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And so in exactly the same way, it is the contrast of on and off, there and not there—in other words, life and death, being and non-being—that constitutes existence. Only, we pretend that the random side of things, the disorderly side of things, could possibly win in the game of competition—or, I would rather call it collaboration—between the two. When you lose sight of the fact that the order-principle and the random-principle go together, that’s exactly the same predicament as losing sight of the fact that all individually delineated things and beings are connected underneath.
You know, just like mountains stick out of the Earth and there’s a fundamental Earth underneath them, so all of us, as different things, we stick out of reality and there’s a continuity underneath—but you ignore that, you see? That’s the thing that’s left out. See?
I’m just giving you many examples of the same principle. But really, deep down, we are—each one of us—everything that there is. Doing it this way, and then again that way, and then again another way, and that’s what it keeps up doing for ever, and ever.
Only, it has holidays which are called deaths. You know, in the story of the creation of the world, in the Bible, God works for seven days and rests the seventh. It’s necessary to have a holiday.
Holiday is holy day. And the Sabbath for the Jews is Saturday, for the Christians it’s Sunday, because Saturday is the last day of the week, but Sunday is the first day of the week. And it’s a slight difference of alteration between the Jewish temperament and a Christian temperament.
Some people like to take the holiday and then do the work, other people like to do the work and then take the holiday. And since the Jews do the work first and then take the holiday, they’re always a little up on the Christians in business! But the point is that a holiday—this pause between something going on—is of the essence of the idea of a web.
For example, there’s a famous Irishman who is supposed to have described a net as “a lot of holes tied together with string.” So the holes are very, very important. And these are the holy days, you see? The holes.
It all goes together. So there must be that interval, and it exists on all kinds of levels. It isn’t simply that there is—for example, a sound that is sounded is a vibration, and the sound goes on and off.
Everything that we call sound is sound-silence. There is no such thing as pure sound; you couldn’t hear it. What you hear is that tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap against the eardrum, But it happens very fast so that you get more of an impression of sound than you do of silence.
But between every little undulation of sound there is also an interval. When you listen to music you hear a melody. But what you hear, actually, that makes the melody significant, are the steps between the tones; what we call the intervals.
And a person who doesn’t hear intervals is tone-deaf. He only hears noises, he doesn’t hear the steps. So that interval between whatever happens is as important as what happens.
So we’ll call these two things the sound and the silence, the life and the death, somewhat analogous in weaving to the warp and the woof. Now look at the marvelous way in which the warp and woof go together. A piece of cloth is an extraordinary thing when you consider it’s made of a line of string.
There’s something that always struck me as a child; fabulous, that string—just thread—could turn into cloth. Why should it hang together? How improbable.
My mother was a very great artist in embroidery; did absolutely fabulous work. And she could do everything with thread: sewing, knitting, embroidery, make tapestries, repair tapestries—oh, just fabulous work. So I’ve grown up in a background where thread is of enormous importance.
She made a living this way, for a while. So I was always amazed at the way—say you take a ball of wool, and with knitting needles, and suddenly it turns into a sweater. Fantastic!
But I found out, you see, the secret of this, which is that it will do this—it will hold together—by this combination of warp and woof. By this process where one thread goes under the other, omits the next, goes under the other, and then the next thing does the same thing, but in the opposite way. Connect that.
And they hold each other up. For example, you can put two sticks of wood, and lean them against each other, and they’ll stand up. We know the Chinese character for man (人) looks more or less like that.
And although this is simply the brush form, the brush abbreviation, of what were originally the legs of a little human stick figure, there’s a story that Japanese children sometimes learn from their mothers: that the reason this is the character for man is that two sticks, leaned together as I described, will keep each other up. And the one depends on the other; it’s mutual. And so in the same way, the existence of human beings depends on our supporting each other.
Without that, no one of us can exist. But that, which may seem a little trite—a little, sort of, moralistic and so on—but it is absolutely fundamental. That anything that there is, whenever we can say that something exists—existence is a function of relationship.
Motion itself is a function of relationship. For example—forgive me if some of you have heard this one before, but it’s a very important basic lesson—if there is only one object, one small ball in the middle of endless space, nobody knows whether it’s moving. Because you can’t tell whether it’s approaching anything, or whether it’s going away from anything, because there’s nothing else.
So in that state of affairs, no motion exists. But if we introduce a second ball into the picture, and the two either come towards each other or go away from each other, then we can say that both of them or either of them is in motion. We can’t decide which is the one that’s doing the moving, because it could be one, it could be the other.
Now we’ll put three balls into space, and we find two of them staying together and the other one going away. Now, it’s up to the two of them to decide whether the other one is going away from them or they’re going away from the other, because two is a majority in this case, and the vote, of course, always goes to the majority; the universe being, basically, a democratic organization. And so it goes.
And now, once you’ve got that, you can see that motion is a form of relationship. Or, let me put it in another way: energy is a form of relationship. If the universe is basically a play of energy, then you can say energy and relationship go together.
Now, what is this saying? This is saying that being—existence itself—is relationship. Let’s look at it in several other ways.
You know the old question, “If a tree crashes in a forest and there is nobody around to hear it, is there a noise?” This question has been discussed in many futile ways, but noise—basically—is a state of affairs that requires an eardrum and an audio nervous system behind the eardrum. When the tree falls, if there is—anywhere around—an ear with the appropriate nervous system, there will be a noise. Because noise is a relationship between motion in the air and ears.
If there is not any ear around, there won’t be any noise—although there will be vibration in the air. And if there is some instrument around, such as a microphone attached to a tape recorder (which is a mechanical copy of a human ear) then, according to that, there will be noise; there will be a vibration. In the same way, let’s suppose the sun sends out light into space.
Now, the space surrounding the sun will be black darkness as if there were no light in it, unless a planet happens to float by. When a planet floats by, there will be light. In the darkness.
But if there isn’t anything to relate to the sun in that way, then comes no light. Now this goes right down to the root and ground of everything. It goes down to the essence of your nerves, of your whole being: that it’s all an interdependence.
And that’s why one of the basic symbols of the universe is the Chinese yin-yang symbol, which, you know, is a circle with an S-curve in the center. One side of the S is black, the other is white. So it makes, as it were, two commas, or two fishes.
And the eye of the fish is the opposite color; the white fish has a black eye, the black fish has a white eye. And these things are going like this, see? Curling in on each other.
Now, this thing is called a helix, and that is the fundamental form of the galaxies; the great nebulae we see out in space are doing this. Curves. And this is, basically, too, the position of sexual intercourse.
This is lovemaking. And this is, you know, when you hold hands, and so on. This is it.
But there are two involved, and the two are secretly one. Now, this is what I really want you to understand: to get into the unitive world underneath, underlying, and supporting the everyday practical world, there have to be certain alterations in one’s common sense. There are certain ideas—and beyond these ideas, certain feelings—that are difficult to get across not because they’re intellectually complicated—not at all because of that—but because they’re unfamiliar.
They’re strange. We haven’t been brought up to accommodate them. In exactly the same way that, in past times, people knew that the planets were supported in the sky because they were embedded in spheres of crystal.
And if they weren’t embedded in spheres of crystal—and, of course, you could see them, because you could see through them—they would fall down on the Earth. And now, when astronomers finally suggested that there were no crystal spheres, people felt unbelievably insecure. See?
They had a terrible time assimilating this idea. Now, do you see what it involves to assimilate a really new idea? You have to do quite a flip.
For example, there are some people whose number systems only account four quantities: one, two, three, many. So they don’t have any concept of four corners to a table—see, a table has many corners. And a pile of pebbles is, in that sense, equivalent in many-ness to the four corners of the table.
Now, they have difficulty, you see, in beginning to assimilate the idea of counting through, and numbering all those corners or all those pebbles. But we’ve done that, so—to us—that is perfectly simple. But imagine the kind of mentality, the kind of person, to whom that is not simple at all.
Now, in exactly the same way, there is, here—what I’m trying to explain—a new idea that most people don’t assimilate, and that is the idea of the total interdependence of everything in the world. The Buddhists in Japan call it jiji muge. Jiji muge: “Between thing and thing, between event and event, there is no block.” And they represent this, imagistically, as a network.
Imagine a multidimensional spiderweb covered in dew in the morning, and every single drop of dew on this web contains in it the reflections of all the other drops of dew. And, of course, in turn, in every drop of dew that one drop reflects, there is the reflection of all the others again. And they use this image to represent the interdependence of everything in the world.
In other words, if we give this dewdrop-image—if we put it into a linguistic analogy, we would say this: “Words have meaning only in context.” The meaning of any word depends upon the sentence, or upon the paragraph in which it’s found. So that, if I say, “This tree has no bark,” that’s one thing. And if I say, “This dog has no bark,” that’s another thing.
So, you see—always—the meaning of the word is in relation to the context. Now, in exactly the same way, the meaning—as well as the existence—of an individual person, an organism, is in relation to the context. You are what you are, sitting here at this moment, in your particular kind of clothes, and with the particular colors of your faces, and your particular personalities, your family involvements, your business involvements, your neuroses, and your everything—you are that precisely in relation to an extremely complex environment.
So much so that, if—let’s take, for example, this piece of wood that forms a support to the beam out here. Now, believe me, this is true: you can see that has little nubbles on it, and so on. If it were not the way it is, you would not be the way you are.
The line of connection between what it is and what you are is very, very complicated. Also, we could say if a given star that we observe didn’t exist, you would be different from what you are now. I don’t say you wouldn’t exist, but you would exist differently.
But you might say the connection is very faint, is something you don’t ordinarily have to think about, it’s not important. But basically, it is important, only you say, “I don’t have to think about it, because it’s there all the time.” See, for example, the floor is underneath you all the time. Some sort of floor, some sort of earth, and you really don’t have to think about it—it’s just always there; it’s always around.
If you become insensitive you stop thinking about it. But there it is. And so, in the same way, our subtle interdependence with—mind you, it’s not just our plain existence, it’s the kind of existence we have—is dependent upon all these things.
Also our plain existence, but that gets way down. But the fundamental thing is: existence is relationship. In other words, if my finger, up here, is all alone, and the wind doesn’t move, and nothing touches it, it stops knowing that it’s there.
But if something comes along and does tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch; immediately, it’s aware that it’s there. So, you see, it takes two. We could have so much fun, but it takes more than one, and she don’t wanna!
But in this way, you see, what we call duality—you can see, can’t you, how duality is fundamental. It takes two. But duality is always—secretly—unity.
Take the contrast between the words we use: explicit and implicit. They’re very valuable words. What is explicit, what’s on the outside, that’s, say, how we come on publically—explicitly we are thus and so.
We have a fight. We’re in competition, say, in business, explicitly. But implicitly, we’ve worked this out: that we’ve agreed, in a secret way that nobody knows about, that this competition is extremely valuable to both of us.
Take it politically, for example: let’s take the situation of Russia versus the United States. Explicitly, in public, this has to be a big fight. These two ways of life, these two ideologies, are opposed.
They say, “Brrrrrraaaagh,” you know? But behind the scenes it’s all been carefully worked out. You bet it has.
That this opposition has to happen because our economy depends on it, and their economy depends on it, and everybody knows this who’s got a little smart. But there are a lot of people who get taken in by the propaganda, and they should be taken in, because that makes the thing work. It’s crazy, but that’s the way it goes.
And everything works this way. There is, for example—when swans start to mate, they’re not sure what they’re supposed to do, and they begin to fight. I had a long talk about this with C. G. Jung.
He lived on the edge of Lake Zürich, and he had a little summer house right on the water’s edge, and there were many swans there. And I was getting up after the end of a conversation with him, and we were beginning to walk back to the main house, and I said, “Isn’t it true that swans are monogamous?” And he said, “Yes, they are.” He said, “Do you know, I have had most interesting relationships between these swans and many of my female patients who thought they were homosexual.” I mean, Jung wasn’t a sexual snob—I mean, he understood all the legitimacy of all kinds of sexual variations—but he said, “It has been a point of departure for our discussions.” And he said, “It’s a very funny thing that, when they begin to mate, they start fighting. And they don’t know what it’s all about, and then, suddenly, the fight turns into lovemaking.” So that’s what I mean.
Underneath opposition there is love. Underneath duality there’s unity. That Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle.
So you see, here’s that weaving principle. That things hold together by over-under, under-over, over-under, under-over, over-under, under-over, and that creates a stuff, it creates a fabric, it creates clothing, it creates shelter, it creates what we call matter. Matter.
Mater. Mother. And also, the same word, māyā, “illusion.” See?
The world as a marvelous illusion. Now, we’ve got to go into this. Look at another form of the thing: you can play it not only by two as one, but you can play it by three as one.
You know the trademark for Ballantine’s Ale, which is three interlocked rings. Now, the way these rings are interlocked is such that they are joined only if the three of them are present. If you take one away, the other two fall apart.
This is a very interesting phenomenon, but it can be created physically, with steel rings. Their cohesion depends on all three of them being present. Now, we have tried, scientifically, to understand the world and explain its mysteries by analyzing the smallest, smallest particles of things that exist.
Inquiring down, down, down: what is this thing we call flesh, or call steel, or stone—what is it made of? Go down into the midst of it. And that’s given us a certain understanding.
But only half of the understanding. Equally important is not what is the tiniest particle, but in what context is the tiniest particle? You see?
In relation to what is it? Just as the word “bark,” as I showed you, has different meanings in different sentences, so cells, molecules, atoms have different properties in different contexts. So what the scientist equally needs to study is not, simply, what is anything when very, very minutely analyzed, but where is it?
When is it? That makes all the difference. So, do you see that a lot of people who get anxious when they hear that everything is relative have no need to get that anxious?
Relativity isn’t some kind of slippery morass in which all standards and all directions get lost. Relativity is really the soundest situation that there is. See?
It’s the one supporting the other. It’s this thing. Do you know this?
This is wonderful. X marks the spot. Imagine this going on and on.
Supposing my finger were indefinitely long—both fingers—and they were doing this. See, they’re just crossing each other. Now, on one side of it it’s a pair of scissors, and it cuts.
What is it on the other side? Why, it’s opening female legs saying, “Please, come in.” Utter softness, utter receptiveness; on the other side it’s “Krrrrck!” But on this side it’s, “Please, please, please, please! Yes!
Welcome!” And everything’s based on that. See? It’s “Krrrck” this way; sharpness, teeth, biting, spines, crab shells, all that kind of thing, you know?
On the other side it’s the melting softness of life, see? They go together, just like that. “Shhhhhwwwt.” And goodness knows what it is on these outer two sides.
I haven’t thought about that yet! So if you see that, if you get that principle, you can feel yourself not sort of just rattling around in the world—as kind of a, you know, somebody’s been stuck down there—but you can feel yourself going on in absolutely exact relationship with everything around you. And this is very beautiful.
It isn’t just that you are here looking at what’s out there—like you might be photographing it with your eyes—it’s that if that, there, wasn’t there, you wouldn’t be here. The outside thing that you see, and the inside thing that you are, are poles of the same magnet. Or back and front of the same coin.
And without one there isn’t the other. That means, of course, then, that we are living in the midst of a world of animals, vegetables, minerals, atmospheres, astronomical bodies that’s highly intelligent. It’s intelligence concentrated, crystallized, in our brains.
That’s where it comes out, you see? In any field, let’s say—let’s take any field of forces. Take a chemical solution, and at certain critical points in this chemical solution, the crystals start to form.
And so, in the same way, the total intelligence of this whole universe crystallizes in human brains. Also in other kinds of brains. But that’s where it really comes out.
But it’s the total intelligence of the whole field that does this. So we go with the whole thing; interdepend with it. We don’t live in an environment which is just rock, just air, just atmosphere, and so on.
The environment’s only like that when we think about it analytically and try to explain it. But when we think of, “It isn’t just rock and air,” see, but “those things go together.” When you see the interconnectedness, when you see, in the simplest way, how flowers go with bees and other insects; they don’t live without them. Humans go with cattle, they don’t exist without them.
Plants, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. When you see the intervals, the significance of the relationships between these things—it’s only then, when you see that, that you are aware of the melody. Go back to the illustration I gave of the person who can’t hear melody, who is tone-deaf.
He only hears a succession of sounds, because he’s not aware of the intervals. Now, most people are brought up to be tone-deaf in respect to their own existence and the rest of the universe. They don’t see the relationships.
They’re not aware of the unity. And so, once you spot that, you spot how everything goes with the thing, but you are one end and that, out there, is the other end. And they really go together.
Then you may be said to be living a harmonious life. In exploring the theme of The Web of Life, I have thus far discussed two principal topics. First, the web considered as selectivity.
Experience considered as what we pay attention to, on the one hand, and what we ignore on the other. And I showed how the way in which we pay attention to the world creates isolates—I’m using that as a noun—isolates that we call particular things, events, and persons, and they seem to be disconnected, and to be alone, because we ignore the connections between them. And I used the analogy of weaving, where the threads go underneath and join on the back in a way that is not seen on the front.
So you might say, in the unconscious—although I don’t particularly like that word, because it makes it seem as if it were something rather dead—but, on the unconscious side of life, as on the back of the weaving, or the back of the embroidery, there are connections which are not published. Now, in the second part of the theme was the web as mutuality. When I discussed the way the existence of a web, the existence of cloth, or anything like that, depends on a mutual support of the warp and the woof.
And this miraculous thing occurs that, when these things support each other, being comes into being. Cloth comes into being. And so, in exactly the same way, our world is a manifestation of relativity.
And this requires a balance, a combination, a relationship of opposites in every domain of life. And although these opposites are explicitly different, and even antagonistic, they are implicitly one—and that’s the secret. See, there are these two secrets that we went into.
The connection between what are supposed to be separate things and events, and the mutual unity between what are manifestly—that is to say, openly, for purposes of publication—opposites. Now, this afternoon I’m going to take two other aspects of the web. The web is a trap, like the spider’s web is a trap for flies.
Also, the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men—from a certain point of view. And I want to consider the web as something playful. You see, there are so many ways of looking at it, and you will find that all these ways are right, but what we need is the fullness of the view.
There are people, for example, who can see the web as a trap and get stuck with that. There are people to whom existence is simply hateful. They see it as nothing but a ghastly mistake.
The Lord really erred when he created this world, because he arranged it in such a way that everything lives by eating something else. And what I’m doing is, I’m describing a certain point of view, you see? I’m not exactly philosophizing, I’m describing a point of view.
You can look at life in such a way that the whole thing is this ghastly mistake. For example, there is no such thing as genuine kindness or love. Everybody is really pretending that they are loving other people in order to get some advantage from them.
And indeed, there is a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia, where people don’t seem to be real. They are mechanisms, and you can think that out quite intensely with a good deal of intelligence. After all, if you start from a good old Darwinian or Freudian basis, and see that man is a material machine, and that the consciousness of man is simply a very involved and complicated form of chemistry, and that’s what it is, you see?
Well, then these awful mechanical things, these Frankensteins that everybody is, they come around and they say, “Well, I’m alive. I’m a human being. I have a heart, I love, I hate, I have problems, I feel.” And you feel like saying, “Come off it!
You’re just a monster, and you put on this civilized act because, really, you’re just a set of teeth on the end of a tube, and got a ganglion behind those teeth which you call your brain or your alleged mind.” And this thing is really, basically, there for two purposes: one, to be cunning enough to get something to eat, to put down the tube, and the other—you know what—Mr. Freud’s libido. And everything else, you see, can be construed as an elaborate, subtle way of pretending that that’s not really what you want to do.
But you do, but you put on a great show. Now some people, according to this view, get mixed up. They so repress that what they really want to do is to eat and to screw, that they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities, and think that that’s the real purpose of life.
And then they become what’s called neurotic, because they get involved in being pure camouflage. So that’s what’s called escaping from the facts: not looking at life, not looking at reality correctly. Now, this is a very strange thing, you see, that it is partly true that the universe, so far as its biological aspect is concerned, is this weird system that lives by everybody eating everybody else.
Only, what we do to maintain what is called order and civilization, is that various species make agreements, as it were, that they won’t eat each other. They’ll cooperate, and so be an enormous gang which can beat down the others. So the human being is the most successful, so far, of this gangster arrangement.
We are the most predatory monsters on Earth, and we have cooperated to assault the fish, and the vegetables, and the chickens, and the cows, and everything, you see? Only, we do it by not letting our left hand know what our right hand doeth. In other words, ladies and gentlemen—unless gentlemen happen to be prone to going hunting as a sport—they don’t see their food killed.