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But you still want to ask how to stop the illusion. Now, who’s asking? I mean, do you think—in the ordinary sense in which you use the word “I”—how can I stop identifying myself with the wrong me?
But the answer is simply: you can’t. The Christians put this in their way when they say that mystical experience is a gift of divine grace. Man as such cannot achieve this experience.
It is a gift of God. And if God doesn’t give it to you, there’s no way of getting it. Now that is solidly true.
You can’t do anything about it, because you don’t exist. Now, in not being able to get it, you get it. Because this whole feeling—what Krishnamurti is trying to explain to people, for example, when he says: why do you ask for a method?
There is no method. All methods are simply gimmicks for strengthening your ego. So how do we not do that?
He says you’re still asking for a method. There is no method. If you really understand what your “I” is, you will see there is no method.
Well, you say this is so sad. But it’s not. This is the gospel; the good news.
Because if you cannot achieve it—if you cannot transform yourself—that means that the main obstacle to mystical vision has collapsed. That was you. What happens?
You can’t do anything about it. You’re at your wit’s end. What are you going to do, commit suicide?
Supposing you just put that off for a little while. Wait and see what happens. You can’t control your thoughts, you can’t control your feelings, because there is no controller.
You are your thoughts and your feelings, and they’re running along, running along, running along. Just sit and watch them. There they go.
You’re still breathing, aren’t you? Still growing your hair. Still seeing and hearing.
Are you doing that? I mean, is breathing something that you do? Do you see?
I mean, do you organize the operations of your eyes and know exactly how to work those rods and cones in the retina? Do you do that? It’s a happening.
It happens. So you can feel all this happening. Your breathing is happening, your thinking is happening, your feeling is happening, your hearing, your seeing.
The clouds are happening across the sky. The sky is happening blue. The sun is happening shining.
There it is, all this happening. And may I introduce you: this is yourself. This begins to be a vision of who you really are.
And that’s the way you function. You function by happening—that is to say: by spontaneous occurrence. And this is not a state of affairs that you should realize.
I cannot possibly preach it to you, because the minute you start thinking, “I should understand that,” this is the stupid notion again that “I” should bring it about, when there is no “you” to bring it about. See, that’s why I’m not preaching. You can only preach to egos.
All I can do is to talk about what is. It amuses me to talk about what is, because it’s wonderful. I love it, and therefore I like to talk.
If I get paid for it, then I make my living. And sensible people get paid for doing what they enjoy doing. So this is not a—you see, this whole approach is not to convert you, not to make you over, not to improve you, but for you to discover that if you really knew the way you are, things would be sane.
But, you see, you can’t do that. You can’t make that discovery, because you’re in your own way so long as you think “I’m I,” so long as that hallucination blocks it. And the hallucination disappears only in the realization of its own futility, when at last you see you can’t do it.
You cannot make yourself over, you cannot really control your own mind. See, when we try to control the mind—a lot of yoga teachers try to get you to control your own mind mainly to prove to you that you can’t do it. There’s nothing.
You know, a fool who persists in his folly will become wise. So what they do is: they speed up the folly. And so you get concentrating, and you can have a certain amount of superficial and initial success by a process commonly called self-hypnosis.
And you can think you’re making progress. And a good teacher will let you go along that way for a while until he really throws you with one. Why are you concentrating?
See, Buddhism works this way. Buddha said: if you suffer, you suffer because you desire. And your desires are either unattainable or always being disappointed or something.
So cut out desire. So those disciples went away, and they stamped on desire, jumped on desire, cut the throat of desire, and threw out desire. But then they came back and Buddha said, “But you are still desiring not to desire.” Then they wondered how to get rid of that!
So when you see that that’s nonsense, there naturally comes over you a quietness. In seeing that you cannot control your mind, you realize there is no controller. What you took to be the thinker of thoughts is just one of the thoughts.
What you took to be the feeler of the feelings—which was that chronic muscular strain—was just one of the feelings. What you took to be the experiencer of experience was just part of the experience. So there isn’t any thinker of thoughts, feeler of feelings.
We get into that bind because we have a grammatical rule that verbs have to have subjects. And the funny thing about that is that verbs are processes and subjects and nouns, which are supposed to be things. How does a noun start a verb?
How does a thing put a process into action? Obviously it can’t. But we always insist that there is this subject called the knower.
And without a knower there can’t be knowing. Well that’s just a grammatical rule. It isn’t the rule of nature.
In nature there’s just knowing, like you’re feeling it. And I have to say you are feeling it, as if you were somehow different from the feeling. When I say, “I am feeling,” what I mean is: there is feeling here.
When I say, “You are feeling,” I mean: there is feeling there. I have to say, even, “There is feeling.” What a cumbersome language we have! Chinese is easier because you don’t have to put all that in.
Why, you can say things twice as fast in Chinese as you can in any other language. Well, anyway, when you come to see that you can do nothing—that the play of thought, of feeling, et cetera just goes on by itself as a happening—then you are in a state which we will call meditation. And slowly, without being pushed, your thoughts will come to silence.
That is to say, all the verbal, symbolic chatter going on in the skull—don’t try and get rid of it, because that will again produce the illusion that there’s a controller. Just: it goes on, it goes on, it goes on, and finally it gets tired of itself and bored and stops. And so then there’s a silence.
And this is a deeper level of meditation. And in that silence you suddenly begin to see the world as it is. And you don’t see any past, and you don’t see any future.
You don’t see any difference between yourself and the rest of it. That’s just an idea. You can put your hand on the difference between “myself” and “you.” You know?
You can’t blow it, you can’t bounce it, you can’t pull it. It’s just an idea. You can’t find any material body, because “material body” is an idea.
So is “spiritual body.” It’s just somebody’s philosophical notions. See, reality isn’t material. That’s an idea.
Reality isn’t spiritual. That’s an idea. Reality is [clap].
So we find (if I’ve got to put it back into words) that we live in an eternal now. You’ve got all the time in the world because you’ve got all the time there is, which is now. And you are this universe.
And you feel this strange feeling. When ideas don’t define the differences, you feel that other people’s doings or your doings. And that makes it very difficult to blame other people.
If you’re not sophisticated theologically, you may of course run screaming in the streets and say that you’re God. In a way, that’s what happened to Jesus, because he wasn’t sophisticated theologically. He only had Old Testament biblical theology behind him.
If he’d had Hindu theology he could have put it more subtly. But it was only that rather primitive theology of the Old Testament. And that was a conception of God as a monarchical boss.
And you can’t go around and say, “I’m the boss’s son.” If you’re going to say, “I’m God,” you must allow it for everyone else too. But this was a heretical idea from the point of view of Hebrew theology. And so what they did with Jesus was: they pedestalized him.
That means: kicked him upstairs so that he wouldn’t be able to influence anyone else. And, only you may be God. And that stopped the Gospel cold right at the beginning.
It couldn’t spread. Well anyway, this is therefore to say that the transformation of human consciousness through meditation is frustrated so long as we think of it in terms of something that I myself can bring about by some kind of wangle, by some sort of gimmick. Because, you see, that leads to endless games of spiritual one-upmanship, and of guru competitions; of “my guru is more effective than your guru,” “my yoga is faster than your yoga,” “I’m more aware of myself than you are,” “I’m humbler than you are,” “I’m sorrier for my sins than you are,” “I love you more than you love me.” This interminable goings-on about which people fight, and wonder whether they’re a little bit more evolved than somebody else, and so on.
All that can just fall away. And then we get this strange feeling that we have never had, you see, in our lives—except occasionally by accident some people get a glimpse—that we are no longer this poor little stranger and afraid in a world it never made, but that you are this universe. And you are creating it at every moment.
Because, you see, it starts now. It didn’t begin in the past. There was no past.
See, if the universe began in the past, when that happened it was now. See? Well, it’s still now.
And the universe is still beginning now, and it’s trailing off like the wake of a ship from now. And the wake of the ship fades out. So does the past.
You can look back there to explain things, but the explanation disappears. You never find it there. Things are not explained by the past, they’re explained by what happens now.
That creates the past. And it begins here. That’s the birth of responsibility.
Because otherwise you can always look over your shoulder and say, “Well, I’m the way I am because my mother dropped me. And she dropped me because she was neurotic, because her mother dropped her,” and away we go back to Adam and Eve, or to a disappearing monkey, or something. We never get at it.
But in this way you’re faced with that you’re doing all this. And that’s an extraordinary shock. So cheer up!
You can’t blame anyone else for the kind of world you’re in. And if you know, you see, that I (in the sense of the person, the front, the ego) really doesn’t exist, then it won’t go to your head too badly if you wake up and discover that you’re God. So since we’re under the auspices of the School of Business, I’m going to talk about commerce.
And basically, the word “commerce” is very friendly, because it means “communion interchange;” originally the “bartering of goods.” But now it has a rather bad flavor because we speak of something being commercial. And I wonder why that does have what we call a pejorative flavor, something a little bit beneath a gentleman or lady, to indulge in commerce. I remember this in England.
In one’s home, gentlemen and ladies came in by the front door, but commercial people—that is to say, tradesmen—always came in at the back. And there was a notice, “tradesmens’ entrance” to all respectable houses. Why is it that there is something that is not quite respectable about commerce, and especially when anybody in the field of higher things—the arts, literature, the university, and above all religion—is accused of having somehow become untrue to himself by going commercial?
For example, if I were to conduct a television series under a sponsor such as Coca-Cola, a lot of my interested students would think that I’ve gone commercial and was somehow corrupted. And we need to inquire as to why this is so. The root of the matter is, I think, that in the worst sense of the word, the commercial is an enterprise into which one goes for the sole purpose of making money.
You, in a way, almost by definition, don’t enjoy doing what you’re doing. I always marveled at this, when I was a small boy, that my father had to dress in peculiar clothes and don a derby hat and catch a train at 8:30 to go into the center of London, where he bored himself for long hours selling automobile tires for the Michelin company. I couldn’t make out why he was doing this.
It seemed to me to be the most ridiculous thing to do, because I knew he didn’t enjoy it. And then later on he did something else of a rather similar kind. It was all bookwork, accounting, and adding up figures, which are arid abstractions—unless, of course, you happen to love figuring, as some people love playing poker or chess.
And then I feel it’s a legitimate game—if you really love playing the stock market for its own sake, just because it’s a marvelous intellectual exercise. But the idea of doing work simply to make money shows an extraordinary lack of realism. There are lots of people playing the stock market to make money, and they don’t give a damn what the businesses they’re investing in are actually doing.
They may be destroying rivers, raping the countryside, getting rid of whole tribes of whales. But they’re in it for the money. And what is characteristic of people who are simply in it for the money is that, when they get the money, they don’t know what to do with it.
That’s what really bothers me. Some years ago I married a lady who was chief of public relations for Mobil, the oil company, and after she met me she left it. But she had good friends in the offices there, and one day she took me to meet some of them, and we all had lunch together in the director’s dining room.
Well, I had expected that the director’s dining room of Mobil Oil would be a very superior affair. I expected to be served with the finest French wines, to have pâté de foie gras for hors d’oeuvre, I expected to have truite au bleu as a first course and steak en côte for the second, and at least zabaglione or some fantastic dessert to end up with, and then followed by benedictine. On the contrary!
It was the most miserable kind of lunch. It was merely a kind of dolled-up version of what you get in the university. The waitresses were wearing black skirts and pretty white lace with little bonnets on, and it was all cutey-pie.
And these gentlemen came to their offices in hearses—in other words, enormous black Cadillac limousines—and they dressed like funeral directors with not a touch of color. And likewise, their wives on formal occasions appeared in modest black with a string of pearls. Real pearls, which you wouldn’t know the difference.
And, somehow or other, they seemed not to have any imagination about enjoying themselves, to perhaps expiate their sense of guilt about making so much money, so as not somehow to present the impression that they were enjoying life. They come on as if they were doing their duty to society. And therefore, in a cultural context which is basically Puritan, they must be very careful not to show that they’re living it up.
Now, something is to be said for certain millionaires in Texas who make enormous sums of money out of oil who live it up in a very vulgar way, but without taste. They at least have the courage of their convictions. But if you are a businessman in a northernmost part of the United States—outside Texas—you must be very careful indeed not to give the impression that you’re enjoying what you’re doing, but that you are, on the other hand, an extremely responsible citizen who is suffering a great deal, and therefore naturally dresses in a funereal way, and wouldn’t until the days of color television wear such a loud tie as this.
Now, I consider that I myself am a successful man in business. I hate business. I hate everything to do with it—accounting, figuring, adding up numbers.
Because they’re all arid. They don’t smell of anything. Sometimes there is an interesting smell to the ink on a checkbook.
But, by and large, all this figuring is a completely colorless occupation and I don’t like it. So I have to hand it over to accountants and lawyers and people who seem to like it. But I don’t know whether they really do.
The essential principle of business, of occupation in the world, is this: figure out some way in which you get paid for playing. When I was quite young—I forget the exact age—I made a solemn vow, which was that I would never accept a job. I would always be my own employer.
And curiously, there are very few roles in life which provide this possibility. The successful artist, writer, and sometimes musician, sometimes the independent consultant, can occupy this role. I mean, he may be a scientific consultant.
But, by and large, almost everybody seems to be compelled to take a job with a corporation. It’s very difficult indeed these days to run a small business where you’re your own boss. Because you have to employ an enormous staff of people to keep track of the paperwork.
I know a person, for example, who has a farm where he raises avocados. And the department of commerce visited him with a stack of forms this thick, which he had to fill in. Well, he got tough and said, “I haven’t the faintest idea what to fill into these forms.” He said to the agent of the department of commerce, “You fill them in!” And he made that man sit down and go through the whole procedure of filling in these forms, because he said, “I don’t have the time.
I’m raising avocados. That’s my business!” And as to all this paperwork—well, to hell with it! And the same situation prevails not only in business, but also in the university, and in the hospital.
One of my favorite doctors told me the other day that he spends only one third of his working hours practicing medicine. The rest is in recording, accounting, filling in reports. And it’s the same in every hospital.
Paperwork endlessly, because the record of what you do is more important than what you do. Write it down, and then it’s real. And so, for the same reason, a lot of people don’t believe they exist until they see their activities reported in the newspaper.
A lot of juvenile delinquents commit crimes just to get attention. They’ll get recorded. It’s like you go to a party—you know, it’s a picnic on the beach, and it’s great fun.
And somebody says, “What a shame it is that nobody has a camera!” (Well, now, I should talk, because at this moment we’re recording what’s going on both on tape recorder and on TV.) And remember that it takes as long to view it or to listen to it as it does to do it. Now, who’s going to listen to all of this over and over again?
So there’s something fundamentally wrong here, and which the businessman of all people needs to understand. What the businessman needs to know, equally what the army officer needs to know, is the same: what do you really want? I’ve proposed that there be an entirely new kind of college entrance examination in which, instead of answering a lot of silly questions, you write for about twenty pages on your idea of paradise.
It can be any kind of paradise you want. It can be very spiritual, it can be very sensuous. But spell it out: what do you want to happen in life?
And then you will hand this thesis in to an assigned tutor on the faculty, and he’ll read it over and examine you closely as to whether this is what you really want. Do you realize, for example, what goes with the things you say you desire? I mean, for example, you want to marry a certain kind of beautiful woman, and you specify in your paper the characteristics she should have.
“But,” says the tutor, “you said absolutely nothing about her mother.” Because every girl goes with a mother—I mean, unless she’s an orphan. And you must also specify what kind of mother-in-law you want. Well, then you have to stop and think about that.
And that’s just an illustration of going into detail and being very careful about what you desire. Because there’s a good saying: be careful of what you desire—you may get it! So this is the problem of thinking out carefully where it is that you want to go.
Now let’s take the war in Vietnam, which is supposed to be concluded. What on Earth was it all about? If we had gone with military pomp and might into Vietnam for the express purpose of conquering the country and possessing it and carrying off the women into captivity, it would’ve been understandable.
But, as it was, it was waged for some absolutely abstract end, namely the stoppage of an ideology called communism. Nobody knows what communism is—nor do we know what capitalism is—but we can fight endlessly on the supposition that there are good guys and bad guys. And when we fight on that supposition there is no possibility of compromise or of gentlemen’s agreement as there is honor among thieves.
We’re all thieves, let’s face it. There is a doctrine in the Jewish religion that, when God created Adam, he put into him a spirit which is called the yetzer hara, and that means the “wayward spirit,” or what I call the element of irreducible rascality. And that is in us all—a little bit; it’s not the whole of us.
It’s like just a pinch of salt in the stew, and you don’t want the whole stew to be salt. But you have to have just a touch of rascality to be human. And I find it difficult to get along with people who don’t know that they have it.
People who come on that they’re all sincere, all good, all pure, bore me to death and scare me. They’re unconscious of themselves, and therefore they suddenly do terrible things without warning—either to themselves or to others. They make promises that they’re never going to fulfill because they want to talk right.
And so if I do business with someone who is not really aware that he’s a rascal, I know he is impossible to do business with. He’ll suddenly cheat me completely. But if I’m aware that he’s a bit of a shyster, I feel comfortable and I let him know that I am, too.
Then we’re human. Then we can let our hair down. Then we can say, “Look, let’s work this out.
This is what I want, and I know what you want, and if we can get that clear, we can work out a reasonable agreement.” We can compromise. We have a little play of give and take. But if you don’t have that, you’re absolutely snarled.
Now look at it this way. You can’t operate business nowadays without a whole team of lawyers. And what is the function of lawyers?
They’re to write down the rules of the game, so that we have what is called the rule of law. A lot of people talk today about law and order, and how it’s got to be upheld. Now, what does that actually mean?
It means that all organizations—business corporations, bureaucratic government corporations, even churches—are going by the book. They are operating according to a manual. And in many corporations individuals have constantly to consult some sort of manual to know what they should do instead of using their own good sense.
This doesn’t work! It means that an organization is entirely different from an organism. You, each one of you, are an organism: a very, very complicated organism which your nervous system facilitates—let’s use that nasty word.
And you don’t know how you do it. You couldn’t begin to describe how your nervous system works. And even neurologists don’t know how it works.