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Only, you have to watch—always—what games people are playing. Now, you see, the thing is—that really is a puzzle—is that they don’t admit they are playing games. And when a person is playing games, and doesn’t admit that they are playing games, then you have some kind of a trickster who isn’t really being fair to you.
Now, of course, the game that this game is not a game has a certain kind of a fascinating quality to it. How mixed up can we all get? Let’s try.
See? There’s a certain possibility in that. I would like to go insane, and be as insane as anybody has ever been, and be the far-est out crazy nut in the world.
See? That’s a game. But it’s not a good game.
It’s a game being played by a person who didn’t really understand that everyday life was a game, too. And I think the most important thing is to admit this. All really humane people admit that they’re rascals.
That’s, you see, on the side of the not respectable, the selfish. But so, also, all humane people should admit that they’re jokers; that they are playing games and playing tricks. That I am doing it on you; I am most ready to admit this.
I hoaxed you all into coming here to tell you—what? It was a trap, you see? But I’m going to make it an entertaining trap so that you won’t feel so badly about it.
Now, this is philosophy, but I think philosophy is like music. You go to a concert and you listen to somebody play Bach, or Mozart, or Beethoven, and what’s all that about? You know, it isn’t about anything except “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, dee-dee diddly-dee”, you know?
That’s what it’s about. And so, in the same way, as I conceive my work as a philosopher, I am simply pointing out that existence is the same kind of a thing as a Bach invention. It’s going this way, and that way, and hills, and water is going “tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch-tch” all out there, and the fish are going around in it, breeding, and the ducks are going this, that, and the other, and that’s the same thing as “dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee, dee diddly-dee,” see?
So, if you can admit that—that that’s what it’s all about—you have a little problem. Because there’s not only the threat that it really might be serious, and that you shouldn’t be laughing about this, but there’s also a kind of opposite. Then are you saying it’s merely just fiddling around?
I mean, are you saying that it’s only a game? Is that all there is to it? What do you think?
You see, this, again, is a question that everybody has to think things through. What did you want? Didn’t you want a game?
Did you want it to be serious in the end? Think about the question. What kind of a thing would you like God to be?
What would you like to do for eternity? Really? Here is Jan van Eyck, who paints the eschatological picture of the Last Judgement.
What a strange man he must have been. Here is heaven above, and hell below. And in heaven, here’s God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, all that together, and the virgin Mary, and the Apostles, and they are all sitting in committee, and they have an aisle—you know, just like in church—and there they are, facing each other, and they’re all sitting there very solemnly.
Now, I don’t know what it’s about. But below, right at the end of the aisle, you see, where all these Apostles are sitting, is Saint Michael: a rather gorgeous figure in beautiful armor with wings. And underneath him is a batwinged skull.
And beneath those batwings all horrors is let loose. Michael is about to slosh that skull, you see, with his sword. But below; whoo!
There are nude bodies—some of them pretty comely—and they’re all squirming in there, and they’re being eaten by worms, and they are eating the worms, and it’s a kind of a mush. It’s like the sort of situation you find when you turn up a big rock and there’s all that going on underneath. Now, there’s no question whatever that van Eyck, the painter, had more fun painting that part of the picture, than he did painting the top part.
So, in the same way with Hieronymus Bosch, and with Bruegel: they painted every kind of weird, surrealistic deviltry going on, and they really loved it. But they couldn’t admit it. Now, the only time when the holy people had a ball was when, for example, the Islamic artists made arabesques, and the Celtic artists made fantastically intricate lattices to decorate the margins of their gospels and missals.
They are unbelievably beautiful. Or take stained glass, or something like that. But what are they doing?
What’s it all about? So you asked the question, then what will you do in heaven? And the thing you wanna do, of course, is to get mixed up in this “tshhhh twtwtwtwtwt.” See it’s like the musician: he likes to take a melody, and he likes to put another melody that fits in with it, and another one that fits in with both, and then a fourth one, and arrange them together, and then invents an instrument like an organ that he plays with two hands, then he adds foot pedals so he can play with his two feet.
And he’d get this hand doing one rhythm, this is doing another, this is doing another, and this doing another. See, that makes it complicated. And so, when drummers get together and play, somebody starts out with a certain rhythm, and then that rhythm has holes in it.
In other words, it has certain silences. And the next drummer fills those silences in an interesting way. He comes and picks out a pattern.
And what do you imagine DNA is? The basic form of biological existence. Now, DNA is like a necklace—like Charlotte’s wearing—with different kinds of beads in it.
And according to the order, and the way those beads are arranged, so you get genes, and so you get the particular form of life that emerges from those genes. So what we are doing—basic down, way down—is saying, “She loves me, she don’t, she have me, she won’t, she would if she could, but she can’t.” You see? Or, “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich Man, Poor Man, Beggar Man, Thief.” This is the way life is going on.
And as a result comes all this, you see? The question is then, you see—in you heart of hearts—you can take the attitude that all this is terrible, or that it’s dreadfully serious. You see, you can play comedies, you can play tragedies, farces, histories and romances, and all that kind of thing, and you can take these various attitudes to it.
But if you are awakened, and, as it were, you’ve been let in to the secret—which is what we’ve been talking about, see? Because the web is also the curtain, you know? The veil.
The veil which hides the face of God from the angels, you see? There’s always this veil. That’s why we like a strip tease: because there’s an implication that this—you should never give the show completely away; always should be a little bit of a veil left, you see?
There always is. Because even if you find the strip tease artist gets completely naked, there’s really something hidden. What’s the motivation?
What sort of a person is she? Would I really like to embrace her? Or will she have bad breath?
You know? Or something. And you never really know.
You never really get to the bottom. That’s why everybody—all men poets say that women are basically mysterious. And they ought to be.
So are men basically mysterious, from women’s point of view—although they play that they’re not. See, this is the way it goes: men are supposed to be very open, and they say, “Well,” of a certain situation, “this is the way it is. After all, it’s perfectly rational; a matter of practical affairs.” And women say, “Well, I’m not quite as articulate as you are, but I know there’s something you’ve left out, but I can’t explain it.” And by this means everything is kept going.
So, what I’m saying is, I think, this: I’m trying to share with you a certain style of life, and an attitude to life, and an insight. I’ve taken you to one side and said, “Listen, kids, things aren’t what they seem. Don’t be fooled.
There’s a big deception going on, and you’re involved in it, but I just thought you ought to know it and enjoy it.” See? I’m terribly puzzled about the way people go out of their way to dis-enjoy themselves. It takes so much trouble about it.
Did you ever read H. L. Mencken’s essay called The Libido for the Ugly? And it describes a Pennsylvania mining town which isn’t exactly totally impoverished. I mean, they can build things, and they have enough money to do this, that, and the other.
But they—he describes how they made a church out of yellow stone that’s so awful that it looks like a Presbyterian with a grin. And all around you have only to look and you see this perfect passion for making the world look grizzly. And it isn’t only job builders and garage owners who do this kind of thing, it’s also people who profess to be painters.
They’re actually using excrements for painting in Paris today, on the theory that the world is shot to pieces. And since the artist is a representative of his times, he ought to show the times as they really are, as a social critic. And so he makes the most weird—I mean, he paints Campbell’s soup can, and then he makes music that shrieks and screams, and the most—he just goes out of his way to make it sound as ugly as he possibly can manage.
And the ingenuity about that is endless. Because that is the times. He’s the critic, you see?
Instead of being somebody who reveals. Now, you see, let’s take the sort of the character of the Pied Piper: the person who brings you an invitation to dance. I would say, then, you see, “There is going to be a dance this evening, and I would like you all to come.” You know?
That’s the spirit in which I invite you to a seminar. I am not inviting you in the spirit of saying “No, we’re going to have to discuss some very grave matters, and you ought to be awake to all these things and arouse your social conscience,” and so on, and so forth. Because when you get through with all that, then what?
When you get through with feeding the hungry and clothing the naked—and we are making great strides with automation, and technology, and abolishing poverty totally—then what are we going to do? Well, you see, if you got all these people clothed, and fed, and so on, and then they say, “Well, now, what next?” And if you got a kind of a Quakerish state of mind you don’t know what to do. Well, feed and clothe somebody else, you see?
Get busy. But then, where is that leading? So, you see, to spread joy you have to have it.
To impart delight you have to be, more or less, delightful. And to be delightful is not some factor of trying to make yourself look delightful. It is to do things that are delightful to you.
You become, thereby, delightful to others. That’s to say, people who are interesting are people who are interested. Any person, for example, who is always constantly thinking about all sorts of other things, and other people, and so on—because they are fascinating—becomes a fascinating person.
But a person who doesn’t think about anybody else, and who’s got very little going on inside their skull, is boring. So, in other words, your engagement with the external world—the more you are involved, the more your personality is enriched. But if you try to enrich your personality by taking a course on how to win friends and how to influence people, or how to be a real person, you become just a washout.
Because you’ll be—in a small circle—you’ll be, as it were, you’ll be like somebody trying to get a good nutrition by biting his nails. And then the fingers next, you know? And then half an arm gone, and so on, and you’re entirely nourishing yourself with yourself.
Now, of course, on a vast scale the universe does that: it eats itself up. That’s why the symbol of the snake swallowing its tail is a very fundamental, archaic symbol of life. But the way it’s done is that the snake has, in some part of the ring, a place where it’s not sensitive.
It’s called the unconscious. Where it doesn’t know that what comes to it in the form of food is actually what left it in the form of excrement. That thing is—don’t mention it.
After all, as the Lord said, “In the beginning of the universe you must draw the line somewhere.” And so, as a result of there always being a kind of gap—that’s the gap, you know, like where the electric spark jumps—that’s the thing behind your head, behind your eyes, that you can never get to look at. It’s the gap. And because of that little gap the circle doesn’t just revolve in a dull way, just going round, and round, and round like a boring thing.
It has rhythm. See, if I say, “Yoeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee;” no rhythm, see? It’s just one long sound.
After a while you’ll say, “Oh, cut it out!” Or we just become insensitive to it. But what we want to hear is a break in it, you see? And we want to hear it go on and off, and vanish and come back again, and so on.
And it sets up a rhythm; that becomes interesting. That’s putting gaps between, you see? We need those gaps.
So: now you see it, now you don’t, now you see it, now you don’t. Well, that’s pretty dull. So what we are going to do is this: we’re going to have you see it three times, and then with a regular not see it between them, then there are gonna be a longer not see it after that one, and then I’m going to do something very complicated after that, so that you don’t really know when it’s going to come next.
So it’s going to be a surprise. You know how we all do that? And interesting people are those who do this in very involved ways.
Dull people—sort of, people who put their hats on absolutely straight—are the kind of people, for example, who have the same meal every day. Exactly the same thing, always. See?
Have no inventiveness. They have the same routine, they go to the same office, they answer the same kind of letters, and that’s that. See?
But then, if they want to start up a more interesting kind of business and make more money, then they have to figure out—take the people who make clothes. They figure out fashion. There’s going to be a new thing for ladies; a new style this fall.
We’re going to make them do long skirts instead of the short skirts and the middle skirts. And they skirts go “wi-tchi-tchi tchi-tchi tchi-tchi,” like this. Then, finally, they thought about having topless women, and they are going to play around with that and have an absolutely scandalous ball.
But that’s the whole thing, you see? It’s this thing of rhythm. And yes, you ask, “Well, I see that.
What is doing this rhythm? Who, after all, am I?” And as you explore deeper, and deeper, and deeper into the nature of yourself, you find that you are a rhythm doing a rhythm. And behind that there is another rhythm doing a rhythm.
You’re vibrations; and once again you meet our friend, the onion. And who, who is doing all this? Why, he disappeared.
He came around, there it was, and we were looking for him, and he vanished. And then, just when we weren’t looking for him again, there he is. But every time we try to see, he isn’t there.
Now do you see that? That that situation is what’s called life. This seminar is about a very sticky problem.
The problem to which the Buddha primarily addressed himself, which is that of agony; suffering. But before we get into that, we have to be clear about certain basics. And these basics have to do not so much with concepts and ideas, as they do with the state of mind.
You can call it also a state of feeling, a state of sensation, a state of consciousness. And we need to understand that—even be in that—before we can really go very far. And this is an extraordinarily difficult state of mind to talk about, even though in its nature it’s extremely simple.
Because it is, in a way, like we were when we were babies. When we haven’t been told anything and didn’t know anything other than what we felt, and we had no names for it. Now, of course, as we grow older, we learn to differentiate one thing from another, one event from another, and above all, ourselves from everything else.
Well and good, provided you don’t lose the foundations. Just as mountains are differentiated, but they’re all based on the Earth, so the multiple things of this world are differentiated, but they have, as it were, a basis. There is no word for that basis—not really—because words are only for distinctions.
And so there can’t really be a word, not even an idea, of the non-distinction. We can feel it, but we can’t think it. But we don’t feel it like an object.
You feel you’re alive, you feel you are conscious, but you don’t know what consciousness is because consciousness is present in every conceivable kind of experience. It’s like the space in which we live, which is everywhere. It’s like a fish being in water, and presumably a fish doesn’t know it’s in the water because it never goes out.
A bird presumably knows nothing of the air. And we really know nothing of consciousness, and we pretend space isn’t there. So, however, when you grow up and become fascinated—which is really the right word; spellbound, enchanted—by all the things that adults wave at you, you forget the background.
And you come to think that all the distinctions which you’ve been learning are the supremely important things to be concerned with. You become hypnotized, just in the same way as when the beak of a chicken is put to a chalk line, it gets stuck on that line. And so when we are told to pay attention to what matters, we get stuck with it.
And that’s what, in Buddhism, is called attachment. Attachment doesn’t mean that you enjoy your dinner, or that you enjoy sleeping, or beauty. Those are responses of our organism in its environment as natural as feeling hot near a fire or cold near ice.
So are certain responses of fear, or of sorrow. They are not attachment. Attachment is exactly translated by the modern slang term hang-up.
It’s a kind of stickiness, or what in psychology would be called blocking. When you are in a state of wobbly hesitation, not knowing how to flow on, that’s attachment; what is meant by the Sanskrit word kleśa. So when the chicken has its beak put to the chalk line, it’s got a hang-up; it’s stuck on that line.
And so, in the same way, we get a hang-up on all the various things we are told as we grow up: by our parents, our aunts and uncles, our teachers, and above all, by our peer group. And the first thing that everybody wants to tell us is the difference between ourselves and the rest of the world. And between those actions which are voluntary and those which are involuntary; what we do on the one hand and what happens to us on the other.
And this is, of course, immensely confusing to a small child, because it’s told to do all sorts of things that are really supposed to happen, like going to sleep, like having bowel movements, like loving people, like not blushing, stopping being anxious, and all sorts of things like that. So what happens is this: the child is told, in sum, that we—your parents, elders, and betters—command you to do what will please us only if you do it spontaneously. And no wonder everybody is completely confused!
We go through life with that burden on us. We therefore develop this curious thing: we develop a thing which is called an ego. Now, I’ve got to be very clear to you what I mean by an ego.
An ego is not the same thing as a particular living organism. For my philosophy, the particular living organism, which is inseparable from a particular environment—that is to say, from the universe centered here and now—there’s something real; it isn’t a thing. I call it a feature of the universe.
But what we call our ego is something abstract, which is to say it has the same order and kind of reality as an hour, or an inch, or a pound, or a line of longitude. It is for purposes of discussion, it is for convenience. In other words, it is a social convention that we have what is called an ego.
But the fallacy that all of us make is that we treat it as if it were a physical organ. As if it were real in that sense, when in fact it is composed, on the one hand, of our image of ourselves—that is, our idea of ourselves as when we say to somebody, “You must improve your image.” Now, this image of ourselves is obviously not ourselves anymore than an idea of a tree is a tree, anymore than you can get wet in the word ‘water.’ And to go on with our image of ourselves is extremely inaccurate and incomplete. With some God the gift he gave us to see ourselves the way others see us; we don’t.
So my image of me is not at all your image of me. And my image of me is extremely incomplete, in that it does not include any information, to speak of, about the functioning of my nervous system, my circulation, my metabolism, my subtle relationships with the entire surrounding human and non-human universe. So the image I have of myself is a caricature.
It is arrived at through, mainly, my interaction with other people who tell me who I am, in various ways, either directly or indirectly. And I play about with what their picture is of me, and they play something back to me, so we set up this conception. And this started very, very early in life.
And I was told, you see, and you were told, that we must have a consistent image. You must be you, you have to find your identity in terms of image. And this is an awful red herring.
A lot of the current quest for identity among younger people is a search for an acceptable image. What role can I play? Who am I in the sense of what am I going to do in life, and so on.
Now, while that has a certain importance, if it’s not backed up by deeper matters it’s extraordinarily misleading. So therefore, on the one hand, there is this image which is intellectual, emotional, imaginative, and so forth. Now, we would say I don’t feel that I am only an image.
I feel there’s something more real than that because I feel. I mean, I have a sense of there being a particular sort of—how do we say—a center of something. Some sort of sensitive core inside this skin.
And that corresponds to the word “I.” Let’s take a look at this. Because the thing that we feel as being myself is certainly not the whole body, because a lot of the body can be seen as an object. In other words, if you stand—stretch yourself out, lie on the floor, and turn your head and look at yourself, you know—you can see your feet, and your legs, and all this up to here, and finally it all vanishes and there this sort of a vague nose in front.
And you assume you have a head because everyone else does, and you’ve looked in a mirror and that told you you had a head, but you could never see it, just like you can’t see your back. So you tend to put your ego on the side of the unseen part of the body. The part you can’t get at.
Because that seems to be where it all comes from, and you feel it. But what is it that we feel? Because if I see clearly, and my eyes are in functioning order, the eyes certainly are not conscious of themselves.
There are no spots in front of them, no defects—in other words, in the lens, or in the retina, or in the optic nerves that give hallucinations. So also, therefore, if my ego—my consciousness—is working properly, I ought not to be aware of it. As something sort of there, being a nuisance in a way, in the middle of things because your ego is awfully hard to take care of.
Well what is it, then, that we feel? Well, I think I’ve discovered what it is: it’s a chronic, habitual sense of muscular strain, which we were taught in the whole process of doing spontaneous things to order. When you’re taking off in a jet plane, and the thing has gone rather further down the runway than you think it should have without getting up in the air, you start pulling at your seat belt: get this thing off the ground!
Perfectly useless! So, in the same way, when our community tells us, “Look carefully. Now listen, pay attention,” we start using muscular strains around our eyes, ears, jaws, hands, to try to use our muscles to make our nerves work—which is, of course, futile.
And, in fact, it gets in the way of the functioning of the nerves. Try to concentrate. And then, when we try to control our emotions, we hold our breath, pull our stomachs in, or tighten our rectal muscles to hold ourselves together.
“Now pull yourself together!” And immediately, what are you to do? What does a child understand by that? He does it muscularly; pulls himself together.
This is useless! So everybody chronically pulls themself together, so that—it’s so funny—if you get a person to just lie on the floor and relax—there’s the floor under you, as firm as can be, holding you up—nevertheless, you will detect that the person is making all sorts of tensions, lest he should suddenly turn into a nasty jello on the floor. So that chronic tension—which in Sanskrit is called saṅkoca, which means contraction—is the root of what we call the feeling of the ego.
So that, in other words, this feeling of tightness is the physical referent for the psychological image of ourselves. So that we get the ego as the marriage of an illusion to a futility. Even though the idea of an “I” with a name, with a being, is naturally useful for social communication, provided we know what we are doing and take it for what it is.
But we are so hung up on this concept that it confuses us, even in the proposition that it might be possible for us to feel otherwise. Because we ask the question—if we hear about people who have transcended the ego—well, we ask, “How do you do that?” Well, I say, “What do you mean, ‘you?’ How do ‘you’ do that?” Because the you you’re talking about doesn’t exist! So you can’t do anything about it anymore than you can cut a cheese with a line of longitude.
Now, that sounds very discouraging, doesn’t it? Let’s suppose, now, you are babies again. You don’t know anything.
Now, don’t be frightened, because anything you know you can get back later. But, for the time being, here is our awareness. And let’s suppose you have no information about this at all, and no words for it, and that my talking to you is just a noise.