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That is to say, immaterial in the sense of unmeasured. So these are studies, practices, disciplines (or whatever you want to call them), that are of very great and special value to a culture as powerful as ours, which is seriously suffering from alienation, splitness, divorce of consciousness from reality. Well now, the general trend of this seminar has been from the theoretical to the practical.
That is to say, I started in the first session talking to you in a very theoretical way about the relation of the individual to the world, and showing how our apprehension of our own existence is (when compared with the scientific description of our relation to nature) really a hallucination. And then the problem is the practical overcoming of this hallucination. And so I’ve discussed with you two approaches—which are very like each other—to that objective.
One, the essential principles of the method of Zen. And the other, the essential principles of the method, or the non-method, of Krishnamurti. Because coming to the Blaisdell Institute are these people—Zen people and Krishnamurti, we hope.
So that—you know, don’t bruit it around too much, but that’s what you’re in for. But, of course, the work there has a particular relevance for students; for young people. And both these approaches, Krishnamurti’s approach and the Zen approach, are very proper and appropriate for young people today.
One of the most balancing factors in San Francisco life at this time is the existence of a very strong movement for the practice of Zen alongside the whole wide open world of hippiedom. And many, many young people who are, what you might call in the general hippie direction and classification, as a matter of fact, being beguiled by Suzuki Rōshi with the Zen Center in San Francisco to go out to Tassajara springs at the end of the Carmel Valley and practice Zen meditation. Now, this is a very extraordinary thing, because the sessions in Zen meditation out at the end of the valley are tough.
And Mr. Suzuki stands no nonsense. This is a very, very—I don’t quite want to say serious; that’s the wrong word, because Zen isn’t serious. Let’s say a very sincere application, which requires a great deal of work because you don’t only meditate, you have to be responsible for the maintenance of the grounds and the buildings and everything.
So it’s a wonderful training school for young people. But they will go for this in a way that they wouldn’t go for discipline under other and more traditional auspices. This is something new.
This has a new flavor. But this man, Suzuki, is doing wonders for young people in San Francisco. The difficulty, you see, is with people who get their introduction to mysticism—through LSD, or marijuana and other chemicals—is that they get suddenly flipped into very high states of consciousness with no background, no way to comprehend it, no way to deal with it, no way to bring it down to earth.
And therefore, since there are operating (in the same area where these things are happening) experienced people who have long, long training in knowing how to connect the mystical with the practical, this is a very good influence. And in the same way I would think Krishnamurti has a comparable influence, although he doesn’t act as the leader of an ongoing community as Suzuki does. This is a more or less touch and go thing: a few meetings, a few encounters, and that’s the end of it.
It’s up to you after that. But both these directions of presenting the problem of self-realization are certainly not frivolous, and certainly require a great deal of self-examination. And this is a great problem which faces us now among young people who are in revolt against all sorts of things that, in the lives of their fathers and mothers, they feel to be false.
They’re in revolt against what Buddhists call saṃsāra. Saṃsāra means “the wheel of birth and death,” but saṃsāra really is the same thing as a squirrel cage, a rat race, where you are working and working and working for you really know not what. A process of gaining money, or status, or whatever it is—not really to be enjoyed, because one feels a little bit too guilty to enjoy it.
But to bring up children, to give them expensive and glorious college educations, so that they can bring up their children to do the same thing, you see? And it just goes on, and on, and on, and on, like this. And so, against this rat race, against the absorption—say, of the executive in paperwork and abstractions, against the complete dissolution of the family by reason of husband’s absorption in business, wife’s absorption in womens’ clubs, children’s absorptions in a school where they’re not cared for by their parents—the revolt against all that sort of thing is going on.
But it’s just not enough to revolt. It’s just not enough to take various drugs which open your mind to new dimensions. It’s not enough to challenge everybody’s standards in clothing, in housing, in family arrangements, and so on.
Behind and beyond all that there must be some way of bringing it all to earth; grounding it. As I’ve intimated already, the fascination of young people today for the mystical, and for chemical mysticism, is very dangerous—like every worthwhile enterprise is dangerous. If they weren’t doing that, they’d be driving hot rods and perhaps skydiving.
Anyway, something dangerous. The young always have to be involved in something dangerous. This adventure of exploration of the inner world is of peculiar danger simply because it goes into that aspect of our being about which we know least: our own inner life, our minds.
But it is of the utmost importance that those adventures be accompanied with some kind of discipline. Now, discipline is a dirty word today among young people. When you say “discipline” it means “AAGH!” You know?
“Don’t do it!” And so I substitute for the word “discipline” the word “skill,” because there is no pleasure in this world without skill. And skill is an attractive word; discipline is a push-away word, you see? And you—all of you, as I look around to estimate the ages of people in this room—you’re all involved with young people.
And you must be very conscious, as you all are very conscious, of the strife, the discord, the gap between generations. And so I, myself, regard my function to be a bridge-person. I’ve worked all my life to be a bridge between East and West, and now it’s thrown in my lap the job of being a bridge between the young and the old.
And so now I’m talking to a relatively older group, and I want to say some very serious things to you about how to handle what is happening among young people, especially since this is under the auspices of the Blaisdell Institute, which is concerned with the university and, therefore, with the education of young people—in relation to everything I’ve been talking about. Because the young are interested—deeply and seriously interested—in the transformation of consciousness, in breaking out from the narrow situation of the alienated individual against the world. But in doing this, they are showing the usual excesses and imbalances of things that young people always do.
They’re not experienced, they’re not mature. Therefore, just for the very reason that they’re not mature, they have the guts—or the foolhardiness, if you want to call it that—to go out on these expeditions. But it was always so.
In the year 6000 B.C., an Egyptian priest was complaining of the decadence and irresponsibility and indiscipline of the young. So what to do under these circumstances? You must not give up your own ground—in the sense that there is, as I said, a very definite need for a discipline, for something that will act in the same way as in radio the ground wire acts to the antenna.
It’s not enough to have a way-out experience and come back and say to your friends, “Man, it was a gas!” Because it is immemorial wisdom that everybody who takes a heroic journey must bring something back—because if he doesn’t, nobody knows he’s taken it. He may have lied, he may just have said that he went to the land of the demons and fought with the dragons, and then crossed the perilous bridge and came into the fairy palace. Bring back a fairy’s feather!
Prove it! This is not merely to prove it, this is also to do another thing, which is the whole work of art. What is art?
Art is what Christians call the process of incarnation. The making of the divine word into the flesh; the expression—in a material form—of vision. And to do that is very difficult.
On a hundred micrograms of LSD you may very well have seen the vision of God in a dirty old ashtray. Can you imagine that that’s possible? But it is, because: what is an ashtray?
Ashes. The decay. The falling apart, the burning away.
The turning of more or less alive, or at least moist, leaves of tobacco into dust. And as you begin to think about that from a certain point of view, it becomes a parable of the process of existence. What is this turning of everything into dust?
At first sight it looks as if it were a kind of doom. Everything is just going into dust, dust, dust, dust, and blowing away. And you realize that’s what you’re doing.
And by smoking these cigarettes, you’re slowly committing suicide. Giving yourself lung cancer or something. Then you may remember the words of C. G. Jung: that life is an incurable disease with a very bad prognosis, which lingers on for years and invariably ends with death.
Everything you do is bad for you! Like the little boy, four years old, who’d got sunburn and his skin was peeling, and he looked in the mirror and said, “So young, and wearing out already….” You know? All energy wears you out.
Everything is going into dust. So it is to the extent, you see—there’s a kind of a paradox in all this: to the extent that you completely accept the dissolution of everything into dust—that, by doing that, you let go of that clinging (to permanence, to yourself, to security) which releases all the energies of life. The formula, then, is: to the degree that you are willing to become dust, to that degree you are alive.
And that’s how a person could see the vision of God in an ashtray. Now, I’ve spent a few minutes taking some trouble with words to explain the ashtray as a vehicle of the vision of God. Now, if you’re a painter, it’s not just enough to take a pedes—I mean, let’s say you’re a sculptor, you’re a person who presents objects of art: you can’t just get away with putting up a nice walnut cube, beautifully polished, filthy ashtray on it, enclose it in a glass case, put a label on it, and say “Beatific Vision.” That’ll shock people a little bit.
That might give them pause. But if you’re really skillful, you will understand how to paint an old ashtray (or photograph it) in such a way that people’s hearts will stop. They’ll say, “Look at that!” And then—but to do that it will be necessary for you to show all the individual little pepper-and-salt patterns in ash as a collection of tiny jewels.
Which is how you can see them. But you’ll have to represent that, and carry it out, and bring it through. Just in the same way as the people who painted Persian miniatures—which are painted jewelry—would look at trees and grasses and rocks, and suddenly show them as full of interior light, enchanted, divine, by a very skillful technique.
But you have to have that technique to bring it through. Some possession, some complete mastery of an artistic technique is necessary for the bringing through of the vision. So then, our young people have stumbled on a key to the vision: psychedelic chemicals and such things.
But they will not be able to bring it through unless they also have the skills. And therefore, the attitude of the older generation in this situation will naturally be one of great concern and worry as to what this kind of easy mysticism—too easy mysticism, shall we say—is going to bring about. All this has become terribly popular for the simple reason that human beings need religion, are starved for it, and the churches have not delivered.
They have not delivered the experience; therefore, alternatives are being explored. It’s quite natural. But you—I repeat—you are rightly and properly concerned as to what will be the outcome.
And the only way to make a good job of it is, instead of saying, “Suppress the whole thing”—which never works anyway—is to emphasize the point: “Alright, alright. You’ve done this. This is what you’ve seen.
You’ve had these experiences, but there is a great deal more to it than that.” In my own study of these kind of experiences I could not have really enjoyed them unless I had, before that time, been trained in all sorts of ways—not only to understand the doctrines and the symbolism of religions, mythologies, but also simply to speak and write. Because unless you know the art of language, or you know the art of numbers—or whatever it is, whatever is the vehicle through which you express yourself—you can’t bring it forth. See, one of the great puzzles of life is: consider people who’ve had a great love affair; Dante and Beatrice.
Everybody knows about that love affair because Dante could express it so gorgeously. But supposing there’s some people who’ve had a love affair, and all the guy could ever say to the girl was, “Ugh! Mmmh!
Aaah! Ooogh!” This is a real puzzle, because: is that guy any less in love with the girl than Dante was with Beatrice? Perhaps it was the same degree of love.
But obviously, the effect for mankind of Dante’s love was far greater than the guy who can only say, “Oogh!” See? They both go into the paradise. They both go into the beatific vision.
But one brings it back and shares it. And this is the distinction which is made in Buddhism between two kinds of Buddhas. There’s the Buddha who attains nirvāṇa for himself: he’s called a pratyekabuddha.
And there is the Buddha who crosses and sees nirvāṇa and comes back to share it with the whole universe, with everybody, with all sentient beings: he’s called a bodhisattva. And it so turns out that, in the literature of Mahayana Buddhism, pratyekabuddha is almost a term of abuse, whereas a bodhisattva is the ideal form of man. Because the bodhisattva realizes that he does not have the vision, really, if—well, let me put it this way: I don’t have it if you don’t have it.
Because I have it only to the extent that I can give it away; that I can give it up and to—I’m quoting Gary Snyder—up and to all others. But in order that people may master these disciplines—and this is a responsibility of the older generations—it must be understood that working on the disciplines is fun. And this is the task of all good teachers.
All good, really gifted, and great teachers are people who never have to resort, in their classes, to artificial methods of imposing discipline. They need no proctors. They need no punishments.
They need no bribes. Because the good teacher is the person who makes the work of learning the discipline so completely fascinating that the student is embroiled. The reason being that learning a discipline is not a matter of forcing yourself.
And here, the English language leaves a little bit to be desired. We have a paucity of words for “effort,” for “application,” for “concentration.” We can talk about—when we’re talking with children—“you must apply yourself.” Now, it’s perfectly true: nothing in the way of a skill will be achieved without practice. But if practice is strained, still nothing will be achieved by it—except resentment.
Many a little boy learns to hate the violin or the piano because it was drummed into him, “This is what you’ve got to do. You’ve got to apply yourself to it.” Za-cha-cha-cha-cha, driving it home. But on the other hand, if there is a way of fascinating a child with the discipline of any musical instrument, or what have you, then they can apply themselves day after day after day after day, and be fascinated with the discipline.
So this is the skill of the teacher. This is upāya—I used this Sanskrit word this morning; “skillful means”—to get the student to love the art. Because—remember this principle—if your student does not learn to love the discipline, he will never be any good at what you’re teaching him.
Now, you may know that certain kinds of scholars do work that most of us would think very tedious. They are, let’s supposing—I talk a field about which I know a few smatterings, which is the study of Chinese. Chinese scholarship is very difficult.
You have an enormous amount of characters to study, and you have to look up things in dictionaries, and consult volumes of this, and volumes of that. But the true scholar is a person who just loves doing that. He’ll spend a whole afternoon going after one character, through all sorts of things, sifting this reference and that reference.
And he will be having more fun than someone at a bowling alley, doing just that. And from the standpoint of an external observer who has no particular interest in this, they’ll say, “Oh, how hard he’s working!” You know, in my private life—I must confess to you—I’ve had a terrible time with this because I love my work. And people who had absolutely, say, no comprehension or interest in what I’m doing would wonder how do I keep up the pace?
How can I possibly do this, that, and the other? I love it. But then there are other people who say, “You never do a lick of work in your life!
You’re playing all the time. Just goofing off. It’s too easy for you”—see?—“because you love it.” But that’s the only way to get it done, and done well!
Because if you have something that is, say, a good marriage: a good marriage is not the result of forcing yourself into that marriage. Are you seriously supposing that if you say to your husband or wife, “Darling, do you really love me?” and the partner answers, “I’m trying my best to do so.” This is simply not a satisfactory marriage. We are not going to get beautiful work by mere effort against the grain.
You can tell of a cook instantly, by tasting one mouthful of a dish, whether it was cooked out of a sense of duty or cooked out of love. A person, say, who cooks out of true love would, of course, encounter days on which it is difficult. But somehow, the overall love of the art will manage to get him through those days when it’s difficult.
And so with marriage, and so with the mastery of any other art. But it is on the end of the older people—it is up to the teachers, the parents—to present the disciplines of life as something that’s not just what you ought to know, but as something that is beautiful to understand. Now, let’s look at the cold question from quite another point of view.
One certain way of approach is appropriate for the young, but what what way of approach is appropriate for the older, so that they should be able to take this approach to the young? Many of us who are older inherit teachings of discipline which were all forced on us, and we’ve learned to grow up dull and rigid. And so I could say things to this audience that I would not possibly say in an audience of students.
It’s up to you to loosen up and to become a little mad. There’s no point saying that to a younger audience, because they’re going to do that anyway. But a great problem for the generation of parents and grandparents is psychic rigidity, because we have been indoctrinated for a long time in not being able to trust ourselves.
And this morning I was discussing, you know, Chinese ideas about trusting human nature, about spontaneity, the disciplines of spontaneity, and so on and so forth. Now, this becomes a peculiar importance to people who have passed the threshold of the middle of life. Because in the first half of life—if you’ve lived your life properly—you are supposed to set up yourself in the world, have established your business, your profession, or whatever it was.
Then you go on to the second half of life: you’ve got to get ready to die. Now, are you ready to die, right now? Supposing, I mean, we were going to be annihilated by an atomic bomb in, say, five minutes.
Supposing we’re going to be annihilated by an atomic bomb in five minutes: what would you think you ought to do between now and then? R. H. Blyth asked this question to a Zen master: “What would you do?” He said, “I would practice Zazen.” Meditation. Blyth was disappointed in this answer.
Because he had put it: would you like to listen to your favorite music? Would you like to make love to a beautiful woman? Or would you just go on, sort of, with everyday life as if nothing had happened, like somebody winding up his watch on his way to execution.
He once asked a Zen mistress (there are such great ladies; old nun, you know, who was a great Zen teacher), “Where do you think you’re going to go when you die?” She said, “I don’t think I’m going to go anywhere.” He said, “In that case I’ll go with you.” She said, “Oh, that’s so nice. That’s the first time a man is ever wanted to go anywhere with me.” But, you see, it is traditional. All cultures have understood this in some way or other, that when you enter the second half of life, the business of that part of life is to get ready to die.
That sounds to us terrible: to prepare for death. It suggests preachers coming around and saying, “Are you ready to meet your maker?” You know, ugh! And so, as a result of that, in our culture death is a thing that is completely swept under the carpet.
You go to hospital and they don’t tell you you’re going to die. They pretend it’s going to be all right. U-huh!
Don’t worry. And all your friends and relatives come around when you’re lying in bed with cancer, on the end of a lot of tubes. And with a kind of weak smiles on their face they say, “Well, won’t it be nice, two weeks from now when you’re feeling better, we’ll go down to the beach.” And this, that, and the other.
And you know very well, deep down, even if you won’t admit it, that things are pretty rough. Especially when they start talking like that. We seriously need an entirely new approach to death.
We need entirely new hospitals. We need sanitaria for the dying, where dying is made into a work of art and a real achievement. Where, when you’re going to die, and it becomes fairly certain this is the end—I’m talking about this specifically because, if you understand the last minute, then you can kick it back into that whole of the second half of life, which is a preparation for the last minute.
But the thing is to understand the last minute first. Let’s say we take an entirely different attitude to death. Say, “Now, look,”—quite different.
The way we say to the young, “Build up your strengths and your skills so that you can take on responsibilities. But death is where you’re going to be absolved of all responsibilities. There’ll be no need for you anymore.” Quite a different scene—but a very liberating one if you can learn to enjoy it.
Now, a man, a British obstetrician like Grantly Dick-Read has taught women how to have children without resisting it. So that they don’t talk about the pangs of childbirth, but they talk about the tensions, about really learning a kind of masochistic ecstasy from having a baby. Now, some new physician has got to come onto the scene now and tell us exactly the same thing about the pains of death.
Death is not a disease. Death is very healthy, just as childbirth is. Everybody has to die.
You can’t possibly call it a disease. You may die as a result of a disease, or of an accident, or anything, but death itself is not a disease. It is simply the other end of life, opposite birth.
And instead of regarding it as something to be put off and simply really disregarded, death is something for which one should train oneself as a very valuable experience, because death is the automatic taking away of all your attempts to cling onto life. All that frightened clutch is simply going to be broken. Well, it’s pretty rough to have it broken.
Why don’t you let go first? So in that case, then, when somebody is about to die, instead of the friends and relations coming around and consoling him and saying, “You’re going to be alright,” they come around instead and say “Wowee! This is the great moment for you,” you know?
Here is the colossal opportunity for you to realize who you really are. Because all that you thought you were is going to disappear. What do you suppose is going to be left?
So you can have your choice—in my ideal sanitarium for the dying—in the way you want to die: whether you want to die in a religious way with candles and priests and chants and meditations, or whether you want to die with an enormous and glorious champagne party. The principle is pretty much the same. Do you really let yourself go?
Do you cooperate with what nature is doing in you? Nature is giving you, by death, the opportunity to let go of all this nonsense. Now, when you’ve passed the middle point of life you can see it coming.
You begin to read the obituaries, and this friend and that friend has disappeared. And you know it’s on the way. Now, instead of avoiding this, what about it?
Because nature is in this fact assisting you to let go of yourself. Making it easy what is very difficult for the young. It’s hard for the young to face death, because they feel there is a timeliness about death.
I’m too young to die. Cut off so soon, and there is so much promise, so much potentiality. It’s very tough.
But as we get older, nature helps us. We realize that, well, we’ve had it. Past the middle of life every day is gravy.
But you are being helped, you see, to this act of release. So as one of the Zen poets who said, “While living, be a dead man. Thoroughly dead.
And then whatever you do, just as you will, will be right.” So there’s a kind of higher zombieism: those who are dead while alive, those who have given themselves up to death, and will therefore look forward to death as the great enlightenment, the great awakening. And this requires no hocus-pocus, no beliefs in immortality that you can’t really be convinced about. It’s simply that it’s even better for you if you have no beliefs in an afterlife.
If you’re willing to let the future go completely, and abandon any future. Anything that you could want to grasp for yourself or to preserve yourself—recognize that you’re being forced to let it go. There is no promise of any future beyond the grave, see?
I’m not saying that there isn’t. I’m saying that the psychological state of not expecting anything, of facing death as if it were really—crrrck!—the end, and you don’t resist this. You end.
You have the ability to end. This is central in Krishnamurti’s thought. You find that, if you do that, something flips inside you, as a result of which you have no further questions.
You will say to yourself, “Well, now, for the first time I realize what life is, what it’s all about. Because I’m not looking to the future to answer my question. I know there is no future.” I end up clunck, like that, and all future is cut off.
So if you do that, you see, you then can let go of yourself. Now then, if you can let go of yourself—especially in the second half of life, in that way—you cease to be to be rigid. What young people don’t like about old people is that they’re rigid.
They’re stuffy. It’s like Ogden Nash wrote: “The trouble with a kitten is that, eventually, it becomes a cat.” And one understands this to some extent. It’s very hard for, let’s say, a woman who was once very pretty and is now afflicted with rheumatism and what have you, pains all the time, to put up with a great deal of noise and dance and stuff going on when it just racks through your head all the time.
And therefore, you put on an expression that makes you look stuffy. You can’t help it. It’s very rough.
But if you’re not racked with pain all the time, you’re enjoying a reasonably healthy old age: don’t be on the defensive. So, to this part of life one must say it is important to be a little mad. When a bridge built of steel doesn’t swing in the wind, it’s going to crash.
It has no give. And so, likewise, people who don’t have any give are in danger of being insane. In order to be sane you must have—just as I said the stew has to have a little salt in it—the good human being has to have a little rascality in him.
So the sane person, especially the mature person, must have a little craziness. And just as it says in the Book of Genesis that God ordered that every seventh day should be a holiday, one seventh of your life should be madness. Otherwise you’ll be crazy, because too rigid.
And therefore it’s important for all of us who are set in our ways (who are habituated to certain patterns of life, and we cling to these) to get off it—not all the time, but about a seventh of the time—and learn to swing. And that means that the art of meditation, shall we say, for the older people is not necessarily what the art of meditation is for the younger people. It’s the older people who need to be present at a happening.
Where you don’t know what’s going to happen. Where anything might happen. Where you simply allow what it is in you to do whatever it likes.
A Chinese, Liezi, an old gentleman, said, “I let my mouth say whatever it wanted to say. I let my ears hear whatever they wanted to hear. I let my eyes see whatever they wanted to see.
I let my feet go wherever they wanted to go. And then I didn’t know whether the wind was riding on me or whether I was riding on the wind.” After all, you are all practiced people, mature people, who can be trusted upon to behave themselves and not like the monk of Siberia who burst in the cell and devoured the father superior. You’re all mature, and therefore you can trust yourselves to let go a bit and to be a little mad.