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Do the trees mean something? Are they symbols? Are they figures?
Are they about something? No! So when an artist paints a landscape in a kind of chocolate-box style, he’s actually painting a painting of an abstraction, of a non-objective dance—which is the tree or the cloud.
See? Or the foam on the waves. It’s just become a little corny, that’s all.
It’s been done so often. So instead, painters thought, “Let’s not do that. Instead of copying the dances that nature is doing, let’s just make dances directly on the canvas.” And so Jackson Pollock and everybody starts leaping around all over the place doing different things.
But then, in a few years to come, people walk down a street, and there’s an old board which has been splattered, and they’ll say, “Oh, ain’t it just like a Pollock!” See? “Ain’t it just like a picture?” Because they’ll have been taught to see the marvel of these particular colors and forms. So again, some artist has done māyā, and so made a new universe to see.
Now, however, here comes the interesting point. Is it all a projection; māyā? That’s to say—look, when we look at someone who’s tested on a Rorschach blot, we assume that the story he tells about it is a projection.
That is to say, it is only in his mind. And because it’s only in his mind, the story he tells you about the Rorschach blot is symptomatic of his particular psychological condition. Are we then going to say that the external world has no order and no sense in it intrinsically, but that is something purely projected into it by human beings?
And since human beings might differ from each other—as, say, one artist differs from another, or as one might have different kinds of brains or different sense organs—does that mean that according to the differentiations in the individual the external world is changed? Let’s say this: when astronomers use their telescopes and they discover that the stars are not angels, or they’re not lights being carried in crystal spheres, but they discover these galaxies—when they discovered the galaxies, did they invent them? Were there galaxies there before anybody looked at them through telescopes?
That’s the same question as: when there is a noise, is it noisy if there’s not anybody around to hear it? And, of course, we know from a physical point of view of that old problem about the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it is very simple. It’s a problem of relativity.
In other words, the vibrations in the air do not become noise until they hit an eardrum. Just as light going through space is not manifested as light until it falls upon a reflecting object. Just as a thing is not moving unless it can be shown to be moving in relation to something comparably still.
So, you see, in a way there are no galaxies until they arise as a situation responsive to them. Nothing exists by itself, but only in relation to other things. This is a rough point.
But remember this, though: this isn’t pure projection. Because the ability of the human being to have these sensory responses—to hear sounds, to see lights, and to know about galaxies and stars—the ability, the brain which makes that possible, is in itself a member of the external world. The brain is a member of the same world it’s looking at.
It has something in common with the universe that surrounds it. See, that was the thing that (in the beginning) we screened out: nobody realizes that he’s in the external world. Everybody else is, but I’m in the internal world.
Oh no, I’m not! I’m just as much in the external world as you. And my consciousness, my thoughts, my so on, can be regarded as something in the external world.
So I go with it. The external world, as I pointed out in the beginning, does me. Therefore, there are correspondences, there are transactions, there are relations between what I call “me” and “everything else” in the external world.
Only: I’m under the illusion that we don’t go together. I’ve forgotten that I create the galaxies in the same moment that I’ve forgotten that the galaxies create me. It’s mutual.
Like two sides of a coin: they go together. You can’t separate them. Otherwise you have no coin.
So then, in sum, let’s go back. These are the principal meanings of māyā: “measurement” through cutting, “play,” “magic,” “drama,” and “creative art.” All fundamentally resting on the idea that the universe is not finally serious. And so the man who has penetrated māyā is a man who doesn’t take life quite seriously, you see?
Now, there’s something unnerving about that, isn’t there? Because we use the word “serious” in two senses. When somebody says, “I love you,” and the other person says, “Are you serious?” the answer is, “No, I’m sincere.” Heavens, you don’t want to be loved seriously, do you?
I mean, do you want a Sturm und Drang, a kind of Tristan and Isolde relationship? Surely not. I mean, if you go in for that kind of thing, maybe that’s your dish.
But do we really want the world to be serious, you see? Is God serious? Now, in Christianity it seems that God is serious because nobody ever imagines that the one who sits on the throne of grace is sort of laughing.
He may be a very sad expression, a very kind expression, a very severe expression, but it wouldn’t be laughing. No. Because we feel, you see, that anything that’s in play and that isn’t serious is in some way trivial.
But that’s not the case. You see, we have to get over that idea and realize that the Lord—or whatever It is that all this is about, that’s doing all this—is having a ball; is playing. Even though the play sometimes involves scaring itself out of its wits.
The universe creeps up behind itself and says, “Boo!” And it jumps and all sorts of catastrophes happen, but ultimately they all change and disappear, and it all starts over again, see? This constant flowing in and out. And if things come they must go.
See? Going and coming are the same sides of one coin, you see? If they live, they must die.
It’s all one. And after all, here we are, thinking we are living, but going around chewing up animals and vegetables and creating death in every direction, see? And we say this disappearance of those forms into this form, we think it’s a good show.
But imagine what a pretty girl’s pearly teeth look like to an oyster! Alright. Now let’s have an intermission, and then we can have questions.
Well now, you know that one of the great problems that has arisen out of the Western study of Indian philosophy as well as out of the tradition of Western philosophy in relation to the whole problem of illusion is the question of what is called in the technical jargon of Western philosophy subjective idealism. This is the theory that all reality is mental. And we have to start by making a clear distinction between subjective idealism and solipsism.
Solipsism is the doctrine that you are the only person who exists and everybody else is your dream. And you can see there’s a certain analogy between that and the Hindu idea that all this cosmos is the dream of the godhead. But the difference here is that, in the solipsistic doctrine, it is just you as you more or less know yourself from a conscious standpoint as a finite individual, and not much more than that, having this dream that all these other people exist.
There’s no way of really producing an argument against solipsism because you can always say to a solipsist: what evidence, if someone could produce it, would you regard as disproving your idea? That’s a very disconcerting question to ask anybody, and I give it to you if ever you get involved in philosophical oneupmanship. Ask a Freudian: “What evidence, if it could be brought forward, would you consider to disprove the oedipus complex theory?” You find he can’t think of anything at all.
Or ask a theologian: “What evidence would you find conclusive as disproving the existence of God?” And he can’t think of any. Whereas other people, if you ask them that question, will suggest an experiment and say, “Alright, if this experiment is negative then we’ll accept the evidence.” And one of the classic experiments of this nature is the Michelson-Morley experiment which disproved the existence of the aether—at any rate, in the form that people had conceived aether. And it’s been generally accepted.
Somebody thought out what would happen if there were really aether. So this is always one of the problems of solipsism, and we’re going to see it’s one of the problems of subjective idealism. But if you will be a little naïve for a moment and seem at least to understand what you mean when you use the word “mind,” they will pitch the argument in the following way: you do not know anything except in your own mind.
The whole existence of an external world is something known to you in your mind. The distance of other people and other objects from you is a distance that exists in the mind. You cannot possibly conceive any world existing unless it be an experience.
How could there be an unexperienced world? That would not be a world for anyone or anything, therefore it would not be at all. Because being is always being for something.
It is, in other words, relational. The sun is light for eyes. Eyes are organs of vision for a mind.
If there are no eyes, the sun gives forth no light. If there are no nerve ends, it gives forth no heat. If there are no muscles, nothing is heavy.
And if there are no soft skins, nothing is hard. Because it’s only in relation to a certain softness that something hard can be said to be hard, only in relation to a certain degree of measurement performed by the neurons that things can be said to be relatively hot or cold. Hot and cold are the impact of energies on a nervous system.
Energies at all are recognized as energies by their impact on something. Now, the theory is incredibly plausible as it has been stated by people like Berkeley and Bradley and the Western idealists, but today it is about the most unfashionable philosophical theory in the academic world that you could follow. Because Western philosophy has undergone a great revolution since about 1914.
In that year, there was published Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Wittgenstein came from the so-called Vienna school or was influenced by the Vienna school of people who called themselves scientific empiricists, sometimes logical analysts, sometimes logical positivists. And they said only statements that are empirically verifiable have meaning. They never verified that statement.
But that was their point of departure; that’s their basic assumption. Everybody has a metaphysical assumption which he can’t prove. Watch out for it.
It’s basic to all thought. For example: you must be consistent. Try and imagine a system of logic that isn’t consistent.
But at any rate, this school has had immense influence in the 20th century, and it argues, basically, that in order to say something meaningful—he’s having fun!—you must be able to verify it. That is to say, to verify things by prophecy. If you make a prediction based on your statement and it comes true, you verified it.
If it doesn’t come true, you haven’t verified it. You de-verified it. A statement which was de-verified, shown to be untrue, might be meaningful, but untrue.
But a statement that you can’t think any way of verifying it is in this theory meaningless. Now, so, you say, “The world is ruled by God. Everything that happens happens under the governance of God.” So the logical analyst says: “You’ve made a statement now that says everything is affected by X; God.
Suggest a way of verifying this. What difference would it make if it weren’t so? Would it make any difference to the way things are going on if they weren’t governed by God?” This is a problem because it’s just the same as if you had said, “All bodies whatsoever in the universe”—that includes all stars, all galaxies, all planets—“are moving in a certain direction.” Now, there’s no way of verifying this because you can only verify movement in a certain direction by comparison with something that’s relatively still.
But there will not be any still body with reference to which all the other bodies move, because you said in the beginning all bodies in the universe are moving in such and such a direction. So you could only say everything in the universe is governed by God if you made an exception. “But there are certain things that are not.” You see?
Then, according to logical analysis, you could’ve made a meaningful statement. But when you start making statements about everything, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t prove it, you can’t disprove it.
And so they say although you think you have said something, you haven’t really said anything at all. You made a statement that was actually as nonsensical as asking, “Why is a mouse when it spins?” This statement about God doing or ruling all things sounded meaningful because we’re used to it, but is really pure nonsense. And this has been so persuasive in the climate of academic philosophy today that idealism of all kinds is, as I said, extremely unfashionable.
But there are considerations that might cause us to reflect on this more carefully. Because we can think of situations analogous to the idea that all things are ruled by God, or all things exist only in the mind, there are situations analogous to that in our everyday experience. Only, we can be aware of these situations because we stand outside them.
Now, first of all, consider a mirror. A mirror will reflect all kinds of shapes and colors. And when you look at the mirror, the mirror itself will be the ground, or the underlying element, common to all those shapes and colors.
And it is not meaningless to say that they are all reflections in a mirror. Because the mirror has an edge, and you can see other things around the mirror which behave in a different way from the reflections. You can’t put your hand out and pull the necktie of a reflection in the mirror, but you can reach your hand out and pull the necktie of somebody standing beside the mirror, you see?
But nevertheless, within the context of the mirror all the things that are there are reflected in it. And if the mirror weren’t there, they wouldn’t be there; those reflections. Now supposing, similarly, everything that exists has its being in a mirror called the mind, only there is no way of seeing the edge of this mirror—is that meaningful?
Is that possible? The positivist, logical analyst will say no, because the statement makes no difference to anything. It makes no difference to anything in this thing you call the mind that it’s in the mind.
It makes no difference to anything in the mirror that it’s in the mirror. For example, your face is not immediately changed by being reflected in a mirror. The mirror doesn’t exercise influences—or so they say—upon the reflections.
But it very well could. Let’s consider what we were discussing last night. Lenses in cameras influence the kind of world they photograph.
A convex lens will give you one thing, a concave lens will give you another thing. And one can think of all sorts of wonky lenses: prismatic lenses, bent lenses, squarely lenses. Now, you see, if the lenses of your eyes could be said to distort the physical world, you would take that distortion as normal.
Because there would be no way of setting up a standard and saying: by that standard, my eyes are wrong. Unless you simply took some other kind of a lens and said this is right, and the eye is distorted. You would’ve always seen things that way.
So nevertheless, whether the eyes are distorted or not distorted is impossible to decide. So according to this way of logic that is a meaningless question. There is no way of deciding the answer, and it makes no difference whether it is or whether it isn’t—or so they say.
But I think that they have neglected certain kinds of difference that these things do make. First of all, there is a difference of feeling, and very often a difference in behavior, between a person who is aware of an underlying ground or continuum for every experience and every reality, and a person who is not aware of it. The person who’s aware of it feels at home in his surroundings, the person who’s not aware of it doesn’t.
The first belongs and the second doesn’t feel he belongs—he feels he’s engaged in a contest. Furthermore, one of the difficult ideas to get across and express well in any language which wants to assert a pluralistic universe—in which there is no unifying ground—any language based on that assumption is going to have difficulty talking about relationships. Let’s go back in the history of philosophy and look at former instances of this difficulty.
The thing that really bogged Descartes down and that puzzled him—he never could answer—was the relationship of mind and matter, or spirit and matter. He had inherited from Platonism and from Christianity the theory of the two worlds: the natural and the supernatural, the material and the mental, the real and the ideal. And what never could be explained by the philosophies of the people who believe that way was how the one influenced the other.
How does the spiritual world influence the material? As is well known, all ghosts, all well-behaved ghosts, walk straight through walls without budging a brick. Now, if my mind is my ghost within me, how on earth does it lift my arm when a ghost doesn’t budge a brick when it walks through a wall?
See, this is the real problem. It all sunk on this. They couldn’t explain that.
And, you see, in just the same way as the cartesian cannot explain the influence of mind on matter, so a person who works according to the theories of logical analysis can’t really explain relationship between so-called things. If he’s going to take a pluralistic theory of the universe in which there is no unifying continuum, but there are just these events, you see—there are these things we can talk about in a scientific descriptive manner. How are they related?
They obviously are related. They obviously influence each other. But how?
Put it in another way of historic philosophical problem: how does a cause influence an effect? Kind of amazing, you know, that they do. We say there are causes and effects.
But how does a cause lead to an effect? Is it something like a row of dominoes that stand on their end, and you flip down the first one and they go clickety, clickety, clickety, clickety, and all knock each other down? Or a row of billiard balls—that was the idea of Newtonian physics.
Of course. That the atoms were things like billiard balls, and they bang each other around, and so you got results. But this really won’t do.
For very many reasons. One is, of course, that things influence each other backwards. A future event can change a past event.
A lot of people aren’t aware of that, but it can. If I say, “The bark of the dog and the bark of the tree,” what happens to “bark,” the former event, is very seriously influenced by the later event “dog” or “tree.” Although the word sounds the same and is spelled the same, it has a different meaning according to what happens later. So, in the same way, in music.
What is happening at this moment may be changed altogether by something happening later. A note has one meaning in one context, another meaning in another context. So what is the cause-effect relationship between them when, apparently, the earlier event seems to be causally affected by the later event?
You see how puzzling all that is. But it’s very easily illustrated by certain phenomena of music. When a person is tone deaf—that is to say, he cannot hear melodies, he only hears noise and he can’t understand why other people find music attractive.
What is his deficiency? Where is he blind? His blindness is that he cannot hear relationships.
Or rather, in musical language: he doesn’t hear intervals. If you are musically sensitive, what you hear in a melody is not a string of notes. You hear the steps between them.
You recognize the major scale of C as ascending. Why do we think of that as up? What does it mean that one sound is higher than another?
That’s nonsense to a person who’s tone deaf. There are just different sounds. There are boomy sounds and squeaky sounds, but they don’t rise.
You see, he hears no motion in him. Because, you see, each note is static, and he doesn’t hear the lede from one to the other; the step. Well so, a person who’s a logical positivist is a tone deaf philosopher, see?
And you can’t explain. There’s nothing you can do to a tone deaf person to explain how you hear music, just as there’s absolutely no way of making a congenitally blind person understand color. We may find out one, eventually, when we find out a lot more about our senses.
But in the ordinary way he just can’t get it. And so in exactly that same way, there are people who cannot get certain things. We say of such people, “You know all the words but you don’t know the music.” And you may as well not waste your energies trying to convince, but there are, alas, these poor, afflicted souls who just aren’t functioning on a certain wave band.
But now I don’t want to say, you know, make a kind of a esoteric scene out of this. A lot of people are trained to pretend that they are not on that wave band. You may be perfectly capable of understanding the relationship between a cause and effect.
Do you know what the relationship is? It’s very simple: they are the same event, only divided into two parts. If you see a cat walk by a very narrow window, you see first the head and then a little later the tail.
If you speak in cumbersome philosophical language, you’re going to start talking about the event “head” being the cause of the event “tail.” Well, it’s all one cat. And that’s it. So when you see causes and effects, what you’re saying is this: “Aha!
I realize at last my perception is limited. And when I saw one thing that’s invariably followed by something else, what I hadn’t noticed is that they’re continuous with each other. So that when one part of this pattern arises, I should expect the other part.” They’re one pattern.
They’re not cause and effect. They’re not something that is an action and a response to that action, an action and a reaction. They’re a single action.
That’s why they’re related in this way. Alright, so I’ve got these two discrete events, and I’ve called them “cause” and “effect,” but I find they are really one. Okay, in exactly the same way, I’ve got the two discrete events: “you” and “I.” We could equally well, couldn’t we, just say that there may be some sense in which they are one.
Or the organism and the environment: it’s becoming plainer and plainer that they are one. Now, what this goes back to—again, we are looking at philosophical history—is the Western debate between the two schools of thought called the nominalists and the realists. And the modern logical philosophers are nominalists.
Their fight is as follows: the realists say there are real—this is how they get the word “realist.” It’s not what we call a realist today at all, it’s quite different. The realist says there are, in reality, substances which could be called matter or spirit or humanity, just to take an example. Every individual human being is an instance of something called “mankind.” And mankind is a real entity.
You could say, too, the United States of America is a real entity. And all these individual examples of it are, as it were, members of a body constituted by the real mankind, or the state, or the society, or the church, or the whatever. In contradistinction, the nominalist says all your so-called real natures are abstractions.
There is no such thing as mankind. There are simply these individual people, and calling them all men is a way of identifying them, but there is no such thing as mankind. In the same way, there is no such thing as the United States.
There are all these people living here who imagine that they’re the United States and call themselves that, but the United States as such has no physical existence. Because when you say the policy of the United States towards Russia is thus and so, you don’t mean the policy of the geographical territory. And nominalism, you see, is a very big thing for the followers of Korzybski and for all logical analysts and so on, because they take the point of view—the whole think in Korzybski is that you mustn’t just go ’round calling things “dogs,” but you must recognize there is Fido1, Fido2, and Fido3.
And so this helps you, as the song says, to see each doggy differently. The idea in semantics is this tremendous, precise accuracy; of getting the details clear, seeing that not every colored man is a [censored], not every Chinese is a [censored], not every Italian is a [censored], you see? Now, of course, yes, there is the richness of detail.
But these are philosophical fashions that go back and forth between the prickly-minded people and the gooey-minded people. The prickly-minded people are the nominalists. They like to emphasize the details, the atomic, discontinuous structure of things.
The gooey-minded people like to emphasize the great connected generalities, the way things form into bodies. But you see very clearly what happens if you press nominalism to its logical conclusion: the answer is there are no people, there are only amalgamations of cells. What you really are ,are these cells.
Or you want to go further? Say what you are is only these electrons. That’s all there is, you see?
And this idea that they add up in some way to a person is just an abstraction. You’re not really there, you see. They’re just all that.
Now wait a minute, Mr. Nominalist! Suddenly, you are beginning to turn into a believer of māyā. Watch your step, you see?
If you push anybody far enough philosophically, they all arrive at the same place. You suddenly tell me you don’t believe human beings really exist, there are only these atoms. Well, well, well!
So I suppose we can argue the same thing about connections in time. Melody is then an illusion. There are only the individual notes.
After all, if you’re going to be a nominalist, a melody is something that just doesn’t exist at all. Okay. That’s almost what the Buddhists say.
When I was explaining to you this morning the moment, moment, moment, and you don’t connect the moments, there is only one moment? You see? Well, that’s just saying the same thing the same way, and saying that all the connections are an illusion.