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And what makes a plastic person? The answer is that anything that that person says or does is going to be very highly predictable. No surprise.
So it is the element of surprise somewhere, somehow—of not knowing how it’s done—that is essential to beauty. Alright, then. If that is the case, we have to be very careful how we handle nature and ourselves.
Because, you see, we are in a passionate state of wishing to predict it all—to make it, as they say, foolproof. But it should be obvious that if there are no fools, there is no fun. That is why fools used to be in great demand.
A king would have a fool present at court. The jester was actually a very wise person. Because fools often are extremely wise, and they see things that other people don’t see just the same way as children do.
Somebody completely naïve, totally honest, but not caring for the morrow, and generally speaking screwy, will say things that are exceedingly funny. And everybody absolutely breaks up. We used to play a game as kids.
You had a little book with a story in it, but every so often a word was left out and there was just a blank. Then we had an assortment of cards that were shuffled and passed around, and people in turns would take the first card that came and read it in while the person was reading the story, he’d stop for a blank, and then he’d read a word. I mean, it’s utterly disconnected!
But everybody just broke up because of the incongruity of the fill-in. And so kids today: they’ll turn on the television with no volume, see? And then they’ll play a record, maybe people talking or singing or something or other, and compare it with what’s on the TV.
It’s the same principle. I recently had to visit someone who was insane and couldn’t talk English anymore. They were just talking nonsense.
And I spent an hour with her having an extremely sociable, pleasant conversation in which I simply talked nonsense back to her. And she was quite happy. But, you see, people don’t ordinarily like to do that.
They’re trying to correct the person in the state of insanity and see if they can’t push them back into talking proper English. There’s no need to do this! What does music mean?
I mean, we get together and make music, but it had no meaning except itself. Music is beautiful—like a flower, like a fern, like a cloud. And we like to look at it just in the same way as we like to look at a landscape.
And so, if you can listen to music, you can listen to soundscape, you can listen to just anything, and dig it. Now, this is enormous fun, but it’s not generally recognized. If you just close your eyes and listen to all the sound that’s going on, and you stop naming it—see, you don’t call it anything, you don’t identify it, but you just listen to this buzz.
Fantastic! And you also make certain discoveries. To the eyes, the world appears rather static.
To the ears it’s never static, it’s always on the move. Now, using ears only to study what is going on, to study reality, is a very, very fascinating enterprise. There’s a book about it which is called Sound and Symbol, and the author rejoices in the name of Victor Zuckerkandl, published by Princeton University, where he uses music as a method of inquiry into the nature of the physical world.
And it is an extremely interesting book. But he doesn’t bring up the point which I’m going to make, which is that if you listen to the world, you will discover that there is no past and no future. They are absolutely inaudible.
The past pop of a champagne cork is suddenly not audible, nor is the future sound of the San Francisco earthquake. And also, you can’t hear anybody listening. So if we are to believe our ears, there is no past and there is no future, and there is no difference between yourself and the sound you’re hearing.
It’s all one. So there is a process going on, but nobody is being processed. There is just a process.
That’s you. See, when you listen, everything you hear is you. Or else, there is no “you” at all.
In that state of pure listening without naming, you cannot tell the difference between the universe and your action upon it. That’s kinda scary. Because when we experience the world simply as a happening, we’re apt to say, “Well, hell, who’s in charge around here?” Because we always think somebody has to be in charge.
I mean, doesn’t somebody have to be in charge to make things go the right way, or to make anything happen at all? I mean, don’t you need a bit of a shove? Mustn’t there be some primordial source of energy to goose the whole thing into being?
No, there doesn’t. All that is a military image of nature where somebody’s in command, based on the idea of a king, a general, commander-in-chief, who gives the orders and makes the original shove. Like, say, when you have a row of dominoes all standing up on end: somebody flips the first domino and they go catta-catta-catta-catta-catta-catta all the way down, and then you have cause and effect, see?
That’s not the way nature works. But it’s an image, it’s a model, in terms of which we have been accustomed to think about nature. So that God, as conceived in the West, is the big boss who is in charge, who orders all things.
And then they got rid of God, you know, around the 18th century, and people stopped believing in God—although they continue to think they ought to believe in God. They don’t really. So they got rid of the commander-in-chief and were left with the mechanical consequence of the commander-in-chief’s operations.
And so the universe was looked upon as a mechanism, and we talked of the mechanisms of nature and the mechanisms of the mind. And so now we all tend to regard ourselves and each other as machinery, and we want to make that machinery as predictable as possible. Because if you were a perfect psychologist, you see, you would always know what a person is going to do next.
You would always know what was wrong with them when they were neurotic or psychotic. And you would be a mechanic, and you would just go in there with your wrenches and screwdrivers and straighten it out. And there would be no surprises left.
So there would be no fools. There’d be no crazy people. And, you see, in this industrial society, we’re terrified of crazy people.
You can’t have crazy people driving automobiles! And, you know, it’s gone so far that, whether you are or are not in a fit condition to drive an automobile is just about the definition of sanity. Well, now, most people are not really fit to drive an automobile, especially people who are angry or depressed, whose mind is not on the job because they’re furious at their wives, or in terror of their bosses, and just aren’t thinking about anything except that, and they are going down the road.
They’re worse than drunks! You can’t drive an automobile while profoundly in love with the girl sitting next to you. You are thinking about her.
Her vibes are coming right across you. You know? You can’t read poetry and drive an automobile at the same time.
And what is this tyranny that’s over us all, that we all have to be in a fit condition to go roaring down freeways in a death-dealing instrument? “What’s good for General Motors is good for America.” So this industrial civilization is terribly tidy, because it’s so dangerous. If you’re going to work on a production line—you know, this thing is going whizzing along—well, you can’t be foolish.
Another thing about the freeway is that you must be going somewhere. You can’t be purposeless on a freeway. You can’t wander.
You can’t even wander in the suburbs. Because if you go out on foot and start wandering, a police car will come and say, “Where are you going?” And if you’re not going anywhere, well, you’re obviously suspicious. So you have to be walking a dog, or jogging, or doing something important.
Otherwise you’re a deeply suspicious character! So the passion to control everything, to predict everything, to square everything off, is destructive of life. When we get to the foolproof world, you see, and have no fools, there’s no joke left.
No jester, no joker. Because the joker in the deck of cards is your representative: it’s the wild man who can play any other card. So the more predictable you are, the less you are of a joker.
When everybody knows what you’re going to do, you’re an ace, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, or a knave, maybe a queen or a king. But not the joker. The joker corresponds to the man whom, in Hindu society, would be called the jivanmukta: the one liberated, the sannyasa, a holy man.
He’s a joker. And when you meet real holy men, you cannot figure them out. They might do anything.
And they’re often shocking people, because they do things that holy men are not supposed to do. I mean, characters like Gurdjieff, and even Sri Ramana Maharshi, and so on, are very, very unpredictable. They’re weird.
But always surprising. Zen masters—I know many—you never know what they’re going to do next. Now, be careful, though.
One warning: you cannot be artificially weird. There is no program for becoming spontaneous. A lot of people think there is, but what they do is this: they become only extremely conventional in an obverse way.
That is to say, they do all those things which are not allowed by convention. And that is following convention, you see? It’s just its mirror image.
So when we discuss spontaneity—or, say, in an encounter group of some kind where everybody is going to be spontaneous. Well, all they do is: they become hostile. Because hostile is bad form according to convention.
And so we call it being genuine. Now I, being an Englishman by origin, I have been brought up to preserve fairly good manners, be civil to people, not lose my temper and so on. And I feel perfectly comfortable with it.
I don’t have to flout those standards in order to feel real. But a lot of people tell me I’m not really there. “We want to see the real you.” “Are you in touch with your real feelings?” they’ll say.
And well, of course I’m in touch with my real feelings. And I know that sometimes I’m furious, but I don’t have to blow up at people. It’s not necessary.
Because one gets one’s results much better by not blowing up, by being subtle. But beware of the phony spontaneity of merely going against what is conventional. Because that is not the watercourse way, that is not the line of least resistance.
And you have to be very sensitive to discover what that line is to be able to flow. Do you mind if I talk for a while about something I love; about water and the ocean? Ever since I can remember anything at all, the light, the smell, the sound and motion of the sea has been pure magic.
Even the mere intimation of its presence: gulls flying a little way inland, the quality of light in the sky beyond hills which screen it from view, the lowing of foghorns in the night. If ever I have to get away from it all and, in the words of a Chinese poet, “wash all the wrongs of life from my pores,” there’s simply nothing better than to climb out onto a rock and sit for hours with nothing in sight but sea and sky. Although the rhythm of the waves beats a kind of time, it’s not clock or calendar time.
It has no urgency. It’s timeless time. Because I know I’m listening to a rhythm which has been just the same for millions of years.
And it takes you out of the world of relentlessly ticking clocks. Clocks, for some reason or other, always seem to be marching, and armies never march to anything but doom. But there’s no marching rhythm in the motion of waves.
It harmonizes with the breath. It does not count our days. Its pulse is not in the stingy spirit of measuring, of marking out how much still remains.
It’s the breathing of eternity, like the Brahmā of Indian mythology, who inhales and exhales, manifests and dissolves the worlds endlessly, for ever. As a mere conception, that sounds appalling and monotonous—until you listen to the breaking and washing of waves. Just in the past few weeks I’ve come to live right on the edge of the water.
I have a studio, library, and place for writing in an old ferryboat tied up on the waterfront of Sausalito, north of San Francisco—I suppose the nearest thing in America to a Mediterranean fishing village: steep hills clustered with little houses, and below, along the rim of the bay, the forest of masts rocking almost imperceptibly against a background of water and wooded promontories. In some ways it’s rather a messy waterfront: not just piers and boats, but junkyards, industrial buildings, and all the inevitable litter-ature of our culture. But somehow, the land and seascape absorbs and pacifies the mess.
Sheds and shacks thrown together out of old timbers and plywood, heaps of disused lumber, rusted machinery, and rotting hulls. All of this is transformed in the beneficent presence of the sea. Perhaps it’s the quality of the light, especially early in the morning and towards the evening, when the distinction of sky and water becomes uncertain, when the whole of space becomes opalescent; the sort of pearly, luminous grey, and the rising or setting moon is straw yellow.
In this light, all the rambling mess of sheds and junkyards is magical, blessed with the white cries of gulls, and with the patterns of masts and ropes and boats at anchor which put me in mind of landfalls a long way away, and of all the voyages of which one has dreamed. I look out now as I talk to you across a wide space of nothing but water and birds ending in a line of green slopes with clumps of trees. Right over the edge of the boat the water contains, seemingly, just under the surface, a ceaselessly moving network of reflected sunlight through which a school of very tiny fish passes delightfully uncaught.
And yet, only a few yards from where we are moored, tackle shops sell the marvelous salmon and crabs with which this particular area abounds. This is the paradox of the ocean. Sand, flying spray, pebbles and shells, driftwood, sparkling water, space incredibly luminous, with cloud banks along horizons underlying skies into which one’s imagination can reach forever.
But under the surface of both sky and water there’s the grim business of preying. Men and birds against fish, fish against fish. The torturous process of life continuing by the painful transformation of one form into another.
To creatures who don’t anticipate and reflect imaginatively upon this holocaust of eating and being eaten, it’s perhaps not so terrible. But poor man. Skillful beyond all other animals by being able to think in time and knowing the future, he dies before he’s dead, he shrinks from the shark’s teeth before they bite him, he dreads the alien germ long, long before it’s banquet begins.
Here is a gull that has picked a crab from a tide pool. Sprawled now upon the sand, the crab shrinks from the walls of its shell, resounding to the tap-tap-tap of the gull’s beak. Who’s that knocking at my door?
I suppose the shell of the crab, the clam, or the mussel is the boundary of its universe. To put ourselves in their position we should have to imagine a knocking sound, louder and louder, that doesn’t come from anywhere in particular—from the door, or the walls, or the ceiling, or the floor. Think of a knocking that comes from everywhere, that beats against the boundaries of space and consciousness, that comes as the intrusion of an utterly unknown dimension into our own familiar world.
Let me in! Let me in! I love you so much I could eat you!
I love you to the very core—especially the soft, juicy parts; the vitals most tender and alive. Surrender to this agony and you will be transformed into me. Dying to yourself, you will become alive as me.
We shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, on the morning when the last trumpet sounds. For behold, I am he that stands at the door and knocks. There’s no way of getting around it, is there?
The gull isn’t rapacious or greedy. It’s just that his being alive at all is the same thing as eating crabs. Sea birds are transformations of fish.
Men are transformations of wheat, chickens, and steers. And a love for the food is the agony of the food. To object to this inseparability of pleasure and pain, life and death, is simply to object to existence.
But, of course, we cannot help objecting when the time comes. Objecting to pain is pain. So far as we know, the gull and the fish don’t philosophize.
They enjoy life when they’re eating it and hate it when being eaten. They don’t reflect on the process as a whole and say: “How rough it is that we have to work so hard for a living,” or, “It’s just hell having to watch out all the time for those gulls!” I’m sure that, in their world, this is something that just goes along with life, like having eyes or feet. But man, with his astonishing ability to stand aside from himself and think about himself—in short, to comment on life—man has done something which confuses his own existence down to its roots.
For the more sensitive he is, the more man finds the very act of living in conflict with his moral conscience. Upon reflection, a universe so arranged that there is no way of living except by destroying other lives seems to be a hideous mistake; not a divine, but a devilish creation. Of course, there’s the myth that once upon a time things were quite otherwise, that there was no death, that the lion lay down with the lamb.
But that, since then, there’s been a fall, a vast error, which has corrupted the whole of nature. All that must’ve been eons ago, perhaps in some other galaxy, where the conditions of life were quite different. Or perhaps the ghastly mistake was just that step in man’s evolution which made it possible for him to comment, to reflect upon life as a whole.
In being able to stand aside from life and think about it, he put himself outside it and found it alien. Perhaps thinking about the world and objecting to its whole principle are simply two aspects of the same mechanism. The very words suggest, don’t they: perhaps we must object to everything that becomes an object.
But aren’t there also times when we speak of something that we know as a subject—the subject of this book, the subject I am now studying? Would it be possible to subject to life instead of objecting to it? Is this playing with words, or does it possibly mean something?
Now, if the gulls and the fish don’t philosophize, they have no consciousness of life being either good as a whole or bad as a whole. So when we philosophize and pity the poor fish, that’s just our problem. From its own standpoint, the world of animals and insects doesn’t find itself problematic at all.
There’s not the slightest evidence to suggest it. On the contrary. I’m inclined to feel that all these creatures really swing and go on living up to the very moment when the game is no longer worth the candle.
I’m quite sure they don’t lecture each other about their duties or worry about where they’re going when they’re dead. Isn’t it, then, rather an enormous relief for us men to see that the plant and animal world is no problem to itself, and that we are wasting intellectual energy in making moral judgments about it? But of course we can’t return to the unreflective consciousness of the animal world without becoming animals.
To be human is precisely to have that extra circuit of consciousness which enables us to know that we know, and thus to take an attitude to all that we experience. The mistake that we’ve made—and this, if anything, is the fall of man—is to suppose that that extra circuit, that ability to take an attitude to life as a whole, is the same as actually standing aside and being separate from what we see. We seem to feel that the thing which knows that it knows is one’s essential self.
That, in other words, our personal identity is entirely on the side of the commentator. We forget that self-consciousness is simply a subordinate part and instrument of our being; a sort of mental counterpart to the finger-thumb opposition of the human hand. And which is you, the finger or the thumb?
Look at the stages of differentiation. First: the organism from its environment—and with this, knowledge of the environment. Second: the distinction of knowing knowledge from knowledge itself.
But all this, like the finger-thumb opposition, is a difference which does not divide. The thumb isn’t floating in the air alongside the rest of the hand. At their roots they’re joined.
And at our roots we are joined to the whole subject of nature. Of course, you may say that nature or the universe is just a big abstraction. But tell me: is an orange just an abstraction from its component molecules?
I think our difficulty is that our consciousness is too superficial, as if all our sensation were in the tips of the fingers and not in the palm. Our comments on life are insufficiently balanced by the clear sensation that what we are talking about as ourselves, and ourselves in a sense far more basic and real than that extra circuit which knows knowing. Are we misled by the fact that we move freely on the Earth and aren’t rooted to it in the same way as trees to the ground and fingers to the hand?
Were we as spatially distant from the Earth as one atom of an orange from another, I suppose we should be somewhere out by the Moon. Now, we know that the atom, molecule, cell, or subordinate organ of any particular organism is what it is by virtue of its place and its membership in the pattern of the whole. Blood in a test tube is rapidly ceasing to be the same thing as blood in veins.
In the same way, man must beware, lest in cutting himself off psychically from the world that he sees, and so isolating the subject from the object, lest in doing this he rapidly ceases to be man. So I think this is why I love the ocean. It’s the most difficult part of nature to mess up with emblems and symptoms of man’s dissociated consciousness.
It’s an environment in which the awareness of our roots can awaken, in which space (so real because of the light and color) can be seen to be joining things instead of separating them. Yes. And I’ve just discovered that that knocking on the wall of space and consciousness was my own heart beating.
Now, I’m particularly interested in what Dr. Weaver said about the attitude of the family to children. Because we have an absolutely extraordinary attitude—in our culture and in various other cultures; high civilizations—to the new member of human society. Instead of saying frankly to children, “How do you do?
Welcome to the human race. We are playing a game, and we are playing by the following rules. We want to tell you what the rules are so that you will know your way around.
And when you’ve understood what rules we’re playing by, when you get older, you may be able to invent better ones.” But instead of that, we still retain an attitude to the child that he is on probation. He’s not really a human being, he’s a candidate for humanity. And therefore, to preserve the role of parent, or to preserve the role of teacher, you have to do what they do in the Arthur Murray School of dancing, which is that they string you out.
They don’t tell you all the story about dancing, because if they tell you, you’ll learn in a few weeks and go away, and you’ll know it. But instead they want to keep you on. And in just this way we have a whole system of preparation of the child for life, which always is preparation and never actually gets there.
In other words, we have a system of schooling which starts with grades. And we get this little creature into the thing with a kind of a, “Come on, kitty, kitty, kitty!” And we get it always preparing for something that’s going to happen. So you go into nursery school as preparation for kindergarten.
You go to kindergartn as preparation for first grade. And then, you see, you go up the grades until you get to high school. And then comes a time when maybe, if we can get you fascinated enough with this system, you go to college.
And then, when you’re going to college—if you’re smart—you get into graduate school and stay a perpetual student, and go back to be a professor, and just go round and round in the system. But in the ordinary way they don’t encourage quite that. They want you (after graduate school, or after graduation; commencement, as it’s called) beginning to get out into the World, with a capital “W.” And so, you know, you’ve been trained for this and now you’ve arrived.
But when you get out into the world, at your first sales meeting they’ve got the same thing going again. Because they want you to make that quota. And if you do make it, they give you a higher quota.
And come along about forty five years of age, maybe you’re vice president. And suddenly it dawns on you that you’ve arrived—with a certain sense of having been cheated, because life feels the same as it always felt. And you are conditioned to be in desperate need of a future.
So the final goal that this culture prepares for us is called retirement: when you will be a senior citizen and you will have the wealth and the leisure to do what you’ve always wanted, but you will at the same time have impotence, a rotten prostate, and false teeth, and no energy. So the whole thing, from beginning to end, is a hoax. And furthermore, some other aspects of the hoax, just for kicks: you are involved, by and large, in a very strange business system which divides your day into work and play.
Work is something that everybody does, and you get paid to do it because nobody could care less about doing it. In other words, it is so abominable and boring that you can get paid for doing it. And the object of doing this is to make money.
And the object of making money is to go home and enjoy the money that you’ve made. When you’ve got it, you see, you can buy pleasure. And this is a complete fallacy.
Money never can buy pleasure. Because all pleasures depend upon not putting down a symbol of power—money—but upon disciplines. In other words, now in Sausalito, where I live, we have pier after pier full of fine boats—motor cruisers, sailing boats, all sorts of things—which nobody ever uses.
Because they’ve been bought on the falling for the ad line that if you buy this thing you will have pleasure, you will have status, you will have something or other. But then they suddenly discover that having a boat requires the art of seamanship, which is difficult but rewarding. Therefore, nobody has time for it, and all they do with the boats is have cocktail parties on them at the weekend.
And in myriads of ways, you see, you go home—we’re the wealthiest people in the world, and you would think that, having earned your money, and go home, you would have an orgy and a great banquet and so on. But nobody does. They eat a TV dinner, which is just warmed-over airline food, and then they spend the evening looking at an electronic reproduction of life which is divided from you by a glass screen.
You can’t touch it, you can’t smell it. It has no color, except maybe if you’re very wealthy it has color. But by and large it doesn’t.
And you look at this thing, and you have a strange feeling, you see, that the whole procession of grades that was leading to something in the future—to that goody, that gorgeous, galuptious goodie that was lying at the end of the line—and it never quite turns up. And this is because, from the beginning, we condition our children to a defective sense of identity. And this, I think, is the most important feature in the whole thing.
That a child grows into our culture and—as I repeat, this is not only Western culture, it’s equally true in Japan; it’s an area which I can speak with some firsthand knowledge—we condition the child in a way that sets the child a life problem which is insoluble, and therefore attended by constant frustration. And as a result of this problem being insoluble, it is perpetually postponed to the future. So that one is educated to live in the future, and one is not ever educated to live today.