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So I should worry about reincarnation. Yes? All wise action is never the result of choice.
Wise action is never the result of choice. Huh? Choice implies ignorance, indecision.
When you know what to do, you don’t choose—you do it. What? What question could you ask about love?
What is love? Love is not a what. Love is the energy of the world, and nobody can say what that is.
If anybody were to say what God is or what the energy of the world is, he would be talking nonsense. Now, there are times when it is important to talk nonsense because we can discover the energy of the universe through nonsense. When you, say, you take a sound that really doesn’t mean anything much, like Aaaauuuuummmmm, that’s the energy of the universe going.
Dig it! See? As you listen to sound.
That’s why music is a marvelous support for meditation. Digging sound. Listening, just listening, to that hum.
There goes the energy of the universe, see? What is it? Aauuuuummmmm, that’s what it is.
Auuummmmmmm, see? Yeah? Yes.
Yeah, that’s right. Then, if you do that, it isn’t meditation. Meditation is centered in the here and now.
Done for some other reason, it isn’t meditation. It stops dead right there. What is satori?
Satori is any kind of “A-ha!” “Eureka!” phenomenon, only specifically applied to discovering who and what you are. The clear light is that. You say, “I saw the light!” It doesn’t necessarily mean that there was the physical hallucination of a flash.
It may mean suddenly everything becomes transparent. That may be a way of feeling it. It’s just that the problem vanishes and you stop asking the question.
I, uhm… what do you mean, risk it? The thing or the problem—there’s no risk being God, the risk is being human! I’m going to start by talking to you about the foundation idea underlying the whole of this seminar, which is the Hindu Buddhist—that is to say, Indian—idea of the world as illusion, which they call māyā.
This is one of the most rich ideas that has ever been thought by the mind of man, because it has such a great multiplicity of meanings. When Hinduism is reported in little textbooks on comparative religion and encyclopedia articles, this is one point on which almost all the scholars are either completely misleading or very incomplete. Because a general impression has circulated in the West that the Hindus live in a very, very hot country, have very little to eat, and live an absolutely miserable life, and therefore this affects the brain in a certain way.
The heat makes the world seem like a mirage, makes it seem rather unreal. And the extremely low standard of living makes life intolerable, and so they would just as soon believe that it isn’t real, that it all has a dreamlike quality, and that the highest ideal to which man can aspire is to escape altogether from this sort of physical existence (which they call saṃsāra: the round of birth and death), and to disappear into a state of rather diffuse consciousness wherein the individuality vanishes and one is simply suspended forever, or in a kind of timeless time, in an infinite ocean of faintly luminous, mauve jello. Now, this is all terribly misleading.
This isn’t the point at all. And so I want to start, then, by telling you the many, many things that the word māyā actually means. First of all, the foundation of the word is the Sanskrit root mātṛ, and that has as its original meaning (so far as we can trace it back) the idea of measuring or laying out the foundations for a building.
And you can see how, from that root mātṛ, we derive many, many words through Greek and Latin in the English language connected with measurement: “metric,” “meter,” “matrix,” “matter”—as in the saying: “does it matter?” Does it measure up to anything? And so, fundamental to the concept of the world illusion is, then, the idea of measurement, of equating the realities of the physical world with certain systems of numbering—whether it be so many spans of the hand, so many feet, so many paces, so many bongs on a drum, or whatever you got to be your regular model, your regular system. For the whole idea of measurement is to find an equation between the physical world and something regular, that is to say, with a ruler.
Because, you see, the physical world is fundamentally wiggly. We don’t notice this very much if we live in towns and if we live in ordinary houses, because we build our streets and our homes so as to seem to be non-wiggly. And so we’re confronted with tables and chairs and walls and window frames, and we get a sense of non-wiggly reality.
And so then we are also always in conflict with wiggliness. We try, for example, not to let the stars seem to be disordered, but to organize them into constellations. The constellations, of course, aren’t there; there are no strings joining those stars which constitute the Big Dipper.
Seen from another point of view in space they wouldn’t look like a dipper at all. Actually, those stars happen to be fairly close to each other in space. But sometimes a member of a constellation could very well be in an entirely different galaxy millions of light years away.
But we like to do this, and even I once read something that I never believed any human being had ever thought, but during the 18th century, when Western man had a peculiar passion for symmetrical order, somebody wrote an essay saying that the stars had been very poorly disposed, and that if they had been arranged in geometrical patterns it would have been far more consistent with the divine reason than this haphazardly scattered affair. So our world is wiggly. All of us are wiggly objects.
Trees are, rocks are, clouds are, waters are, the outlines of islands and so on—it’s all wiggly. And so, in that sense, the universe is rather like an enormous Rorschach blot. Now, a foundation of artistic creation is to see things in blots.
For example, if you examine the animal paintings in the caves of Lascaux, which are probably the earliest artforms in existence, it is apparent that the painters of those images first looked at the rock, at its contours and at the smudges and various changes of color in it, and saw the animals and creatures that they painted just as you might see something in a Rorschach blot. And then they brought it out. Leonardo da Vinci spoke of using his imagination on a dirty old wall in which he could see landscapes and battles and all kinds of things.
And there was a very great Zen painter in China in the Sung dynasty who used to paint as follows: he’d get very drunk and then—he had long hair—and he’d dip his hair in ink, and then he’d wave his head over a piece of paper. Then, when he’d sobered up a little, he’d look at this and do a Rorschach blot on it, and he would see a landscape which could be brought out for all to see by just a few extra touches of the brush. And, you see, by that method you create a gorgeous landscape.
So this curious ability of the mind of man to pick out significant things in any kind of a wadge is what we call consciousness. Con-scio. The basic root in Latin means, con: “together with,” scio: “to know.” “To know together.” And so from the root—scio, you see, is connected with “cutting.” “Science” is the same root.
And “schizm,” see? It’s the same word: to cut. To cut things up into bits, to recognize, to pick out what is significant from what is not.
Because conscious attention as it exists in man is a kind of radar, or a kind of spotlight, whose function is to warn the whole organism of significant changes in the environment. If things don’t change, consciousness goes to sleep; it gets bored. But the moment anything changes, consciousness notes it at once.
That is why our attention is won or captured by a moving object rather than still backgrounds, by easily enclosed and recognizable figures as distinct from vague and diffuse spaces. Although, as a matter of fact, our organism responds to everything that is happening in the environment, but consciousness only notices those things that are thought to be significant. So then, consciousness is constantly active in trying to make sense and pick out the significant separate bits of a wiggly and fundamentally bitless and thingless universe.
And that is one of the meanings of māyā. So, for example, if we have some wiggles like that, that immediately creates something problematic for us to describe. How can we say anything exactly about that shape?
How can we deal with it? Well, the answer is: to deal with that shape—which is essentially wiggly—we’ve got to measure it in some way. There are various ways of doing that.
For example, we might refer to certain significant elements in the shape. This can be interpreted either as a promontory or an inlet, whichever one you want. But it seems to be a thing.
We can catch hold of that. It’s something that sticks out like a nose. Or here’s another one, you see?
We can mention that. Or we can liken this to certain other things we’ve seen and say, “Well, at the point where there’s a pear-shaped inlet, there’s something significant.” That’s one way of doing it. The other way of doing it—which is more exact and more scientific, and which we use for purposes of navigation and also for plotting the stars—is to superimpose over the wiggly shape a uniform pattern, and the fundamental one that we use is, of course, the grid.
You see? Now, superimpose that over the wiggliness on cellophane, and then we can number the spaces down and the spaces along. And we can say: this point is number one down and two across, and so give every point a number on our grid, see?
And that begins to give us an accurately describable but nonetheless somewhat caricatureish version of the wiggle. Imagine for a moment—you see, if you examine a newspaper photograph under a magnifying glass you will find that it is an amalgamation of dots, some light and some dark. In other words, the whole thing has been reduced to a sort of pointillist amalgamation of bits.
And under the magnifying glass this doesn’t look at all like the thing—like the human face, for example—that is supposed to be represented. But put away the magnifying glass, look at it from a distance, and it approximates to the human face that you recognize. Now, in a way, all conscious knowledge does that to the world.
It reproduces it in terms of some kinds of bits. Words are bits. We arrange words in lines so as to describe events, but we’ve got a limited number of words that we use: the words in the dictionary.
And they are the bits. And words, in turn, are composed of letters. And these are, again, the bits.
Or much more so when, for example, we transmit television: what is actually coming into our set is a series of impulses, of bits, in certain rhythms. And these, when they affect the television tube, do more of this kind of newspaper jazz on the screen. And so, in that way, a picture is arranged—but again, in terms of little bits.
So, also, you see, this was all related to the fundamental way in which, from the earliest times, the study of physics approached nature. From Democritus on, the physicists wanted to know: what are the fundamental bits out of which everything is made? And so they thought at first there were atoms.
The square ones were for the element of earth because cubes would all hang together, whereas water would be made up of balls, because it flows, you see, and doesn’t stay put. And so on. Fire was made of pyramids and so on.
I forget what air was made of. But they wanted to analyze it. And that is because consciousness itself is an analytical faculty.
Consciousness is a bright light which illuminates the world one bit at a time; in series. So that is one fundamental meaning of māyā: the illusion that the world consists of separate things which can be isolated from each other and regarded as being independent. Now that is a colossal illusion.
It’s a very useful illusion, but it simply isn’t so. But it looks as if it were so because we are so accustomed to looking at it that way. You see, as a matter of fact, we’ve all been kind of hoaxed by our culture, by the way we’ve been brought up, into looking at the world in this way, and to picking out those things which the culture has told us are important and ignoring the things which it doesn’t think are important.
Now, for example, most people are completely unaware of space. Space means where there isn’t anything at all. There may be air, but you can’t see air, and you can only feel it if you move very quickly.
So space is nothing. It’s not important. And so we tend, you see, to be unconscious of the field, the area, the setting, the background, the space, in which so-called things and events happen, and so to pretend that things and events are not influenced by their space.
But every architect knows that space is immensely important; that the kind of room you live in, the kind of house you move around in influences your behavior enormously, just as the frame makes all the difference to the picture. I’m thinking, for example, of photography. Where does the photographer frame the subject?
How does he shoot it, how does he sight it? And then, when he’s developed the print, where does he cut the edges? Upon how he does that depends the whole significance of his picture.
So we could say, then, it is a māyā, an illusion, that we all imagine ourselves to be living inside our skins separated from the rest of the cosmos. We’ve been taught to ignore this enormously significant relationship. Because if we ignore it, we can play the game “who started it?” That is: who is responsible?
Who shall we praise and who shall we blame for things being thus and so? I was given a riddle the other day—I’m not going to go through the whole riddle, it’s a complicated story of a woman who got murdered, and because she had an assignation with a lover and so on and so on, and there’s a whole lot of people, and her husband, a lover, the friend, the woman. And they asked me: who is responsible?
And I thought and I said, “Well, this isn’t the question. The whole situation is responsible because the parts that everybody play in the thing are defined by the other people. You can’t have them playing these parts unless they’re all in relation in a common group.” So it’s the group, you might say, as a whole, that is responsible.
And to play that the individual members of it are responsible is a game, an illusion. And note, please, that the word “illusion” is related to the Latin ludere, of which one part is lucus, the perfect. Ludere: “to play.” So playing that we don’t go with our environments, our surroundings—that is to say, the whole cosmos in which we are discovered—is a big game.
You can do lots of things with it. But we’re all going around unconscious of this marvelous interdependence between what we call “ourselves” on the one hand and what we call “the universe” on the other, and therefore don’t notice that, as a matter of fact, our real self is the whole cosmos. We’ve forgotten that.
That was rapidly expunged from our minds in very early infancy. And we’re all something the cosmos is doing, just like the water is waving and the wind is blowing. The whole wind is blowing, but it blows through this window and that window and the other window.
It isn’t a separate wind that blows through each window. So, in the same way, we’re all something, we’re all wavings of the universe—only, we’ve forgotten it. That knowledge was never verbalized.
We had it in a nonverbal form in infancy. But as soon as we were taught words, the words hypnotized us—one always hypnotizes with words—they hypnotized us out of that realization. Now, that doesn’t mean to say that individuals just aren’t there; that if you were awakened and free from illusion this room would suddenly turn into a formless void.
The void doesn’t mean that in Buddhist philosophy. What it does mean is something like this: we are individual in the sense that you can see separate and clearly formed waves or whirlpools in water. Now, here is a whirlpool swinging around.
The actual water is constantly flowing through the whirlpool and there is no stuff permanently in the whirlpool. All that the whirlpool is is a pattern: it’s something the water is doing. And so, in exactly the same way, we are a constant current of electronical phenomena.
At a more obvious level we are a current of beefsteak and potatoes and eggs and milk and water all flowing through us. And we know that the cells in the human body are completely changed within at least seven-year periods. So who are you?
In the same way as a university may change not only its student body every four years, but its faculty every ten years and its buildings every hundred years, and is still known by the same name: the university. Well, what is the university? The university is a particular kind of behavior, you see?
It’s a particular kind of doings. And there we are. But, you see, when you don’t notice that and the behavior changes slowly enough—like the behavior of this building—so one thinks of it as a thing rather than a process, then we get into our heads that the world is full of things.
But it ain’t! So now, let’s just retrace our steps a moment to clarify some of the ideas about māyā. The first was “measurement:” making sense out of the apparent formlessness of the world—the wiggliness of it; it’s a better word than formlessness—making sense out of the wiggliness of the world by cutting it.
As the grid cuts, or as the consciousness cuts out certain things that it deems as significant. That’s measurement. The second is related to it: playing the game that things so cut are really separate.
Now, further than that, māyā means also “magic.” Magical power. Power to evoke. Power to create dramas.
Now, all magic is related to drama because the art of the dramatist is to convince the audience who’ve come to see the play that what is happening on the stage is real. The audience hopes to be convinced of that almost, but not quite. Now, the conventions of drama provide a certain setup that we are all familiar with—in our culture at any rate—that there has to be a certain arrangement.
There’s an auditorium for the audience. There is a stage for the play. There is a proscenium arch that divides the stage from the auditorium.
And behind the stage there is a green room for the actors to change their clothes. Now, there it all is. There’s the whole box of tricks.
Because what the proscenium arch says is, to the audience: what goes on behind this arch on the other side of the footlights is not real, it is a play. And the actors have a place to go off and hide in the green room so that we won’t see them changing their costumes or their masks or their personalities from plain Mr. Smith on the one hand to the role of Hamlet on the other. He will walk into our view as Hamlet.
And although we know in the back of our minds that this is only in play, the skillful actor will put everybody on the edge of their seats in suspense because he half-convinces them that it’s real. And so he makes magic. Now, the Hindu doctrine of the creation of the universe is, if I may put it in extremely naïve terms, that the lord God—who, in Hinduism, doesn’t have a beard and things like that, as he does in the West, but is something unimaginable; however, he is represented often in human form with many arms and so on—but the lord God is playing that he’s not himself.
And in the Western version, the first thing that the lord God said in creating the universe was, “Let there be light.” But the Hindus would have said: the first thing he said was, “You must draw the line somewhere.” That is this action of cutting; of māyā, see? And that’s the whole of life: you must draw the line somewhere. See?
If we’re going to draw a line at all, you see, there’s going to be a difference between this and that, between good and evil, between the pleasant and the painful, between the modest and the immodest. Whatever you will, you see? You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
So the whole of life is the game of where are we going to draw the line, see? And how far can you go? And you can be way in or you can be way out, but still you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
And then that was māyā. And then he decided, you see—the second thing he said to himself was: “Get lost!” Because he was bored with being God. And he thought, “Everything is possible.
There is no obstacle in any direction. Nothing is happening. So… let’s get lost.
Let’s pretend we are not God.” And so he’s pretended that he’s all of us. And every one of us is the Lord in disguise making a big scene that you’re just “little me.” And it’s very embarrassing when a good, skillful guru calls your bluff on this and says, “Listen, Shiva, stop kidding me! You know, I know who you are perfectly well, and all this come-on that you’re just you, and that you have these problems, and so on and so on—that’s a lot of bullshit!
Come off it!” So the person is very embarrassed by this and makes out that they really don’t know what the teacher’s talking about. But just like the audience in the skillfully acted play knows in the back of its mind that it is a play, so every individual in the back of his mind—hardly and barely conscious—knows who he is. And he may insist on “little me” just like, you know, when—have you ever enjoyed being in a state of grief?
Or hating someone? You know, there’s a fundamental zest in really hating someone. And you know you don’t really hate them: somehow, you wouldn’t want to give it up.
Even though it’s an unpleasant feeling to hate someone, you see? And so they have a sort of attitude of, “Oh, come off it!” You can sometimes penetrate through these negative emotional states. So then, you see, in the green room—behind the stage—this corresponds to the back of the actor’s mind.
Because it’s in the green room that he doffs his mask and changes his costume and drops his role, see? So it’s interesting, isn’t it, that the word “person” is a dramatic word, because the persona was the mask worn in classical drama. It is shaped with a mouthpiece, like a megaphone, so that in the open air stage the sound will travel.
So “that through which the sound comes:” per sona. The masks. So the dramatis personae in the beginning of a play is a list of the masks which are going to be worn by the actors.
And by a very, very curious and significant subversion of the meaning of this word: how to be a real person. Think of that! How to be a genuine mask.
A really successful fraud! That’s māyā! Magic.
The next meaning of māyā is “art.” “Art” or, indeed, “skill.” I wonder—there’s an old Greek tale that there was a competition in painting. And two very great painters were the final runners up in the competition, and they had to do paintings that were going to be judged at a great affair. And the first one painted a vine with grapes on it.
And it was so convincing that birds kept banging into it trying to pick at the grapes. And the bees were coming around, and, you know, wasps, and so on. And everybody thought, “My!
Isn’t that fantastic! How clever this man is.” Well, they said, “We’d better have a look at the other painting.” And they said to the artist, “Unveil it. Draw the curtain and let’s see it!” He said, “What curtain?” His painting was the curtain.
So he was awarded the prize because it was considered more remarkable to deceive human beings than to deceive the birds. So that story lies at the beginning of a world of art, a philosophy of art, which has prevailed—certainly in the West—for many thousands of years, really. The sense that the skill of an artist is to make art look like nature.
And so the highest reach of Western technique comes with people like the great Flemish masters—Pieter de Hooch and van Dyck and van Eyck, so on—who represent what you might call the peak of photographic realism, which eventually deteriorated into the sentimental painting of the 19th century with all its luscious nudes and historical mythological scenes done like colored photographs. And for most people living today, the vast majority of Westerners, that is art and anything else doesn’t look like a picture. But, however, what is not appreciated about this (except by painters and people who understand the techniques involved) is that the camera has a prejudiced point of view.
The camera does not see things as they are, it sees things as it is constructed to see them. The camera has been bewitched. And the lens is made the way it is made in order to conform with a certain philosophy of how things are supposed to look.
For example, if you show a so-called primitive person a photograph of himself or of a friend, he will not recognize it. He will turn the picture over and look at the back and wonder what happened to the back of the person’s head. He will not understand why it’s flat.
He will not understand perspective. Why are the trees in the distance smaller? They’re all the same size.
When an American G.I. in Paris—during the war or just after the war—met Picasso, they got into a discussion about modern painting and Picasso’s painting, and the G.I. said he simply couldn’t make head or tail of it.
He said the world doesn’t look like that; women don’t look like that. Picasso said, “Do you have a girlfriend?” And he said, “Yes.” “Well,” he said, “let me see her picture.” And he pulled out his wallet, and he had a little photograph in the thing, and showed the picture. Picasso stared at it and said, “Is she so small as that?” So, you see, it’s a very instructive exercise to look really carefully at the surrounding world and not jump to conclusions about the colors of things.
You see, a person might walk into this room and be asked, “What color is it?” and he would jump to the conclusion, “Oh, it’s a sort of off-white.” Now, it’s nothing of the kind! Watch this wall carefully and you will see that it’s myriads of colors. Pearly grays, golds, blues, purples—all kinds of shadows play along it.
But these shadows are not gray things, they’re all colors. And luminous. So just to say it’s off-white color is to have an idea in one’s head and not to be using one’s eyes at all.
And to have an idea in one’s head and not to be using your eyes is, in a way, to be a victim of māyā. But then, you see, art and māyā have a kind of a curious relationship. Because one is not merely a victim of māyā.
There’s good māyā and bad māyā, as it were. There’s a way of creating a world. And in this sense an artist or a poet is a great creator.
The word “poet,” from the Greek poiesis, means “to make” or “to do.” The poets, then, are those who give us an imagination—that is, the power of building images—and so also painters teach us to see things that we never saw before. They evoke them. They see creatively.
Because we can see this Rorschach blot of the universe in many different ways just as the ordinary Rorschach blot is seen in many different ways by different people. And if I can convince you to see this Rorschach blot my way, I’ve not necessarily pulled the wool over your eyes, but I have given you a new possibility of imagination. There’s a place in a national park called Inspiration Point, and everybody goes there and they say, “Oh, ain’t it just like a picture!” That is because they have seen the kind of landscapes that are reproduced on the tops of candy boxes and so on, and they know that this is supposed to be beautiful.
Now, ask the question: of what is a landscape itself a picture? Are the clouds like anything? You know, do they reproduce something?