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And this is the mistake, of course, that these kind of philosophers fall into. If I say, now, underneath all distinct things space constitutes the ground in which they live and move and have their being, this is not quite correct. Because, if I speak of space in that way, it makes it just another thing of the same kind and nature as all the things it contains.
If, in other words, I can think about space—and I can only think about it by analogy, by likening it to paper, to a mirror, to a basis, a background—well, if I can think about it, that makes it a think; which is to say, a thing. All things are thinks. They’re as much of life as you can catch hold of in one thought.
That means a think. So, likewise, in German: denken, “to think,” Ding, “thing.” In Latin, reor, “to think,” res, “thing.” So if I make space into a think, I’ve somehow missed it. That’s why we have to say it’s a no-think.
In Buddhism it is said the real nature of mind is no mind. And you realize this in daily life by the fact that, when you see clearly, you see everything except your eyes—except if there’s something wrong with your eyes and you see spots in front, you know? That interferes with seeing.
If you hear clearly, you don’t hear your ears. But if you have ear trouble you get buzzing in your ears. Same way if you’re very healthy, physically, you hardly notice your body except as a kind of blissful vagueness, which is exhilarating and so on.
And if your clothes are comfortable, you don’t notice them. So this is connected with the nature of a beautifully functioning mind is that it doesn’t get its own way. It doesn’t think itself.
If it thinks itself, it gets in its own a way because it’s a no-think. No-thinks is the background for thinks. See?
So that’s why every attempt to conceptualize the ground of being—whether it’s space or God—is an idolatry. And that’s why sages have always condemned idolatry. To understand the nature of the the ground of being correctly you must not have an image of it.
Now, we don’t need to be compulsive about that. Compulsive iconoclasm is a terrible thing. The Islamic people suffered from it from time to time, and when they got to India they knocked down all the Buddhas and beautiful images and banged off their noses.
And the Puritans did the same sort of thing to Roman Catholic and Anglican churches in England. They hated images. That meant, you see, they were terribly attached to them.
They were still hung up by the images and therefore had to smash them. Either way, if you say: you must not—as in very strict orthodox Islamic culture—you must not make any image of any living creature. And so their art—very interestingly, one must admit—went off into abstract patterning.
But what one is saying here is not that it is somehow just wrong to make an image. The point is much deeper than that. It is this: that, in order to realize, in order to experience the ground of being, you need to be free from images.
That is to say, you need to suspend the activity called thinking. Now, most people imagine that if they stop thinking, that’s sort of the end: the life of the mind instantly curls up and dies. But this isn’t the case, because there’s a lot more to the mind than thinking.
There is this direct apprehension of the world, unmediated through concepts or thoughts. And that’s the kind of apprehension of the world you need to understand space. It’s interesting how, to some extent, this sort of thing enters even into the sciences.
Because scientists operate with certain, shall we say—it’s hard to say “concept”—with certain tools that are not concepts, really. We always feel about a concept that you have to know what it is. But, for example, the basis of algebra is operating with patterns.
And you don’t know what they are. They’re called unknowns: X is the unknown. You can say X + Y = Y + X, and you made a perfectly clear statement.
But you don’t have to know what X is or what Y is. Could mean anything at all. So, in the same way, in in modern geometry: you don’t define what you mean by a point.
They’ve abandoned this as a sort of a nonsense definition; Euclid’s idea that a point is that which has position but no magnitude. What do you mean, it has position? What has position?
And so now, a point. Everybody knows what a point is. But you don’t explain it.
Because, you see, there must be a starting point in anything that anybody does, and anything they think about, in any system of ideas, any conception of the good life, where you don’t explain it. Because everybody knows what it is. And yet, when you ask them about it, they don’t.
And, you see, we get time and space. If you turn back on your starting point and say, “I will not go anywhere. I will not proceed with my geometry, with my investigation, with my business plans, until I am quite sure of my starting point.” You will never begin.
Because you can go back into your starting point forever. And that manifests itself in people who, for example, have certain kinds of hypochondria. Their starting point is the body.
They wonder. “My goodness! Ought I to go out?
Would I catch cold? Would I get into an accident? Should I go to a foreign country?
Would I get the great Siberian itch, or heebie jeebies, or trots, or whatever?” So, always worrying about the starting point forever. Now, are you quite sure that your premises are right? It’s always good to look at your premises.
But you can very quickly come to the conclusion that, if you don’t have some premises, you won’t go anywhere at all. So, as one general once said: a poor plan of attack carried out with zest and determination is much better than an excellent plan carried out in a wobbling way. So, in this way—for example, in Japan I have no ideas, really, about talking Japanese.
I know lots of words and no grammar. Therefore, I have no compunction whatsoever about talking because I know it’s mistakes all over the place. And if I were nervous about it, as they get nervous about talking English, because they do desperately want to be correct, I have absolutely no desire to be correct because I know that, in my whole lifetime, I will never be able to speak correct Japanese.
So I just plunge in and I get understood. And that’s the way you have to do it in life: you muddle through. So if you keep turning back, you see, on the initial beginning point and trying to be sure of it, nothing will ever happen.
So then, whatever is the point, whatever is the ground that we are and that we take our stand upon, appears to us as space, as not being there, to give us transparency. You see, if God were visible, nobody could see anything but God. It would blot out everything else.
But by virtue of becoming invisible, the world is created. Because, as it were, God gets out of the way so that the world can appear. And the world is a selection.
As I explained, the eyes select what they see, because they are only noticing what goes on in a certain spectrum of light. If you could change the eyes’ spectrum altogether, you would see a different world of creatures. Flip, flip, flip: you could have the thing like a radio tuner, going from performance to performance, all on different bands of a spectrum.
To see them all at once, though, would be (for our kind of intellect) like taking your hands like this across the piano and going slam. See? You just get this chaos of sound.
So that there being realized objects in space is partly dependent upon our using an attentive and selective type of consciousness. You see, they’re the same thing. If you have a selective consciousness, you have a selective world.
So, putting down the five fingers on the piano—instead of the full, flat arm—selects a certain pattern of sound. And you can say it’s a chord, it’s a melody, and so on. So when the angels play their harps in heaven, they are selecting: they’re the fingers of God selecting what kind of patterns are appearing in the world, you see?
That’s really what that image is about. So then, to see this, then, you go back to no thinking. The suspension of thought is—for modern man in particular—a tremendously important undertaking.
When, in about 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein published a book called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it was the end of Western philosophy. Because where he finished, he said, you know, philosophy is really a method for getting rid of meaningless concepts. And so he practically got rid of all metaphysical concepts and ended up by saying, “Whereof one cannot speak, of that one should be silent.” This was the great moment for philosophy departments all over the Western world to lapse into silence and practice meditation.
But instead, they had to go on talking. Because they couldn’t prove that they were an academic discipline unless they did some talking and especially some publishing. So they began, then, to chatter nauseatingly about trivialities.
They became grammarians, mathematical logicians, and things. And everybody forgot about philosophy because it got so dull. It wasn’t expressing any more man’s fascination and wonder at the improbable situation of living in the universe.
But fortunately, things are at last getting through to people. And you would not be entirely laughed out of court in academic surroundings today if you suggested that some non-verbal research be carried on. You would have to put it rather carefully.
You would have to refrain from calling it yoga, or Buddhism, or meditation, but it would be the sort of research in non-verbal sensory awareness, or something. You know, something out of academic gobbledygook. But it’s coming.
And this presents problems to people who are compulsive thinkers. Because when they try to reach this completely non-verbal level, they think about doing it. They think, “I’m trying to reach the nonverbal level.
I’m trying to empty my mind of thoughts. I’m trying to think not-thinking.” And you feel so sorry for those people. But it is an awful problem if you have it.
And to get rid of it, then, one uses gimmicks. One uses methods of absorbing the individual in non-conceptual experiences. Such as: you can play a single loud musical tone, and get that going, and it really shatters thinking.
It just turns you into this—your whole body becomes this one tone. And you get the person concentrated on that one point, you see? Go, go, go, go!
And zzzzip, cut it off. Then where are you? Haven’t had time to collect your thoughts.
You’re blown by this tone. And all those techniques that are used in yoga—when they chant, when they do some kind of physical exercises, when they have a nonsense proposition like a kōan to concentrate on—all these things work in the same essential way: to suspend the analytical thinking, to suspend the spotlight mind for a while. So that you get back to what is called original mind, where you act without thinking.
That’s why, in the whole interchange between a Zen teacher and his students, the Zen teacher is constantly challenging the student to respond intelligently to a given situation without thinking, without stopping to think. Just as in, say, using Judo: you mustn’t stop to think. You’re lost if you do.
You must learn to respond without thinking. So, creative skill in so many things depends upon the opposite of thinking. When you examine what people say, what inventors say, what artists say, what mathematicians say about the discovery of new ideas, very few of them arrived at those ideas by a purely thought, thinking, verbal or numerical process.
And the reason is, of course, that the structures which we have a arrived at and we do understand by analytical thinking—once you see them, they tend to stay put. They become habits. And there’s nothing more difficult to cure in an individual than a habit of thought.
You know, I’ve argued for hours and hours and hours, sometimes, with people who simply can’t understand knowing without a knower. Because they are so trapped by sentence structure. The verb has to have that subject.
Therefore, you can’t have a state of affairs in which there is just the verb—that is to say, knowing. They say, “Well, who is knowing?” And it’s as bad as arguing with a flat-Earthist or a Jehovah’s witness. Impossible!
Because of the ruts of thought. And such a person can never be inventive. Why?
Because he will never see a new pattern a new structure. And he won’t see one because he’s thinking all the time. He’s not open to the variations of the actual world.
And so he can only see what he’s been taught to see. That’s why academic psychology is always in a position of bafflement about learning theory. Because if learning is a process of converting new experience into the terms of what you’ve already learned, you never really learn all.
It’s like, according to kind of a narrow-minded aerodynamics, bees cannot fly. There is no way of explaining the aerodynamics of that vibration. But it flies!
And you often come up against this when an inventor has an idea, and all his colleagues say to him, “Oh, don’t be silly! You can’t do that. It just wouldn’t work.” Well, he says, “I’ve tried it and it does work.” Well, they say, “Come on.” And very often they won’t even try.
They’ll just say it can’t be done. You can get a fantastic dogmatism in the scientific world. And you have to be terribly careful not to upset certain absolutely fundamental, strictly, prejudices, which are the result of thinking too much and of getting accustomed to the warm ruts of thought.
And so you never could see the new. So this is the real meaning of an open mind. Not merely that you’re a liberal sort of guy, but that you can turn off thoughts—and, yes, thus be turned on to reality.
Thoughts, you see, belong to the world of symbols. What we experience with our senses is, of course, the physical world; the real world. You may ask me, “Well, isn’t there also a spiritual world?” But you must understand that the spiritual world is the same thing as the physical, when the physical is not confused with the symbolic.
There is no real difference between the spiritual and the physical. It’s all one energy, all in one space. Now, you see, though, the difficulty is that, in saying something like, “It’s all one energy,” this is the really the point.
I mean, if you understand that this whole universe is one energy and you’re it, you don’t really have any much in the way of further problems. I mean, you have some few practical problems, like how to make a good table or a beautiful dress or whatever it is that you’re after. But you don’t have any more metaphysical problems when you see that.
But a person who thinks a lot can’t understand that at all, because he says, “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. If everything is all one energy, let’s begin again. I mean, what have you said?” Of course, we haven’t said anything.
Logically, the statement is pure nonsense. “Everything is one energy.” So What? But that’s only because the person who has received this communication has had it only as a thought.
And as a thought it’s, again, like saying, “There is paper under every word on this page,” and thinking that that means, “paper,” “paper,” “paper,” “paper.” But when this is something that emerges from not-thinking, and when you see that you’ve been bamboozled. All your life long you’ve been bugged by everybody else into thinking that you are some kind of a freak that came into this world. And you don’t really belong here because, probably, your parents didn’t really want you, and certainly your brothers, older brothers and sisters didn’t want you around; you were eating up more.
And in school they tell you, you know, you’ve got to learn that you’re not the only pebble on the beach and that, therefore, the best way of teaching you that is that you’re really rather insufferable around here, and you’re on probation until you are acceptable. Well, babies, they grow up, you see, with this treatment: feeling strangers, feeling that the Earth is something alien. And so we all have this feeling of being alone, of being impotent little puppets of a huge system going on.
And so we are progressively fooled out of, really, with our own cooperation, fooled out of this sense that you can get if you suspend all these identifications that that one does with the thinking process. This is this, this is that, I’m me, what’s me is different from so on. You suspend that.
And you see not simply that all those problems and all those definitions of who you are were unreal. There’s something else. You see, there is the feeling—beyond having dissipated the illusion—of the sheer joy and delight of this one energy now is realizing itself as you.
And how nice that it won’t always be doing that, because that would get boring. It’ll go bwwllpp, like this, you see? And it will be a different situation altogether.
You know, you’ll run into a brick wall and bwwllpp, before you know where you are, you’re going peep, peep, peep, peep out of an eggshell. Waaaah! The whole thing is flipped and you’re doing it on another track.
But there’s only one you, you see? It’s all the one energy. But this is, as I say, difficult to understand logically if you don’t understand it experimentally.
If you understand it experimentally, it’s perfectly clear when somebody says everything is one energy. You say, “Of course!” But the person who’s stuck with the concepts and has nothing more than the concept simply can’t make any sense of it at all. And he says, “Well, you’re suffering from a hallucination.” And will proceed to prove, according to his ideas, that what you’ve achieved in that has made no difference to you or to anything else.
Of course he can prove it. Because his proof is set up to give just that result. Well then, I got into that at some length—the question of no thinking—because of trying to point out how one must avoid trying to understand space in such a way as to make it a thing.
Like a box, you see, which contains all the objects in it. But a no-thing like space is at the same time in cahoots with things. They’re two aspects, two poles, two terms, of the same one energy.
Don’t make space at the same pole of the one energy as the things. It’s the opposite pole. It is, then, because of our treatment of space as nothing, you see, that we are afraid of death.
We are afraid of that pole of experience, which is unconsciousness, that corresponds to space surrounding the world. And because we think that reality, that our life, that our identity, is entirely in the domain of consciousness and thingness and thinkableness, the other pole seems completely threatening. Whereas, of course, it is that on which it all depends.
Because the two poles depend on each other. They energize each other. So when you are scared of the non-being side of things, you are, as it were, frightened of your own mother.
Now, of course, you may have reason to be, because there are such things as devouring mothers. But the devouring mother represents the original horror felt for the unknown. And in practice, in human relationships, the devouring type of mother is that precisely the person who cannot come to terms with her own unknown.
Therefore, she wants to control everything: she wants to see that all the children remain perpetually under her dominance. Because she can’t let go. Because if she let go, you know, she would become uncorseted and flop all over the place, as it were.
So she becomes the devourer. But you always conquer the devourer by dropping into it. By faith, in other words.
Faith in the sense of trust. I don’t mean belief. Trust.
Drop into space and you float. See, this only begins to be understood by rocket people as they get out there. And we’re going to have—I don’t know how the psychology of this is proceeding—but we’re going to have an awful lot of people getting out in space and not wanting to come back.
Because when you’re in orbit and you float—very interesting sensation. And they have to follow very strict rules. The same way you do with skin diving.
When you get to a certain level of pressure, you start floating and you feel no body weight. And you have to absolutely keep your will going. When the watch says a certain thing, up you go.
Orders is orders, see? Otherwise you’ll drown—in great delight and bliss. So the point is, though, that we are at the moment looking at space as something to be entered by the tremendous thrust of a rocket.
Because that is the attitude of attacking the unknown. And that causes us not to realize that we are already on the most magnificently equipped spaceship which could hardly be improved upon. It has got a source of temperature and energy just at the right distance from it.
It’s beautifully equipped with oxygen, with food supplies, with all kinds of delightful things to do while on the journey. And it’s traveling through space at a colossal speed. And it’s called the planet Earth.
The art of exploring from the planet Earth depends not on conquering space with rockets and bombs, but on developing greater sensitivity in the place where we are. Lao Tzu said, “Without going out of my house, I know the whole universe.” Clumsy beginnings of this sensitivity are seen in radio astronomy which, instead of trying to leap out of the world, stays here and gets more sensitive. And eventually, I feel, that we shall discover each one of us have inside our heads a radio astronomical contraption of great subtlety.
And we shall eventually, the more we use instruments, we shall begin to watch a process which I will call etherealization. What at present we call miniaturization is connected with this. Miniaturization means that electronic equipment becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, until what was originally a great box like this becomes a tiny, tiny little thing.
Little tiny cell. And so, in the same way, as certain techniques advance, all kinds of joining lines like wires begin to vanish. See, when radio substitutes for the telephone, all the wires vanish.
When the airplane substitutes for road and railway, all the roads and rails are going to vanish. See? And more and more we’ll find means of getting rid of the clumsiness of primitive technology.
And then, as all this apparatus disappears, we find that we are moving in the direction of having it all in our own apparatus. Just like dolphins have sonar, homing pigeons have built-in radar. I think it’s all in us.
But we had to exteriorize it technologically in order to discover it within. It’s curious how, past the middle of the 20th century, there’s a very strong evidence of a revival in Western philosophy of what used to be called idealism—not in the moral sense, but in the metaphysical sense. That is to say, of the feeling that the external world is in some way a creation of the mind.
Only, we come to this point of view with very different assumptions than were held by people like Hegel or Berkeley or Radley (the great idealists of the European metaphysical tradition), and probably rather more akin to similar trends in Buddhist philosophy emerging from India about 400 A.D. The difference of approach, the difference of the way in which today this thing arises and the way in which it arose in the thought of a man like Bishop Berkeley is that the new idealism has a kind of curiously physical basis. When one would argue everything you know is in your mind, and the distance, the feeling of externality between you and other objects and people is also the content of consciousness, and therefore it’s all your consciousness—this, of course, created all sorts of weird feelings.
Are things there when I’m not witnessing them, or is there anybody else there, or are you all my personal dream? And one has only to imagine a conference of such people of solipsists—those who believe that they alone exist—arguing as to which one of them is really there to make the whole idea rather laughable. And furthermore, there seems to be no clarity in such philosophical thinking as to what the term “mind” or “consciousness” meant.
It had long associations with the mic and the gaseous by way of images. Mind and soul and spirit were always vague and formless. And matter, by contrast, was very rugged; craggly.
And how these two ever influenced each other, nobody ever could decide. Because all properly behaved ghosts walk straight through brick walls without disturbing either the bricks or the ghost. And so how can a mind incarnate in a material body move that body in any way?
This was always a puzzle. So people began to think that the differentiation between mind and matter was of no use. Because actually, what happens in making such a differentiation is that you impoverish both sides of it.
When you try to think of matter as mindless, or mind as immaterial, you get a kind of a mess on both sides. It’s the same way when you get a mystic who is not a bit of a sensualist, and a sensualist who has no whit of a mystic. Such a sensualist is boring.
Such a mystic is a fanatic; too spiritual. It’s the same when we divide the medical profession from the priesthood: both are losers. Not just because they lose their so-called opposite half, but the problem is, when you separate a doctor from a priest, you do more than create a specialization out of what was originally one field; to create two specializations.
Because a priest-physician is more than a priest plus a physician. By having, as it were, the binocular vision from medicine and from religion, he just doesn’t see two added areas. He sees the area in three dimensions as a result of this combination.