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“Self” means “self” only because “other” means “other” just in the same way as “is” means “is” only because you can think of “isn’t.” And you know what “isn’t” means because you know what “is” means, and you know what “is” means because you know what “isn’t” means. There is a relation. And so, likewise, with the black and the white we see the relation.
But that implies that self and other are inseparable. They gowith each other. Characteristic of the difference between self and other is voluntary behavior and involuntary behavior: what you do on the one hand and what happens to you on the other.
This is not always quite coterminous with the difference between self and other, because when you have hiccups, you feel that it happened to you, but it was your hiccups—or belly rumbles, or headache, or whatever. What about when you breathe? Do you do it or does it happen to you?
That’s a very moot case because you can feel you’re doing it, but you can also feel it happening to you. So perhaps the distinction between the voluntary and the involuntary is a little arbitrary, a little vague. Certainly it is when it comes to breathing.
But once again, I think how could I say of an act I’ve done it unless there were contrasting acts of which I could say I didn’t do them? So I need the involuntary if I’m to have any voluntary. So that if there is a union of implication between the two, I get the same sort of relationship between them as I explained when I said you can use white for either the positive or the negative symbol.
In other words, I can regard what I do as what happens to me, and I can regard what happens to me as what I do. It is in this sense that a Hindu or a Buddhist will say: if you have an accident, it was your karma. Because the word karma means nothing more than “doing.” You had an accident.
It was your doing. Well, we would say that’s not fair. And naïve people suppose it was their doing in the sense that this mishap is a punishment for a misdeed you did at a former time.
That’s only a superstitious meaning of karma. Karma means literally: “you did it.” But you did your accident in the same way, you see, as you do certain other things that are classified as involuntary, like growing your hair or digesting your dinner. Because it all depends what you mean by “you.” If you restrict self to the voluntary, then you get the distinction between what you did and what you didn’t do.
But if the self really must include the other and the involuntary, then others are your others and involuntary happenings are your deeds. That’s rather interesting. You may feel—as a result of seeing that—one of two things: you may feel that you really don’t do anything at all.
That you are not completely deterministic universe where everything happens. That your own voluntary decisions and deeds spring out of unconscious mental mechanisms which determine them completely, so that you are at best only a witness of what happens. Or you can feel the opposite of that: you can feel that you are God, that you’re doing everything.
That rocks fall, water is wet, and fire hot because of you. Which is, in a way, true. Because the sun would not be light except in relationship to eyes that can see light.
Nor would rocks be hard except in relation to relatively soft skin. Nor would they be heavy except in relation to a certain musculature. So by the way you are you evoke the way the world is.
We might say there are some vibrations out there that are really out there. But these vibrations are not colored, or soft or hard, or light or dark, or light or heavy until in relation to some sensitive system. But then again, the sensitive nervous system is part of the external world.
And the external world is an event in the nervous system. The inside of the box is outside the box, and the outside is inside. I mean, you know, it seems to flip flop perpetually.
Take, again, another contrast: the solid in the space. Most of us think that reality is solid, rather than space. We talk about hard facts.
We talk about impenetrable reality; even brute facts. The hard always seems real, just like the black mark on a white background, even though it’s black, even though the solid is untransparent, unluminous, it seems to be more real than blue sky. This is a very partial point of view.
Can you imagine a world that was solid without any space? The edges of the solid would be, of course, invisible. There would be no edges.
Because an edge is a point of interface between a solid and a space. So if you take away space, you take away solid. Alright, let’s take away solid, where’s the space?
After all, you say of space: it’s a space between. If there are no limits, there’s no space. Even if you imagine purely empty space, you’ve always got the sense of yourself looking at it, and that’s the solid.
Now, this is very awkward. Because we are quite sure that space isn’t there. We take no account of it and therefore get puzzled when our mathematicians and physicists begin to talk about curved space, or properties of space, or expanding space.
People say—the ordinary, average person says, “You can’t talk like that. That’s bunk! Space can’t expand because it’s not there.
It isn’t anything. It can’t do anything.” Well, let’s see if a solid can. Let’s investigate a solid.
You know what happens when you start going into nuclear physics: you find that, in any given solid, however dense a piece of steel it may be, there’s a great deal more space in it than there is any solid. The distances between molecules, the distances between atoms and subatomic particles are relatively vast. In something there’s a lot more nothing than there is any something.
Because as you investigate and penetrate the solid, you find it to be increasingly spacious. Now, what happens when we investigate the spacious? How do you investigate space?
Why, you go there. You bring in a solid. You map it.
So space and solid are really like poles. They’re limits. And the same with yourself and the other, the organism and the environment, the individual in the world.
Go thoroughly into any one and you get the other. Ask, for example, the question: what do you mean when you love yourself? Love yourself thoroughly.
I want you to be completely selfish as possible. Tell me: what do you love? Wowee!
You see? Well, I like to… I like candy, I like beautiful girls, I like beefsteak, I like wine, I like good bread, I like the sun on a lovely landscape, I like clear water, I like music. Come on, now!
Talk about yourself, will you, for a change! And I suddenly realize I can’t. When I love myself, I think of all things other than myself that I love.
It’s very queer. But that’s what’s called the basic flip-floppability between the powers of opposites. That’s why the Chinese represent them with these two interlocked commas that suggest the kind of blwwp, blwwp, blwwp, blwwp rhythm.
So that when you get the full development of yang, you get the beginning of yin. And when you get the full development of yin, you’ll get the beginning of yang. That is, the one implies the other.
So they’re always flipping; doing a flip. And doing a flip is the love that makes the world go ’round. You’ve got a double helix, so the male and the female.
That’s the love position. The double helix. Spiral nebulae do this.
So do creatures in sexual intercourse. The double helix: I’m chasing you, you’re chasing me. I love you so much I could eat you.
I realized myself, you see, only through other. So in this way, then, we get another marvelous instance of the pairs of opposites. We’ve got the differences, and we see a unity between them.
Then let’s contrast the principle of difference with the principle of unity. Here we are again. We know what we mean by different because we know what we mean by one.
So difference implies unity and unity implies difference. Now, what is it that lies beyond difference in unity? See, we found unity lying beyond differences.
North and south. The difference is united. They are poles of one.
Alright, now let’s take difference in unity. What lies between them? You could say your mind.
As in the magnetic tape: what lies between the on signals; the one signals and the zero signals? Of course, the tape. They’re both on the tape.
Only, the tape as such doesn’t register. It registers only in terms of yes or no. But you don’t get a signal tape with yes/no tape because it’s irrelevant, makes no difference.
And yet, if there weren’t the tape there, you wouldn’t get any signals at all. So is there something underlying yes and no, life and death, light and darkness? Well, that’s what we call God.
Only, we can’t say anything about it because everything we say is a statement, and that implies an opposite. But as I pointed out in the beginning: this is so frustrating! Because we want to play a game with these opposites, you see?
Just like we have opposites in chess: the black side and the white side. But we want to win. And we want to win—but then, when we think of the other fellow, we realize that if I’m going to win, you’re going to lose.
It’s rather hard, isn’t it? Couldn’t we arrange for a game in which everybody wins? Then nobody wins.
Nothing happened. There was no game. So to try to play a no-lose game is impossible.
We set ourselves an impossible task, and that makes us feel very frustrated. Always frustrated, because we’re trying to do what can’t be done. You want it good all the time.
You want sunshine every day—okay, a desert for you. No, that’s not what you wanted, was it? Do you really want a world which is all positive?
No, nobody really does. Only, we think we do. We think we ought to.
But it still bothers us. Because after all, if I come to the conclusion that it doesn’t make any difference, it’s going to be black and white, black and white, life and death, good and evil, alternately for ever and ever and ever. I can’t improve this world.
I feel sort of sad, and I’m just going to sit around and vegetate. All the guts have gone out of me. And yet I can’t put up with that.
I have an itch. Surely, there must be some way of getting through. So what is it?
Is there a great pleasure which lies beyond the ordinary contrast of pleasure and pain? What do the Hindus mean when they say that Brahman, the absolute reality, is satcitānanda? Sat: “reality,” cit: “consciousness,” ānanda: “bliss.” What is ānanda?
What is metaphysical bliss? Joy beyond pleasure/pain, good/evil? Has such a conception even any meaning?
Well, in all the various accounts that are given to us of the mystical experience, they have an intense, joyousness: the sudden realization that the dark and the light constitute a harmony. They are not discordant. That, as somebody once put it to me—this was a lady of sixty or so, who was in an accident with an elevator, and she had her leg crushed.
And they couldn’t get a rescue crew to her for half an hour. But she said: “During that time I had the most extraordinary experience. I realized there wasn’t one grain of dust in this whole universe that is out of place.” Pretty weird.
But from a strictly philosophical and logical point of view it doesn’t mean anything. If I say, “everything is good”—you know, sort of a Christian science attitude—it doesn’t mean anything. It’s no more, from a logical point of view, than saying “everything is everything.” That doesn’t tell me anything.
It’s all good. It’s all happy. It’s all harmonious.
And yet, if any one of you ever had an experience of cosmic consciousness, you know jolly well that those are no idle words. Because you can see the positive and the negative, the yes and no singing together, constituting each other in this fantastic dance in which the outward radiance, flowing outward of the white light, is at the same time the withdrawal of the black outline. And that withdrawal seems to be drawing aside a veil to show the white, the light.
And if the veil didn’t draw back, there would be no light. The veil to the drawing back for the light to shine. Or did the light shove the veil back.
If it hadn’t got a veil to shove back, where would the contrast be? So you see the light and the dark playing with each other. So there is a concept in a game called good sportsmanship, which means that you can be a good loser, that you can play the part of “lose” with the same enthusiasm that you can play the part of “win.” And therefore, what you look for is a good opponent; someone who’ll really give you a run.
And so what you do is: you let the opponent win every so often, and you have to try and keep yourself on top as just a little edge on the other one, you see? Well, after a while, you see, your consciousness changes and you find you’re always a little on top when you average it out. And that gets boring.
So you’re going, after a while, to let the other person average out. But then you’re going to count the spaces. Do you see?
For a year, you average out. Then you’ll allow your your partner to have six months averaging out better. And you get a little more daring and give him seven months.
Then he’s going to catch up with you just at eleven months. And I’m going to come in again and I’m going to add another twelve months in which I’m the usual winner. See?
The more you think of that, the more you think, “Well, I’m kind of a cad to be like this.” You’ve got to let the other person win. Because you can’t maintain consciousness without the contrast, you see? That’s why people go in for adventure, why we take risks, why we do absolutely foolish things: toss a coin and see what happens.
Go skydiving. Let’s go roaring around in racing cars. Let’s even have wars, see what happens.
Because some people are cautious and say life is like a fire, and the thing to do is to keep it burning as long as possible. See, there are two kinds of pipe smokers: people who take enormous puffs and having vast clouds of smoke, and the pipe burns out very quickly, and the other people who very slowly take a puff and keep the pipe going for a long, long time. Some people like a quick, enormous flash.
Others like a long, long, slow glow. Who’s right? Who’s left?
You can take it either way. You may go off with a whimper, but we will go off with a bang. The morning glory blooms for an hour, and yet it differs not of heart from the giant pain that lives for a thousand years.
Fruit fly at the one end, bzzzt, lives a few hours. Tortoise at the other—slow, solemn tortoise—who lives for 500 years, but slowly. Maybe they both, from their own point of view, lived the same time.
Maybe the fruit fly thinks a few hours are very long and the tortoise thinks 500 years are but four score and ten and all flesh is grass. From your own point of view, it’s always the same. Because it’s your point of view.
If you are a person born to riches, you will feel it’s terrible to go down to poverty. But if you’re born to poverty, that will be the usual state of affairs. You will think it’s extremely lucky if you rise to riches.
But, you see, I haven’t really answered the question. Is there any way around this? Yeah, we can be a good sport, but it all comes out the same thing in the end.
I mean, it balances out. And so what? What do you mean, so what?
What’s wrong with it doing that? Would you rather it was different? Well, if you really go into your thinking, you find you can’t rather that it was different.
When you see that you cannot have the positive without the negative, and if you want the positive, you’ll have to take the negative. You say, “Well, it’s making the best of it,” you know? As if to say, “Well, the thing’s kind of a lousy deal, but I’ll take it.” But I would ask you: what else would you have?
Suggest me a better arrangement. You suddenly find that if you do suggest what you think is a better arrangement, that that won’t be what you wanted. And you finally have to admit that you want it the way it is.
Because the whole nature of wanting involves contrast. You want the good to be good, don’t you? You wanted it be real yummy.
Okay. Alright, so I’ll give you nothing but chocolate éclairs with honey and a glass of champagne for breakfast every day, and for lunch and for dinner. Whew!
You’ll soon get sick of that. Or I’ll give you a harem. You just keep it up day and night.
Pretty soon you will say, “Will someone take me to a bar?” So by following this through the relentless logic of “is you is or is you ain’t,” you come to the curious sensation that, after all, if I really go into this problem of life, it is the way I want it to be. If I look at it superficially and in a sort of short-run view, well, it isn’t the way I want it. I want it changed right now.
See? And I will—you see, life is like sleeping on a hard bed. You lie on your left side for a while and then you say, “I can’t stand this anymore,” and turn on your right side.
Same with politics. And you get tired of that, so you say, “Well, I’ll lie on my left.” You get tired of that little bit faster than you did before. You try the right again.
And it’s boring, so you try your back. Then that begins to get rough. Then you turn over and lie on your tummy.
And then you switch to your back. And to your tummy. And then you try your right side again, then your left, you see?
And so you proceed. But what else do you suggest? I would like it to be so that I was always comfortable.
But you can see that, if you were, you wouldn’t know what comfortable is. So here’s this puzzle. It’s got two sides.
Side one: I cannot beat the game of opposites. I cannot have more positive than negative. Side two: I wouldn’t want it otherwise, because I cannot imagine how to improve it.
So, involved in this is a sudden and curious initial deflation. I’m out of sorts when I feel there’s no impression I can make on it. And yet I find: who is this “I” that’s tried to interfere and wants to be challenged and is put out of sorts?
Well, when I look for it, I can’t find it. I cannot find an “I,” “myself” opposed to “they” or “it.” Because how could I have the one without the other? So that feeling that I had of deflation, of frustration, was simply the realization there is no such thing as a separate “I.” Now, if you don’t want to feel that truth, you will resist feeling it.
But if you’re open, this logic of the opposites of the game of black and white will lead you ineluctably to the conclusion that you have no separate self apart from what is called “other.” So there you are. You find that you are the vibration system, which is what’s going on. You are the undulation, the pulsation, called existence.
That’s you. And it’s going womm womm womm womm womm womm womm womm womm womm in ever so many different ways. Well, you say, “Is that all?” What more did you expect?
“Well, I don’t know what I wanted. Just a little something more.” You mean you want a surprise? I think we’re back where we were a little while ago.
But the surprise is, in a way, this: we are looking in this system for that little something more which will give it meaning. But we’re looking for the wrong kind of meaning. The meaning of this “now you’ll see it, now you don’t,” “is you is or is you ain’t,” tcha-tcha tcha-tcha tcha-tcha tcha, this pulsation, goojidee goojidee goojidee goojidee goojidee—the meaning of it is not apart from it, away from it, something different.
The meaning of it is the dance, you see? That’s why we get back to the point I made this morning. To get with this you’ve got to swing.
In other words: if during the winter I think of the summer, it’s colder. And if during the summer I think of the winter or ice cream, it’s hotter. So that’s why the Zen master replies, “In summer we sweat, in winter we shiver.” When it’s hot, eat curry.
When it’s cold, try ice water. Swing with it! Roll with the punch.
This is jūdō. Because the colder you make it, the hotter it’ll get. Now we’ll have an intermission.