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The heebie-jeebies is the problem.” So let’s deal with the heebie-jeebies in the same way as with death. You cannot stop the heebie-jeebies. You think you should.
I say don’t! The heebie-jeebies are very valuable. Not that they will stop you from dying, but becuase from them you will learn the same thing as you would learn from dying.
But the social pressure on you to resist the heebie-jeebies is terrific. Now, why must you do that? Why is everybody saying these heebie-jeebies, these fears, et cetera, are not permissible?
You wonder about that, and the reasoning behind all that is not very clear, because it seems to be saying, “Well, if you have all these fears and things like that, you won’t be a very good soldier. You won’t be able to act competently in a crisis; you’ll get the heebie-jeebies instead, and you won’t know what to do.” Well, nobody has ever really proved that. Because actually, people who we would call ‘very courageous,’ are, in fact, often quite frightened.
And courageous action is not necessarily a consequence of having no fear. Sometimes it might be, but it isn’t always so. The real reason why the heebie-jeebies are suppressed has more to do with its orgiastic aspects.
Wherever the human organism gets into a certain kind of extreme, it starts an oscillating process going. Just as it does in sexual orgasm. And that oscillating process will inspire in others an emotion which they cannot identify, either as disgust or as lust.
They don’t know quite what it is. All those extreme situations—terror, and as we shall see more, response to pain—have an orgiastic quality. And they are, therefore, embarrassing because they conflict with our image of ourselves as in control, composed, deported—that’s in the sense of deportment.
But it would be shameful, in a way—you might not want to look at your own face in a state of complete sexual rapture. As a matter of fact, if you saw a photograph of your face, you wouldn’t be able to tell whether you were in pleasure or in pain. It might be either.
Because then, you see, what has happened is that a tide, a vibration, a pulsation, has taken over the whole being, so that you are, as it were, in the possession of a God. And that’s something taboo. So we begin, here, to move into a very difficult area.
Because a lot of people will beginn to say this conversation is getting out of line, because we are moving into what are normally called perverse experiences. And the two critical forms of perverse experience are sadism and masochism, where there is the association of pain and ecstasy. In sadism, the confusion of another person’s suffering with that person’s sexual orgasm.
In masochism, the identification—or if you want to say confusion—of your own suffering with sexual orgasm. Now, we say “Well, that’s pathological, that’s absurd!” But it exists! People do it all the time—both ways, and sometimes both together.
And although this is generally put under the heading of pathology, the fact remains that we can still learn something from it. There’s an important principle in there. Somehow, somewhere.
And perhaps, in people who are sadists and masochists, the phenomenon is somehow out of hand because they don’t understand the principle. Now, do you realize many sadists want nothing more than that their victim should enjoy the pain? The combination sadist and masochist is perfect.
And many sadists would be quite reluctant if the victim really didn’t like participating in this at all. And so there’s the joke of the masochist asking the sadist to beat him and he says, “I won’t.” But what happens here is that pain, and the attendant convulsive behavior of the organism, is associated with the erotic. A different value is given to the same symptoms as, say, it is common in France to get a young woman really aroused, you know?
And she will say, “Tue-moi! Tue-moi!”—“Kill me! Kill me!” As if, you know, to go as far as you can in throwing yourself away to somebody else, you know?
Do anything you want to. And in that abandon, you see, there is the possibility that this—an undulation of feeling, which is total orgiastic feeling—may take over. And in that feeling, you see, you are one with what is happening; completely.
And that’s what everybody, as it were, finally aspires to. So therefore—the masochist, in particular—is a person who has learned throughout life to defend himself against pain by eroticizing pain. Now, do you understand how, therefore, different valuations can be put on one and the same vibration?
We see, don’t we, all that we experience is understandable as a spectrum of vibrations. There are different kinds of spectra. There’s a spectrum of light, there’s the spectrum of sound.
We can also think of spectra of smells, of tactile feelings, of emotions, and so on, all down the line. We are, as it were, living in the midst of a woven tapestry of many dimensions, in which the warps of and woofs are all these different spectra of various kinds of vibrations. And as, on the loom, the warp crosses the woof, and if you didn’t have one you wouldn’t have the other, it takes two to reveal the pattern.
So see yourselves as patterns in a weaving system. You wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the interlocking of all these different spectra of dimensions. So then, here they go, and these things are vibrating.
Now, when it reaches a certain point, you say, “Oh, that’s too much!” When it reaches another point, you say, “It’s not enough! Why, there’s nothing here! I don’t feel a thing!” You know?
“I’m going to go to sleep.” But on the other end, you say, “No, no! No, no, you’re going far enough! If you go any further it is going to tear things apart!
I can’t withhold this tension!” See? Now, so, some people will say, “Alright, now. Now, relax, relax, relax.
Take it easy, take it easy.” But often, you see, the point is you can’t do that. So then, what I would say to the person who cannot relax—I will stress his tension; go the other way. In other words, go with the line of least resistance.
Say, “Okay, you’re tense about all this. Now let’s get really tense! Let’s scream!
No! No! No!
No! No!” See, you get violent inside! This is not to happen, see?
But so that, one way or the other, you see—it doesn’t matter which you go—you begin to get into this thing, which is what is happening when the boat of life begins really to rock. Get rocking with it by whatever way is open. But you are not going to force the issue here.
Instead of saying to you, “You should be doing it in another way that you’re doing it,” I will say, “Now find out the way you must do it, and go that way.” Now, this is a general principle of an art, and we will find there is a kind of a—there are limits to this art, and how it can be used, and so forth. But once the general principles are clear, there aren’t many serious problems left. That if you begin to look at it in that way, you will begin to realize that ecstasy, by one road or another, is inevitable.
That, indeed, ecstasy is, in a way, the nature of existence. There is a universe for the simple reason that it’s ecstatic. What else is all this fireworks about?
It is just like music in this ecstatic thing going off. And you have to be, certainly, careful—in a little way here—that any initiation into a deep wisdom is apt, at first, to demotivate you. You think, “What the hell am I doing?
All these projects, building this up, and that up, and doing something to save the world, and so on and so forth. Why, the whole thing is nonsense!” Yes! If you stick there, that’s what they call, in Mahayana Buddhism, the pratyekabuddha.
That means the ‘private Buddha,’ as distinct from Bodhisattva, who comes back into everyday life, as they say, for the liberation of all other sentient beings. Because when you know that all this is alright anyway, and that the situation is inevitable ecstasy—I mean, you’re going to get it one way or another—you say, “Well, what was all the fuss about?” you know? The fact remains: there are a lot of people who just don’t know that and are really hating life, not knowing how to handle hate.
And if you are at a certain point you know those other people are you. They’re like—you had an extended body, and all these were nerve ends on the end of it, you see? However, you know also that you can’t really show them anything that they don’t already know, and won’t be able to show them anything else until they know it.
But then, the question “What shall I do?” has now disappeared. It should have disappeared in the beginning. Because there wasn’t any real I, there was just the happening.
And so that question brings us back again to the experience itself, see? That’s the only way that you can answer the question: is from the experience. You would say, “what would happen if?” The answer is only: “You must feel it.
Then you’ll know.” And the people who hear about this and say, “Wouldn’t that—wouldn’t everybody become totally callous and impassive? How can you assure me that that wouldn’t happen?” I say, “I can’t. But you must get into this state, then you’ll find out.” There’s just no you to get into it anyway.
I was making a basic comparison between the state of consciousness of a baby and that of a so-called mature adult. Respectively, what we would call undifferentiated and differentiated. The adult consciousness being highly selective, and the baby consciousness being very open and hardly selective at all, and therefore unable to distinguish what adults consider to be the important things, which have to do with the conventions and rules that the positive aspects—whether they be called good, or pleasant, or life-giving, and so on—must prevail over the negative aspects.
And I went on to show that this contrast between the two views of the world has another marked characteristic: that, in the case of the baby who hasn’t been trained or told about the difference between himself and all that is defined as ‘other’ than himself, doesn’t distinguish between voluntary behavior and involuntary occurrence. And, of course, we think this is a very fundamental defect. But if we go back, you see, to a principle that underlies the whole universe with a kind of mathematical exactitude, we see that if we reduce things to a situation of primal simplicity, and we have a primordial ‘self’ and ‘other’ situation—that is to say, two balls in space—there is absolutely no way of telling, when they move, which one of them is moving or which one is still.
They must necessarily appear to move mutually. There’s no point of reference—except each other—to determine which is moving and which is still. Now, everything that goes on in the universe is simply a complication of that principle.
Because the same thing holds true if you multiply the number of balls. You’ll see that that primordial principle—that all movement is mutual—still applies. And therefore, the baby’s failure to distinguish between the voluntary and the involuntary—the ‘I’ and the ‘other’—is, in a way, correct.
Psychologists—psychoanalysts in particular—make a great deal of this contrast and consider that the baby’s view is inferior to the adult’s. And if an adult should acquire that view, in psychoanalysis this would be called ‘regression.’ The point that is missed is that the two ways of looking at things need each other to balance out. And that one needs the baby’s view as a basis for the adult view, because if you don’t have it you take the adult view too seriously; get completely carried away by it.
And that would be analogous to a person who, in playing poker, loses his nerve because he doesn’t realize it’s only a game. So he becomes a very bad player. In exactly the same way, we, in life, are only playing a game.
But because we didn’t keep the baby view, we can’t see it. So what we would call a ‘Buddha-view’ is one that knows both, and therefore is not taken in by the adult games—although perfectly capable of playing them—but in so far as they are not regarded as finally and absolutely serious. He’s not captivated by them.
Now, therefore, one asks the question, “That sounds very interesting, but how do I recapture the baby point of view?” And I showed that that was the wrong question, because it arises entirely and exclusively out of the adult point of view. Because the adult point of view involves the fiction that ‘I’ exist as an agent independently of everything else that’s going on. And so ask, “How can I do this?” And the important thing is to realize that the feeling of there being this isolated ‘I’ is part of the game, and it has no fundamental reality—except as a convention.
And so long as that isn’t clear, we’re confused. I reiterated the point that, when we ask, “To whom must it become clear?” or “To whom is it not clear?” that this, too, was all part of the illusion of the world that the adult presents to the child. So the only way in which the child’s vision can come again is in the realization that the ‘I’ can’t do anything about it at all, and can’t even do nothing about it.
All possibilities of vision for what we call “I, myself” are out. And this in, of course, is the same meaning—as the Christian or the Islamic mystics would say—that the mystical experience is the gift of God. And there’s nothing you can do to get it.
That’s a clumsy way, really, of saying the same thing. Because so long as you are trying—or not trying—you are aggravating the sensation of the separate ego. Now that, in itself, you see, as I talk about it, presents a certain difficulty.
Or one thinks it’s difficult. There would be a second difficulty if we were to go on and say, “It isn’t only the illusion of the ego, but the whole valuation system that we put on the complexity of vibrations we call ‘awareness of life’.” All the various valuations that are put on this by the social game are māyā! That is to say, they are illusory—basically.
Because it is only in play, as it were, that we say this is good and this is bad, this is advantageous, this is disadvantageous. And so we would go on to say, after this, “But I cannot imagine anything more difficult than overcoming that hypnosis. I am so enchanted by this system that the idea of treating it as not really very serious seems to me unthinkable.” Of course you have to think that.
It’s like a hypnotist working on somebody and saying, “You are not going to remember any of this conversation after you come to.” And so he’s put the suggestion into you that you forget the whole thing. So, in the same way, the suggestion has been put into all of us that these rules that we have learned are sacrosanct. And that we—they don’t say that you will not be able to think otherwise, they say they are true!
They are the truth, you see? And that is the same function as the hypnotic suggestion put into us ever since we were receptive children. So, naturally, it’s all part of the conspiracy which we are playing on ourselves.
We can’t blame our parents for this, because their parents played it on them, and they bought it. And don’t forget that time goes backwards. You see?
You can’t blame this on the past because now, in the present, you are creating the values of the past, and you are buying them all along, you see? So there is no out on this. You see, in a way, psychoanalytically, one is given an out by saying, “Well, the parents didn’t bring up their children properly.” And American people are consumed with guilt about the way they bring up their children.
So we must abandon, completely, the notion of blaming the past for any kind of situation we’re in, and reverse our thinking and see that the past always flows back from the present; that now is the creative point of life. And so, you see, it’s like the idea of forgiving somebody. You change the meaning of the past by doing that.
It’s like, also, when you watch the flow of music: the melody, as it is expressed, is changed by notes that come later. Just as the meaning of a sentence—especially, say, take German or Latin, where there’s the convention of placing a verb at the end of a sentence. You wait, in other words, till later to find out what the sentence means.
According to our way of feeling it. So it is also, in our language, if I say, “I love you,” you don’t know when I said “I” what ‘I’ is doing. I could say, “I hate you.” So we don’t know until later.
So, in other words, the word ‘love’ or the word ‘hate’ changes the function of the word ‘I.’ And then I was going to say, “I love flowers. No, but I love you.” You see? And so the word later changes the meaning of those that go before.
The present is always changing the past. So when you get the idea in your mind that the point of view that I am talking about is very difficult indeed to acquire—that idea is one you are putting there to stop yourself seeing the other point of view. And above all, you must not take that seriously.
It is simply a method of postponing seeing the point now. So you have to see it now or never. Because there is only now.
If you say, “Well, tomorrow. The next day. Maybe in another dozen lifetimes, I’ll be ready.” That means, simply and solely, “I don’t want to be bothered with it now, I'm even not interested in it now, so I’ve got an excuse for putting it off.” Which is fine; that’s perfectly okay.
You can put it off. There is no reason, there is no compulsion, why you should come out of this illusion. That’s why Oriental people do not tend—in the same way as Westerners—to be missionaries, and saying it’s very urgent that you be saved.
It isn’t—unless you say so. I mean, unless you are so disturbed by the suffering, and the problem of suffering, that you’ve go to find some sort of escape. But if you don’t want to, you can stay there.
It’s okay, there’s lots of time. And maybe you’ll see through it when you die. At least in the moment of death you’ll see that it was all fake.
So don’t be scared about the idea of the difficulty of it. That’s a red-herring. And it’s quite irrelevant, and I don’t think that teachers should talk quite so much about this as they do, and saying, “Oh, this is going to take a long, long time, and a lot of practice, and many years.” Maybe it will.
Maybe it won’t. But that’s beside the point, because it distracts. It’s like telling somebody that, “This is a very difficult book to read and it requires immense powers of concentration.” Well, that immediately kills your interest in it.
Instead, if I were to say, “Well now, this is a most extraordinary book. It’s just so fascinating. I’ve been working on it for years!
And every time I just get so involved, I can’t drop the thing.” You know? I mean, that’s a far more encouraging attitude to a student than “Well, this is going to be very difficult.” Except to very, very self-hating students who somehow, perversely, enjoy suffering through it. Now, I suppose that is, of course, a way, too.
Alright, now: if we can see the first part, which is that the ego is purely fictitious—that it is a symbol or image of oneself plus a sensation of muscular strain occasioned by trying to make the symbol an effective agent—to control emotion, to concentrate, to direct the nervous operations of the organism. Then, immediately, it is clear that what we have called ourselves, what we have thought of ourselves, isn’t able to do anything at all. There follows this kind of silence in which there is nothing to do except watch what happens.
But what is happening is watching itself; there is nobody apart from it, watching it. And so we get into the state of meditation—or, as I prefer to call it, contemplation. So then, the next problem that arises is: well, what about all the other illusions?
Although they are somehow integrated and centered upon the illusion of ego, nevertheless the whole value system—of what is important, what is not important, what is good, what is bad, what is pleasant, what is painful—has to be called into question. Not in order to destroy the whole value system, but in order to see it for what it is. And that’s where we will object and say, “Well, surely that’s a colossally difficult task, because we are so long habituated to it.
And we have been taught to believe that the longer we have been habituated to something, the more difficult it is to change it.” And that is true if you believe it. And if you don’t, it isn’t. That’s why it’s always emphasized—at any rate, in Zen—that when anything is to be done, it should be done immediately, without thinking it over in advance.
Act at once. And you find that characteristic of people trained in Zen; they always act immediately. They don’t say, “Well, oh, uhmm… hmmm, well… mmm, when should we do this sort of thing?” They just do it.
Because that doesn’t build up. It gives no time for the building up of all this reflection of, “Well, I’ve done this way for a long time, and I really feel kind of draggy about doing it another way.” It’s like some people eat the same thing every day, and the idea of suddenly eating something else seems absolutely weird. I remember when I used to have lunch in London—in the city of London—I used to go to a rather fancy sandwich bar.
And there was a very square young man in a derby hat, who ordered exactly the same lunch every day. Fantastic. And so it came that the man who served the bar—the moment he saw him coming in at the door, he had it there.
And he would’ve had a real qualm if somebody had suggested that instead of having a beef sandwich he should have the smoked salmon one. Now then, we get to this: what we are aware of is a complex of vibrations. And we have been conditioned to call them, graduatedly, ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘pleasant,’ ‘painful.’ Whereas, as a matter of fact, they are nothing but vibrations.
And if you look at any one of them, by itself, you won’t know where it is. That is to say, if you only know ‘red,’ you can’t see that it’s red; you can only know that this is red by contrast with yellow and green and blue and violet. So you don’t know that a sound is loud unless you know soft sounds, or you don’t know that it’s soft unless you know loud.
And it is that comparison which gives us the feeling of the spectrum as being varied. Otherwise we wouldn’t know. For example, when you watch television you are actually seeing a single moving point moving over the screen.
But it goes so fast that you see it in all these different places having different values of light. But let us—supposing there was someone whose retina was not retentive in this way, he would look at the screen and see the moving point of light, and say to human beings, “I don’t see what you see in this.” Now can we, therefore, get back not only to the situation where we see that the ego is a mere construct, but also where we see that all the values we put on the vibrations are arbitrary. And that we get to a position where we see the vibrations simply as the vibrations.
And we would say, then, “Well, surely, all this is nonsense.” Which is correct. The universe, I mean, is a kind of a “Ba-doo-di-da, ba-doo-di-da, ba-doo-di-da, ba-doo-di-da, ba-doo-di-da,” and going on in this fantastic way. This is why music can be used as a meditative technique.
Because a lot of music is nonsense; it doesn’t mean anything. But it can be very interesting. So, can you get back again to recollecting, from childhood, your pleasure in events that—from your present point of view—you would call entirely meaningless?
That you could listen to a sound like twanging metal, and it goes boing, boing, boing, boing, and that’s fascinating. Boing. It’s just boing.
And that’s all it is, see? Now, if you can really get with boing, you see, you can see the whole universe in boing. Really!
Because every vibration that’s possible implies all the others. And so, likewise, with a candle flame, with a reflection, with grain in wood, anything can—from this child point of view—be completely fascinating. Not because it means anything, but just for what it is that it is shaped so.
There was a joke-in-punch some time ago—many years ago, I remember—of an Army doctor interviewing a private, and the private says, “Every time I shake my leg like this it hurts!” He said, “Goddamnit, don’t shake it!” But, you know, when one has something that hurts, there’s a subtle temptation to keep worrying it. Like if you have a filling out of a tooth, your tongue plays with the empty hole. And children will experiment with pain in this way; it’s like a dare.
Children are always playing the game of daring each other to do something forbidden. Because the risk of disapproval involved—the calamity that may follow from it—it makes it so exciting. And why on Earth do people challenge disaster the way they do?
Doing all sorts of wildly adventurous things? Because, obviously, that gives a taste of quality to a vibration that is extremely interesting. Why the craving for speed?
And it’s only if you look very carefully at a vibration that you can see this point. That’s why meditative exercises often involve a repetition process. Oṃ, or saying a phrase, or doing an act like a mudra over and over and over again.
After a while it becomes meaningless. You can say your own name like the Sufis do, and go on and on and on and on and on, and finally it doesn’t mean anything at all; it’s just a noise. But it isn’t just a noise, you see?
The attitude of saying that something is just a noise, or just a wiggle, is an adult attitude. No wiggle, to the child, is just a wiggle. To the child, the elemental thing going on is, “Bwwlllaaaaaaaah,” you know?
I mean, it’s just fantastic! Now do you see why this is what mystics call ineffable? That is to say, you can’t really talk about it.
When I try to explain what I mean by digging a sound, I suddenly realize that I’m not really saying anything. And yet there are states of consciousness in which you can listen to sound and realize that that is the whole point of being alive. Just to go with this particular energy manifestation that is happening right at this moment.
To be it. The whole world is the energy playing at doing all this, you see? Like a kaleidoscope jazzing.
So if you watch that, and watch it that way, you will be accused, of course—by those who are guardians of the game—of doing something very dangerous. You’re going completely crazy. I mean, the number of theological texts I’ve read which express, in one way or another, this horror of everything becoming meaningless—the meaningless life, tale told by an idiot full of sound and furies signifying nothing.
Those people, you see, have not dared to look at it. Now, there’s another way of looking at it, of course, where—in states of acute depression—people see it all as meaningless, but not really meaningless; they see it all as a conspiracy of horror. Let’s imagine that everything is mechanical.
There are no living beings at all. There are a lot of beings that are such good computers that you can’t tell the difference between them and what you thought were people. But everything going on is simply clockwork, and there’s nobody home—although it puts on a convincing show that there is.
So you get the feeling that the entire world is enameled tin or patent leather or plastic, and tasteless, hollow, vulgar; like a Wurlitzer jukebox. That’s a very common feeling of people who get into acute depression. But, you see, there is still, here, a valuation: you are associating the world with the mechanical as distinct from the organic.
And we have a tendency, you see, to put down the mechanical because, obviously, a plastic flower doesn't have the scent, it doesn’t have the soft feeling, of a living flower. There will be perfume plastic flowers soon, but you know what it’ll do: it’ll smell vaguely like soap, and it won’t smell like a flower. So it’ll be plastic smell.
Now, we know that, you see, and so we contrast it with the organic. In what we are doing now, we are getting to a feel of the world that is neither organic nor mechanical; simply what it is. We don’t—again—we don’t know the contrast, just as we don’t know the contrast voluntary/involuntary, we don’t know the contrast organic/mechanical.
Neither. So we get to what the Buddhists call tathātā: ‘suchness.’ Tathātā, based on the word tat, ‘that,’ ‘da.’ Fundamentally da-da, see? Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.