Datasets:
eliwill
/
Watts

Dataset card Data Studio Files Community
text
stringlengths
11
1.23k
They don’t see the slaughterhouse. And so, what you get [from] the butcher in the market is steak, you know? It’s a thing in its own right; it has nothing to do with a cow.
Steak is a thing shaped thus and so, and it looks as if it might be like a banana, or something like that, you know? And nobody worries. And when a fish is served up, it does indeed look like a fish, but it’s not the squiggly, squirmy fish that comes out at the end of the fisherman’s line.
You know, when you really fish, you realize that the fish doesn’t like it very much. Now, there is that absolutely extraordinary side of things that is really terrifying. And so, let me repeat the illustration I used of the cross in the net, where one side of it is scissors that cut and eat, teeth that chew and get this thing in, and the opening side of it is like James Joyce’s—in Ulysses, the girl who says, “Yes,” and I said, “Yes, yes, yes, she wants to be absolutely ravaged by her man,” you see?
So it’s open, open, open! But now comes the—if we take the dark view of things, the horrible view—excuse me if I go into some rather grizzly details, but have you ever heard of a vagina dentata? That is the idea that, in the sexual organ of the woman, there are teeth.
And a lot of men have this fantasy, and so are rendered impotent. They daren’t make love, because they feel that the price of this blessed experience, this creative experience, this loving experience, is you’re going to get trapped. You’re going to get emasculated, and you’re going to lose your precious member.
And this is a very ancient fantasy. It appears throughout all known history, because this is simply the woman’s come-on, where she attracts, but she’s out, really, to get you. She is basically a spider mother, you see, who is selfish and doesn’t really love you—not really—but says she does.
And, of course, there are, on the other side, all the tricks of the men, which we can go without mentioning. So this is a view of the world as a system of mutual exploitation and of maximal selfishness. Now, it’s a very profitable view to explore.
Everybody should do—in their lifetime, sometime—two things. One is to consider death: to observe skulls and skeletons, and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up. Never.
That is a very gloomy thing for contemplation, but it’s like manure. Just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on, so the contemplation of death, and the acceptance of death, is very highly generative of creative life. You get wonderful things out of that.
And the other thing to contemplate is to follow the possibility of the idea that you are totally selfish. That you don’t have a good thing to be said for you at all. You’re a complete, utter rascal.
Now, the Christians have avoided this, because although they say, in their Episcopalian form of confession, that “We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, and we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” Too much, you know? “We have offended against thy holy laws. We’ve left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us.” But!
It ought to be different. And we are going to do our best to amend, with the help of God’s grace. And that is a real con act, because if you equate health with genuine love and perfect unselfishness, then, in that sense, there is no health in us when we look at ourselves from this point of view.
Now, when you go deeply into the nature of selfishness, what do you discover? You say, “I love myself. I seek my own advantage.” Now, what is the self that I love?
What do I want? And that becomes an increasingly, ever-deepening puzzle. Now, I’ve often referred to this.
When you say to somebody else, “I love you,” it’s always rather disconcerting to the person to whom you say that. If you imply that you love them with a pure, disinterested, and holy love, they automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony. But if you say, “I love you so much I could eat you,” that’s an expression—it’s a way of saying to a person, “You attract me so much that I can’t help it.
I’m absolutely bowled over by you. I’m gone.” And people like that. Then they feel they’re really being loved, that it’s absolutely genuine.
But now, “I love you so much I could eat you.” Now what the devil do I want? I certainly don’t want to eat the girl in the sense of literally devouring her, because then she’d disappear. Hmm.
But I love myself. What is me? How do—in what way do I know me?
Well, it suddenly occurs to me that I know me only in terms of you. See, when I think of anything I know and that I like, then it’s always something that can be viewed as other than me. I can never get to look at me—real me.
It’s always behind, it’s always hidden. And I really don’t know it well enough to know whether I love it or not. Maybe I don’t.
Maybe it’s an appalling mess. But certainly, the things that I do love, and that I want from a selfish point of view, when I really think about them, they’re all something else that’s, in a way, outside me. Now, we saw that there is a reciprocity.
A total, mutual interdependence between what we call the self and what we call the other. That’s the warp and the woof. And so, if you’re perfectly honest about loving yourself (and you don’t pull any punches, you don’t pretend that you’re anything other than exactly what you are), you suddenly come to discover that the self you love—if you really go into it—is the universe.
You don’t like all of it, you’re selective about it—as we saw in the beginning, perception is selection—but on the whole, you love yourself in terms of what is other, because it’s only in terms of what is other that you have a self at all. So then, I feel that one of the very great things that C. G. Jung contributed to mankind’s understanding was the concept of the shadow. That everybody has a shadow, and that the main task of the psychotherapist is to do what he called, “to integrate the evil,” to, as it were, put the devil in us in its proper function.
Because, you see, it’s always the devil, the unacknowledged one, the outcast, the scapegoat, the bastard, the bad guy, you see, the black sheep of the family. It’s always from that point that—which we could call the fly in the ointment, you see—that generation comes. In other words, in the same way as in the drama: to have the play it’s necessary to introduce a villain, it’s necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble.
So, in the whole scheme of life, there has to be the shadow, because without the shadow there can’t be the substance. So this is why there is a very strange association between crime and all naughty things, and holyness. You see, holyness is way beyond being good.
Good people aren’t necessarily holy people. A holy person is one who is whole; who has, as it were, reconciled his opposites. And so there’s always something slightly scary about holy people.
And other people react to them in very strange ways; they can’t make up their minds whether they’re saints or devils. And so holy people have, throughout history, always created a great deal of trouble, along with their creative results. Let’s take Jesus, for example.
The trouble that Jesus created is absolutely incalculable. Think of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the—heaven only knows what’s gone on in the name of Jesus. Very remarkable.
Freud’s a big troublemaker, as well as a great healer, you see? It all goes together. So, the holy person is scary because he is like the earthquakes—or better, still—he’s like the ocean.
See, the ocean, on a lovely sunny day, you can say, “Oh, isn’t that gorgeous?” You can go into it, and relax, and float around. But boy, when the storm comes does that thing get mad. Terrifying!
So there is, in us, the ocean, you see? And Jung felt that the whole point was to bring the two together, and—by a kind of fantastic honesty—to penetrate one’s own motivations to the depths. Jung had a tremendous humor.
And he knew that nobody can be completely honest. That you will try, and you’ll have a great deal of success in exploring your motivations and your dark, unconscious depths, but there will be a certain point at which you will say, “Well, I’ve had enough of that!” You know? And, do you see how, in a strange way, there’s a certain sanity in that?
When a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity, of deception, there is something—you all laughed when I said that—there’s something humorous about it. And this humor is [a] very funny thing. Basically, humor is an attitude of laughter about one’s self.
There is malicious humor, which is laughing at other people. But real, deep humor is laughter at one’s self. Now why, fundamentally, do you laugh about yourself?
What makes you laugh about yourself? Isn’t it because you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside? That if I hint, you see, that your inside is the opposite of your outside, it makes people laugh—if I don’t do it unkindly.
If I get up in the attitude of a preacher and say, “You’re a bunch of miserable sinners and you ought to be different,” nobody laughs. But if I say, “Well, after all, boys will be boys, girls will be girls,” we all know; then, people laugh. Now, you see, what’s happening when we do that?
I passed you around a lot of embroidery to look at before we started. And I’m perfectly sure that you got the point that there’s a big difference between the front and the back. In some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front because people take shortcuts.
In the front everything is orderly, and it is supposed to be kind of messy on the backside. See? Which side will you wear?
You’ve got to be sure you get the front in the front and the back in the back. And the back has all the little tricks in it, all the shortcuts, all the lowdown that people don’t acknowledge, see? And it’s exactly the same with the way we live.
You know, like sweeping the dust under the carpet in a hurry, just before the guests come. I mean, we do ever so many things like that. And if you don’t do it, if you don’t think you do it, and you think, “Well, really, my embroidery is the same on both sides.” See?
Well, you’re deceiving yourself, because what you’re doing is you’re taking the shortcuts in another dimension, which you’re keeping out of consciousness. Everybody takes the shortcuts, everybody plays tricks, everybody has in himself an element of duplicity, of deception. Because, you see, from this point of view that I’m discussing, where the web is the trap, to be is to deceive.
Think of camouflage. The chameleon who changes its color. Think of the butterfly pretending it has eyes.
Think of the flower saying to the bee, “Like my honey?” The bee says, “Wow!” But then that means that the bee has to be, and it has to go on living, and all the trouble it takes to go around collecting honey, and raising other bees, and organizing itself, and doing that dance which tells the other bees where there’s more honey—all that stuff to do, because the flower was deceptive. Now, in the same way, I’ve often said life is a drama, and a drama is a deception. It’s a big act.
When you peel an onion, and you don’t really understand the nature of an onion, you might look for the pit in the center, like any ordinary fruit has. But the onion doesn’t have a center. It’s all skins.
And so, when you get right down, there’s nothing but a bunch of skins. You say, “Well, that was kind of disappointing.” But, of course, you have to understand that the skins were the part that you eat. Well, in rather the same way, you see, you find—when you explore yourself, and your motivations, and you go through and through—and you try to find out that thing which is really genuine.
That’s why, in Zen discipline, they give you kōans which require a perfectly genuine act. An act of total and absolute sincerety. And people knock themselves out trying to do this thing, but they always know that the master is going to catch them, because he reads their thought.
Do you know that story of von Kleist, about the man who had a fight with a bear? And the bear could read his thoughts, so that the only way of hitting the bear was to do so not on purpose—because the bear would know in advance. So it’s the same in working with a Zen master.
You have to do the genuine act not on purpose. But since you’re put in a situation where it’s rather formal, and you’re supposed to do it on purpose, you’re stuck, you see? So you explore the onion, and you go in, and in, and in, and then you find—well, it’s all a deception!
Now then, the question arises: who’s deceiving who? Who’s fooling who? I’m fooling me?
What is fooling? Fooling is playing like you’re there when you’re not. You know, getting somebody else to answer your name in the roll call.
So we’re all—you see, this is the metaphysical basis of it, this is what the Hindus mean by māyā: the world-illusion. The world is playing it’s there when it isn’t. And it’s a trap.
And it sucks you in. And you can’t get out of it. And it’s a thorough, big trap, too.
But always, when you get an idea like this, or a feeling like this, follow it to its extreme. Don’t back out from it. If you find you’re selfish, go to the extreme of what selfishness means.
Confusion largely results from not following feelings or ideas to their depth. You know, people think they want to be immortal, they’d like to live forever. Do you really want to do that?
Think about it. Really go into it, what it would be like. People say they want this, that, and the other; they want this kind of car, they want this kind of dress, or so on, and this much money, and so on—it’s always a good idea to think it right through.
What it would involve to be in that situation, to have those desires fulfilled? Also, when you form a relationship to another person, think it through, too. You see?
How inconvenient would they be, however attractive? And always turn the embroidery around and look at the underside, but don’t get caught doing it. See, that’s something one does on the side, in secret.
Because otherwise you play the game that everything is as it’s supposed to be on the front. But that makes you humorous, and that makes you human. Now, summing up, we’ve discussed the web from three points of view.
As an analogy of the selective operation of our senses and mind, whereby certain things in the world are picked out as significant according to certain game rules. The game that we are playing, mostly, is the survival game. That is to say, the game ought to go on.
Only, the way we play the survival game has a kind of element in it which makes it difficult, because we tend to say, “The first rule of this game is that it’s serious,” and that messes the whole thing up. So you have to watch out, in other words—when you play—for contradictory game rules. Self-contradictory game rules.
Because if you get mixed up into them, the game ceases to be worth the candle. You start straining at doing something when it just isn’t worth it. Then, the second thing that we observed was the web as an analogy of mutual interdependence.
We could call it the idea that all existence is relative, that all existence is transactional. The transaction being typically exemplified by, say, the operation of buying and selling, in which there can be no buying without somebody selling, and there can be no selling without somebody else buying. That kind of interdependence of the inside going together with the outside, what is in you going together with what is outside you, is absolutely fundamental to existence.
It is existence. Existence is relativity. Then we explored the web as a trap.
The spider’s web: “Won’t you come into my parlor?” said the spider to the fly. And we saw what happens if you look at all of life from the point of view that it is original selfishness and original hunger. And we found that if you take that point of view to its ultimate extreme, it dissolves.
And it isn’t so bad after all. There’s a famous comment that R. H. Blyth made on the passage in Macbeth, where Shakespeare says, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And Blyth says, “When it’s put that way it doesn’t seem so bad after all.” I remember that I had a Zen master friend who wrote a letter to a friend of mine, which was passed on to me, saying that the greatest writers—this friend of mine was aspiring to be a writer, and he was trying to write novels that would put across Buddhism to people. You know, sugar the pill.
And my Zen master friend didn’t approve of this at all. He said, “Don’t write any story to people. Write it to the great sky.” Because all the real masters of literature, especially novelists and storytellers, are great masters of nonsense.
Think of Lewis Carroll. You can use Lewis Carroll—and he did use Alice in Wonderland—as a Zen textbook: because “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” And that’s Zen. I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, on the last visit there, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English.
And he said that’s a waste of time. “If you really understand Zen,” he said, “you can use any book.” You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland.
You could use the dictionary. “Because,” he said, “the sound of the rain needs no translation.” So what does the rain say? Evening rain.
It is the banana leaf that speaks of it first. You see, that’s the point. And all the talk in the world doesn’t get it unless you listen to the talk in a new way.
“The sound of the rain needs no translation.” So, you see, there’s something going on. This web may be looked at as pattern. And the world is basically patterning.
What else do you do, when you come to think of it? When you eat you are turning food into the pattern of your skeleton, your muscles, and your nervous system. That’s a pattern.
And you say, you see—basically—“Hooray for that pattern! That’s great! It’s terribly interesting!” But then you want other patterns.
You like to look through a microscope and see the patterns that exist in the small world. You like to look through a kaleidoscope, or a telidoscope, and see the patterns. You like to have paintings around and see the patterns.
You like to watch the water play. You want to watch the birds go, and the clouds, and all that. Fascinating patterns.
And that really does—doesn’t it?—seem to be the point. I mean, what do you do when you’re very rich and you want—let’s take some rascal from ancient times who became very rich by all sorts of skullduggery, and warfare, and so on: he got himself a suit of armor, a beautiful sword. And he had the armorer make the most intricate patters, arabesques of inlaid gold, on the steel.
Why? Because it’s, as they say among the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s “f’nice.” It’s a great thing to have all that jazz, and that’s what we go for. What do people do most of the time when they—what would they like to do, really?
What’s your idea of heaven? When people are unoccupied, as far as I can make out, they get together and they sing and dance. Or else watch somebody else do it.
Nowadays we live in a non-participative culture and we don’t do very much singing and dancing. We are lugubrious. But we watch other people do it on television.
What we really are interested in is to be able to spend all the time going, “gohooda-bada-doo boom-di-di-boo-ba, bee-boo doodie-boodie doo-doo tchi-ko boom-boom-boom,” you know, something like this. And that’s what our heart’s doing, that’s what our lungs are doing, it’s what our eyeballs are doing, and it’s what all these fantastic capillaries of the veins are doing. They’re just going, “joo-di-boo-di, huppa-bubba, umpa-buba jee-dee-dee-dee,” you see?
And that’s the point. Now, the thing is: ought this to be allowed? You know?
Dare we admit it? Because we’ve been brought up, you see, in a cultural context in which the universe is presided over by somebody serious. And it’s only very, very occasional obscure references in the Jewish and Christian scriptures to the idea that God dances.
Of course, in Hindus—they know Shiva dances, and all the Gods dance, and they are represented in the dance. But in our way of looking at things—no. Back, deep down in, there is something that you must respect with a very, very—you mustn’t laugh in church, especially if you got in front of the throne of heaven.
Everybody would be dead silent. Wow! You see, I mean, that’s really serious.
Here is the Father Almighty, world without end, and you watch out! Don’t you laugh! Why not?
Because Father Almighty, world without end, is a very insecure fellow. And if anybody laughed he might feel uneasy, you know? Like something wrong going on; someone challenged his power.
So he is a funny fellow, you see, as we’ve mythologized ultimate reality in the form of this cosmic grandpapa, who is also a king and is demanding—above all things—reverence and respect. So it’s difficult for us—because of that cultural heritage—to accept, to accommodate our common sense, to the idea that the web might basically be playful. That it might be like somebody saying, “Won’t you come and play with me?” A child.
And the other child has some little hesitation. “I don’t know whether I ought to play with you. You come from the wrong side of the tracks.” Or, “I don’t feel like playing today; I feel serious.
I don’t think play is important. We ought to do something real, like wash the dishes for mother.” Who, incidentally, has forgotten that the whole point of washing the dishes is playful. You know, you don’t wash the dishes for a serious reason.
You like the table to look nice, you know? You don’t want to serve up the dishes with dinner with all the leavings of breakfast still lying on them. So why do you want the table to look nice?
Well again, it’s “f’nice,” you see? You like the pattern of it that way. People get terribly compulsive about doing these things, and they think that going on arranging the patterns of life is something that’s a duty.
That means a debt that you owe it to yourself, or to your family, or to someone or other. You’re in debt. See, that’s the trouble.
When a child comes into the world, the parents play an awful game on it. Instead of being honest, they say, “We’ve made such great sacrifices for you. Here we are, we’ve supported you, we’ve paid for your education, and you’re an ungrateful little bastard.” And the child feels terribly guilty because what we do is we build into every human being the idea that existence is guilt.
The existentialists make a big deal out of this, and you watch out for them because they’re hoaxers, and they say that guilt is ontological. If you’re not feeling guilty you’re not human. And that was because papa and mama said, “Look at all the trouble you’ve caused us.
You shouldn’t dare to exist. You have no rights, but maybe we’ll give you some out of the generosity of our hearts, so that you’ll be permanently indebted to us.” And so everybody goes around with that sort of thing in their background, unless they had different kinds of papas and mamas who didn’t play that trick on them. But so many papas and mamas do do that.
And if they don’t do it, somebody else does it. Aunty comes around and says, “You don’t realize what your father and mother have done for you. You think,” you know, “you can just stay around here and goof off!
But they’ve sweat blood to give you your clothes, and food, and so on, and you ought to be grateful for it.” But that’s not the way to make people grateful. They won’t be grateful that way; they’ll imitate gratefulness. They’ll go and put on a big show and say, “Oh thank you so much!
I feel so indebted to you!” And so on, and so forth, and they’ll make it look good. But it isn’t real. Because, actually, one’s father and mother had a great deal of fun bringing you into being—or we hope they did.
And they wanted to do that the worst way. They have no reason to complain about all these things, and try and make the children feel guilty. But, you see, it’s an amazing thing in our culture that everyone is afflicted with ontological guilt.
For example, if a policeman comes to the door, everybody is instantly frightened; you wonder, “What on Earth have I done?” And there are certain clergy who are absolute experts in making you feel guilty. They’re really marvelous. And there are clergy of all kinds, for all classes, and for all levels of intelligence, and they can make you feel real guilty!