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Now then, when you want to get control of something that wiggles, it’s pretty difficult, isn’t it? You try and pick up a fish in your hands, and the fish is wiggly and it slips out. What do you do to get hold of the fish?
You use a net. And so the net is the basic thing we have for getting hold of the wiggly world. So if you want to get hold of this wiggle, you’ve got to put a net over it.
And I can number the holes in a net. So many so holes up, so many holes across. And if I can number these holes, I can count exactly where each wiggle is in terms of a hole in that net.
And that’s the beginning of calculus, the art of measuring the world. But in order to do that, I’ve got to break up the wiggle into bits. I’ve got to call this a specific bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle, and this the next bit, and this the next bit of the wiggle.
And so these bits are things or events; bits of wiggles, which I mark out in order to talk about the wiggle. In order to measure and therfore, in order to control it. But in nature, in fact, in the physical world, the wiggle isn’t bitted.
Like you don’t get a cut-up fryer out of an egg. But you have to cut the chicken up in order to eat it. You bite it.
But it doesn’t come bitten. So the world doesn’t come thinged; it doesn’t come evented. You and I are all as much continuous with the physical universe as a wave is continuous with the ocean.
The ocean waves, and the universe peoples. And, as the wave, I wave at you and say “Yoo-hoo!”—the world is waving at me with you and saying, “Hi, I’m here!” But our consciousness—the way we feel and sense our existence, being based on a myth that we are made, that we are parts, that we are things—our consciousness has been influenced so that each one of us does not feel that. We have been hypnotized—literally hypnotized—by social convention into feeling and sensing that we exist only inside our skins.
That we are not the original bang, but just something out on the end of it. And therefore we are scared stiff. Because my wave is going to disappear; I’m going to die!
And that would be awful. We’ve got a mythology going now which, as Father Maskell put it, “We are nothing but something that happens between the maternity ward and the crematorium.” And that’s it. And therefore everybody feels unhappy and miserable.
You know, this is what people really believe today. You may go to church, you may say you believe in this, that, and the other. But you don’t.
Even Jehovah’s Witnesses, who are the most fundamentalist fundamentalists—they are polite when they come round and knock on the door. But if you really believed in Christianity, you would be screaming in the streets. But nobody does.
You would be taking full-page ads in the paper every day. You would have the most terrifying television programs. The churches would be going out of their minds if they really believed what they teach.
But they don’t. They think they ought to believe what they teach. They believe they should believe, but they don’t believe it because what we really believe is the fully automatic model.
And that is our basic, plausible common sense. You are a fluke. You are a separate event.
And you run from the maternity ward to the crematorium, and that’s it, baby. That’s it. Now why does anybody think that way?
There’s no reason to, because it isn’t even scientific. It’s just a myth. And it’s invented by people who wanted to feel a certain way.
They want to play a certain game. The game of God got embarrassing. The idea of God as the potter, the architect of the universe, is good and it makes you feel that life is, after all, important.
There is someone who cares. It has meaning, it has sense, and you are valuable in the eyes of the Father. But after a while it gets embarrassing, and you realize that everything you do is being watched by God.
He knows your tiniest, inmost feelings and thoughts, and you say after a while, “Quit bugging me! I don’t want you around!” So you become an athiest, just to get rid of him. Then, then you feel terrible after that, because you got rid of God, but that means you got rid of yourself.
You’re just nothing but a machine. And your idea that you’re a machine is just a machine, too. So if you’re a smart kid, you commit suicide.
Camus said there is only really one serious philosophical question, which is whether or not to commit suicide. I think there are four or five serious philosophical questions. The first one is ‘Who started it?’ The second is ‘Are we going to make it?’ The third is ‘Where are we going to put it?’ The fourth is ‘Who’s going to clean up?’ And the fifth, ‘Is it serious?’ But still, should you or not commit suicide?
This is a good question. Why go on? And you only go on if the game is worth the candle.
Now the universe has been going on for an incredible long time. And so really, a satisfactory theory of the universe has to be one that’s worth betting on. That’s a very—it seems to me—absolutely elementary common sense.
If you make a theory of the universe which isn’t worth betting on, why bother? Just commit suicide. But if you want to go on playing the game, you’ve got to have an optimal theory for playing the game.
Otherwise there’s no point in it. But the people who coined the fully automatic theory of the universe were playing a very funny game. What they wanted to say was this: “All you people who believe in religion are old ladies and wishful thinkers.
You’ve got a big daddy up there, and you want comfort and things, but life is rough. Life is tough, and success goes to the most hard-headed people.” That was a very convenient theory when the European-American world was colonizing the natives everywhere else. They said, “We are the end product of evolution, and we’re tough, see?
I’m a big, strong guy because I face facts, and life is just a bunch of junk, and I’m going to impose my will on it and turn it into something else, you see? And I’m real hard.” See, that’s a way of flattering yourself. And so, it has become academically plausible and fashionable that this is the way the world works.
In academic circles no other theory of the world than the fully automatic model is respectable. Because if you’re an academic person, you’ve got to be an intellectually tough person. You’ve got to be prickly.
There are basically two kinds of philosophy. One’s called prickles, the other’s called goo. And prickly people are precise, rigorous, logical.
They like everything chopped up and clear. Goo people like it vague. For example, in physics, prickly people believe that the ultimate constituents of matter are particles.
Goo people believe it’s waves. And in philosophy, prickly people are logical positivists, and goo people are idealists. And they’re always arguing with each other, but what they don’t realize is neither one can take his position without the other person.
Because you wouldn’t know you advocated prickles unless there was somebody else advocating goo. You wouldn’t know what a prickle was unless you knew what goo was. Because life is not either prickles or goo, it’s gooey prickles and prickly goo.
They go together like back and front, male and female. And that’s the answer to philosophy. You see, I’m a philosopher, and I’m not going to argue very much, because if you don’t argue with me, I don’t know what I think.
So if we argue, I say “Thank you,” because owing to the courtesy of your taking a different point of view, I understand what I mean. So I can’t get rid of you. But however, you see, this whole idea that the universe is just nothing at all but unintelligent force playing around and not even enjoying it is a put-down theory of the world.
People who had an advantage to make, a game to play by putting it down, and making out that because they put the world down they were a superior kind of people. So that just won’t do. We’ve had it.
Because if you seriously go along with this idea of the world, you’re what is technically called alienated. You feel hostile to the world. You feel that the world is a trap.
It is a mechanism; it’s electronic and neurological mechanisms into which you somehow got caught. And you poor thing have to put up with being in a body that’s falling apart, and that gets cancer, that gets the Great Siberian Itch, and it’s just terrible. And these mechanics-doctors are trying to help you out, but they really can’t succeed in the end, and you’re just going to fall apart, and it’s a grim business, and it’s too bad.
So if you think that that’s the way things are, you may as well commit suicide right now. Unless you say, “Well, I’m damned.” Because there really, after all, there might be eternal damnation in the back of the thing, if I did that. Or I identify with my children, or something, and I think of them going on without me and nobody to support them.
Because if I do go on in this frame of mind and continue to support them, I shall merely teach them to be like I am. And they’ll go on, dragging it out to support their children, and they won’t enjoy it, and they’ll be afraid to commit suicide, and so will their children. They all learn the same lesson.
So you see, all I’m trying to say is that the basic common sense about the nature of the world that is influencing most people in the United States today—the fully automatic model—is simply a myth. If you want to say that the idea of God the father with his white beard on the golden throne is a myth, in a bad sense of the word ‘myth,’ so is this other one. It’s just as phony and has just as little to support it as being the true state of affairs.
Why? Let’s get this clear. If there is any such thing at all as intelligence, and love, and beauty—well, you’ve found it in other people.
In other words, it exists in us as human beings. And as I said, if it is there in us, it is symptomatic of the scheme of things. We are as symptomatic of the scheme of things as the apples are symptomatic of the apple tree, or the rose of the rose bush.
The Earth is not a big rock infested with living organisms any more than your skeleton is bones infested with cells. The Earth is geological, yes, but this geological entity grows people. And our existence on the Earth is a symptom of the solar system and its balances as much as the solar system, in turn, is a symptom of our galaxy—and our galaxy, in its turn, is a symptom of the whole company of galaxies.
Goodness only knows what that’s in. But you see, when—as a scientist—you describe the behavior of a living organism, you try to say what a person does. It’s the only way in which you can describe what a person is: describe what they do.
Then you find out that in making this description, you cannot confine yourself to what happens inside the skin. In other words, you can’t talk about a person walking unless you start describing the floor. Because when I walk, I don’t just dangle my legs in empty space.
I move in relationship to a room. And so in order to describe what I’m doing when I’m walking, I have to describe the room; I have to describe the territory. So in describing my talking at the moment, I can’t describe it as just a thing in itself, because I’m talking to you.
And so what I’m doing at the moment is not completely described unless your being here is described also. So if that is necessary—if, in other words, in order to describe my behavior, I have to describe your behavior, and the behavior of the environment, it means that we’ve really got one system of behavior. That what I am involves what you are.
I don’t know who I am unless I know who you are. And you don’t know who you are unless you know who I am. Just, for example, as a whirlpool in water.
You could say because you have a skin you have a definite shape; you have a definite form. All right, here is a flow of water, and suddenly it does a whirlpool, and then it goes on. The whirlpool is a definite form, but no water stays put in it.
The whirlpool is something the stream is doing, and in exactly the same way, the whole universe is doing each one of us. And I see you today, and I recognize you tomorrow, just as I would recognize a whirlpool in a stream. I’d say, “Oh yes, I’ve seen that whirlpool before.
It’s just near so-and-so’s house on the edge of the river, and it’s always there.” So in the same way, when I meet you tomorrow, I recognize you; you’re the same whirlpool you were yesterday. But you’re moving. The whole world is moving through you.
All the cosmic rays, all the food you’re eating—the stream of steaks and milk and eggs and everything—is just flowing right through you. When you’re wiggling the same way, the world is wiggling, the stream is wiggling you. But the problem is, you see, we haven’t been taught to feel that way.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it; aliens. And we are, I think, quite urgently in need of coming to feel that we are the eternal universe; each one of us. Otherwise we’re going to go out of our heads.
We’re going to commit suicide, collectively, courtesy of H-bombs. And—all right, supposing we do—well, that will be that, then there will be life making experiments on other galaxies. Maybe they’ll find a better game.
Well now, I was discussing two of the great myths, or models, of the universe, which lie in the intellectual and psychological background of all of us. The myth of the world as a political, monarchical state in which we are all here on sufferance as subjects of God. In which we are made artifacts, who do not exist in our own right.
God alone, in the first myth, exists in his own right, and you exist as a favor, and you ought to be grateful. Like your parents come on and say to you, maybe, “Look at all the things we’ve done for you, all the money we spent to send you to college, and you turn out to be a beatnik. You’re a wretched, ungrateful child.” And you’re supposed to say, “Sorry, I really am.” But you’re definitely in the position of being on probation.
So that idea of the royal god—the king of kings and the lord of lords—which we inherit from the political structures of the Tigris-Euphrates cultures, and from Egypt. The Pharaoh Amenhotep IV is probably, as Freud suggested, the original author of Moses’ monotheism, and certainly the Jewish law code comes from Hammurabi in Chaldea. And these men lived in a culture where the pyramid and the ziggurat—the ziggurat is the Chaldean version of the pyramid—indicate, somehow, a hierarchy of power, from the boss all the way down.
And God, in this first myth that we’ve been discussing—the ceramic myth—is the boss, and the idea of God is that the universe is governed from above. But do you see, this parallels—and goes hand in hand with—the idea that you govern your own body. That the ego, which lies somewhere between the ears and behind the eyes in the brain, is the governor of the body.
And so we can’t understand a system of order, a system of life, in which there isn’t a governor. “O Lord, our governor, how excellent is thy name in all the world.” But supposing, on the contrary, there could be a system which doesn’t have a governor. That’s what we are supposed to have in this society.
We are supposed to be a democracy and a republic. And we are supposed to govern ourselves. And yet, as I said, it’s so funny that Americans can be politically republican—I don’t mean republican in the party sense—and yet religiously monarchical.
It’s a real strange contradiction. So what is this universe? Is it a monarchy?
Is it a republic? Is it a mechanism or an organism? Becuase, you see, if it’s a mechanism, either it’s a mere mechanism, as in the fully automatic model, or else it’s a mechanism under the control of a driver; a mechanic.
If it’s not that, it’s an organism, and an organism is a thing that governs itself. In your body there is no boss. You could argue, for example, that the brain is a gadget evolved by the stomach in order to serve the stomach for the purposes of getting food.
Or you can argue that the stomach is a gadget evolved by the brain to feed it and keep it alive. Whose game is this? Is it the brain’s game, or the stomach’s game?
Actually, they’re mutual. The brain implies the stomach, the stomach implies the brain, and neither of them is the boss. You know that story about all the limbs of the body?
The hand said, “We do all our work,” the feet said “We do our work,” the mouth said, “We do all the chewing, and here’s this lazy stomach who just gets it all and doesn’t do a thing. He doesn’t do any work, so let’s go on strike.” And the hands refused to carry, the feet refused to walk, the mouth refused to chew, and said “Now we’re on strike against the stomach.” But, after a while, all of them found themselves getting weaker, and weaker, and weaker, and weaker, because they didn’t recognize that the stomach fed them. So there is the possibility, then, that we are not in the kind of system that these two myths delineate.
That we are not living in a world where we, ourselves, in the deepest sense of self, are outside reality, and somehow in a position that we have to bow down to it and say “As a great favor, please preserve us in existence.” Nor are we in a system which is merely mechanical, and in which we are nothing but flukes, trapped in the electrical wiring of a nervous system, which is fundamentally rather inefficiently arranged. What’s the alternative? Well, we can put the alternative in another image altogether, and I will call this not the ceramic image, not the fully automatic image, but the dramatic image.
Consider the world as a drama. What’s the basis of all drama? The basis of all stories, of all plots, of all happenings?
It’s the game of hide-and-seek. You get a baby—what’s the fundamental first game you play with a baby? You put a book in front of your face, and you peek at the baby, like this.
The baby starts giggling. Because the baby is close to the origins of life; it comes from the womb really knowing what it’s all about, but it can’t put it into words. See, what every child psychologist really wants to know is to get a baby to talk psychological jargon, and explain how it feels.
But the baby knows; you do this, and this, this, this, and the baby starts laughing, because the baby is a recent incarnation of God. And the baby knows, therefore, that hide-and-seek is the basic game. See, before—when we were children, we were taught “1, 2, 3,” and “A, B, C,” but we weren’t sat down on our mothers’ knees and taught the game of black-and-white.
That’s the thing that was left out of all our educations: that life is not a conflict between opposites, but a polarity. The difference bewteen a conflict and a polarity is simply: when you say about opposite things, we sometimes use the expression, “These two things are the poles apart.” You say, for example, about someone with whom you totally disagree, “I am the poles apart from this person.” But your very saying that gives the show away: poles. Poles are the opposite ends of one magnet.
And if you take a magnet, there’s a north pole and a south pole. Alright, chop off the south pole; move it away. The piece you’ve got left creates a new south pole.
You never get rid of the south pole. Things may be the poles apart, but they go together. You can’t have the one without the other.
That’s the basic idea of polarity. But what we’re trying to imagine is the encounter of forces that come from absolutely opposed realms that have nothing in common. When we say of two personality types that they’re the poles apart, we are trying to think eccentrically instead of concentrically.
And so in this way, we haven’t realized that life and death, black and white, good and evil, being and non-being, come from the same center. They imply each other, so that you wouldn’t know the one without the other. Now I’m not saying that that’s bad.
That’s fun. You’re playing the game that you don’t know that self and other go together, in just the same way as the poles of the magnet. So that, when anybody in our culture slips into the state of consciousness where they suddenly find this to be true, and they come on and say “I’m God,” we say “You’re insane.” Now, it’s very difficult—you can very easily slip into the state of consciousness where you feel you’re God; it can happen to anyone.
Just in the same way as you can get the flu, or measles, or something like that, you can slip into this state of consciousness. And when you get it, it depends upon your background and your training as to how you’re going to interpret it. If you’ve got the idea of God that comes from popular Christianity—God as the governor, the political head of the world—and you think you’re God, then you say to everybody, “Well, you should bow down and worship me.” But if you’re a member of Hindu culture, and you suddenly tell all your friends, “I’m God,” instead of saying, “You’re insane,” they say, “Congratulations!
At last, you found out.” Becuase their idea of God is not the autocratic governor. When they make images of Shiva—say, he has ten arms. How would you use ten arms?
It’s hard enough to use two. You know, if you play the organ, you’ve got to use your two feet and your two hands, and you play different rhythms with each member. It’s kind of tricky.
But actually we’re all masters at this, because how do you grow each hair without having to think about it? Each nerve? How do you beat your heart and digest with your stomach at the same time?
You don’t have to think about it. In your very body, you are omnipotent in the true sense of omnipotence, which is that you are able to be omni-potent; you are able to do all these things without having to think about it. When I was a child, I used to ask my mother—of course—all sorts of ridiculous questions that every child asks, and when she got bored with my questions, she would say, “Darling, there are just some things we’re just not meant to know.” I said, “Will we ever know?” She said “Yes, of course, when we die and go to heaven, God will make everything plain.” So I used to imagine on wet afternoons in heaven, we’d all sit around the throne of grace and say to God, “Well, now, why did you do this, and how did you do that?” And he would explain it to us.
“Heavenly father, why are the leaves green?” And he would say, “Because of the chlorophyll,” and we’d say “Oh.” But in he Hindu universe, you would say to God, “How did you make the mountains?” And he would say: well, I just did it. Because what you’re asking me for—when you ask me how did I make the mountains, you’re asking me to describe in words how I made the mountains, and there are no words which can do this. Words cannot tell you how I made the mountains any more than I can drink the ocean with a fork.
A fork may be useful for sticking into a piece of something and eating it, but it’s of no use for imbibing the ocean. It would take millions of years. So it would take millions of years, and you would be bored with my description long before I got through it, if I put it to you in words.
Because I didn’t create the mountains with words, I just did it. Like you open and close your hand. You know how to do this, but can you describe in words how you do it?
But you do it. You are conscious, aren’t you? Don’t you know how you manage to be conscious?
Do you know how you beat your heart? Can you say in words, explain correctly, how this is done? You do it, but you can’t put it into words!
Because words are too clumsy, and yet you manage this expertly for as long as you’re able to do it. We are playing a game, and the game runs like this: the only thing you really know is what you can put into words. Let’s suppose I love some girl, rapturously, and somebody says to me, “Do you really love her?” Well, how am I going to prove this?
They say, “Write poetry. Tell us all how much you love her. Then we’ll believe you.” So if I’m an artist, and I can put this into words and convince everybody that I’ve written the most ecstatic love letters ever written, they say “All right, okay, we’ll admit it, you really do love her.” But supposing you’re not very articulate.
Are we going to tell you you don’t love her? Surely not. You don’t have to be Héloïse and Abélard to be in love.
So the whole game that our culture is playing is that nothing really happens unless it’s in the newspaper. So when we’re at a party, and it’s a great party, somebody says, “It’s too bad there wasn’t a tape recorder.” And so our children begin to feel that they don’t exist authentically unless they get their names in the papers, and the fastest way of getting your name in the papers is to commit a crime. And then you’ll be photographed, then you’ll appear in court, and everybody will notice you.
It really happened if it was recorded. In other words, if you shout, and it doesn’t come back and echo, it didn’t happen. Well that’s a real hangup.
It’s true, the fun with echoes; we all like singing in the bathtub, because there’s more resonance there. And when we play a musical instrument, like a violin or a cello, it has a sounding box, because that gives resonance to the sound. And in the same way, the cortex of the human brain enables us—when we’re happy—to know that we’re happy, and that gives a certain resonance to it.
If you’re happy, and you don’t know you’re happy, there’s nobody home. But this is the whole problem for us. Several thousand years ago, human beings evolved the system of self-consciousness.
And they knew they knew. You see? And this is the human problem: we know that we know.
And so there came a point in our evolution when we didn’t guide life by distrusting our instincts, and had to think about it, and had to purposely arrange, and discipline, and push our lives around in accordance with foresight, and words, and systems of symbols, accountancy, calculation, and so on. And then we worry. Once you start thinking about things, you worry as to whether you’ve thought enough.
Did you really take all the details into consideration? Was every fact properly reviewed? And by Jove, the more you think about it, the more you realize that you really couldn’t take everything into consideration, because all the variables in any human decision are incalculable.
So you get anxiety. And this, though—also—this is the price you pay for knowing that you know. For being able to think about thinking, to feel about feeling.
And so you’re in this funny position. Now then, do you see that this is simultaneously an advantage and a terrible disadvantage? What has happened here is that by having a certain kind of consciousness, a certain kind of reflexive consciousness—being aware of being aware.