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Time out from being rational and methodical and efficient. It’s like a Mardi Gras. It’s like the old meaning of an orgy.
A carnival. You got to be crazy, a little. Because if you’re not crazy at regular intervals, you become insane.
Because you’re too rigid, you don’t swing in the wind, and so you’re going to collapse. But again, the problem remains. For the rigid person—and we all have a rigidity—how on earth do we release it?
Because I noticed that people who undertake programs of de-rigidifying themselves—it may be psychoanalysis, it may be therapy of some other kind, it may be exercises, it may be a sensory awareness training, it may be encounter groups, it may be yoga—all sorts of de-rigidifying processes are done in such a grim mood. I know there’s a book called You Must Relax. Because then people get into these things and they start playing games.
You know, it’s like people who retire and they think they’re going to have fun. So they get on the golf course early in the morning. And instead of enjoying golf, which is entirely possible, they begin to think not in terms of athletics, but of mathletics.
What is my score? See, they gamble on it. And that gives it the interest of the prayer mat; of the abstract aspect, you see?
How much? What is my measure? Do I matter?
“Matter” is the same as the word “meter.” See? “Measure.” Do I matter? And so they get this religion of golf and are playing all sorts of social games tied in with it.
See? It’s very serious. Then, when golf is over, they’ll go to the bridge table.
When they’re completely worn out, they’ll get vaguely drunk. And this grim pursuit of pleasure goes on. And the religious people do it, too.
They do their meditations at forty minutes before breakfast. UGH! You know?
Meditate. Then they’ve got stages they can get through in it. And they wonder whether so-and-so is doing yoga with Mrs. X, and so-and-so is doing it with Swami B.
And Mrs. X’s followers are afraid that Swami is phony. And it’s not quite the real thing. Well, how do you know whether he’s the real thing or not?
Well, the genuine swamis can perform magic, and they can remain undecomposed in forest lawn for an indefinite period without benefit of embalming. Crazy! And now, what does that prove?
You see, it’s the same old thing. That is spiritual technology. And the people who want power, who want to get there fast, want results now—the same temperament that wants it in the management of the material world wants it in the management of the spiritual world.
My yoga is more efficient than yours because it’s faster. I’m going to get there. So we come to the great question: where is “there”?
You’re gonna get there. Where is it? What do you want?
Where are you going? Very few people now. Some people have a precise, (I would say) disciplined, clear sense of what they want.
And they get it. And then they stop. As G. K. Chesterton once wittily said: “Progress is looking for a place to stop.” Very few people like that.
Most people you see, when they think of pleasure, don’t have any very definite idea. Or else they have a definite idea, which isn’t really what they wanted. When they get it, they don’t like it.
So the saying “be careful of what you desire. You may get it.” But fundamentally, then, the question arises: where is “there”? Where’s your rush?
Where are you going? To what are you progressing? Stop, look, and listen.
Because you may be there already—only that you don’t notice it. From the point of view of a starving Indian in a Calcutta slum, we are all as lucky as Maharajas. Even the most penurious person in this room is, by comparison, the Maharajah.
You’re there. You’ve arrived. But you say it can’t last.
Eventually I’m going to turn into a corpse. That gives you the horrors. Or you’re going to take a painful route to that end, And to be a terminal case and hospital on the end of a lot of tubes.
Say: “I don’t want to disintegrate.” So how can I overcome that? So you turn to religion and say, “Well, physical demise is an unfortunate limitation of the body. So I’m going to identify myself with something beyond the body.
So that I can believe that that will go on. And that will be the true vehicle of my personality. I shan’t lose all that I’ve acquired carrying around with me my bag of rubbish.
I managed to smuggle it across the border.” They say you can’t take it with you, but you can if the guards can’t notice it—because the baggage is spiritual. Do you know what the gate of heaven is? Hear about the “pearly gates”?
People think it’s gates decorated with pearls—it isn’t. The gate of heaven (it says in the Book of Revelation) is one pearl. Of course, it’s got a hole through for the string.
You’ve got to get through there. And you can’t get through if you’ve got a lot of baggage. So you’ve got to leave your past behind to get through.
Now, what happens to you when you get rid of your past? Forget it all; forget who you are. The future, of course, is the past reflected in your rear-vision mirror.
And as McLuhan says (he borrowed the metaphor from me, as a matter of fact): we’re like people driving, looking at their rear-vision mirror. So you’ve got to let go of all that past in order to get in through the pearly gate. And what is left of you when you let go of your past?
What remains? You can’t bring out your education. Can’t bring out your ancestry.
Can’t bring out your distinguished accomplishments, the things you’ve done. Because they say, “Well, you’ve done all that. But let’s see what you can do now.” Where are you?
Who are you when you have no past? After all, there isn’t any past. Where is it?
Twist your common sense around and see that you’re not being shoved by the past, you’re just leaving it behind like tracks. It’s not pushing you unless you insist on it. You can always pass the buck.
Everybody does that. They say, “I’m a neurotic mess because my mother was a neurotic mess. I never had a fair chance in life.” And somebody says to your mother, “Well, you shouldn’t’ve brought up a child like that.” “Well,” she says, “it’s too bad.
I know. But I couldn’t help it. I was a neurotic mess, and my father was just appalling, and my mother was dreadful.” And they look back over their shoulder and say, “Well, it was our parents.” Everybody passes the buck to the past until it gets back to Adam and Eve.
And you know what happened there? They passed the buck, too—to the serpent. And God looked at the serpent.
He didn’t ask, “Hast thou eaten the fruit of the tree whereof I told thee thou shouldst not eat?” He just looked at the serpent, and the serpent didn’t say anything. So the serpent—the wiggle—it really doesn’t have a past. Because it wiggles from its head backwards to the tail.
And it’s always the head where it starts. So are you a head? Or are you just a tail?
Do you move backwards or forwards? Which way are you going? See, if you’re leaving your past behind you, it doesn’t drive you.
It wells up out of a mysterious present, ever new. This moment is the creation of the universe. It’s starting now!
If you look back and back and wonder whether there was a big bang a long time ago, all you’ll see is vanishing traces. The big bang is happening now. This is when the world begins.
You’re doing it. Only, you’re not doing it by straining. A you deeper than the straining you is doing all this.
The same you that is growing your hair and coloring your eyes and making your thumbprints and all that. But you don’t think about it. You don’t strain muscles to do it.
But that is what is creating the world. Here it comes. Now.
So instead of thinking that the past is the reality which explains everything that happens now, let’s look at now and see it happening. Where does it happen from? That’s a question asked only by people who think that the past causes the present.
They always want to know where it comes from? Who started it? What makes it happen?
Supposing nothing makes it happen? Supposing it happens. Well, what is “it” that happens?
Again, we get to this basic question: what is it that you want? Where is it? What you looking for?
It’s the same question as: what is reality? What is now? What is life?
You won’t get at it by analysis of all sorts of things into their components. You won’t get it by labeling it in various ways and calling it names. You can only find out what it is by looking at it.
By feeling it directly. And all kinds of classification where we say, well, it’s animal, vegetable, mineral; it’s this, that, and the other, is putting it in boxes and tidying it up. That’s how you tidy up: you put everything away in a box.
And then you have boxes inside boxes and all that sort of thing. That’s tidied up. But when it’s all put away in boxes you can’t see it.
Now, instead of putting everything in boxes, let’s just look at it the way it comes. Now, that’s enough to start with. I’ve therefore discussed the principle of the necessity of wiggling.
Only, when I say necessity, you mustn’t take that word in a Calvinistic sense. We’ll talk about the pleasure of wiggling as a means of adaptation to the wiggly world. The human being is of such a design that it perceives everything by contrast.
There is no way of knowing whether the real world is arranged the same way or not. But we are a nervous system composed of neurons in an extraordinarily complicated pattern, based on a very simple principle called “is you is or is you ain’t”? The neuron—in transmitting any sensory input—either fires or doesn’t.
So you could represent the fact that it fires by the figure 1 and that it doesn’t by the figure 0. And out of zero and one, with those two integers alone, you can represent all conceivable numbers. This is called binary arithmetic and it is the kind of arithmetic that is used by digital computers.
Messages in 0-1 language can convey not only mathematical and verbal information, but also information that comes out as television; both black and white and in color. And through the same notation we can convey solid objects. You can turn a solid object into terms of this notation at one end of a process and have it come out at the other end of the process engraved in plastic, enlarged or diminished at will by the operation of laser beams.
So one is tempted, therefore, to think that “is you is or is you ain’t” is fundamental to the universe. The Chinese thought so, and therefore devised the yang and the yin; “yang” meaning “positive” and “yin” meaning “negative” principles upon which they based the Book of Changes, the I Ching, showing the various combinations of yang and yin that constitute the 64 basic situations of life. They took hexagrams, made up of six lines.
An unbroken line representing the yang and a broken line representing the yin. So if you have six lines with the two possibilities for each line, you get 64 different hexagrams. They use this for making decisions.
When it was necessary to make a decision, you would (by a random process) arrive at one of the 64 hexagrams, and on the basis of that decide what you were going to do. It’s rather like tossing a coin, only this coin has 64 sides instead of two. But it all comes down to: is it heads or tails?
Is it yang or is it yin? It seems absolutely basic to our life. And it’s rather awkward, because when we apply this to the pursuit of pleasure, it seems to be saying: yes, you can have pleasure, but you will not know what it is unless you can contrast it with non-pleasure.
And if you want to know pleasure, then you must have non-pleasure. If you want one end of the spectrum, you’ve got to know the other, because you can’t have a one-ended spectrum any more than you can have a magnet with one pole. And that seems to put an awful kibosh on everything we’re trying to do.
Every sort of achievement, every sort of progress, sort of rearrangement of things always runs into the problem that what you gain on the roundabout you lose on the swings. And this is dispiriting, to say the least—but in a way, oh, how true! So let’s look into this business rather thoroughly.
Because if you understand the yang and the yin, you really understand something. The first point is this. Let me sort of clarify the situation in its most simple terms.
We’ll take the contrast of black and white. Now, obviously, if I’m confronted with a black background, there is nothing particular to register upon my attention and I am as good as blind. If I’m confronted with a purely white background, there is nothing in particular to attract my attention and I am as good as blind.
If, however, I’m a naughty little boy and I’m confronted with a black wall, and I have a piece of chalk, I am tempted to make a mark on it. And if I am confronted with a nice, clean white wall and I have a piece of charcoal in my hand, I’m tempted to make a black mark—because nature abhors a vacuum. So here I have a black ground with a white dot on it, and a white ground with a black dot.
Interesting. Now, of black and white, which is positive and which is negative? If I look at the white background with the black dot, I shall be inclined to say that the black is positive—because it’s the thing, it’s the mark.
If I look at the black background with the white dot, I shall, on the other hand, be inclined to say that the white is the positive—because it’s the thing, it’s the mark. I can think of white as positive in general in that it’s light, and black as negative because it’s darkness. But I can also think of white as negative because it’s blank.
French: blanche. I can think of black as positive because it’s not blank. It’s all filled up.
Then again, I can think of the dot as being the negation in both cases. Because my black background with a white dot is a picture of a wall with a hole in it. And my white background with a black dot is a picture of a box with a hole in it.
But I can choose it either way I like; call white negative and black positive, or vise versa. But it’s difficult to do both at the same time. Now, they are, of course, these two, as different as different can be.
We say it’s as different as black and white. Or we also say these two points of view are the poles apart—and we use the word polarization rather incorrectly to indicate an increase of discord in the society, whereas polarization is really a form of harmony. The two poles of the Earth are the harmony of the Earth.
The two poles of the magnet of the harmony of the magnet. Because they’re like male and female. A man, a woman are not the poles apart in the sense that they have no common ground.
We could say you can’t have a fight between a shark and a tiger, because they have no common ground. One lives on land and the other in the water. But there is common ground between poles.
Obviously, the common Earth is the common ground between the north and the south and the common magnet, if it’s electrical. The circuit runs from the positive to the negative. And the circuit won’t begin to run until a negative pole is established.
That’s what happens when you turn on the switch. So therefore, although the black and the white, the positive and the negative, are as different as different can be, they’re also the same. Because they are differences of one; of one field.
And this is what makes the difference between what we’ll call an exoteric point of view and an esoteric point of view. In philosophy, religion, and so forth, from the exoteric point of view, the black and the white are emphasized with respect to the difference: good and bad, life and death. Oh, how different.
Light and darkness. God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. That’s the exoteric point of view.
But always, behind that, there’s a secret. Every religion has a secret. There’s always something esoteric.
What is the esoteric thing that is only revealed to initiates; to people who can stand it? It’s simply that black and white, although explicitly different, are implicitly one. Because you can’t have one without the other.
You could say black is white, if by the word “is” you mean “implies”. The Buddhists say emptiness is form and form is emptiness. The Chinese way of saying it is not quite the English way; it doesn’t equals.
It rather means, Chinese is saying: void that form, form that void. In other words, it implies; it goeswith, if I may invent a word. So we say that is esoteric.
You mustn’t let it out in church that God has a dark side as well as a light side. But it says so. Isaiah 45:7—“I am the Lord and there is none else.
I form the light and create the darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.” Well, there’s your answer to the problem of evil.
But that, you see, we don’t let out, because someone who wants to commit a murder, they say there’s no reason I shouldn’t commit a murder, because if somebody didn’t commit murders, you wouldn’t know what nice people were. If somebody didn’t steal or cheat, you wouldn’t recognize honest men. Like, if it wasn’t a wet day occasionally, you wouldn’t enjoy the sunshine.
There’s no getting around it that that’s true. St. Paul wrestled with this problem when he saw that the law of Moses made people conscious of right and wrong. “I had not known that there was lust except the law had said, ‘thou shalt not covet’.” So therefore, he said (asking rhetorically), “Shall we sin that grace may abound?” Oh, mythi genito [?]!
“Heaven forbid!” So you have to be careful that you don’t let this get into the hands of children. Like it says on the bottle of poison: keep away from children. And yet we have poison, and we have uses for poison.
So, in the same way, we have uses for evil. In the ordinary way, we do a balancing act between them. And what we do is this: we establish an in-group and say this in group, which is us, has a collective ego.
And it is wrong to do anything evil to any member of this group. But it’s alright to do it to somebody who’s not in the group. Therefore, when we are going to be very evil to someone, we have to define that person as outside the group.
And so we—like when Hitler was going to persecute the Jews, they were defined as not really human. And likewise, if we are going to persecute [black people], we define them as not really human. People can easily see, they can imagine that, because a [black person] looks so different from a Caucasian, that he’s more like an animal.
Or you can take people who are generally thought to be insane and you can deprive them of civil rights without due process. They’re insane; they’re defined as not all there. They’re not human, merely bodies.
Their mind is absent. We used to do that with heretics and other very seriously diseased people; lepers and so on. They were outcasts.
They were not humans. And they were therefore outlawed. They didn’t have the protection of the in-group.
So the worst thing we can do in eating is cannibalism: don’t eat your own kind. You may eat everything else, but not your kind. But that still doesn’t get away from the fact, you see, that you cannot live without eating, and you cannot therefore live without death, without committing murder.
I don’t know what the practical solution to that is, except one I’ve suggested is that if you do eat any living creature, at least you can show your respect by cooking it well. As Lin Yutang said: “A fish that has died for you and has not been well cooked has died in vain.” Now, there are very, very interesting applications of this theory. Let’s look at some of the contrasts in terms of which we are aware.
Primary, of course, is what is myself and what is not—which is a sort of contrast, not of two ends of a pole, but rather of the center of a circle and the circumference of the circle. Of course, those are two ends of the radius: one end still, the other end moving. And we say we feel there is a great difference between “myself” and “other.” I do not know your thoughts, I do not feel the pleasures and pains unless I am in a sympathetic relationship with you.
I don’t know what you’re going to do. My actions are voluntary, yours are involuntary so far as I’m concerned. And yet, when I think it over, I realize that I could not realize “self” without the contrast of “other.” I wouldn’t know what I meant by myself unless I meant something contrasting by someone else, or something else.