The Web Of Life, Consciousness, Energy & Existence - Alan Watts (BLACK SCREEN)

the Web of Life let me try from the first to indicate the point that we're aiming at the point is this that human consciousness is at the same time as being a form of awareness and sensitivity and understanding it's also a form of ignorance the ordinary everyday Consciousness that we have leaves out more than it takes in and because of this it leaves out things that are terribly important it leaves out things that would if we did know them allay our anxieties and fears and Horrors and if we could extend our awareness you see to

include those things that we leave out we would have a deep interior peace because we would all know the one thing that you mustn't know you know according to the rules of our particular social game one thing you mustn't know that's really not allowed that is the lowdown on on life and the low down on the one hand means the real dirt on things but the low down is also what is profound what is mysterious what is in the depths and there's something left out and our everyday Consciousness screens this out in the same way

that when you say you have weaving you have say on this uh rug here in front of us when the Black finishes here the black threads will go underneath and then appear again over here then they'll go underneath the white and then they'll appear again over here you know so that the back will be the obverse pattern of the front now the world is like that our sense organs are selective they pick out certain things that receptive for example we have a small small band of uh what you might call a spectrum of light of

sound of tactile sensation and so on to which the human organism is sensitive but we know that outside that small band there is a huge range of vibrations to which we have built instruments that are sensitive things like cosmic rays ultraviolet rays uh gamma rays hard X rays so on they're all outside the band of our spectrum and obviously there are things that are outside the range of our instruments we may build new instruments someday which will evoke bring into our Consciousness other orders of vibration altoe but yet as yet we don't know about them

so you could imagine you see the universe is a vast vast system of vibration ations and has infinite possibilities all these vibrations you know are like the strings on a harp and the harps that the angels are supposed to play in heaven are really this huge possibility see when you play the harp you select strings you don't play all the strings it's stupid to just run your finger along the whole edge of the heart back and forth back and forth and go what you do is you pick out with your fingers select let like on

the piano you don't go you pick out certain notes and these make the patterns but at the same time as you pick out you reject what you don't pick up but it's all there constituting a fundamental continuity the kind of continuity of the thread as they go to the back of the woven material and make up the obverse of the pattern that's on the front now the question that is absolutely basic for all human beings is what have you left out you see you are focused on certain things that constitute what you call everyday reality

look you single out people and you see them sitting sitting sitting all around and you know there are things that are really there and then behind the people are the houses or whatever we live in and the the Earth and behind all that the sky and so on but we see the world as a collection of rather disjointed events and things and I might say to you as you came in here today now my goodness you all forgot something what did you forget and you think my goodness did I put my pants on did I

wear a sweater did I put my glasses and my hair on or my wig or whatever and uh no no it's none of that something you've forgotten see everybody's forgotten something you left it out you just missed it see see and so I can bring this out what you've forgotten if I ask you who are you will you say I'm Paul Jones or whatever your name happens to be I said oh no no don't give me that stuff who are you really and you think um well of course I'm just I'm just me no don't

give me that I I don't want to he all that nonsense you're you're playing a trick on me really deep down who are you I don't know well that's the thing to find out that's the thing that's been forgotten see that's the underside of the tapestry the thing that's been left out because what we are carefully taught to ignore is uh that every one of us fundamentally deep deep inside let's put it that way is a an act of a function of a performance of a manifestation of the works the whole blinking Cosmos with all

its galaxies and forever and ever and ever whatever it is beyond that what uh you might call God in the western tradition or Brahman in Hindu philosophy or da in Chinese every one of us is really that but we are pretending we aren't and we are pretending with tremendous skill and decep now what I would call a really swinging human being is a person who lives on two levels at once he's able to live on the level of being his ordinary ego his everyday personality and play his role in life and do observe all the

rules and so on that go with that but if he's only on that level if he's only playing that kind of thing and thinks that's all there is it becomes a drag and he starts being the kind of person who feels that he's just got to go on Surviving see it's terribly important to go on Surviving live and uh he works at that and his uh children learn the same attitude from him and they you know he says well I I've got to survive because I've got all these children I got to support and so

on and so forth and then they take the same attitude and they breed up children and they feel compulsive about supporting them because they've got to go on and so nobody really has any fun it's just we got to make this thing you see and you don't have to see whenever I get somebody who comes to me and says I really can't go on and I have to commit suicide I say well that's entirely uh you're you're right there's really no reason why you should go on and if you want to commit suicide do it

you can check out of course this reduces anxiety when they feel free to commit suicide they don't really have to commit suicide so so much you know you you can commit partial suicide [Laughter] so uh the sense that you just have to go on living see that life is a must when you say to anything spontaneous see life is spontaneous it happens in the words of the doist Zan which means of itself so that's their Chinese expression for nature what happens by itself what isn't pushed but it just pop pops up you see like um

yeah I'll never forget there was a great zen master I knew once in New York he was giving a lecture one evening and he was dressed in his gold ceremonial robes and he was sitting in front of an altar like this sort of thing and but he had a table in front of him with very formal with candles on it and a Sutra scripture on a little desk and he was lecturing on the Sutra and he said um fundamental principle in Buddhism is no purpose pness when you drop F you don't say at 9:00 I

drop f it happen of itself you know and all these Pious Western devotes you know kind of put their handkerchiefs in their mouths and try not to laugh you so but that's the meaning of something that happens of itself like drop drop fart or have hiccups or uh um just you you came into being you know it happens in a kind of a plop way like that see now you can't tell that process you ought to happen you must happen because that puts a bind on it in the same way as when you have a

little child and all the relatives have come to a party on Thanksgiving and you put the child into the middle of all the relatives and say now dear play see and absolutely bugs the child to do it like that and so this is the problem for every artist because an artist is a man who makes his living by playing whether he's dancing or painting or playing music or whatever it is and he has to overcome this problem he has to know how to play in public at a given time on an appointment see now that's

not an easy thing to learn but when you catch on to the trick of it you can do it to play On Demand that's the hardest lesson of life to contrive what is called by my Japanese artist friend sabro hasagawa a controlled accident the thing is that we have been educated to use our minds in a certain way a way that ignores or screens out the fact that every one of us is an aperture through which the whole Cosmos looks out you see it's as if you had a light covered with a black ball and

in this ball were pin holes and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out so in that way every one of us is actually a pinhole through which the fundamental light that is the existence itself looks out only the game we're playing is uh not to know this to be only that little hole which we call me my ego my specific J Jones or whatever if however you see we can maintain at the same time the sense of being this specific Jon Jones with his role in Life or whatever and know also

underneath this that we are the whole works you get a very marvelous and agreable Arrangement this is the most remarkable harmoniousness I mean it gives one's life a great sense of joy and exuberance if you can carry on these two things at once if you in other words you know that all the serious predicaments of Life are a game now I want to put it two ways I'm not saying that it's a bad thing something to be condemned to take your own individual life seriously in dead Earnest and to have all the problems that go

with that do you understand that that being that way that being a real mixed up human being is a manifestation of nature that is something just like um patterns on the waves out here or like a seash shell you know we pick up shells I I always keep one around uh sort of an example for many things and say my goodness isn't that gorgeous there's not an aesthetic fault in it anywhere it's absolutely perfect now I wonder I wonder if these fish look at each other's shells and say don't you think she's kind of [Laughter]

fat oh my those markings aren't really very well spaced cuz that's what we do see we don't realize that all of us in our various goings on and behavior and so on are just as more marvelous much more complicated much more interesting all these gorgeous faces that I'm looking at you know every one of them some are supposedly pretty some are supposedly not so pretty but they're all absolutely gorgeous and everybody's eyes is a piece of jewelry Beyond Compare beautiful but we have specialized in a certain kind of awareness that makes us neglectful of that

you see we specialize in more or less briefly concentrated pinpoint attention we look at this and we look at that and we select from all the things we might possibly be aware of only certain things and as a result of that we leave out of our everyday consciousness generally speaking two dimensions of experience one amazing beauty of experience that we never see at all and on the other hand the very deep thing the sense of our basic identity Unity with Oneness with the total process of being see because we are staring as it were at

certain features of the landscape we don't see the background and because we get fascinated with you know I could go into details of this shell as I said and put myself in the mind of a con or whatever it is that lives in this thing and to say um H that's not so hot that one like that see and so I I wouldn't see the whole thing but when I look at it like this when anybody looks at it like that we say oh my God isn't that gorgeous another way of talking about the web

is that there are different levels of magnification for example supposing you take a piece of embroidery and here it is obviously in front of you an ordered and beautiful object then you take out a microscope and you look at the individual threads at a certain point as you turn up the microscope you'll get a hopeless tangle it doesn't make any sense at all the wrapped fiber that constitutes the thread is a mess hasn't been organized nobody did anything about it but at the level of magnification at which you actually see it with the naked eye

it's all been organized all right now keep turning up that microscope take one of those individual threads in the fiber that seems to be so chaotic and go into the constitution of that and again you will find fantastic order you will find the most gorgeous designs of molecules then keep turning it up and again at a certain level you'll find chaos again all right keep going and at another level you'll find the this marvelous order now you see order and Randomness constitute in other words the warp and the Woof where everything is in order everything's

under control and Randomness it's all all it's a mess but we wouldn't know what order was unless we had messes it's the contrast of order and messes that order itself depends upon and so in this exactly the same way it is the contrast of on and off there and not there in other words life and death being and non-being that constitutes existence only we pretend that the random side of things the disorderly side of things could possibly win in the game of competition or I would rather call it collaboration between the two when you lose

sight of the fact that the order principle and the random principle go together that's exactly the same predicament as losing sight of the fact that all individually delineated things and beings are connected underneath no just like mountains stick out of the earth and there's a fundamental Earth underneath them so all of us as different things we stick out of reality and there's a continuity underneath but you ignore that you see that's the thing that's left out see I'm just giving you many examples of the same principle but really deep down we are each one of

us everything that there is doing it this way and then again that way and then again another way and that's what it keeps up doing forever and ever only it has holidays which are called deaths you know in the story of the creation of the world in the Bible God works for seven days and rests the seventh it's necessary to have a holiday holidays holy day and uh the Sabbath for the Jews is Saturday for the Christians is Sunday because Saturday is the last day of the week but Sunday is the first day of the

week and it's a slight difference of alteration between a Jewish temperament and a Christian temperament some people like to take the holiday and then do the work other people like to do the work and then take the holiday and since the Jews do the work first and then take the holiday they're always a little up on the Christians in [Laughter] business but the point is that a holiday this pause between something going on is of the essence of the idea of a web for example as an IR famous Irishman is supposed to have described a

net as a lot of holes tied together with string so the holes are very very important and uh these are the holy days you see the holes this all goes together so there must be that interval and it exists on all kinds of levels it isn't simply that there is for example a sound is sounded is a vibration and the sound goes on and off there every everything that we call sound is sound silence there is no such thing as pure sound you couldn't hear it what you hear is that tap tap tap tap tap

tap tap tap tap tap against the eardrum but it happens very fast so that you get more of an impression of sound than you do of Silence but between every little undulation of sound there is also an interval when you listen to music you hear a Melody but what you hear actually that makes the melody significant are the steps between the tones what we call the intervals and a person who doesn't hear intervals is toned deaf he only hears noises he doesn't hear the steps so that interval between whatever happens is as important as what

happens so we'll call these two things the sound of the silence the life and the death somewhat analogous in weaving to the warp and the Woof now look at The Marvelous way in which warp and wolf go together a piece of cloth is an extraordinary thing when you consider it's made of a line of string there's something always struck me as a child fabulous that string just thread could turn into cloth why should it hang together how improbable my mother was a very great artist in embroidery did absolutely fabulous work and uh she could do

everything with thread sewing knitting embroidery make tapestries repair tapestries oh just fabulous work so I I've grown up in a background where thread is of enormous importance she made her living this way for a while so I was always amazed at the way a say you take a ball of wool and with knitting needles and suddenly it turns into a sweater fantastic but I found out you see the secret of this which is that it will do this it will hold together by this combination of warp and Wolf by this process where one thread goes

under the other omits the next goes under the other and then the next thing does the same thing but in the opposite way connect that and they hold each other up for example you can put two sticks of wood and lean them against each other and they'll stand up you know the Chinese character for man looks more or less like that and although this is a written this is simply the brush form the brush abbreviation of what were originally the legs of a uh little human stick figure there's a story that Japanese children uh sometimes

learn from their mothers that this the reason this is the character for man is that two sticks lent together as I described will keep each other up and the one depends on the other it's mutual and so in the same way the exist of human beings depends on our supporting each other without that no one of us can exist but that which may seem a little trite a little sort of moralistic and so on but it is absolutely fundamental that anything that there is whenever we can say that something exists existence is a function of

relationship motion itself is a function of relationship for example uh forgive me if some of you have heard this one before but it's very important basic lesson if there is only one object one small ball in the middle of endless space nobody knows whether it's moving because you can't tell whether it's approaching anything or whether it's going away from anything because there's nothing else so in that state of affairs no motion exists but if we introduce a second ball into the picture and the two either come towards each other or go away from each other

then we can say that both of them or either of them is in motion we can't decide decide which is the one that's doing the moving because they it could be could be one could be the other now we'll put three balls into space and we find two of them staying together and the other one going away now it's up to the two of them to decide whether the other one is going away from them or they are going away from the other because two is a majority in this case and the vote always of

course goes to the majority the universe being basically a democratic organization and so it goes now once you've got that you can see that motion is a form of relationship all right let me put it in another way energy is a form of relationship if the universe is basically a play of energy then you can say energy and relationship go together now what is this saying this is saying that being existence itself is relationship let's look at it in several other ways you know the old question if a tree crashes in a forest and there

is nobody around to hear it is there a noise this question has been discussed in many feal ways but noise basically is a state of affairs that requires an eardrum and an audio nervous system behind the eardrum when when the tree falls it makes the air vibrate if there is anywhere around an ear with the appropriate nervous system there will be a noise because noise is a relationship between Motion in the air and ears if there is not any ear around there won't be any noise although there will be vibration in the air and if

there is some instrument around such as a microphone attached to a tape recorder which is a mechanical copy of a human ear then according to that there will be noise there will be a vibration in the same way let's suppose the sun sends out light into space now the space surrounding the sun will be black darkness as if if there were no light in it unless a planet happens to float by when a planet floats by there will be light in the darkness but if there isn't anything to relate to the sun in that way

then comes no light now this goes right down to the root and ground of everything it goes down to the essence of your nerves of uh your whole being that it's all an interdependence and that's why one of the basic symbols of the universe is the Chinese yinyang symbol uh which you know is a circle with an S curve in the center one side of the S is black the other is white and so it makes as it two commas or two fishes and the eye of the fish is the opposite color the white fish

has a black eye the black fish has a white eye and these things are going like this see curling in on each other now this thing is called a helix and that is the fundamental form of the galaxies the great nebula we see out in space are doing this curves and this is basically to the position of sexual intercourse this is this is love making and this is you know when you hold hands and and so on uh this is it but there are two involved and the two are secretly W now this is what

I really want should to understand to get into the unitive world underneath underlying and supporting the everyday practical World there have to be certain alterations in one's common sense now there are certain ideas and Beyond these ideas certain feelings that are difficult to get across not because they're intellectually complicated not at all because of that but because they're unfamiliar that's strange we haven't been brought up to accommodate them in exactly the same way that in Past Times people knew that the planets were supported in the sky because they were embedded in spheres of crystal and

if they weren't embedded in spheres of Crystal and of course you could see them because you could see through them they would fall down on the earth and now when astronomers finally suggested that there were no Crystal spheres people felt unbelievably insecure see they had a terrible time assimilating this idea now do you see what it involves to simulate a really new idea you have to do quite a flip for example there's some people whose number systems only account for quantities 1 2 3 many so they don't have any concept of Four Corners to a

table so a table has many corners and a uh p of Pebbles is in that sense equivalent in many to the four corners of a table now they have difficulty you see in beginning to assimilate the idea of counting through and numbering all those corners or all those Pebbles but we've done that and so to us that is perfectly simple but imagine the kind of mentality the kind of person to whom that is not simple at all but now in exactly the same way there is here what I'm trying to explain a new idea that

most people don't assimilate and that is the idea of the total interdependence of everything in the world the Buddhists in Japan call it gug g mug between things and thing between event and event there is no block and they represent this imagistically as a network imagine a multi-dimensional spider web covered in due in the morning and every single drop of Dee on this web contains in it the reflections of all the other drops of Dew and of course in turn in every of do that one drop reflects there is the reflection of all the others

again and they use this image to represent the interdependence of everything in the world in other words if we give this be drop image if we put it into a linguistic analogy we would say this words have meaning only in context the meaning of any word depends upon the sentence or upon the paragraph in which it's found so that if I say this tree has no bark that's one thing and if I say this dog has no bark that's another thing so you see always that the meaning of the word is is in relation to

the context now in exactly the same way the meaning as well as the existence of an individual person an organism is in relation to the context you are what you are sitting here at this moment in your particular kind of clothes and with the particular colors of your faces and your particular personalities your family involvements your business involvements your neurosis and your everything you are that precisely in relation to an extremely complex environment so much so that if let's take for example this piece of wood that forms a support to the beam out here now

believe me this is true you can see that has little nubbles on it and so on if it were not the way it is you would not be the way you are the line of connection between what is it is and you are is very very complicated also we could say if a given star that we observe didn't exist you would be different from what you are now I don't say you wouldn't exist but you would exist differently uh but the you might say the connection is very faint is something that you don't ordinarily have

to think about it's not important but basically it is important only you say I don't have to think about it because it's there all the time see for example the floor is underneath you all the time some sort of floor some sort of Earth and you you really don't have to think about it it's it's just always there it's always around if if you're you become insensitive you stop thinking about it but there it is and so in the same way our subtle interdependence with mind you it's not just our plain existence it's the kind

of existence we have is dependent upon all these things also our plain existence but that gets way down but the the fundamental thing is existence is relationship in other words if my finger up here is all alone and the wind doesn't move and nothing touches it it stops knowing that it's there but if something comes along and does immediately it's aware that it's there [Laughter] so you see it takes two we could have so much fun but it takes more than one he don't [Laughter] want but in this way you see what we call Duality

you can see in K you how Duality is fundamental it takes two but Duality is always secretly Unity take the contrast between the words we use explicit and implicit the very valuable words what is explicit what's on the outside that say how we come on publicly explicitly we are thus and so we have a fight uh we're in competition say in business explicitly but implicitly we've worked this out that we've agreed in a secret way that nobody knows about that this competition is extremely valuable to both of us take it politically for example let's take

the situation of Russia versus the United States explicitly in public this has to be a big fight these two ways of life these two ideologies are opposed they say now we are but behind the scenes it's all been carefully worked out you bet it has that this opposition has to happen because our economy depends on it and their economy depends on it and everybody knows this who's got who's smart but there are a lot of people who get taken in by the propaganda and they should be taken in because that makes the thing work it's

crazy but that's the way it goes and everything works this way there is uh for example when swans start to mate they're not sure what they're supposed to do and they they begin to fight I had a long talk about this with with CG Yung he lived uh on the edge of lake zich and he had a little summer house right on the water's edge and there were many swans there and I was getting up after at the end of a conversation with him and we were beginning to walk back to the main house and

I said isn't it true that swans are monogamous and he said yes they are he said do you know I have had most interesting relationships between these swans and many of my female patients who thought they were homosexual I mean Yong wasn't a uh sexual snob I mean he he understood all the legitimacy of all kinds of sexual variations but he said it has been a Point of Departure for our discussions and he said it's a very funny thing that when they begin to mate they start fighting and they don't know what it's all about

then suddenly the fight turns into love making so that's what I mean underneath opposition there is love underneath Duality there's Unity that Tweedle Dam and Tweedle D agreed to have a battle so you see here's that weaving principle the things hold together by over under under over over under under over over under under over and that creates a stuff it creates a fabric it creates clothing it creates shelter it creates what we call matter matter matter mother and also the same word Maya illusion see the world as a marvelous illusion now we've got to go

into this look look at another form of the thing you can play it not only by two as one but you can play it by three as one you know the uh trademark for Valentine's ale which is three interlocked rings now the way these rings are interlocked as such that they are joined only if the three of them are present if you take one away the other two fall apart this a very interesting phenomenon but it can be created physically with uh steel rings that their cohesion depends on all three of them being present now

we have tried scientifically to understand the world and explain its Mysteries by analyzing the smallest smallest particles of things that exist inquiring down down down what is this thing we call flesh or call Steel or stone what is it made of go down into the midst of it and that's given us a certain understanding but only half of the understanding equally important is not what is the tiniest particle but in what context is the tiniest particle you see in in relation to what is it just as the word bark as I showed you has different

meanings in different sentences so cells molecules atoms have different properties in different contexts so what uh the scientist equally needs to study is not simply what is anything when very very minutely analyzed but where is it when is it that makes all the difference so do you see that a lot of people who get anxious when they hear that everything is relative have no no need to get that anxious relativity isn't some kind of slippery morass in which all standards and all directions get lost relativity is really the soundest situation that there is see it's

the it's the one supporting the other it's this thing do you know this this is wonderful x marks the spot imagine this going on and on supposing my finger were indefinitely long both fingers and they were doing this they're just crossing each other now on one side of it it's a pair of scissors and it cuts what is it on the other side why it's opening female legs saying please come in this utter softness utter receptiveness on the other side it's but on this side it's please please please please yes welcome and everything's based on

that see it's this way sharpness teeth biting spines crab shells all that kind of thing you know on the other side it's the melting softness of light see they go together just like that and goodness knows what it is on these outer two sides I I haven't thought about that yet so if you see that if you if you get that principle you can feel yourself not sort of just rattling around in the world as a kind of um you know somebody who's been stuck down there but you can feel yourself going on in absolutely

exact relationship with everything around you and this is very beautiful it isn't just that you are here looking at what's out there like you might be photographing it with your eyes it's that if that there wasn't there you wouldn't be here the outside thing that you see and the inside thing that you are are poles of the same Magnet or back and front of the same coin and without one there isn't the other that means of course then that we are living in the midst of a world of animals vegetables minerals atmospheres astronomical bodies that's

highly intelligent it's intelligence concentrated crystallized in our brains that's where it comes out you see in any field let's say let's take any field of forces we take a chemical solution and at certain critical points in this chemical solution the crystals start to form and so in the same way the total intelligence of this whole universe crystallizes in human brains also in other kinds of brains that's where it really comes out but it's the total intelligence of the whole field that does this so we go with the whole thing interdepend with it we don't live

in an environment which is just rock just air just atmosphere and so on the environment's only like that when we think about it analytically and try to explain it but when we think of it isn't just rock and air see but those things go together when you see the interconnectedness when you see in the simplest way how flowers go with bees and other insects they don't live without them humans go with cattle they don't exist without them plants etc etc etc when you see the intervals the significance of the relation ships between these things it's

only then when you see that that you are aware of the melody go back to the illustration I gave of the person who can't hear Melody who Tone de he hears only a succession of sounds because he's not aware of the intervals now most people are brought up to be toned deaf in respect to their own existence and the rest of the universe they don't see the relationships they are not aware of the unity and so once you you spot that you spot how everything goes with the thing that you are one end and that

out there is the other end and they really go together then you may be said to be living a harmonious life in exploring the theme of the web of life I have thus far discussed two principal topics first the web considered as selectivity experience considered as what we pay attention to on the one hand and what we ignore on the other and I showed how the way in which we pay attention to the world creates isolates I'm using that as a noun isolates that we call particular things events and persons and they seem to be

disconnected and to be alone because we ignore the connections between them and I use the analogy of weaving where the threads go underneath and join on the back in a way that is not seen on the front so you might say in the unconscious although I don't particularly like that word because it makes it seem as if it was something rather dead but on the unconscious side of life as on the back of the weaving or the back of the embroidery there are connections which are not published now in the second part of the theme

was the web as mutuality when I discussed the way the existence of a web the existence of cloth or anything like that depend depends on a mutual support of the warp and the Woof and this miraculous thing occurs that when the things support each other uh being comes into being cloth comes into being and so in exactly the same way our world is a manifestation of Relativity and this requires a balance a combination a relationship of opposites in every domain of life and all the though these opposites are explicitly different and even antagonistic they are

implicitly one and that's the secret see the these two secrets that we went into the connection between what are supposed to be separate things and events and the mutual Unity between what are manifestly that is to say openly for purposes of publication opposites now this afternoon I'm going to take two other aspects of the web the web is a trap like the spider's web is a trap for flies also the lovely embroideries are worn by women as traps for men from a certain from a certain point of view and I want to consider the web

as something playful you see there are so many ways of looking at it and you will find that all these ways are are right but what we need is the fullness of the view there are people for example who can see the web as a trapped and get stuck with that there are people to whom existence is simply hateful they see it as nothing but a ghastly mistake the Lord really heard when he created this world because he he arranged it in such a way that everything lives by eating something else and what I'm doing

is I'm describing a certain point of view you see I'm not exactly philosophizing I'm describing a point of view you can look at life in such a way that the whole thing is a is this ghastly mistake for example there's no such thing as genuine kindness love everybody is really pretending that they're loving other people in order to get some Advantage from them and indeed there is a point of view which occurs in certain forms of paranoia where people don't seem to be real they are mechanisms and you can think that out quite intensely with

a good deal of intelligence after all if you start from a good old darwinian or Freudian basis and see that man is a material machine and that the consciousness of man is simply a very involved and complicated form of chemistry and that's it what it is you see well then this awful uh mechanical things these uh Frankenstein that everybody is they come around and they say well I'm alive I'm a human being I have a heart I love I hate I have problems I I feel and you feel like saying come off it you're just

a monster uh and you put on the Civilized act because really you're just a set of teeth on the end of a tube and you've got a gangon behind those teeth which you call your brain or your so alleged mind and this thing is really basically there for two purposes one to be cunning enough to get something to eat to put down the tube and the other you know what Mr frid's libido and everything else you see can be construed as an elaborate subtle way of pretending that that's not really what you want to do

but you do but you put on a great show now some people according to this view get mixed up they so repressed that what they really want to do is to eat and to screw that they get involved in higher things that are the masks for these activities and think that that's the real purpose of life and then they become what's called neurotic and uh because they get involved in being pure camouflage so that's what's called escaping from the facts not looking at life not looking at reality correctly now this is a very strange thing

you see that it is partly true that the universe so far as its biological aspect is concerned is this weird system that lives by everybody eating everybody else only what we do to maintain what is called order and civilization is that various species make agreements as it were that they won't eat each other they'll cooperate and so be an enormous gang which can uh beat down the others so the human being is the most successful so far of this gangster arrangement we are the most predatory monsters on Earth and we have cooperated to assault the

fish and the vegetables and the chickens and the cows and everything you see only we do it by not letting our left hand know what our right hand doth in other words ladies and gentlemen unless gentlemen happen to be prone to going hunting as a spot they don't see their food killed they don't see the slaughterhouse and so what you get in the butcher in the market a steak you know is a thing in its own right it has nothing to do with a carow steak is a thing shaped thus and so and it uh

looks as if it might be like a banana or something like that you know and nobody worries and when a fish is served up it does indeed look like a fish but it's not the squiggly squirmy fish that comes out on the end of the Fisherman's line you know when you really fish you realize that the fish doesn't like it very much no there is that absolutely extraordinary side of things that is really terrifying and so let me repeat the illustration I used of the cross in the net where one side of it is scissors

that cut and eat teeth that chew and get this thing in and the opening side of it is like James Joy's in ulyses the girl who says yes and I said yes yes yes she wants to be absolutely ravaged by her man you see so it's open open open but now comes the the the if we take the dark view of things the horrible view excuse me if I go into some rather G grizzly details but have you ever heard of a vagina dentata that is the idea that in the sexual organ of the woman

there are teeth and a lot of men have this fantasy and so are rendered impotent they don't make love because they feel that the price of this blessed experience this creative experience loving experience is you're going to get trapped you're going to get emasculated you're going to lose your precious member and uh this is a very ancient fantasy it appears throughout all known history because this is simply the woman's come on where she attracts but she's out really to get you she is basically a spider mother you see who is is selfish and uh doesn't

really love you not really but says she does and of course there are on the other side all the tricks of the men go without [Laughter] mention so this is a view of the world as a system of mutual exploitation and of maximal selfishness now it's a very profitable view to explore everybody should do in their lifetime sometime two things one is to consider death to observe skulls and skeletons and to wonder what it will be like to go to sleep and never wake up never that is the most is a very gloomy thing for

contemplation but it's like manure just as manure fertilizes the plants and so on so the contemplation of death and the acceptance of death is very highly generative of creative life you get wonderful things out of that and the other thing to contemplate is to follow the possibility of the idea that you are totally selfish that you don't have a good thing to be said for you at all you are complete utter Rascal now the Christians have avoided this because although they say in their Episcopalian form of confession that we have heard and strayed from thy

ways like lost sheep and we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own Hearts too much you know uh we have offended against thy holy laws we've left undone those things which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we ought not to have done and there is no health in us but it ought to be different and we're going to do our best to amend with the help of God's grace and that is a real con act because uh if you equate Health with genuine love and perfect

unselfishness then in that sense there is no Health in us when we look at ourselves from this point of view now when you you go deeply into the nature of selfishness what do you discover you say I love myself I seek my own Advantage now what is the self that I love what do I want and that becomes an increasingly ever deepening puzzle now I've often referred to this when you say to somebody else I love you it's always rather disconcerting to the person to whom you say that if you imply that you love them

with a pure disinterested and holy love they automatically suspect it as being a little bit phony but if you say I love you so much I could eat you that's an expression it's a way of saying to a person you would me so much that I can't help it I'm absolutely bowled over by you I'm gone and people like that then they feel they're really being loved that it's absolutely genuine but now I love you so much I could eat you now what the devil do I want I certainly don't want to eat the girl

in the sense of literally devouring her cuz then she disappear ah but I love myself what is me how do in what way do I know me when it suddenly occurs to me that I know me only in terms of you see when I think of anything that I know and that I like then it's always something that can be viewed as other than me I can never get to look at me real me it's always behind it's always hidden and I really don't know it well enough to know whether I love it or not

maybe I don't maybe it's an appalling mess but certainly the things I do love and that I want from a selfish point of view when I really think about them they're all something else that's in a way outside me now we saw that there is a reciprocity a total Mutual interdependence between what we call the self and what we call the other that's the warp and the wolof and so if you are perfectly honest about loving yourself and you don't pull any punches you don't pretend that you are anything other than exactly what you are

you suddenly come to discover that the self you love if you really go into it is the universe you don't like all of it you're selective about it as we saw in the beginning perception is selection but on the whole you love yourself in terms of what is other because it's only in terms of what is other that you have a self at all so then I feel that the one of the very great things that CG Yung contributed to man kind's understanding was the concept of the shadow that everybody has a shadow and that

the main task of the psychotherapist is to do what he called to integrate the evil to as it were put the devil in Us in its proper function because you see it's always the devil the unacknowledged one the outcast the scapegoat the bastard the bad guy you see the black sheep of the family it's always from that point that which we could call the fly in the ointment you see that generation comes in other words uh in the same way as in the drama uh to have the play it's necessary to introduce a villain it's

necessary to introduce a certain element of trouble so in the whole scheme of Life there has to be the shadow because without the shadow there can't be the substance so this is why there is a very strange association between crime and all naughty things and Holiness you see Holiness is Way Beyond being good good people aren't necessarily holy people a holy person is one who is whole who has as it were reconciled his opposites and so there's always something slightly scary about holy people and other people react to them in very strange ways way they

can't make up their minds whether they're Saints or devils and so holy people have throughout history always created a great deal of trouble along with their creative results take Jesus for example trouble that Jesus created is absolutely incalculable think of the Crusades the Inquisition the heaven only knows what's gone on in the name of Jesus very remarkable Freud's a big Troublemaker uh as well as a great healer you see it all goes together so the holy person is scary because he is like the earthquakes or better still he's like the ocean see the ocean on

a lovely sunny day you can say oh isn't that gorgeous and you can go into it and relax and Float around but boy when the storm comes does that thing get mad terrifying so there is in us the ocean you see and Yung felt that the whole point was to bring the two together and uh by a kind of a fantastic honesty to penetrate one's own motivations to the depths Yong had a tremendous humor and he knew that nobody can be completely honest that you will try and you will have a great deal of success

in uh exploring your motivations and your dark unconscious depths but there will be a certain point at which you will say well I have had enough of that do you see how in a strange way there's a certain sanity in that when a person indulges in a certain kind of duplicity of deception there is something you all laughed when I said that there was something humorous about it and this humor is very funny thing basically humor is an attitude of laughter about oneself there is malicious humor or which is laughing at other people but real

deep humor is laughter at oneself now why fundamentally do you laugh about yourself what makes you laugh about yourself isn't it because you know that there is a big difference between what goes on the outside and what goes on the inside that if I hint you see that your inside is the opposite of your outside it makes people laugh if I don't do it unkindly if I get up in the attitude of a preacher and say uh you're a bunch of miserable Sinners and you ought to be different nobody [Laughter] laughs but if I say

well after all boys will be boys we all know then then then people laugh now you see what's what's happening when we do that I passed you around a lot of embroidery to look at before we started and I'm perfectly sure that you got the point that there's a big difference between the front and the back in some forms of embroidery the back is very different from the front because people take shortcuts in the front everything is orderly and it is supposed to be kind of messy on the back side see which side will you

wear youve got to be sure you get the front in the front and the back in the back the back has all the little tricks in it all the shortcuts all the low down that people don't acknowledge see and it's exactly the same with the way we live you know like sweeping the dust under the carpet in a hurry just before the guests come I mean we do ever so many things like that and if you don't do it if you don't think you do it and you think well really I my embroidery is the

same on both sides see well you're deceiving yourself because what you're doing is you're taking the shortcuts in another dimension which you're keeping out of Consciousness everybody takes the shortcuts Everybody Plays tricks everybody has in himself an element of duplicity of deception because you see from this point of view that I'm discussing where the web is the trap to be is to deceive think of camouflage the chameleon who changes its color think of the butterfly pretending it has eyes think of the flower saying to the bee like my honey be says wow but then that

means that the bee has to be and it has to go on living and all the trouble it takes to go around collecting honey and raising other bees and organizing itself and doing that dance which tells the other bees where there's more honey there all that stuff to do with a flower was deceptive now in the same way I've often said life is is a drama and a drama is a deception it's a big act when you peel an onion and you don't really understand the nature of an onion you might look for the pit

in the center like any ordinary fruit has but the onion doesn't have a center it's all skins so when you get right down there's nothing but a bunch of skins you say well that was a kind of disappointing but of course you have to understand that the Skins were the part that you eat well in rather the same way you see you find when you explore yourself uh and your motivations and you go through and through and you try to find out that thing which is really genuine that's why in Zen discipline they give you

Coons which require a perfectly genuine act an act of total and absolute sincerity and people knock themselves out trying to do this thing they always know that the Master's going to catch them as he reads their thought you know that story of um Von kist about the man who had a fight with a bear and the bear could read his thoughts so that the only way of hitting the bear was to do so not on purpose because the bear would know in advance so it's the same in working with a zen master you have to

do the genuine act not on purpose but since you are put in a situation where it's rather formal and you're supposed to do it on purpose you're stuck you see so you explore the UN and you go in and in and in and then you find well uh it's all a deception now then the question arises who's deceiving who who's fooling who I'm fooling me what is fooling fooling is playing like you're there when you're not you know getting somebody else to answer your name in the roll call so we're all you see this is

the metaphysical basis of it this is what the Hindus mean by Maya the world illusion the world is playing it's there when it isn't and it's a trap and it sucks you in and you can't get out of it and it's a thorough big trap too but always when you get an idea like this or a feeling like this follow it to its extreme don't back out from it if you find your selfish go to the extreme of what selfishness means confusion largely results from not following feelings or ideas to their depth you know people

think they want to be immortal they'd like to live forever do you really want to do that think about it really go into it what it would be like people say they want this that and the other they want this kind of car they want this kind of dress or so on and this much money and so on it's always a good idea to think it right through what it would involve to be in that situation to have those desires fulfilled also when you form a relationship to another person think it through too you see

how inconvenient would they be however attractive and uh always turn the embroidery around and look at the underside but don't get caught doing it see that's something one does on the side in secret because otherwise you play the game that everything is as it's supposed to be on the front but that makes humorous and that makes you human now summing up we've discussed the web from three points of view as an analogy of the selective operation of our senses and mind whereby certain things in the world are picked out as significant according to certain game

rules the game that we are playing mostly is the survival game that is to say the game ought to go on only the way we play the survival game has a a kind of element in it which makes it difficult because we tend to say the first rule of this game is that it's serious and that messes the whole thing up so so you have to watch out in other words when you play for contradictory game rules self-contradictory game rules because if you get mixed up into them the game ceases to be worth the candle

you start straining at doing something and it just isn't worth it then the second thing that we observed was the web as an analogy of mutual interdependence we could call it the idea that all existence is relative that all existence is transactional the transaction being typically exemplified by say the operation of buying and selling in which there can be no buying without somebody selling and there can be no selling without somebody else buying that kind of interdependence of the inside going together with the outside what is in you going together with what is outside you

is absolutely fundamental to existence it is existence existence is relativity then we explored the web as a trap the spiders web won't you come into my parlor said the spider to the fly and we saw what happens if youd look at all of life from the point of view that it is original selfishness and original Hunger and we found that if you take that point of view to its ultimate extreme it dissolves and that isn't so bad after all there's a famous comment that RH BL made on the passage in mbth where Shakespeare says it

is a tale told by an idiot full of Sound and Fury signifying nothing and bl says when it's put that way it doesn't seem so bad after all I remember that I had a Zen master friend who wrote a letter to a friend of mine which was passed on to me saying that the greatest writers this friend of mine was aspiring to be a writer and he was trying to write novels that would put across Buddhism to people you know the pill and my zen master friend didn't approve of this at all he said don't

write any story to people write it to the great Sky because all the real masters of literature especially novelists and storytellers are great masters of nonsense think of Lewis Carol you can uh use Lewis Carol and he did use Allison Wonderland as a Zen textbook the because was brillig and the slyy toes did gar and gimbal in the wave and that's uh that's Zen I had a discussion with a great master in Japan on the last visit there and uh we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into

English and uh he said that's a waste of time if you really understand Zen he said you can use any book you could use the Bible you could use Alice and Wonderland you could use the dictionary because he said the sound of the rain needs no translation so what does the rain say evening rain it is the Banana Leaf that speaks of it first you see that's the point and all the talk in the world doesn't get it unless you listen to the talk in a new way the sound of the rain needs no translation

so you see there's something going on this web may be looked at as a as pattern and the world is basically patterning what else do you do when you come to think of it when you eat you uh are turning food into the pattern of your skeleton your muscles and your nervous system that's a pattern and you say you see basically hooray for that pattern that's great it's terribly interesting but then you want other patterns you like to look through a microscope and see the patterns that exist in the small world you like to look

through a kaleidoscope or a teleidoscope and see the patterns you like to have paintings around and see the patterns you like to watch the water play you want to watch The Birds Go and the clouds and all that fascinating patterns and that really does doesn't it seem to be the point I mean what do you do when you're very rich and you want uh let's take some Rascal of ancient times who became very rich by all sorts of scal dugery and uh Warfare and so on he got himself a suit of armor a beautiful sword

and he had the armor make the most intricate patterns arabesques of inlaid gold on the steel why because it's as they say among the Pennsylvania Dutch it's for nice it's a great thing to have all that jazz and that's what we go for what do people do most of the time when they what would they like to do really what's your idea of heaven when people are unoccupied as far as I can make out they get together and they sing and dance or else watch somebody else do it nowadays we live in a non-participative culture

and we don't do very much singing and dancing we are lugubrious but we watch other people do it on television what we really are interested in is to be able to spend all the time going you know something like this and that's what our heart's doing that's what our lungs are doing it's what our eyeballs are doing and it's what all these fantastic capillaries of the veins are doing they're going just see and that's the point now the thing is ought this to be [Laughter] allowed you know a dare we admit it because we've been

brought up you see in a cultural context in which the universe has presided over by somebody serious and it's only very very occasional obscure references in the Jewish and Christian scriptures to the idea that God dances of course in Hindus they know Shiva dances and all the gods dance and they're represented in the in the dance but in our way of looking at things no back deep down in there is something that you must respect with a very very you you mustn't you mustn't laugh in church especially if you got in front of the Throne

of Heaven everybody would be de silent wow you see I mean that's really serious here is the Father Almighty World Without End and you watch out don't you laugh why not because father almighty World Without End is a very insecure fellow and uh if anybody laughed he might feel uneasy you know there was something something wrong going on there someone challenging his power so he he is a is a funny fellow you see as we mythologized Ultimate Reality in the form of this Cosmic uh Grandpapa who is also a king and is demanding Above All

Things reverence and respect so it's difficult for us because of that cultural heritage to accept to accommodate our common sense to the idea that the web might basically be playful that it might be like somebody saying won't you come and play with me a child and the other child has some little hesitation I don't know whether I ought to play with you you come from the wrong side of the tracks or um I don't feel like playing today I feel serious I don't think play is important we ought to do something real like uh wash

the dishes for mother who incidentally has forgotten that the whole point of washing the dishes is playful you know you don't wash the dishes for a serious reason you you like the table to look nice you know you don't want to serve up the dishes for dinner with all the leavings of breakfast still lying on them so why do you want the table to look nice well again it's for nice you see it's it's you like the pattern on it that way people get terribly compulsive about doing these things and they think that uh going

on arranging the patterns of life is something that's a duty that means a debt that you owe it to yourself or to your family or to someone or other you're in debt see that's the trouble when a child comes into the world the parents play an awful game on it instead of being honest they say we've made such great sacrifices for you here we are we've supported you we've uh paid for your education and you're an ungrateful little bastard and uh the child feels terribly guilty because what we do is we build into every human

being the idea that existence is guilt the existentialists make a big thing of this and you watch out for them because they're hoaxes and they say that guilt is ontological if you're not feeling guilty you're not human and that was because Papa and Mama said look at all the trouble you've caused us you shouldn't dare to exist you have no rights but maybe we'll give you some out of the generosity of our heart so that you'll be permanently indebted to us and so everybody goes around with that sort of thing in their in their background

unless they had different kinds of Papas and masas who didn't play that trick on them but so many Papas and mamas do do that and if they don't do it somebody else does it Auntie comes around and says you don't realize what your father and mother have done for you you think you know you can just stay around here and goof off but they have sweated blood to give you your clothes and food and so on and you you ought to be grateful for it but that's not the way to make people grateful they won't

be grateful that way they'll imitate gratefulness they'll go and put on a Big Show and say oh thank you so much I feel so indebted to you and so on and so forth and they'll make it look good but isn't real because actually one's father and mother had a great deal of fun bringing you into being or we hope they did and they wanted to do that the worst way they have no reason to complain about all these things and try and make the children feel guilty but you see it is an amazing thing in

our culture everybody is Afflicted with ontological guilt for example if a policeman comes to the door everybody is instantly frightened you wonder what on Earth have I done and there are certain clergy who are absolute experts in making you feel guilty they really marvelous and they're a clergy of all kinds for all classes and for all levels of intelligence they can make you feel real [Laughter] guilty only you have to watch always what games people are playing now you see the thing is that really is a puzzle is is that they don't admit they're playing

games and when a person is playing games and doesn't admit that they're playing games then you have some kind of a of a trickster who um isn't really being fair to you now of course the game that this game is not a game has a certain kind of fascinating quality to it how mixed up can we all get let's try see that that is that certain possibility in that I I would like to go insane and be as insane as anybody has ever been and uh be the farest out crazy nut in the world see

that's a game but it's not a good game it's a a game being played by a person who didn't really understand that everyday life was a game too and I think the most important thing is to admit this all really Humane people admit that they're Rascals that's you see on the side of the not respectable the selfish but so also all Humane people should admit that they're Jokers that they're playing games and playing tricks that I am doing it on you I am most ready to admit this I hoaxed you all into coming here to

tell you [Laughter] what that was a trap you see but I'm going to make it an entertaining trap so that uh you won't feel so badly about it uh now this is philosophy but I think philosophy is like music you go to a concert and you listen to somebody play b or Mozart or bethoven and what's all that about you know it isn't about anything except you know that's what it's about and so in the same way uh as I conceive my work as a philosopher I'm simply pointing out that existence is the same kind

of a thing as a dark invention it's going this way and that way and pills and water is going all out there and the fish are going around in it and uh breeding and the Ducks are doing this that and the other and that's the same thing is see so uh if you can uh admit that that that's what it's all about you have a little problem because it's not only the threat that it really might be serious and that you shouldn't be laughing about this but there's also a kind of opposite then are you

saying it's merely just fiddling around see I mean you're saying it's only a game is that all there is to it now what do you think you see this again is a question that everybody has to think things through what did you want didn't you want a game did you want it to be serious in the end what I mean think about the question what kind of a a thing would you like God to be what would you like to do for eternity really here is uh Yan van Ike who paints the eschatological picture of

the last judgment what a strange man he must have been but here is Heaven above and Hell below and in heaven here's God the Father God the son God the Holy Ghost all there together and the Virgin Mary and the apostles and they're all sitting in committee and they have an aisle you know just like in church and there they are facing each other and they're all sitting there very solemnly I don't know what it's about but below right at the end of the aisle you see where all these Apostles are sitting is St Michael

a rather gorgeous figure in beautiful armor with wings and Underneath Him is a bat-winged skull and beneath those bat wings all horror is let loose Michael is about to slush that skull see with his sword but below ooh there are nude bodies some of them pretty comly and they're all squirming in there and they're being eaten by worms and they're eating the worms and there's a kind of a mush it's like the sort of situation you find when you turn up a big rock and there's all that going on underneath now there's no question whatever

that van Ike the painter had more fun painting that part of the picture than he did painting the the top part so in the same way with a with heronimus Bosch and with bral they painted every kind of weird surrealistic devilry going on and they really loved it but they couldn't admit it now the only time when the Holy people had a ball was when for example the Islamic artists made arabesques and the Celtic artists made um fantastically intricate lates to decorate the margins of their gospels and uh missiles they are unbelievably beautiful or take

stained glass or something like that but what are they doing what's it all about so you ask the question then what will you do in heaven and the thing you want to do of course is to get mixed up in this this little see like it's like the musician he likes to take a melody and he likes to put another Melody that fits in with it and another one that fits in with both and then a fourth one and arrange them together and he invents an instrument like an organ that he plays with two hands

then he adds foot pedals so he can play with his two feet you get this hand doing one Rhythm this doing another this doing another and this doing another see that makes it complicated and so when drummers get together and play somebody starts out with a certain Rhythm and then that Rhythm has holes in it in other words it has certain silences and the next drummer fills those silences in an interesting way he counts and picks out a pattern and what do you imagine DNA is the basic form of biological existence now DNA is like

a necklace like Charlotte's wearing with different kinds of beads in it and according to the order and the way those beads are arranged so you get genes and so you get the particular form of life that emerg is from those genes so what we're doing basic down way down is saying she loves me she don't she'll have me she won't she would if she could but she can't you see or think Taylor solar saor Man Poor Man beg man Thief well this is the way life is going on as a result comes all this you

see question is then you see in your heart of hearts you can take the attitude that all this is terrible or that it's dreadfully serious you see you can play comedies you can play tragedies aases histories and romances and all that kind of thing and you can take these various attitudes to it but if you are awakened and is it were you've been let into the secret which is what we've been talking about see as the web is also the curtain you know the veil Veil which hides the face of God from the Angels you

see there's always this Veil that's why we like to strip teed because there's an implication that this you should never give the show completely away always should be a little bit of a veil left you see there always is because even if you find the stripes artist gets completely naked there's really something hidden what's the motivation what sort of a person is she would I really like to embrace her or would she have bad breath no or something and uh you never really know you never really get to the bottom that's why everybody all men

poets say that women are basically mysterious and they ought to be so are men basically mysterious from women's point of view although they play that they're not see this is the way it goes men are supposed to be very open and they say well of a certain situation this is the way it is after all it's perfectly rational it's a matter of practical Affairs and women say well they say I'm not quite as articulate as you are but I know there something you've left out but I can't explain it and by this means everything is

kept kept going so what I'm saying is I think this I'm trying to share with you a certain style of life and an attitude to life and an Insight I've taken you on one side and said listen kids things aren't what they seem don't be fooled there's a big deception going on and you're involved in it but I just thought you ought to know it and enjoy it see I I'm terribly puzzled about the way people go out of their way to dis enjoy themselves it takes so much trouble about it did you ever read

HL M's essay called a for the ugly and it describes a Pennsylvania mining town which isn't exactly totally impoverished I mean they can build things and they uh have enough money to do this that and the other but they he describes how they made a a church out of yellow stone that's so awful that it looks like a presbyterian with a grin and all around you have only to look and you see see this perfect passion for making the world look Grizzly and it isn't only job Builders and uh garage owners who do this kind

of thing it's also people who profess to be painters they're actually using excrements for painting in Paris today on the theory that the world is shot to pieces that since the artist is a representative of his times he ought to show the time as they really are as a social critic and so he makes the most weird I mean he paints Campbell's Soup can and then and then he made music that streaks and screams and the most uh he he just goes out of his way to make it sound as ugly as he possibly can

manage and the Ingenuity is about that is endless because that is the times he's a critical you see instead of being somebody who reveals now you see let's take the the sort of the character of the pi Piper the person who brings you an invitation to dance I would say then you see there is going to be a dance this evening and I would like you all to come you know that's the spirit in which I invite you to a seminar I am not inviting you in the spirit of saying no we're going to have

to discuss some very grave matters and you ought to be awake to all these things and and arouse your social conscience and uh so on and so forth uh because when you get through with all that then what when you get through with feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and we are making great strides with Automation and technology in abolishing poverty totally then what are we going to do well you see if you've got all these people clothed and fed and so on and then they say well now what next if you've got a

kind of Quaker State of Mind you don't know what to do well uh feed and clothes somebody else see get busy but then where is that leading so you see to spread Joy you have to have it to impart Delight you have to be more or less delightful and to be delightful is not some factor of trying to make yourself look delightful it is to do things that are delightful to you you become thereby delightful to others that's to say people who are interesting are people who are interested any person for example who is constantly

thinking about all sorts of other things and other people and so on because they're fascinating becomes a fascinating person but a person who doesn't think about anybody else and who's got very little going on inside their skull is boring so in other words your engagement with the external world the more you are involved the more your personality is enriched but if you try to enrich your personality by taking a course in How to Win Friends and Influence People or how to be a real person you'll become just a wash out because you will be in

a s of small circle you'll be as it were you'll be like somebody trying to get a good nutrition by biting his nails and then the fingers next you know and then half an arm gone and so on and uh you're you're entirely nourishing yourself with yourself now of course on a vast scale the universe does that it eats itself up that's why the symbol of the snake swallowing its tail is a very fundamental archaic symbol of life but the way it's done is that the snake has in some part of the Ring a place

where it's not sensitive it's called the unconscious where it doesn't know that what comes to it in the form of food is actually what left it in the form of excrement that thing is don't mention it after all as the Lord said in the beginning of the universe you must draw the line somewhere and so as a result of there always being a kind of Gap that's the Gap you know like where the electric spark jumps that's the thing behind your head behind your eyes that you could never get to look at it's the Gap

and because of that little Gap the circle doesn't just revolve in a dull way just go around and round and round like a boring thing it has rhythm see if I say no rhythm see it's just one long sound after a while we say oh cut it out uh or we just become insensitive to it but what we want to hear is a breaking you see and we want to hear it go on off and vanish and come back again and so on and it sets up a rhythm that becomes interesting that's putting gaps between

you see you need those gaps so now you see it now you don't now you see it now you don't oh that's pretty D so what we're going to do is this we're going to have you see it three times and then with a regular not see it between them then they're going to be a longer not see it after that one and then I'm going to do something very complicated after that so that you don't don't really know when it's going to come next so there's going to be a surprise you know how we

all do that and interesting people are those who do this in very involved ways D people sort of people who put their hats on absolutely straight are the kind of people for example who have the same meal every day exactly the same thing always see have no inventiveness they have the same routine they go to the same office they answer the same kind of letters and that's that see but then if they want to start up a more interesting kind of business and make more money then they have to figure out let's take the people

who make clothes they figure out fashion it's going to be a new thing for ladies a new style this fall we're going to make them do long skirts instead of the short skirts middle skirts and the skirts go be like this then finally they thought about having topless women they're going to play around with that and have an absolutely scandalous Ball but that's the whole thing you see it's this thing of Rhythm and yes you ask well I see that what is doing this Rhythm who after all am I and as you explore deeper and

deeper and deeper into the nature of yourself you find that you're a rhythm doing a rhythm and behind that there's another Rhythm doing a rhythm your vibrations and once again you meet our friend the onion and who who is doing all this why he disappeared came around there it was and uh we were looking for him and he vanished and then just when we weren't looking for him again there he is but every time we try to see he isn't there now do you see that that that situation is what's called life