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And that tells you human beings have been there. Why this passion for Euclidean order? Because Mr. Euclid had a very, very simple mind and tended to think in these rather uninteresting shapes instead of in curvaceous wiggles.
Now, nobody would fall in love with a Euclidean woman. What we appreciate about women is their curvaceousness, their wiggliness. And wiggliness offends some people because they are not sure of it.
They can’t figure it out. You never know quite what it’s going to do next. That’s why people often don’t like snakes, because a snake is the great symbol of wiggly vitality, of undulation, of waves.
And all this world is fundamentally a system of wave vibrations. And if you cannot wave with it, if you are rigid, you will always be resisting life. So wiggliness and going with wiggliness—in other words, do you swing?—is fundamental to the pleasure of life.
But, you see, we think that order and getting things in order is getting them squared away. We always saying: let’s get it squared away. Let’s get it straight.
And so there are certain kinds of people who are called straights and squares who do not swing. And as a result of that they are out of harmony with a wiggly universe, and their attitudes range from cookery at one end to religion at the other. Because a square religion is one that is too abstract, that resists the flow element of life.
It wants a canal instead of a river. And it conceives heaven as a city rather than a rose garden. Paradise is a garden.
And all the trouble began when people substituted the heavenly city for the paradise garden. When, in other words, popes began to be called urban and unbelievers were called pagan. Because a paganos is a country dweller, a man of the wiggles as distinct from a man of the streets.
A liver under the sky instead of one who lives in a box. Because the box, you see, is the great symbol of classification: what box are you in? All words are labels on intellectual boxes.
Is it animal? Is it vegetable? Is it mineral?
Three boxes. Is it solid or is it a gas? Is it Republican or is Democrat?
Is it capitalist or is it communist? Is it Christian or is it heathen? Is it male or is it female?
All boxes. And so, because we think in boxes, we live in boxes, all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same. And whereas certain kinds of fish live in beautiful shells.
Glorious spirally wiggles on them and lovely colors. And we tend to want everything straightened out, you see? And that rigidity is always in a fight with the surrounding fluidity.
And so we are, as it were, landlubbers rather than men of the waves. And the British have always made a great thing about this because they’ve always associated freedom with the ocean. Who are so free as the sons of the waves and Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
Because of this seamanship. Now, we think, you see, of the sea as fluid and the land as solid. And nothing could be further from the truth, as you’ve all experienced recently in southern California.
The Earth is not very solid. It flows. Where I live, in Sausalito, we have along the waterfront a lot of land that has been reclaimed.
And not so long ago they built a marina quite close to us, where they dredged out mud to make the marina, not realizing that land is liquid. Therefore, the land adjoining the water is sinking to fill up the hole made by excavating for the marina. People just don’t think of things like that because they think of land as solid.
And so, in religion we are seemingly looking for solids, for something upon which I can take my stand, for a firm foundation, for the Rock of Ages, or even—poor old Paul Tillich—for the ground of being. But we are not living in that sort of universe. We’re living in a fluid universe in which the art of faith is not in taking one’s stand, but in learning to swim.
You don’t cling to, you don’t try to stand on water. By breathing and by a certain relaxation, you learn to trust the water to support you. This is even more true in flying in the air—gliding, especially—or in sailing.
In all those arts there is an adaptation to the fluid, and that is the major thing that we have to learn if we want to survive as a species—and survive happily. Nobody wants just to go on. One wants to go on in an elegant way.
And even that passion for survival is something against pleasure. Because nothing ruins pleasure more than the anxiety to go on having it. More!
More! More! Because that shows, when you ask for more, more, more and have the anxiety to go on, that you’re not having it now.
You always think it’s coming. That you want jam tomorrow is more pleasing than jam today. And we say of something that is useless: it has no future.
That’s the most awful thing you can say about it. I would rather say of something that’s no good: it has no present, not it has no future. Because the future is merely a promise in the same way as this symbol is merely a promise to pay.
Promises, promises, promises. So therefore, it is fundamental to pleasure that one learns to wiggle and not be stiff and rigid. As we would say: let go.
Relax. That doesn’t mean become droopy. Relax means to become supple.
It also means to learn the strength of your weight, how to use weight, how to flow with gravity. Water, for example, always flows with gravity. And it wiggles: it takes the course of least resistance and yet has tremendous strength.
But we, in our white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethical system—not to mention our Irish Catholic one, which is really the same thing only a little bit more fancy and dressed up in lace—is to take a line of least resistance is considered cowardly and despicable. Go straight! KAFLUNG!
Right through. The bulldozer ahead. Why go straight?
We’ve got to get there! Fastest way! Shortest distance between two points.
Now I get back to jogging. That is not the right way to run. The right way to run is to dance.
To dance across the countryside. And anyone who dances across the countryside will outwit and out-time the jogger. I don’t know if any of you witnessed the world cup in soccer last year on television.
It was won by the Brazilian team, and I have never seen such soccer. That’s not the way they taught us to play it in school. As the Sportswriter and the London Times put it: they danced their way to victory.
Because the whole thing was like very fine basketball, where instead of being this sort of tough pushing to victory, they were lilting with that ball. And the most incredible teamwork of subtle passing, bouncing it off almost any part of the body with a capacity to give it direction—with one’s back, with one’s shoulder, with one’s hip, anything; head—it was a beautiful art and a magnificent spectacle. But, you see, we are not taught to do things that way because we are taught that life is serious, and therefore must be done in an efficient way—but according to Euclidean ideas of efficiency.
In ancient times, when people worked, they used to sing. Hardly anybody sings anymore except at a performance of some kind or something like that. Imagine a bank teller singing as they were counting out the money: “Oh, the king was in his counting house, counting out the money.
5, 10 and 20, 30, 40, 50.” You know? Why not? What would happen if you were confronted by a singing bank teller?
You would complain to the management and say, “This is money! It’s very serious! You can’t sing about it.
Everything will go wrong!” Can you imagine a stockbroker’s working song? I have seen people. I once had my shoes shined in a New York subway.
That was a most extraordinary performance! Ba doo jee da! Dee doo dee da!
Dee doo dee doo dee doo dee! Daa daa! Boo!
Boo! Boo! Whzzht!
Pshht! Whzzht! Pshht!
You know? And he was swinging. And imagine—supposing you were a bus driver.
You know, most people, when they drive a bus through city traffic, they are cursing and swearing and being angry and fighting the clock all the way through town. Well, that’s a disaster! But imagine driving a bus with the idea that going from here to there—the point wasn’t to get there, but the point was to go!
And dancing that bus through the streets with very, very skillfully accurate traffic dodging. And when you get to a stoplight and there’s a jam, you play a little tune on the horn, or you pass jokes to the cab driver near you, or you play with the passengers. See, anything can be turned into juggling; into playing with balls.
That’s why we say “Have a ball!” So this bus driver is swinging through the streets and he prides himself in the marvel of his terpsichorean art. But people don’t do that. Because work is not supposed to be pleasant, because you get paid for it.
You’re not supposed to get paid for enjoying yourself. See, that’s what I do, because I think I’m smart. I talk to you not because I think I’m doing you any good, but because I like talking about these things.
And if you pay me for it, then I make my living. It’s as simple as that. I’m a sort of philosophical entertainer.
But that’s the point: that the transformation of work is swinging it. And the curse of work—that came in the story of Genesis, you see—work became a curse because the tree of knowledge was the knowledge not of good and evil in the ordinary sense, but of the advantageous and the disadvantageous. The words in Hebrew refer to the art of metallurgy.
That’s where the trouble begins: when we use technology to get there fast. And the faster we get there, the less worth is the place of arrival because you’ve eliminated the distance between. And that’s what makes the difference between here and there: the distance.
If you take it away, then there is the same as here. So there was no point going there. There’s no point going from here to Honolulu.
None, whatever; it’s the same place to all intents and purposes. Certainly no point in going from Los Angeles to Tokyo. I mean, there are a few nice little bars in Tokyo where you can get sushi, but you can get them in Los Angeles now because Tokyo’s come to Los Angeles.
So it’s practically the same place. And both have the same smog. The police in Tokyo wear gas masks when they’re directing traffic.
You know, crazy. Is this wealth? You have a $150,000 house in Beverly Hills and live in poison gas.
Crazy. That’s wealth. So work, then, being regarded as a method of getting there effectively.
A lot of businessmen imagine that they are practical people. They say, “Oh, I’m not in for philosophy and that kind of thing. I’m a practical man and I can get things done.” What?
What is practical? Well, you made money, but that’s not practical until you spend it, until you enjoy it. And it’s very difficult to enjoy money.
Money is a great responsibility. Besides, if you get lots of it, you’re afraid something is going to take it away. It gives you the jitters.
You know, lots of people think that if they had a little more money, their problems would be solved. And they get it, and they worry about their health. There’s always something to worry about if you’re the worrying kind.
Always. And it can get worse instead of getting better by achieving all those things you think will stop you worrying. So the first principle in (we could call it) the art of pleasure is: you must swing.
And that means—or at least it looks like, superficially—that you mustn’t take anything seriously. You must realize that life is a form of dancing. And dancing is, of course, not serious, and that’s why it’s prohibited by Baptists and gloomy people of that kind.
They don’t approve of dancing. Even in the Catholic Church you don’t normally see priests dancing. I mean, it’s not because it’s sexy.
You can dance without partners of the opposite sex. You can dance by yourself. But it’s considered undignified.
This was all started by one of David’s wives. I think her name was… it wasn’t Bathsheba; I forget which one it was. Perhaps somebody remembers it better than I do.
Anyway, he danced before the Ark of the Covenant, and she reproved him for being undignified. Because he didn’t sit stiff and rigid. But what is the virtue in being stiff and rigid?
As Lao Tzu said: “Man at his birth is supple and tender. But in death, he is rigid and hard. Plants when young are juicy and soft.
But when old, they are brittle and dry. And thus, suppleness and softness are the signs of life, but rigidity and hardness are the signs of death.” I suppose some men confuse psychic rigidity with getting a hard-on, or at least substituted for it as they substitute guns, rocketships, and other things of that kind to manifest a masculinity which isn’t really there. But certainly women should uphold to us.
I mean, the real secret of women’s liberation is the liberated woman; the woman who is the human serpent. The wiggly one. The gentle one who has the power of water.
And we should look to that, as Lao Tzu again said: “The valley spirit does not die.” The valley spirit, that is: the spirit of the valley. That is the feminine as distinct from the mountain, which is the male. And so, while being a man, you should have a certain feminine element.
Because then you will become a universal channel. Hold to the masculine, yes. The mountain is necessary for there to be a valley.
You can’t have valleys without mountains. But unfortunately, the gorgeous music of Handel has prevented us from realizing the horror of that biblical passage: “Every valley shall be exalted and every mountain laid low, and the rough places made plain.” Why, it’s happening all over California. So the feminine—in the sense of the lilting, the playful, the curvaceous, the soft—is the neglected principal by all us Euclideans.
And it is the principle of life and of nature. But the problem that exists for rigid people—and we all get rigid in the sense of resistance: resistance to life, resistance to change—is: how on earth do I stop that syndrome, which makes me [???] uptight.
How do I stop that? Because it’s useless—almost useless. And do you know that your basic sense of ego—of existing here and of being “I” as distinct from all that—do you know it is muscular tension of a certain kind?
That is your the physical basis of your sense of identity. It is—for example, you can try this experiment. Maybe we’ll just try it.
It’s the simplest thing to do. I just want you to look a little downwards at whatever view is just in front of your eyes. Just allow your eyes to rest on that.
Just let the light, the color play with your eye, see? Just rested, easy. Now, supposing I said: “Now I want you to look hard at it.
Pay attention.” To be totally attentive and aware of what is in front of you. So look hard. Now do that.
Do whatever you would do if somebody told you to look hard. Now don’t do it. Just see, don’t look.
Now, again, look hard. And now don’t do it. So what’s the difference between the two states?
What did you do when you were looking hard that you didn’t do when you were looking easy? Where? What?
How do you tense your brain? What did you tense? Muscles around the eyes?
Anything else? Temples, yes. Narrowed your focus, yes.
That was a muscular action. Where do you feel concentration? You all go tense.
Tense all over. But, you see, muscular tension in your jaw, in your focal muscles, has absolutely nothing to do with seeing. The focal muscles of the eyes, all they do is simply open or close the aperture or move the lens in such a way that it comes in focus.
It doesn’t need any effort to do that. In fact, the effort you make when you look hard distracts from your seeing accurately. But we are constantly making efforts to do everything we do.
For example, to will something. We make all this absurd, muscular straining. Grit your teeth—doesn’t help you to do anything.
And all this accumulates as a constant strain between the eyes in here, and that’s what you call “I.” It’s that sensation of totally unnecessary strain that exists all the time. That is the ego, the physical referent of the idea “ego.” Just that unnecessary strain. Because that tells you you exist.
“Teacher, I’m trying. At least give me B for effort.” UGH! You know?
And it doesn’t work. So we could say psychic staring is the ego that we feel as being the center of myself, which is opposed to and which is resisting all that is defined as not myself. And so that rigidity of holding against life so that I maintain my shape, my form, my place—all the time that constant resistance—makes you uptight and unable to swing through fear of what will happen if you let it wiggle.
And so, therefore, a non-wiggly person is unadaptive and a wiggly world. And so you get these insectual, mechanical-like behavior patterns that have to go on, on, on regularly. Always the same.
Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. And they are not adaptable. And it doesn’t hold up as we watch, you see?
It isn’t holding up. The cracks are in the pavements. And, you know, the grass comes through.
We’re squaring all the fish out of existence. What will there be to eat? Somebody said we’re going to be left with nothing but crows, crab grass, and inedible fish.
So this is, you might say, it’s a square world, but then you can always—not by preaching at people and condemning them, but by wooing them—you can get them to come off it. See, that’s the thing that I’ve often said: that preaching is no good. Because on Sunday you go to church, and the preacher says baa, baa, baa, baa, baa and lays down the law, law, law.
In other words, he throws the book at you. Look at a church: the minister wears the same robes as the judge, and he’s got the book up there. And not only does he tell you what to do, he tells God what to do!
And this endless talk fest goes on. And when you get to sing, you sing hymns. Well, hymns are religious nursery rhymes.
They all have dreadful tunes and stupider words. And that’s all the singing, you know? Maybe the choir does an anthem.
Nobody dances. And there’s nothing mysterious going on—except in the Catholic Church, and they’re trying to get rid of it. And, you know, translate the mass into English so that everybody understands it and finds out at last what it meant after all.
Sunday is supposed to be the day to swing. God worked for six days, and the seventh day rested. That’s a time-out.