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So, in this same way, the individual—although seeming to be something that rattles around in the universe, although a given planet or a given star seems to be something that is moving on its own—the motion, the behavior of stars is a situation that arises only because of the mutual interdependence of all stars. Because, to take a very simple illustration: if there is only one star in the whole universe, no motion can be ascribed to it. It can’t even be said to be still.
Nobody knows what it’s doing because there’s nothing for it to relate to. But take two stars, and they can get nearer to each other or further away from each other. But no one knows which is moving.
Get three stars and then you have, say, two close together and one of them seems to go away. Now, who is moving away from whom? Are the two stars saying, “Hey, we don’t like you.
We’re gonna get out of your way,” or are they saying to the other star, “Why don’t you like us? Why do you keep going away?” Well, who’s right? Well, you can say on the principle of democracy that the majority must be right.
But then they say, “Well, let’s have an umpire.” And we have a fourth star who can stand above us, you see? Two stars can only move in a straight line with respect to each other. Three stars can move in a plane with respect to each other.
But a fourth star can establish a third dimension where I can look down on you and take an objective standpoint. But then the argument is: which one of them is the fourth? But that’s the basic principle on which the whole universe is constructed.
It’s a relativity system in which motion depends on comparison with something relatively still. And there can’t be any motion at all unless there is that comparison. So, because of this relationship, every individual is so related to everything else that’s going on that you imply it.
In other words, anybody who was a great scientist from some other world altogether—who studied a human body carefully and figured out the conditions under which such a thing would exist—he would come to the conclusion that that human body was something from a universe just such as we have. He would find that your structure and your behavior implied this whole thing, just as, with a laser beam system, you can photograph a small fragment of any photographic negative, and from that tiny fragment you can reconstruct the whole picture from which it was taken. Because the crystalline tensions in that fragment imply the whole context of crystalline tensions that belong to that particular negative.
So, in exactly the same way, you as an individual imply this world, and this world mutually implies you. And you are a natural formation moving in and with this universe—not determined by it, because this is not a system of determinism—but you are moving with it in just the same harmonious way that you notice the waves moving, and the trees growing, and the clouds moving. And as you don’t accuse the clouds of making aesthetic mistakes, so, really, is a certain light in which you can see human beings—both good and bad—as perfect forms of nature.
You may have fashionable discriminations about who is beautiful and who is ugly, you may have metaphysical discriminations about who is sick and who is healthy, you may have moral discriminations about who is good and who is evil. Now, these are all points of view; relative points of view. They’re all legitimate because they are parts of the functioning of the whole.
The fact that you take those points of view—that, too, is part of nature. But a skillful person lives on two levels at once. You live, basically, on the level where you know there are no mistakes.
There can’t be. Everything moves in accordance with what the Chinese call the Tao: “the way of nature.” And if you have that basic feeling, you will always be sane. But you are able to comprehend within that feeling a more restricted point of view whereby things are good and bad.
Just as in the confines of this room and this area, it’s perfectly clear that there’s a difference between the up-direction and the down-direction. But we know that this area is situated in interstellar space. And there, there is no up and no down.
Now, the second situation doesn’t contradict the first. But if you have only the discriminatory point of view—if you take your fundamental stand as a being on the difference between good and evil—in the Christian hang-up you have then to say that there is eternal heaven and eternal hell. That the distinction between good and evil is radical.
And if you do that you begin to suffer from a disease called chronic guilt, which is one of the most destructive emotions that anybody can have. You feel an outcast from the universe, at odds with reality itself, at odds with God. And that sends people quite mad.
And it’s responsible for a good deal of the craziness of Western civilization. It’s making too much of a good thing out of the distinction between good and evil. It is an important distinction, but it’s not fundamentally important.
And you have to learn to admit different degrees of importance. You can’t just say that, because a certain distinction isn’t absolute, that it’s not important. After all, your own physical formation is not absolute, but it’s important.
So the situation of man in this network is (to repeat the proposition), on the one hand, that he, as a psychophysical organism, is something that the whole cosmos is doing. That was as much of truth, I think, as there is in modern astrology, which I regard as a pseudoscience. But it is based on a very fundamental principle.
When you draw a map of a person’s soul, you draw a small picture of the universe—a very crude picture—and that is the design of that person’s individuality. The truth is, therefore, that your soul is something which contains your body. Your body does not have the soul inside it like a spook.
And the whole cosmos is your soul. So the cosmos is doing you at the point you call here and now. Reciprocally, you are doing it!
And the one depends upon the other. You have difficulty in conceiving this as a Westerner because we have all been brainwashed by several centuries of put-down theories of man. That you were, A, the wretched little subject, and a disobedient one at that, of an eternal king, and B, that you were just the fortuitous congress of atoms in a mindless mechanism of incredible vastness.
Having entertained those two theories of man and of existence for so many centuries, we are very much brainwashed into being unable to see that we and the universe are mutually causative—or, to use the Chinese expression, mutually arising. Now then, a second difficulty arises in this which requires that I bring in some ideas, first of all, from Buckminster Fuller. The principal notion of Buckminster Fuller’s thought—and if you don’t know this name, Buckminster Fuller is what I would call a philosophical engineer: a man who is one of the most creative minds in the modern world.
He invented the geodesic dome, which is his main claim to economic fame. But beyond that, he’s done a great deal of extremely fascinating thinking about the future of technology and the situation of man in the universe. And he has devised this important term, synergy, coming from the Greek συν, “with;” εργός, “work.” But what he means by synergy is this: that every complex organism, as a whole, has an intelligence greater than any one of its parts.
And this, again, is a difficult idea to swallow, because he applies it to technology in this way: he is saying that the industrial-natural complex in which we live is something that is going in a certain direction on its own, whether you like it or not, and that it is able to organize your behavior in a more intelligent way than you can organize it. And he believes, therefore, that the increasing complexity of the industrial complex will of itself, say, outlaw such lunacy as war. It will make it impossible.
And that we shall find ourselves increasingly organized by an intelligent system that is not under our conscious direction, but will make us feel, I suppose, rather as our individual cells feel inside our bodies. He gives an illustration. The transportation-communications network: aircraft, radio, television, telephone—these, taken together, are constituting a global net, which might be said to be something like Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the noösphere.
I hope you all read Teilhard de Chardin, the famous Jesuit theologian. The best of his books is The Phenomenon of Man. The Earth—which is the geosphere, from the Greek γη, the Earth.
Then the Earth, as the geosphere, is covered with a biosphere—that is the sphere of living organisms. The biosphere, in turn, generates the noösphere, which is the communication network that we call the mind. Through literature, through speech, through radio and television communication, the noösphere is slowly realized.
So, Buckminster Fuller is really talking about the same thing. The noösphere is the network of communication set up by technology. And so, for example, let’s just take air transportation: as a result of jet planes, all centers that are in communication with each other by jet aircraft are becoming increasingly the same place.
When you wake up in Tokyo, having come from Los Angeles or San Francisco, you are slightly in doubt as to where you are. Because Tokyo is an immense muddle. It’s a mixture of Paris with Los Angeles, of San Francisco with Shanghai, of London vaguely thrown in, and sort of a touch of Japan.
It’s a phenomenal place. But if you live in San Francisco, you realize it’s becoming more like Tokyo. Because we have a tremendous inrush of Japanese culture.
We have superb Japanese restaurants, you can go to sushi bars—that is to say, bars for rice balls and raw fish which are beautifully served just like in a bar in Tokyo—and increasingly we have supermarkets which sell Oriental, African, and Japanese goods. I call them supermarkets for the unusual. And more and more people are laying down tatami mats, and cooking over hibachis, and using chopsticks, and every kind of thing like that.
So the point is that, how near a place is to you is simply a factor of transportation. There are places in the United States—I was just in one in a far out Indian area of South Dakota. It takes longer to reach than to get to Tokyo.
So it’s further away. That’s all there is to it for all practical purposes. So Fuller’s idea is that, by the year 1968—so soon!—we have a one-town world.
And it’s coming fast. And human beings have some problem adapting to this. Because, as you know, when you travel by jet, just as when you’re in an elevator that drops too fast—you feel it left your stomach on the 14th floor and has taken the rest of you down to the first—so the jet aircraft leaves your psyche in London and brings your body to San Francisco.
And it takes some time to catch up. All your time rhythms are thrown off. But we’ll get used to it.
And eventually, therefore—we must add to this: planes are very expensive. All governments have immense investments in aircraft. And to work they must be kept flying, otherwise they they get out of order.
So they must be kept moving. That means there’s also a huge tourist business constantly interested in shuffling people all around the Earth. And as a result of that, it’s going to be increasingly a vested interest, and politicians will find it harder and harder to stop it in the interest of having a war.
So what we are in effect reduced to at the moment—so far as wars are concerned—are experimental wars. Wars in small areas against people who allegedly don’t matter very much in order to test out our military materials and techniques. Because nobody can afford to keep a large standing army in which there are no veterans.
So they must have practice. And so practice wars are carefully arranged. But increasingly, you see, they find that these practice wars arouse passions and disturb everybody in all directions because there is no such thing as an unimportant people.
And so they become increasingly difficult to carry on. So Fuller is extraordinarily hopeful about the future of mankind, because he feels that the synergy—the quality of intelligence in the total system—will overcome the folly of individuals, or of parts who are unable to act with full understanding of what’s going on. And, you see, this is a serious problem so far as the individual is concerned.
Because today, not only is there a population bomb, there’s also an information bomb. The proliferation of information about everything is so great that no individual can possibly grasp it. Not only has he difficulty in grasping it, but there is difficulty even for big committees to organize this information; to integrate it in such a way that, if I need to know a certain thing, I can very swiftly find it out.
For an individual untrained in physics it’s very difficult to find out quickly about physics, because physics is expressed in a mathematical language which he probably has never learned to read. So the time lag in scanning—you see, all consciousness is a matter of scanning. And it takes in the totality of events in the world by a sweeping motion, like the glance of our eyes around a room.
Well, it takes time to glance your eyes around the room and register what’s there—if you want to remember it consciously. So what we are saying is that the intelligence of the system—the synergy—is more intelligent than any individual consciousness can be. But, of course, as a living organism, you are much more than consciousness—in this scanning sense.
Because you certainly don’t arrange the complexities of your own brain by conscious decision. That’s something that you grow. Or we could put it this way: that the intelligence of the universe grows as it grows you.
But here, again, is another hurdle for the average Westerner whose common sense is derived from the philosophy of science current in the nineteenth century of thinking that the organization of the universe is intelligent. That seems, to us, to echo of theism, of God-ideas where God is based on an anthropomorphic or man-like image: the old gentleman with whiskers in the sky. And, of course, that God is dead beyond recall.
But that’s not the only kind of God. To think of the universe itself—its vast and complex organization—as being intelligent… what on Earth does that mean? What do you mean by the word “intelligent?” Well, when you come to think of it, it’s a most difficult word to define.
Everybody knows what it is, but very few can say. It’s like you know what love is, but just try and define it. You know what time is, but try and define that.
Space: everybody knows what space is, but it’s the most difficult thing to pin down. And that’s equally true of intelligence. We can see certain elements in intelligence.
We can see complexity as an element of it. We can see complexity as what we call an orderly arrangement of different clusters of complexity. But again, we’re using words—all of which are imprecise.
What do you mean, “orderly?” That’s practice to say “it’s all in order”—it was almost like saying it’s intelligently arranged. We recognize these things, but we are not quite sure what we mean by them. But we recognize them at once.
And, for example, if we begin with the pure hypothesis that we, ourselves, are intelligent, and let it go at that—if we are not, then nothing is—but let’s, for the sake of argument, say that we human beings are intelligent. Now, if that is so, then the environment in which we live must also be intelligent, because we are symptoms of that environment. And I don’t for the life of me see how you can have intelligent symptoms of an unintelligent organization.
We belong in this world. We didn’t arrive here from somewhere else; we’re not tourists in the universe. We’re expressions of it like branches express the tree, or fruit express the tree.
And so you will not find an intelligent organism living in an unintelligent environment. That is to say, the environment in which you live will be a system of mutual cooperation between a vast complexity of different kinds of organisms. And the total balance of that makes your life possible.
In other words, human life goeswith (as front goeswith back) an extremely complex bacteriological world—which sometimes diseases us but most of the time assists us by its colonies, its societies, its methods of reproduction—all these complex interrelations are the which without which not the sine qua non of there being blood and veins and bones and intestines and all that kind of thing. That’s only the bacteriological world. In addition to that, there’s a world of insects which is tremendously important to us.
But the insects are extremely clever. And if you talk to a good entomologist he will scare the wits out of you, because he will show you the most conclusive reasons why insects should ultimately take the whole planet over. Fortunately, we are not absolutely abominated by flies, because we have lots of spiders.
And we have birds. And so birds and insects are mutually necessary to each other, and especially flowers and insects have an arrangement with each other whereby one could say of flowers and bees that—although they look very different—they are one and the same organism. Flowers perfume and color, bees buzz and fly around.
But you can’t have the flowers without the bees and you can’t have the bees without the flowers. And so you can think through relationships between every conceivable kind of organism into which you must add things like atmosphere qualities, gas content of atmosphere… on and on and on. Until you suddenly realize that what you call your mind and intelligence, and your very brain and body, is utterly involved with this network of other kinds of organisms existing at a special temperature in certain gases which could only be found in certain kinds of solar systems.
Now then, seeing that should give every technologist pause. Because you can’t go running into that situation with penicillin and DDT unless unless you know very well when to stop. Unless you can be very discriminating just what surplus of insects you want to get rid of without killing the other ones that are important.
How to give penicillin without destroying all the stomach flora and having to build them up again with acidophilus and stuff. So this is why, in the Taoist Chinese view of nature and the relation of nature to human politics, they set as fundamental the principle called wú wéi, which means “non-interference.” Not quite what we mean by laissez-faire, but rather close to it. That is to say, when you act upon nature—and you must; you can’t help but interfere.
There’s no way of isolating yourself from the world. Every time you breathe you interfere with something, see? But the art of wú wéi is that, when you interfere, endeavor to do so by going with the grain of things.
In other words, if you want a split wood, split it with the grain. Don’t try to split it across the grain. And likewise, when you want to pick a fight, don’t use violence but use the other person’s violence to bring about his downfall.
That’s judo. And that judo is applied wú wéi. Sailing is wú wéi—as distinct from rowing, which isn’t.
So then, the Taoists, you see, recognized that there is this universal organism, and they thought of the cosmos as a great organism without a boss. There is no one in Chinese philosophy making the world happening, or ordering it. There is no, as it were, central principle in the middle which sends out commands to all the subordinate parts, but rather, that the thing organizes itself—their word for nature being zìrán, meaning “what is so of itself.” So they saw the whole cosmos as a self-regulating organism.
And they further saw that the individual is not merely a part of that organism, he is an expression of the whole thing, and the whole depends upon this expression just as much as the expression depends upon it. And that was the principle of mutual interpenetration which is called in… well, it’s more familiarly known by its Japanese name jiji muge: the principle of the network. Between thing-event and thing-event there is no obstruction.
But, you see, it remains to us a bit of a puzzle to say that all this is an intelligence, because we can think of all kinds of objections to it. We could think if, by some conscious science, we were able to construct the universe, we would do it a little differently. We would have improvements to suggest upon mosquitoes.
We would—perhaps a great surgeon might suggest that the human body be organized a little differently. We can think of dozens of things. But you find the curious thing is this: when you try to think out carefully how to improve the world, and then you realize what the consequences of your suggestion would be you wouldn’t like all of the consequences.
Hence, the saying: be careful of what you desire—you may get it! And then one invites the individual—and this is one of the great, great things to do—to suggest another kind of universe. What kind of universe would you design if you were God?
And I recommend—I’m not going to go into this because it’s a long story—but I thoroughly recommend it as an exercise in thought: model your own universe and see what comes out of it. Because I can only tell you that you will eventually discover that you will model this one. And you’ll find out, you see, that it’s based on certain absolutely fundamental principles which, of course, includes the game of hide-and-seek (now you see it, now you don’t), which is vibration, which is the same thing as energy.
You’ve got to begin with that. Once you start with that, it implies the rest. Because all that we see around us is just a fantastic combination of black and white elements; of what the Chinese call the yin and yang: the negative and positive forces.
And it all leads to this, but in an incredible dance. So then, you have difficulty, though, of course, in seeing the world as an organism because, when you look out at the stars, you are in roughly the same situation or relationship to what you are seeing as when a physicist studies the constitution of the atom. He will make a map of the behavior of the nucleus in which there will be various rotating particles—or waveicles.
And you will see something which looks like a mathematical design and doesn’t look like an organism. Because we expect an organism to be a kind of gooey thing with blood and flesh and wriggles and so on. So if you looked only through the microscope, you wouldn’t see the organism.
Well, when we look out at the rest of the universe, we are, as it were, sitting down on one of those electrons, looking through a microscope at the rest of it. And therefore, we don’t see the, sort of, total design it makes up. That’s much too far away from our conscious inspection.
And this is one of the reasons, then, why it’s difficult for us to formulate the idea that there is an intelligence operating here. Because all we see is a firework display. This tremendous display of radioactive mud and gas.
And one would say, “Well, it’s just a kind of a contraption that happened to arrive there, and… pffff… that’s all there is to it.” But the funny thing about man is that he can put himself down and say that he is an accident; a kind of colloidal chemical accident that occurred on this very unimportant rock rotating around a lesser star on the fringe of one of the minor galaxies, and that this is where we are, and that the universe does not give a damn about us. Yet, the odd thing is that this wretched little chemical thing can reflect an image of the whole cosmos—in its vastness—inside his head, and can know he’s there. And that means, though, that this thing—however small in dimensions—is vast in comprehension.
And what scale are you going to attach the word “importance” to? Mere size? Or degree of comprehension?
By degree of comprehension, man is huge. By that scale. So then, the principle is simply that if we can see from a perfectly physical point of view—what we would call a strictly scientific point of view—that the individual organism goeswith its environment in just the same way as bees go with flowers, and flowers in their turn go with grubs, and grubs in their turn go with birds, and so on all the way through, then, when you want to define yourself, you cannot say that I am just what is inside this skin.
Because what is inside this skin goeswith everything outside it and constitutes a single complex field of diversified behaviors, diversified processes. You look at that, then, from a strictly physical point of view. And there it is: this network.
But then the trouble comes up is: you say—when you’ve studied that, and you read all the books on ecology, and botany, and zoology, astronomy, and so on—you say, “Yes, I see that. That’s quite true, theoretically. But I would like to be able to feel that this is so as mystics report that they have felt it.” To have that kind of experience in which the network is absolutely clear.
Because, you see, if we don’t take it that far, if we know about it theoretically only, the theoretical knowledge is not going to have much effect on what we do. But knowledge of a more emotionally compelling nature will indeed affect the way we act with respect to our environment. And may, in fact, prevent us from destroying our environment as we are now very busily doing.
It’s interesting that the Congress of the United States recently passed an act making it a very serious offense to burn the American flag. And they passed this act with many patriotic speeches and rhetoric and much reciting of poems. This is the most fantastic example of American confusion between symbol and reality, between menu and meal.
Because this same Congress is directly or indirectly responsible for burning up what the flag stands for—namely, the geographical United States and its people. By not really doing much about the devastation of our forests, the pollution of our water and atmosphere, the reckless waste of our natural resources, and resorting to a form of economy which under any sane circumstances would be termed sheer lunacy. You see, they cannot distinguish between the symbol and the reality because we are all hypnotized with words and symbols.
And so when the flag is more precious than the country we are insane. When you say, “I love my country,” what you mean by that is you feel certain emotions when you salute a flag. You don’t love your country at all!
Because to love the country means to participate in its life in a loving way, in a considerate way. And our animals are, in a certain sense, members of the United States—birds, bears, all these lovely creatures. And what we are doing is: we are getting rid of birds at a fast rate.
We’ve reduced certain populations of birds by as much as 75% in the last few years. Because they eat our poisonous insecticides and so on, and eventually they get into us. That’s love of country.
So as a result of this confusion, you see, and failure to see that the outside world is not a kind of chunk of mineral resources and cows to be exploited and to be just eaten up—if we do that, we turn ourselves into a swarm of locusts on the planet. The price for eating beef is that you must farm beef. You must conduct husbandry.
You must help cattle to multiply and you must care for them properly. The same with fishing. We have not husbanded whales, and therefore they’re on their way to extinction.
This is the price. You’ve got to cherish the animals that you live off. And then, furthermore, after that—to put in my particular prejudice—you’ve got to cook them properly.
You don’t just chew it up because it’s supposed to give you energy and be good for you. That’s an irreverent use of dead animals and dead plants. They give their lives for you, and the proper response to that is: take it with reverence.
And that means: cook it well. So that your act of cooking is like the rituals of a priest at an altar. It is the sacrificial altar; the chopping board and the range which we use.
Kitchens are not to be looked on as a sort of lavatory where you throw things together to put in at the upper end. So that this can only come about, you see, in a situation where human beings are vividly aware of the external world as as much themselves as their own bodies. And you must allow yourself, therefore, to feel that what you see is not merely something out there.
It’s in your head. And your head’s in it. And these things mutually interpenetrate each other, like this.
Now it’s in your head. Now your head’s in it. Now it’s in your head.
Now your head’s in it. Like this, you see? And this rhythm sets up what we call vision.
So, if you see that the external world is as much you as anything inside your skin or anything inside your head, then you have a certain respect for it and no longer consider matter—for example, take a piece of wood: a piece of wood not just a chunk of stuff. But people think about wood that way. You can’t be a good carpenter if that’s the way you think about wood.
We think we’re dealing, you see, with these inert, unfeeling blocks of stuff. Rocks have no feelings, of course! And bang it around.
Mountains have no feelings—blow them up with dynamite. But they do have feelings. And if you hurt them—this is the Indian saying.
I’ve just been with a whole bunch of Indians. They say the continent of the United States is getting ready to shake us off as a dog would shake off fleas. They say the storms are going to get worse, the earthquakes worse, the floods worse, and the insect pests will multiply in all sorts of strange ways and finally get rid of us and leave the land to the Indians who originally owned it.
Let’s have a brief intermission. The question arose this morning about the problem of whether the extension of the network, especially by electronics, might not abolish individual privacy. And I said I was planning to devote this afternoon’s session to that problem and some of its ramifications.
This, of course, is the area of the problem with which Marshall McLuhan is very largely concerned, for he has pointed out that just as the wheel is an extension of the feet—and as, beyond the wheel, naturally, comes the horse and carriage, the automobile, and the airplane—all these technological creations are extensions of the human organism. And finally, the electronic network—of telephone, telegraph, radio, and television—is an extension of the nervous system. And into that we must throw, as an additional extension of the nervous system, the computer.
The computer, into which data can be fed from the files of the insurance companies, the Internal Revenue Service, the police, the credit agencies—everything. So that in a matter of seconds, when an individual is identified, an enormous amount of information about him can be instantly known. In a rather similar way, the time is not too far ahead when you will be able to have a box, about so big, on your desk which has a little screen on it, and a dial.