out in numbers. Because that is analogous to the task of, say, removing the water from the Pacific Ocean into the Atlantic with a beer mug. We can only take one mug at a time.
And so we say in popular speech you can only think of one thing at a time. That’s not exactly true, but what it reveals is that thinking, that conscious thought, is a kind of calculus in which we understand things bit by bit. And it leads us into the superstition that things really are bits.
Now, when you eat chicken, of course you have to bite it. And you take it in bits. And to make it easier to bite you order from the grocer a cut up fryer.
But you don’t get cut up fryers out of eggs. Because, you see, although we can speak of a chicken, an egg, or a body, it is not actually a bit. It hasn’t been bitten off, except for purposes of thinking.
Now, this is beautifully brought out in a passage from Whitehead, which I will read to you. He is discussing the 19th century philosophy of science, which I was just discussing, too. And he’s saying in this philosophy: He calls that, you see, the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
The attribution, in other words, to our bitty way of thinking to the world which we are biting. That is misplaced concreteness. The separations between things are abstract, they are concepts—in the same way, for example, as lines of latitude and longitude are concepts.
Even though a Russian poet has recently made a beautiful poem about the world being like a ball carried in a net bag. But you never expect to trip over the equator when you cross it. And although it is something quite abstract and does not exist in nature, it’s extremely useful for purposes of navigation.
So, in the same way, bit-ing and having words to describe particular events or particular wiggles in the universal pattern are very useful. But they are very dangerous when you confuse things with natural events. Because then you get into this sort of trouble; the trouble of the sorcerer.
The surgeon who is too much of a specialist in one organ runs into that organ and alters it and does what he considers a better mechanical job than the Lord did. But then he discovers to his dismay and the even greater dismay of his patient that the operation has unforeseen consequences in some other part of the organism, because he didn’t realize the connection. When, likewise, we object to certain insect pests—oh, we say, get rid of them!
DDT. And so whzzzsht, then we found we got rid of something else we didn’t want to get rid of. And worse still, that this insect that we didn’t like was doing a job for us in some manner of which weren’t aware, and we only become aware of it when suddenly we find ourselves covered with another kind of fly altogether, or with some sort of bacteria which this insect kept down.
Watch it, watch it, watch it! Because nature does not consist of separate things which you can just pull out like parts from an engine. Take the case of bees and flowers.
Oh, we always use the bees and flowers to explain fundamental things about life. But we’re going to go deeper than sex this time. Fascinating thing about bees and flowers is: they are very different looking things.
A flower sits still and blooms and it smells—or stinks, to be correct. The bee moves about and buzzes. But they are all one organism.
You don’t find flowers without bees, you don’t find bees without flowers. They are just as much one as your head and your feet, which also look very different. So in that sense, you see, we are one with the incredible complexity of processes and wiggles upon which we depend.
Although to say, “upon which we depend” is not quite accurate, because that separates us from it as if I were hanging onto a beam and depending on it. It isn’t like that. You don’t depend on it, because it depends on you.
It’s a mutual arrangement. And it isn’t that one bit of this sort of came first—although that sometimes happens—but it’s always there in potentiality; what came later. But it’s rather in the same way that, when a flower opens, you see all the different petals extending simultaneously.
Especially when you watch a fast-motion movie of a flower opening. And so, in the same way, there is a simultaneous arrival, or evolution, of the human organism and the human environment. And thus biologists speak about the evolution of an environment as well as the evolution of an organism in it.
In other words, human beings could not have appeared on this planet until its temperature had lowered to a certain degree, until the atmosphere contained certain gases as a result of vegetative development. And then the environment became evolved enough for human beings to appear in it. Evolved enough?
I’ll say something further: intelligent enough for the appearance in it of intelligent beings. For your environment is intelligent. Otherwise you couldn’t be.
You see, as Jesus said, you don’t gather figs off thistles or grapes from thorns. You won’t get pears off an apple tree. So you won’t find people, except on a people tree!
And this planet, this solar system, this galaxy is people-ing in exactly the same way that an apple tree apples. Put our existence into verb language, as distinct from noun language, and you’re much closer to the point. You see, nouns have the difficulty of designating things.
Verbs designate process. Now, everything is a process, really. When we speak of housing for houses, matting for mats, we’re getting there.
The Nootka Indians have a language in which there are no nouns. So they say: “it houses,” and then they add an adverb to show whether it houses religiously, homely or marketingly. And so they see the world as the flow.
What is it that houses? What is it that rains when we say, “It is raining?” You see, we always have a funny idea that, to get a verb—that is to say, to get action—you have to have an agent. Now, this is the most ridiculous idea conceivable.
How can a noun start a verb? How can a thing start an event? Because there’s no action in a thing.
Action can only come from action. Energy from energy. You can’t get energy from a concept.
Because nouns are all concepts. They’re abstract, really. It’s only verbs that are concrete, because the world is process.
Now, common sense insists that the pattern of the world must be made of something. Because we still think with Aristotle’s common sense—or with the imagery of the Book of Genesis, where God made Adam out of the clay. In other words, he made a clay figurine and breathed breath into it and it became alive.
And so we constantly think that we are made of flesh, as if flesh were some sort of stuff like clay out of which you shape bodies, or like you make tables out of wood. Are trees made out of wood? What a ridiculous question.
Trees are wood. They’re not made of wood. And it is simply this artifact thing that gives us the idea of the world being made out of something.
It isn’t made out of anything! And so when physics tries to investigate what is the stuff of matter, it can’t find any. Because you can never talk about anything except a process.
You can describe what a process is doing: you can describe the structure, the nature of the dance, whether it’s doing a waltz or a mazurka or the frog or whatever it is. Then you can describe that melody, shall we say; what it is performing. But there is nothing doing the performing at all.
There is no stuff out of which it’s being done, because when you examine stuff you just find more pattern. See, what you mean by stuff is fuzz. When you look at something with a lens and you’re out of focus, you see fuzz.
But when you come into focus you see structure. Right now, the structure is made of all sorts of little lines and things. You can see them and you want to know: what are they made of?
So you turn up the magnification. And for a while you get a lot of fuzz. But when you’re clear again you see that those little lines are also made of more little lines, more structure.
Big patterns have little patterns upon their backs to bite, and so on. And that’s the way it goes. So suddenly you feel rather insecure, because stuff has disappeared.
There’s a famous story about a physicist who understood this so well that he always went about in the most enormous padded shoes because he was afraid of falling through the floor! Now look what’s happened! Just look and see what has happened to us.
If we go through everything that I’ve been saying, we find, first of all, that the thing that we thought was “I” is nothing more than a social institution. Just like the equator, or an inch. And to mistake it—to reify it, as Whitehead would say—is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
It’s strictly a hallucination. And any certain amount of psychological self-exploration shows this to be the case. But what we are is the organism, and what the organism is is a transactional interchange between the organism and the environment.
It’s not quite correct to say you’re doing it and it’s doing you because, you see, Whitehead—in describing the scientific philosophy, saying, for example, that blue is entirely our projection on the sky—he’s half right, you see? Those scientists he’s talking about are half right. But the part of it that is left out of consideration is this: true, you with your optical nerves and eyes, transform the sky into the blue feeling.
But without the sky you wouldn’t have any optical nerves. It works both ways, you see? Without the air whose density gives the blue effect.
It’s mutual. You do it and it does you. But that’s, as I said, a two-way, a clumsy way, of talking about: it’s all one process; a unified process.
And furthermore, from this process there has disappeared what we thought was solidity, what we thought was common sense, substance, and stuff. It’s just pattern. And at once one feels sort of ghostly, as if you could be easily blown away.
And that’s why the Hindus call the universe the māyā, which means “the illusion.” Don’t forget, illusion is related to the Latin word ludere: “to play.” So the play, the big act. It also means “magic,” as in a conjuror’s creation of an illusion. It also means “creative power.” It also means “art.” And finally, it means the “divine power.” The māyā of the Lord.
Lord is a bad translation of Bhagavan. Just the Divine One. Lord means “boss” in English, and the Hindus don’t do it that way.
But now, you see—having arranged this general introduction, which I’m afraid will be familiar to some of you who’ve attended my seminars before, but I’ve arranged this general introduction to raise the question: alright, if that’s the way it is, how on Earth are we going to arrange a transformation of man’s consciousness so that he’ll know it? Not just in theory, but something he feels in the same way as you feel what you take to be “I” at the present moment, confronting an external world. How will you transform that sensation?
Because if you don’t transform that sensation, you’ll not ever be fit to use technology. We shall continue to use our technology in a hostile spirit towards the external world, and we shall wreck the external world. We’re busy doing it now.
There is no necessity to abandon technology. We can’t abandon it. But we can certainly use it in a different spirit.
I’ve just been in the island of Ceylon, which is a garden; a beautiful, beautiful place. But it’s completely undeveloped from a technical point of view. And it’s in very bad economic circumstances because nobody wants to buy natural rubber anymore.
It has no foreign exchange. It is very peaceful. But the change has got to come.
So I discussed with one of the high members of the government the possibility that we could set up in Ceylon an experimental station which would serve not only India, eventually, and Africa, but us, too: an institute of ecological technology where we could—in that experimental island—work out ways of production, of mechanization, automation, and so on, which would not ruin the island. And you have to do that sort of thing with a certain dedication, because one of the reasons why we make such a mess with technology is that the shareholders in any given corporation want to make a fast buck. Now, there’s nothing wrong, you see, in wanting to be rich.
There’s nothing at all wrong in being rich. In fact, I think the world without rich people would be extraordinarily boring. The point is, you have to understand what riches are.
And they are not money. Riches are land, clothes, food, housings, intelligence, energy, skill, iron, forests, gardens. Those are riches.
But when you’re concentrating, you see, only on making the buck, it doesn’t occur to you that you’re not really getting rich, you’re just impoverishing yourself. It’s like, you know, when you up, up, up, up, up prices, the value of the dollar goes down, down, down, down, down. You’re just on a rat race; on a treadmill.
The faster it moves, it doesn’t get anywhere—well it doesn’t even stay in the same place. So it is that kind again—you see, this is another example of confusing the symbol with the reality, of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, as Whitehead calls it. So we shall devote the rest of the seminar to discussing the various ways in which it is proposed that we bring about, or assist the bringing about of, that change in our perception and conception of our own existence so that we can feel ourselves the way we are, as distinct from the way in which we’ve been told to feel ourselves.
So, this morning I was explaining the problem of the relation of the individual to the world, discussing it very largely in the terms of 20th century science, and showing that there was a wide discrepancy between the organism-environment relationship as described in science and the subjective feeling of what it is to be an individual human being. And that the ordinary sensation we have of being an individual ego confronting an alien and external world is a hallucination—and a dangerous hallucination, because it leads to our using technology in a way that is antagonistic to the outside world and results in our destroying the very features of the world upon which we depend for our lives. We are polluting the world.
And so it becomes necessary to find ways in which we can change the basic sensation of existence. And that, therefore, brings in some rather outlandish subjects. Because there is not, within the tradition of Western culture, any well known way of doing this.
What do we have available? Well, we have religion, which is supposed (in some respects) to be capable of this. And we have psychiatry.
I don’t know what else. Religion in the West is a peculiarly problematic thing because it’s extremely talkative. It gives us a great deal of advice, many commandments, but it doesn’t really tell us how to do what it tells us to do.
It has been carefully worked over, and statisticians have checked it, that if you go through the sermon topics of clergymen throughout the United States, that the vast majority of them are exaltations to goodness. That is to say: they are sermons about moral behavior, usually within a rather restricted sphere of moral behavior. When we say of a certain person that he is living in sin, what do we mean by that?
We would very rarely say of a crooked bookie that he is living in sin. You are much more liable to say it of somebody who’s got an irregular sexual relationship. Well, the fact of the matter is that, with some exceptions, the Christian churches and the Jewish synagogues are family and sexual regulation societies, and precious little else.
We used to have, when I was school, a preacher who came—I don’t know who he was or where he came from—but he came once a year. And he always preached a sermon which had in it the refrain: “Drink, gambling and immorality!” And immorality only meant one thing. But the point is that the emphasis of preaching—and Protestants, you see, when they go to church, mostly go to a preaching session.
Catholics receive sacraments (Protestants do occasionally), but Catholics, when you get through the sacrament and you listen to what the priest has to say, he’s usually raising money. And, you know, or saying something like: “This year it’ll be a mortal sin not to send your child to church school.” Things of this kind. So everybody knows that they ought to be good and unselfish and so on.
We all recognize that as a highly reasonable idea, but nobody feels like it. Because if you feel that you are a separate ego, it must necessarily follow that your conduct is egocentric and egotistic. There’s no other way about it.
If you feel that you don’t love someone, then no amount of pretense can make you love them. You cannot possibly love anyone out of a sense of duty. And if you do, watch out!
You will start hating them and they’ll start hating you in a secret and concealed way. The relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children are absolutely haunted with fake love. It stirs up resentment and it leads people to expect things of you which you’re never going to come through with.
If I say, out of feeling, that I really have a solemn duty to love so-and-so, and therefore, in the attempt to trap myself into the fulfillment of this duty, I make rash promises, I’m not going to fulfill them and the person is going to be terribly let down when I don’t. So if anything is a sin, it is emotional dishonesty. Saying I love you when I don’t.
Well, of course, your mother always told you we all have to do certain things we don’t feel like doing. Maybe. But let’s make no bones about it.
When somebody says to me, “Would you like to go out to the market and bring it back so-and-so?” I will answer, “No, I wouldn’t. But I will.” And we need that sort of exchange between each other. Because we put children in awful positions with faking up their feelings for them by telling a child who’s simply enraged and mad that he’s tired.
or by saying, you know, “What nice boy would like to clean the blackboard?” All this sort of thing, you see, leads to emotional dishonesty. So the problem, then, is this: that, when people preach moral behavior, and then—out of a sense of guilt or out of a sense of fear—people try to be good (that is to say, to do those things that are preached), all it does is it turns them into hypocrites. Preaching is a hypocrisy-creating institution in that sense, because it does not transform the consciousness of the individual.
If, by any chance, consciousness could be so transformed that one is no longer felt as a separate ego, then you would not have to be so egotistic. If there is a way, in other words, of generating love within human beings as a kind of constant attitude to the environment, that is going to be far more effective in bringing about unselfish behavior than anything else. Well, that’s our problem, you see?