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See? And in the beginning: “Let there be light!” A commandment. So commandment is the fundamental idea.
So the quest of the law of nature is the quest for the true understanding of the word of God. “For by the word of the Lord were the heavens made. And all the hosts of them by the breath of his mouth.
In the beginning was the word. And the Word was with God and the Word was God.” What is that word? If we could find out the Word of God—here is the idea, you see—we could perform incredible magic.
That’s why, for example, the name of God in the Bible is not to be uttered except once by the high priest in the holy of holies once a year. Otherwise that name, yaad hai vo ha in Hebrew—we don’t really know how it was pronounced, and Jehovah mixes up those consonants with the vowels of Adonai. And then it’s all mixed up in translation.
But anyway, Jehovah is a polite way of saying what can’t be said. Because if you know the word, if you know the name of God, you have power. You have the power of God.
And so all ancient ideas of magic were based on knowing the names of God. It is said that there are 100 names of God, and 99 are revealed to us, and the camel knows the hundredth name—which is why he looks so snooty. But so, also, a person in what we now call primitive orders of society are loath to reveal their names.
Because if I know your true name I can utter it and have power over you. Now you say, “Well, that seems a very naïve idea.” But it is exactly through the knowledge of names that we have Western science. And that is magic.
That is, through trying to understand the laws of nature. So that if you could understand the word underneath all the phenomena, you could change the phenomena and create magic. Only this: that many scientists have got rather sophisticated and have realized that the word comes later than the event.
That in the beginning wasn’t the word. Of course, if you want to make new sense out of the phrase “In the beginning was the word,” you have to go to Hinduism, where they have the idea that vac, or “speech,” is the basis of creation. But by this they fundamentally mean vibration as sound.
You see? It’s NyoooeeeooeeooeeooeeooeeooeeooeeooeeOOOOOHHHMM. If you listen to sound and go right down into it—fundamentally get what sound is all about—you understand the whole mystery of things.
Because the whole mystery of things is vibrating energy. On and off. Simple as that.
Life and death. Life is on, death is off. Have to have off to have on, have to have on to have off.
Whew! It’s quite a relief. But there they say, “That’s the beginning.” But they also say—in another sense, on another level—that the roots of Sanskrit—say, the the root form of the word Buddha comes from the root form budh, which means “to know” or “to be awake.” Bhāva, which means “becoming,” comes from the root bhū, which means “to grow.” So on.
Karma, “doing,” comes from the root kṛ, “to act.” So they say, though, that the roots of Sanskrit are not simply the roots of a language, they’re the roots of life. Because, in another sense altogether, you see, you create the world by the word. And this is something that we’re not very conscious of.
It’s the way you think that determines your basic reactions to what happens. In the words of Shakespeare, “There is nothing either good or ill, but thinking makes it so.” Thinking is talking to yourself inside your head. And we, through this, build up all sorts of weird notions.
We say, for example, “Well, one day you’ll have to die.” Have to? What’s the emotional content of saying you’ll have to die? It means it’s going to be something imposed upon you against your will.
So it’s put in this passive mode. “Have to.” You’ll be compelled to die. But I can’t be compelled to die unless I’m fighting it.
If I—supposing I want to die? Supposing I commit suicide? Or supposing we look at it all in another way and say, “When I get a disease and die as a result of it,” getting a disease is something I do just as much as taking a walk.
Only, we’ve got our thoughts arranged so that we say, “You ought not to get a disease,” even if it’s just plain old age. Somehow you ought not to do that. You ought to go on.
And therefore, you can’t say, when death comes about, where—to put it in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson—“I laid me down with a will.” Because we’ve got this hang-up about life being divided into two parts: things that we do on the one hand, and things that happen to us on the other. And Buddhists say what happens to you is your karma. And people don’t readily understand that.
They think my karma… “Yeah. Something awful happened to me because of something bad I did in my last life, and therefore I’ve got bad karma.” Karma simply means “your doing,” “your action.” So that, when something that happens to me is called my karma, it means that it’s your own doing. And if you recognize that it’s your own doing, it’s never bad karma.
It’s only bad karma if you refuse to admit that it’s your own doing, and merely blame someone or something else that it’s something that happened to you. Now, I’ve digressed a little, because what I was getting at was the meaning of a law of nature. Laws of nature were taken over—the idea of the law of nature—was taken over by Western science from this ancient magical notion of the Word of God, the commandment of God, being the foundation for everything that happens in the world.
But now, today, in Western twentieth-century science, there is an entirely new idea of the law of nature. The laws of nature are not things that exist in any real sense, which phenomena—like the motion of stars or the behavior of animals and rocks—they’re not phenomena which these things obey. The universe is doing its stuff.
But because we have a certain kind of structure and brain, we want to make sense of it. And therefore, we find various ways of understanding the world by the principle of regularity. Now, what’s that?
Let’s take a clock. A clock ticks regularly. But the world does not tick regularly.
Inconveniently enough, the sun does not go does not have the Earth go ’round it in a neat 360 days. This has always irritated calendar-makers: how to make a rational calendar. There is no solution.
Because the rotations of the Earth upon its own axis do not neatly synchronize with its rotation around the sun. There’s always something a little odd about it. So what we do is, we superimpose over this rather odd elliptical path the ideal figure of a circle with its 360 degrees.
Now, that is also like putting a ruler along a piece of wood and saying, “This piece of wood can be cut to twelve inches.” Now, there are no inches in the wood. Inches are a method, a technique, that human beings have invented for measuring things. And so we can cut out of a piece of cloth or a trunk of a tree so many feet.
Well, originally, it’s simply comparing the trunk with us by putting our feet over it one after another, saying it’s so many feet long—or so many spans when you stretch out the hand. This is the fundamental idea of measurement. And the inches, of course, one joint.
(Not your kind of joint!) And so, the this comparison of man’s body and its regular shape, you see—ten fingers on either side… I mean, you know, five fingers on either side makes ten; five toes on either side makes ten. And so, by stretching ourselves out, as it were, against nature, we measured it.
And the idea of measurement is the same idea as the idea of the law of nature. A law of nature is exactly the same kind of thing as a ruler or a hammer or a saw. It is a way of thinking which enables us to control our environment by observing regularities and then by making a calculus, which is a process, really, of betting: will it be regular next time?
And the odds are that it may be. If it’s done it once this way, it’s likely to do it again that way. So, in this way, you predict eclipses of the Sun, you predict the phases of the moon: you measured them, you counted how it went, how often it did it like this, how often they did it like that.
And you say, “Well, it keeps on doing it.” And you think “Well, this is fascinating. It seems to obey me! Because now I can tell you any time it’s going to come up.
And if the other people around haven’t figured it out, they think I’m magic because I’m going to say to them: the moon is going to change at such and such a time. So many days from now it’s gonna have a different shape. And they say, ‘My god, he was right!’ And they think I’m making it happen because I can do that.” And so I get a rather privileged position because I could predict.
But that’s the basic idea of the law of nature. The law of nature is a human network like the lines of celestial latitude and longitude. They don’t exist in the heavens, but we project them on the sky in order to measure the positions of the stars.
Because the stars are scattered in a very confusing way, and just try and remember that mess and figure it out! Though the clever ones, you see, just sit and look at it through a network, a spherical network. Then you can number all the squares in the spherical network in accordance with the principles of the circle; the 360 degrees.
You’ve thrown the network on the sky. It isn’t really there, see? Then, to help you a little further, pick out some of the big stars and see if they make a shape.
You know? This is like a doing a Rorschach test. And you say, “Oh, look!
There’s one over there that looks like a dipper.” Or some people call it a plough. And there’s one there that looks like a cross. There’s one there that, by some extreme wrangling, can be made to look like a virgin!
And all these lines that join the constellations together are our ways of projecting a pattern upon this great and glorious confusion so that we can remember it and chart it. But obviously, you can very well see that, if you looked at the same pattern of stars from some completely different position in space, all those constellations and their arrangements would vanish. You would have to invent a new one.
Because there is nowhere where the stars really are. It depends where you’re looking from. So in this sense, then, man in nature—with his extraordinary symmetrical brain and its amazing complications—figures it out.
And it’s man who introduces the law into the world. He invents it. But in a way—invenīre, “to invent,” is to discover.
But what we discover, in a way, is not something that’s out there. When we invent the laws of nature we are discovering something about ourselves and our own passion for prediction, for regularity, for keeping things under control. Therefore, there has to be a law.
So then, going back right now to the beginning of what I started to say: the question was, then, what is the law of relationship between the atoms? Between the fundamental billiard balls of which the world is composed? Well, you watch the game of billiards, and there’s a cue and it hits that ball, and then it moves over and it hits that one, and then that hits that one, and then that hits that one.
And so the final ball which moves into the pocket has its behavior explained through its contact with the other billiard balls and the final contact with the cue. That’s why it did it. And so this view of the world as something that happens by the mechanical processes of the law of cause and effect is one that is really basic to most people’s common sense, today, to most educated people.
They would say it’s very difficult to figure it all out because the whole thing is so complicated, but if you could know all the details involved in, say, the behavior or a single act of a human being, you would find that it was the ineluctable result of a series of bouncing balls against each other; fundamental atoms that predisposed the great final event to be just like that. So that theory of the relationship between the atoms is called, in technical language, catenary. A catenary effect, or a relationship between events, is like, for example—we use another illustration where you stand a row of bricks up end up, and you knock over the first one and they all go katta-katta-katta-katta-katta and fall down.
That is a catenary sequence. But it becomes increasingly obvious today to the physicist and to the biologist that that will not do as a sufficient description of how various events affect each other. And so there’s another type of causal relationship altogether which is called, instead of catenary, reticulate.
Reticulate, from the Latin rete, meaning a net. A net relationship, wherein, in other words, any given event is not simply ascribed to one or more previous events, but that the relationship between the past and the present and between the present and the future is all to be taken into consideration in understanding any one event. In other words, let’s take one event—I drop a ball and it bounces.
That’s… let’s say it’s an event. I don’t know how many events it really is, but we’ll just say for the sake of argument that it’s an event. Now, is it enough in describing this event to say I let the ball go, it obeyed the law of gravity and hit the floor, but because it was made of rubber and had some air inside it, it bounced and sort of slightly disobeyed gravity because it had an energy in it.
But that’s not enough. Because that the ball dropped, that I let it go, that it bounced, depended not merely upon a historical sequence of events that you could lay out in a string along along a line of time. It depends also upon a present context there must be a certain density of air.
All kinds of things have to coexist with this in order for me to be there to drop the ball at all! Much less manufacture a ball. So that what happens must be considered not merely as a historical phenomenon, but it must be seen in context.
Context is terribly important, because it isn’t just when a thing happens that is important, it’s where it happens. In what setting. So that you could say that my blood in my veins is in a certain setting.
In a test-tube it’s in a completely different setting. And in a test-tube my blood is not behaving in the way it behaves in my veins. Therefore, it’s not the same thing!
So, an individual person in one setting will behave in one way, in another setting in a completely different way. I remember when I was a child: I was one boy when I was at home with my parents. When I went to visit my uncle and aunt I was someone different.
When I was with my peers I was someone quite different. Because I changed according to the setting. And children are very well aware of this.
It’s only as we go on that we keep having it drummed into our heads that we ought to have a consistent character. Because we are influenced by novels where the characters are supposed to be consistent—and so you ought to have a consistent character, you ought to behave the same in all circumstances and towards all people. That merely means you become inflexible.
So what things are, therefore, depend on the context in which they are found; upon their network relationship to everything else that’s going on. And one of the reasons for this—which is going to lead us to something more profound but much simpler—is, of course, that the whole notion of a thing or of an event in nature (and, of course, all relationships between different things and different events) is a purely abstract idea that does not really fit the facts of nature at all. In nature—in this physical world that you feel when you hold your head or hold somebody’s hand or just breathe—in that world there aren’t any separate events.
None whatever. Sure, there are all sorts of wiggles around here, all sorts of lines, all sorts of colors, all sorts of surfaces, all sorts of forms. But they’re not separate.
Because, you see, you can’t separate an inside, what you are inside your skin, from the outside of the skin. You can see that at once: if there weren’t anything outside your skin, there’d be no inside. It takes the outside and the inside working together to create this situation.
And, in the simplest way, the situation that I call my body wouldn’t be operating unless there was air around here to breathe. This physical phenomenon goeswith the situation of there being air. Now, true—it wiggles about inside the air in a rather complicated way, and other people watching say, “Huh, some something’s going on over there!” You know?
Because the air you can’t see, and it remains rather constant except when there’s a gale, and so you don’t pay much attention to it because it’s always around. What you pay attention to is what changes rather rapidly. And you say, “Well, that’s a that!” “Hey,” you say to someone.
You see this change going on; some wiggling over there, and say, “What’s that?” See? He knows what you mean by a “that.” A “that” means something on the end of a finger-point. It’s different, it’s peculiar.
See? That’s a “that.” And so, from that comes the idea of an event or a thing. A “that.” But all these “thats” that are happening aren’t disconnected.
They go with each other just as I go with this surrounding air, and just as this whole situation in which we are at this moment is a complicated goingwithness. Now here, then, we get to the fundamental idea: this idea of goingwith. And from this we shall be able to construct the whole notion of network.
And this idea, I said at the beginning, is extremely simple but very difficult for people brought up to use Western languages to understand. Now, goingwithness—we could call it “relativity,” “relationship”—means simply… let me first of all put it in a very extreme form. Consider yourself sitting here at this moment, being just exactly the sort of person you are—maybe a little neurotic, maybe a little sick, physically, maybe a little ashamed of yourself for some reason or other, or whatever; just the way you are, anyway; just like that: sitting here—that situation goeswith as back goeswith front.
The entire situation of the rest of the universe. In other words, you as you are, exactly the way you are—and you really don’t know what that is. You may have some opinions about it, but you really don’t know.
That goeswith the way the whole of the rest of boundless being is arranged. Now, it isn’t that the way the rest of boundless being is arranged is determining you to be the way you are. Or, if it is that—if that’s true, if it determines you—then we must also allow the other side of the picture: that you determine it.
It’s your karma. You did it. But you say, “No, but I didn’t!
I couldn’t help it. It did me!” And you can say, “’Tis, ’tisn’t, ’tis, ’tisn’t, ’tis, ’tisn’t,” like two children arguing until you realize that the argument was stupid. Because you and it are one event, and it isn’t the question of it controlling you or you controlling it, it’s all one event.
As Teilhard de Chardin said: “The whole universe is the only true atom; the only truly indivisible whole.” So the human being, though—it finds this difficult to understand because we’re always telling each other, “Now, you should be different.” “You ought to change.” “Don’t be like that!” “Now, listen: you’re sick and I’ve got a system. See? I’ve got a system.
I’ve got a real school here. A thing that’s very important. And you should come and study with that.”—it may not be mine, but it may be some big sage or pundit that I know—“and you should come around and study that.” And I’ve thought about this for a long time because I’ve heard every kind of opinion of all the sorts of things that I should do in order to get myself into shape.
And I realized that, if I followed this advice, I would spend my entire day doing exercises in preparation for life. I don’t know when I’d ever get around to that. You know?
I would have my half an hour’s yoga practice, one hour of zazen, so much physical exercises, and so much memory practice, so much special diet preparation to be sure that I got proper food. And if I think this all through I think oh my god! It wasn’t worth it!
Then, another school of thought will say, “No! That’s the thing: you’re getting confused. Just do one thing!” See?
But then I say, “Now, how am I going to choose which one I’m going to do?” “Well,” he says, “Obviously, this one’s the best.” And then, before you know where you are you’re sewed up by some religious fanatic. Now, please, I don’t want to do this to you. Please don’t think that I have any such recipe, that I’m going to give you anything to do for five minutes every morning.
I just am not. I want to—my whole notion would be to set you a all free so that you’d only have to attend one seminar and never have to come back. That’s the idea—really!
Because I know that, so far as my own livelihood is concerned, that there are always more people. And if I don’t collect a following and just send them all away, there are plenty more people to fill the vacuum! But this is the important thing.
This is the whole idea that we’re going to work on of a net: that you are like a dew drop on a multi-dimensional spider’s web early in the morning. And if you look at that thing carefully you will see that, in every dewdrop, there are reflections of all the other dew drops. So the way that dew drop looks goeswith the way all the other ones look.
See? A particular glimmer in it and so on. Its peculiar position—and everybody has to have a peculiar position in the cosmos—so, you see, the reflections in every one of them are different according to the position they’re in and the other dew drops that they reflect at such and such angles.
But nevertheless, the whole network—all the dew drops—depend on each individual dew drop. And each individual dew drop mutually depends on all the others. And that’s the sort of a scheme we’re living in.
And it a little bit affronts our logic at first, because we say, “I can understand that I depend on this universe because, after all, I need sunlight and air and water and the help of a society and that kind of thing. I needed a father and mother. But looking at it from the other point of view, I find it very difficult see how the whole thing depends on me!” That’s because we’ve been brought up with a put-down theory of the individual.
You know, children should be seen and not heard. You are the servant and subject of God, and don’t you ask impertinent questions! Or, another way of putting us down is to say, “Well you’re just a piece of a fluke in a mindless mechanism.” See?
We always managed not to find out that the relationship of the network is mutual: it runs both ways. That it depends on you just as much as you depend on it. Because, you see, it’s you with your ingenious brain that, for example, turns vibrations of air into sound.
You turn whatever the sun is doing into light. You turn whatever the air is doing into a sky called “blue.” There is only blue for a brain, just like if you hit a drum and it’s got no skin it won’t make any noise. So it’s the tight skin that evokes the noise out of a moving fist.
No skin, no noise. So you as the reflector—like the dew drop reflects—you as the so-called reflector of all that goes on, by the constitution of what kind of a reflector you are, you evoke what we call sun, moon, and stars, nebulae, vast spaces—it’s only vast in relation to you. They’re not really vast.
Only if you compare them with yourself they’re vast. They could be considered very tiny. Or, equally, the space between two sides of a hair could be considered vast if you want to think about it that way.
I mean, if you really want to go into a hair, there is an awful lot between one diameter of a hair, you know? And if you think about it a long time, you’ll think it’s what we call a vast subject. The study of hair.
Like microscopy. It is a vast subject. Depends on on the attitude, you see?
But the basic principle—the thing I really want to try and get across—is this idea of goingwith. The universe around you is your outside just as much as the organs inside your skin are your inside. You gowith it in the same way that the stalk goeswith the root or with the flower, and as front goeswith back, as north pole of magnet goeswith south pole.
This principle of relationship governs everything. I wouldn’t say “governs.” I’m only using these wretched terms that we have to use out of our language. It underlies everything.
And it’s important to realize. And let me repeat this: that the great universe does not control the small individual any more than the small individual actually controls the great universe. This is not a question of controlling.
It is a question of more like dancing; of what happens rather than what makes it happen. Things aren’t made to happen. Only if you insist that a certain event is quite separate, then you can think of it being made to happen by the events that came before it.
But if you realize they’re all parts of one event (or different aspects, different phases, of one event), then you see it happening and you don’t see anything making it happen. Forcing—that whole idea of things being made to happen, in other words, goes back to the idea of a universe that is based on a monarchical image where the boss says, “Damn it! You do that.” And the thing can’t help it, and so it’s made to happen.
But, say, in Chinese Taoist philosophy the universe is just not seen in that way. It’s not seen as—anything is not made to happen. It is what does happen.
But it’s all interrelated. And therefore there is a pattern to it, there is an order to it: the order of the net. So let’s have an intermission, and then we can have discussion.
I was talking in last night’s session about the nature of networks. And you remember that I explained the two different conceptions of causal relations between things and events. And I may as well write these down, unless you’ve forgotten them.
There’s the caternary and the reticulate. In this kind, things and events are explained as being links in a causal chain, and so every particular happening that is identified as a thing or an event—which is, however, quite an arbitrary kind of selection—is explained by its past: by the chain of events which lead to it in a causal sequence. On the other hand, the thinking of the reticulate relationship, a thing is explained not simply by its relationship to past events, but by its context—that is to say, its relationship to present and future events as well as past.
So that every event becomes something in a network. Now, you will very well understand that when you see the knots in a network—or or better, the squares of the net—they’re all held together by each other. Imagine the kind of network where, instead of there being… well, something like knitting: in knitting, the stitches are all held together by each other, and something breaks at one point the thing starts raveling.
So the reticulate view, the net view of the universe, is one in which the Buddhists say everything mutually interpenetrates everything else. So, as I was trying to make the central point—the point of implication, the point of relativity—that things go together like two sticks standing on the ground in this way, see? They give each other mutual support.
Or like the three rings in the Ballantine Beer trademark, or the Christian symbol of the Holy Trinity. Those rings interlock. But take one of them away and the interlocking is broken down for all of them.