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Because they’re very uneasy. Because everybody’s responsible. You mean—you may try not to be, and avoid it and say, “Oh, let the senators take care of it, or the president.” But theoretically, everyone’s responsible.
Now that’s terrifying. See, it’s alright when you know what’s right. There is an aristocracy, there is the clergy, and they know what should be done, and they’re used to ruling you, you see.
But now it’s in your hands. You say, “What are we going to do?” “Well, I think this way, and you think that way, and he thinks the other way.” And so we’re all unsettled, and therefore we become more and more conformist. Individualism—rugged individualism—always leads to conformism, because people get scared and so they herd together, and, compounded with industrial society—mass production, et cetera—they all wear the same clothes, and they’re sensible clothes that don’t show the dirt too much, and we get duller and drabber, and—with the exception of the Californian revolution.
So, the reason for this is, in a way, that democracy—as we have tried it—started out on the wrong foot. You see, in the scriptures—Christian scriptures—it says everybody is equal in the sight of God. Now, that’s a mystical utterance.
That means that, from the standpoint of God, all people are divine and are playing their true function. And that is something that is true on a certain plane of consciousness. But come down a step and try to apply the mystical insight in the practical affairs of everyday life, and what do you get?
You get a parody of mysticism. You get the idea, not that everybody is equal in the sight of God, but that all people are equally inferior. And that’s why all bureaucracies are rude, why the police are rude, and why you’re made to wait in lines, and there are obstreperous income tax individuals, and all that sort of person—because everybody’s a crook, everybody’s equally inferior.
See, that becomes the parody in democracy. And that kind of society—watch out for it—it turns in a quick click into fascism, because of its terror of the outsider. Now, a free and easy society loves outsiders.
In fact, it’s a little bad for the outsider’s integrity because he becomes a holy man, see? And people make salaams, and give him food, and all that; they really take care of the outsider, because they know that man is doing—for us—what we haven’t got the guts to do. That outsider, who lives up there, in the mountain, is at the highest peak of human evolution.
His consciousness is one with the divine. And great! Just—there is someone like that around!
It makes you feel a little better. He has realized; he knows what it’s all about. And so we need a number of those people.
Even though they don’t join our game, they tell us, you see, “What you’re doing is only a game. It’s okay, I’m not going to condemn you. But it is only a game, and we—up on that mountaintop—are watching you.
We love you, we have compassion for you, but excuse us, please. We aren’t going to join.” So that gives the community great strength, because it tells the government, in no uncertain terms, that there’s something more than government. That’s why wise kings kept not only priests, but court fools.
The court fool is much more effective than the priest to remind the king that, after all, he’s human, and, you know how—in Richard II, where the fool is called the antic—the king says: See? Always this reminder of the priest—or of the antic—to the royalty, to the government. You are going to die, you are mortal.
Don’t give yourself heirs and graces as if you were a god. As king, you are only a representative of God, and there is a force, there are domains way, way beyond yours and way, way higher. But it’s very difficult for a republican government to realize that, because it’s insecure.
And therefore, in our present world, you cannot abandon nationality without the greatest difficulty. People who try to abandon nationality get constantly deported from one place to another. You must belong to this thing.
As Thoreau put it: “However far into the forests you may go, men will pursue you and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.” This particular weekend seminar is devoted to Buddhism, and it should be said first that there is a sense in which Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export. Last week, when I discussed Hinduism, I discussed many things to do with the organization of Hindu society. Because Hinduism is not merely what we call a religion; it’s a whole culture.
It’s a legal system, it’s a social system, it’s a system of etiquette, and it includes everything. It includes housing, it includes food, it includes art. Because the Hindus—and many other ancient peoples—do not make, as we do, a division between religion and everything else.
Religion is not a department of life, it is something that enters into the whole of it. But, you see, when a religion and a culture are inseparable, it’s very difficult to export a culture because it comes into conflict with the established traditions, manners, and customs of other people. So the question arises: what are the essentials of Hinduism that could be exported?
And when you answer that, approximately, you get Buddhism. As I explained: the essential of Hinduism—the real, deep root—isn’t any kind of doctrine. It isn’t really any special kind of discipline—although, of course, disciplines are involved.
The center of Hinduism is an experience called mokṣa—‘liberation’—in which, through the dissipation of the illusion that each man and each woman is a separate thing in a world consisting of nothing but a collection of separate things, you discover that you are, on one level, an illusion, but on another level, you are what they call the Self, the one Self, which is all that there is. The universe is the game of the Self, which plays hide and seek forever and ever. When it plays ‘hide,’ it plays it so well, hides so cleverly, that it pretends to be all of us, and all things whatsoever.
And we don’t know it because it’s playing ‘hide.’ But when it plays ‘seek,’ it enters onto a path of yoga, and—through following this path—it wakes up, and the scales fall from one’s eyes. Now, in just the same way, the center of Buddhism—the only really important thing about Buddhism—is the experience which they call ‘awakening.’ Buddha is a title and not a proper name. It comes from a Sanskrit root budh, and that sometimes means ‘to know,’ but better, ‘waking.’ And so you get from this root bodhi; that is the state of being awakened.
And so buddha, ‘the awakened one,’ ‘the awakened person.’ And so there can, of course—in Buddhist ideas—be very many buddhas. The person called the Buddha is only one of myriads. Because they, like the Hindus, are quite sure that our world is only one among billions, and that buddhas come and go in all the worlds.
But sometimes, you see, there comes into the world what you might call a big buddha; a very important one. And such a one is said to have been Gautama, the son of a prince living in northern India, in the part of the world we now call Nepal, living shortly after 600 BC. All dates in Indian history are vague, and so I never try to get you to remember any precise date—like 564, which some people think it was—but just after 600 BC is probably right.
Most of you, I’m sure, know the story of his life. But the point is that when, in India, a man was called a buddha—or the Buddha—this is a title of a very exalted nature. It is, first of all, necessary for a buddha to be human.
He can’t be any other kind of being, whether—in the Hindu scale of beings—he’s above the human state or below it. He is superior to all gods, because according to Indian ideas, gods and angels—or, angels would probably a better name for them than gods—all those exalted beings are still in the wheel of becoming, still in the chains of karma; that is, action which requires the need for more action to complete it, and goes on requiring the need for more action. They’re still, according to popular ideas, going ‘round the wheel from life, after life, after life, after life, because they still have the thirst for existence.
Or, to put it in a Hindu way: in them, the Self is still playing the game of not being itself. But the Buddha’s doctrine, based on his own experience of awakening, which occurred after seven years of attempts to study with the various yogis of the time, all of whom used the method of extreme asceticism; fasting, doing all sorts of exercises, lying on beds of nails, sleeping on broken rocks, any kind of thing to break down egocentricity, to become unselfish, to become detached, to exterminate desire for life. But Buddha found that all that was futile; that was not the Way.
And one day he broke his ascetic discipline and accepted a bowl of some kind of milk soup from a girl who was looking after cattle. And suddenly, in this tremendous relaxation, he went and sat down under a tree, and the burden lifted. He saw, completely, that what he had been doing was on the wrong track.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. And no amount of effort will make a person who believes himself to be an ego be really unselfish. So long as you think and feel that you are a somewhat contained in your bag of skin, and that’s all, there is no way, whatsoever, of your behaving unselfishly.
Oh yes, you can imitate unselfishness. You can go through all sorts of highly refined forms of selfishness, but you’re still tied to the wheel of becoming by the golden chains of your good deeds, as the obviously bad people are tied to it by the iron chains of their misbehaviors. You know how people are when they get spiritually proud?
They belong to some kind of a church group, or an occult group, and say, “We are the ones who have, of course, the right teaching. We’re the in-group, we are the elect, and everybody else outside is really off the track.” But then comes along someone who one-ups them by saying, “Well, in our circles, we’re very tolerant. And we accept all religions and all ways as leading to The One.” But what they’re doing is, they’re playing the game called ‘We’re More Tolerant Than You Are.’ You see?
And in this way, the egocentric being is always in his own trap. So Buddha saw that all his yoga exercises and ascetic disciplines had just been ways of trying to get himself out of the trap in order to save his own skin, in order to find peace for himself. And he realized that that is an impossible thing to do, because the motivation ruins the project.
He found out, then, you see, that there was no trap to get out of except himself. Trap and trapped are one, and when you understand that, there isn’t any trap left. I’m going to explain that, of course, more carefully.
So, as a result of this experience, he formulated what is called the dharma, that is the Sanskrit word for ‘method.’ You will get a certain confusion when you read books on Buddhism because they switch between Sanskrit and Pali words. The earliest Buddhist scriptures that we know of are written in the Pali language, and Pali is a softened form of Sanskrit. So that, for example, whereas the doctrine of the Buddha is called in Sanskrit the dharma, but in Pali—and in many books in Buddhism—you’ll find that the Buddha’s doctrine described as the dhamma.
And so, in the same way, karma in Sanskrit, becomes in Pali, kamma. Buddha remains the same. The dharma, then, is the method.
Now, the method of Buddhism—and this is absolutely important to remember—is dialectic. That is to say, it doesn’t teach a doctrine. You cannot find anywhere what Buddhism teaches, as you can find out what Christianity or Judaism or Islam teaches.
Because all Buddhism is a discourse, and what most people suppose to be its teachings are only the opening stages of the dialogue. So the concern of Buddha as a young man—the problem he wanted to solve—was the problem of human suffering. And so he formulated his teaching in a very easy way to remember.
All those Buddhist scriptures are full of what you might call mnemonic tricks; numbering things in such a way that they’re easy to remember. And so he summed up his teaching in the form of what are called the Four Noble Truths. And the first one, because it was his main concern, was the truth about dukkha.
Dukkha: suffering, pain, frustration, chronic dis-ease. It is the opposite of sukha, which means sweet, pleasure, et cetera. So, insofar as the problem posed in Buddhism is dukkha, “I don’t want to suffer, and I want to find someone or something that can cure me of suffering.” That’s the problem.
Now then, if there’s a person who solves the problem—a buddha—people come to him and say, “Master, how do we get out of this problem?” So what he does is to propose certain things to them. First of all, he points out that with dukkha go two other things. These are respectively called anitya and anātman.
Anitya means—‘nitya’ means ‘permanent,’ so impermanence, flux, change, is characteristic of everything whatsoever. There isn’t anything at all in the whole world—in the material world, in the psychic world, in the spiritual world—there is nothing you can catch hold of and hang on to for safety. Nothin’.
Not only is there nothing you can hang on to, but by the teaching of anātman, there is no ‘you’ to hang on to it. In other words, all clinging to life is an illusory hand grasping at smoke. If you can get that into your head and see that that is so, nobody needs to tell you that you ought not to grasp.
Because you see you can’t. See, Buddhism is not essentially moralistic. The moralist is the person who tells people that they ought to be unselfish when they still feel like egos, and his efforts are always and invariably futile.
Because what happens is he simply sweeps the dust under the carpet, and it comes back again somehow. But in this case, it involves a complete realization that this is the case. So that’s what the teacher puts across, to begin with.
The next thing that comes up—the second of the noble truths—is about the cause of suffering, and this, in Sanskrit, is called tṛṣṇā. Tṛṣṇā is related to our word ‘thirst.’ It’s very often translated ‘desire;’ that will do. Better, perhaps, is ‘craving,’ ‘clinging,’ ‘grasping,’ or even, to use our modern psychological word, ‘blocking.’ When, for example, somebody is blocked, and dithers and hesitates, and doesn’t know what to do, he is in the strictest Buddhist sense attached; he’s stuck.
But a buddha can’t be stuck. He cannot be phased. He always flows, just as water always flows, even if you dam it; the river just keeps on getting higher and higher and higher, until it flows over the dam.
It’s unstoppable. Now, Buddha said, then, dukkha comes from tṛṣṇā. You all suffer because you cling to the world, and you don’t recognize that the world is anitya and anātman.
So then, try, if you can, not to grasp. Well, do you see that that immediately poses a problem? Because the student who has started off this dialogue with the buddha then makes various efforts to give up desire.
Upon which he very rapidly discovers that he is desiring not to desire, and he takes that back to the teacher, who says, “Well, well, well.” He said, “Of course. You are desiring not to desire, and that’s, of course, excessive. All I want you to do is to give up desiring as much as you can.
Don’t want to go beyond the point of which you’re capable.” And for this reason, Buddhism is called the Middle Way. Not only is it the middle way between the extremes of ascetic discipline and pleasure-seeking, but it’s also the middle way in a very subtle sense. Yes, don’t desire to give up more desire than you can.
And if you find that a problem, don’t desire to be successful in giving up more desire than you can. You see what’s happening? At every time he’s returned to the middle way; he’s moved out of an extreme situation.
Now then, we’ll go on. We’ll cut out what happens in the pursuit of that method until a little later. The next truth in the list is concerned with the nature of release from dukkha.
And so number three is nirvāṇa. Nirvāṇa is the goal of Buddhism; it’s the state of liberation corresponding to what the Hindus call mokṣa. The word means ‘blow out,’ and it comes from the root nivṛtti.
Now, some people think that what it means is ‘blowing out the flame of desire.’ I don’t believe this. I believe that it means ‘breathe out,’ rather than ‘blow out,’ because if you try to hold your breath—and in Indian thought prāṇa, breath, is the life principle—if you try to hold on to life, you lose it. You can’t hold your breath and stay alive; it becomes extremely uncomfortable to hold on to your breath.
And so, in exactly the same way, it becomes extremely uncomfortable to spend all your time holding on to life. What the devil is the point of surviving—going on living—when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.
They spend enormous efforts on maintaining a certain standard of living, which is a great deal of trouble. You know, you get a nice house in the suburbs, and the first thing you do is you plant a lawn. You’ve gotta get out and mow the damn thing all the time.
And you buy expensive this-that, and soon you’re all involved in mortgages, and instead of being able to walk out in the garden and enjoy it, you sit at your desk looking at all the books and filling out this, that, and the other, and paying bills, and answering letters. What a lot of rot! But, you see, that is holding on to life.
So, translated into colloquial American, nirvāṇa is ‘whew!’ Because if you let your breath go, it’ll come back. So nirvāṇa is not annihilation. It’s not disappearance into a sort of undifferentiated void.
Nirvāṇa is the state of being let go. It is a state of consciousness, and a state of—you might call it—being, here and now in this life. We now come to the most complicated of all.
Number four, mārga. Mārg, in Sanskrit, means ‘path,’ and the Buddha taught an eightfold path for the realization of nirvāṇa. This always reminds me of a story about Dr. Suzuki, who is a very, very great Buddhist scholar, and many years ago he was giving a fundamental lecture on Buddhism at the University of Hawaii.
And he’d been going through these four truths, and he said: Well, I’m going to do rather the same thing. What is important is this: the eightfold path has really got three divisions in it. The first are concerned with understanding, the second division is concerned with conduct, and the third division is concerned with meditation.
And every step in the path is preceded with the Sanskrit word samyak, in which sam is the keyword. In Pali: samma. And so, the first step, samyak drishti, which means—drishti means a ‘view,’ ‘a way of looking at things,’ a ‘vision,’ an ‘attitude,’ something like that.
But this word samyak is in ordinary texts on Buddhism almost invariably translated ‘right.’ This is a very bad translation. The word is used in certain contexts in Sanskrit to mean ‘right,’ ‘correct,’ but it has other and wider meanings. Sam means—like our word ‘sum,’ which is derived from it—‘complete,’ ‘total,’ ‘all-embracing.’ It also has the meaning of ‘middle wade,’ representing, as it were, the fulcrum, the center, the point of balance in a totality.
Middle wade way of looking at things. Middle wade way of understanding the dharma. Middle wade way of speech, of conduct, of livelihood, and so on.
Now, this is particularly cogent when it comes to Buddhist ideas of behavior. Every Buddhist in all the world, practically, as a layman—if he’s not a monk—undertakes what are called pañcaśīlā, the Five Good Conducts. Sīla is sometimes translated ‘precept.’ But it’s not a precept because it’s not a commandment.
The formula when Buddhist—you know, these priests, they chant the precepts, you know?—panatipata veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami. And that means: panatipata; pana is, in Pali, this thing, prana—life; tipata, taking away; ‘I promise to abstain from.’ So the first is that one undertakes not to destroy life. Second, not to take what is not given.
Third—this is usually translated ‘not to commit adultery.’ It doesn’t say anything of the kind. In Sanskrit: kamesu micchacara veramani sikkhapadam samadiyami; kamesu micchacara means: ‘I undertake the precept to abstain from exploiting my passions.’ Buddhism has no doctrine about adultery; you may have as many wives as you like. But the point is this: when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to have a drink, because you may become dependent on alcohol whenever you feel unhappy.
So, in the same way, when you’re feeling blue and bored, it’s not a good idea to say “Let’s go out and get some chicks and have some sex-fun.” That’s exploiting the passions. But it’s not exploiting the passions, you see, when drinking, say, expresses the conviviality and friendship of the group sitting around the dinner table, or when sex expresses the spontaneous delight of two people in each other. Then, the fourth precept, musāvāda: ‘to abstain from false speech.’ This doesn’t simply mean lying.
It means abusing people. It means using speech in a phony way, like saying ‘all niggers are thus and so.’ Or ‘the attitude of America to this situation is thus and thus.‘ See, that’s phony kind of talking. Anybody who studies general semantics will be helped in avoiding musāvāda; false speech.
The final precept is a very complicated one, and nobody’s quite sure exactly what it means. It mentions three kinds of drugs and drinks: sura, meraya, majja, pamadatthana. We don’t know what they are, but at any rate, it’s generally classed as narcotics and liquors.
Now, there are two ways of translating this precept. One says to abstain from narcotics and liquors. The other, liberal, translation favored by the great scholar Dr. Malalasekera is, “I abstain from being intoxicated by these things.” So if you drink and don’t get intoxicated, it’s okay, you see?
You don’t have to be a teetotaler to be a Buddhist. This is especially true in Japan and China—my goodness, how they throw it down! Once, a scholarly Chinese said to me, “You know, before you start meditating, just have a couple of martinis, because it increases your progress by about six months.” Well... Now you see, these are—as I say—they are not commandments.
They are vows. Buddhism has in it no idea of there being a moral law laid down by some kind of cosmic lawgiver. And the reason why these precepts are undertaken is not for a sentimental reason.
It is not that they’re going to make you into a good person. It is that, for anybody interested in the experiments necessary for liberation, these ways of life are expedient. First of all, if you go around killing, you’re going to make enemies, and you’re going to have to spend a lot of time defending yourself, which will distract you from your yoga.
If you go around stealing, likewise, you’re going to acquire a heap of stuff, and you’re going to, again, make enemies. If you exploit your passions, you’re going to get a big thrill, but it doesn’t last. When you begin to get older, you realize “Well that was fun while we had it, but I haven’t really learned very much from it, and now what?” Same with speech.
Nothing is more confusing to the mind than taking words too seriously. We’ve seen so many examples of that. And finally, to get intoxicated or narcotized—a narcotic is anything like alcohol or opium which makes you sleepy.
The word narcosis, in Greek, means—narc is ‘sleep.’ So if you want to pass your life seeing things through a dim haze, this is not exactly awakening. So then… so much for the ‘conduct’ side of Buddhism. We come, then, to the final parts of the eightfold path.
There are two concluding steps which are called—I explained the word samadhi, but I’ll write it here again—smṛti; samyak-smṛti and samyak-samadhi. Smṛti means recollection, memory, present-mindedness. Seems rather funny that the same word can mean ‘recollection,’ or ‘memory’ and ‘present-mindedness.’ But smṛti is exactly what that wonderful old rascal Gurdjieff meant by ‘self-awareness,’ or ‘self-remembering.’ Smṛti is to have complete presence of mind.
There is a wonderful meditation called The House that Jack Built meditation—at least that’s what I call it—that the Southern Buddhists practice. He walks, and he says to himself, “There is the lifting of the foot. There is the lifting of the foot.” The next thing he says is, “There is a perception of the lifting of the foot.” And the next, he says, “There is a tendency towards the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.” Then, finally, he says, “There is a consciousness of the tendency of the perception of the feeling of the lifting of the foot.” And so, with everything that he does, he knows that he does it.
He is self-aware. This is tricky. Of course, it’s not easy to do.
But as you practice this—I’m going to let the cat out of the bag, which I suppose I shouldn’t do—but you will find that there are so many things to be aware of, at any given moment in what you’re doing, that, at best, you only ever pick out one or two of them. That’s the first thing you’ll find out. Ordinary conscious awareness is seeing the world with blinkers on.
As we say, you can think only of one thing at a time. That’s because ordinary consciousness is narrowed consciousness. That’s being narrow-minded in the true sense of the word; looking at things that way.
Then you find out that—as, in the course of going around, being aware of what you’re doing all of the time—what are you doing when you remember? Or when you think about the future? I am aware that I am remembering?
I am aware that I am thinking about the future? But, you see, what eventually happens is that you discover that there isn’t any way of being absent-minded. All thoughts are in the present and of the present.
And when you discover that, you approach samadhi. Samadhi is the complete state; the fulfilled state of mind. And you will find many, many different ideas among the sects of Buddhists and Hindus as to what samadhi is.
Some people call it a trance, some people call it a state of consciousness without anything in it; knowing with no object of knowledge. Some people say that it is the unification of the knower and the known. All these are varying opinions.
I had a friend who was a Zen master, and he used to talk about samadhi, and he said a very fine example of samadhi is a fine horserider. When you watch a good cowboy, he is one being with the horse. So an excellent driver in a car makes the car his own body, and he absolutely is with it.
So also a fine pair of dancers. They don’t have to shove each other to get one to do what the other wants him or her to do. They have a way of understanding each other, of moving together, as if they were Siamese twins.
That’s samadhi on the physical, ordinary, everyday level. The samadhi of which Buddha speaks is the state which is, as it were, the gateway to nirvāṇa, the state in which the illusion of the ego as a separate thing disintegrates. Now, when we get to that point in Buddhism, Buddhists do a funny thing, which is going to occupy our attention for a good deal of this seminar.
They don’t fall down and worship. They don’t really have any name for what it is that is, really and basically. The idea of anātman, of non-self, is applied in Buddhism not only to the individual ego, but also to the notion that there is a Self of the universe, a kind of impersonal or personal god, and so it is generally supposed that Buddhism is atheistic.
It’s true, depending on what you mean by atheism. Common or garden atheism is a form of belief, namely that I believe there is no god. The atheist positively denies the existence of any god.
All right. Now, there is such an atheist—if you put dash between the ‘a’ and ‘theist,’ or speak about something called ‘atheos’—theos, in Greek, means ‘god’—but what is a non-god? A non-god is an inconceivable something or other.
I love the story about a debate in the Houses of Parliament in England—where, as you know, the Church of England is established and, therefore, under the control of the government—and the high ecclesiastics had petitioned Parliament to let them have a new prayerbook. And somebody got up and said, “It’s perfectly ridiculous that Parliment should decide upon this, because, as we well know, there are quite a number of atheists in these benches.” And somebody got up and said “Oh, I don’t think there are really any atheists here. We all believe in some sort of a something somewhere.” Now again, of course, it isn’t that Buddhism believes in some sort of a something, somewhere—and that is to say, in vagueness.
Here is the point: if you believe, if you have certain propositions that you want to assert about the ultimate reality—or what Paul Tillich calls ‘the ultimate ground of being’—you are talking nonsense. Because you can’t say something specific about everything. You see, supposing you wanted to say, “God has a shape.” But if God is all that there is, then God doesn’t have any outside, so he can’t have a shape.
You have to have an outside, and space outside it, to have a shape. So that’s why the Hebrews, too, are against people making images of God. But nonetheless, Jews and Christians persistently make images of God, not necessarily in pictures and statues, but they make images in their minds.
And those are much more insidious images. Buddhism is not saying that the Self—the great Ātman, or whatnot—it isn’t denying that the experience which corresponds to these words is realizable. What it is saying is that if you make conceptions and doctrines about these things, you’re liable to become attached to them.
You’re liable to start believing instead of knowing. So they say in Zen Buddhism, “The doctrine of Buddhism is a finger pointing at the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.” Or so we might say in the West, the idea of God is a finger pointing at God, but what most people do is, instead of following the finger, they suck it for comfort.
And so Buddha chopped off the finger and undermined all metaphysical beliefs. There are many, many dialogues in the Pali scriptures where people try to corner the Buddha into a metaphysical position. “Is the world eternal?” The Buddha says nothing.
“Is the world not eternal?” And he answers nothin’. “Is the world both eternal and not eternal?” And he don’t say nothin’. “Is the world neither eternal nor not eternal?” And still, he don’t say nothin’.
He maintains what is called the noble silence. Sometimes, later, called the thunderous silence—because this silence, this metaphysical silence, is not a void. It is very powerful.
This silence is the open window through which you can see not concepts, not ideas, not beliefs, but the very goods. But if you say what it is that you see, you erect an image and an idol, and you misdirect people. It’s better to destroy people’s beliefs than to give them beliefs.