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It’s a question of taking responsibility for what happens. If I don’t do anything about the world? The boredom.
Well, that’s another way. That’s another way: you can explore boredom. You can bore into boredom and watch it.
Sometimes, when you’re bored, that’s the only thing to do, because even for God you can’t lift yourself up by your own bootstraps. Because that is, by nature of the definition, impossible. Yes, I think that would be fun.
I mean, why else does one go on stage except to make myths? Excuse me, what did you say? What is my motivation for going on the stage?
That is like asking, “Why is there a universe?” Well, now, if you listened to George Leonard last night, George Leonard explained how children were befuddled by being taught to ask ‘why’ about everything. Because you always look away from what you’re asking about to its antecedents, and that won’t lead you anywhere at all. Why am I here?
And I answer that question. Then somebody says, well, why that? And then somebody says, well, why that?
Why that? Why that? And you get back and back and back, and eventually you get tired of answering.
And so fathers, when their children say, “Why, daddy? Why? Why?” they say, “Oh shut up and eat your lollipop!” But what happens, you see—when we trace the causation of things into the past, it all begins to fade out in silence and no answer.
Why? Huh. Because it didn’t begin there.
The universe begins now, it didn’t begin in the past. And the past trails back from now like the wake of a ship. If everything is God and there is not time except now, what is the role of chance?
Chance pairs with order. We’ll say randomness—we’ll call it—and it pairs with order. And it is part of the nature of order: if you know what you mean by order, you know that you mean contrast with randomness.
And if you know what you mean by randomness, you know that you mean contrast with order. So if you want to have order you must have randomness, and vice versa. Yes?
Yes, but it came out in a different way. Yes? Well, I admit to you, my dear, that this is a very, very dangerous conversation.
And… that I thoroughly agree with, but we didn’t come here—did we?—to play it safe. All profound ideas and profound questions are dangerous. It is dangerous to go into science.
As we all know too well, it is dangerous to go into medicine. Dangerous to go into writing, because the pen is often mightier than the sword. And so I don’t think we should withdraw from certain things because they’re dangerous, but I entirely agree with you that if I were, as it were, in the spirit of God to go about social reform, I would be failing to realize the construction of my own universe, which is that when you interfere with it you’ve got to know exactly how you’re interfering.
Otherwise, the most amazingly unexpected things will happen. So when people ask for miracles they don’t realize what the miracles involve. I mean, if I turned the microphone into a rabbit, it’s altogether possible that you might drop dead because those events might be connected.
Did I ever study with Carl Jung? I never s— I didn’t study with him. I knew him and I read a lot of his writings, yes.
It does in a way, yes. And it depends how you’re watching. There is a very interesting thing that comes up in this respect with regard to the Bhagavad Gita and to the Yoga Sutra, where they talk about the witness.
There is, as it were—behind our ordinary self with its emotions and involvements—a witness self that does nothing more than perceive what happens. And this is the Ātman, or the puruṣa, which is not involved. And some of you, no doubt—especially in times of crisis—have suddenly discovered this sort of witness center behind everything that just isn’t involved.
The most terrible things can be going on, but the witness is impassive. Now, when we go into these states we’ve got to be very careful about descriptive language, because the descriptive language makes the witness seem something apart from what is happening in such a way that—if we want to become, really, sort of schizy and catatonic about things—we can always be withdrawn and go in and in and identify ourselves with the solitary and uninvolved witness who is merely a hangout for the ego, as when the police raid a house in which there are burglars. And the burglars know they’ll be caught if they’re on the ground floor, so they go up to the first floor.
So then, the police come up to the first floor, they’re up to the second. Finally, they get to the roof, the open sky and the infinite. And, in this way, this was why the Buddha did not teach about the Ātman—the real Self within us—because he knew people would use the real Self as a hideout for the ego.
And so, when, say, Krishnamurti tries to explain this, he doesn’t talk about the witness. He talks about awareness and people say to him, “But who is aware? What is aware?” And he seems a little sticky in his answer here, because what is the matter is that the people asking the question are bewitched by grammar.
They are using a language in which it is part of the grammatical convention that the verb always have a noun subject. Now, how on earth do verbs get started by nouns? I ask you: how can a thing start a process?
Surely, this is really the same problem Descartes was wrestling with when he tried to find out how spirit could influence matter, or how mind could influence body. Because everybody knows that all proper ghosts walk straight through walls without disturbing the bricks. So how can the ghost in the machine—as Koestler put it; the soul in the body—how can it do anything to the body with no connection?
Two different realms. The point is, when we’re talking about this awareness… what we call thought, feeling, sensation, emotion, we could say in a very clumsy way is: it’s aware of itself. It’s the very nature.
There wouldn’t be sensation without awareness. You don’t have to have some thing which is aware of it any more than you have to have a thing called lightning which does something called flashing. The flashing is the lightning.
And so awareness is the one who’s aware of it. You could say this awareness—if I say, “I am aware,” the word “I,” as William James suggested, is simply a word of position like “this” or “here.” Awareness here. And your awareness there.
Yes, sir? Yes, life is like one great kōan. No, death is not the solution; it has no solution.
Otherwise it wouldn’t happen. You see, the thing is like this—this is what is hard, for Westerners especially, to understand: I said if you understand the yang and the yin, you don’t need to ask any further questions, and all you I Ching buffs ought to know this by now. What is not a component of Western common sense is that nothing is something.
Now, that may sound a little contradictory, but I think I can explain it. We treat nothingness as if it were ineffective, as if it wasn’t really important at all. And yet, when we look out at the night and we see all these stars in space, try and imagine what the heavens would look like if there weren’t any space.
Then, obviously, there wouldn’t be any stars. I mean, you could think they would all be jammed together in a lump. There are various objections to that; how would you see the edge of the lump, and know it was a lump, without space around it?
Furthermore, we know, when we investigate the constitution of matter physically, that at the atomic level there’s more space in something than there is anything else. Most of it is empty, which led a physicist at the Argonne Lab at the University of Chicago to become a little nutty. He was so impressed with the emptiness of matter that he went around in the most enormous padded slippers in case he should fall through the floor.
So… now, the point that I’m making is this: if space is essential to solid, it’s perfectly obvious, then, that nothing is essential to something. If you can’t have something without nothing, it means nothing is pretty powerful stuff. Because something comes out of it.
BLWWP, like that! It’s a dogma of Western thought expressed in the Latin phrase ex nihilo nihil fit: “out of nothing comes nothing.” But that’s not so, out of nothing comes something! Now, you would say, “Well, if something comes out of nothing, there must be some kind of mystery inside nothing, it must have a secret structure of some kind.
I mean, there must be, sort of, electrical goings-on.” This is the trouble they have about cosmology: how could this world generate? Could it just be out of free-floating hydrogen? No!
It’s a much simpler idea than that: it comes out of real, solid nothing. It’s so simple! Look: if you listen, you see, you live in a world where there’s only sound, for a moment.
You’ll hear every sound coming out of silence. Where do these sounds come from? They come out of silence.
Suddenly: BOOIINGG. And you can accustom yourself to seeing light doing the same thing. You can open your eyes and see all this world emerging out of nothing.
BOOIINGG, like that, and fading off into the past. So that’s why the future is unknown, because the future is zero. And everybody who tries to know it—and that’s the whole endeavor of… you see, trying to be God… you don’t need to try to be God, you are!
But if you try to be God it means you don’t know you are, and therefore you try to know and dominate the future. And you believe prophets, and things like that. Well, prophecy is simply contaminating the future with the past; projecting what we know upon the unknown.
And that’s why, really, things like astrology—although interesting—are rather ridiculous. Because if you know the future, there’s no surprise for you. A completely known future is past; you’ve had it!
Yes? Ha-ha! There are two answers to that question.
This is a real fun question; I love it. The question is about now. He’s saying: really, there is no now.
The future and the past come together, and the future turns into the past. They go BLWP, and it’s gone, like that. So, you know, in no time at all, the future has become past.
And so we get this frantic feeling: where did you go? Well, let’s take the small view, first of all. The now is infinitely short, and yet it’s the only thing that is.
In that case, this whole world is an illusion. It doesn’t really exist. So when the king—the emperor Akbar—once was feeling a little sorry for himself and asked his jeweler, he said, “Make me a ring that will restrain me in prosperity and support me in adversity.” And so the jeweler made him a ring, and gave it to the emperor, and he saw written on it: “It Will Pass.” Now, the other side of the matter is this: that this short now is an illusion of the clock.
We make our second-marks on clocks as thin as is consistent with visibility. And therefore, we always think of the present as crossing the hairline. TICK.
That’s too long, see? How short can you get? FWWWP, you see?
But really, the present isn’t like that at all! Everything’d go BWWWP, got it. There is nowhere else but now!
Everything that happens is happening now. Well, it’s like your field of vision. Your field of vision isn’t just a point of light, your field of vision is an oval.
And it isn’t fuzzy at the edges, it just ceases to be at the edges. But there’s plenty of room in it to see something move across. So, in your field of time—your now—there is enough now to include a phrase of music.
If there weren’t, you wouldn’t be able to make out melodies because there’d just be instantaneous notes with no connection between them. You would never hear intervals. So, now is a big, slobby thing.
But it comes out of nothing. Yes? Lady standing by the pillar.
So the question is: is there, then, no need for man to seek for a meaning in his life? Now, of course you may use the word “meaning” in a less precise way, and say, now, although the music of Bach has no meaning in the sense that it is not like the music of Tchaikovsky, designed to imitate natural events and noises, nevertheless it has meaning in the sense that it enchants us, the patterns of it ravish us in the same way as abstract patterns in an arabesque. That’s a little different sense of the word “meaning.” And yes, I would say that life has that kind of meaning.
But you don’t seek it. Because if you seek it you lose it. I see the process of life as an essentially musical process which has no meaning except itself.
It is going ’round in circles like we love to spin in circles when we’re dancing, like children love to spin around in circles ’till they get dizzy. That’s fun. And so the articulation of wonderful patterns is the meaning of life.
If you seek for meaning—now, this applies to all seekers; I’m sorry, growth-seekers. But—seeking’s alright; I mean, it’s a free country—but it invariably takes you away from what you’re looking for because every search supposes I will find it later, not now. In the next moment.
That somehow, by some gimmick, by some exercise, by some process of transformation, I will later discover what I want. This is postponement. Yes?
Yes. Well, this is a matter of words, my friend, because you may think that dancing is superficial, whereas I think it’s profound. And so on.
And I suggested two meanings of the word “meaning,” one of which reduces life to being symbolic of something else, something always beyond. Then I’m going to ask what’s the meaning of that? And then we get into that infinite regression of questions.
I feel that instead of getting into these infinite regressions of “what is beneath,” “what is behind”—look! It’s right out in front of you now. And when you catch on to that, now gets very profound.
I mean, it’s the moment when nothing becomes something and I don’t see how much profounder than that you can get. Yes? Oh yes!
I’m telling—that’s… I agree with. Seeking can be fun! But it won’t get you to what you’re looking for.
You see, it’s a way—seeking is a way of postponing finding. Let’s put it off, you see? Children, on a hot day, they’re terribly thirsty and they say, “Let’s get an ice cream soda.” The other kid says, “No, let’s get thirstier.” So when we finally get the ice cream soda, we are a real zomb!
This is the principle of postponement, and everybody who is questing, who is practicing yoga, and Zen meditation—all that kind of thing—is putting off that ice cream soda. What do I propose? Nothing.
Yeah, but I mean, look here: when you ask, always, “Why did you come?” I repeat: that is a barren question. Why did you do it? Why did this happen?
It goes—a question that peters out. So this is not important. What is important, surely, is this immediate now.
Not why are we here, but what are we here? Unless you live in the eternal now consciously, you have no use for plans. Because people who live in the future, or for the future—when their plans come off, they’re not there enjoying them.
They’re planning for another future. They never catch up with themselves. Yes, in that sense.
Of course. When you make plans you plan now—and that can be a gas, making plans. But for goodness sake, do it in the now spirit rather than, as it were, “Oh, I can’t wait ’till that happens.” Because then, if you’re in an I-can’t-wait spirit, you just bolt life like somebody swallowing food so fast they can neither taste it nor digest it.
Yes? Yeah. Well, yes.
The searching in a spirit that the search is more fun than the finding—you know that? When you’re traveling, for example, going somewhere is he real joy of it, often. That’s the fallacy of the jet plane: that it abolishes distances between places.
And all places which have a distance abolished between them become the same place. So there’s no point going to Tokyo if it’s already Los Angeles. I mean, this is the thing.
Yes, there was a hand here. Well, the comment is about seeking. Is it necessarily a road, like taking a road, or is seeking also conceivable as readiness to receive?
Well, of course, the road isn’t a merely Western analogue. It’s a very common metaphor. The path, and the stages of the path, the steps of the path are used in both East and West.
But the Chinese word for the Way is Tao, and the path is what we’re looking for—in the Chinese sense, you see? The Tao is the works, baby. That is the which than which there is no whicher, and to be in harmony with the Way, to be on the way, you see?
But the Tao isn’t going anywhere. And that’s like when the Chinese poet is wandering in the forest, and he looks at the clouds and he says, “Where are they going? No one knows.
Where does this path lead? No one cares. I’m wandering on and on in a great forest without thought of return.” That is poetic feeling to the Far East; both to the Japanese and the Chinese.
They call that spirit yūgen, and it’s the mysterious going-nowhere-ness of things; the wandering spirit. So that sort of seeking is different from anxiety to get something in the future which you don’t have now. Yes, sir?
Well, pure hedonism is a quest for pleasure. The hedonist, in that sense of the word, would not live in the eternal now if he found it not altogether enjoyable. He would then read romances of the past or fantasies of the future to get away from now, because what he’s looking for is pleasure.
But when we look for pleasure, you see, we split ourselves. We divide ourselves from pleasure in seeking it. And in trying to get away from pain we divide ourselves from pain, not realizing that that’s what creates pain, is the division of experience, so that the wholeness of experience is broken and we are dis-integrated.
Yes? That’s true. Categories do not really exist in nature.
Categories are like taking a network printed on cellophane and putting it over a picture of a forest, and then numbering the trees according to what squares they’re in on the cellophane. That’s categorization. Oh, I said it was thoroughly empty.
But—wait a minute—it is a category in the sense that something is its limit. So it has an edge, and that’s what you see in the yang-yin diagram. No.
I don’t want to comment on China at the moment. Yes, what I was trying to say about pain is this: we are in a split relationship with the contents of our experience. The knower and the known.
Then there is: the knower is opposed with a known called pleasure and tries to identify with it. The knower is confronted with a known called pain and tries to be disentangled from it. But it is this very split; it is trying to get away from pain that makes pain painful.
It’s as if you got caught in some brambles and you pulled away from them, and they just dug more deeply into your skin. You would have to go the other direction to let the brambles out, you’d have to go into the bush. Yeah.
Yeah. So—I mean, that’s only a metaphor. But the point is that as we keep up this distinction of the knower from the known, we’re always running away and wanting to change experience.
And there’s a fundamental, therefore, escape in every project to transform consciousness; there is an escape from what is. And when you realize you cannot get away from what is—not should you, not might you, but you can’t—then, at that point, when you realize you can’t get away from what is, there’s nothing left to you but to watch it. And then, for the first time, you’re taking a good look at your real self.
Because your real self is a happening. The Chinese call it ziran—‘nature,’ ‘what is so of itself’—and that’s you. And you is this happening, and everything that you’re aware of is your happening—and a good deal more besides.
You’re not aware of all of yourself. Like, you don’t have an immediate vision of the contents of your stomach because you haven’t got eyes down there. Um… yes, sir?
Yes. This—you see, I know when I’m confronted with the beautiful or when I pass into the beautiful as I know when I pass into the ugly. When I try to say what these are or what my criteria are, all I’m doing is I’m trying to find a form of words that will apply to all my different sensations of beauty or of ugliness.
The problem is not to know what is beautiful but to know how to put it into linear language. That’s where the complexity comes in. We very well know what is beautiful.
But when we come to talk about it, the words disappear. Here’s our fundamental problem. Because, you see, in a certain way, what we mean by sense is God.
Now, it is not that God doesn’t have a sense of nonsense—look at giraffes, for heaven’s sakes! But it’s this old thing. One form is: could God make a stone so heavy that he couldn’t lift it?
That is an equivalent question to saying, “Could God make a dead body into a living body?” That is the same question as asking, “Could a dead body be a living body?” And that is the same question as asking, “Could the head be the feet?” Yes, that’s a different matter. Now, look: one of the most interesting meditations is to think about death and imagine what it would be like to go unconscious and never become conscious again. That is, as Keats said of the Grecian Urn: “it teases you out of thought.” And while you think of that, say, “Good heavens, fancy.
Never coming to again,” you get a mirror image thought which is about your birth. My goodness, you came to without ever having gone unconscious! That’s pretty weird, and it seems to me that if that happened once it can happen again.
Now, what happens is this: when you die, BOING; there’s a blank. And the next thing you know is, WAAAAH! Just as you did it before.
Because every “I” that comes into this world is I, is me, is you. On this level it is diversified. But yet, I is always central.
Everyone feels he’s the center of the universe, and on the surface of a sphere any point may be the center of the surface. So here it is. Every time it happens it’s me.