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And the priest used to come and look at him every day and see these huge sheets of paper accumulating with all the counts he had done, one sen each. The priest is very happy. Guy’s going, “Namu amida butsu.
Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.” One day he came, there was a the miser sitting, saying, “Namu amida butsu.
Namu amida butsu. Namu amida butsu.” And he wasn’t making any marks. Priest said, “Ha-ha!” And another day, still sitting there, going “NamuamidabutsuNamuamidabutsuNamuamidabutsu,” nothing happening at all.
And then one day the priest came, and he opened the gate at the end of the garden path, and the doors flew open, and the miser came rushing out and he embraced the priest and says, “Oh! I can’t thank you enough. You don’t owe me any money at all.” Well, that explains the prayer wheel.
But, you see, if the prayer wheel is to do that thing—or rather, you are to do that thing—you can’t be in a hurry. You can’t be trying to get anything. You must be fascinated with the possibility of tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo, you see?
And you just do this tchoo tchoo tchoo tchoo at your wits’ end. It’s why you’re kind of a nut. You have to be, you see, to do this.
You’re at your wits’ end. All there is. You don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to think anything, you don’t have to be virtuous, you don’t have to believe anything.
All you have to do is do goojhee goojhee goojhee goojhee goojhee, see? That’s it. And so you can have a ball swinging that thing.
So therefore, we need to be delivered from utilitarian religion altogether and come to the realization that the highest form of religion is perfectly useless. And this is the true nature of play, and of course it’s the true nature of the universe. And, you see, what I’m doing is: I’m playing a sort of little trick here because I’m showing you the importance of the unimportant.
See, we got ourselves down to being absolutely incapable—that’s what we did to begin with—and show you that that’s where you really begin to live. So now, again, we’re going to get down to the very highest that there is—the Godhead, and religion, and the Saints and angels, and the Dhyani Buddhas in their mandalas sitting at the heart of the universe—and we’re going to show that they are all quite useless. They serve no purpose whatever.
They are not good for anyone or for anything. Why? They don’t need to be.
They’re not going anywhere because they’re there. And the expression, the māyā of the universe, which they show, is not done because they have some purpose to work out. It’s the way you spend your time when you don’t have any purpose to work out!
Then you can afford to be devious. You don’t have to go the direct way. If you’ve got a purpose, get there baby!
See? ZHOOMP! Like that.
Get there! But if you don’t have any purpose, you wander and you go ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo ka-choo, and suddenly you say, “Well, that’s the outline of a leaf.” And all those veins going through it: Blww blww blww blww blww blww, see? So you get the wiggly path instead of a straight path.
Let’s go ’round in circles. So the planets go ’round the sun. They’re not going anywhere.
What’s the sun? Going around another star. And all this thing is a great spiral nebula with its center somewhere beyond the constellation of Sagittarius going around and around.
So, in the religious dance, we all join hands and we go around. In meditation, you make your breath go ’round. It isn’t just in and out like a pump, whhsht tchh-foo.
It’s not like that. It goes like this, and there’s no sort of hitch between the in and the out. It flows the whole way.
You see? In yoga. The Chinese call it the circulation of the light.
It’s going ’round. In Buddhism and in Hinduism they talk about the world as saṃsāra, the round. The sorry-round.
The sorry-go-round, as distinct from the merry-go-round. Saṃsāra, the wheel of becoming, the bhavacakra, the wheel of birth and death. And, on the other hand, there are certain people who have a different attitude to the wheel of fortune: let’s spin it for fun!
Let’s gamble! Not to make money, but just because it’s fun to gamble. Now, you see, that is a gamesman.
He’s liberated. He’s not hung up on the game. So, in the same way, the mandala is a symbol of the transformed rat race.
Now, what’s the nature of the rat race? The bhavacakra symbol of the six divisions of life, with the successful people at the top (they’re the angels), the unsuccessful people at the bottom (the naraka, or the purgatorial states of extreme suffering). And then in between are various graduated states: the humans, the frustrated spirits, the furious spirits, and the animals.
See? At the top are the gods, at the bottom are the demons and the tormented spirits. So everybody is moving to get up.
So in a way, wherever you are, you’re at the bottom; you’re tormented. Those gods are trying to stay up. But there’s no way higher than heaven.
And the only way is down. Down and out. So they got that thing running, whhzzz whhzzz whhzzz whhzzz whhzzz, see?
Now, importantly, recognize on this wheel that being at the top is not being a Buddha. You may be a God, you may be an angel, a deva—from which we get our word “divine” as well as “devil.” But you’re not a Buddha. You’re not liberated from the wheel.
How do you get off? By knowing that wherever you are on the wheel is it. Be there.
Let’s say we’re all at the bottom, because on a squirrel cage wheel, the running squirrel or rat always stays at the bottom, you see? Alright, so you’re as low as you can get. That’s what I was pointing out this morning.
Can’t get any lower. You’re in the naraka: the bottom of hell. But there you are.
Now, what happens? You realize that every point on the wheel is there. And so you get a different picture of the wheel: the significance of it is no longer in the rotary movement around it, but suddenly in the movement from the center to the circumference.
And from the circumference to the center, you get a flower. The path of the petal. And your wheel suddenly becomes a mandala—that is to say, a circle subdivided by petals (or other symbolic petals) to be a floral shape.
And there you see the great Tibetan paintings of mandalas. We go back to the five great Buddhas, (Dainichi Nyorai as the Japanese say, in Sanskrit he’s Mahāvairocana Buddha), who represents the basic energy of the universe, the great sun Buddha. He’s in the middle.
Then he has around him Amitābha, Akṣobhya, Ratnasambhava and Amoghasiddhi. And there are all these beautiful jeweled creatures in their places, and you see the balanced wheel; the joyous wheel. So this is the transformation of the rat race.
And this also is a kind of ritualization of everyday life. And this—you see, just as the rat race has transformed into the mandala, so for the person who is a master of pleasure, the little things of everyday life are likewise ritualized. Not because somebody is compulsive—you know: “All the dishes must be without spot!
Give me my magnifying glass.” Not that. But that doing any simple action with delight looks ritualistic. If you watch a very skilled craftsman at work, or a surgeon, or a good dentist, or a shoemaker, or a potter who thoroughly loves the work, you notice their caressing hands, the delight, the dance they do; to do this thing.
The doing of it is more important than the done-ing of it. You see, they look ritualistic in their action. It’s a ceremony, and you think he’s worshiping some kind of a God.
That’s because he’s turned the rat race into the mandala. So you can do that with everything if you’re not in a hurry. And you’re not in a hurry if you know there’s nowhere to go!
I mean, here’s the end of the line, and there’s a place called death and a tombstone on it that says, “Well, he did it once.” We write his name on the tombstone. That’s the end. That’s where you’re going—if you look at it from that point of view.
But if you’re going here, and you’ve already arrived. What is proper behavior for a Buddha? Supposing you are as rich as rich can be—and you are; the whole universe is yours—supposing you got all the time you need (and you do have; now’s enough), what to do, you see?
Well, of course: live it up! Take delight in all the ordinary things that are to be done instead of trying to get them out of the way so that you could do something else, which is supposed to be better or more rewarding. You’ll see the reward is everywhere because there’s no hurry.
In this way, now, the world is transformed. In this way you might have a utopia. Because as Gary Snyder, my friend, has put it: “There is no possibility of your doing anything effective to save this world from a terrifying ecological disaster unless you know it doesn’t need to be done.” If you can see the dissolution of this world, the end of the human race, as the Kali Yuga that Hindus talk about—the cosmic cataclysm which comes at the end of every 4,320,000 years; every kalpa—and realize that this ecological disaster is simply the periodical death of a world system, and therefore, there’s nothing especially tragic about it.
It’s the way things go. Just like the death of every individual. You would think that such a realization would make a person cold, indifferent.
But no! If you understand that, and you’re not fighting it, you are not afraid of it. And if you’re not afraid of it, you can handle it.
But you have to show that the preservation of the planet and of life is not a frantic duty. It’s a pleasure. And you won’t convince everybody it’s a pleasure if you go and scream in the streets or start throwing rocks.
Then you are saying it’s your duty. To whom? To whom do we owe this duty?
Do you owe it to yourself? Well, that depends what you want to do. Do you want to go on chasing on the wheel?
Do you want to think that by fierce political action we will have a better world to live in and we’ll all be so happy? Five-year plans, and then another five-year plan, and then after that another five-year plan? It’s like my music teacher when I was a child: he used to play a scale in some ridiculous ditty, and, you know, he said, “Now, once more.” You’d play it again.
He’d say, “Now, just once more.” Broowwt. “Once more.” Blweh blweh blweh blweh, you know? Horrors!
But you can find, or realize, the great life if you’re not looking for it. Between Western psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and the so-called religions of Asia, there is common ground, because both are interested in changing states of human consciousness. Whereas institutional Western religions—Christianity, Judaism, and even Islam—are relatively less interested in this matter.
Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and of the world. But this matter concerns psychiatry and psychology very much. Only: those states of consciousness which are not normal are usually treated in Western psychology as being, in some way, sick.
There are, of course, exceptions to this, and there have increasingly been exceptions. In the work of Jung, and to some extent even of Groddeck, of Prinzhorn, of more modern people—Rogers and Ronald Laing—changing consciousness is often looked upon as a form of therapy. But in general, different states of consciousness from the normal are regarded as a form of sickness and, therefore, official and institutional psychiatry constitutes itself the guardian of sanity and of socially approved experience of reality.
And very often it seems to me that reality appears rather much the way the world is seen on a bleak Monday morning—in this official doctrine (I might even say dogma) of what reality is. Because, after all, we know that our science (such as it is) of psychology is founded in the scientific naturalism of the 19th century. And the metaphysical and mythological assumptions of that science still underlie a great deal of psychological thinking—in behaviorism, eminently—but also to a large extent in official psychoanalysis.
Indeed, one might say that psychoanalysis is based on Newtonian mechanics and, in fact, could be called “psychohydraulics.” Not that that analogy is altogether inappropriate, because there are certainly respects in which our psychic life flows and exhibits the dynamics of water. But, of course, we want to know what kind of water. And for the scientific naturalism of the 19th century the basic energies of nature were considered to be very much inferior to human consciousness in quality.
Ernst Haeckel, a biologist of that time, would think of the energy of the universe as blind energy. And correspondingly, it seems to me that Freud thought of the libido as essentially blind, unconscious energy embodying only a kind of formless, unstructured, and insatiable lust. This is a generalization.
Some modification in that thinking is, of course, possible. But the tendency is to regard all that which lies below the surface of human consciousness as being less evolved—because you must remember that this was also the time of Darwin’s theories of evolution—of seeing the human mind as a fortuitous development from much more primitive forms of life coming forth by purely mechanical processes: by natural selection and by survival of the fittest. And therefore, man was in general seen as a fluke of nature—an embodiment of reason, emotion, and values for which the more basic processes of nature had no sympathy and about which they did not care.
If, therefore, the human race is to flourish, we must take charge of evolution. It can no longer be left to spontaneous process, but it must be directed by human ingenuity despite the fact that although our brains are capable of dealing with a colossal number of variables at once, our conscious attention is not. Most people cannot consider more than three variables at the same time without using a pencil.
And this shows that, in many ways, the scanning process of man’s conscious attention is very inadequate for dealing with the infinitely many variables, the multidimensional processes, of the natural universe. However, a serious attempt has been made and scientific naturalism issued in a fantastic fight with nature in this whole notion of the conquest and subordination of nature—which has, as a matter of fact, very ancient, non-scientific and biblical origins—with the idea of man as the head and chief and ruler of nature in the image of God, and the time has now dawned upon us all when our attempts to beat nature into submission are having alarming results. Because we see that it’s very dangerous to mess around with processes that we don’t understand, that have enormous numbers of variables, and we begin to wonder whether we hadn’t better let well enough alone.
At the same time, although I said that Western psychology had more in common, or more common interest, with Oriental religion than it does with Western religion, there is a sense in which psychiatry and psychotherapy are becoming the religion of the West. Psychoanalysis has much in common with the forms and procedures of institutional religion. There is, for example, apostolic succession: the passing down of manna, of qualified power to practice therapy, from the father-founder Sigmund Freud, through his immediate apostles, to an enormous company of archbishops and bishops, among whom there are, of course—as there were with Christianity—heresiarchs such as Jung and Groddek and Rank and Reich, and the heresiarchs are duly excommunicated and anathematized.
There are rituals, as there are also rituals with religion. There is the sacrament of the couch, there is the spiritual discipline of free association, there is the mystic knowledge of the interpretation of dreams, and there are also the two great symbolic fetishes, the long one and the round one. Now, it’s extraordinarily easy to make fun of all this, and we must not forget that we owe a tremendous debt to Freud, if for nothing else than pointing out that that much of ourselves of which we are aware in terms of the conscious ego is not really ourselves, it is something superficial.
However we define its nature, it is superficial. And the realities of human life are not under the gaze of its scanning process, at least not in the ordinary way. And that as a tremendous revelation, there’s no question about that.
But one sees troublesome signs when the doctrines and processes of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and so forth become officialized, and I think Thomas Szasz—in his books The Myth of Mental Illness and The Manufacture of Madness—is pointing out something extremely important to us, which is that, in effect, the psychological official of today is the priest and that he is beginning to exercise the same sort of controls over human life as were exercised by the church in the Middle Ages. So that a professor of psychiatry at Columbia or Harvard or Yale medical schools has today the same sort of intellectual respectability and authority as the professor of theology at the University of Toledo or Padua would have had in the year 1400. Now, you must realize that the theologians of those days not simply believed in their cosmology and the theology, they almost knew it was true in the same way that our scientists know certain things to be true.
Despite the fact that they change their opinions often while they hold them, they have, in effect, the force of dogma, as witness the anathematization of Velikovsky for his uncomfortable ideas. And therefore, there are heresies existing today which are persecuted in the same way as heresies were persecuted by the Holy inquisition. And they are persecuted out of kindness in exactly the same way that the holy inquisition persecuted heresy out of kindness and deep concern for human beings.
That is unimaginable to us, but it was so. For, after all, if you seriously believed that someone who did not hold the Catholic faith, and who voluntarily rejected it would be tortured physically and spiritually forever and ever and ever in hell, you would resort to almost any means to preserve a fellow human being from such a fate, especially if the complaint or disease of heresy from which he suffered was infectious. You would, first of all, reason with him.
And if he was not responsive to reason you would resort to abuse and to forceful argument. And if he was not responsive to that you would give him shock treatment and bang him about. If that didn’t work, the thumb screw and the rack and the iron maiden, and if that didn’t work—as a last desperate resort—you would burn him at the stake in the pious hope that, in the midst of those searing fires, he would think better and make a last act of perfect contrition, and so be rescued from everlasting damnation.
And you did all this in the spirit of “this is going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt you.” In the spirit of a surgeon who is very, very sorry indeed that he has to make you undergo this extremely painful operation, but it is in your best interests, and there really is at least a 50-50 chance that you may survive. And so, therefore—in perfectly scientific medical spirit—people may be very arbitrarily and without due process deprived of their civil rights, incarcerated in prisons that are in many cases much worse than prisons for criminals, and generally left to rot, be neglected and ignored, and when bumptious given shock treatment or put in solitary confinement. For what?
Because they have unorthodox and heretical states of consciousness. A lot of these people are not dangerous until provoked into being dangerous by being ignored, by being treated as machines, and generally defined as non-human. And if you are defined as non-human, there’s precious little you can do about it because everything you say that sounds human will be taken as a kind of utterance of a mechanical man, as imitating humanness out of lunatic cunning.
You will be suspicious. Everything you say will be listened to in a different way and with different ears. And you will have one hell of a time talking yourself out of it because there really are no rules as to what one must do when incarcerated for having unorthodox consciousness.
There is no clear road to repentance. And this is found, likewise, in jails where people are incarcerated on one- to ten-year sentences as in places like Vacaville, California, where—when I visited such prisons—young men have come to me in perfect desperation saying, “I don’t know what’s happened to me. Because I want to live like a decent citizen.
I know I’ve done things that are wrong, but I simply don’t know what is expected of me here. If I try to do what’s expected, they say I’m compliant. And that seems to be some sort of a sickness.
Thomas Szasz drew attention to this when he quoted a discussion of the types of schoolchildren who may very well need therapy. There were overachieving children, there were underachieving children, there were children who exhibited erratic patterns, there were children who were, sort of, dully mediocre. In fact, every sort of child can be given a diagnostic name for his behavior which sounds sick.
As Jung once suggested: “Life itself is a disease with a very poor prognosis. It lingers on for years and invariably ends with death!” And I submit that, in our present knowledge of the human mind, such power in the hands of psychiatrists is amazingly dangerous. However, I would suggest that, today, we know about as much concerning the human mind as we knew about the galaxy in 1300.
And that while there are indeed individuals who are certainly able to perform psychotherapy, it is the sheerest arrogance for anybody to say that he is officially qualified to do so. We do not know how it is done just as we do not know, really, how musical, artistic, and literary genius is done. You cannot really teach it.
You can put the tools for doing these things into people’s hands, and you can show them how to use the tools. But whether they will use those tools with genius is quite unpredictable. And this is, above all, true of the art of psychotherapy.
We don’t know how it’s done. We’ve got some vague ideas. There probably are some people who, by reason of their mental derangement, are probably not qualified to perform it because they are maybe out just to make other people into messes.
But to say that there are certain standards and certain examinations that can be passed, and certificates that could be issued which do indeed qualify people for this work is, I think, pernicious nonsense and is used, of course, out of economic self-interest when those who consider themselves official therapists run into competition. The same was done by religion! I was talking—imagine it—to a Buddhist priest in Thailand some years ago.
I was looking at some books in a bookshop in the precincts of a Buddhist temple, and I was wandering over and I noticed a book on a certain form of Buddhist meditation. And I murmured, “Hmm, satipaṭṭhāna,” which is the name of a certain kind of Buddhist meditation. And a voice suddenly said to me, “You practice satipaṭṭhāna?” I looked up and there was a skinny Buddhist monk in a yellow robe with rather red eyes looking at me.
I said, “Not exactly satipaṭṭhāna. I use a different method, it’s called Zen.” “Oh! Satipaṭṭhāna not Zen!” I said, “Oh, well, it’s something like it, isn’t it?” “No.” “Well, it’s rather like yoga,” I said, “isnt’ it?” “Not yogh, no.
Satipaṭṭhāna different. Only right way.” “Well, look,” I said to him, “I have a lot of Roman Catholic friends who tell me that their way is the only right way. Who am I to believe?
You know,” I said, “you’re like someone who’s got a ferry boat for crossing the river,”—I used the Buddhist simile—“and another fellow down the stream has opened up a ferry business. And you go to the government and say, ‘He’s not authorized to operate a ferry boat’ because he’s competition to you. Let all operate ferry boats who will.
And if you haven’t got the sense to get off, to stay off one that sinks, it’s your fault. And, after all, I could say to him, ‘You believe that everything that happens to you is your own karma.’ So why worry?” But now, it’s so interesting that since official psychiatry—and I underline that word ‘official’ because I hope those of you in this audience who are therapists will regard yourselves as unofficial; at least that’ll give you an out. But nevertheless, official psychiatry has curious things in common with Western religion as well as with Eastern.
With Eastern I said only insofar as it has an interest in states of consciousness and inclines to regard other states of consciousness than the ordinary as sick. But it has one very important feature in common with Western religion. And to that we have to go a little bit into Western religious history and ask ourselves what in Western religion, and especially in Christianity—and this goes also for Judaism, Islam—what is the great heresy?
Curiously enough, the great heresy was first in the West committed by no lesser person than Jesus Christ, who believed himself to be God. This, of course, will be unquestionably true if you think that the Gospel of St. John has historical value. It’s a little vaguer in the Synoptic Gospels, but if you read the Gospel of St. John there is absolutely no doubt about it, for he said, “I and the Father are one.
He who has seen me has seen the Father. Before Abraham was, I am. I am the way, the truth, and the life.
I am the resurrection and the life.” He said all that, according to this gospel. And that is something that, in the Western world, you are not supposed to say and, especially, you are not supposed to believe it. And, naturally, it was very difficult for Jesus because he was saying all this in the context of the Hebrew culture, and he tried to find language in the Hebrew scriptures with which to express his state of consciousness because he had an unusual state of consciousness.
As I read it, he had cosmic consciousness, otherwise known as mystical experience, otherwise known as mokṣa, nirvāṇa, bodhi, satori, [??? ], or what you will. And that happens to people.
It has happened as far back as we know. It happens all over the world and in all cultures. We don’t know very much about it.
We don’t really know ways in which to make it happen because it seems to be the nature of it that it is a spontaneous surprise. But it unquestionably happens, and most people keep their mouths shut about it when it does. I had a friend who—in the middle of having a stroke—had this illumination, and he said to me, “I fear to speak to my friends of this, but it was the most beautiful experience.
I shall never be afraid of death. In fact, I recommend everyone to have a stroke!” This was my friend Jean Varda, [the] lately deceased Greek painter. But Jesus certainly had this transformation of consciousness and he was crucified for it.
Why? Because he had committed an act of insubordination and treason against the cosmic government. Because if you believe that God is a monarch, an absolute and omniscient and omnipotent authority—shall we say, a sort of cosmic ego—then to claim to be that is to introduce democracy into the kingdom of heaven, to usurp divine authority, and to speak in its name without proper authorization.
And they asked Jesus, “By what authority do you speak? Of heaven or of men?” And he was tricky about answering that one. He said, “By what authority did John the Baptist speak?” And they were nervous about answering that one.
He could have asked by what authority did Isaiah speak, et cetera, or Moses? But Moses became official authority, and if you can wangle it that what you said was simply an extension of what Moses said because rabbi so-and-so said it, who got it from rabbi so-and-so, who got it from rabbi so-and-so, who got it from rabbi so-and-so, who got it from Moses, then it’s okay. Notice this: that to be an authority today, in the academic world, depends on documentation.
It’s not enough to say, “For I say unto you,” you must put in your footnotes. And the more the footnotes, the more the authority—obviously. So our dissertations tend to be books about books about books about books, and our libraries multiply by mitosis.
So when somebody speaks as an authority, that means speaks as the author. That’s all it means. It’s a statement of which you are the author and, therefore, for which you assume responsibility.
That is to speak with authority. And to be original is, likewise, not to be freaky, but to speak from the origin. That is what Christians mean when they say “to speak in the spirit”—to have your mouth possessed by the Holy Spirit, as they believe the mouth of Jesus was possessed by the Holy Spirit.
So, the gospel of Jesus—which, of course, was hushed up from its inception—was that “Wake up, everybody, and find out who you are!” Asking that—again, in the Gospel of St. John—they (pointing to his disciples) “may be one even as you, Father, and I are one.” And when he was accused of blasphemy the Jews took up stones to stone him, you know. And he said, “Many good works have I shown you from the Father, and from which of these do you stone me?” And they said, “For a good work we don’t stone you, but for blasphemy. Because you, being a man, make yourself God.” Now, listen to the reply: he said, “Is it not written in your law, I have said ye art gods?
And if that is what the scripture says, it can’t be denied. So why do you tell me I blaspheme because I say I am a son of God?” No answer. “Because I said I am a son of God.” He doesn’t say that in your King James translation, it says “I am the son of God.” And you’ll see the ‘the’ italicized and you will think that that is for emphasis if you don’t realize that passages in italics in the King James Bible are interpolations by the translators.
In Greek, leaving out the definite article is equivalent of having the indefinite article. Gios tou Theoú is ‘a son of God,’ not o gios tou Theoú. So: ‘son of’ in Hebrew and in Arabic means ‘of the nature of.’ When we call someone a son of a bitch we mean bitchy.