Finding Harmony in the Rhythm of Life Black Screen

well now the book of changes uh has a very mysterious history and Scholars are naturally disposed to believe that a great deal of this history is pure Legend but there was supposed to have been many thousand years ago a Great Sage Emperor by the name of fushi who was followed in due course by a king whose name was one and fushi is said to have looked around and studied nature and to have felt the forces in it and to have invented what are called the bwa or the eight trigrams now you see if you will

arrange Yang and Yin which are represented by broken and unbroken lines unbroken line for Yang a broken line for Yin you if you combine these in groupings of three you have eight possible combinations for example three Yang lines which are unbroken will then represent what the Chinese called Chan or Heaven three broken lines being all Yang all female will therefore represent the opposite of Heaven which is Earth two broken lines on either side of one unbroken line will represent water and the opposite Arrangement two unbroken lines on either side of one broken one will represent

fire and so on until you get eight fundamental elements and the idea is you see that it represents eight elements of the process of nature now we used to say in the west before in a pre scientific age that there were four elements earth water fire and air we got this from India the Indians add another one actually called Akash which is space uh we say now that is pre-scientific gobble deuk because actually there are how many elements today in 90 something have been established by chemistry but it's the same sort of thing as saying

there are three primary colors so many colors in the Spectrum so many notes in the scale it is simply that in order to describe nature you have to divide it up some way for example in classifying people there are various schemes have been worked out we talk about there being extroverts and introverts and Yong made up his four functions so that he could describe intuitive types sensation types thinking types and feeling types Sheldon has his own special way where he can talk about ectomorphs mesomorphs and endomorphs and then have them variously cerebrotonic somon and viscerotonic

and he could combine these three in various ways now a man like Aldis hxy was quite obviously a catonic ectomorph long skinny intellectual but if you look at any of these sort of classifications you can always find flaws in them they never really fit and so in the same way the uh say political classifications that we have don't really fit people because their opinions are always too complicated unless they're quite stupid to be able to be fitted into any of these divisions in a precise way but nevertheless you can't do without classification of this sort

you can't do without Spectra and that's the the sort of thing that the eing classification is based on now now then that was fushi was supposed to have invented these things and there is another legend that he saw these trigrams by heating the shell of a tortoise until it cracked and then studying the cracks in the same way Leonardo da Vinci used to go to a filthy old wall where there were all sorts of bird droppings and scratches and markings and he would do a RW Shak blot on it and he would see a great

battle scene and this would give him inspiration for a painting uh this is the same thing that you do when you gaze in a crystal ball or when you look into a deep pool of ink uh there are all sorts of ways of what is called divining to Divine is um to consult the Oracle like uh it's like a word to Divine you see there's a subject called Divinity which is to do with the scriptures so to Divine is to study the article just as wienstein wanted to make a a verb out of philosophy philosophy

he always thought to do philosophy philosophy isn't just a subject it's an activity and uh so to Divine is to call upon the unconscious instead of thinking something out in a logical way you allow your imagination to flow into something that is useful for an oracle whether it's a raw shock blot or a crystal ball or a hexagram of the book of changes for after fushi King one combined the eight trigrams and there are obviously 64 possible combinations of eight and so the book of changes is simply a setting out of the 64 hexagrams with

a commentary on them and when you are a beginner in the art of the book of changes you need the book you look up the commentary to uh help you find out what the hexagram means but when you are an expert you don't need the book you simply feel the meaning of these combinations of uh two elements now the theory of the book of changes is a very curious one and it's related to Gig mug that is to say the mutual interpenetration of all things and events and is based on the idea that anything that

happens at this moment will be related to this moment because it's in the context of this moment therefore the way I would do something at random at this time will be what we call a sign of the times or a manifestation of what in German is called the sist the spirit of the time or the mind of the time uh another way of putting it would be the configuration of the time and it's in the same way that for example astrologers cast what is called a horor horoscope that is to say as of the moment

what are the stars what is in other words the configuration of the universe and so in exactly the same way the yijing philosophy is based on the idea that how one randomly selects the arrow stalks or the sticks or tosses coins in a given situation and you might Define the situation by asking a question that random pattern that falls will be related to the situation and you can Divine something about the situation from it I remember a zen master who used to use the eing he had another way he would take anything he took for

example one day a bowl of flowers and he looked at the pattern of the arrangement of the flowers and derived a hexagram from the the pattern and from that he told us about the mood the person who had arranged them had been in now of course this is all from our scientific point of view unverified and may be unverifiable and of course a scientific person poo poos this kind of thing because you would say that's not the way to go about deciding what to do in an important situation well when you have to decide upon

action in an important situation what you do if you're a scientifically minded person is you study all the relevant data and you uh get information and then on the basis of that information and past experience and previous scientific studies of behavior you decide how this situation is likely to turn out but there is a very serious problem about that it it is not any use for practical purposes it is only applicable in Trivial situations which are highly controlled in an experimental way for example in the old times when you went to the doctor he would

look at you and prod you and smell you and uh come up with some feeling about what was the matter with you no doctor will do that today they say they don't move unless they take innumerable tests see so you're tested and measured precisely then they they come back and they think about it but you know they still don't know what to do because there comes a point in any decision-making process where you have to act on hunch how do you know when you've gotten enough data about any situation when to call a Hal because

you can go on collecting data forever there are always in initely many variables in any situation whatsoever and especially in the human situation so ultimately you don't kid yourself you are always deciding on Hunch what you're going to do even the best informed person ultimately comes to a leap of intuition before making a decision so then uh when you really don't know which way to decide on a certain thing people say flip a coin you know you can always rib Christians on this because uh um the Disciples of Jesus cast lots uh and uh to

make a decision and uh but we're always doing that you're fundamentally you're always at the point where you don't decide for what we call Purely rational reasons so then flipping a coin gives you two possibilities yes or no now let's suppose you had an eight-sided coin the six-sided dice is a little bit richer instead of giving you uh uh only two decisions possibilities here you've got a possibility of variation now let's consider a foursided Co that's what you've got here uh now again when you get the Oracle in the eing uh it is never terribly

specific although sometimes in your given situation it seems to be absolutely specific when you consult it but on the other hand uh you you use it like theologians use the Bible that is to say they read into it anything they want to find only you mustn't do this deliberately you have to let your own unconscious processes uh read the Oracle for you and decide what it means in other words you use the Oracle like a rosak plot and the the wisdom of that is this that your brain if it is your brain and nobody really

knows you see just to put something in parenthesis is the brain the mind some say yes some say no one would think that the structure of the brain has something to do with the structure of thought but on the other hand it may not in the same sense that a structure of a radio has nothing to do with the message that comes over it although Marshall mcluhan says he belongs to the other School you see that the medium itself is the message what is the relationship for example between the grid pattern of a newspaper photograph

and the picture the same grid pattern can convey any picture so there seems to be a complete irrelevance between the two but on the other hand there is not quite as much irrelevance as you might think because any picture reproduced uh by this method has some connection with a time and with a technology that can produce this method it's a rather roundabout connection that one but nevertheless from a big point of view it's a very close connection depends where what uh What uh framework you're looking at it in whether you've got a very big framework

or a very narrow one but so when it comes down to it though uh and you don't know how to make a decision all right you then you consult your brain now I'm using the word brain here to mean a complex organization which you have at your disposal which you don't stand and which is much smarter than you are because you see whatever it is that is the mind the brain or whatever I don't care what you call it it takes care of ever so many things at once which you could never possibly think of

consciously you can't be bothered consciously to regulate your glands to see that your blood flows all right all the time but your nervous system is taking care of that it is regulating it at all your nervous system is receiving information which you don't know anything about because when we look consciously we by no means notice all that our eyes see but your mind or brain registers everything that is input to your eyes so genius in thinking is fundamentally based on being able to trust your own mind and not confuse your mind with the content of

conscious perception the content of conscious perception is a tiny fragment of what's going on around you you can train yourself to be more receptive than you are in ordinary Consciousness but this isn't quite the point it is not like how many things did you notice you know how you can play a game uh with children and when they're become boring in a car and uh they get out a pad and write down how many things you noticed as you went along you know Scouts play this sort of thing well that's all right but that's not

the point here the point here is not how much did you notice because there's no end to that you can play that game and there are infinitely many things that you could notice the point is to take them all in in one glance and you can't do that with conscious attention but you do do it with your basic neurological or mental equipment whatever you want to call it so therefore you have at your disposal this amazing uh computer or whatever it is that can think um multi-dimensionally on ever so many levels at once now thousands

of years ago we don't know how far all this goes back but people naturally trusted their minds to tell them what to do they didn't make decisions they did what they felt like or as we should call it they followed Instinct as animals do then they discovered how to figure through language and through numbers they found that figuring could be very effective and they started using it and relying on it more and more and more and as a result of this developed anxiety because when you don't figure and you live purely spontaneously you never worry

if this decision is disastrous it's disastrous and death will hit you in a hurry and you'll never know what hit you you don't spend all your time worrying about did you make up your mind in the right way and you see that may uh lead to trouble but the thing is that people don't realize is that everything leads to trouble in any case if you develop the intellect and its calculation processes to an excessive degree what do you have well you have the weapons lab of the United States Air Force and you have the Russian

this that and the other and the Chinese something else uh you have planned disaster uh if you leave it alone which is what the doist mean partly by wooe or non uh interference uh there will still be troubles in the world but you won't have to worry about them and you will float along and you will feel very free and the question is to try and con modern people into living that way now uh I'm putting this you you mustn't take me too literally because for a really well-developed human being he isn't one who simply

abandons thinking and planning because after all that is some faculty that we have in just the same way that a bird has a beak and you don't want to as it were um amputate your faculties the point is rather something like this we have to recognize the hierarchical situation of our faculties that the thinking faculty is the servant of the larger mind which doesn't need to think just as God uh if I may use that expression again uh if you asked him how high is mlan in millimeters he would say well I really don't know

I'll have to measure [Laughter] it because to ask that question is to ask the relation of mlan to a ruler M Blan is not in itself any millimeter or meters in height that is a what is this simply a short way of talking about comparing it with a scale and knowing what it is in height is the same thing as comparing it with the scale so the Lord would have to say I must get out my ruler just in the same way as you don't know how you breathe but you do it so the Lord

God creates the universe without kn KN how it's done that is to say knowing in terms of technical considerations but you still know how to breathe even if you don't know how you do it because you do it that's knowing how to do it you know how to walk you know how to think nobody does but they do it so then this unknown process produces the knowing process but the knowing process is subordinate to it and therefore you have to learn how to include thinking in spontaneity but it's subordinate to spontaneity that's when I wrote

that thing in the bulletin about Suzuki and ended with a quotation in which he described his own life as a thinker because he was an intellectual he was a scholar but he did scholarship in the spirit of spontaneity he used thinking he was not used by thinking and when I say he here I'm referring to the Mind Beyond Consciousness now the Mind Beyond Consciousness we discussed a little bit of this yesterday that we call um the self with a capital S is distinct from the ego and I pointed out why the horoscope was traditionally considered

to be the map of the Soul and that the body is in the soul not the soul in the body so the mind that I talking about is not merely your nervous system if we will talk about it now in physical terms it is not merely the nervous system but it is the entire physical environment in which your nervous system exists and all the relationships operating within it that's your mind in other words the kind of mind you have at this moment is impossible without your living in this kind of a society your mind includes

the telephone book the Encyclopedia Britannica the University of California uh and everything else going on say in the intellectual world every one of us exists mentally in relation to the total intellectual process going on in this day and age in society you draw on it it infiltrates you it provides you with language you didn't invent the English language it was given to you as a result of a social Enterprise going on for thousands of years so in this sense uh when you consult your mind you are Consulting the entire organization of the universe as it

is immediately more immediately reflected in the structure of your nervous system and everything that your nervous system is doing all the kinds of messages that are running through it it is these messages that constitute the mind and so this is what Buckminster Fuller means when he talks about Synergy s y n e r g y means the from the Greek curos working together and uh um he believes that any organized ation has more intelligence than any one of its members and he therefore goes on to believe that the industrial complex of communication systems covering the

face of the earth is developing its own intelligence and it will be much more intelligent than any one of us and this may perhaps save the situation we don't know I mean one illustration of this is that I'm very familiar with is air transportation now every country in the world has invested a fortune in jet aircraft and by Joe these things have to run otherwise they fall apart so they must run on time and this network of air Communications is joining every city in the world together so that by 1968 according to Buckminster Fuller we

have a one toown world figure it if it takes you an hour to to get from here to New York in a supersonic craft New York is only as far away as Palo Alto well that's practically in the same community and this is going to include Tokyo and Moscow and uh Paris and so on and they're all going to become the same place they'll speak increasingly the same language share the same culture eat the same food can fly in San Francisco go bread to Paris which is being done because some of the bread made here

is better than the bread made in um you know it can go the other way too and uh we're going to share a a common Urban culture and this is the work of synergy also the aircraft people get increasingly bored at passport and Customs regulations because they hold up traffic well now then uh you might like to see how the eing is used and uh I have here mainly for symbolic reasons three ancient Chinese coins you'll see that they have a square hole in the middle and that on one side they're inscribed and on the

other side they're not and the inscribed side is counted as the yin face and the uninscribed side is counted as the Yang and when you use the book of changes you um usually face it with a question and uh it seems to me that a good question that it might be faced with is what should the people of the United States do about China and you um uh respectfully request the wisdom of the article in this matter and um you throw the coins down to see how they fall and what I have is one Yang

and two Yin now strangely enough that counts in the system and I don't quite know why as uh what's called the Yang Yang I think maybe I do know why you would think it would be a Yin with two Yin and one Yang but it counts as the Young young and uh that's the bottom line of the hexagram and by being a young young it means it's a fixed line it doesn't change perhaps the reason why that's called the the uh Yang Yang is that when you've got two Yin and one Yang it means the

yin is weakening and the Yang is coming up because when you reach a point at which the in force comes to a maximum there is in it the seed of the young force and vice versa and you see you have to do this six times to get six lines so this time we have two yangs and one Yin which gives us the young Yin that again is a line which doesn't change and we get two Yin and one Yang which gives us another Yang Yang and has made the hexagram of water no fire and this

time we get three Yin which gives us a changing Yin line which is written like this that means that after you consult the hexagram in its first form you consult the hexagram which is so far as that line is concerned the opposite again two Yin and one Yang giving us the Yang Yang and we get here two yangs and one Yin gives us the Y yin and so we get fire over water fire no water over fire water over fire cool it baby so that is five over s sway s leave 63 let's see the

Oracle is up very surprising 63 GG meaning after completion this hexagram is the evolution of Tai or the hexagram number 11 meaning peace the transition from confusion to order is completed and everything is in its proper place even in particulars the strong lines are in the strong places the weak lines in the weak places this is a very favorable Outlook yet it gives reason for thought for it is just when perfect equilibrium has been reached that any movement may cause order to revert to disorder the one strong line that has moved to the top thus

affecting complete order in details is followed by the other lines each moving according to its nature and thus suddenly there arises a gain the hexagram p number 12 which is stand still see we're going to move to 47 now here comes uh the the Oracle itself it says after completion which is the name of the hexagram success in small matters perseverance furthers at the beginning Good Fortune at the end disorder then following the Judgment comes another part of the Oracle called the image water over fire the image of the condition in after completion thus the

superior man takes thought of Misfortune and arms himself against it in a advance and then there's a comment on the lines and we have a an eight in the no was six in the one fourth place and the Oracle here here says of this line which is a moving one the finest clothes turn to rags be careful all day long now uh there are many comments on this but we should look first at the hexagram it turns into which is uh number what did I say 43 I think that's it 47 turns into 47 the

one it turns into uh indicates the direction of the motion of the it turns into Kun which means oppression exhaustion with the lake above and the water below the judgment is oppression success perseverance the great man brings about Good Fortune no blame when one has something to say it is not believed the image there is no water in the lake the image of exhaustion thus the superior man Stakes his life life on following his will there is a comment on this one it says the lake is above water below the lake is empty dried up

other words the water flows out exhaustion is expressed in yet another way at the top a dark line is holding down two light lines below a light line is hemmed in between two dark lines the upper trigram belongs to the principle of Darkness the lower to the principle of light thus everywhere Superior men are oppressed and held in Restraint by inferior men the transition from the old to the new time is already accomplished in principle everything stands systematized and it is only in regard to details that success is still to be achieved in respect to

this however we must be careful to maintain the right attitude everything proceedes as if of its own accord and this can all too easily tempt us to relax and let things take their own course without troubling over details such indifference is the root of all evil symptoms of Decay are bound to be the result here we have the rule indicating the usual course of history but this rule is not an inescapable law he who understands it is in position to avoid its effects by Dent of unremitting perseverance and caution and then the image which is

water over fire when water in a kettle hangs over fire the two elements stand in relation and thus generate energy but the resulting tension demands caution if the water boils over the fire is extinguished and its energy is lost if the heat is too great the water evaporates into the air these elements here brought into relation and thus generating energy are by Nature hostile to each other Only The Most Extreme Caution can prevent damage in life junctures when all of course according to Hindu philosophy the physical universe is an illusion they use the word Maya

but Maya has many meanings and uh among these meanings only one is illusion and the word illusion of course always carries a bad connotation to Western ears we want something that's for real but it doesn't necessarily carry such a bad connotation to Hindu ears is something that um as it were is is the bif foration or two aspects of a single process and they you know it's a single process because they can't do without each other if they could do without each other then it would be a divided process radically divided split down the middle

but as it is the interdependence of these two sides of things or two ways of looking at things shows that there is something in common between the two and to understand this is the essential key to uh living in a sane way because if you're insane you're split up an idiot you know the word Greek idiotes is means uh private purely private uh isolated out of communication out of relationship and so uh this is a way of saying that uh insanity is a lack of awareness of relativity because all existence is relationship now if we

can take a very fundamental illustration of this I want you to imagine a universe in which all that there exists is one ball this ball will of course have to be floating in space because if there is no space outside the ball nobody knows that it's a ball there's no possibility of a ball which has no space beyond it because then the ball itself the solid material of the ball would be all that there was and there would be nothing outside it so there would be no way of defining it as a ball so there

has to be our universe one ball in space and the space outside the ball furthermore must be regarded as depending upon the existence of the ball the ball and a space go together now then however there is no way of telling what this ball is doing whether it's moving or whether it is still it could be roaring through this space at thousands of miles an hour and there'll be no way of proving it there will be no air friction upon it there would be nothing uh relatively stable with which its movement could be compared and

against which it could be measured so this ball has no energy it can't even uh be said to be still because it isn't moving it isn't not moving you can't think about it because and the reason you can't think about it is uh not because it exceeds you it's because it is you you can't get at it like you can't bite your own teeth so then if we introduce two balls into our Cosmos then we can say something about motion because it is apparent that they can approach each other or get away from each other

but no one can say which one is doing it or whether both are doing it because uh there is no no way of determining it uh we used to have a sergeant in training in the in the Army in England who used to teach us about rifle shooting and he said to die we going to practice aiming off wind now there are three kinds of wind mild fresh and [Laughter] strong and uh three kinds of wind and there you are stuck with it you see because as always you can always think of this extreme that

extreme and something in the middle see well now you've got something a little richer to play with if if you have eight instead of four is something that um as it were is the bif or two aspects of a single process and they you know it's a single process because they can't do without each other if they could do without each other then it would be a divided process radically divided split down the middle but as it is the interdependence of these two sides of things or two ways of looking at things shows that there

is something in common between the two and to understand this is the essential key to uh living in a sane way because if you're insane you're split up an idiot you know the word Greek idiotes is means uh private purely private uh isolated out of communication out of relationship and so uh this is a way of saying that uh insanity is a lack of awareness of relativity because all existence is relationship now if we can take a very fundamental illustration of this I want you to imagine a universe in which all that there exists is

one ball this ball will of course have to be floating in space because if there is no space outside the ball nobody knows that it's a ball there's no possibility of a ball which has no space beyond it because then the ball itself the solid material of the ball would be all that there was and there would be nothing outside it so there would be no way of defining it as a ball so there has to be our universe one ball in space and the space outside the ball furthermore must be regarded as depending upon

the existence of the ball the ball and a space go together now then however there is no way of telling what this ball is doing whether it's moving or whether it is still it could be roaring through this space at thousands of miles an hour and there would be no way of proving it there would be no air friction upon it there would be nothing uh relatively stable with which its movement could be compared and against which it could be measured so this ball has no energy it can't even uh be said to be still

can't be said to be in motion and of course this is the situation of the universe as a whole in the beginning one of the things that God said before the Bible started the first thing according to the Bible was let there be light but actually there were several former pronouncements um one of which was you've got to draw the line some where and the other was have a ball and this is why uh most objects of celestial uh existence are spherical don't you think it's very odd to be living on a spherical Rock revolving

around an enormous spherical fire this is weird wake up and find yourself in that situation so he said have a ball now this is the fundamental situation the universe has a whole is presumably some kind of ball it's curved space and there it is and nothing can be said about the whole universe as to whether it is moving or whether it is still it's neither that's why the Hindus in trying to U make some indication of the Ultimate Reality say it is not this it is not that it is not one thing it's not the

other it doesn't exist it doesn't not exist it doesn't both exist and not exist it doesn't neither exist nor not exist so you can't say anything about it your tongue is tied up that's why it is said in the muman Khan which is a great Zen text that when you've attained Enlightenment you're like a dumb man who's had a marvelous dream everybody who's had a marvelous dream wants to tell everybody about it but if you're dumb you can't say a thing so in the same way the moment you realize that you are one with all

that there is well it's this fundamental ball and you can't say anything about it because it isn't moving it isn't not moving you can't think about it because and the reason you can't think about it is uh not because it exceeds you it's because it is you you can't get at it like you can't bite your own teeth so then if we introduce two balls into our Cosmos then we can say something about motion because it is apparent that they can approach each other or get away from each other but no one can say which

one is doing it or whether both are doing it because uh there is no no way of determining it one may be still and the other moving to it or away from it both may be moving towards each other or away from each other but there is no way of saying which one starts and furthermore they can only move with respect to each other in a straight line they have no possibility of moving on a Surface they have defined linear motion now we will introduce three balls into our system and suddenly we find uh not

only that they can move uh on a surface with respect to each other but also that there's going to be a little fight started because if two balls stay together at a constant space apart and one ball appears to approach them or to recede from them uh well here is a problem are the two standing still and the one uh likes them or doesn't like them so moves closer away or is the one standing still and the two moving towards it or away from it well there's only one way in this thing of deciding two

balls that stay together constitute a majority and according to the majority vote they will decide whether they are moving away from the other one or approaching it or whether it is standing still or whatever now then uh the the third ball of course can lick them by joining them it can always stay if it wants to at a constant space from the other two unless they break up and go off in different directions so long as they they stay together it can stay with them and then we are back to the original situation because no

one is moving at all however much they move because the three constitute now one constellation one triangle all right introduce a fourth ball now we have the possibility of motion in three dimensions and you would say well now this is good because we've got an Umpire somebody who stands at the distance of objectivity and looks down upon those three balls and will decide which of them are moving and which of them are still very good but the problem is which one of them is the fourth who's the Umpire everyone is in a position of a

third dimension to the other three so everyone is both involved in the game of three and could be the external Observer who is the Umpire of what the three are doing now that is exactly your situation as being sensing yourself as an external Observer of the world and this is a simple basic principle in terms of which all bodies in the cosmos may be understood it's simply nothing but a multiplication of this situation it's very it's complicated yes so that you have to scratch your head uh to think about it but it all reduces down

to this fundamental uh Mutual motion of balls so you see from this what is the meaning of Relativity so uh none of the balls incidentally have such a thing as a true position because the position of any one of the four is where seems to be from the the uh different points of view of each member of the group the members of the group can get together and agree upon a theoretical uh positioning of the balls but they can never directly see all of the balls including the one that's looking in this theoretical position just

in the same way as you have a theoretical idea of the dimensions of a room which would correspond to an architect's ground plan and elevation and you would say you know that that corner up there is a right angle although you see it as an obtuse angle now this agreement as to what are the true positions of things is very important because upon such agreement depends all possibilities of human communication we have to have a standard of what is north south east and west of what is a unit of measure of what languages and what

words or what noises are to mean what experiences and by constructing this conventional standard of measures we are able to agree with each other but one must see at the same time that this is a convention there is no reason for driving on the right side of the road rather than the left except that everybody must agree what side they're going to drive on one isn't really preferable to the other the point is to agree so when we agree about certain social conventions whether they be legal or moral or uh descriptional aesthetic whatever they are

they are a construct they are an abstraction and nobody uh uh well let's say they're an abstraction and it uh this abstraction is never directly perceived just as you cannot possibly go up to the ceiling to a position where you can see uh the whole floor as a rectal linear pattern as it would be drawn in an architect's blueprint your vision will always be distorted if by Distortion you mean departure from the blueprint so then except in terms of some sort of Convention of this kind there is no such thing as the true position of

the four balls in space because you must always ask when you ask about truth truth for whom or truth in relation to what standards now you see when we measure something by inches inch numbered one is the same length as the the inch number two 3 4 Etc when we measure things by the clock the clock is a circle regularly divided into 360 or multiples thereof or degrees but I've often wondered whether uh it wouldn't be interesting to have elliptical clocks or may West shaped clocks so that certain times of the day would go faster

than others or slower than others it might be very convenient to have the evening to last longer uh slow slow time down for the evening you see speed it up at some other time uh why not but you see we try to fit everything into an ideal of regularity now the next point is that if relationship is existence we are going to discover from this that the existence of any identifiable thing or event in the whole Cosmos depends upon and in an opposite sense is responsible for the existence of everything else but to do that

we've got to understand another image which I will illustrate with the parable of a rainbow now you know there's an old philosophical conundrum if a tree falls in a forest and there is nobody around to hear it does it make a noise this is a very simple problem but it has been discussed in ways that make it very confusing a noise is a a neurological experience caused by a vibration of air interacting with an eardrum and an auditory nervous system system so therefore obviously when the tree falls it will set up a vibration in the

air but if this vibration in the Air does not pulsate upon an eardrum there will be no noise you can see it in a simpler way what will happen if I hit a skinless drum there will be a hit but no sound because the drum has no skin so if there is no eardrum the vibrations in the air will not make a noise I don't need to introduce to prove this any spooker about mind is distinct from matter or anything like that that's quite straightforward but now let's take the somewhat more subtle case of seeing

a rainbow to perceive a rainbow there must be three variables present three factors there must a be the sun b there must be moisture in the atmosphere and finally enough see there must be an observer at a certain angle relative to the angle of the sun and the uh moisture The Observer will in other words be standing shall we say on a straight line line between the Sun and the body of moisture uh and what will then appear to be the center of the rainbow that's why the side of a rainbow is always off to

one side you never see this the the side of a rainbow directly in front of you so the position of a rainbow differs for every Observer just in the same way as that the position of this table differs for each one of you in the room depends where you're sitting as to where you see it now the trouble with this illustration is that a rainbow is a rather diaphanous thing and we tend to Accord it a rather low reality status and yet it fulfills all the requirements necessary for a genuinely existent thing oh it's true

you can't grab hold of it but neither can you grab hold of the moon at least not yet now it has these criteria it isn't a hallucination because everybody standing around will curse and swear they see that they have such and such a time and place they veritably do see this rainbow so it's not like a ghost or a hallucination but everybody sees it in a slightly different place and you see if there were no Sun shining there would be no rainbow if there were no moisture in the atmosphere there would be no rainbow but

let us suppose that the sun is shining and there is moisture in the atmosphere but nobody is around we only say with great reluctance that there would be no rainbow because that way of looking at things upholds a particular mythology of the world the world is something independent of us uh this is the great Superstition of Western culture that the world is independent of you that you don't make any difference to it is just something into which you come and it's going along and along and along you come in and you look you look in

the box and say well that the way it is then they kick you out again but now let's set up the situation in another way let's suppose the sun is shining Out on the Ocean somewhere and I am on a ship and I could look over there and I say my goodness isn't this a nice day if there was some moisture right over there we would have a rainbow and everybody says well there isn't one it just does not truly exist that there is a rainbow all right the sun is shining Out on the Ocean

and there is some moisture if there were a ship sailing near it so that there could be someone to see there would be a rainbow now in these two situations they are both exactly the same there would be a rainbow if there were some moisture around but there isn't and equally there would be a rainbow if there was someone to see it and there isn't those are two completely equivalent situations because it this isn't again a question of spooker it's a question that the existence of the phenomenon rainbow depends on the presence of three factors

like the existence of a human being depends on the existence of two factors a man and a woman everybody has to have a father and a mother or have had and otherwise with the exception of that relationship you don't exist well now the case of the rainbow is exactly the same case as everything else it's just because a rainbow is rather diaphanous and intangible although it sure hits you in the eye and the eye the seeing is a form of touching seeing is touching at a distance when you find that the table is hard uh

that is a way of feeling with your fingers the same thing as that you cannot see through it with your eyes so uh we we we are funny about this purely Optical Sensations are regarded as having a lesser grade of reality than tactile Sensations when you get hold of something and can grab it and you feel it solid you you feel you are sure of its existence than if you merely see it but it's all the same thing touch is a sensation as if your finger ends were full of millions of little eyes every nerve

end an eye and they close around this and they find it is not transparent here is a limit here is something we don't go through but that's exactly the same as when you see with these eyes here you don't see through something so then the the physical world responding to the sense of touch I mean you it's it's another way of saying the the the table would not be hard and is not hard except when touched it is the touch that evokes the hardness in the table when it is not touched it's not soft it's

not hard it has no quality at all nothing which is not in relation to us has any existence or I will add in relation to some other kind of uh responsive creature just in the same way that when light energy uh goes out of the sun into space the energy will only be manifested as light if there is some body outside the sun to reflect the light otherwise the light does not in any way illumine the darkness of space you must bring something into it to manifest the light in space so a Zen poem says

the tree manifests the bodily power of the wind the water manifests the spiritual nature of the Moon because you see if the wind is blowing that is to say an energy is moving along and there is nothing to stand in its way the energy is not there the energy in the situation is evoked only by something standing in its way then it's manifest the water manifests the spiritual power of the Moon why because in the breaking waves the moon can be shattered into thousands of fragments and yet it always remains one that's its spiritual power

you wouldn't see that Miracle of the Moon if it weren't for the waves they divide it up like that all right you can say it's a distortion that's not the way the Moon is the waves are not reflecting it correctly but that's only trying to say that things reflected in a smooth and still surface are reflected more really than things reflected in a vibrating surface okay if you want to construe it that way it's your Your Privilege but you can have any kind of reflector you want so in the same way it is with you

what you see therefore depends on the way your senses are constructed you have certain kinds of sense organs and these sense organs evoke the kind of universe appropriate to them it's not necessarily the way things are because there is no way that things are apart from their impact or better relationship with some kind of perceiver or perceiving organism because because things are only in relation when there is nothing to which they can relate nothing is happening and the the so-called existence which we perceive and that to which it is related come into being together now

is that to say say that uh before any living organisms existed there wasn't any universe is that to say that all our knowledge of the prehistoric and geological past of the world and the cosmos before life came to it is nothing but an extrapolation that is to say all we are saying is that this is what would have been happening if the had been people around to see it but since there weren't since there was no living organism around to witnessed this nothing was going on now it's possible to make a very good case for

that point of view but I would like to be a little more modest and not make it quite that uh radical and I would say rather this there would never have been a universe before living beings existed unless there was going to be a creature called man man living in a future say implies uh in the past a certain State of Affairs in other words this planet had to come into being with an adequate amount of uh temperature oxygen gases everything else food supplies for the organism called man to exist so let me say then

the existence of man implies a certain kind of environment uh meteorological geological and astronomical but the other side of this proposition is that such an environment implies man now where you get two sides of a situation where they imply each other mutually you have in fact a truly relational and unitary system well then therefore the answer to this problem is that prior to the existence of any form of life the universe at that time is dependent upon the fact that those forms of life are going to emerge now this is a thing that uh is

very difficult for us to understand because we think of reality proceeding uh forward into the future but dependent only upon the past it's very difficult for us to see that events that we call past are dependent upon events in the future that a lot of things would never started unless certain results were going to happen again this is another of those ideas which is in the front to Common Sense but uh there are a number of ways of showing that it's quite a sensible idea uh unless you were if you know you're flying an airplane

you leave London you arrive in New York you wouldn't have started out from London and unless you had known in advance there was a place called New York where you could land so in a very similar way the Energy System of the universe does not start out with certain say very primitive Amic creatures until it knows that it can arrive I don't know where where it's going on Beyond man but at least it's got to get as far as man because if it's not going to be able to do that it won't even start now

you can put this in other terms an electric current uh the electricity isn't like water when you turn on the foret the water goes right down the hose and waits at the nozzle so as soon as you turn on the nozzle there's the water but an electric current isn't like that when you've got two wires I mean two terminals positive and negative you've got the positive one hitched up and here's your wire and you leave the end of that wire just an inch away from the negative terminal there is no electro electric current moving it

hasn't flowed down the wire from the positive terminal so that it waits to be ready to jump trouble with is that uh is that electricity moves so fast we don't see these things and you can only see it if you do it on a colossal scale let's supposing that we had an electric wire that was uh oh 300 million miles in length now we connect it at the positive end nothing at all happens connect it at the negative end so that too can have possibility see that the other terminal then immediately the circuit starts but

the circuit of electric current does not start until there is a place for it to to arrive see that's the point so in exactly the same way it you see it makes no difference whether the wire be something that uh is 180,000 miles and is traversed in 1 second or whether it's 60 billion miles that will take a somewhat longer time in either case the current will not start until the receptor terminal the minus terminal is secured so in this way I I would say in just exactly the same way life will not start up

in a universe uh to which it really doesn't belong in which it is uh can be regarded as nothing more than a stranger so if you follow that out you see this that the whole existence of the universe depends on every individual it isn't a question of how long you last that the universe will only last as long as you do that's not the point the universe is much bigger than you are and you are very small but at this moment it depends on you the universe is much longer than you are and you are

very short in time but nevertheless it depends on you the universe in the future long after you're dead will still be depending on the fact that you once existed the universe in the past existing long before you were ever thought of still depends on the fact that one day you would exist and it depends on each person so in other words uh there is uh in in everything that happens uh every whole depends on every part because you see in truth there are no parts of the universe parts are an abstract creation when we think

of someone or something as a part we are quite arbitrarily cutting him off and saying by convention we will agree that our skins are our boundary and therefore since our skins do not include the whole Cosmos we are only a part of it but there are no parts just as in your own when you study your own organism uh all of it's continuous all the so-called Parts flow into the others like the Motions of waves you not have detachable parts that you can unscrew inside you you see unless you got false teeth or something like

that then you take it out see but in the ordinary way in other words the world is looked upon or can be looked upon as a perfectly good illusion because all art in a way is a creation of Illusion on a stage the actor plays and Hindus think of the World by analogy with drama the whole thing is a big act and there is one actor behind the whole thing which is you not you in the sense of your so-called empirical ego not you as you imagine yourself and as you ordinarily sense yourself to be

but what is really and truly you at a much deeper level the moment moment one talks about Cosmic gamesmanship it carries with it the assumption that the physical universe is a game and that doesn't seem to be taking it sufficiently seriously of course according to Hindu philosophy the physical universe is an illusion they use the word Maya but Maya has many meanings and uh among these meanings only one is illusion and the word illusion of course always carries a bad connotation to Western ears we want something that's for real but it doesn't necessarily carry such

a bad connotation to Hindu ears because the word Maya also means magic creative power art and of all things measurement because it comes from the Sanskrit Ro Matra M from which of course we get meter matter and the Latin Mar mother but you see when we use the word game or play in English we usually tend to mean that it's something trivial you see we divide life very strictly into play and work other peoples don't do this and that's uh one of the shatteringly awful features of our culture this division of play and work so

that most people are working at tasks which they hate so that they can make enough money to stop doing it and play this is perfectly ridiculous nobody needs to do that because what you get with work done in this way done heartlessly and without Joy is money and what can you do with it supposing you do earn time to spare and money to spend what is there to buy with it the answer is the other fake and joyless products made by other people who hate their work and this goes on all over things are judged

you see because they're good for you and if we inquire carefully as to what this good for us is uh you know you mustn't look into that it's t uh the whole culture would fall apart if we found out what it was because what is the good that is good for you is always and necessarily something in the future it never happens and is never going to happen all that these vitamins and carbohydrates and things can do for you is keep you in a state of reasonable survival and uh uh in which you you never

catch up with anything because you see time is strictly an illusion there is no such thing as time any more than there is such a concrete thing as the Equator the measurement of time time is a measure of motion just like lines of latitude and longitude are a measure of the geographic surface of the Earth and nobody will ever tie up a roll roast with the equator uh there is however such a thing as timing which is quite different from time timing is skillful rhythm and but you cannot ever attain proper timing if you hurry

if you're in a hurry to get to the Future because the future is never going to arrive so if you hurry to get to the Future you always get a punishment for it for example instant coffee TV dinners the sort of food they serve on airplanes or or beef that is cooked in electronic ovens where you push the switch and and a whole roast is done it isn't it's heated through it's not roasted and all these things are awful because they are the result of the illusion of time that there is something that is good

for us and that we're going to get to and so this is the result of an educational system which is completely geared to literary and mathematical Pursuits which trains everybody to be clerks sales uh Insurance Sal salesman and bureaucrats and only with great reluctance does education offer any kind of instruction in material competence and then only for people who are considered too stupid uh to be intellectuals to go on to college so you see because of this state of mind we we don't uh think that play is important we play in order to refresh ourselves

to go back to work and that's not playing playing is uh a real absorption in a in the Delight of a dance for example you don't dance because it's good for you you dance because you're happy but you see we have a very odd Inc capacity for happiness because we are happier when we expect good things to happen rather than when they're happening and so we say of a thing that we consider bad it has no future well nothing has a future there isn't a future there's always a present and one has to get this

as a kind of a basic approach so then one can also therefore use the word play or game in a sense that is not trivial we don't think for example that when we hear a performance of aach canata or better a purely uh non symbolic thing like a Fugue uh we don't think that that's trivial we don't think it's trivial to play the organ in church uh we don't think that the plays of Shakespeare are trivial they're plays play you see in the sense that I'm using it is a musical Thing it is a dance

it is an expression of delight in the sense of Blake saying that energy is eternal delight and uh for example the art of Islam the arabesques which aren't pictures of anything they're just fantastically intricate beautifully colorful designs they are play and according to this thesis the universe is just like that it is a very very elaborate play system and the fundamental elements of this play the Chinese called the Yang and the yin yang means uh the positive and Yin the negative Yang refers to the south side of a mountain which is in the Sun and

yin to the north side which is in the shade Yang refers to the North Bank of a river which is in the Sun and yin to the the South Bank of a river which is in the shade Yang is symbolically or prototypically male Yin is symbolically female that's not to cast any Reflections on women uh but uh so you might say there the reason they're called male and female is that Yang is aggressive and Yin is yielding uh Yang is convex Yin is concave now the secret about the Opposites which is as important as realizing

that there is no such thing as time the secret about the Opposites is this that they appear to be as different as different can be we say of opposites like black and white that the they are the poles apart but in using that phrase poles you imply a connection between them as there is a connection of the North to the South Pole of the earth and as there is a connection between the North and South poles of a magnet there are two ends of the same stick two sides of the same coin two opposite points

on the same sphere and that means that they go together in Chinese this is called arising mutually as in the second chapter of lza where he says when all the world knows beauty to be beautiful there is already ugliness when all the world knows goodness to be good there is already evil for to be and not to be arise mutually so the basic Arts of life in our culture farming cooking dressing Furnishing love making are utterly neglected there is no sophisticated training widely available in any of these things for the average person and so that

that's the reason why there is nothing on which to spend the time that we save and the money we own except trash so uh f cars pasteboard houses bread made of squishy styrofoam vitamin enriched and uh all that sort of thing you see because of the illusion we've fallen for the illusion of time so only uh there what is absolutely necessary for a culture that means a society of cultivated people is the cultivation and Devotion to the present to the Mater Material World rather than to the purely theoretical world you see Maya in Sanskrit uh

does indicate in one sense the physical world because in the positive sense that the physical world is actually a marvelous work of art but Maya in another sense in the sense in which it means measurement refers to all the ways we have of numbering and naming and dividing up into to categories the physical world so time is Maya latitude and longitude is Maya the future is Maya in the the the less uh exciting sense of Illusion what confuses people is that they don't see this they think for example that the positive is something there which

truly exists whereas the negative has less reality it doesn't exist we think that for example the space in which this universe floats is a non- entity and has no importance and we are thereby become because we see energy manifested in the positive aspect of things and no energy manifested in the negative we are afraid that energy and its Delight is threatened by nothingness that it's going to be swallowed up and that in the end Darkness will win we feel that about ourselves and we feel it about the universe as a whole because energy is effort

and effort after a while you get tired and you can't keep it up and so Darkness must win according to Chinese philosophy that is a hallucination because energy cannot be manifested without inertia there must be something to push against for there to be any manifestation of energy you cannot dance without a flaw to use your energy against you cannot when energy or any kind of motion is completely unobstructed there's a sort of Squish a fizzle and nothing happens because fundamentally as we shall see next hour motion is only realized when there is stillness relative of

Stillness and so energy is only realized when there is inertia and the positive is only realized when there is the negative to bring it out these things work together but when you don't realize it you are anxious you are afraid that the dark side is going to win now the minute that happens you become unable to play you start getting serious and the game degenerates into a fight because you feel it absolutely urgent and necessary under those circumstances that the positive must be made to win accentuate the positive you see and that leads to all

this beastly kind of religion where people go around with Force smiles and Hearty handshakes and uh uh accentuate the positive and the moment that a person does that you know that it's a big fake it's a put on and that there's something utterly unreal about it that's why you may have often experienced the fact that certain kinds of virtuous people are offensively virtuous and they are very difficult to get on with they don't have any light touch and of course this is particularly prevalent in religions because uh not all religions but many religions are states

of Terror about the negative side I was talking with a very enlightened nun the other day Catholic and she was open to all sorts of new ideas I said you know uh there's one thing wrong with your worship and the way you sing your hymns and chant your chants and uh do all these rituals you don't swing that means I don't mean by that that it isn't syncopated I mean by that that there is not an attitude of delight about it it's always you feel the service is being conducted in the presence of the Chief

Inspector of morals the uh the the original stuffed shirt the appalling grandfather in whose presence you don't uh show any kind of sprightliness because after all you know when we are children and we are very exuberant and we leap around and bounce and all over the place we make the adults tired because the moment a child starts getting exuberant is that we try to give him a guilty conscience you have no business having so much fun there are other people in the world who hurt there are people who are starving there are people who suffer

and to you to go around leaping around as if the whole thing were gorgeous is a kind of irreverence so be guilty shut up so as a result of that where we think that an occasion is a particular cele where you're in church or in court or uh standing in a row of uh Marines or something saluting the flag uh everybody gets grim and so there is no Delight in religion of that kind well this none agreed with me that uh they they really ought to do something about that and I said well maybe I'll

come to your Convent and teach you how to [Laughter] sing but you see all of that is because uh of the fear that the nothing will win over the something now it's true in games there is a winner and there there is a loser but in a fight it's different in a fight the object of Victory is to get rid of the defeated party because he's bad and he ought not to be there at all but in a game it's quite different because if there is to be a winner there has to be a loser

so it's terribly important not to get rid of the opponent you could have no chess unless you had the black side as well as the white impossible so in a game uh what we we admire a person we call a good loser that is to say a good sport because he does not take the loss seriously it's very instructive for example to play any game that you know well whether it's chess or Checkers or whatever with yourself and each time you move over to the opposite side uh play it with your best skill for example

you can play a very marvelous game you take two cocktail um Olive uh toothpicks you know the kind they they make into little plastic swords and you do a fencing match with yourself and actually try to stick one of your hands and the other hand really tries to defend itself you find this is extremely interesting it's a meditation exercise and uh and then you realize you see uh what is the nature of a game because if you are a good chess player uh you may congratulate yourself if your opponent wins if you have given him

a good contest because then the game as such was interesting and you come to realize that you and your opponent in a game of chess together constitute a single organism like your right hand and your left hand fencing with each other let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth that means have a conspiracy to pretend that they don't belong to one organism and that they're different like black and white like space and solid they must look as different as possible but underneath in order that there be a game in order that there

be in other words a relationship of these two there has to be a secret agreement they have to be tacitly one but uh openly to ex esoterically two esoterically one because you see on the stage when you get the hero and the villain they are really friends behind the scenes because they belong to the same company of actors but this mustn't be admitted on the stage because that would give the show away now you see it's true we mustn't give the show away that's why there are e iic teachings but on the other hand there

is another opposite extreme uh which is not realizing that the show is a show and that's as bad as giving the show away so you have always when you are in the theater say you go to the movies and you go to see some great horror movie you know awful thing well why does one do it you want a thrill and the whole of the universe wants a thrill that's what it's all about otherwise it would be boring but when you go to the movie you know in your heart of hearts that it's only a

movie and yet you contrive to some degree to forget this while you're there and therefore get scared and feel real creeps but that's great some people like to go and cry they go and see some tragedy and just love to weep because it's a catharsis it gets all the salt out of you or something I don't and uh so uh you you you you do this thing and uh it is we say it's vicarious yeah but that is the spirit of Showmanship of play so one might say then that uh it is possible in this

life to attain a sort of metaphysical courage in which you are you know really know deep within that the most harrowing experiences that physical existence can offer are a show now this is the uh what you might call Ultimate nerve and for example when the samurai in Japan studied Zen that's what they wanted to get from it they wanted to get ultimate nerve so that absolutely nothing would phase them so there is a poem which says under the sword lifted High there is Hell making you tremble but go go ahead and there is the land

of bliss don't hesitate see don't don't be blocked don't be um phased nonplused by the illusion so it is really this kind of worrying is a completely useless Pursuit and yet we feel a little guilty if we don't do it because uh it's somehow put into us that a proper amount of worrying is uh showing a good sense of responsibility you're concerned and Paul tiik uh used this word concern in a special way and Quakers always use the word concern and all people you might say who are socially conscious are concerned so when we say

I'm concerned it means I have a frown on my face and uh I I'm I'm worried about you about the nation about the war so on concern until it said religion is ultimate concern I am concerned about the universe and he used this wonderful decontaminated word for God which he got from eart the ground of being see God still has whiskers on it but the ground of being doesn't obviously and so uh ultimate concern is to be concerned about the ground of being well now I don't think you you I'm not sure about Toth I

I knew him and he was a very wonderful man but what I call concern in the way I would want to interpret it instead of this sort of frown is something more like amazement in other words that existence is extremely peculiar um I mean it's I can't get my I can't explain this feeling because I don't know quite how to ask a question about existence so that I could be said to be wondering about it in some sort of clear thinking way what what it's a very nice thing to consider to yourself that if you

were going to have an interview with the Lord God and you would have only 5 minutes and you might ask one question what would you ask and you've got plenty of time to think this over in advance and you realize question after question say no that's not really the thing I want to get at uh-uh it's not that like do you exist God would say of course yes here I am well you're you're loving it uh it may be that it's an apple in your hand and you say I love you so much I could

eat you and you eat it and you relish it that's loving in a special way so uh concern and love and there are many forms of love there's a whole Spectrum of different kinds of Love which runs from the red of libido to the Violet of divine charity but all of them are equally important because as you know you can't have the Violet end without the red end and vice versa you wouldn't know what Violet was unless you had all the other colors the colors create each other and that's why gurus and teachers set their

students weird tasks they may discover that the dissociated ego is indeed a hallucination now for example one of the ones that is commonly used is to get yourself a pure mind and that means you control your thoughts and emotions you mustn't have any violent or hateful emotions you mustn't hate anybody you mustn't have any sexy emotions All Pure ideas clean up you know what happens there are so many in the parent child relationship uh many parents can't stand their children uh they are a nuisance they are the result of bad rubber goods and uh they

didn't mean to have them anyway and they're expensive and noisy and they've Disturbed the piece of the place and they they detest them but you cannot admit in this culture that you detest your child that's the most awful thing but you see what happens if you don't admit it is that whereas outwardly you go through the motions of being loving and beautiful you don't smell right and the child gets it the child knows intuitively and inwardly that these are crossed up message here it says love but it acts hate vice versa a lot of children

hate their mothers hate their fathers that's supposed to be very bad and the whole pandemonium that's going on these days is uh largely due to that that nobody can come out and be honest about it so now control your thoughts watch that hate the moment it arises D knock it down well now you know the guru who's teaching you all this uh you've projected quite a bit on him uh the fact that you accepted a guru at all shows that um you have endowed another person with much greater wisdom than yourself that's your opinion incidentally

[Laughter] and therefore people invariably attribute to gurus are all kinds of astounding Powers especially of a telepathic nature and indeed uh a good Guru is a very sensitive fellow and can tell by people's eyes and gestures and tone of voice all sorts of things about them as can any experience psychologist but you see when you are trying to control your thoughts and you know you have some kind of wrong thought you project upon the guru to recognize it instantly he reads you he sees right through you and therefore you know that he almost must look

at you as a terrible worm because you can never quite succeed in doing it you see and the lesson of this is you see the whole point of this lesson is to discover that the alleged you which is different from your thoughts and feelings is a hallucination there is a stream of thought and feeling going on just like there is a stream of water going by and that's you it's an organized stream just in the same way that when you see a whirlpool in a river it's organized it's recognizable it has a shape and it

has an enduring shape even though it is a constant flow or take better illustration still a flame on a candle it is a stream of gas and no particle of this gas stays in the flame for about a split second but the flame keeps apparently there and is recognizable I can say one 2 three Flames this one that one other one and that's like us but that stream which we are as thought feeling uh what we call the body body uh everything like that but the body is one of the most intangible things there is

you seem to be able to grab hold of it but it is nothing more than a vibrating pattern of energy and on it flows so when you understand that uh you can see a little bit more why Hindus speak of the body as Maya as illusion because one of the things they mean by illusion is transitoriness as distinct from permanence that is to say everything in this world is disintegrating in fact if it weren't it wouldn't be there disintegration is life and it's as important to see that as it is to see that there is

no time and that black and white go together because to the extent that you see it is disintegrating and that there's no way of stopping this you can get into a frame of mind where you get with it where you as it were give up and fall apart along with everything else now you might think you see again our in our a general Western frame of mind we would think well that's just giving up that's spineless that's cowardice that's so that's awful and anybody who would just give up like that would be expected to become

a slob but the contrary is true you see in all what you might call the Dynamics of the spiritual life there are appear to be many paradoxes courses of action which in common sense would lead to one result turn out in fact to lead to an opposite result so you would think that a child who admits to hatred of parents or vice versa would act out the hatred would do something violent no it is precisely the the one who does not admit it that will act out and who will do something violent because like the

monk of Siberia who are fasting grew wearier and wearier the violence will at last burst from itself it can't be contained and I found again and again and again going around especially in religious circles where so many people are trying to not admit what they feel especially Puritans prudes very frequently have a strong streak of Cruelty and this of course can be a kind of sexual substitute a sadistic uh or masochistic thing uh that is simply because they they don't admit to having negative side and so the negative side will Express itself in a violent

way uh people who are always doing things for other people's good uh will be liable to to bomb them for their benefit uh and utterly destroy them in the name of goodness and uh this is because uh such people are not ever going to be good soldiers I was uh talking a few day few weeks ago to the Air Force weapons research lab at Kirtland uh near Albuquerque and uh I was somewhat surprised to be invited to this Sinister [Laughter] institution but uh it was full of extremely brilliant people uh fantastic minds and so naturally

we got onto the subject of strategy because uh military strategy is a very very interesting thing it contains all the basic life problems and I said to them when I started out I said now you have asked me to tell you as a philosopher what are my basic premises for moral Behavior well I said they are total selfishness I'm not going to beat around the bush with you people and going to be sentimental or anything like that because you're dealing with military matters and where you have to be tough and where you have to uh

be so tough that you've no time for finer feelings so let's begin that way now I said you might imagine therefore that if I base my behavior on total selfishness that I would go around being rude to people and aggressive and uh pushing through and so on but I said I don't because I found it doesn't work people put up resistance they get obstreperous and I don't win them over so my self-interest is better conserved by putting on a pretense of politeness and that I really am concerned about you all and so on but I

said I am not uh that's just a big act now then I said the next thing that happens is this when I decide that I'm going to base everything on total selfishness I start wondering what I want well so many things that I thought I want when I got them I found out I didn't so I have to go very deeply into the question what do I really want what sort of friends do I want what sort of a house do I want what sort of a life do I want what sort of a job

do I want to do and you see people don't think this through they get all sorts of ready-made ideas of what they ought to want because what education does to us to so large an extent is to fit us into a set of prepared stereotypes and we never stop to find out what we really want to do well that's one thing but then something else very odd comes up when I say I'm purely selfish which is what is me then I come across this curious thing that I don't know who I am unless I know

who you are if I would live without any other people I don't think I would know I was there I see myself in terms of others that is to say by a social relationship I am I because you are you you are you because I am I but then there something something that's gone screwy here something funny about this which is of course that myself isn't at all what I thought it was myself is almost everything else as well as myself well then I really don't know what to do because um there's no point my

thinking any more that I can just go around attacking people and uh getting rid of them and so on and uh uh uh because all I'm doing is sort of um as if I was hungry and I started chewing on my own toes because I discovered that hurting others hurts me now of course you do have to cut your toenails and take care of your hair and things like that and uh the always uh some kind of violence is necessary in life just like you have to kill a fish to eat it or you have

to kill an apple when you chew it well that's sort of like cutting off the toenails and combing your hair and so on clipping things like that and sort like getting rid of dead skin and the general elimination process but fundamentally you see when you think that there are dreadfully wrong people who ought to to be obliterated or that the world world outside you is something that you are in a fight with well that's just like um a person who uh is completely insensitive in the middle so that he doesn't know that his legs leg

end goes with the top end um you know that in worms uh if a worm gets damaged it develops a sort of callous area in it and uh the worm when it Wiggles the rhythm of the wiggle doesn't pass through the callous area it has to wiggle separately on each end so the worm instead of going wiggle wiggle wiggle goes wiggle bump wiggle bump wiggle bump Wile and uh so uh uh a lot of people are like that physically this is one of the important things that vilhelm Reich found out that uh people tend to

have a state of tension in the diaphragm as a result of which they can't swing uh you know uh have you ever tried to teach anybody to dance the hoola lots of people just cannot bring themselves to make that hit motion they're too rigid and they're like the worm with a Callis or then there's another myth about this you know there's a famous snake called Ur Robos and he's always drawn chewing his own tail and eating it imagine what happens when the tail gets inside and it gets inside and inside the the whole thing is

clutched up you see uh and this worm is a the snake is a symbol of what the Buddhists call ssara that is to say the round or rat race of life and death and this goes on so long as the worm doesn't know that his tail is himself when he discovers that uh he lets go of it and wiggles happily along uh like every good snake should uh of course there is something more to it than that you might say well why in the first place did he not realized that his tail was his own

well because he wanted something else see there wasn't anything except the snake in the beginning because the snake is the symbol of God but uh in the upanishads in the ISA upanishad first line of it said that in the beginning there was the one uh God the ishvar and he said I'm lonely and so he made another which was a woman and he made love to her as a result of which all gods were born but the woman got guilty about this because she felt it was incest and so she turned herself into a cow

and he became a bull and he made love to her and so came all cattle and the same thing happened she got guilty and turned herself into a sheep and he turned himself into a ram and so on and by this means the universe was created so uh this is othering It's called in Christian theology by the Greek word kenosis which means self-emptying uh where God others himself in the sense of getting himself into a position where he forgets he's God or where he has abrogated omnipotence now in the theory of games it is absolutely

important to abrogate omnipotence because you realize that if you knew if your knowledge and power was without limit there were no obstacle to it whatsoever there would be no way of realizing it when we know for certain the outcome of a game we don't play it we call it off and we invent a new game in which we don't know the outcome so power whether partial power or Omni power will always be in a state of abating itself so the fundamental game therefore the fundamental game form which is manifested in the Yang and the yin

the two opposites is of course the game of hideand-seek of remembering and forgetting you see uh really to forget is the opposite of remember only the word hasn't the same form we should put remember opposite dismember because to remember is to put back the members of something that has been dismembered so when the snake thinks that its tail isn't itself it is dismembered when the snake finds that its tail is itself it's remembered so that's why uh the Catholics say uh the words of Jesus at the mass do this in remembrance of me so that

you will discover that you are one body which is of course the only body there is so lesson number two is relativity lesson number one having been the Opposites in this course on cosmologic or Cosmic gamesmanship we were discussing the fact this morning that any manifestation of energy needs an opposition in other words nothing happens there is no motion there is no possibility of energy unless there is something opposing it there is no dancing except on a floor against which you can push and move and so uh I pointed out therefore the sense of self

depends entirely on the sensation of there being something other but that this is a kind of a Maya the another words the general feeling that one side is definitively spit off from and separate from the other is an illusion but nevertheless uh there is the the the opposition between energy and inertia motion and Stillness is something that um as it were is the bipoc or two aspects of a single process and they you know it's a single process because they can't do without each other if they could do without each other then it would be

a divided process radically divided split down the middle but as it is the interdependence of these two sides of things or two ways of looking at things shows that there is something in common between the two and to understand this is the essential key to uh living in a sane way because if you're insane you're split up an idiot you know the word Greek idiotes is means uh private purely private uh isolated out of communication out of relationship and so uh this is a way of saying that uh insanity is a lack of awareness of

relativity because all existence is relationship you can't unscrew parts of the human being from another they're continuous well in exactly the same way you are continuous with this environment and although we have been habituated to looking upon ourselves as separate things we are no more separate from what's going on around us than each of these waves here are separate from the ocean or that mount Tamil is separate from the planet Earth we have great freedom of movement so do the waves so do the gulls floating in the air so do the trees waving in the

wind we have a larger degree of freedom than that because we are more volatile but we are just as much waves in the total process it depending upon us and we in turn depending upon it now understand the meaning of there being no parts all parts are ideas we have an idea of a part we uh chop things up and say one human being two human beings three human beings and so on and so think of it as Parts but that's not the way it works you can see this from the most Elementary neurology by

understanding that uh it is the way you are as a living body that evokes the kind of universe that you see it is your body which turns the sun into light which turns it into heat which turns water into wet and rocks into hard and in turn your body is uh one of the pulsations of nature along with the Sun the Rocks the water Etc so there's a mutual arrangement it creates you or evokes you or does you whatever word you want to use and at the same moment you do it and you do all

of it so this is why uh there was some kind of Truth in astrology I say this but at the same time I certainly don't consult astrologers and plot My Life by the crude calculations of hor horoscopy uh but uh because you you if you do that you you get into endless Tangles of self-deception because it isn't accurate uh but it has a principle in the astrologer was right when he drew a map of your soul he drew a crude map of the universe he drew the universe as it was at the time and place

of your birth the universe as it was as seen from the point of view where you were born and that was your soul so your soul you see is not in your body your body is in your soul because your soul is the entire network of relationships in terms of which you live your soul is the whole universe but each one of us as it were is a different point in it but all these points in it are the center we can go Way Beyond tmy and Copernicus now and if we think that space is

curved every point of space is the center of the universe because any point on a ball is the center of the sphere of the surface see you can turn any point of a ball and wherever you look at it it's the center isn't it see so in the same way take a crystal ball in your hand a crystal mirror no what I mean it's not a crystal mirror I mean a spherical mirror look at it and wherever you turn it your face place will be in the middle so in exactly the same way every place

in the universe is the middle of the Universe from a standpoint of curved space so uh we go back to an entirely new uh toic view of the world Beyond cernus not that the Earth is the yes the Earth is the center of the universe but every other place is also the center of the universe there is no absolute Center so this is a an astronomical way of saying uh in Sanskrit tasi you're it everyone is rightly the center you may think yeah my mother used to say to me you're not the only PE on

the beach no indeed but uh but in a but in a way everyone is the central pebble and the feeling that you have of being the center which turns out into selfishness and all the sort of conflict and scrapping is nevertheless based on something true what we do is we misinterpret it we don't realize uh that everybody else is the center too in that sense you're not the only Pebble on the beach you're not the only center of the universe and yet there is only one Center and that's why um who was it I think

it was St Bonaventure who first thought up the description or the definition of God as that Circle whose Center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere and this is a poem I simply remember from Alfred no where said the king oh where I have not found it here said the dwarf and music echoed here this infinite Circle hath no line to bound it behold its strange deep Center everywhere so this then you see as I'm what I'm playing with here is what the Buddhists call the gig mug that means a g means a Thing If

event and you repeat it twice so it means between thing event and thing event mug there is no Mutual obstruction um this is called the doctrine of the mutual interpenetration of all things and events so it would be like there's lovely drawings where you take a circle uh and you can play with this it's a nice thing to play with and you mark out 12 equal points around the circumference of the circle then you join every point to every other point you get this beautiful star and incidentally this is the diagram of the notes of

the TW the 12 notes of the scale um bar work this out and uh it's a lovely thing see it's beautiful star so this is the diagram of the way it all fits together now if you study that and by study again I mean not just think about it but feel it out you will find very strange thing happening that uh you will find that the present moment with all its particularity in which you live and are functioning now is exactly the same thing as anything you could possibly conceive of as eternity you will find

that your limited life and remember what I said about limits you have to have something to push against you your limited life with its frustrations and with its particular problems at this instant is the same thing as omnipotence and that your situation in space which is appears to be in sorito California sitting on a boat which has rickety old thing miles and miles away is China and Russia and England and uh Mars Venus and everything yeah but this particular point in space you will find the same way by this law of relativity is the same

thing is infinity Infinite Space because it all goes together it implies the infinite the Eternal all the energy of the universe is implied in any tiny hair on your on your skin it goes with it mutually implies this is the point just as the kind of uh Cosmos and uh atmosphere in which we live I my my existence implies that kind of an environment so the environment implies me mutually and it all goes together now the the the the only reason for saying this you see uh it is really terribly obvious but the only reason

for saying it is that people don't know it and think instead that uh they don't belong that this um you know I'm just because of the the parents put down the children and said little children should be seen and not heard you don't belong here like I read the other day in some paper somebody was saying uh some young person was addressing a girl and saying he was trying to make love to her he was trying to woo her and she said you you you won't be friends with me because you say I I I

don't like your personality but um said uh you don't have to have a personality a personality is something you had to put on because your mother didn't love you you had to make up to her really you you don't need a personality because you're you're you're the essential thing you see and and a personality is just a a way of of Performing to uh uh ingratiate yourself well we all do it because we put on personalities when we act like clowns and entertain the audience put on masks funny faces but really and truly The Mask

covers the one self that we all have and we all know it only uh just like black and white we are pretending to be as different as possible while remaining the same I said that one of the aspects of cosmic gamesmanship that we were going to deal with would be group Theory and of course I don't mean exactly by that a sort of mathematical meaning but the the the relationship that's tremendously important and that is not sufficiently recognized between ingroups and out groups you know how you've heard about little birds where they're cold and they're

all huddling together the idea being to see who can get most inside and uh human beings are just like that and so also is everything else uh because this is a an absolutely basic requirement of having an identity to have an identity is in some way or other to be in I often try the experiment in giving a lecture drawing a circle on the Blackboard and asking the assembled multitudes what I have what I have drawn and people will almost invariably say that I have drawn a circle a ring or a ball only very rarely

does some bright person suggest that I have drawn a wall with a hole in it because uh the gestal theory of perception shows us that our attention is captured by enclosed areas as against open areas and by moving objects rather than still and so always therefore we tend to prefer the in situation that is something you see uh the the the star is an in situation with respect to space the space is the out situation and so we feel that space is not important it is nothing it is uh just unimportant in a way but

the in situation is something so then whenever human beings get into an out situation like being a rejected minority living on the wrong side of the tracks They will find reasons for convincing themselves that their situation is the truly in one and that the people who claim to be in are really out so as I have sometimes said before I hope this uh doesn't bore too many of you but uh in sorito we have exactly that situation we have the hillbillies who are the oldtime people who regard themselves as in because they have the money

and they live in the fancy houses up on the hill and then we have the Waterfront people whom they regard us out as a a nefarious bunch of beatniks and Bohemians and Scallywags and so so uh the people at the hill top uh fortify themselves at their cocktail parties with conversation about how awful the people are down in the Waterfront and that the cocktail parties down in the Waterfront uh people fortify themselves by discussing the squares on the hill and uh we believe uh down here that we have the true way of life that uh

we're not beating our heads out making money to buy pseudo rocket ships although I do own a pseudo rocket ship but it was wished on me because you see I try to be a bridge person that's what's called a ponteix one who uh between opposed classes points out the connections because the connection is that neither class would know who they were without the other so it's tremendously necessary to have an outgroup in order to know that you're an ingroup in other words if you belong to the church which is the Assembly of the elect of

God or if you belong to the synagogue which is to be a member of the chosen people and outside are all those goys then uh you know you're in you see but you must have The Outsiders to know that you're in there must in other words be Beyond The Pale of the village the howling waste then you feel cozy you feel protected you feel you're there and so in that way bodies have skins eggs have shells and so on all through nature inside versus outside but this versus must be understood as a form of symbiosis

and this is the crucial matter this is absolutely of critical importance to anyone who wants to understand politics or military strategy or any of the real hard tough games of life that uh social conflict or conflict between the various biological species is a form of symbiosis now ordinarily we consider the symbiotic relationship to be one of mutual support as is obviously the case between bees and flowers which came the first bee or flower this is the same question as which came the first egg or hen because where there are no flowers there can't be bees

and where there are no Bees or other fertilizing insects there cannot be flowers so the truth of the matter is that bees and flowers different as are in appearance and separated as they may be in space they constitute a single organism this is the real lesson of the bees and the flowers and uh the same must be said truly of man and woman there are no men without women there are no women without men because it always takes a man and a woman to produce a human being so we are our manwoman Arrangement a woman

man Arrangement whichever way you want to look at it and so although you see therefore we move and look as if we're individuals uh and separate from each other this is not the case at all so now this what I want to point out is that the same sort of relationship exists between groups that would seem to be hostile to each other now what are some of the bases of hostility the real basis of hostility is that the biological order is a mutual eating Society it's a very curious game indeed and if you are philosophically

inclined it is one which might bother your conscience when you realize that you as an organism are comp a compound of murders uh you are actually a bag of water because the human organism consists mostly of water and this water is held together and presented from slobbering prevented from slobbering all over the floor by a very complex Arabesque of tubes and cells and films the material of which was invariably belonging to some other being before you got it you had to kill a chicken a cow or a cabbage or an apple in order to get

that tensile film of tube or whatever to hold the water in you and as you and so uh we are as human beings a predatory creature in fact we are more predatory than anything else in nature the sharks are supposed to be predatory but they stay in the ocean the piranha fish are supposed to be very predatory but they stay in the Amazon the Eagles are predatory but they stay in the air and on the land only man ranges the whole uh range of elements earth air and water and prays on things and he eats

like a swarm of locusts not only does he pray on the living beings he play prays on the minerals and uh someone recently described our our civilization there's a lot of people sitting in the middle of a sewage dump shooting rockets at the Moon because if you you read get Playboy magazine for um September and read about the use of water or rather the misuse of water in our civilization and it is absolutely horrifying we've got to get that atomic power bringing us water from the ocean and nothing flat or we're going to be very

thirsty and you can see how uh uh we use water in the most amazingly uneconomical ways so we are a predatory Monster eating up the planet and uh I have seen uh say a soral plant uh in the country covered with greenfly one day it is full of little green succulent bodies having a ball a day or two later stalk with gray dust all over it see they've eaten up they multiply to the point of eating up the plant and so they turn into gray dust human beings could do just exactly the same thing and

the reason why human beings are in danger of this is that they have refused membership in a mutual eating Society they want to be top and only eater and do not want to be eaten so that instead nowadays of returning what you ate to the Earth we return our remains to the Earth in an unassimilable form our remains include not only mummified formal deid bodies courtesy of the morticians encased in concrete so that no worms even can get in but also the fact that many things that we return to the Earth are no longer in

the organic cycle for example rust does not assimilate properly uh all sorts of chemicals all sorts of gases that we give off do not return into the organic cycle and we are ruining uh we are we are actually abolishing animals wild animals have less and less of a prospect of living wild birds are being greatly reduced in numb whales have almost are ceasing to exist because the whaling industry is getting rid of them and what is more some of the animals we Farm like chickens are no longer chickens they are strictly non- chickens which lay

pseudo eggs because they are raised in enormous wire cell blocks and fed on chemicals under the Superstition that anything fed to a chicken will turn into chicken and it won't that is why you may have noticed that the chickens you buy don't take tast like chickens could taste especially those that have been allowed to run around in the sunlight and scratch those can become real chickens uh because you see the the necessary thing about any species that you live on is that you must love it I love you so much I could eat you or

I eat you so much I could love you but where you get things raised without love you cannot love a whole cell block of chickens you cannot love wheat when it is grown in vast wastelands or out of any trees and it is sheared off the Earth and then uh winnowed and uh reduced to Pancake makeup and then chemicals are added to it and it is converted into the styrofoam material called bread uh you know like one converts milk into cin so one converts wheat or r into a plastic material which is a kind of

universal solvent which is nothing at all and tastes of nothing at all in fact you know when you feed babies that kind of nasty white paum and you feed it in there always spit it back into the spoon well our white bread reduces itself to that instantly on the contact with liquid and becomes a miserable paste it's not bread at all so uh if if if you are unwilling you see to join the mutual eating society and you want to conquer everything and not be eaten by anything the penalty you pay for this is uh

the annihilation of your species and you eventually annihilate through eating things that taste like chalk and string that's what it will come to because you don't love what you eat you have no respect for the Raw materials so uh what we haven't understood then is that all groups need an enemy group but that the enemy Group which prays upon it is actually a kind of friend because the enemy group prunes your own group it keeps your population at a reasonable level and it keeps you on your toes because you have to defend yourself against it

so you don't become flabby but you see in uh uh we we have lost the meaning of chivalry in all uh War situations and all conflict situations chivalry is indicated for example still in such Customs as that the partners to a fight salute each other before beginning to fight and salute each other again at the end uh you shake hands before boxing uh e e uh you um do these various things you bow before a judo contest and so on and that means that you recognize the opponent as an honorable opponent as somebody with whom

uh a fight is a really important matter and that is uh really one of the most essential laws of survival to recognize that enemies unless they are predatory locusts who have no respect who do not in other words Farm the species that they Prey Upon that's the essence of the thing you must cherish the species you Prey Upon you must see like for example in in lumbering you must REO you must plant a tree for every tree you take that is cherishing the species and if you farm cows you don't treat your cows you often

treat them better than you would your servants because the servants can go hang uh but the cows are valuable and so you nurture them because they're going to sell as beef and they're going to provide milk or whatever it is so the the perception of the fact that it is absolutely necessary to have an outgroup for your having an ingroup and that you cannot do without it is the beginning of sociability and so what you get then in that case is a situation of contained conflict a conflict gets out of hand when an ingroup does

not realize that it needs the outg group then it says let's get rid of the outg group uh get the dirty Communists off the face of the Earth but do you realize what fix we'd be in without Communists the whole economy would fall apart because there would be no external threat and the Communists are in exactly the same situation their kind of politics would fall apart unless there were some wretched capitalistic imperialists with whom they could Contra contrast themselves and against whom they could organize their energes because it is a curious thing that it's very

difficult to get human beings to organize their energies for something pleasant it's only under fear under external threat to their life that human beings will really get busy and cooperate so the solidarity of any group of human beings depends to an enormous extent on an external Menace and therefore that Menace is friendly to the solidarity and the Cooperative Enterprise of the group and this will be true of big groups as well as of small groups even people who say uh say in matters of religion that religious exclusivism is bad that bigotry is terrible those same

people are actually playing a game called I'm more tolerant than you and so constitute an ingroup of the tolerant opposed to the outgroup of the bigots there's no way of getting away from this except by transcending it with a sort of humor when you see that the two groups need each other you start laughing when for example if uh I have people who argue with me with contrary opin opinions and who belong to different religions I can't get mad about it because I realize that I wouldn't know what I thought unless somebody disagreed with me

and therefore your disagreement is necessary to the preservation of my opinions and this is this is the secret of humor huh so when you realize that you are given one of the most important clues that there is to the nature of yourself now you see we are all brought up in a huge historical cultural linguistic background which has a very powerful influence upon the way in which we experience self and we experience self as an enclosed Island confronted by an enormous out group called The Universe within me within my body is a palpitating soft sensitive

reality there is the self but outside I don't feel when I hit you you suffer but I don't it's the outside is therefore somehow alien and it has been drilled into US therefore that the world as a physical entity or process is an organization that goes on and on and on probably through all eternity but that the individual is in it as a brief occurrence and is furthermore as man a tiny little germ living on a an obscure Rock revolving around an unimportant star on The Fringe of one of the minor galaxies and that the

other galaxies are much bigger and that there are more of them than you can think of and so this puts us in this extremely remote position as if to say you don't really belong at all now I explained yesterday I knew cosmology where we can surely say that any point in the universe can be regarded as the center of it there is no absolute Center but all points are the center so in the same way uh if we can see that we can make a very curious psychological Readjustment to our life situation and learn how

what it is that we call I is not a poor little puppet but that the situation of Inus that is to say of feeling Central to All Things is a a kind of distortion of the true situation which is that iness and being iness and uh existence are the same thing only uh just as the sense of self requires the sense of other the sense of being here requires also the interval of apparent nothingness which we call death life goes with death in the same sense as self goes with other we saw there has to

be this yangan Rhythm the crest of the wave and the trough of the wave the Crest is the life the trough is the death the interval someone has asked me uh what I think about uh the um survival of the individual personality uh and so you see this problem of death is very critical to us but you have to understand it and approach it by seeing that the real you is not the individual if for example we draw a circle and that Circle represents the universe then we draw r coming from that Circle in such

a way that you are drawing tangents to the circle which meet at points outside it so making a star in which each Ray is uh a point which focuses the entire diameter of the star now turn it inside out so that the Rays go inwards into the circle so that inside the circle the whole circle focuses itself at innumerable points within it and then you have something like what we are I said using the astrological illustration that the um soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul the soul is the

whole universe focused at a particular time and a particular place a here and now and that is what you really are in other words those galaxies that are immensely far off and which you could think would have nothing to do with you at all all that's in you and what you call your body your brain your nervous system and so on is in you too now you can never get at just as we we can't get at the whole universe in the sense that uh if there is only one ball in space and that one

ball constitutes the whole universe I showed you that we couldn't say whether that ball was moving or standing still because there is nothing else in relation to which it moves or stands still so there's something about the universe as a totality which is always Indescribable and unget addable now that is the same Indescribable and unget at ability as your own mind there is no way in other words just as we cannot find a name for the color of vision the color of the lens of the eye and so we call it transparent no color of

course we have to because in the same way a mirror is has no color otherwise it would not be able to reflect colors so at the root of all experience whatsoever there is the non-experience which is fundamental to it it can never be described in terms of any of the uh experiences within it but it's basic and and it lies between light and darkness coming and going life and death but there is no way of your as it were possessing it and you have to realize that there is no way of your possessing it for

the very simple reason that it is you so because of the invisible and intangible nature of this reality one tends to forget all about it and to become fascinated instead with um subsidiary features inside it because it has no color no shape at least none that uh could be defined because it would have to get out itself outside itself to Define its shape therefore for all practical purposes it doesn't have any shape therefore it it slips out of attention and especially out of uh conscious attention because as I've pointed out to you conscious attention always

is a concentration on figures in contrast with backgrounds and so naturally the total background of everything that's going on this is again what Pik means by the ground of being uh escapes attention it is the very first thing what we fail to notice and so in this way we become absolutely fascinated with all the things going on inside it and we start identifying with them and taking sides as if for example uh again when you uh read the newspaper and you read out about all the terrible things that's going on uh you find you get

worked up you get mad about this that and the other and uh before you know where you are you're completely absorbed it's just in the same way as going to a play or in the cinema you you you get infuriated you get excited you get uh so you've identified you see with the contests going on if you could look with at your blood with a microscope and see all the different kinds of creatures in your blood eating each other up you would think that you were in grave mortal danger if that side is going to

win wowe look at that poor thing and that's part of [Laughter] me and so you get absorbed You' get partisan in that quarrel so we're all in this way absorbed in the daily events going on the conflicts and everything like this and we're taking sides not realizing you see that you can't actually take sides because you need both sides you are both sides you are self and other you are inside and outside how can you take the side of the outside against the inside because if you won you wouldn't be outside you wouldn't be inside

either so then the the the the project of ways of Liber ation like Hinduism and Buddhism and Daoism is to restore to the fascinated individual an awareness of his eternity and his Infinity not necessarily in terms of what we ordinary ordinarily call personal IM mortality a system in which we would be able to go on into a future life with memories of all the past lives through which we have lived or past times in which we have been so that I could address myself to the pleasures of Heaven in the person of Alan Watts I

think there might be something mutually exclusive about that uh but in another way a much more interesting way because you you well know if you think it through that if you remembered forever and ever uh and had a kind of continuous accumulative experience that after a while you would want to forget things that had happened you see forgetting is as important to remembering as elimination is to assimilation just as uh you don't simply eat food but you let out the excrement so in the same way in ones we were discussing this morning while somebody brought

it up an analogy between the mind and the digestive system so forgetting is tremendously important to one's mental functioning that's why we sleep that's why we have these intervals of unconsciousness and unconsciousness renews things you remember don't you your childhood when the world was new to you and how extraordinary it was and how very beautiful well if you want to go on being an adult for always and always and always you can never have that experience again because you've got to die first and see it all a new and that is why uh all initiation

ceremonies involve a symbolic death what you call dying to yourself in various rituals people are put in coffins and all books of the Dead like the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Egyptian Book of the Dead actually are Cod Ed references to initiation rights and initiation processes whereby you die to come alive and that is for this reason thinking about death is extremely productive uh you you know it's so difficult to think about death isn't it imagine what it would be like for Consciousness to cease and never occur again to go to sleep and

never wake up this is a consideration which teases you out of thought what would it be like to start out of nothing at all as it seems that you did when you were born that equally teases you out of thought what is outside space you see all these questions which are beloved of children bring you to a point where you have to stop thinking you can't possibly imagine and that is a creative moment when thought is nonplused because what you have got to at that point is yourself just in the same way as you cannot

conceive yourself in its vastest sense in the sense of being one with the universe so you cannot conceive these particular questions that I have raised and you will find if you think long enough about death about the possibility of your total disappearance and which will so as far as you're concerned be the total disappearance of everything else there's a clue in that see as to who you are if you think long enough about that there will occur a curious flip Yang leads to Yin you will realize that the infinite nothingness into which you will disappear

when you die was the same infinite nothingness out of which you came when you were born do you remember not existing for millions and and millions of years before you were born you see how it flips and so you will see the rhythm of this that you know of course from objective observation that after you are dead there will be babies born baby humans baby snakes baby beetles baby spiders baby fish of babies you've watched people die and you've watched babies born later so then you will be every one of those babies only one of

the interesting properties of being a baby individual is that you can only experience yourself one at a time that's the game there would be no point in experiencing yourself as many eyes simultaneously because the nearest thing to that would have course of being the self of all the cells in your body which are coagulated into one individual but you are all of those ones that are born but each one of course experiences itself in the singular so you can expect very well after you're dead to have the the same experience in general as you had

when you were born now it may be that you are born again as a human being or you may be reborn as a fish but if you are a fish you will be in a situation where you feel that you're a human being and that people are fish I mean there are something else there are another species you are the center species which is the human situation so it will be like it is now it keeps repeating itself only it does it with variations on a theme that's the reason for the many different species many

different kinds of Consciousness so you do not need if you understand the sense of this you do not need to believe in any secret super natural information which I might have access to and you don't it is perfectly obvious what's going on you would say but uh there is no connection between me and somebody else living later my dear friends there is no connection between the molecules composing your hands there are no strings joining them together there is nothing but space between there is as I talk no connection between the sounds I'm uttering because they

are vibrations and if you magnify the sounds I'm saying that means you would have to slow them down on a recording system you would eventually get something that go uh and you see I can goggle that a little so that you can I get deep Bas enough you can actually hear the the the texture of the sound that is to say you're beginning to hear the spaces in the vibration what is the connection between these things well you say as you listen to it while I'm talking to you it makes perfect sense or it's say

one sound sounds like it's one sound continuous but it's not it's discontinuous but when you look at it from far enough away it looks like it's continuous so it is with connections between lives with connections between anything whatsoever there are no connections you can look at the universe from the prickly philosophy point of view and see it as purely discontinuous particles Machinery but if you were a goo type person you see it as all continuous W you see instead of going p p p but both points of view are correct so if you want to

be continuous you go a little bit to goo if you want to be discontinuous and some people would much rather be dead when they're dead then you can go over to particles about you must realize you see that the differentiation between particles and waves is a differentiation that is necessary to both sides of the difference You'll Always Find this is so whatever kind of Duality you make you will never be able to escape non-duality which is what holds dualities together so cheer up uh the uh the whole system is rigged that you're it only uh

you you learn to be bugged yes to be bugged to uh be phased by eventualities see well when you're a baby you see this is pushed into you by the whole society the babies know you see when they first arrive in the world the babies know that they can't say cuz they don't have any language but they know who they are they have what Freud calls the oceanic experience I don't know really how he found this [Laughter] out [Laughter] see the the whole problem of a child psychologist is that um we would just love to

teach an infant to talk so that it can tells it how it feels not to be able to talk how things are before you get any concepts and so we have a kind of a theoretical notion that a baby experiences the whole world as its own body and makes no differentiation between itself and its mother and so on uh may be very probable as a matter of inference because none of us remember quite how it was we don't we can't remember because we didn't have any words to put our memories into no notation memory depends

to a large extent on such notations well you can get regressions by hypnosis and uh maybe they tell us something maybe they don't but at any rate uh what happens is that as you start to grow up you let me put it like this I think I can get this across to a baby nothing has any special value life is just a thing that [Music] [Applause] goes see there's something just happening there's just a play of energy see and uh there's nothing to say in it that this is the right noise and that's the wrong

noise this is the right shape and this is the wrong shape it's all just shape it's Jazz with no discrimination as to what ought to happen What ought not to happen when the baby's in pain it hasn't yet been taught that pain is bad the baby just squawks and squawking isn't necessarily bad until mamas teach babies that they ought not to squawk then squawking becomes bad now when you get enlightened at the other end of the of the road you will once again see that everything that's going on is just in all kinds of ways

marvelous it has no value there's no it doesn't have to go on but as a matter of fact if it stops stopping means going on later it's just an interval there's nothing except intervals you can't just there's nothing outside space You Can't Stop permanently supposing the you you take the theory that the universe is called the um explode theory of the universe that there was a big bang sometime or other and that all these galaxies were flung into space and they are systems of falling energy and eventually they'll Fade Out and that'll be that well

then what well but then how did it ever get to start I mean presumably before it all happened there was nothing going on which will be the way is when it stops anything that happened once can happen again so I mean you you may say I can't prove that you may say that is my metaphysical leap of faith that anything that happened once can happen again but I would like to be able to bet on it if I could find some way of collecting the winnings [Laughter] of course if I lose I'll never know I

lost but I think this is the way it works because everything works that way only the thing is that don't don't don't worry about not retaining your personal identity because you would get absolutely bored with it if you could enough it would kill you and indeed [Laughter] does so uh in Far Eastern philosophy human life is looked upon very much as one looks on the seasons and uh spring summer autumn winter and as there is felt especially in Japanese poetry to be an absolutely essential rhythm in the rhythm of the seasons so too there is

felt to be this marvelous rhythm in in the biological cycle in the life cycle and uh you will disappear but you will reappear and the interesting thing about it is this you could reappear in a form very like what you are now just in the same way as two performances of a given musical piece are different performances and yet the same composition and there are all possibilities of making this Energy System uh go into every conceivable kind of complexity and differences of shapes and differences of games and every conce able sort of possibility and it's

going w w w w all through time now the moment you you see this is an essential step you might call it in the meditation process is to see this is to see everything as nonsense as completely meaningless but being just what it is this is what Buddhists call seeing things as of one suchness the word suchness in Sanskrit is tatata and that means da da see like this when you get to seeing everything like that when nothing matters it doesn't matter if you die this instant because that will be one kind of a jazz

if you go on living a long time it'll be more kind of jazz if this happens if that happens it's all just a kind of jazz you see you get to being able to see that and simultaneously with seeing that it becomes perfectly obvious that you sitting here are a continuous life with everything else all around you one life but that the Jazz which is called feeling that I am myself there's a way of going buoy buoy booy buoy this way then feeling there's something other is a thing that goes to R like that you

see but it's all as it were um bonging on the same drum and you're the drum well now following on from our discussion yesterday afternoon about relativity and about the mutual interpenetration of every individual thing or event in the universe with every other one and having previously discussed in the morning the Yang Yin principle the inter relation of the Opposites we are in a position to take a look at the meaning of this extraordinary classic of China the book of changes called the Y Jing not the Y Ching I'm afraid that the way that we

romanize Chinese words uh Bears very little resemblance to the way they're pronounced uh that's because the scholars have a secret conspiracy to outgroup everybody else because only if you in the node you know how to the fact that it should be Jing when there's no apostrophe after the CH but Ching when there is an apostrophe after the CH and so it goes so the Y Jing or the book or Jing means a a classical book a scripture the Sanskrit Sutra is translated into Chinese by Jing so the classical book the book of ye which is

change it is suspected that the character for ye was once a picture of a chameleon or lizard and that because in the same way that the chameleon changes its color on whatever background it's put so it came to mean change but you see in that idea of change it isn't simple change it was an idea of adaptation an idea of harmonization with surroundings and one of the basic ideas of Chinese thought about nature is a word that means resonance as when tuning Forks respond to each other and so the resonance between any individual event and

the context in which it occurs is one of the most important things that strike the Chinese mind for example if we take blood blood in the veins is not the same thing as blood in a test tube because it's in a different environment it is not behaving in the same way and to a very large extent is uh you you must say that a thing is what it does this uh I never Tire of pointing out this fundamental confusion in our Thinking by reason of the fact that grammar contains both nouns and verbs and therefore

gives the impression that there are two quite distinct classes of reality one is process uh denoted by verbs the other is uh stuff objects entities denoted by nouns but actually um there's no need for this division because all nouns all so-called things are processes they are particular forms of behavior and we never can possibly describe anything but their behavior we can say what they do but we never can say what they are and we can never say what does things there isn't any need for anything that does anything all you need is doing that is

energy