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For some reason my lectures are always attended by dogs! Now, to clear our heads—now, how do you do that? This is the most important adjunct to intellectual discipline. |
I say this most urgently, because here we are. We’re at the University of California, and we’re all presumably intellectuals. And we need to further the intellectual life, we need to further the disciplines of learning languages, of psychology, of science and physics and chemistry, medicine, and so on and so forth. |
But underlying that there must be a background. In other words, you need plain white paper in order to write something. And so, in the same way, underlying all our thinking there must be emptiness. |
And that’s what we call in Asia dhyāna, which means the practice of meditation. You can also call it yoga. These are really—oh, there are little nitpicking details we might make between them—but they’re really equivalent words. |
Dhyāna, yoga, zen, and of course also the Sufi disciplines, are all the same thing, but they’re largely missing in Western religion. Because Western religion is excessively talkative, excessively didactic, and does not really practice silence. The nearest thing we have—I mean, we have some Catholic orders like Trappists and we have the Quakers, who practice silent disciplines. |
But I’m rather inclined to believe that they talk to themselves while they’re silent. Real silence, dhyāna, is stopping talking to yourself inside your head; is to get real mental silence. Now, that doesn’t mean that you have a blank mind. |
You are vividly aware of what is, only you don’t give it any name. Now, if you, for the moment, would experiment with this by closing your eyes and listening to all sounds whatsoever that are going on, but don’t try to identify or name them. Listen to the susurrus of the world in the same way as you would listen to classical music without asking what it means. |
If you find yourself thinking compulsively, unable to stop naming what is going on, don’t try to stop it. Listen to yourself doing that in the same way as you would be listening to the air conditioning. And as and when I say anything, don’t try to make sense of it. |
Just listen to the sound of the voice. And now I ask you: listening to what is, can you hear anything past or anything future? Can you hear yourself as a listener? |
It’s amazing how many things there are that aren’t so. And just for a moment, also be aware of your breath. Are you doing it or is it happening to you? |
Or both? Or neither? Listen and feel the breath as it wants to go, as your ears want to respond to the waves. |
And don’t be uptight about coughing or shifting your position or… you know, doing whatever nature wants you to do. It’s all part of the symphony. Just listen. |
Ears only and breath only. This is your method of testing out what reality is. You’re a baby. |
You have no ideas. Nobody’s ever told you anything. You have no theories about the universe. |
And if you’re anxious about that—you know, you’ve checked your theories at the door. You can pick them up when you go out. Just feel it. |
I think I’ve got you into the state of meditation. At least that’s the way it feels. Now remember, in this state we are not looking for any result. |
Nothing at all to be accomplished in the future. We are simply experiencing what is now, here, and we are abandoning the project—momentarily—of forming any concepts about it. Watch it. |
And don’t ask who is watching it, because that’s a merely grammatical question. Because the verb has to have a subject according to the conventions of our language. There is a watching. |
Now, feel it like that. This is called tathātā in Sanskrit. “Da-da-da.” “Suchness.” [???] |
See? Alright. Now, what you are now experiencing is what I’m trying to tell you. |
And I want you now to return to your state of normal restlessness. And if any of you in this company has questions to ask, I’d be very happy to try and answer them to the best of my ability. Yes? |
Well, I feel that he cheated. You see, he was what is called a mauni practicing silent yoga, but yet he always used to talk on a letterboard. And if you’re going to be a true mauni, you have to stop writing also and be absolutely at silence. |
It’s a very difficult exercise, and I don’t recommend that anybody do it for much more than a month. To go on doing it for ever so many years is, really, a rather egocentric performance. Y’know: “I’m so different from everybody else.” One should never overdo yogic practices. |
They are—all yogic practices, meditation practices—are wrong if they are not fun. True meditation should be an absolute delight. An absolute delight. |
Delight, the light. Yes? Astral projection. |
This astral projection is not important. Yes. Yes. |
Yeah. Yes, yes. Aha! |
Now, I hope you all heard this question. No, alright. Now, he’s raised the question of two meanings of the word “identity.” The first meaning is the separate identity that each one of us tries to find in the course of our education, where we know who we are as an ego. |
The second sense is to be identical with the universe, as a mystic discovers that he is. Excuse me, ladies, for using the word “he,” but it’s shorthand. Don’t forget that the word “man” doesn’t mean “male.” It comes from the Sanskrit manu, from which we get manas (“mind”) and the Latin manus (“hand,” “handy”). |
Has nothing to do with sex. So these two senses of identity—the particular who I am, and the fact that I also realize that I am finally identical with what there is; you know, with the whole thing that’s going on. I mean, the two go together. |
They’re not antithetical in any way. The second one is basic, because that’s the way you felt when you were a baby. You have what Freud calls the oceanic feeling. |
And you knew that you were—you didn’t have words to put it in—but you knew that you were this jazz, whatever it is that is. And you made no distinction between the knower and the known, the voluntary and the involuntary, the doing and the happening. There was just this jazz. |
You knew that perfectly well as a baby. But then they came and put it on you that you were different, see? They wanted you to be something particular. |
And, well, so you learned that. Well, they put it on you so heavily that you forgot the first thing. But the whole point of sanity is to have them both at the same time. |
It’s just the same as I described the white paper behind the print, the mirror behind its reflections. Because if you don’t get both going at the same time, you get a kind of myopia of not being able to see the forest for the trees, of forgetting your own origin. And if you forget that each one of you is an incarnation of god, if you don’t know that, you will try to become god by effort, and therefore will become impossible; a demon—an aggressive, obstreperous nuisance. |
But if we all know, basically, we are god—and I don’t mean god in the grandfather sense of the Judeo-Christian image, which is an idol, but in the sense that we can’t define. See, you can’t define yourself. Just like you can’t bite your own teeth. |
You don’t know who you are. And, you know, all science of neurology is trying to go out and make out: what is, finally, consciousness in here? What is the brain all about? |
And they don’t know. And they’re the people, most of all, who know they don’t know. Well, you don’t know. |
Because each one of us is an aperture through which the universe is observing itself. But, of course, it couldn’t observe itself completely and totally, because that would be a bore. To understand absolutely, to be totally in control of everything, would be like screwing a plastic woman. |
Who wants that? See? Always, there needs to be an element of mystery. |
So the thing that is is mysterious to itself—but not completely, because if it were completely mysterious to itself, nothing would happen. That would be everything being even. What we need is something odd. |
But we can’t have something odd without the even. See, that’s the nature of the way it works: yang and yin. Next question? |
Yes? The question is whether it is possible for a Jew or a Christian to follow a yogic philosophy without abandoning the tradition. No, it is perfectly possible to put the two together. |
I am, this weekend, going to a community of nuns to show them how to practice Christian yoga. And this is entirely possible, because it’s perfectly obvious if you understand Jesus Christ, as a historical figure, that he was a realized person who knew that he was an incarnation of god in the same way as you are—only, he was embarrassed by the language of the religious tradition which was the only one he knew. Because in the language of that tradition, to be the son of god was to claim, like, “I’m the boss’ son,” because they had a boss image of god. |
Now, on the other hand, if he had been in India and he’d suddenly announced that he was the incarnation of god, everybody would’ve said, “Of course. We all are.” And so likewise, in China, the image there, you see—the Tao—is not a boss image. Lao Tzu says: So the image of the Tao and the image of the Brahman—the Ātman-Brahman behind the Hindu universe—is not something that gets up and says booh, booh, booh, booh, booah, eeaargh!—you know, has its back to the wall—but it’s something invisible, subtle, always self-effacing. |
Now, however, there are grounds for this in Christianity. There is a passage in Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians which I’m going to translate in a slightly different way from the King James: Crazy! If you really understand what he’s saying, he’s saying: let this state of consciousness be in you that was also the state of consciousness of Jesus, who—being identical with god (Ātman is Brahman)—didn’t think that’s something you had to make a great scene about. |
Take it natural. Play it cool! And said: let’s see what happens if we don’t cling to this permanent state, but we let everything go, and we get into a weird thing called death. |
Now, what would you do without death? Norman Brown made the point very cleverly in his book Life Against Death that it is only that we die that we have individuality. Death is what creates our individuality. |
Now, one always thinks of death as something lying in the future. I want you to think of it in another way: as something in the past. How would you know you were alive unless you had once been dead? |
This sense that we are here, that we are real—that, you know?—depends upon that contrast. All knowledge is contrast. That we go back in our memories, zzzhhhhht, and we find a place we can’t remember anything. |
Well, that’s just the same place that you go to when you think, “Well, what would it be like to go to sleep an never wake up again?” Clunk! It’s the end. Take a last look at your creator’s blessed son. |
But you need that “no” in order to have “yes.” You need that void in order to have form. They go together. It’s all of a piece. |
And if you understand that, you are at peace. Yes? Yes, this is an important point. |
The question is: if this acceptance of the void and of death can lead to a certain kind of optimism which would be, as it were, socially destructive—in other words, to a lack of concern for the torments and problems of underprivileged people. It could do so, but it wouldn’t necessarily do so. Now, I find myself, as an individual, that I have some limited but very intense social concerns. |
I mean, I can’t, as an individual, concern myself about everything going on in the world, because I don’t have the power as an individual to do all the things that need to be done. But I’m very concerned about prisons, about mental hospitals, and the reform of the police. And these are things for which I work extremely actively. |
But I’m also sympathetic to people in all sorts of other fields. But this has to be understood. Gary Snyder, the poet, said once to me, “You cannot work effectively in the realm of good ecology unless first you realize that it doesn’t matter.” If you have the primary realization “it doesn’t matter,” then you are in the position of a surgeon who can operate with a steady hand. |
If your surgeon is so concerned about you that his hand shakes when he operates, you don’t want a surgeon like that. But surgeons who are excellent and very competent make all sorts of funny jokes while they’re operating upon very important people. And they talk to the nurses and flirt with them, and, you know, carry on as if nothing mattered, and so therefore have absolutely accurate and precise work. |
Because they’re not anxious. They don’t shake. They don’t ask, “To be or not to be, is that…” you know? |
They just go right ahead. And so, in the same way, in order to do good work—politically and so on and so on—we have, first of all, to realize that it doesn’t matter. Then we have the energy to go into it. |
You can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. It won’t work! It won’t happen! |
So: you can’t improve yourself, you can’t improve the world. Forget it! But then, suddenly, you have the energy available to do things that can be done. |
As Voltaire said: il faut cultiver notre jardin—“we should cultivate our gardens.” Will you announce that? Now, is it— Now, this question is: how can one make this statement that in all the great religious traditions there is a basic common denominator? Experimentally. |
At the end of August last, we had a conference at a Benedictine monastery where the good fathers invited a gaggle of gurus to be present—there were twelve of them—with 150 students who were priests, nuns, monks, ministers, educators; goodness only knows. We had this great audience. And what we did was that, instead of being merely talkative, we started at 4:30 in the morning to practice each other’s disciplines. |
You know, we attended the dancing and chanting of a Sufi master, we attended the Jesus prayer of a Greek orthodox master, we attended the zazen sessions of a Zen master, we had the services of two great yogis—Swami Satchidananda, et cetera—and three rabbis who were Hasidic, and we all joined in, and likewise, also, we attended the mass of the Benedictines and the divine office, which is the chanting of the Psalms. And we found in about one and a half days—we had five days in all—that there was nothing to argue about! We even had a black girl who was present who was a southern Baptist who’d worked with Martin Luther King, and she was a real swinger! |
And I got together with her very quickly, even though the language was so different. The only sort of holdout was the Greek orthodox, who wasn’t really approving of this extreme ecumenicism. I said to him at the end: “Look, I’m closer to your style of religion in feeling, in my gut, than I am to this black southern Baptist. |
I love the style of your liturgy, the beauty of your ritual. But would you tell me one thing? What does your belief in the sole preeminence of Jesus Christ do to your state of consciousness? |
Would you work that out? Because if you would be so kind, we’d all like to know.” He said, “I’ll think that one over.” He was a very learned theologian. And, you know, when he started out his sessions, he had a young man there in front of him teaching pranayama; breath control, so as to be able to chant the Jesus prayer. |
What it is, when you get beyond words—which is what I was trying to show you—when you get into that state of consciousness where you’re not talking to yourself, but you are simply experiencing what is, then you begin to be at the level of the divine. Now, I think this is it for now. Talking and discussing these things is very much like the art of cookery, and you can overdo it. |
And so there comes a certain time when the soufflé is just right. And when I have a feeling that that is so, I think we should conclude. Okay. |
Now, if everybody’s comfortable, we can get started. I’ve announced that this seminar is to be about the cosmic network, and therefore we’ve got to spend the first evening understanding something about the nature of networks. Because in order to get the principle of a network across I have to convey to you an idea which is extremely simple, but which is difficult to grasp only because we’re not used to it. |
We are used to thinking, as Westerners, as having a certain kind of language, and therefore a certain kind of logic that goes with it. We’re used to thinking of the world in terms of the game of billiards. In other words, we are still thinking about our psychology, our bodies, and their relationship to the outside world in terms of what would scientifically be called Newtonian mechanics. |
And Newtonian mechanics has a very long history because it goes back to some of the atomic theories of people like Democritus, who were among the great pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. And so we may as well begin with a little bit about the history of the idea of an atom, because this has always fascinated people. What is the world, fundamentally? |
What is all this? Well, one way of finding out is to take a knife and chop something in two so you can see what’s inside it. What is an apple inside? |
What is a seed inside? What is a human body inside? And then you find that, when you chop a thing in two, you’ve got two pieces. |
But the cutting reveals that it has a structure inside. And this structure is composed of what we call organs, or parts. And then, in turn, in order to inquire into them, we take them and we chop them apart. |
And in our curiosity to find out how it’s made in just the same way that a child will take a toy to pieces, we chop and chop and chop until we’ve got bits so small that they’re the same width as the edge of the knife. And they can’t be cut anymore unless we find a finer knife. And so, when we get down to that bit beyond which there is no bit-er—that is to say, it can’t be chopped any further—it is called in Greek ἄτομος, which means: the first letter, ἄ, means “non;” τομος, “cuttable.” And so the word “atom” means that smallest particle of the world which can’t be cut into any smaller particle. |
That’s the original idea of atomism. So then, we went further than that to the notion that the world was built of atoms in the same sort of way that a house could be built of bricks or stones. The world is seen, therefore, as a composite of fundamental particles. |
Then what remained to be discovered was the laws governing the relationship between these particles. And so, naturally, one thought of them as little balls. Why balls? |
Because balls are hard to cut. If you take a ball bearing and hit at it with a sword it’s liable to jump right off to one side. A cube will submit to being cut, but a ball is very difficult to get at. |
Very strong form of nature. So people have always tended to consider atoms as balls, especially atoms of liquid. There was a notion, you see, that the atoms of the element of earth were cubes, because cubes all sit together rather firmly. |
Liquid—which, when you put out—goes blwwwub; that was balls. Fire was made of—if I remember rightly—little pyramids. Air… I can’t remember what air was made of; what their atoms were shaped like. |
Maybe sausages or something like that, because air is pretty difficult to get at, too. But they had some ideas. But fundamentally, what has influenced Western thought and still influences Western thought is the idea of an atom as some sort of fundamental little planetary system. |
And so these things come into relationship with each other, and they bang each other around as in the game of billiards. And so if we are to understand the world profoundly we have to find out what are the laws governing the relationship of the atoms? Now, you must understand, first of all, a principle about what are called laws of nature. |
We inherit the idea of laws of nature from our theology. And our theology that we’ve grown up with is in certain ways peculiarly different from the theologies of Oriental peoples. Jewish theology and Christian theology, which have entered very profoundly into the common sense of the average person, have an image of the world which is quite basically political, and we’ll go further than that and say it’s monarchical. |
It’s based on the idea that the world is a construct evoked out of nothingness by the commandment of a celestial king. Now, there may be Jews in this room who are practicing and devout Jews, and there may be Christians in this room who are practicing and devout Christians, and I don’t want to offend you by any imagery that I choose or remarks that I may make about this imagery. Because I don’t suppose that anybody has come to this room and to this particular place who is either a practicing Christian or Jew who has what I would call a naïve idea of God. |
But the funny thing about our ideas of God is that our symbols—the images, the mythological forms which we use to describe God—have an extremely powerful influence on our feelings and on the way we behave. After all, I was a member of the Church of England when I was a small boy, and that had a very powerful effect on me. And in the Church of England it’s quite obvious—from an emotional point of view as distinct from a very intellectual point of view—that God stands behind the King of England. |
And the King of England, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the whole hierarchy of lords and ladies and noblemen and officials who descend from this point are somehow involved—at any rate, this is perfectly clear to a small boy—are somehow involved with the hierarchy of heaven. Because at morning prayer, to which we went every Sunday, the minister would pray a prayer which began, “Oh almighty Father, high and mighty King of kings, Lord of lords, the only ruler of princes who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth: most heartily we beseech thee with thy favor to behold our most gracious sovereign Lord, King George…” et cetera. And so this was a very courtly procedure at which the clergyman, dressed in his proper robes, proceeded to the altar—which is a kind of earthly symbol of the throne of heaven—made due obeisance and present in this petition with all proper humility. |
Now, these are things that—if you’re brought up in that environment—you take for granted. That seems to be the natural attitude to God. But imagine someone coming in from a culture where God is not conceived in the image of kingship. |
How strange he would find this behavior! What’s all this bowing and scraping? Because you know very well that places where they bow and scrape, and where there are thrones, are places of terror. |
Because anybody who rules by force must be, basically, terrified. That’s why he has to have all these protections, why he has to be addressed in the right form of language. Say you go into a court today—an ordinary U.S. law court: there is a very strict etiquette. |
And if you start laughing the judge will bang the gavel and threaten contempt of court, and all sorts of dire punishments. Because here, everybody has to be serious. It’s like on the parade ground. |
All those Marines lined up, you know? And they salute the flag. And I have to have a very grim expression on. |
Because it’s serious. And so,in the courts of Kings they have to be serious because Kings are afraid of laughter. They’re also afraid of being attacked suddenly, so everybody has to kneel down. |
Because if you kneel down or prostrate yourself, you’re at a disadvantage. And the King stands or sits at his throne with his bodyguards ranged on either side, see? Like that. |
We’ve already got the form of a church. The bishop at his throne, his attendant canons and clergy flanking him on either side. And so, certain great Catholic cathedrals are called—they’re described with the word “basilica.” And “basilica,” from the Greek βασιλεύς, is the king. |
So the basilica is the court of the king. The very titles of God in the Bible—“King of kings” and “Lord of lords”—are, of course, borrowed from the Persian emperor Cyrus, and to the Greek word, κύριος, meaning “lord.” So the mass begins with the invocation Kyrie eleison: “lord have mercy upon us.” The titles are borrowed from the Persian emperor. And so the rites that have become associated with Christian religion, and to some extent the Jewish religion, are reflections of those great autocratic monarchs of the ancient Near East. |
Cyrus of Persia, the Pharaohs of Egypt, and people like Hammurabi—who were the great Chaldean monarchs. The universe was conceived, then, as being ruled on a political pattern like that, so that Hammurabi in particular and Moses after him were great lawgivers. They were the wise ones who laid down the rules. |
They were the patriarchs who said, “Now, this is the way everybody’s got to behave. Somebody’s got to tell what the rules are. And since you can’t all agree among yourselves as to what the rules are going to be, I’m going to tell you what to do. |
And since I’m the toughest guy around here, and I got these brothers of mine who are pretty tough too, we’re gonna say this is the law.” See? “And you’ve got to obey.” So this is how we have got, historically, the idea of there being a law of nature: that somebody told nature what to do. Somebody told—for example, a wonderful poem by Father Feeney about bees. |
God—to some sticky stuff not yet alive in a hive—said, “Come! Hum! Be my bee and buzz as I bid!” And sure enough, it was and it did. |
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