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But, on the other hand, here is nature, here is your body. Not merely your body by itself, as something bounded by the skin, but your body in relationship to a whole community of people and animals and bugs and vegetables, functioning in this astonishing way, doing myriads of things altogether everywhere at once, and not thinking about it at all. It is astonishing, you know, how we overlook that.
Because, of course, this is the faculty which everybody possesses, and therefore we say, “Well, that sort of cleverness is a dime a dozen.” What we like to distinguish is special cleverness: people who can do strange tricks—like great feats of thinking, and talking, and intellectual and cerebral performance. But we mustn’t forget that there are also people who do absolutely astonishing things without thinking at all. There are jugglers, there are very beautiful people—that’s pretty astonishing when you pick out someone and say, “Gee, isn’t she gorgeous!” And that’s done without thinking, and it embarrasses many women to be told that they’re beautiful because they want to be admired for their intellectual achievements rather than for the bodies which their parents provided for them.
And so we are a little bit on the defensive about the things that we achieve without our egos being in charge. But we do the most beautiful things that we do, really, by that means. Because all that thought and intellectuality can do is: it can embellish your natural talents.
A lot of people who are incredibly good at thinking never do anything creative because they have no talent available. They may have it, but they don’t trust it, they don’t know how to make use of it, and therefore their intellect works to little purpose. Because the function of the intellect is to be the servant of the organic intelligence.
You see? Only, what we’re doing is: we’re trying to make the intellect the master. The intellect is a wonderful servant just so long as it knows its place.
But once it becomes saying to nature, “Look, you submit. I know how you ought to be run. Now I’m going to take charge.” That is the moment of hubris where Adam eats the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—that is to say, of technical knowledge—and tries to be God to the world.
And God says, “Okay, baby, you try!” Then, you see, you’ve got to work. That’s why the curse of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was work. Everything became work.
Cats, dogs, and birds—they don’t do any work. They, true, they scurry around getting food, but that’s what there is to do. That’s fun, that’s life, that’s living.
It’s not work. Besides, you don’t have to think about it. Your brain tells you where to look for it.
Your nose tells you where to find it. You do what comes naturally. And there it is.
And if God so clothed the grass of the field which today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven, how much more would he clothe you, faithless ones? But I never met a minister—never!—who would not comment upon that, that that is a very impractical passage which we can’t live up to. But to get back to space.
All I was showing in this sort of digression was that our mind, our self, is not inside our heads, but extends. And so, you see, you have—as the great vehicle of this extension of the universe—you have space. And you see immediately that you cannot pin space down.
You cannot really conceive space at all. Look at the wonder a child has when it asks questions and begins. What’s up there?
What’s beyond? What’s after that? What’s after that?
The child is absolutely fascinated by thinking about that. Do you know all children are fascinated with infinity? Don’t you remember seeing, say, a child’s book, and on the cover of this book is a little girl sitting, reading the same book with the same little girl on the cover.
And so, naturally, there is another little girl on the cover of the book she’s looking at in the picture. And so the child begins to wonder how small can it get, how far can it go? Or they get in opposing mirrors and look.
Gee, that’s wonderful, why can’t you line them up so that it doesn’t just disappear around the corner, always? Couldn’t you get in straight on this? Seems so difficult.
Mummy, what did God do before he started the world? You think back. What would it be like to be in heaven and live forever and ever and ever and ever?
And immediately this somehow stretches the skull. And children love doing this because children are always trying out experiments on themselves. You know, they prod themselves, pull themselves, they love to spin in circles and make themselves feel dizzy.
Because that’s a great thing, you know, that feeling; wwghlllea, going like this, you see? They’re always fascinated with the limits of experience. So what’s out beyond that?
Because now, when a sophisticated astronomer tries to tell you that space is finite, we resent this and say, “Alright, space is finite. But what’s outside it?” “Well,” the astronomer says, “you see, you can only talk about an outside inside space. Outside space, there is no outside.” You see, the mind won’t take it!
The sense, you see, of infinity. So this space fascinates us. Going on forever; expanding.
It seems to be actually going on forever, you see? If the universe is a huge explosion. But you can see—can’t you, I think—this: space, although you cannot pin it down, and it has the quality of infinity, there’s no way of talking about space because it has no color, it has no weight, you can’t cut it, you can’t possibly chop it into pieces.
And yet, at the same time, you cannot differentiate it from solids. We come to another important point here, you see? That solid and space are in a secret conspiracy with each other.
Actually, there’s very little solid in the world. Most of what appears to be solid appears so by virtue of the speed at which it’s jiggling. It’s like an electric fan, which, when put in rotation, the blades appear to form a solid disk.
And this chair is solid for rather the same reasons. You can’t put your finger through it; it’s moving too fast. But actually, whatever it is that’s dancing in space is increasingly difficult to define.
The more you think about energy, you see—and you can make a calculus of energy like you make a calculus of wiggles in the world, and you can say there are various waves, or wavicles, or particles of energy, which we give all sorts of different names to—but the more we pursue it, the more it all seems to disappear. Like space. The more you try to think what it is, the more difficult it is.
So, in the same way, the more you try to say, “Now, come on! Let’s sit down. What is this, here?” It’s alright if you stop at a certain point.
Then you say, “Well, now we know. That’s practical. Let’s not ask any more questions.” They say, “Shut up!” See?
But if you keep on asking questions, everything falls apart. You notice this in the scholarly world. Scholars spend far more time debunking than they do creating.
Because everything that has ever happened has been debunked, practically. You can show that there is no evidence that Julius Caesar existed—not really. Certainly, there is no evidence that Jesus existed, that Socrates existed.
There was a great deal of doubt about Plato. Probably the emperor Shōkō was a myth, and so on. You know, you can go on in that indefinitely, finding out that there really is no evidence.
I don’t know—probably the same sort of thing is happening with the Warren Commission. I don’t know. Although it’s something, that it didn’t happen anyway.
Because that is the work of the analytical intellect, you see. When you finally try to be God—that’s to say: define it exactly. Now just where is it?
And let’s get perfectly clear so that snap, it’s fixed, see? It all becomes slippery. Because in order to handle the world, you have to touch it rather gently.
You mustn’t try to pin things down. As they say in Zen: you do not try to drive a nail into the sky. Because that’s the beauty of space, you see?
There’s nothing in it to hang on. It hasn’t a hook to put your hat on, you know, somewhere in space. And yet, it hasn’t got a floor to fall onto.
See, if space had a concrete floor on the bottom, it’d be pretty dangerous stuff. But it doesn’t. There’s nowhere in space to collide with space.
You can run into somebody or something else, yes. But not with space. Figure, then, on this.
Work on this hypothesis—you see, it’s only a hypothesis at the moment; nothing more—that space is you. Because you are equally inaccessible to inspection. When you look to find out who you are, somebody like a Zen master will interrupt you and say, “Excuse me, but who is it that wants to know?
And who is it that’s looking?” Find out that. So, you know, you’re soon chasing your own tail like a little dog. And you never catch up with it.
All this, you see. So space is like you. Only, we turned in the ordinary way to think of ourselves, we make the gesture like this, see?
I’m here. We go this way. I can feel this.
I’m inside it. That’s me. See?
But alway, when you get a certain feeling about things, examine the opposite possibility. That you are this. Now we’re going to look in due course at the neurology of this.
But you do see that what you see outside you and feel outside you is the way you feel inside your skin. Since all the optical images, shapes, and colors, and everything, are neurological states in the brain. So what appears to you as outside is the most intimate feeling you have of the inside of your head.
Because, you know, it’s difficult to feel inside of your head unless you have a headache or a tumor or something. But in the ordinary way, the inside of your head is unconscious. And a surgeon can open up your skull and put instruments in the brain, and you won’t feel them at all.
The brain is very anesthetized. So, in order to feel the brain, you have to look out there. See?
And that’s how it feels in the brain. So I’m just trying to give an indication of how to get the feeling of reciprocity. Of you, on the one hand—it’s easy to see, as I said—you depend on the whole show.
Now I want you to see the opposite and equal truth that the whole show depends on you, so that you don’t anymore put yourself down as this wretched little bacterium, living on this obscure planet that evolves around a minor star on the outer fringes of one of the lesser galaxies. This is the great 19th century put-down of man. How nice to be all unimportant.
Watch out for this! Watch out for the political consequences of “everybody is equally inferior.” The political consequences emerging, in becoming clear as day goes by—barbarism is the answer to that. Untrammeled violence, police states, and shocking disregard for human existence.
Because they’re only wretched little bacteria. See? Pssht!
Let’s get rid of a whole lot of them. Zzzip. Burn them up.
And this is not unrelated, you see, to this feeling of the individual as someone who doesn’t matter at all, which can be the reaction against the philosophy of life in which an individual matter too much in the wrong way. In the Christian tradition we have made the individual matter too much in the wrong way. That is to say, you as an ego are infinitely precious.
God has made each one of you separately. And each one of you (as a separate ego) will last forever. And therefore you are all important in the eyes of God.
But you better know your place, baby, because you’re subjects of the king! On the other hand, the other way of looking at the individual as an incarnation of the divine, as God him- or it- or herself, coming on at God everywhere. Did you realize how fascinating that is?
That if you were God, wouldn’t it be fascinating to see myriads? To know yourself in terms of myriads of reproductions of yourself, all different? And really different!
Like other people’s need to be different from you. And they’ve got a secret in them; you don’t know what they’re going to do next. See?
So they are alive. If I push you and you just go bleeah, I say, “It’s only plastic.” If you jump a little, I say, “Ah! That’s someone else!
I don’t know what she’s going to do next!” See, that’s what I’m looking for. That’s what we’re all looking for in personal relationships. And that’s—you see, you can imagine, if you simplified, here is a kind of ball of light which is the divine being.
But it’s fascinating, you see? It’s fascinated with itself. And so, in order to find out its own possibilities, you see—bllwwp—it puts another one out there.
And they bounce together. And fllwpp, there comes another, you see? They go all over the place.
And so you get this idea of ever so many echoes of one sound, and they’re all chattering back. But they’re not just plain uniform, you see? Soon you introduce into this the element of differentiation, so that each one looks as different as possible from the other.
But it’s all one. Because there can’t be the sense of “I am,” “I,” without the sense of “there is someone else.” Something else. There is other.
“I” and “other” imply each other as much as solid implies space. Well, we’ll have an intermission. Last night I began by reviewing two possible concepts of the nature of space.
One: that it is simply an abstraction, and projected upon the physical world in rather the same way that we project measurements—lines of latitude and longitude or the cutting up of another abstraction called time into divisions like hours, minutes, and seconds, which are there only on the dial of the clock. The Earth, in its rotation, doesn’t tick. And time is, of course, seen thus; simply a measure of change, of the rate of change as between two changing processes.
The changing process of the clock and the changing process of, say, a person running around. It is out of that relationship, in other words, that you get a concept of time. And similarly, through being able to measure distances in a similar way, you get a concept of space.
You see, this is one point of view: that it’s the an abstraction, because force would be lent to this point of view by the fact that space itself isn’t really there. Space is just absence, and you must be very careful not—as Whitehead would have said—to reify; that is, to make a thing out of something that is isn’t there at all. Like saying, “Have an absinthe.” Oh boy!
Gary Snyder invented a corporation. It was called the Null and Void Guarantee and Trust Company. And its slogan was “register your absence with us.” And so I had some business cards made up for him, which put at the bottom: Gary Snyder, Non-Representative.
But this is, of course, Zen humor. Because Zen people are always joking about things not really being there at all. The general feeling of this being nobody at all—as distinct from being important and somebody—has a kind of inverse humor to it.
One becomes a sort of bag of wind, and there’s something about that. The Zen masters call each other wind bags and rice bags, and things like that, because the whole idea of taking nothingness for real is somehow funny. The other point of view that I was trying to contrast with this was rather different.
And that is that, just because they are so imponderable and so un-get-at-able, space is you. Space is your consciousness. And your consciousness is not something located in your head—although your head is a way in which it’s focused.
And therefore consciousness can be altered by a surgeon putting instruments into the brain. But the full range of consciousness, or the full range of the mind, is the entirety of space as the continuum in which the universe exists in rather much the same way as images exist in a mirror. Only here, there seems to be no solid mirror.
There is an infinitely permeable continuum of space. In a Chinese text called the Tánjīng—or the Platform Sutra—attributed to the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism, Huìnéng, he has the passage where he says that the mind is like the emptiness of space. Now, he says if you want to realize this, don’t exclude everything from your mind.
Because if your mind is like space, space contains the Earth, and the stars, and the sun, the moon, and the mountains, and forests, good men and bad men, enlightened men and unenlightened men. Everything is in it. And so, if a person wants to attain an understanding of the mind merely by emptying his mind, he’s making his mind small instead of a great.
So you cannot, therefore, separate space from what it contains. Because without the content there is no container. Without the container, no content.
And when you see that kind of relationship—when you see two apparently very different things going together inseparably, always find them together—you can smell a rat. For example, nobody has seen any stuff that had no shape, and nobody has ever seen a shape that had no stuff. There is a suspicion here, then, that stuff and shape are the same.
And likewise, improbable as it may seem, you can realize that space and solid are the same. Only, they are, as it were, the same energy showing itself under two different aspects to a being who always must see things two-sidedly, which is man. Man is symmetrical—almost, you see—right down this dividing line.
Two sides to his brain, two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, a symmetrical mouth, two arms, two nipples, hips, legs. You see? All balancing except the heart is a little bit over to one side.
But here he is, you see: this two-wayed thing. Man is like a Rorschach blot. He’s some mess that was squeezed, folded, and then you unfold it, and by Jove!
It’s symmetrical. And it’s a very strange thing about that. You could make order out of almost any mess by symmetrizing it in various ways.
You know, there’s a gadget called a teleidoscope, which is a marriage between a kaleidoscope and a telescope. And you can look at things through it, and because it’s got mirrors inside of the 45 degree angle, they will balance the reflection in a circle, which is very elegant. And the more messy that you thing you look at, the more interesting it is with the teleidoscope.
Because it is through this balancing process of some sort of symmetry that order comes about, repetition, regularity. So the human being, being thus two sided, is always wanting to ask, “Is you is or is you ain’t?” Is it this or is it that? Answer yes or no.
True or false. Black or white. And has very different great difficulties.
The more simpleminded the person is, the more difficulty they have in using their conscious attention to do anything but estimate these very simple contrasts between the good guys and bad guys. You man or you woman? There can be no doubt, see?
There may be nothing vaguely in between:, no grays, no washes. Because a simple mind wants this great precision—which, of course, you can’t have. But as poles—you see, one of the greatest dualities in the world is the duality of something and nothing.
Of being and non-being. And, of course, in our thinking the solid-world represents existence and the space-world represents nonexistence. The conquest of space, therefore, will be the conquest of nonexistence, perhaps.
See, this is our great attempt to survive by being able to leave this increasingly plundered planet, go somewhere else and plunder that. That’s the difference between mining and farming. Hunting and farming, too.
Well, so there’s this great contrast of reality considered as what’s in the space. That’s what’s there. And the space is simply what’s not there.
But you can’t make it that simple because you’ve only got to think about one step to realize that you can’t have the recognition—or perhaps even the existence of what is there—unless there is also what is not. In other words, I wouldn’t be able to see you as moving human entities if you were all densely packed in some sort of material medium—like, say, jello, or milk, or whatever—because then there would be no intervals between you to bring you out. You see?
Now, actually, space must—in this connection—for a moment be considered from the point of view of optics. The eye is receptive to a certain spectrum of vibrations of light. And therefore, where such vibrations are not being transmitted, the nerve ends are not stimulated, and therefore don’t report.
And that failure to report is space. We call it darkness: where there is no visible light. But actually, there is nowhere in the universe where there is not some kind of vibration going on.
So that if you had instrument that responded to it, you would see that space was full of impulses. And if you saw it all, you wouldn’t be able to make out the individual outlines which require these non-being intervals in order that their being can be realized. That is to say, outlined, distinguished, delineated.
Discriminated. So to see the outline of the being, you must have the intervening space of the non-being. But non-being means simply, in this connection, the lack of stimulation of whatever perceptive or perceiving instrument you are using.
Now, for example, when you print a book, we say there is empty paper underneath the print. But, of course, it isn’t nothing under the print. It’s nothing so far as print is concerned, but something very much so far as white paper is concerned.
Now, do you see, in the same way, perhaps it isn’t nothing in which we are living in moving. It’s only nothing so far as our visible shapes are concerned. But you could say this: that space is something of a quite different order than ordinary something.
Ordinary something being the things and events which we say occupies space, just as the print occupies the paper. But the philosophers—especially modern philosophers—have a great deal of trouble thinking about this. And the reason is that they are too one-sided in the kind of instruments they use for understanding the world.
And the instrument they use principally is words and thought. Now, they have just as much trouble in thinking about the universe in terms of their words and thoughts and logical categories as you would have in a printed book, writing some words down which pointed directly to the paper underneath them. Supposing I say, “There is paper underneath every word on this page.” Now, the philosopher—the type of logical positivist person who dominates American and British academic philosophy today—he would think that could only mean something if I wrote the sentence, “there is paper under every word on this page,” and then under each one of those words I wrote the word “paper,” “paper,” “paper,” “paper,” “paper.” Then he would say, “Yes that’s true.” But, you see, that isn’t the way it is.
The difficulty is, you see, there is an incommensurability between the print and the paper. If we can stand outside that because we are diverse enough to realize that print is one process and paper is another, and they can be put together. But if you are immersed in the print, you can’t see the paper.
And so, if you’re immersed in the kind of consciousness which simply discriminates things, you cannot realize the background. That is to say, then, you cannot realize the nature of space when you use only your analytical consciousness—the consciousness which looks at things bit by bit by bit by bit, that I call the spotlight consciousness—if you use that alone, then you can’t think anything about the continuum, the ground in which all this flourishes. But you may then go on to make a mistake if you’re not following me correctly.