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Because as a principle in operation which the Japanese call jiji muge. Now, the word ji means any experience which you could identify as a thing or an event. And the doubling of the word, jiji means: “between thing-event and thing-event.” Muge: mu means “no,” ge means “barrier” or “obstruction.” Or, put it in another way: Every thing-event implies all the others.
And here, in this way, you begin to see that that is actually so. When you pick up a chain, you pick up one link and the rest comes. In this, you pick up one thing-event and the universe comes up with it.
Because, you see: there are no separate things. It’s all a single unified process, no longer divided into the voluntary and the involuntary, the “I” and the “you” or the “I” and the “it.” Because it is the big happening which is neither voluntary nor involuntary, which is neither free nor determined. All these are mere ideas about it.
You’ve abandoned all that. You’ve abandoned philosophy totally. Because you see it’s just a net designed for catching water.
And when all that’s gone and that whole attempt to clutch life, to capture the pleasure, has disintegrated—there it is. And you needn’t feel anxious about: will it stay? It’s a gorgeous thing to feel you’ve no longer got to worry whether it will stick around.
Because you know that if you do worry, you’ll shoo it away. So it’s a tremendous relief, you see, not to have to bother with: will it stick around? Will I lose my insight?
Will my satori take wing and go off with the bats? You just say: forget it! Because the more you let go of it, the more it stays.
And you don’t even have to worry about: will you be sure to let go of it? Because that, too, is a hangup. And you can begin—you see from your very weakness.
That’s your strength. It’s not your big ego and your big will that is the strong thing here. It’s your slobbiness, it’s your weakness, it’s your foolish side that is your strong suit here, see?
I suppose many of you are familiar with the work of Krishnamurti. And you will of course recognize that there is something in common between what he says and what I have been saying to you. But probably you will also notice that there’s something different.
Because Krishnamurti is more of a purist than I am, and he takes, apparently, a rather negative attitude to things that are recognizably religious. That is to say, he sets no store by religious literature, by ceremonies, by meditation practices, religious ideas and so forth, and does without them. He wouldn’t dream of being involved in a ritual, at least not one that would be mistaken for a religious ritual.
I, on the other hand, have a different attitude about those things because I, first of all, am not going to argue with anybody about their religion, because everybody’s religion is the same sort of thing as their life. You may be living a very weird life, but I could say—speaking sort of from a Hindu point of view—that that’s your trip this round. If the generation of māyā (of the world illusion) is the play of the Godhead, then he will play the villains as well as the heroes, the fools as well as the sages, and the sinners as well as the saints.
And that’s why I’m not out to convert anybody or win souls. Because it’s as if I would go and talk to a pig and say, “My dear pig, you should be a cow,” or to a giraffe and say, “Your neck is too long,” or to an elephant and say, “You are too heavy.” I try to see what people are not in the sense of trying to classify them or type them, but to see if it is possible to find what is called divine in every disguise. And beware [???]
was when he came to maturity. He used to look around. He was a mystic—who was part Hindu, part Buddhist, part Islamic—who lived in India in about the 15th century.
He used to look around and say, “To whom shall I preach?” Because he saw the beloved, the Godhead, on all sides in every being, and therefore felt it would be presumptuous to make any recommendations. That’s a strange state of mind. Because it’s so easily made over into a very shallow, Pollyannaish optimism.
But, you know, in the mythology of the Hindus they have some very nitty-gritty characters. Let’s take Kālī. Kālī, the female, one of Shiva’s girlfriends; shaktis.
She really represents the dark side of yin, the feminine of feminine. the spider mother, the devouring feminine, the night which sucks in all days. But also, Kālī is the mother of the universe.
But it emphasizes the dark side of the mother. And she’s shown with fangs, black-skinned. In one hand she carries a scimitar, in another a severed head.
And she is a bloody character. And, you know, there are Kālīs all around us. And it’s not like saying, “Oh, Kālī’s not so bad after all.
She has her good side.” The thing is to see a bad side as an aspect of the divine, and then genuinely be able to refrain from saying, “I wish you would improve.” It sounds sort of tough to do that. I mean, I feel the same way when I’m confronted with a representative of the militant lunatic fringe of Protestantism, a Jehovah’s Witness, or a Southern Baptist, or a Billy Graham type. I have immense personal distaste for that kind of religion.
So I wonder, and I look at it, and I think: where is the real kick in that? What are those people really doing? What do they get their basic pleasure from in this?
How can God be playing that game? That’s a very mysterious business. So I try to look at it that way instead of blankedly saying: well, all your religious gimmicks are vanity, therefore cease and desist.
Because although many religious gimmicks are vanity from my point of view, I yet think of Blake’s saying “the fool who persists in his folly will become wise.” And for this reason, even foolish religions are ways of realization. Because the more far out you get from realization, in a way, the nearer you get to it. Because the path is a circle.
Then, on the other hand, I suggested this morning that there’s a way of looking at religion which is quite different from: what will it do for me? What can I get out of it? What magic can I perform?
Here is yoga. Here is meditation. Here is zazen.
Ordinarily, we look into those practices and say: I wonder if that will do something for me? Now, I’m suggesting that we look at them quite differently—as art forms. And instead of saying what will a painting do for me?
What will sculpture or music do for me? I don’t think we ask that. We say: I enjoy music.
It’s fun. It’s beautiful. Let’s do some.
So you’re not looking for something from it. And that’s the attitude which I take to any practice which may be designated religious: that it’s an art form, that it is a way of expressing exuberance, delight, and above all the sense of wonder, appreciation of the magic of being. And I’ve often quoted that saying of van der Leeuw that the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
And the people who tried to explain mysteries are people who try to destroy mysteries, and that is in a way to destroy life. It’s often said by men that women are mysterious. Is that a complaint or a compliment?
I take it as a compliment. May they remain mysterious and may men remain mysterious to women. But you would see that there seems to be—after all I’ve said and after all that Krishnamurti says—there would seem to be something inconsistent in practicing meditation or going to church or participating in a ritual.
If we didn’t do those things, I think myself that life would be very much impoverished. All the churches would be turned into museums. The holy scriptures would be used for fuel.
The rituals might live on in funny dances. But we should be scrubbed clean of superstition. And I don’t exactly look forward to that prospect from an aesthetic point of view.
I like magical toys. I don’t believe in them in the sense of thinking they will help me in the competitive games of life. But when I see a figure of the Buddha seated on his lotus throne with an aureole behind him and incense burning in front of him, I feel something glowing, warm, civilizing, humanizing, and also mysterious.
It’s very hard to say what it is or to put your finger on it, because I don’t think it would be there if I could. Especially the Mahayana form of Buddhism has spread a kind of warm glow all over northern Asia. It’s such an urbane, such a sophisticated religion.
It doesn’t harass you with preachments, it doesn’t pursue you, it doesn’t make a busybody nuisance of itself. And yet it fosters the arts, it fosters compassion and concern—but not of the kind of concern for people that shoves what is good for them down their throats. And it’s so roomy—that’s why it’s called the Mahayana: the “great vehicle” or the “great course.” It has so many different ways in it, so many different practices.
And there’s no kind of scrubbing people down to the basic essentials. It’s not plagued with efficiology. So (personally, you see) I dig that.
I also like that side of Christianity where it’s expressed in Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t like scrubbed Christianity—the Protestant kind—where they take away the candles and the vestments and the mystery and the incense and make it all rational. Because when you ask the question: what are the essentials of a religion?
To my mind, when people reduce any religion to what they call the essentials, they get rid of all the important things and leave in only the misleading ones. Because when we get it down to essentials, we say—we get back to this question, you see, that all religions offer a way of salvation (or of liberation, or whatever it may be; of union with God). And the Protestant would say to the Roman Catholic: “Well, all your rituals and obscure ways are getting in the way of man reaching God directly.
We want to get all that crud out of the way and find a more efficient way of getting to God, so that we can reduce the course from five years to ten weeks.” Now you have to take off all those holy days, too, which distract from business, because it gives our apprentices holidays and we don’t want to lose time. We’re on the make. But, you see, the moment you reduce the time it takes, you take out the religion.
Because you make it into an enterprise to get something—and that’s what I’ve been telling you all this weekend you can’t do. Because the moment you try to get God, you assume that you aren’t there. When you don’t try to get, there’s a chance that you may discover that you are there already.
We were thinking over lunch how funny it would be if we got a real speeded-up easy course in meditation without tears: all the nonsense taken out of it, only the essentials, with a big headline: “They laughed when I sat down to meditate.” So here are all the merchants who are telling you the quick way. But what is fascinating about the non-efficient religions is precisely their colorfulness: all the unessential things they do, all the exuberance of flowers and smells and ornaments and color. You notice—in efficient religions the first thing they take away is color?
Why do people take away color? Oh, they say, “Color shows the dirt. You have to wash it all the time.” So you wear black because you live in a grimy city.
You don’t want to show the dirt. That’s efficiency. But color is the first thing that goes.
But let’s suppose we look at religion in an entirely different way. We have begun, first of all, you see, with the understanding that religion is not an acquisition, and therefore there’s nothing you can do to acquire it. You begin from the point of recognition that you are what you are.
You can’t improve yourself—because if you try to, you’ll only make yourself more tied up and then messed up. See? You have to recognize that, because there’s no alternative.
And then you’re in a position to be very simply and ingenuously aware of life without trying to do anything to it. You let it happen. And then it begins to show its color.
And then you feel intensely the marvel and magical nature of the world, so that whatever you do by way of a religious practice is an art form (like singing) to express the marvelous feeling that comes out of this. Not to secure yourself, not to acquire anything, any reward, but simply to live it up. It’s difficult, perhaps, for many people to understand how you could be living it up by meditating.
Meditation seems on the surface so dull. “Why… sit still for a long time? That’s awful!” You know how, when they tried to make you sit still as a child, how you resented it?
You’d be jumping around, looking for this, that, and the other all the time. Of course, you can do that. You can take up dervish dancing as a form of yoga, if your temperament suggests it.
But what about the more ordinary still-sitting kind of meditation? Nobody seems to realize that it’s supposed to be fun. You know, when you have been sick and you just have to lie in bed, there’s nothing else to do while everybody else in the world goes about their business.
And you’re left with almost nothing to do except listen. And you hear all the funny little noises that you don’t normally notice, of not only people, but also animals and birds and things going about their daily business. And it suddenly occurs to you that this is an unheeded symphony that’s going on.
You notice sunlight leaving curious patterns on the painted walls—maybe of a hospital room where there are patches of damp and cracks in the ceiling. And because you are in a condition of complete receptivity and passivity, all this starts to come to life. Because, of course, passivity is the root of life.
Activity is the end of it, but passivity is the beginning. It’s the womb from which creation starts. And so, in the same way, when you meditate, in some schools you will be given something to meditate on.
Although very often, when an Oriental explains that he meditates, and a Westerner asks as he will, “What do you meditate on?” the Oriental will look vaguely surprised. He says, “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t meditate on, I meditate.” Although, as I say, you might be given the practice of concentrating on a visual image of a chakra, or a mandala, or a syllable, or humming a sound, or some focal point.
But that isn’t necessary. When you are at the point of which I am speaking, where you are simply not doing anything—even not trying to do nothing, because you can’t—then you are sitting, and you are as aware as can be of every tip of a hair. And you’ve got nowhere to go.
You’re not in a hurry. There is a period of forty minutes, an hour, or whatever it is, where is it only required of you that should be. Now, normally, at that moment, one is impatient; somehow bothered by having to be restricted.
If you take it easy you will feel no restriction. I’m trying to think how I can explain this. If you lift up a heavy weight and hold it up on the tips of your fingers (say it’s a big rock), normally we think of that as an effort to maintain it there.
But there’s a certain way of looking at this where you say it isn’t an effort, it’s just going to stay there. And instead of fighting against any feeling of tension that the rock causes, you just turn that tension into: “It’s gonna stay there.” It’s a curious thing. You can support a heavy weight for a very oddly long time doing that.
So, in the same way, when you sit, even if your legs hurt or you get uncomfortable, there’s the sudden attitude wherein that just disappears and you’ve got this extraordinary—the only thing it does is: it keeps you awake, which is fine—then you’ve got this extraordinary feeling of the amazing nature of looking at reality, at life, without doing anything to it, without any sense of hurry, without any wish to improve it. Just let it happen. And you can understand, then, why Buddha images look blissful.
Because cats do this. Cats will sit for ages and watch. American Indians will do it.
They’ll sit for hours by a roadside. We think they’re dumb. You know: “Sometimes I sits and thinks, but mostly I just sits.” You think they have nothing better to do.
Someone else was saying at lunch that if you’re bothered on the phone and somebody asks you, “Could you come over this morning and do thus and so?” it’s perfectly legitimate to say, “No, this is my morning for a hair appointment. This is my morning to go down shopping,”—et cetera—“and I can’t come.” But if you say “This is my morning to be alone,” people would think you were very strange. Because you wouldn’t be doing something for the world.
But hermits, for example (and people who live solitary lives and meditate a great deal), are doing an enormous amount for the world. Just the very suspicion that people exist like that is marvelous for everybody! Because it says to all of us: Where do you think you’re going?
Why are you raising so much dust? Because you think you’re going somewhere and you’re already there. And this dust is getting in everybody’s nostrils, and it is polluting everything.
All because you are so busy to put up this big thing—whatever it is. It is getting top-heavy and it’s getting a bore holding the thing up. So to know that there are hermits deep in the forest is like knowing that there are still streams and flowers which no one has ever seen.
We are mostly of the mentality that if we heard of a hidden valley full of flowers which nobody has ever seen, we would say: “Ugh! That should be open to the public, should be bought for the nation.” You know? And they should put in a ranger station and toilet facilities and a picnic ground.
It’d be still worse if there were one person living in there and enjoying it all by himself. They’d say, “That selfish bastard! That he should live in that beautiful, flowery valley all alone.
Open it up! Let’s all have a look.” And then, when everybody’s had a look, the place is a desert. Now, I live opposite a forest.
It’s in a state park, and I can see right across to that forest. It’s a very big and very dense forest occupying the whole side of a valley. And I think sometimes it’d be fun to explore it.
And then, on the other hand, I decide I’m not going to. I’m not going to disturb it. The only one who lives there is an old she-goat who comes out every so often and dances on top of a big rock.
Oh, of course there are birds, and probably deer, and skunks, rabbits. But nobody ever goes there. You never see anybody in that forest.
And it’s just wonderful to leave it alone. So, you see here two things, two trains of my thought connect. The first train was, you see, the folly of trying to do good.
And the second train is that you are doing good by doing nothing. That the very hands off on this thing called life—the meditative attitude which realizes to you how magical it all is—also, it benefits other people in the same way as the untouched forest and wilderness land benefits people. It’s essential to our sanity to have those areas of un-interfered-with life.
So we might say that is the passive side of exuberant religion; is the meditative: the one activity in which we are completely here and now and not seeking any result. The other side of this exuberance is, of course, the musical dancing, ritualistic side of religion. When you see another kind of ritual—nobody is expecting to get anything out of this ritual because it’s not considered as magic.
It’s the Japanese tea ceremony. It is apparently a purely secular ritual. It is a way of drinking tea together, sociably.
Actually, it’s a Zen Buddhist ritual. Because in Zen, you get to a place where there isn’t any difference between religion and everyday life. But they don’t, therefore, knock the ritual out of everyday life.
They put the ritual into everyday life. They have the tea ceremony. And there, the beauty of gesture, and of the primitive style vessels that are used, and the serenity of doing this ritual for no reason except the ritual, is a very lovely experience.
But, you see, in the life of America today—and you notice it here in a rather special way—there is very little joyous ritual. I mean, there are Freemasons, and there are Shriners, and Knights of Columbus, but those people laugh at their own rituals, really. They don’t understand them.
They have no real feeling for it. It’s a kind of a clowning affair where you dress up, and you do this, and you give the money to charity, and so forth. And in the Roman Catholic Church, here, they don’t understand ritual.
So that you get the impression, you see, that&ghellip you know, you put a quarter in the slot, and BLLWWP! out comes a goody. You go to confession.
And you don’t even make the full confession, you know? You just say, “The sins that I remember are so and so and so,” and the priest says, “Blhwehbble blhwehbble blhwehbble blhwehbble blhwehbble blhwehbble blhwehbble blhwehbble blwehbble blhwehbblepp!” and then it’s done, you see? And I remember once watching a midnight mass in New York.
I never saw anything go so fast! I don’t know if any of you ever remember a story by Alphonse Daudet called Les Trois Messes Basses—The Three Low Masses—with a play on basses; low. It was about the three masses of Christmas being celebrated in one hell of a hurry because the priest and the acolytes all wanted to get to dinner.
And they gave themselves such indigestion at the dinner that they died and their ghosts were compelled to celebrate three masses through all eternity. Well, this mass was just like that. I’ve never seen anything like those—the people at the altar, the acolyte suddenly went up, genuflected, and vanished.
And it reminded me of that passage in the book of Genesis, where it says, “And Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” He just disappeared! I mean, PFFEEYONG! There was nothing stately about it.
There was no rhythm, no sense of a dance. It was: “Let’s get this thing ground out as fast as possible! Damndest [???
], you know? HAAAAAILmaryfullofgrace-thelordiswiththee-blessedblewbbleblwebble-blhwebbleblebbl-ourDEATH! You know?
I can understand that being done because somebody digs a kind of yooing yooing yooing yooijng yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing yooing sound, you see? But this isn’t done that way, it’s done to get it over with. So nobody digs it.
This ritual is just a magic to be done as fast as possible. You know, it’s like a prayer wheel with an electric motor on it! Now, you may laugh at prayer wheels.
Have you ever tried to use a prayer wheel? You get one—they’re all over the place nowadays—you rotate it, you see? It has a cylinder, and a little chain, and a weight on the end of the chain.
And you get this thing going. It says inside oṃ maṇi padme hūṃ. You get this going and, you know, you’ve got the Earth going ’round the sun.
That’s the same sort of process. You get this going, like this. Whoop tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo.
It’s fascinating. There’s a little bit of a trick to it, see? You don’t want the chain to get loose and drop the weight on the end.
So you’ve got to keep that rhythm going. Whoop tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo tch-choo. Once upon a time there was a miser, and a Buddhist priest was his friend.
He thought he’d go and trick that miser. The Buddhist priest said to the miser, “Look, every time you say the religious formula namu amida butsu”—which means: namu, like hail, or it really means “the name of;” Amitābha, the Buddha, that’s the great sun Buddha—“I’ll give you one sen.” (Which was 1⁄100 of a yen; that was a very small amount of money.) “But all you’ve got to say is namu amida butsu and I’ll give you a sen.” The miser thought, “That’s crazy!
Think of all the money I’ll make!” So he began, took out a brush. “Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.
Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.
Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.
Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.
Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.” Krrk! See?